Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India by Parmesh Shahani

Author:Parmesh Shahani [Shahani, Parmesh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2008-04-14T20:00:00+00:00

He invites gays to talk to him in confidence about their feelings and emotions. Telephone: 230247’.152 A year and 112 interviews later, Mr Kala had churned out his book. Now titled Invisible Minority: The Unknown World of the Indian Homosexual, 153 the far-from-sympathetic account was published to almost universal denouncement as a ‘badly written’154

piece of work, intended perhaps for ‘the round eyed, half-price scandal seeker’155 instead of a more serious audience. Jeremy Seabrook’s Love in a Different Climate (1999) turned out to be an infinitely better book produced using a similar methodology. (The author spent some months in 1997 interviewing 75 ‘men who have sex with men’156 in Delhi. Most of the interviews were conducted in one of the city’s public parks—a popular cruising ground and the subjects formed a cross section of Delhi’s homosexual population).

Seabrook’s book is elegant, intelligent and reflexive—his sensitivity to the testimony of his subjects and perceptive analysis is striking compared to the gross crudeness of Kala’s effort. (Seabrook’s attempt appears nobler too—his inspiration for writing stems out of the HIV prevention work being carried out by the Naz Project in Delhi, while it seems apparent that all Kala wants to do is milk a sensational topic for some quick bucks). Unfortunately, Love in a Different Climate is not available in India; I wish the same could be said for Kala’s book. Three other books conspicuous by their absence from Indian bookshelves are Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India (1996), The Man Who Was a Woman and Other Queer Tales (2002) and Tritiya-Prakriti: People of the Third Sex (2003) . Vanita (2001) also mentions Leslie de Norhona’s Dew Drop Inn (1994) and P. Parivaraj’s Shiva and Arun (1998);157 neither of which is available within the country.

There have been four significant anthologies of Indian gay and

lesbian writing published so far. First off the block in 1993 was Rakesh Ratti’s (Ed.) A Lotus of Another Colour: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience. The book is primarily concerned with issues concerning the South Asian LBGT diaspora living in Western countries and aims at increasing their visibility in ‘both the South Asian and gay and lesbian communities’158 they inhabit. It consists of essays, poems, autobiographical and fictional short stories and interviews Media Matters 197

without South Asian celebrities like activist Urvashi Vaid and filmmaker Pratibha Parmar.

The two Penguin India releases in 1999— Yaarana: Gay Writing from India and Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India follow more or less the same formula, but with contributors that reside mainly in India.

Because I Have a Voice: Queer Polics in India (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006) is another India-focused collection, edited by Gautam Bhan and Arvind Narrain. Narrain is part of a small but growing tribe of recent National Law School of India (Bangalore) graduates, committed to applying their legal background to queer rights and legal advocacy, while Bhan is a queer rights activist based in Delhi and one of the founders of the city’s Nigah Media Collective.

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