Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (33 page)

Bombay

honest living. There was an equally misleading, misinformed and wrongly named series on CNN-IBN aired for one week, starting 10 April 2006, called ‘The Third Sex’, which reported luridly, among others, stories of a gay man acquiring HIV virus so as to be ‘together’ with his married male partner.

Just as they have done in print, India’s gay celebrities, with the exception of some like Vikram Seth, have shied of talking to television media about their sexuality. The media, by and large, has tacitly complied with the subterfuge. Thus, an episode of the Star World talk show
Rendezvous
With Simi Garewal
(telecast date 20 September 2002), where the host interviews the high profile gay fashion designer couple Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla about everything—meeting each other for the first time, partnering each other at work, living with each other, tiffs and quarrels—everything except their homosexuality! The couple also co-anchored a reality show together (
Lakme Fashion House
, which was telecast between January to April 2005) where again, their coupledom was obvious and the participants and invited guests all clearly treat them as a couple, but it was never explicitly stated.

In contrast, ordinary gay men are slowly being visible on Indian television screens, mainly in talk shows and panel discussions related to homosexuality or Article 377. For example, the panel discussion show on CNN IBN
Minus 30
(telecast on 23 September 2006) had several ordinary non-celebrity, non-activist, just regular guy-next-door type of people, like Praful, a PR professional; and an episode of
Life’s Like That
on Times Now (telecast on 12 September 2006) titled ‘What’s Life Like for a Homosexual in Urban India?’ had corporate trainer Ali Potia and web developer Rudra, both in their mid-20s, frankly discussing their day-to-day experiences.

ORMUS: I FEEL TELEVISION HAS HAD A MAJOR ROLE TO PLAY, WITH

SERIALS LIKE
WILL AND GRACE
AND
FRIENDS
. ADMITTEDLY

THIS CHANGE IS TAKING PLACE IN THE YOUNGER GENERATION,

BECAUSE THEY ARE THE ONES WHO ARE MOST EXPOSED

TO THIS ‘WAVE OF DEPRAVITY FROM THE WEST’. ONE CAN

ONLY WISH THAT SUCH WAVES ARE MORE FREQUENT AND

VOLUMINOUS. THAT SAID, INDIA STILL REMAINS INDIA.

A CURSORY SURVEY OF PEOPLE FROM MY OWN AGE-GROUP

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195

WOULD REVEAL VERY DEEP SEATED PREJUDICES AND

MISCONCEPTIONS. BUT THERE MOST CERTAINLY IS A BREATH

OF FRESHNESS.

In late 2003, the popular Sony soap opera
Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin
(‘There’s No One Like Jassi’) was in the news151 because of one of its characters—

Maddy, a gay fashion designer with over-the-top mannerisms and a penchant for bullying Jassi, the show’s main lead. Episodes of the show telecast on 1 December 2003 and 2 December 2003, featured a gay club, a gay kiss and a bet between Maddy and his boss (who visits the gay club searching for Maddy), which the boss eventually loses. The penalty—

the boss dresses up in a drag (in the episode telecast on 19 January 2004) and accompanies Maddy to a party as his ‘baby doll’!

CONTEMPORARY INDIAN WRITING ON HOMOSEXUALITY

KARIM: IN INDIA, YOU GET A WIDE VARIETY OF BOOKS. GAY CLASSICS LIKE

THE ARMSTEAD MAUPIN SERIES, MARY RENAULT’S
THE PERSIAN

BOY
OR JAMES BALDWIN’S
GIOVANNI’S ROOM
WERE ALL AVAILABLE

IN BOOKSHOPS IN MADRAS. SOME OF THEM WERE GOD-

AWFUL BORING…NOBODY SHOULD HAVE TO READ
THE WELL

OF LONELINESS
! I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR ANSWERS. THE BOOKS

JUST CONNECTED ME WITH A LARGER GAY WORLD, WHICH I DID

NOT HAVE ANY CONNECTION WITH GROWING UP IN MADRAS

OR CALCUTTA…[BUT] THERE WAS A LIMIT WITHIN WHICH

I COULD IDENTIFY WITH THE PROTAGONISTS IN THE NOVELS;

THEIR REALITY WAS SO DIFFERENT FROM MY REALITY. WHAT

I DID NOT FIND…WERE NARRATIVES IN AN INDIAN CONTEXT.

