Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (47 page)

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HOW DID GAY BOMBAY COME ABOUT?

A simplistic linear explanation would go something like this—Globalization and liberalization happened, media exposure to gay lifestyles happened, bars and social spaces opened up, gay activism began, and then Gay Bombay came about. While this line of logic is not entirely wrong, it is un-nuanced. There were several forces at work that led to the unique set of circumstances in which gay Bombay was engendered; the post 1991

changes in India were only the last piece within the larger jigsaw.

The initial piece would have to be the existence of a significant English speaking population in India, which can be attributed first of all, to the colonial exercise of ‘creating a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.2 The British pursued this goal by spreading missionary style English education throughout the country and following that up by opening up certain jobs in the British Indian administration to Indians, who spoke and wrote English. After the British left India in 1947, India’s southern states vehemently opposed the imposition of Hindi (the language of central and northern India) as the national language. Prime Minister Nehru’s solution was a compromise which stated that ‘while Hindi would remain the national language, it would not be imposed on non-Hindi speaking states. Instead, English would henceforth enjoy the status of the official language’3 (Kapur, 2002). This compromise ensured the continuation of English’s predominance over the years (in parliament, in the courts, in trade and commerce and especially in higher education) and proved to be beneficial for the creation of Gay Bombay in many ways. To list just two—

(
a
) When the Internet emerged, predominantly in English, there was already a ready constituency of English speaking, upper middle

class gay men, ready to exploit its opportunities and utilize it for their benefit.

(
b
) The IT and IT-enabled services boom, when it happened, found a treasure trove of ready and able workers, including Gay Bombay’s members, who could leverage their English speaking abilities as their passport to a better life.

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Second, as Varma points out in his book
Being Indian
(2004), India after independence pursued a lop sided and ‘socially callous’ educational policy—tertiary education received more funds than primary education and basic literacy training; ‘while the campaign against illiteracy languished…some of the finest technical institutions were set up as part of an enviable infrastructure of higher education’4 and thus, today,

‘a country with the largest number of people in the world who cannot read and write produces a veritable army of technically proficient graduates’.5 Entrance to this army is highly competitive (for example, in 2003, over 2,00,000 students took the entrance examination for admission into the Indian Institute of Technology, but only 2,000 were admitted, a success rate of less than 1 per cent)6—but once you are in, the rewards in terms of salaries and the ability to lead a life of privilege are sumptuous.

I do not want to comment on the social inequality of the system here, but for the purpose of this book, it is clear to see that the technology and job booms that followed the opening up of the Indian economy in 1991 (and their subsequent ripple effects on Indian gayness, as noted in previous chapters) would not have been possible, had there not been an already existing structure of higher education that shepherded young and ambitious Indian graduates on to the assembly line to a shining techie future.

Third, as we have also seen in Chapter 2, there was
already
a thriving social gay community existing in Bombay city during the 1970s and 1980s.

In the 1990s, the pioneering efforts of
Bombay Dost
magazine and the Humsafar trust had laid the groundwork for the possibility of Gay Bombay with their constant outreach through the media. One should remember that even in the Western world—sexual politics and social formations only came to the forefront after the 1960s and took off in the 1970s and 1980s. Jackson has pointed out that there were gay cultures in countries like Philippines, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand even in the 1960s, just like in India. I am saying this because I want to emphasize that it would be wrong to consider the emergence of gayness in India (and in Bombay, specifically) entirely as an after effect of globalization or an emulation of Western standards, instead, as Jackson suggests, we could consider it as a ‘parallel development’.

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The issue is not so much to consider how these cultures appeared after they did in the West, but rather how they emerged at much the same time as they did in many parts of the West. It may be necessary to revise current accounts which imagine the West, in particular the United States is the original site of contemporary gay and lesbian identities and instead see these identities emerging by a process of parallel development in diverse locales. (Jackson, 2000)
7

The above three factors were vital in creating the context for the birth of GB and eventually, Gay Bombay came to be born in the late 1990s out of the friction, overlaps and disjunctures of the six scapes we have recounted in Chapter 2.

We saw in Chapter 3 that the changed mediascape played a sig-

nificant influence in enabling news stories about gay rights and gay cultures and lifestyles from abroad to circulate freely within the Indian imagination. As my respondents noted, it was a big thing for them just to be able to see the existence of gay people in other countries; it valid-ated their own existence and made them feel that they were not alone.

More importantly, the changed mediascape allowed stories about
Indian
gay rights and gayness in an
Indian
context to circulate widely and the coverage, while not always positive, was often supportive, at least in the English language press. The issues covered were diverse (gay activism and conferences, the pink rupee, lesbian suicides, corporate HR

policy and LBGT issues…); in some cases, the media reflected societal concerns (for example, in framing the emergence of homosexuality in the popular perception as a debate on globalization), in other cases, it played advocate (as in the articles advocating for the abolishment of Section 377). Page 3 culture and the press tabloidification of the 1990s contributed significantly to the discursive idea of gayness as a part and parcel of everyday urban life. The media also contextualized Indian gayness within the larger scheme of Indian sexuality as a whole, through its periodic sexual surveys.

Thus, the (English) media performed the important role of an ambassador of gayness in the minds of Indian middle and upper middle classes. It enabled gayness to be brought out of the closet, into the public sphere. It activated the imagination of a larger gay Indian community than what already existed. Every time there was a story that could be Conclusion
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used as a hook (the
Fire
controversy of 1998, the Pushkin Chandra double murders of 2004, Vikram Seth’s open letter in 2006 and so on), the media upped the ante by using the story to debate and discuss Indian homosexuality at large, thus constantly reinforcing the imagination and construction of Indian gayness with every iteration. Indian literature, films and English theatre as performed in the country, all added to the news media’s deliberation of the gay cause. All this cemented the emerging gay ideoscape.

