Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (7 page)

around two broad agendas, as outlined by Sanders (2004). The first was the
equality agenda
, focusing on equality-based human rights.

Western activists use minority rights arguments in what is often called identity politics. The stigmatized identity is used to rally individuals in a movement for change. If the idea of a gay
identity
simplifies reality, it is a simplification that large numbers of individuals happily accept. The homosexual identity now gives emotional support and forms the basis for collective action. (Sanders, 2004)94

gay and lesbian studies was the academic complement to this agenda.

Radical gay activism was tempered in favour of a programme more focussed on health issues, engagement with government and other authorities and to some extent, the invisibilizing of certain elements of the movement that straight society might be perceived to be uncomfortable with, such as drag queens and effeminate men; also, practices like sadomasochism and fetishism and race and class differences within the community were smoothened over.95

The late 1980s and 1990s were the age of continued mainstreaming—

of straight acting people
coming out
and rapid gains being made in all spheres of society, especially in the workplace. There was another shift of activism in the 1990s from being individual-centered to family-centered.

In 1989, Denmark allowed same sex couples the right to have registered partnerships and most legal rights as that of marriage. That shifted the focus of activism to fighting for marriage equality in the Western world.

The field of gay and lesbian studies followed this historical process with felicity through its sociological, anthropological, historical and psychological works.

At the same time as all this was happening, there was also another agenda being pursued, though not as successfully and on a much smaller scale. This was the Liberation Agenda, academically articulated under the rubric of Queer theory, which attempted to become inclusive of a wide umbrella of sexual minorities (especially those that were feeling left out by the mainstreaming process described above) and was associated with social constructionism and post-modernism and inspired by French poststructuralist theory. Queer theory, with champions like Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, David Halperin and Michael Warner, Introduction
47

is about playfulness, power, indeterminacy and performance. Gender and sexuality are seen as social constructs to be performed, reinforced through repetition and possibly subverted. These scholars were influenced by the works of Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan—they ‘rejected the Renaissance notion of the subject [being] fixed, unifying and self determining… [and]

argued that this notion… was an ideological fiction that worked to conceal, and thereby perpetuate, modern relations of power’ (Corber and Valocchi, 2003).96

The central tenet of Queer theory is a resistance to the normativity, which demands the binary proposition, hetero or homo…. If we can speak of the difference as one of emphasis, strictly gay and lesbian discourse more typically stresses the essentialist nature of sexuality over the socially constructionist nature embodied in Queer theory. (Hawley, 2001) 97

However, while Queer theory has gained a fashionable legitimacy in universities, the Liberation Agenda has had a limited impact on the identity-based equality rights activism of the gay and lesbian organizations. Queer theory is essentially about opposing the heterosexual hegemony—but the reality is that the hegemony is really not being threatened one bit and in fact, besides a select few in the academy, nobody really wants to either. What
is
being imagined is ‘a pluralist, multicultural mutual tolerance and over the past few decades, gay people in the West have built networks, organizations and media and colonized social spaces on that basis’ (McIntosh, 2000).98

Queer theory has a problem of accounting for why gay and lesbian cultural forms have been flourishing as never before and more and more people appear willing to participate in and embrace the distinguishing markers of sexual difference. Queer theory has little to say about the desire that fuels this widespread proliferation and consolidation of identity markers.

(Barry, 2000)99

There is basic confusion around
queer
which is sometimes used to describe a particular way of being homosexual, perhaps expanded to include bisexual desires and unorthodox gender behavior, and sometimes meant to represent the whole gamut of opposition to the sex or gender order, so that lesbian prostitutes and heterosexual suburban sadomasochists
48
Gay

Bombay

are equally queer. In practice almost everyone who has adopted the label for themselves is likely to be in practice part of the lesbian or gay world, however much they may rail against it. (Altman, 1996)100

