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Gay Bombay SEXUALITY can be an interesting lens to examine changes happening in India—the economic surge, the higher political profile, the cultural explosion on the world stage and a new and assertive confidence in its own capability as a major world power, says a new book. In Gay Bombay, venture capitalist Parmesh Shahani, chooses Gay Bombay—an online-offline community in Mumbai—to describe what it means to be a gay man in India’s financial and entertainment capital. "The timely emergence of pop culture homogeneity, pan-Indianness have enabled gay-identified Indian individuals to imagine a distinctively Indian gay identity," the Mumbai-based Shahani, who also works as research affiliate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Convergence Culture Consortium, writes. He says the present gay scene would not have been possible but for the economic reforms of the 1990s. "Closely connected to this is the political landscape of the time," he writes. According to Shahani, the queer activist movement in India is broad and diverse, pursuing several legal and health agendas. "The history, the legal challenges and the medical interventions have enabled an ideoscape of gayness to be formulated and to circulate within the Indian society. There is an awareness of certain issues, an acknowledgment that gayness is something that exists in India," Shahani writes. Using a combination of multi-sited ethnography, textual analysis, historical documentation analysis and memoir writing, he explores what being gay means to the members of Gay Bombay and how they negotiate locality and globalisation,their sense of identity as well as a feeling of community within its online and offline world. In the process, Shahani also examines the formulation and reconfiguration of contemporary Indian gayness in the light of its emergent cultural, media and political alliances. The author says the peculiar Indian traits — propensity of not losing hope, resilience that comes from being continuously exposed to adversity and adaptability—provide great hope to gay people and the larger Indian queer community. Shahani says he feels both excited and scared when he thinks of the future. "The fears are not unfounded; however, neither is the excitement. If Indianness is something that grows out of imagination, then this imagination can also be re-imagined to include gayness." According to the author, for many gays in India, family and related obligations and duties are much more important. "For most, being gay is just another aspect of their identity and not the dominating aspect." And for many, their gay identity is something that is both fixed and negotiated. "Being gay is something that is often considered intrinsic—"I always knew that I was this way ever since I can remember" is a popular refrain —but alongside, it is also something that is constructed and played with performatively, in an acutely reflexive manner." Shahani says being gay does not mean the same for all Indian men—for some it just represents their sexual desires and for others it was a political statement or a social identity. "For some it is a state of being or a way of life while some feel it is an emotional commitment to other men. But for all of them there is a common element — the imagination of themselves as gay in whatever way they wish to articulate the imagination," the book, published by Sage, says. — PTI
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