Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (4 page)

These in-between-spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. (Bhabha, 1994)19

How do I resist? So, I begin my research by thinking that perhaps this book, just like my sexuality, is not a choice but my destiny.

SOME BIASES ARE GOOD?

Bombay: 25 August 2004. Channel surfing on one of those rare occasions
that I come home before midnight, I chance upon
Tonight at Ten
, a news
programme on the finance channel CNBC India. Today’s episode is a
Introduction
29

special debate on whether India’s anti-gay laws need to be changed. The
dapper news veteran Karan Thapar is the anchor and the guests are Vivek
Divan of the Lawyer’s Collective, Anjali Gopalan of the Naz Foundation,
Father Dominic, a Christian priest and Jai Pandya, a member of the Indian
parliament. I excitedly call my mom from the kitchen to come and watch
the show with me.

Thapar is manoeuvring the show adroitly—there is none of the ‘balanced
perspective’ and ‘giving both sides a fair view’ pretence. It is clear that he
is completely pro-gay, he talks about Persian poetry and Greek love; his
agenda for the show is to passionately propound the gay-equality cause.

I watch with delight as he constantly snubs Pandya and Father Dominic,
never letting them complete their sentences, while at the same time, giving Divan and Gopalan more than enough time to make their case. Divan
comes out on the show and Thapar gives him a lot of airtime to express the
problems that he faces in his day-to-day life as a single gay man in India.

Father Dominic is very flustered—he is simply not allowed to continue beyond stating that the church position on homosexuality is clear—it’s a sin.

Pandya is reluctant to stick his neck out—he opines that politics can only
reflect the views of the masses—but Thapar counter-attacks him viciously,
citing various laws, both in India and abroad that prove just the opposite.

Thapar’s partisanship is evident even in his concluding statement—‘We
haven’t done the subject full justice, no single programme can, but perhaps
this can be part of the process to start the change needed’.

19 September 2006. Another night in front of the television screen and
Thapar has kept his promise. Homosexuality is back on his agenda; this
time, his panel consists of former Attorney General of India Soli Sorabjee,
actor-filmmaker Rahul Bose, and others. Same kind of feel good stuff, so
I flip through the different news channels and every one of them is talking
about homosexuality or Article 377. Earlier in the day, I visited the CNN

India studios to observe a talk show on the same theme and it was quite
a hilarious experience.

The host was a 20-something bundle of energy, with none of the gravitas
of Thapar and the show format seemed to be more MTV than CNN. There
were the same round of faces—Vivek Divan, check, Anjali the psychiatrist,
check, Christian priest, check—supported by a motley bunch including a
visiting gay Harvard student, a pedophilia victim, a fag hag, a token straight
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Gay

Bombay

guy and a non-liberal lawyer. The show was chaotic. The host jumped from
one topic to the other—and within half an hour show packed in everything
from the perception of homosexuality as unnatural sex, to gay men being
more promiscuous, to the laws on marital rape, to straight men being chased
by gay guys, to gay marriage, to life of gay men in India, to why gay men
make such good friends for straight women, to gay men in movies, and
finally, a little bit of Article 377 too. I was slightly appalled because the host
had sought my advice while researching the topic some days earlier, but none
of what we discussed was brought up. It seemed that the intention was not
really to understand the issue or present it fairly in the media—but rather
to cash in on what was perceived to be the sensational topic of the week,
following the other news channels’ coverage of the subject.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

At the onset, I would like to set the record
straight
and declare that I am primarily studying gay men in this book and not lesbians, bisexuals, the transgender,
kothis
,
hijras
and the rest of the spectrum of sexual minorities in India. These groups are quite stratified—there is little interaction between them and each of them has an entirely different ethos. Covering all of them would require a considerable amount of time and energy, much more than the three years that I spend on only working in the gay world. However, this does not mean that this book excludes these other groups completely—they make their appearance in several key debates, often surrounding pivotal issues, but it should be understood that the central characters here are gay identified, English speaking, middle class men, affiliated in some way or another to the different Gay Bombay spaces.

The questions that I am interested in exploring include—

(
a
) What are the factors responsible for the emergence of Gay Bombay within the 1990s? What has Gay Bombay’s impact been

on the pre-existing gay scene in the country?

(
b
) How have changes in the media over the last 15 years influenced the perceptions of gayness in India? How have Gay Bombay’s

participants responded to these changes?

Introduction
31

(
c
) Do the participants of Gay Bombay envisage themselves as a community?

(
d
) How do they access and negotiate their gayness and their individual and collective identities in Gay Bombay’s online-offline spaces?

(
e
) How do they imagine their personal futures as well as the future of Gay Bombay?

I am asking these questions first to locate
gayness
in Bombay and the world and second, to contextualize its public emergence as well as the private growth trajectories of a number of urban gay identified Indian individuals. Each of these questions seeks to reveal a different facet and together, I hope that they can add up and provide a complex, fractal view of what it means to be gay at this particular time in the history of contemporary India.

