Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (28 page)

Back to the scene outside VT station. My own picnic family of choice must
drive itself back to four respective homes. Papa bear has work the next day;
mama bear has to catch a flight to Bangalore. Baby bear reaches home and
sleeps comfortably in his bed, wrapped securely in the love and support from
a gay social network that his companions certainly didn’t have at his age.

(He’s already agreed that he’s one lucky bear, on that count!) And this particular bear continues to stare at another ceiling and wonder how his partner
is doing, half way around the world.

Ye pal hai wahi, jis mein hai chhupi

Koyi ek sadi, saari zindagi

Tu na poochh raaste mein kaahe

Aaye hain is tarha do raahein

164
Gay

Bombay

Tu hi toh hai raah jo sujhaaye

Tu hi toh hai ab jo ye bataaye

Chaahe toh kis disha mein jaaye wahi des

Ye jo des hai tera, swades hai tera, tujhe hai pukaara

Ye woh bandhan hai jo kabhi toot nahin sakta

‘This moment right here, right now,

Encompasses an eternity,

Hidden within it is a lifetime.

Don’t question your forked destiny,

Make sense of it. Choose wisely.

And then, whichever path you choose to walk on,

Know that it leads home.

What calls out to you isn’t just a country; it’s your homeland.

Your bond with it is eternal and unbreakable’.

—
A.R. Rehman/Javed Akhtar
Swades
(Homeland)94

Just like the protagonist Mohan Bhargava in
Swades
, I too will eventually have to make sense of my forked destiny. I am back in India now—but do I want to stay and ‘light a bulb’?95 I am loving my job and feel like I kind of belong here. I have felt that in Bombay, since coming back, it has been comforting; but I also felt like I belonged to Boston for the last year of my stay there. At heart, I guess I am a gay Indian and a gay Bombayite most of all. There is a comfort and solidity to being in India that is hard to match anywhere else. But there are so many variables in play—material, emotional, the legal status of my sexual orientation in the two countries…my partner Junri, who is still at MIT, finishing up his Ph.D. my own Ph.D. and academia aspirations, and my parents and old grandparents in India—bonds that have spurred my return to the homeland. Junri and I have shared our home and our lives with each other for over three years and are planning a future together; and I am scared and anxious and worried about the geographical distance between us.

He is quite sure that living in India is not an option that we want to consider for the long-term. I want to choose wisely. The Indian Prime Minister offered NRIs—Non Resident Indians living abroad, a PIO card in 2004 that enabled them to flow in and out of India with ease; perhaps I will go back to the US and choose to become one of them—another drop in the gigantic diaspora of
Non-Returning Indians
that visit the home country every few years, armed with bottles of imported mineral water Up Close and Personal
165

and energy bars and complaining constantly of the heat and pollution.

Or perhaps, I will choose to remain here in India and navigate our relationship via Skype and regular visits; figure out a way to be both here and there—to be multiple, be everywhere….

NOTES

1. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora Identity’, in Identity:
Community,
Culture, Difference
(Ed. Jonathan Rutherford), (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990) p. 223; excerpted in Kathryn Woodward (Ed.)
Identity and Difference
, (London: Sage Publications, 1997), p. 51.

2. Salman Rushdie,
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
(New York: Henry Holt, 1999),
p. 7.

3. Gay Bombay Website: ‘About Us’. http://www.gaybombay.org/misc/aboutgb.html 4. Throughout, when I use the term ‘anthropology’, I refer to social or cultural anthropology and not the other anthropology subfields like medical anthropology and so on.

5. Delmos Jones, ‘Towards a Native Anthropology’,
Human Organization
(Winter 1970) Vol. 29(4), p. 256.

6. John Van Maanen,
Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 16.

7. Joan Vincent, ‘Engaging Historicism’, in Richard Fox (Ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991), p. 55, as cited in Gupta and Ferguson, op. cit., p. 7.

