Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (2 page)

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Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the backing of my terrific MIT thesis committee. Henry Jenkins was the ideal thesis supervisor and also ideal boss. He, along with Edward Baron Turk and Tuli Banerjee, helped me conceive, mould and eventually pare down the manuscript to its current length. William Urrichio helped with the initial push and (freshly minted University of Michigan professor!) Aswin Punathambekar provided the motivational pull at the finish line. Over the past four years, I have looked up to the five of you as my academic idols and also been privileged enough to consider each of you a close friend; I thank you all for your affection, support and guidance.

I wanted to write this book in multiple voices. I am not sure that I have succeeded, but among the different academic voices that I had the pleasure of discovering while researching this book, were Kath Weston, John Campbell, Arjun Appadurai and closer home, Henry Jenkins, Grant McCracken and Robert Kozinets. These are the voices that have inspired me to continue to keep one foot in academia and if I can eventually manage to express myself with even a fraction of their lucidity and conviction, I will consider myself a success.

I am grateful to my family of classmates and co-workers at MIT Comparative Media Studies, my home during the three years that this book was being written. Chris, I miss you immensely. Susan darling, when will I see you again? CMS mother hen Sarah (and now, new mommy!), Ilya Vedrashko and the entire C3 team—you rock.

I am obliged to the many advisors, experts and confidantes that helped me during my research, with follow-ups, reading drafts and making suggestions for both this book and the video documentary project that accompanied it. Vikram Doctor, Ashok Row Kavi, Vivek Anand, Nitin Karani, Alok Gupta, Jyoti Puri, Wendell Rodricks, Simran Thadani, Rachel Dwyer, L. Ramakrishnan, Robert Cagle, Gulnar Mistry, Acknowledgements
15

Jignesh Jhaveri, Dan Van Roekel, Joe Gibbons, Rajeev Masand, Tara Deshpande, Sridhar Rangayan, Sidharth Jaggi, Darshana Dave, Beth Coleman, Generoso Fierro, James Dai, James Nadeau, Michelle Oshima, Paul Knox, Shailen Bhandare, R. Raj Rao, Mario D’Penha, Nandini Manjrekar, Gautam Bhan, Sandip Roy, Kim Mulji, P. Balakrishnan, Michael Fischer, Shivananda Khan, Pratap, Sachin, Albert, Deepak, Sultan, Ashish, Sameer, Raj, Rohan, Bhushan, Vikram, Sunil, Ketan, Arshad—thank you all. To the wonderful SAGE Publications team in New Delhi, especially Sugata Ghosh, Maneet Singh, Sunanda Ghosh and Anamika Mukharji, a big big thanks.

To all my interviewees, for both the book and the film, I am overwhelmed by how you freely gave me your time and your stories and the several other random acts of kindness that made this journey so special.

I must express my gratitude to my family of friends spread all over the globe, who love me not in spite of my quirks, but because of them and whose affection provided vital nourishment during the process of writing. Anchal, Roy, Alan, Amulya, Prajna, Kriti, Gray, Rommel, Pranjal, Ali, Sujata, Ghalib, Jitin, Fawzia, Shashi, Sajan, Anne, Girish, Kuleen, Kushal, Meenu, Mridula, Aalika, Aakash, Uttara, Ashwin, Yusuf, Nusrat, Ananya Sage, Rahul, Anand, Nikhil, Arvind, Nandan, Ashish, Sharmistha, Aroon, Astad, Paul, Karishma, Aidita, Raul, Murray, Kai, Joyce, Stefan, Nancy, Anuradha, Nainesh, Aneesh, Sangita, Neha, Chandler, Mridu, Ajit, Anmol, Pallavi, Shradha, Seema, Uddrek, Girish, Shilpi, Nargis, Sujoy, Gitu, Akshina, Ramesh, Nitish, Jay, Shubha, Satchit and I am sure I am forgetting loads of people here and will be reminded about it at length, but really…

thanks, from the bottom of my heart. To my maternal grandparents, I owe an eternal debt for raising me like no parents ever could and to my parents, I am grateful for the space, the intellectual freedom, the understanding and the acceptance. I want to make you proud. To my mom especially, I am sorry I take you for granted. Thank you for being there, come what may, with your steadfast love and support for whatever I do. To my sweetheart Junri, what more can I say—you have got a romantic love poem dedicated exclusively to you right up front! You are very lucky to have me, you know that,
na
?