The publication of the literature and reportage mentioned in this chapter has provided a vast account of the history and contemporary struggles around queer Indian sexuality—making it increasingly difficult for the mainstream to claim that queerness is a Western import. More importantly, it has enabled queer Indians (or at least those with access to such material) to find for themselves, the
narratives in an Indian context
that they so desperately sought.

In July 1991, a tiny boxed advertisement appeared in the inside pages of the
Times of India
, which read—‘Book on Gays: A Delhi journalist,
196
Gay

Bombay

Mr Arvind Kala, is writing a sympathetic book,
The World of Indian Gays
.

He invites gays to talk to him in confidence about their feelings and emotions. Telephone: 230247’.152 A year and 112 interviews later, Mr Kala had churned out his book. Now titled
Invisible Minority: The Unknown
World of the Indian Homosexual,
153 the far-from-sympathetic account was published to almost universal denouncement as a ‘badly written’154

piece of work, intended perhaps for ‘the round eyed, half-price scandal seeker’155 instead of a more serious audience. Jeremy Seabrook’s
Love
in a Different Climate
(1999) turned out to be an infinitely better book produced using a similar methodology. (The author spent some months in 1997 interviewing 75 ‘men who have sex with men’156 in Delhi. Most of the interviews were conducted in one of the city’s public parks—a popular cruising ground and the subjects formed a cross section of Delhi’s homosexual population).

Seabrook’s book is elegant, intelligent and reflexive—his sensitivity to the testimony of his subjects and perceptive analysis is striking compared to the gross crudeness of Kala’s effort. (Seabrook’s attempt appears nobler too—his inspiration for writing stems out of the HIV prevention work being carried out by the Naz Project in Delhi, while it seems apparent that all Kala wants to do is milk a sensational topic for some quick bucks). Unfortunately,
Love in a Different Climate
is not available in India; I wish the same could be said for Kala’s book. Three other books conspicuous by their absence from Indian bookshelves are
Sakhiyani:
Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India
(1996),
The Man Who Was a
Woman and Other Queer Tales
(2002) and
Tritiya-Prakriti: People of the Third
Sex
(2003)
.
Vanita (2001) also mentions Leslie de Norhona’s
Dew Drop
Inn
(1994) and P. Parivaraj’s
Shiva and Arun
(1998);157 neither of which is available within the country.

There have been four significant anthologies of Indian gay and

lesbian writing published so far. First off the block in 1993 was Rakesh Ratti’s (Ed.)
A Lotus of Another Colour: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay
and Lesbian Experience.
The book is primarily concerned with issues concerning the South Asian LBGT diaspora living in Western countries and aims at increasing their visibility in ‘both the South Asian and gay and lesbian communities’158 they inhabit. It consists of essays, poems, autobiographical and fictional short stories and interviews Media Matters
197

without South Asian celebrities like activist Urvashi Vaid and filmmaker Pratibha Parmar.

The two Penguin India releases in 1999—
Yaarana: Gay Writing from
India
and
Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India
follow more or less the same formula, but with contributors that reside mainly in India.

Because I Have a Voice: Queer Polics in India
(New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006) is another India-focused collection, edited by Gautam Bhan and Arvind Narrain. Narrain is part of a small but growing tribe of recent National Law School of India (Bangalore) graduates, committed to applying their legal background to queer rights and legal advocacy, while Bhan is a queer rights activist based in Delhi and one of the founders of the city’s Nigah Media Collective. Their book has 30 contributors who are trying to create a conceptual framework for understanding the varied sexuality related struggles taking place in the country, narrating tales from the battleground, as well as their own personal journeys.

For many years now, R. Raj Rao (poet, professor, activist) has been the public face of gay Indian literature. His searing collection of short stories
One Day I Locked My Flat in Soul City
(1995) contains several angst-ridden gay-themed pieces. An obsessive and masochistic lover pining for his former flame (now turned straight); a patient narrating his wild sexual fantasies in a psychoanalyst’s chamber; a homosexual rape in a police station; a gay man who has a sex change to capture the heart of his beloved and upon failing, decides to turn lesbian; a murderous rioter who decides to suck off his victim instead of killing him…Rao’s world is melancholic and gritty, inhibited with characters that are both sad and mad. In 1996, six of Rao’s poems from his still-in-progress
BomGay
were filmed by documentary filmmaker Riyad Wadia as India’s first gay film—
BOMgAY
. In 2003, Rao released his first novel,
The Boyfriend
, which was widely publicized as India’s first gay novel in English. (Authors like Vikram Seth,159 Vikram Chandra160 and Firdaus Kanga161 had all written about gay themes, but Rao’s work was the first to be fully pivoted around homosexuality).