In my quest to answer these questions, I work with Appadurai’s model for a general theory of global cultural processes or theory of rupture20

(1996) as my overriding reference grid throughout this book. I am drawn to Appadurai because I find in him a willingness to confront complexity and an intellectual honesty that declares that there are no answers yet to the model that he is proposing; still it is vital to ask the questions that need to be asked and to shake things up. Appadurai’s exploration of the effect of media and migration on the work of personal and collective imagination in modernity is the starting point for my own exploration within the context, history and character of Gay Bombay. I find his model to be broad-based enough to cover the scope of what I am trying to study and it offers me a way out of several conundrums that I find myself in constantly—global versus local, for example—by its insistence on heterogeneous viewpoints. I am also attracted by Appadurai’s own background and experiences as an anthropologist often studying
home
from a distance and as a Bombay person, always taking Bombay with him wherever he travels. I find his model to be very
Bombay
in its reach, its ambition, its scope and ultimately, its ambivalence. I love it.

Appadurai’s argument goes thus—

(
a
) The old models of studying centres and peripheries, push and pull (migration theory), or surpluses and deficits (balance of

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Gay

Bombay

trade models) are inadequate to explore the complexity of the

current global economy, at least from the cultural perspective.

An alternative framework would be one that looks at ‘funda-

mental disjunctures between economy, culture and politics’.21

These disjunctures can be explored by examining five dimen-

sions of global cultural flows or
scapes
such as ethnoscapes, financescapes, technoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes.

(Scapes are perspectival constructs and the building blocks

of what Appadurai deems
imagined worlds
, an extension of Benedict Anderson’s concept of
imagined communities
(1983).

These are ‘multiple worlds…constituted by the historically

situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the

globe’, that ‘contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined

worlds of the official mind’.22 Global flows today occur ‘in and through the growing disjunctures among ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes’.23

(
b
) Although these disjunctures ‘generate acute problems of social well-being’, they also have positive aspects and ‘encourage an

emancipatory politics of globalization’ through their effect on the reconstitution of imagination ‘as a popular, social, collective fact’.24

On the one hand, it is in and through the imagination that modern citizens are disciplined and controlled—by states, markets and other powerful interests. But it is also the faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life emerge.25

In each of the subsequent chapters of this book, I work with the above framework to track and critically examine the imagination and reconfiguration of Indian gayness in the light of its emergent cultural, media and political alliances. I shift between methods and mode of inquiry, based on what I feel is best suited to the task at hand, aiming for not just thick description, but what Appadurai calls ‘thickness with a difference’,26 that is constantly being aware of contexts and imagined possibilities in the lives of those that I seek to understand.

In Chapter 2, I contextualize and present the various
cultural dimensions
of this book through its intersecting network of scapes. Here, Introduction
33

the
ethnoscape
denotes the landscape of persons who constitute my world of inquiry—the online or offline inhabitants of Gay Bombay. The
financescape
refers to the economic liberalization of India in 1991 that changed the fabric of the middle classes. The
mediascape
comprises the changing Indian urban media matrix, which witnessed a significant reconfiguration in the 1990s. The
technoscape
refers to the emergence of the Internet and the telecom and technology booms of the 1990s. The
ideoscape
refers to the local histories and global influences of the idea of homosexuality in India, as well as the contemporary circulation of ideologies like the struggle for human rights, the fight against Article 377

of the Indian Penal Code (colonial, anti-homosexual, outdated) and the different meanings of the word
gay
.

I add two more elements into Appadurai’s mix—
politiscape
and
memoryscape
. I use the word
politiscape
in a narrow sense—to refer to the changing political spectrum in India between 1991–2007, especially the rise of the Hindu revivalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP—‘Indian People’s Party’) and its conservative ideologies.

My own location within Gay Bombay becomes a frame for me to look at issues from a deeply personal perspective—and I deem this perspective
memoryscape
. My memoryscape, which constitutes my thoughts, memories and lived experiences, both material and symbolic, is the self-activation of my own imagination at work—my personal narrative of being gay in Bombay—and it weaves itself in and out of the book, making it unabashedly subjective. I explore some aspects of this subjectivity in Chapter 3, when I discuss the joys and challenges of conducting ethnographic research
at home
. Following this, in chapters 4 and 5, I attempt a sweeping study of the past, present and (imagined) future of Gay Bombay and the negotiation of identity, notions of community and the influences of globalization within its online and offline spaces.

Finally, in the last chapter, I argue that it was the combination of Indian developments in the 1990s (economic liberalization, media proliferation, the advent of the Internet, expansion of the middle class and creation of a pan-Indian culture) together with the
pre-existing
social conditions (educated English speaking middle class, gay heritage and relative governmental non-interference), that offered gay identified men in Bombay (and India at large), ‘new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds’ (Appadurai, 1996).27

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Gay

Bombay

With their frictions, overlaps and disjunctures, the scapes help me to contextualize the myriad online and offline circumstances that have made something like Gay Bombay as well as my own situated gay existence possible and sustainable. As Appadurai writes—‘globalization…a cover term for a world of disjunctive flows—produces problems that manifest themselves in intensely local forms but have contexts that are anything but local’ (Appadurai, 2000).28

Studying globalization and gayness for that matter, need not only be about problems and their contexts. It needs to also be about solutions and reimagination and thus, so as to take this book beyond the realm of a mere mapping exercise, I add a polemic edge and conclude with a
modus
vivendi
, comprising suggestions and observations from my research and experiences in the field. I hope I might be able to engage my fellow Gay Bombayites with some of the issues that I raise in this section. Nothing would give me greater satisfaction than if this book were to ultimately serve not just as a chronicle of its times, but also as the impetus for a tangible action plan as the group imagines its road ahead.