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Finally, to my gay support systems—Gay Bombay for the subject matter of the book, for helping me rediscover my city and myself; Humsafar for their always accessible advice; the MASALA network in Boston for introducing me to fabulous
desi
queerdom; the incredible resources of LBGT@MIT (especially Rick Gresh, Tom Robinson, Howard Heller, Ajit Dash, Michele Oshima and Abigail Francis) and the MIT community at large, for being such a wonderful refuge while this book was being written.

Synopsis

Gay Bombay is an online-offline community (comprising a website, a newsgroup and physical events in Bombay city), that was formed as a result of the intersection of certain historical conjectures with the disjunctures caused via the flows of the radically shifting ethnoscape, financescape, politiscape, mediascape, technoscape and ideoscape of urban India in the 1990s. Within this book, using a combination of multi-sited ethnography, textual analysis, historical documentation analysis and memoir writing, the author attempts to provide various macro and micro perspectives on what it means to be a gay man located in Gay Bombay at a particular point of time. Specifically, he explores what being gay means to the members of Gay Bombay and how they negotiate

locality and globalization, their sense of identity as well as a feeling of community within its online/offline world. On a broader level, he critically examines the formulation and reconfiguration of contemporary Indian gayness in the light of its emergent cultural, media and political alliances.

He realizes that Gay Bombay is a community that is imagined and fluid; identity here is both fixed and negotiated, and to be gay in Gay Bombay signifies being ‘glocal’—it is not just gayness but
Indianized
gayness.

He further realizes that within the various struggles in and around Gay Bombay, what is being negotiated is the very stability of the idea of Indianness. The book concludes with a
modus vivendi
—the author’s draft manifesto for the larger queer movement that he believes Gay Bombay is an integral part of, and a sincere hope that as the struggle for queer rights enters its exciting new phase, groups like Gay Bombay might be able to co-operate with other queer groups in the country, and march on the path to progress, together.

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1

Introduction: The Heart has its Reasons

Theoretical Domains, Exploratory Questions, Research

Schema, Topographic Terrain and Personal Motives

And love

Is not the easy thing

The only baggage you can bring

Is all that you can’t leave behind

QUEEN’S NECKLACE

Walking down Marine Drive at seven in the evening. Hungry Eyes Chinese
Food truck is shut for the day. Every afternoon, it feeds the hordes that cannot
afford a table at the Oberoi and the grub’s better too. Twilight, dusk. I am
surrounded by the Queen’s Necklace. Very beautiful. High tide. The angry
sea rises above the breakers and hits passers-by. I’ve seen it much angrier.

Bombay has just had seven days of incessant rain. I have walked this route
for years. It is my catharsis. All the way from home, down Colaba Causeway
across Nariman Point and then along the seashore. I climb the rocks and
look at the vast sea, the eternity beyond.

The Queen’s Necklace begins with the high rise buildings of Navy
Nagar—all similarly sized; then the tall Air India and Oberoi Hotel buildings
at Nariman Point and the new NCPA complex with flats more expensive than
Manhattan; the revolving restaurant of the Ambassador Hotel; the string
of art deco buildings, none of them more than six floors high; the flood-light Wankhede Cricket Stadium, now dark, but when there is a match on,
all of Marine Drive is electrified and people climb up to the terraces of the
neighbouring buildings for a free aerial view. Walk past the flyover from
Metro cinema, which curls in a sweeping arc on to the sea front. The point
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at which the flyover and Marine Drive intersect is the centre of the necklace.

If you sit here, you can see the two ends in the periphery of your vision and
the horizon beyond where the sky meets the ocean. I often pause at this point
and wonder about life and being gay and finding happiness…rubbish like
that. My yoga class is across the road at the 100 year-old Kaivalyadham
Institute, but I’ve been skipping sessions.