The Boyfriend
is bleak, hard-hitting and darkly funny. Rao is uncompromising in his examination of Bombay’s gay subcultures and the thorny issues of caste, class and religion that are stirred up when 40-something freelance journalist Yudi picks up Milind, a 19-year old
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Gay

Bombay

Dalit (lower caste) boy at a railway station public toilet and embarks on a tempestuous love affair with him, despite the odds being heavily stacked against its success. The book is peppered with a band of distinctive characters like stubborn fag-hag Gauri, AK modelling agency’s pumped up gigolos, dance club Testosterone’s feisty queens, blackmailing cop Dyaneshwar…. It literally throbs of Bombay—one can feel the crush of the sweltering train journeys up and down the city’s longitudinal rail corridors, taste the grime of the putrid slums, witness furtive sexual encounters in public spaces and hear the earthy vernacular slang used by its homosexual inhabitants.

Ruth Vanita’s three books—
Same Sex Love in India
(2001, Co-authored with Saleem Kidwai),
Queering India
(2002) and
Love’s Rite: Same-Sex
Marriage in India and the West
(2005)—are worthy of canonical status among the body of Indian LBGT writing. Vanita’s agenda for
Same Sex
Love
is simple—to ‘help assure homoerotically inclined Indians that large numbers of their ancestors throughout history and in all parts of the country shared their inclination and were honoured and successful members of society, who contributed in major ways to thought, literature and the general good’.162 The book has a grand sweep, which extends across ancient, medieval (Sanskritic and Persian-Urdu) and modern Indian texts (some of them in English, but most of them translated from different Indian languages like Tamil, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi and Oriya).
Queering India
is completely contemporary—comprised of academic essays divided into three sections—‘Colonial Transitions’, ‘The Visions of Fiction’ and ‘Performative Pleasures in Theatre, TV and Cinema’.

Love’s Rite
was released in the midst of the whole gay marriage debate in the US and it covers impressive terrain, discussing gender, spirituality, the law and the state, parenting, reproduction and the changing concept of families; from pre-modern to contemporary times.

Maya Sharma’s 2006 book—
Loving Women: Being Lesbian in Unprivileged
India
163
is an account of the lives of 10 working-class lesbian women in north India—it is an important work that breaks the myth that lesbians, or queer people in general, in India, are upper class English speaking and urban.

The excellent report—
Less than Gay: A Citizens’ Report on the Status
of Homosexuality in India
was prepared by the New Delhi-based AIDS

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Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan
(ABVA) in 1991. There was a 10-year gap until the next widely circulated LBGT community report—2002’s
Humjinsi:
A Resource Book on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Rights in India
, published from Bombay.164 The rise in Bangalore-based LBGT activism in the past few years has resulted in three major publications. PUCL or The People’s Union for Civil Liberties in Karnataka (the south Indian state of which Bangalore is the capital) has published two reports documenting various types of harassments against India’s different sexual minorities. The 44-page 2001 report titled
Human Rights Violations Against Sexual Minorities
in India
165 is divided into four sections. Section One provides an overview of the status of sexual minorities in India. Section Two lists various discriminations faced by LBGT people by the state (legal, system, police, and so on). Section Three lists societal discriminations (family, workplace, public spaces, medical establishment and the popular media); while Section Four deals with the impact of discrimination on the individual self. The organization’s 2003 publication titled
Human Rights Violations
Against the Transgender Community166
is more specifically focused on
hijra
and
kothi
sex workers being victimized by the Bangalore police and other authorities. 2004 witnessed the publication of Arvind Narrain’s much-needed monograph
Queer: Despised Sexuality, Law and Societal
Change
. Important sections of his monograph include an overview of the legal discourse surrounding queer sexuality in ancient, medieval and colonial India, the contemporary context in which the legal opposition to discrimination against queer sexuality in India is being played out (constitutional challenge to Section 377, campaign for progressive law reform, building a database of human rights violations perpetrated by the state against queer subjects) and a valuable resource list of groups working on sexuality issues throughout the country.