Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (16 page)

Bombay

feet…’ The visuals on screen are plush and evocative—but all I can think of
are the haunting eyes of the old, proud, defeated, powerful man who I met
in my college in Bombay. Perfect in his pathos. Human in his desperation.

There is a segment of
Obstructions
that is shot in Bombay, where Leth
recreates the
Perfect Human
character by consuming fish and champagne
on a table set up in the city’s poorest and most notorious red light area.

Behind him is a transparent backdrop against which we can see the faces
and bodies of hundreds of people who have gathered to watch him eat. It
is sick and surreal.

MEDIASCAPE

My mediascape refers to the changing Indian urban media matrix, which has witnessed a significant growth over the past 15 years. There now exists in India an exciting array of media choices with a lot of envelope pushing as far as content is concerned and as a result of this changed mediascape, as we shall see in Chapter 4, gay images are flowing through Indian newspapers, magazines, films and on television to an extent unimaginable even a decade ago.

Print Media

I identify two major trends that have changed the texture of how gayness has been covered in the English language print media since the 1990s39—the tabloidification of news and the boom in lifestyle-based publications. Tabloidification of news refers to the packaging of news into bite-sized capsules with a focus on light news and entertainment stories and a move away from weighty analysis of any kind. This approach, made popular by
USA Today
in the American market and followed in varying degrees worldwide through the 1990s has been accompanied by an

eager willingness to bend the rules with regard to editorial content in India, especially by the
Times of India
group. This has led to some soul searching and hand wringing by media commentators but not much

else; the
Times
juggernaut marches ahead at full steam40 as does India’s print media—it is expected to grow at a healthy annual rate of 12 per cent From this Perspective…
95

until the end of 2010.41 As a key element of its strategy, the
Times
group launched
Bombay Times
in 1995 as a twice-a-week (extended eventually to a daily) eight-page colour supplement accompanying its flagship brand, the
Times of India
’s Bombay edition. Full of gossip, celebrities, fashion and film trivia and lavish photo spreads of the lifestyles of the country’s rich, famous and beautiful people, the supplement heralded what is now popularly known as
Page 3 culture
in the county.42 Other newspapers followed—most notably the
Indian Express
with
Express Newsline
and
Hindustan Times
with
HT City
—but
Bombay Times
(along with its other city avatars like
Delhi Times, Bangalore Times, Pune Times
, and so on) has consistently led the pack.

Page 3 culture means that the cult of celebrity has been yanked out of its hitherto confined space as an indulgence or a pastime (say, the monthly
Stardust
Bollywood magazine one bought, to flip through at leisure) and propelled on to the centre stage—as something that
has
to be consumed on a daily basis. This has necessitated the creation of Page 3 events by the media houses (the
Times
Group for instance, organizes the annual
Filmfare
Awards, the
Femina
Miss India Contest and the
Bombay Times
Party, to name just three) as raw material, to then be circulated around their various channels, as well as the building up of certain celebrities within the Page 3 circuit (only to bring them down viciously a little later, of course, all part of the game). All this is not new of course—but I find it interesting for this book because, within this Page 3 circuit, out gay celebrities like late filmmaker Riyad Wadia, hair-stylist Sylvie, actor Bobby Darling, designer Krsna Mehta, and so on began to thrive and their gayness began to be consumed by mass media vehicles on a regular basis.

There have also been a great number of new national and international lifestyle magazines launched catering to different market segments like news (
Outlook
, 1995), women (
Cosmopolitan
, 1995;
Good Housekeeping
, 2004;
Marie Claire
, 2005), men (
Man’s World
, 2001), youth (
JAM
, 1995;
Seventeen
, 2003), fashion (
Verve
, 1995;
Elle
, 1996;
L’Officiel
, 2002;
Vogue
, 2007), motoring (
Autocar India
, 1999), investing (
Intelligent Investor
, 1998), travel (
India Today Travel Plus
, 1997;
Outlook Traveler
, 2001) and food (
Upper Crust
, 2000). In the face of the challenge mounted by these new entrants, older and more established magazines have revamped into
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glossier avatars (like
Femina
,
Society, Savvy
and
Stardust
), changed their periodicity (the fortnightly
India Today
shifted to a weekly edition in the face of the competition from
Outlook
), or shut down (like the venerable
Illustrated Weekly of India
, 1880–1993).

Here, I must point out that though the urban English language press has certainly made important strides through the 1990s and beyond, 50 per cent out of a total print readership base of 222 million (as per the 2006 National Readership Survey) is rural and even within the urban press, the English language press is really not that large in terms of the overall number of readers. For example—vernacular dailies have 204 million readers while English dailies only have 21 million. Thus, though the
Times of India
is the most widely read English newspaper in the country with 7.4 million readers, it is well behind the national leader
Dainik
Jagran’s
21.2 million readers.43 However, the English press is considered most influential. It is called the
national
press (as distinguished from its
regional
or
vernacular
counterparts)44 and receives a significant price premium in terms of advertising rates and hence a subsequently higher share of the advertising pie, because of the quality of its readers that it delivers to advertisers. As upper middle class English speakers in a country still struggling with high levels of basic illiteracy, they are the aspirational target groups and highly coveted.

Television

The Indian television scenario changed dramatically in 1991. Until then, there was only one terrestrial state-controlled network (called Doordarshan or DD),45 along with a small homegrown cable industry in the cities,46

which screened pirated Bollywood and English films, music and game shows.47 The telecast of the Gulf War live on CNN in 1991 and the launch of Star TV48 spurred the cable operators to buy satellite dishes and offer these new channels to their customers. Star’s initial bouquet available in India included four English channels.49 The tipping point occurred when Star TV entered into a joint venture with the Hindi channel Zee in October 1992.50 Zee’s programming mix of soaps, game shows and musical variety programmes51 introduced viewers to an
Indian
consumerist lifestyle well suited for the roaring 1990s. In this environment ‘money and good looks From this Perspective…
97

[were] the hallmarks of success’52 and entertainment and fun were all that mattered. Films and film-based programming53 became a key ingredient of the channel’s programming mix. With Zee’s success, a horde of other international, national and regional satellite channels began operations.

