Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (48 page)

In Chapter 2, I commented that all the recent changes in the Indian gay landscape occurred within the
Hindutva
(Hinduness) charged, schizophrenic political environment of the mid 1990s and wondered why the establishment did not jump upon these as yet another Western influence to be fought tooth and nail and squashed. My explanation for this official tolerance of gayness through the 1990s is as follows.

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First, it must be understood that the changes we are talking about were really very tiny and only affected a small section of urban India.

Homosexuality is in any case pretty much a non-issue for any Indian political party—national or regional; it is not even a blip on their political agenda radars and I certainly do not see that changing in the immediate future. This does not mean that the governments in power, at both the state and central level in the 1990s, were not aware of the existence and spread of Gay Bombay; they certainly were, but it is my contention that gayness in general was tolerated by subsuming it into the
imagination
of the ideal nation state.

The mid-1990s were a period of increased political chauvinism; the cultural
threats
supposedly posed by globalization and the opening up of the economy had resulted in a hybrid outward looking or inward looking behaviour amongst the mainstream middle classes. Being Indian took on a shrill jingoistic fervour after the nuclear bomb explosions of 1998 and the Kargil battle with Pakistan in 1999. The BJP-led government tried to forge an identity for India that stood for belligerence and nationalistic assertion. India was no longer to be imagined as an idealistic Gandhian state, a poor country cousin of the world’s superpowers, but a proud international nuclear world power, that would deal with the world on its own terms.

It should be clear that both the BJP government at the centre and the BJP-Shiv Sena government in power in Bombay from the mid 1990

onwards were extremely homophobic; both explicitly and implicitly and practiced what Bachetta (1999) has called ‘the dual operations of xenophobic queerphobia and queerphobic xenophobia’. Within

xenophobic queerphobia, being gay or queer is positioned as being non-Indian—it is a marked as a Western import and something against Indian culture. Within queerphobic xenophobia—‘queerdom is assigned (often metaphorically) to all designated others of the nation, regardless of their sexual identity’.14 Within their kind of nationalistic imagination, there was, of course, no place for homosexuality or difference of any kind, but if by chance, any difference did manage to raise its head, it was not cut off, but immediately marked and made powerless, and thus non-threatening.

We can see this subsumption of difference in operation within the
Hindutva
inspired Bollywood films churned out during that period.

Conclusion
281

[They] created the apparently contradictory images of a marginalized, stereotyped and yet benign religious minority and of overwhelmingly harmonious relations between members of the dominant Hindu culture and the Muslim minority; a set of circumstances not unlike those found in the American cinema with regard to that culture’s African-American minority. Hindus and Muslims do not normally contest for superiority, women, or other prizes in the Hindi cinema. (Booth, 2005)15

I want to specifically point to
Hum Aapke Hain Kaun
(‘Who Am I of Yours?’

1994), the extended marriage video of a film, released in the aftermath of the terrible riots and bomb blasts of 1993, as an excellent example of this display of hegemony. In this film, the Muslim t
hreat
is addressed not by exclusion, but by othering, inclusion and taming. As Kazmi (1999) notes, the only Muslim presence in the film is the jovial doctor couple, who are
othered
by religion, speech (a
daabs
galore, lots of
shaayiri
) and dress (
achkans
and
ghararas
).16 They function as support staff, offering sage words of advice only when asked, completely marginal to the main plot. Even the lower castes, typified by the servants, get a bigger role and Laloo, the main servant, is quite an important character. Of course, his servant stature is constantly emphasized throughout, whether through his own expressions of gratitude at the benevolence of his masters, or their continuous insistence that he is
like a
son or a brother to them. The loyalty of both—the servants and the Muslim friends—is made explicit; they exist within the periphery of the main Hindu family—that is their place and that is how they must live and as long as they understand that, it is good. I am reminded of Hardt and Negri’s contention that ‘Empire does not fortify its boundaries to push others away, but rather pulls them within its pacific order, like a powerful vortex’17 (2000).

One can read the entire slew of Bollywood films that emerged in the 1990s with gay sidekicks keeping this operation in mind. The markedly effeminate, comic gay characters (almost always men) were ridiculed but also indulgently patronized by the protagonists and effectively neutralized. Thus, a Bobby Darling is teased and mocked in whatever film he is a part of, but his place in the youth gang is never in doubt. It is of course understood that he will never behave transgressively with the hero, coo over him or insinuate desire for him. He is accepted, despite being different, because his loyalty as a friend and overall integration
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into the master narrative overrule his effeminate behaviour and implied homosexuality. In
Hum Aapke Hain Kaun
itself, there is a song and dance sequence where the lead heroine performs a raunchy sex simulation act with another cross dressing woman, at the end of which, they are both joined by the film’s hero, in full drag, but the transgressive element of all this is neutralized due to the comical presentation. Similarly, in the public eye, the outspoken Ashok Row Kavi is
othered
and then indulged as a firebrand activist, because ultimately, he is
one of us
—with his im-peccable Hindu credentials and so on.

But let us not forget, whenever the situation gets non-comical, like with the
Fire
controversy, this indulgence stops and the response is vicious and often violent.
Fire
was deemed as an attack by ‘ultra westernized elite’ on ‘the traditional set up’ through ‘explicit lesbianism and other perversities’18 (Bhatia in
Organizer
, 1998).