Crowded traffic moving at 80 kilometres per hour. Crazy people running
across at all the wrong places. 2002. I see a dead body on this very road as
I speed home in my car from another bad day at work. A young man with
his thigh torn from his body and flung across the road. There is a pool of
blood and I can see the bone poking out of the flesh where the thigh used
to be. So many vehicles are rushing by but no one stops. My driver reassures
me that there must be an ambulance on its way. Cold cruel city—home,
nemesis, love. Why do I hate you so much? Why can I not leave you forever?

Why did I let my driver drive on?

What you got, they can’t steal it

No they can’t even feel it

Walk on

Walk on

Stay safe tonight

A light drizzle. Now past the new renovated Police Gymkhana, the dilapi-dated Hindu and Parsi gymkhanas, the old Taraporewala Aquarium, where
no one really goes anymore, except poor country-hick tourists. Chowpatty
and its massage men; crowded
bhel puri
and
falooda
stalls, sanitized
and contained into a concrete food plaza. The beach is cleaner than ever.

Very different from the Ganpati festival with all the Plaster of Paris statue
immersions, and the hundreds and thousands of tightly packed bodies,
squeezed next to each other on the sands. Devotion mixed with rough
fondling of penises; sensations amplified by the noise, the smell, the spectacle
and the release.

Nana-Nani
park—a good idea for old people—but no parking, where
I would take my grandparents when they were younger and I had car
access. New Yorker’s restaurant with the best Indianized
nachos
in the
world outside—which there is always a line to get in, even on afternoons
Introduction
21

and weekdays. The glittering skyscrapers of Malabar Hill and oversized
hoardings in the distance. Some like
Binani
and
Raymonds
have been
there for decades; others like
Reliance India Mobile
are new. And then, the
clasp of the necklace, a stretch of pristine land with its private beach—the
governor’s estate—Raj Bhavan.

And I know it aches

And your heart it breaks

You can only take so much

Walk on

Tall swaying palm trees, sea salt water spraying on my face, wind running
through my hair, tears flowing down my cheeks.
Nariyal pani
vendors
huddled up under ineffectual beach umbrellas. Muscle men in their jogging
suits, fat ladies in
salwar kurtas
and walking shoes, lots of people walking
their dogs, lots of dogs walking their people; servants and children; beggars.

Office-goers deciding to walk from Marine Lines to Charni Road station;
the walk their only respite after a hard, hard day at work. The women will
chop vegetables on the train ride home and men will play cards with their

‘train friends’ who will jump into fast moving trains before they stop at the
station to claim a spot for them on the return journey. Trains filled with
horror. Jayabala Asher thrown out, her legs cut off, for fighting a rapist while
a compartment of men watches silently, not stepping in. The mayor gives
her an award for bravery. Acid thrown on pregnant women from outside
the train compartment. Aircraft engineer tossed out on to the tracks by
rowdies. Killed. The city’s trains devour 10 humans per day. Always hungry
for more. Sometimes they are racked with bomb explosions. Sometimes,
they are submerged under water due to floods.

1996. Early morning train ride to Bombay University’s Kalina campus.

Someone gropes me in the jampacked compartment. No standing room
even. Can’t turn around and see who it is. Squatters are shitting on the railway tracks, their backs modestly turned towards us voyeurs on the trains,
so that we can see their exposed bums and their shiny globules of freshly
ejected shit with flies hovering above, but not their genitalia. One should
never board a running train, I hear my mother say. I am 14 years old and
running after a bus I have just alighted from because I left my pencil box
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in it—but I am too slow. My mother screams at me when I reach home.

Is your pencil box more important, or your life? Never run after a moving
bus, train or anything, do you understand?

Leave it behind

You’ve got to leave it behind

I see myself in the school boys walking on the road today, their shoulders
hunched over with their overloaded bags. They have finished their extra
tuition class and will go home to do two sets of homework while the rest of
the family watches
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi
on television. They
have to study hard and run, run, run, so that they can keep up in the rat race.

But they have their arms draped comfortably around each other’s waists
and their friends will not taunt them with ‘that’s so gay’—this is India and
physical contact between friends in normal; we are like that only. So they
walk about, bodies comfortably touching, flip flops tossing up brown
splotches of mud on their bare calves. Lovers sit down on the rocks amidst
the crabs, holding hands—a brief moment of intimacy before the policeman
comes and shoos them away. The drizzle turns into a downpour. I open my
umbrella, adjust my iPod, walk on.