Some of these have since shut shop (Home TV, BiTV, ATN, Jain TV) while others have been successful. (MTV, Sony, Sun, Discovery, HBO, Cartoon Network, AXN, Eenadu, SAB TV, Sahara). DD has responded by launching a slew of different channels (an upmarket Metro network, various regional language channels, sports channels, and so on) leveraging its vast terrestrial reach to attract viewers. MTV and Star’s Channel V have become significant barometers of the tastes of Indian youth—their
Hinglish
speaking VJ’s, sexy couture, racy videos and yet extremely Indian positioning has ensured their immense popularity among their target audience. Star’s fortunes have soared since 2000—its flagship Star Plus (now completely Hindi) is the country’s leading channel.54 On a macro level, there are now 20 satellites beaming into South Asian homes with more than 300 accessible channels.55 (About a 100 more channels are expected to be launched by 2008–09.)56 The number of Indian television homes increased from 34.9 million in 1992 to 112 million in 2006—these include 68 million cable and satellite homes.57 As we shall see in Chapter 4, gay issues have frequently come up as television news topics, as well as on popular soaps like
Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin
(There’s No One Like Jassi).

Radio

Like television, Indian radio was state controlled until 1993,58 when the government opened up All India Radio’s (AIR) FM channel and allowed private companies in different cities to buy time on it, brand their allocated time slots and resell commercial space on these slots. This move proved to be a big hit with urban India as there was no pre-censorship of the content that was aired—it could be Western music, talk shows, call-in requests, anything and soon, people were listening to FM radio in their homes and cars. In 2000, the government held an open auction for 108 radio licences;59 once a company obtained a licence for a city—it could run its own complete station. Currently, there are several of these
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new stations operating in a very tightly competitive market, including Big FM, Radio Mirchi and Radio City. In 2005, the government opened up the sector to foreign direct investment and gave out 338 licences for 91 Indian towns and cities.60 Radio is set to grow at a rate of 32 per cent per annum until 2010.61 This explosion has resulted in several radio talk shows over the past few years discussing homosexuality—for example, on 3 May 2004, a phone-in show on Radio Mirchi at 10 a.m. raised the topic and had Bollywood stars Shah Rukh Khan and Isha Koppikar, as well as a psychiatrist from the city’s Nanavati Hospital asserting that there was nothing wrong with being gay.62 The real time and interactive nature of radio has been exploited by gay activists effectively. So, on Valentine’s Day in 2006, a Get Your Gay Valentines Out Campaign was organized in Bombay where the organizers decided to bombard the different radio stations with same-sex Valentine dedications to their partners via call-ins and text messages—quite a few of these dedications landed up actually being read out on air.63

Internet

The Internet was officially launched in India on 15 August 1995 as a government-run monopoly service.64 Its initial growth was slow and there were only 7,00,000 users within the country by March 1998.65

After the government allowed private ISPs entry into the market in November 1998, the number of users increased to 3.7 million in 200066

and 18.5 million in 200467 and stood at 45 million in mid-2006.68 On a related note, the Indian personal computers penetration too grew from 3,50,000 PCs in 1991 to 12 million in March 200469 and is expected to cross 80 million by 2010.70

These are still pretty low numbers. However, they are increasing sharply and the reach of the Internet at least within the demographic segment that I am concerned with, is pretty wide. Email usage is widespread.

Popular gay-related websites among the men I interviewed included Gaybombay.org, Advocate.com, Guys4men.com and the chat rooms

on Indiatimes.com and Gay.com—and as we shall see in Chapter 5, many of them look upon the Internet as a major factor in helping them acknowledge and gather more information about their sexuality.

From this Perspective…
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More recently, with the increased popularity of blogging worldwide, there has been a surfeit of gay blogs emerging from India as well.71

TECHNOSCAPE

My technoscape refers to the emergence of the Internet and the telecommunications and technology booms of the 1990s and how both these were enablers of gayness. We have already discussed the emergence of the Internet above. Let us now turn to the telecommunication and IT (Information Technology) revolutions.

Telecommunications

Prior to 1992, the Government of India had a monopoly over telecommunications in the country and there were only about five million fixed line telephones in India in 1990.72 As part of the economic reforms process, the telecommunications sector was liberalized in 1992 and private sector participation was encouraged, especially in the cellular mobile services sector.73 The number of cellphone subscribers in the country rose from about 8,00,000 in 1997–98 to 5.5 million users by the end of 2001—and then sharply rose again to reach 50.8 million in February 200574 and over 120 million by August 2006, by which time, India had become the fastest growing cellular market in the world.75

The figure is expected to cross 500 million by 2010.76 This cellphone boom has benefited India’s gay population in general—the increasing ubiquity and constantly decreasing costs of handsets and phone rates has enabled even modest-income individuals to own their own phones and enjoy the benefits of private communication—this is something that used to be a luxury in India until a few years back. Gay Bombay makes an effective use of the thriving cellphone culture in the city to connect to its constituency virally—organizers regularly sent party announcements via SMS (short messaging service, or text messaging) to their phone lists—and these are forwarded all over the city, in a chain like manner, thus, having an effective blend of good old word-of-mouth and modern connectivity. More importantly, as Asim, one of my interviewees noted,
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with a cellphone number you can remain anonymous. You can give it out to other people without fear; something that you could not do earlier with a fixed line number because there was always a chance that your family would answer that phone sometimes.