It proves that modern India wants to become as modern as ancient Greece. And for those who think that this is going backward, the answer is simple—West is best and nothing coming from the West, ancient or modern, can ever go out of fashion for us. (
Organizer
, 1999)19

That way, one day all the pornographic flings of Mona (sic) Lewinsky-Clinton duo may become the role model, if the aim is to disintegrate the family a la western society. (Bhatia, 1998)20

We see countless other instances of clamping down on gayness whenever the discourse around it becomes too public, or too threatening. For example, Naz Foundation workers are arrested in 2001 for running a
gay sex club
when they are in fact, simply doing HIV prevention outreach (see Chapter 4), the government and the courts constantly decry homosexuality (see Chapter 2) and the current Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, clearly flustered by a question about same sex marriages by a Canadian journalist, emphasizes that ‘these kinds of marriage are not appreciated here [in India]’.21

To summarize, Gay Bombay was formed as a result of the intersection of certain historical conjectures (including an already existing gay history) with the disjunctures caused via the flows of the radically shifting ethnoscape, financescape, politiscape, mediascape, technoscape and ideoscape of urban India the 1990s. It was allowed space to exist due Conclusion
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to its upper class orientation and the relative insignificance of gayness in the larger socio-political scheme of things. Of course, my explanation for the above is ‘radically context dependent’22 (Appadurai himself has emphasized that his theories—my reference grid—are insufficiently developed to be even parsimonious models at this point, much less to be predictive theories’);23 however, I find it to be extremely relevant in dispelling the simplistic one sided linear theory (as evinced within the global queering debate, discussed in Chapter One) that gayness is a Western thing and that its history and circulation in other countries will follow the same path that it has done in the West.

WHAT DOES BEING GAY MEAN IN GAY BOMBAY?

Large numbers of Asian men and women continue to live within the ‘traditional’ spaces for gender or sex difference and to understand themselves and their lives in ‘pre-gay’ terms that often relate more to the pre-industrial rural pasts of their societies than to the post modernizing urban present.

However, there are also large numbers of men and women who are reacting against what they see as the historic constraint on homoeroticism in their respective societies and who are actively engaging in relocating homoeroticism from the shadows and the periphery, to the centre stage of their lives. (Jackson, 2000)24

I encountered two opposing conceptions of homosexuality among my interviewees. One version equated homosexuality with being
gay
; this camp wished to assimilate and appropriate the term within the Indian context, recognizing fully well the unique set of circumstances within which this would take place. For them, social interaction was the key to building a sense of gay community in Bombay, but they recognized that cutting across class and gender norms may be a problem within these kinds of interactions. The other version of homosexuality I encountered questioned terms like
gay
and deemed them Western imports and negative influences and preferred to use
gay
as just one term, alongside indigenous terminology such as
kothi
or functional terms like ‘MSM’.

They were interested in social interaction across class norms, an assimilation of the various LBGT identities that exist in India and were also concerned with issues such as HIV/AIDS. Proponents of both these views
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used the gay Bombay newsgroup as well as real world events like parties and meetings as a battleground for their respective ideologies. The archive facility of the Gay Bombay newsgroup provides a fascinating and rich look at their debates as they have played out through the volatile posts over the years.

However, this is not to suggest that these were the only two positions that my respondents adopted—as we have seen in Chapter Five, there existed a variety of other stances that were sandwiched between and around these two prominent takes on the nature of Indian homosexuality. Many of these included reconciliatory stances advocating a middle ground, which echoed Shivananda Khan’s (2000) line of reasoning that

‘to say gay is appropriate and right. But at the same time to denigrate or deny other frameworks of identities and choices is not…’.

Let us stop seeing a debate that pits those who work for
gay
rights and those who work in preventing HIV/AIDS, among men who have sex with men, against each other. Let us work together, whatever our own frameworks and priorities and recognize that in a region of over one billion people there is space for everyone to work out their destinies. (Khan, 2000)25

Indeed I find it difficult to look at things in black or white after my experiences in the field. What people said often contradicted with what they did and people’s views changed over the course of my research.

Take the case of Harbhajan to whom being gay was ‘just sex, over and out’ and who was also married to a woman who was aware of his sexual orientation. I observed him at several GB events and he was an intrinsic part of the organizing committees for these. It was clear that he experienced his sexuality as something much more than ‘just sex’. He felt a part of the community and there was camaraderie between him and others. Or Bhuvan, who clearly told me that he was not willing to shout out in public about his sexuality. Two years later, he was one of the lead panelists at a CNN talk show, openly discussing his life as a gay man on television!

For the gay identified respondents, being gay signified different things to each of them. For some
gay
just represented their sexual desires, for others it was a political statement or a social identity. Many respondents felt that it was a state of being or a way of life, while some spoke Conclusion
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of it as an emotional commitment to other men. For all of them, the common element about being gay was the imagination of themselves as gay, in whatever way they wished to articulate this imagination. It was fascinating to meet someone like Nachiket, for example. He was married with kids, had never had sex with another man, but still described himself as gay, because he
imagined
himself so.

Many respondents felt that they were bound by the
contract of silence
and that being discreet about their sexuality was the pragmatic thing to do. Within this silent space, they found society to be pretty flexible and accommodating with regard to their sexuality. Some, citing responsibilities towards their parents, families and society, had either chosen to get married, or were contemplating doing so in the near future. As Vanita (2001) writes, this is typical in India—

The parental family remains a major locus of social and emotional interaction for adults. There are few public places where people can comfortably interact, so friends are entertained at home and absorbed into the family or turned into fictive kin. The family is also the only form of social security and old age insurance available to most people. This means that heterosexual marriage and parenthood hold many attractions even for homosexually inclined people. Many deal with the dilemma by marrying and then leading a double life.26

For these married men, or soon to be married men, marriage did not indicate a change in their sexual identity. They were clear that their marriage was an obligation, but that their sexual gratification would continue to rest with men, even after marriage. There was very little sensitivity expressed towards the feelings or desires of women in these worldviews.