8. Robert Emerson, Rachel Fretz and Linda Shaw,
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 1.

9. Tim Plowman, ‘Ethnography and Critical Practice’ in Brenda Laurel (Ed.),
Design
Research: Methods and Perspectives
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 32.

10. Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in
The
Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 10.

11. Andreas Witel, ‘Ethnography on the Move: From Field to Net to Internet’, in
Forum
Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research.
(January, 2000) Available on the World Wide Web at—http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/1-00/1-00wittel-e.htm

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology’, in R.G. Fox (Ed.),
Recapturing Anthropology
(Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991) pp. 191–200; cited in Gupta and Ferguson, op. cit., p. 3.

15. John Van Maanen, op. cit., pp. 17–18.

16. Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap (Eds),
Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay
Anthropology
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 2–4.

17. John Edward Campbell,
Getting It on Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied
Identity
(New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004), p. 7.

18. See http://www.cheskin.com/

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Bombay

19. See http://www.look-look.com/

20. John Van Maanen, op. cit., p. 24.

21. Tim Plowman, op. cit., p. 32.

22. Delmos Jones (op. cit., pp. 251–252) defines fieldwork as ‘a process off finding answers to certain questions, or solutions to certain theoretical or practical problems. As such it involves a series of steps, from the definition of the problem to be studied through the collection of data to the analysis of data and the writing up of the results’.

23. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Eds),
Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and
Grounds of a Field Science
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 12.

24. George Marcus,
Ethnography through Thick and Think
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 79; cited in Andreas Witel, op. cit.

25. Gupta and Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 35–37.

26. Mary Des Chene, ‘Locating the Past’, in Gupta and Ferguson (Eds), op. cit., p. 71.

27. Ibid, p. 78.

28. James Clifford, ‘Spatial Practices’, in Gupta and Ferguson (Eds), op. cit., p. 218.

29. Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Nice (Translator),
The Logic of Practice
(Stanford: Stanford University Press,1990 [1980]), p. 25.

30. Renato Rosaldo,
Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 168.

31. Soheir Morsy, ‘Fieldwork in my Egyptian Homeland: Towards the Demise of Anthropology’s Distinctive-Other Hegemonic Tradition’, in Soraya Altorki and Camilla Fawzia El-Solh (Eds),
Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), p. 72.

32. Ibid, p. 69.

33. James Clifford (1997), op. cit., p. 215.

34. Kirin Narayan, ‘How Native is a “Native” Anthropologist?’,
American Anthropologist
(Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association, 1993), Vol. 95(3), p. 679.

35. Ibid, p. 682.

36. Joanne Passaro, ‘You Can’t Take the Subway to the Field’, in Gupta and Ferguson (Eds), op. cit., pp. 152–153.

37. Kirin Narayan, op. cit., p. 680.

38. Ibid.

39. James Clifford (1997), op. cit., p. 215.

40. Joanne Passaro, op. cit., p. 161.

41. Stuart Hall, ‘New Cultures for Old’, in Doreen Massey and Pat Jess (Eds),
A Place in the
World? Places, Cultures, and Globalization
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 206.

42. Kirin Narayan, op. cit., p. 672.

43. James Clifford (1997), op. cit., p. 208.

44. See Altorki and El-Solh, op. cit., p. 7.

45. Gupta and Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 31–32.

46. Delmos Jones, op. cit., p. 252.

47. Altorki and El-Solh, op. cit., p. 8.

48. Soraya Altorki, ‘At Home in the Field’, in Altorki and El-Solh (Eds), op. cit., p. 57.

49. Delmos Jones, op. cit., pp. 252–256.

50. Kath Weston, in Gupta and Ferguson (1997), op. cit., p. 167.

51. Soheir Morsy, op. cit., p. 73.

Up Close and Personal
167

52. Gupta and Ferguson, op. cit., p. 17.

53. Kath Weston, in Gupta and Ferguson (1997), op. cit., p. 168.

54. Ibid, pp. 176–177.

55. Seteney Shami, ‘Studying Your Own: The Complexities of a Shared Culture’, in Altorki and El-Solh (Eds), op. cit., p. 115.

