Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (15 page)

Bombay

FINANCESCAPE AND POLITISCAPE

My financescape refers to the economic liberalization of India in 1991

that changed the fabric of the middle classes—the gay scene I talk about would not have been possible without these financial changes. Closely connected to this is the politiscape or the political landscape of the time.

I will discuss these together.

1991 can be considered as the defining year for modern India. Internationally, this was the year that witnessed events like the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Persian Gulf War. Within India, it was the year that the socialist leaning country undertook wide ranging economic reforms spurred by a massive balance of payments crisis—with spectacular results. The liberal-minded Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress Party government in the mid-1980s had attempted some reforms of India’s severely protected socialist-leaning economy—but these faltered due to the controversies that the government got mired into and Gandhi was booted out of power at the 1989 polls. After two shaky hotch-potch coalition governments collapsed, another election was called in 1991. Tragically, Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bomber during a campaign rally and in the sympathy wave that swept the nation, the Congress was voted back into power. The new government, headed by the demure intellectually-bent septuagenarian PV Narasimha Rao, took charge of a country in dire fiscal straits.15

The situation was so bad that there were only two weeks of foreign reserves in the government kitty to pay for imports—a bill that had risen dramatically due to the rise of oil prices during the Gulf War. The country was forced to ask the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a US$ 2.2 billion bailout package, which necessitated the dispatch of a part of the country’s gold reserves to London to serve as collateral. Rao’s Finance Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, the Oxbridge-educated former Reserve Bank of India governor (who once again became India’s Prime Minister in 2004), was the chief architect of the IMF mandated reforms implemented subsequently, which changed the structure of the Indian economy significantly. These included the devaluation of the Indian rupee by 20 per cent, the liberalization of the national trade policy, the abolishment of the licence-permit regime for industry, a severe cut in From this Perspective…
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various subsidies and sops, tax reforms and a reign-in of governmental expenditure.

The Congress party initiated reforms were continued by the United Front and National Democratic Alliance coalition governments that fol-lowed and the country has grown rapidly ever since, which is evinced by even a cursory look at some economic indicators: If we use GDP (Gross Domestic Product)—the global standard indicator of economic progress—we see that India’s GDP growth rate rose from 0.9 per cent between 1990–91 to 7.5 per cent between 1996–97.16 For 2000–01, the GDP growth was 5.8 per cent17 and it again sharply rose over the next few years to a 9.6 per cent growth rate for 2006–2007.18

India’s foreign exchange reserves rose from a paltry US$ 1 billion in July 1991 to US$ 159 billion at the end of August 2006.19 From being shunned by investors due to the severe governmental constraints, India has morphed into a desirable global market—AT

Kearney’s 2005 Foreign Direct Investment Index ranked it as the second most attractive country in the world to invest in (it places after China, with the US coming in 3rd)20 and at the 2006 World Economic Forum summit at Davos, India’s business leaders, politicians and Bollywood stars combined efforts to brand
India Everywhere
, a blitzkrieg that had among others, summit chair Klaus Schwab dancing in a turban and shawl and extolling India’s virtues.21 Another indicator of India’s reversal of fortunes is that it actually loaned US$ 300 million to the IMF as well as provided economic aid to 10 poorer countries in 2003.22

Noted economists like Delong (2003), Williamson and Zagha (2002) and Rodrick and Subramanian (2004) have disputed this popular narrative that ascribes India’s current economic robustness to the 1991 reforms and argued that the growth upshift actually occurred in the 1980s itself.

I acknowledge the veracity of their arguments, but still insist on treating 1991 as a watershed year for a variety of reasons.

First, as Rodrick and Subramanian themselves concede, the 1980

changes were pro-business (replacing government hostility towards large business houses with guarded support) rather than pro-market (structural reforms and trade liberalization)23 and so their impact on the general population was rather limited. The impact of the 1991 changes,
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in contrast, was palpable; it resulted in the rapid emergence of a ‘pan Indian domestic class of consumers’24 (Khilnani, 2001), or what is now popularly known as the Great Indian Middle Class, the members of which constitute my ethnoscape. And for this class, as Pawan Varma writes, 1991

‘removed the stigma attached with the pursuit of wealth. It buried the need for hypocrisy about the aspirations to become rich. Most importantly, it made politics congruent with the temperament of the people.…

Material wants were now suddenly severed from any notion of guilt’.25

Consumption was cool. Fashion, lifestyle, beauty, celebrity, entertainment, dining out, travel, credit cards and malls were the new buzzwords and ‘consumerism [became] an Indian value’ (Fernandes, 2000).26

Second, along with a fast changing financescape, 1991 also wit-

nessed sweeping changes in my mediascape and technoscape—changes without which the gayness I talk about would have been difficult to articulate. The mediascape is especially relevant; post 1991, the plethora of media outlets enabled the visuals of the new commodities and lifestyles available in the country as opposed to only being accessed
abroad
earlier, thus allowing the notion among the middle classes that finally, ‘abroad [was] now in India’27 to circulate widely. The flow was not a just one way—as India began to become an international buzzword, Indian IT engineers, skilled managers, models, and others began to flow out of India (and back) rapidly.

Third, as Das notes (2002), besides economic liberalization, there were many other liberations that the country went through during the period—political liberation (the passage of the 73rd Amendment by the Indian parliament in 1992 requiring every village and muni-cipality to have its own elected officials, one third of which should be women), social liberation (the rise of the backward castes post the implementation of the affirmative action Mandal Commission report in 1989; the rise in literacy from 52 per cent in 1990 to 65 per cent in 2000;28 the fall in the poverty ratio from 39.4 per cent to 26.8 per cent in rural areas and 39.15 per cent to 24.1 per cent in the cities between 1987–2000;29 a declining population growth rate of 1.9 per cent in the 1990s as compared to the 2.2 per cent of the three previous decades),30 technological liberation (the spread of the Internet and From this Perspective…
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telecommunications) and mental liberation (a positive new mindset among [certain] people).

