Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (34 page)

Sexuality, Gender and Rights
: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and
Southeast Asia
(New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005) is another recent book that aims at looking at sexual-ity rights discourse through a larger Asian prism; its editors Geetanjali Misra (from CREA or Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action, New Delhi) and Radhika Chandiramani

(from TARSHI or Talking About Reproductive and Sexual Health Issues,
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New Delhi), have collated 15 essays from eight different countries, including India, that make rele-vant links between theory and practice, scholars and activists, rights, advocacy and outreach.

I wish to briefly reflect on two major gay
Indian
texts written before 1991–1932’s
Hindoo Holiday
and 1977’s
The World of Homosexuals
.

Hindoo Holiday
was written by J.R. Ackerley, a 20-something homosexual, Cambridge-educated, war-returned dilettante who spent five months in India in 1923 as the secretary to the (also homosexual)
Maharaja
of Chhatarpur. On his return to England, Ackerley fashioned his Indian diaries into a pacy travelogue and the book—published first in 1932

(when it was considered too sexy to be read aloud on BBC radio!) and then republished subsequently in more explicit editions in 1952 and 1979—became an instant classic. I am considering this as an
Indian
book because of its widespread availability in Indian libraries—for Indian homosexuals rummaging through library bookshelves and looking for characters closer to home in the decades prior to liberalization, this was often a refreshing find.

Hindoo Holiday
weaves desire, palace intrigue and Indian customs adroitly together—laced with the wry humour that Ackerley would later become famous for as the literary editor of
The Listener
magazine from 1935 to 1959. By renaming Chattarpur as Chokrapur (City of Boys), Ackerley is upfront about his intentions. He vividly describes the physical attractiveness of the various young men he encounters during his travels and comically recounts the
Maharajah
’s pining for the performing boy actors of his kingdom. We learn, among several other juicy tidbits, that one of the king’s peccadilloes includes forcing his young queen to make love with one of his regular bisexual playmates in his presence!

Ackerley’s prose, as Eliot Weinberger writes in the 2000 introduction of the book’s reprint edition, is ‘entirely without the psychodrama or the Hellenistic pretensions that were common among gay writers at the time’167—it is natural, guilt-free, evocative and makes for extremely pleasurable reading. Although it appears light on the surface, the book is extremely sensitive to the myriad complexities surrounding issues of power, race, caste, sexuality and gender inequality observed by Ackerley during his sojourn. Consider this description of a kiss between the author Media Matters
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and 20-year-old Narayan, who he has been lusting after ever since his arrival in Chokrapur.

…Narayan came down the path to meet me. I thought how graceful he looked in his white muslin clothes, the sleeves of his loose vest widening out at the wrist, the long streamers of his turban floating behind him. The breeze puffed at his
dhoti
as he approached, moulding the soft stuff to the shape of his thigh; then as he turned a bend in the path, another gentle gust took the garment from behind and blew it aside, momentarily baring a slim brown leg. I took his hand and led him into my tent….

‘I want to love you very much’, he said.

‘You mean you do love me very much’.

‘I want to’.

‘Then why not’?

‘You will go away to England and I shall be sorry. But you will not be sorry. I am only a boy and I shall be sorry’.

…He suddenly laughed softly and drew me after him. And in the dark roadway, overshadowed by trees, he put up his face and kissed me on the cheek. I returned his kiss, but he at once drew back, crying out—

‘Not the mouth. You eat meat! You eat meat!’

‘Yes and I will eat you in a minute’, I said and kissed him on the lips again and this time, he did not draw away.168

The World of Homosexuals
is a concise, detailed and enlightened examination of a wide range of issues surrounding homosexuality in the Indian context. It is by an unlikely author—the celebrated mathematics genius Shakuntala Devi—who beat the then world’s fastest computer (the Univac 1108) at a competition to find the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in the same year of the book’s publication (1977)! She subsequently entered the Guinness Book of World Records three years later, for mentally multiplying two randomly chosen 13-digit numbers and correctly giving the 26-digit answer in 28 seconds! In
The World of
Homosexuals
, she declares at the outset that she is ‘neither a homosexual nor a social scientist, psychologist or a psychiatrist’ and that her only qualification for writing the book is that she is ‘a human being’; and wishes to shed light on a section of her ‘fellow human beings who have been little understood and forced to live in “half-hiding” throughout
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their lives by a society that is merciless towards everything that differs from the statistical norm’.169