There were two other important factors without which the media’s impact might have been lessened, and I am grateful to my respondent Karim for discussing these with me. One was HIV/AIDS which helped to mainstream gayness from a marginal issue by riding on the health agenda. The government is now entwined with gay organizations like Humsafar (through its agencies like NACO) because of this agenda and the basis of the motion for the repeal of Section 377 is HIV/AIDS. The second that at least there is a rudimentary human rights framework in place in India for groups like women, religious minorities and so on, that sexual minorities can appropriate, learn from and also appeal to, in contrast with countries like Egypt which in many other ways parallel India, but where the queer movement is nowhere as close.

The financescape of economic liberalization and the subsequent rapid economic growth within the service sector (especially retail, technology and BPO services) resulted in the rapid expansion and transformation of the great Indian middle class into a ‘pan Indian domestic class of consumers’ seeking a ‘[commodified] Indianness’ (Khilnani, 2001).8

The pressures of the market, both global and local…[are] producing what one might call a commodification of Indianness. The workings of the market are creating a pan-Indian domestic class of consumers who wish to have diversity packaged and served up to them. The new taste for unfamiliar food from other parts of the country (think of the invention of ‘regional cuisines’), fashion, domestic ornament,
vaastu
, astrology and now a search for new travel destinations, all are signs of this new hunger for consuming India. It is a strategy of internal exoticisation and domestication. (Khilnani, 2001)9

Side by side to this commodification and consumerization of Indianness was the creation of what Varma (2004) calls ‘pan Indian culture’—

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The new supranational Indian culture…has given common symbols and icons to Indians even in the remotest parts of the country. Riding on a media and communications revolution, it has spread faster than any cultural development before. It permeates every aspect of everyday life—dress, food, art, language, employment and entertainment. It has the arrogance of the upstart and the self-absorption of the new. Irreverent in expression, it is dismissive of critics and has no time for apologists.

What it lacks in pedigree, it makes up for in confidence, for it can count on the support of the people. Its greatest strength is that—excluding perhaps the absolutely marginalized, it includes more people across India in a common language of communication in more areas of everyday life than ever before. The new culture is still evolving. It is difficult to define exactly, but impossible to ignore in the nationwide appeal of masala
dosa
and
tandoori
chicken, the rhythms of Daler Mehendi and A.R. Rahman, the evolution of ‘Hinglish’, the ubiquity of
salwar-kameez
, the popularity of Hindi films, the audience for cable television, the mania for cricket and the competition for IIT-JEE, to name just a few. What has facilitated the growth of this pan-Indian culture? Certain answers are obvious, such as the reach of Indian films and the exponential growth in the popularity of television. The revolution in communication has helped, as has the huge increase in mobility. Common aspirations and the solidarity imparted by similar constraints…the gradual but definite democratization of the social order…countrywide opportunities, standard institutions and curricula…the presence of the Indian state…the consequence is a far more homogenized India than Indians are aware of or willing to accept.

(Varma, 2004)10

For many years, the semi socialist state had been thrusting its definition of what was modern and national down the throats of the citizens…

But…‘micro narratives of film, television, music and other expressive forms…allowed modernity to be rewritten…as a vernacular globalization… (Appadurai, 1996).11

This globalization was accepted as something very
Indian
—its framing as something that was vernacular, ensured its success. To inelegantly adapt some more Appadurian terminology, there was a case of cultural homo-Indianization and cultural hetero-Indianization occurring simultaneously with vernacular globalization. It is important to remember (and this is a salient feature of cultural heterogenization, as we have encountered in Chapter 1) that various Indian historical Conclusion
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traditions continued to flourish along with the reformulated modernity.

For example, the popularity of Indian pop music was accompanied by a revival of interest in Indian classical music (Varma, 2004).12

For our purpose, we can see that this timely emergence of pop cultural homogeneity, pan-Indianness and vernacular globalization enabled gay identified Indian individuals to
imagine
a distinctly
Indian
gay identity, in opposition to a Western gay identity. As we read in Chapter 5, my respondents were adamant that they were both
Indian
and
gay
; they had created this composite identity by drawing on and appropriating Western cultural elements in combination with the aforementioned homogenous Indian elements that were being articulated at the same time.

Appadurai points out that the work of imagination ‘is neither purely emancipatory, nor entirely disciplined, but is a space of contestation….’.13

I was witness to this contestation taking place as my respondents answered me about how they negotiated this imagined hybrid gayness, individually and collectively. (It is this combination of radically diverse elements that is perhaps, the defining factor of Indianness—never a case of eitherness, but always of bothness; both this
and
that. This can be frustrating, but also liberating, as we shall see later).

Anyway, in a scenario like the above, the advent of the Internet proved to be the tipping point, which served as a catalyst for the expansion of the gay community. It was the right technology that emerged at the right time and soon enough, Gay Bombay was born. Its anonymity (one needed an email address to access it—and one could easily get an email address with a nickname, without having to reveal one’s real identity) and asynchronous nature (both the site and mailing list did not need to be accessed in real time; thus people did not need to have their own computers—they could go to cyber cafés whenever convenient, or access the service from their offices) made it an instant hit among the educated, English speaking men that it targeted.