56. Gupta and Ferguson, op. cit., p. 18.

57. Renato Rosaldo (1989), op. cit., p. 168–195; cited in Kirin Narayan, op. cit., p. 676.

58. Kirin Narayan, op. cit., p. 676.

59. Renato Rosaldo (1989), op. cit., p. 181.

60. Thomas Blom Hansen,
Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 17.

61. See Kamala Visweswaran,
Fictions of Feminist Ethnography
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press), 1994.

62. James Clifford, op. cit., p. 213.

63. Ibid, pp. 215–216.

64. Kirin Narayan, op. cit., p. 678.

65. Ibid, pp. 671–672.

66. A newsgroup (like its earlier avatar, the mailing list) is an asynchronous one-to-many online communication device—as opposed to asynchronous one-to-one online communication devices like email, or synchronous communication devices like chat and instant messenger. In common usage, the terms ‘newsgroup’ and ‘mailing list’

are used interchangeably and I shall be doing the same in this book.

67. These are—(Source—Yahoo! Groups Guidelines: http://groups.Yahoo.com/local/

guidelines.html)

(
a
) ‘You may not harass, abuse, threaten, or advocate violence against other members or individuals or groups.

(
b
) You may not post content that is harmful to minors.

(
c
) You may not post content that is obscene, otherwise objectionable, or in violation of federal or state law.

(
d
) Stay on topic. Although all groups are different, most groups appreciate it when you stay on topic. If you constantly stray from the topic you may be moderated or removed from a group altogether by its owner.

(
e
) You may not add members to a group without their permission.

(
f
) You may not use Yahoo! Groups for commercial or advertising purposes.

(
g
) You may not post content which infringes the intellectual property, privacy or other rights of third parties.

(
h
) You may only post adult-oriented content in age-restricted areas. You must be 18 years old or over to access these areas.

(
i
) Some content may be more appropriate in some contexts than others. Yahoo!

reserves the right to remove content that it determines, in its sole discretion, to be inappropriate and in violation of our rules. For example, discussions or depictions of bestiality, incest, excretory acts, or child pornography may be inappropriate if placed in a sexual or otherwise exploitative context.

(
j
) You may not use Groups solely for the purpose of storing and archiving files’.

68. Within this group, there is a provision to post messages to the entire group at large, or to individuals who have already posted on the list—by clicking on the (partially disguised) email link that appears besides their nickname, accompanying their posting.

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Bombay

69. See
Between the Lines: Negotiating South Asian LBGT Identity
, Official Festival Website—

http://mit.edu/cms/betweenthelines/

70. In
Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space
(Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1998, pp. 62–67), Annette Markham conducts her research by carrying out what she calls ‘User on the Net’ interviews using various ‘real time talk’ software packages.

71. Suketu Mehta,
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 14.

72. Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport Undertaking or BEST is the public undertaking that operates Bombay’s citywide bus services. Bus number 123 operates on a short route from RC Church in South Bombay to V. Naik Chowk in Tardeo. See official BEST website: http://www.bestundertaking.com/

73. Andrew Strickler, ‘Officials in India Strive to Improve Rail Safety for Millions of Riders’,
San Francisco Chronicle
, 12 November 2004. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.

cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/11/12/MNG2P9PCR11.DTL

74. R. Raj Rao,
The Boyfriend
(New Delhi: Penguin, 2003), p. 1.

75. Suketu Mehta, op. cit., p. 14.

76. Georgina Maddox, ‘A Gay Summer’,
Indian Express,
18 July 2004. http://www.

indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=51228

77. Renato Rosaldo (1989), op. cit
.,
p. 168–195; cited in Kirin Narayan, op. cit., p. 676.

78. Suad Joseph, ‘Feminization, Familism, Self and Politics: Research as a Mughtaribi’, in Altorki and El-Solh (Eds), op. cit., p. 35.