Devi’s research is meticulous; her sources include ‘books, pamphlets, departmental reports, parliamentary debates and even blue books [porn]’

and interviews with ‘psychologists, social scientists, social workers, politicians, priests, doctors, lawyers, professors and many homosexuals in India as well as in Canada, West Germany, the UK and many other countries’.170 The book comprises of 16 chapters. There are three extended interviews with Indian and Canadian homosexuals and chapters dealing with historical, legal, religious and psychiatric perspectives on homosexuality, commercialized homosexuality, homosexuality in prisons, homosexuality in literature and films and
gay lib
. Devi’s tone is compassionate and sanctifying—throughout the book, she attempts to clarify misconceptions about homosexuals, (‘The most common

myth propagated about the homosexual is that he is effeminate. This is far from the truth’)171 and present sexual information matter-of-factly, (‘Sometimes men may indulge in what is popularly known as
69
where they lie in such a way that they can simultaneously engage in oral-genital contact’)172 and advocate for the complete normalcy of homosexuality.

(‘What people do not realize is the ordinariness and commonplaceness of homosexuality. Every time we walk down the street, travel in a bus or train, we shall probably pass homosexuals without knowing it…. Most people will have at least one relative who is a homosexual’).173

It is remarkable to observe just how much of the book rings true even today, whether it is in the predicament of Indian gay men who have to marry to conform to social norms,174 or Western gay men who have to constantly struggle to preserve their hard-fought rights.175 In the chapter on homosexuals and community, I find a historical background to some of the issues surrounding kinship that I am exploring in this book—

In India, where such [open] advertisements, bars, clubs or social groups are unheard of, homosexuals, men and women join small cliques of friends of long standing, who visit one another’s homes, patronize the same cafés and meet at one another’s parties.

In ordinary company, many homosexuals who succeed in putting up a front of normality feel themselves outsiders merely pretending to share the lives and interests of the majority. Among their own kind, they can Media Matters
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drop the mask; enclosed by their own tight little circle, insulated from the outside world, they can be completely at ease and they can enjoy the morale boosting effect of being accepted for what they are.176

O BROTHER! WHERE ART THOU?

The
Freshlimesoda
years are probably the most stressful years of my life.

Between 1999 to 2001, I go through a tumultuous rollercoaster of a ride.

I leave my newspaper job to start my youth magazine as a partnership
with a friend, which then collapses due to ego clashes between the two of
us and I buy him out. I take the idea corporate and exult in the company’s
rapid growth and joint venture agreement with one of the world’s largest
media conglomerates only to preside over its equally spectacular demise a
few months later into the rubble of the dotcom crash. After the crash, I am
forced to deal with a messy aftermath that includes a protracted closure of
the company involving several months of legal wrangling with my erstwhile
joint-venture partner, while surreally seated in their very own office as
their newly absorbed employee aiming to expand their business into new
directions. I am a financial and emotional wreck. I cannot trust anyone anymore. People who had crawled out of the woodwork to embrace me during
my dotcom-celebrity page-turning days vanish once they learn that I am
not rich anymore.

When I’m not working, I’m with 14-year old Manav and his family. They
have welcomed me into their fold as an elder brother to Manav ever since
we bonded together on the sets of a film that I worked on two years ago.

I enjoy the affection, but sometimes feel stifled by the demands on my time
that accompany it. My friends wonder why I am spending my spare time
babysitting a 14-year old and I can sense that his friends feel the same. But
I am feeling vulnerable and defeated and Manav is very affectionate—he
hugs me all the time and tells me that he loves me. I can de-stress when I am
with him; his life and his needs are paramount and my professional worries
seem a universe away. He is opinionated, smart and sensitive and my desire
to be a parent gets articulated during the time I spend around him. He is
an only child, just like me and I understand his need for constantly being
the centre of things, the yearning to not be alone. I want to expose him
to art, to literature, to grow up thinking differently about life, to have the
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kind of childhood that I never managed to have. (Yes, I am scarily turning
into an archetypal Indian parent).