Now for some Indian history. As I have noted in the introduction to this section, most ‘Western writings do not hold out a lost past that accepted sexual and gender diversity’.101 But perhaps Foucault and his acolytes were simply ignorant. There is ample evidence that even in Western societies, terms like
Ganymede, sapphist, tribade
and
lesbian
were being used hundreds of years earlier (Vanita, 2002)102 and that there were similar categories existing in other societies as well such as the
mahu
and
aikane
in Polynesia,
berdache
in Native America,
sekhet
in prehistoric Egypt,
eunochos
in ancient Greece and Rome,
saris
in ancient Israel and
mu’omin
in Syria (Wilhelm, 2004).103 In ancient China,

‘homosexuality acted as an integral part of society, complete with same sex marriages for both men and women’ (Hinsch, 1990).104 In Indian mythologies and ancient texts, one finds the mention of terms like
napumsaka
(gay men),
sandha
(transgender),
kliba
(asexuals),
kami
(bisexual) and
adhorata
(anal intercourse), (Wilhelm, 2004)105 and in the recent past—
dogana
(lesbian or lesbian activity) and
chapti
(lesbian or lesbian activity)106 (Vanita, 2001).

Ancient Indian texts from the Vedic period107 and the
Kama Sutra
(a treatise on pleasure, penned by the Sage Vatsayana about 2000 years ago) all indicate that ancient ‘Hinduism acknowledged a
third sex
or people who were by nature a combination of male and female and such people were considered special in many ways…’.

People of the third sex were described as homosexual, transgender and intersexed people, they were such by birth and consequently were allowed to live their lives according to their own nature…. Even gay marriage…was acknowledged in the
Kama Shastra
108 many thousands of years ago. (Wilhelm, 2004)109

In ancient texts like the
Artha Shastra
,110 ‘while homosexual sex is un-sanctioned, it is treated as a minor offence’ and similarly in the
Manu
Smriti
(Laws of Manu, another ancient text)—the penances for a man who has sex with another man are minor. In one case, ‘the same penance

[is] prescribed for stealing articles of little value’ such as ‘eating the Introduction
49

five products of a cow and keeping a one night fast’111 (Vanita and Kidwai, 2001).

Vanita and Kidwai have claimed on the basis on extensive research that pre-colonial India was generally tolerant.112 In general, India, love between women and between men, ‘even when disapproved of, was not actively persecuted’113 and there are no records to prove that anyone was ever executed for homosexual behaviour in India. As opposed to this,

‘for centuries in many parts of Europe, men found engaging in homosexual acts were vilified, tortured or legally executed’.114 They argue that all evidence points to the 19th century being a ‘crucial period of transition when a minor strand of pre-colonial homophobia becomes the dominant voice in colonial and postcolonial mainstream discourse’.115

They indicate the ‘homosexualization of the
ghazal
,116 the suppression of
Rekhti
117 and the introduction of the anti-sodomy law as three markers of this transition’.118

British educators and missionaries often denounced Indian marital, familial and sexual arrangements as primitive…. Hindu gods were seen as licentious and Indian monarchs, both Hindu and Muslim, as decadent hedonists, equally given to heterosexual and homosexual behavior….

Educated Indians defending Indian culture, did not altogether reject Victorian values but rather insisted that Indian culture was originally very similar to Victorian culture and had been corrupted during the medieval period. (Vanita and Kidwai, 2001)119

The British also collected, translated, rearranged and sometimes re-wrote Indian history as part of their
orientalist
agenda during the two decades of their rule and part of their rearrangement included eliminating or marginalizing all traces of positive same-sex references and cor-respondingly, showcasing texts or instances that glorified heterosexual masculinity120 (Baccheta, 1999). Finally, in 1861, the British legal system was imposed on to India as the Indian Penal Code and Section 377 of this code was an offshoot of the British 1860 anti-sodomy law.

However, one must not blame colonialism for everything (although it is a rather convenient sitting duck). As Narrain (2004) pertinently points out, the continued perpetration of the stigma against homosexuality in India ‘owes as much to nationalism as it did to colonialism’.121 I shall
50
Gay

Bombay

discuss Section 377 and the Indian social stigma against homosexuality in later chapters.

