NEW DELHI: 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.
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.
