Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (13 page)

153. Shirley Leung, ‘Armchairs, TV and Espressos—Is it McDonalds?’,
Wall Street Journal
13 August 2002, cited in Jagdish Bhagwati op. cit., (2004), pp. 110–111.

154. Soft power is a term made popular by Harvard professor Joseph Nye, which refers to the power of a country’s culture as an influencing force, as opposed to its hard power or military and economic might. See the issue titled ‘The Rising Soft Power of China and India’,
New Perspectives Quarterly
(Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), Vol. 20(1).

155. Scott Baldauf, ‘A Hindi-English Jumble Spoken by 350 Million’,
Christian Science Monitor
Online
,
23 November 2004. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1123/p01s03-wosc.html 156. See Anushka Asthana, ‘Kiss My Chuddies (Welcome to the Queen’s Hinglish)’,
Observer
25
April 2005. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1202721,00.

html

Introduction
77

157. See Sampa Chakrabarty Lahiri,
‘A Peek Into the Rural Market’,
ET Strategic Marketing
June–July 2002, for more examples of creative appropriations of consumer products by rural India. http://www.etstrategicmarketing.com/smJune-July2/art6_1.htm 158. See Brian Larkin, ‘Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities’, in Inda and Rosaldo, op. cit., pp. 350–378.

159. See Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes,
The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of

‘Dallas’
, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

160. S. Lash and J. Urry,
Economies of Sign and Space
(London: Sage Publications, 1994), paraphrased in Zsuzsa Gille and Sean O Riain, ‘Global Ethnography’,
Annual Review
of Sociology
(Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, 2002), No. 28, p. 274.

161. Manuel Castells,
The Information Age
(3 volumes)
(Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996–1998), paraphrased in Gille and O Riain, op. cit., p. 274.

162. Gille and O Riain, op. cit., p. 275.

163. Saskia Sassen, ‘Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization’,
Public Culture
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), Vol. 12(1), pp. 215–232 paraphrased in Gille and O Riain, op. cit., p. 275.

164. Arjun Appadurai (1996), op. cit., p. 18.

165. Berry, Martin, and Yue, op. cit., pp. 5–6.

166. Dennis Altman (1996), op. cit.

167. ‘Fran Martin responds to Dennis Altman’,
Australian Humanities Review
(1996).

http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/emuse/Globalqueering/martin.html#2

168. Dennis Altman (1996), op. cit.

169. The Humsafar Trust is an NGO formed in Bombay in 1991 by the famous LBGT

rights activist Ashok Row Kavi with the mandate of working in the field of HIV/AIDS

awareness or prevention in Bombay.

170. Chris Berry and Fran Martin, ‘Syncretism and Synchronity: Queer ‘n’ Asian Cyberspace in 1990s—Taiwan and Korea’ in Berry, Martin, and Yue op. cit., p. 89.

171. In Peter Jackson (op. cit., pp. 8–9), he alerts us to the need to avoid ‘over hasty generalizations in specifying what unites and what distinguishes different national or regional forms of g/l/t identity and culture’. The ‘globally uniform view of gay identity’ can also be negative—countries can use this to victimize their own people…

The political complexities of taking either a ‘global’ or ‘western influences’ or local history explanatory line should be thought out.

172. Manfred Steger, op. cit., ‘Preface’.

173. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000). Accessible on the world wide web through Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/

174. Jostein Gripsrud,
Understanding Media Culture
(London: Arnold Publishers, 2002), p. 7.

175. Eric Eisenberg, ‘Building a Mystery: Toward a New Theory of Communication and Identity’,
Journal of Communication
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), No.

51, p. 537.

176. Kathryn Woodward, op. cit., pp. 1–2.

177. Stuart Hall (1990), op. cit., p. 225, as cited in Nayan Shah, ‘Sexuality, Identity and the Uses of History’,
A Lotus of Another Color
(Ed. Rakesh Ratti), (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1993), p. 121.

178. Jeffrey Weeks,
Invented Moralities
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 98.

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Bombay

179. Eric Eisenberg, op. cit., p. 537.

180. Jeffrey Weeks (1995), op. cit., pp. 98–99.

181. Jeffery Weeks (1990), op. cit., p. 115.

182. Eric Eisenberg, op. cit., p. 535.

183. Jostein Gripsrud, op. cit., p. 6.

184. Ibid, p. 6.

185. Bourdieu introduced this term in
Outline of a Theory of Practice
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and returned to it in other works such as Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

186. Mihaela Kelemen and Warren Smith, ‘Community and its Virtual Promises: A Critique of Cyberlibertarian Rhetoric’,
Information, Community and Society
(Taylor and Francis

[Routledge], 2001), Vol. 4(3), p. 373.

187. Raymond Williams,
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 76, as cited in Maria Bakardjieva
‘Virtual Togetherness: An Everyday-life Perspective
’
from
Media, Culture & Society
(Sage Publications, 2003), Vol. 25(3), p. 292.

188. Kelemen and Smith, op. cit., p. 373.

189. Sara Ahmed and Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Re-imagining Communities’,
International Journal
of Cultural Studies
(Sage Publications, 2003), Vol. 6(3), pp. 251–252.

190. Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1983), p. 18.

191. Neo-tribes are transient communities that we choose to become members of, just because we feel like it. Michel Maffesoli (
The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of
Individualism in Mass Societies,
[London: Sage Publications, 1996], p. 6) calls them

‘microgroups’ which are inherently ‘unstable, since the persons of which these tribes are constituted are free to move from one to another.

192. Kelemen and Smith, op. cit., p. 374.

193. Ray Oldernburg,
The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty
Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You Through the Day
(New York: Paragon House, 1991), paraphrased in Kelemen and Smith, op. cit., p. 376.