Now, there is an ongoing debate within academia about whether one can use Western constructs like
gay
and lesbian
when one studies the sexuality of people from non-Western locations. As Leap and Lewis (2002) write, the usage of these terms outside the North Atlantic domains might be considered problematic—

Lesbian and gay are not context free categories, but express subjective understandings of gender, sexuality and social location closely linked to the historical emergence of North Atlantic capitalism and to the politics of cultural pluralism during the late modernity period.122

Within the Indian context, there in a vociferous constituency that protests the use of terms like
gay
for India’s male homosexual population instead preferring the more functional
men who have sex with men
(MSM)123—

In South Asia the socio-cultural frameworks are supremely gendered and often sexual relationships are framed by gender roles, power relationships, poverty, class, caste, tradition and custom, hierarchies of one sort of another. Here for many men or males we have gender identities, not sexual identities. The phrase ‘males who have sex with males’, or ‘men who have sex with men’ is not about identities and desires, it is about recognizing that there are many frameworks within which men or males have sex with men or males, many different self-identities, many different contexts of behavior….

Hijras
, transvestites, transgendered, gay-identified men,
kothis
or
dangas, panthis
or
giriyas
, double-deckers or
do-parathas
or
dubli
[referring to versatile sexual practices—that is, enjoying being penetrated as well as penetrating one’s partner], men or males who have sex with other men or males, in all its variety of terminologies, behavioral choices, desires and constructions. Are we truly saying that we should reduce this diversity into the singular construction of a gay identity, a term that does not readily translate into the multiplicity of languages and dialects that reflect the diversity of South Asia itself ? (Khan, 2000)124

Ruth Vanita (2002) is skeptical of this approach and wonders if organizations like the Naz Foundation, with their preference for
kothi
and MSM

terminology over global terms like
gay
and
homosexual
are not merely Introduction
51

branding themselves trendily
anti-colonial
in the grants bazaar.125 She critically notes that ‘it is usually those who have already obtained most of their basic civil rights and liberties in first world environments who object to the use of these terms in third world contexts’. The words
gay
and
lesbian
have gained significant currency over the past decade in the media—they are known, in HIV related work, ‘the political visibility of a term like
gay
is likely to be much greater than a term like
men who have
sex with men
’; and importantly, ‘anti-gay groups have no compunctions in using familiar terms’. Thus, ‘while intellectuals squabble about politically or historically correct language, Evangelical missionaries from the US are actively campaigning against
gay
and
homosexual
people in India’.126 In any case, as Dennis Altman (1996) rightfully points out, terms like MSM too are hardly innocent—they are constructs, which have been created ‘in a very Foucauldian way’ along with other categories like
commercial sex
workers
and
people with HIV/AIDS
primarily ‘in the interest of preventing the spread of HIV’.127

In relation to this book, while I do see the relevance of terms like MSM

for health and intervention programmes, I find identity-based categories to be more significant culturally, socially and vernacularly. I am working in a space widely considered
gay
—the name itself says it all: Gay Bombay.

Not Queer Bombay, not LBGT Bombay, not
Kothi
Bombay, but
Gay
Bombay. And yes, there are a lot of people in India who identify as
kothi
,
hijra
, or even perhaps MSM, but there are also many people who identify as
gay
and this book is about them. I have come to realize that to these folks,
gay
does not mean what it does in America, or the West at large.

They have creatively played with it, modified it, made it their own, so that a married man is gay, an androgyne is gay; everyone in this universe is gay, in their own way. For my interviewees, ‘what gay does label is the possibility of resisting local gender or sex norms. It gives a name to the idea that things might be different, that people marginalized within dominant gender or sex regimes can talk back and carve out spaces by strategic acts of subversion. It is in the imaginings of how things can be different at the local level that we find the source of the infectious excitement that surrounds the gay label’128 (Jackson, 2000) in India. In short, I do not find the term gay limiting, if used specifically and appropriately.