Was it a coincidence that the Indian economic boom and liberalization of the 90s coincided with the rising Hindu nationalistic wave in the country throughout the late 1980s? The destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 was a cataclysm; it was followed by several waves of communal riots across different flash points in the country which culminated with a (Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP

led) nationalist31 government being established at the centre in 1998, as well as in several key Indian states from the mid-1990s onward, including Maharashtra (of which Bombay is the capital) in 1995. (Here, the BJP won power as part of a coalition with the nationalist Shiv Sena).

Rajagopal (2001) argues that this was not coincidental at all and that economic reforms and Hindu fundamentalism were opportunistic bed-fellows which fed off each other in the public imagination.

Both militated against a
dirigiste
status quo and promised radical change if hidden social forces were emancipated, whether of the profit motive or of a long suppressed Hindu religion. Both drew on market forces energized in the process of liberalization, on the support of middle classes asserting their newly legitimated right to consume and of business groups seeking a successor to a developmentist regime in eclipse…. [Both] shared their technologies of transmission for expanding markets and audiences respectively….32

Now, these national and Maharashtra state governments
did
have extremely rigid notions of Indianness, tradition and purity. However, these were conveniently tweaked when necessary. So the West was evil, but only sometimes. Western culture was bad, but Michael

Jackson was welcomed into Bombay as ‘a part of our culture’33;

capitalism was horrible and the corrupt American corporation Enron was first rebuffed, only to be heavily seduced shortly after; short skirts were frowned upon and bars were closed early, except when they were owned by the politicians in power
…
Kissing and Valentine’s Day-style consumerism were supposedly degenerating Indian youth, but Bollywood films with frantic pelvic thrusts were presumably alright.34

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This schizophrenia was manifested at the national level in the public debates around the BJP’s platform of
swadeshi
(meaning ‘from the home country’, an appropriation of Gandhi’s philosophy of self reliance that he advocated during and after the freedom struggle) policies, before and after its ascent to power at the centre in the mid-1990s. (In contrast, the 1991 reforms were passed without much debate and with much

euphoria, because of their necessity and the dire situation the country was in then and also the inability of their opposers to get parliamentary consensus to vote against them). Before the BJP rose to power, it positioned itself as anti-globalization and pro-
swadeshi
—however, once it won the election, it did an about turn and redefined
swadeshi
as a pro-globalization philosophy. The incumbent finance minister conveniently called it ‘pro-Indian without being anti-foreign’.35

I do not want to make it seem like the economic reforms of 1991 and the subsequent pro-globalization policy changes of the successive state and national governments in power have been accepted as an inevitable certainty within India—they were debated (and continue to be debated) across all strata of society and also through the ballot. (The verdict of the 2004 elections which booted the BJP-led government out of power, was widely perceived to be a silent revolt by India’s poor voters that the economic benefits heralded by the government’s much hyped ‘India Shining’ campaign has passed them by completely).36 But while middle class India, whose lives the reforms have benefited immensely, worried about the loss of its cultural and social values, (or as Seabrook presents it: Liberalization—liberation or westernization?)37 for poor India, the issues were much more serious—the loss of jobs, homes and often, even lives.38

Coming back to gayness, the questions that fascinate me the most are—How did so many changes in the gay landscape pass by, seemingly unnoticed, within the
Hindutva
(Hinduness) charged, schizophrenic environment of the mid-1990s? Why did the press and public, even in the English media, embrace the articulation of gayness and not jump upon it as another Western influence—to be fought tooth and nail?

Why did not the political parties in power squash it? I shall address these issues in Chapter 6.

From this Perspective…
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PERFECT HUMAN

2002. I am laughing and talking to my classmates as we emerge from our
college building but there is someone blocking our way. It is an old man,
stooped, with his right hand outstretched and tears in his eyes that refuse
to trickle down. Stationary, silent, pleading, holding his turban in his left
hand. Daring us to ignore him. Normally, I would just walk by, pretending
that he didn’t exist—my usual beggar avoidance technique—but there is
something mesmerizing about this man that compels me to make an eye
contact.

What I see stays with me forever. It is sadness beyond comprehension,
misery beyond reason, a loss of pride, self-respect and dignity that will never
be repaired and poverty in every sense of the word—of options, of reasons,
of hope. He does not seem to be a regular beggar. His clothes are tattered
but not dirty. I can see that he was once ‘someone’, and that this act—of
spreading his hands out before strangers, head shamefully exposed, asking for help, is probably the worst thing for him, ever. It is heartbreaking.

I want to talk to him, connect in some way, tell him that hope is the last
resort and not to lose it please because as long as there is hope, there is
the possibility that things may be different, but it seems so trite even as
I think of it. What can you say to someone who has nothing? My eyes tear
up as we observe each other silently for a moment. I hand him a 10 rupee
note and then another and then leave because I cannot bear the density of
the moment anymore. When I reach home, Z is already waiting for me and
I make love to him desperately and ferociously, needing to exorcize myself
from the burden of guilt about what I just experienced.

Who was this man? Where was he from? What could have his circumstances been that compelled him to efface his pride in such a manner? And
why the fuck is it so important to me? I encounter hundreds of beggars
every day, most of them way more miserable looking than this man. Why
such strong feelings all of a sudden?

I am reminded about these questions a few years later when I see clips
of the 1967 Jørgen Leth short film
The Perfect Human
, in the 2000 collaborative effort between Leth and Lars von Trier—
The Five Obstructions
.

‘Watch the perfect man. Watch how he eats. Look at his ear. Look at his
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