194. Slavo Zizek,
The Sublime Object of Ideology
(London: Verso, 1989), p. 95, as quoted in Thomas Blom Hansen,
Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 2.

195. Thomas Blom Hansen, op. cit., p. 4.

2

From this Perspective…

Scapes of Understanding

In this chapter, I shall elaborate on six of the seven scapes that I outlined in the introductory chapter, as a part of my larger attempt at conducting information arbitrage (Friedman, 1999)1 throughout this book. A quick recap: Appadurai has outlined five dimensions of global cultural flows as
scapes
(mediascape, financescape, ideoscape, ethnoscape and technoscape)—these are perspectival constructs, the building blocks of what he calls
imagined worlds
. I am using Appadurai’s grid of scapes as the theoretical framework of this book (and adding to them my own constructs of politiscape and memoryscape) so as to understand the
imagined world
of Gay Bombay. With their frictions, overlaps and disjunctures, these scapes will help us to contextualize the myriad online and offline circumstances that have made something like Gay Bombay possible and sustainable.

According to Appadurai, ‘the various flows we see—of objects, persons, images, and discourses—are not coeval, convergent, isomorphic, or spatially consistent’—but in relations of ‘disjuncture’.

By this I mean that the paths or vectors taken by these kinds of things have different speeds, axes, points of origin and termination and varied relationships to institutional structures in different regions, nations, or societies. Further, these disjunctures themselves precipitate various kinds of problems and frictions in different local situations. Indeed, it is the disjunctures between the various vectors characterizing this world-in-motion that produce fundamental problems of livelihood, equity, suffering, justice and governance.

Examples of such disjunctures are phenomena such as the following—

Media flows across national boundaries that produce images of well-being
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Bombay

that cannot be satisfied by national standards of living and consumer capabilities; flows of discourses of human rights that generate demands from workforces that are repressed by state violence which is itself backed by global arms flows; ideas about gender and modernity that circulate to create large female workforces at the same time that cross-national ideologies of
culture
,
authenticity
and national honour put increasing pressure on various communities to morally discipline just these working women who are vital to emerging markets and manufacturing sites.

(Appadurai, 2000)2

These disjunctures produce problems and at the same time can be spaces within which these problems might be creatively tackled with, via the reconstitution of imagination ‘as a popular, social, collective fact’.3

Appadurai builds his argument for the importance of imagination in today’s world in three steps. First he notes that in the ‘post electronic world’, the imagination has ‘broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people…in…their everyday lives’.4 Second, he notes that this imagination does not necessitate the diminishing of traditional values and religion and furthermore imagination is different from fantasy or escapism. ‘Fantasy can dissipate…but the imagination, especially when collective, can become the fuel for action…and not only for escape’.5 Third, Appadurai distinguishes between individual and collective imagination. Collective experiences of the mass media create communities of sentiment—or groups that ‘begin to imagine and feel things together’. These sodalities are ‘communities in themselves and potentially communities for themselves’ and they criss-cross with one another, thus creating the possibilities of convergences…that would otherwise be hard to imagine.6

Let us attach this imagination lens on to six out of the seven scapes which constitute the different dimensions of our world of inquiry and explore what it means to be gay in Bombay,
in
Gay Bombay and
of
Gay Bombay, at this particular time in history. (I am excluding a detailed description of memoryscape from the mix here; it has been sufficiently defined in the introduction and in any case, is omnipresent throughout this work).

From this Perspective…
81

THE NOT SO GOOD DOCTOR AND OTHER STORIES

There’s a masseur hiding under my bed, an irate grandmother in my living
room and a phone call from work, asking me to come in as soon as possible.

Good morning world—welcome to another fine day in the life of Parmesh
Shahani, drama queen.

The masseur, Vijay, is easy to explain. Ramanmal Gangwani, an old friend
(married with children of my age), who has tried to hit on me several times
without success (and whose advice to me on leaving for America is to never
come out but have my fun on the ‘down low’), sends him over one morning, because I complain of a nagging backache. I soon discover that Vijay’s
repertoire consists of an extremely competent full body oil massage, plus a
hand job for only a slight premium over regular rates; or what my friend
Nil calls a ‘happy ending’. Married men in their 50s are his regular clientele
but of late, this has widened to include younger customers like me. We have
weekly sessions—our arrangement consists of him phoning me regularly
from a payphone to fix the time for the next week’s appointment at my
apartment.

This week, however, my grandmother decides to pay a surprise visit (she
has a key to my flat) and I have swiftly managed to get clothed, push Vijay
under my bed and emerge from my bedroom, looking like I’ve just woken
up. Right then I get the summons from my office. My grandmother seems
extremely suspicious; normally when she visits, I fuss over her and ask her
to stay for tea. Today, I ask her to leave, as I have to get ready for work and
don’t want to be late. Her greatest fear now that I stay alone is that I will
bring girls home and gain a bad reputation (that would be terrible for my
marriage prospects, wouldn’t it?) and since my grandparents function
in loco parentis
due to my parents being abroad, they obsess about my well-being, eating habits and chastity all day. I love it… except in situations
like this.

Vijay is not pleased. He has had to stay under the bed for 45 minutes until
I finally manage to sound the ‘all clear’. I have to pay him double his rates
and no massage in return. A few weeks later, post massage, he threatens to
go out of my house and shout loudly about my homosexuality to the entire
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Bombay

building, unless I pay him five thousand rupees at once. I wonder how many
people he’s extorted already, but resign myself to negotiating a fairer price,
finally settling for two thousand. He never calls up again—I refuse to recognize him when our eyes lock in a crowded train some years later. The next
time my back hurts, I try physiotherapy.