His parents are very encouraging—they don’t think that it’s weird that
a 24-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy would want to spend so much
time together with each other. I try my best to be straight acting—but it’s
a small world that we move around in and eventually, they question me
about the rumours they have heard about my sexuality. I deny them and
they choose to believe me.

But it’s hard for Manav—his friends start to tease him, first about having
a gay
brother
and then, about being gay himself. I try to convey to him
the importance of being his own person, of not being swayed by the silly
jibes of other people and tell him that their comments stem out of jealousy
because of his film actor status, but I know I am fighting a losing battle. He
just wants to fit in and needs definition from me—maybe he has made up
his mind and wants me to come out to him, so that he can take a stand on
where he wants to position himself in my life. I am too chicken. My moral-izing about the larger picture is not the solution, but I am scared of losing
him if I do come out.

I realize that the loss is inevitable in any case. I am fed up about lying
and scheming so that my gay life does not seep into our happy bubble. After
breaking up with Z, I haven’t had the time to date anyone seriously, and I’d
like to get back to that. Manav badly wants to be accepted into the
normal

world of his friends—his association with me is an impediment, as is his
status as an actor. He needs to lose both to succeed. First, the hugs stop, then
he stops telling me he loves me and calling me
bhaiya
(brother). We begin
to find excuses not to spend weekends with each other, go for our weekly
Bollywood fix with our separate groups of friends. Eventually, we float into
our own hermetic worlds as, perhaps, it was always meant to be.

QUEER INDIAN FILMS

Commercial Bollywood cinema has a long tradition of having comic sequences or songs featuring cross-dressing male stars (think Amitabh Bachchan in a sari in 1981’s
Laawaris
—‘The Orphan’; Rishi Kapoor in a dress in 1975’s
Rafoo Chakkar
—’The Runaways’) or any number of songs Media Matters
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featuring
hijras
. It is becoming quite trendy to read Bollywood films as

‘gay’ or ‘queer’.177 Hoshang Merchant mentions the
Andaz
(‘A Matter of Style’, 1949) and
Sangam
(‘Confluence’, 1964) love triangles where ‘the real love plot is…
dosti
or
yaaarana
[friendship] between the two heroes….

The female lead is there only to lessen the homosexual sting’;178 Shohini Ghosh reads
Dosti
(1964)—dealing with ‘the intense friendship between two poor and physically-disabled young men who struggle to survive in the city’—as an ‘allegory of homosexual love expressed through the metaphor of physical disability’.179 R. Raj Rao, Gayathri Gopinath and Ashok Row Kavi have all queered Bollywood in a similar vein,180 as have other writers for other Indian cinemas beyond Bollywood.181

Why, there are even now, a handful of explicitly gay-themed Bollywood films, or films which have visible LBGT characters, problematic as these might be. 1991’s
Mast
Kalander
(‘Intoxicated’) is a landmark in this context. It features Bollywood’s ‘first’182 out and out
gay
character Pinku. If Hollywood’s first gay characters were either comic or villainous, Pinku was both and the critics had a field day!

Pinku [is] a new generation gangster. In his flaming yellow or pink suits, Pinku is both pansy and comic rolled into one. A gay little tune strikes up whenever he enters. And just to make really sure that you are left in no doubt about him, Pinku in his opening scene runs his fingers over his father’s brawny body and asks
‘Daddy, hamara body aapke jaise
strong aur muscular kyoon nahin hai?
’ (‘Daddy, why is not my body as strong and muscular as yours?’) When Pinku is not plotting fell murders and kid-nappings, he pleads for a motorbike (‘Daddy, I want to live dangerously’), or chases men… And when all the thugs are finally rounded up in the police lock up, Pinku exults at what he sees as a heaven-sent opportunity.183