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

have it in Delhi (and if I am in a Paris McDonalds, I can order espresso and a brioche (a light textured French roll or bun) from the standard menu, which might be served to me inside a ski chalet themed restaurant interior).153
    Some other examples of cultural heterogenization—The rise of China and India’s soft power in America154 parallel to the flow of capital and cultural commodities from America to these countries. The growth of Hinglish in post liberalized India, popularized by the fast talking MTV
    or Channel V video jockeys and captured so well by the umpteen number of tag lines for brands like Pepsi ( Yeh Dil Maange More , ‘This heart wants more’) and Domino’s ( Hungry, kya? ‘Are you hungry?’);155 and the simultaneous introduction of Hindi words (like chai [tea], masala [spices], yaar [friend], chuddies [underpants] and Bollywood)156 into the global English speaking lexicon. Washing machines being used to churn lassi or buttermilk by restaurant owners in Punjab.157 Bollywood films providing Nigerian viewers with a parallel modernity , closer to their own culture and a counter point to Hollywood cinema.158 Dallas conjuring up different meanings when seen in Israel or Japan….159
    Essentially, the heterogenizing vision of globalization re-imagines society as a flow —‘of people, information, goods and…signs or cultural symbols’ (Lash and Urry, 1994).160 Some theorists have tried to create an opposition between ‘the space of flows versus the space of places’, (Castells, 1997)161 but like Gille and O Riain, (2002) I do not find this notion very appealing as it makes ‘places disappear entirely’ and also ignores the ‘agency of actors and their sense-making activities as forces in shaping the flows themselves’.162 Instead, I prefer Sassen’s pragmatic middle ground approach that sees ‘globalization as a repatterning of fluidities and mobilities on the one hand and stoppages and fixities on Introduction 57
    the other’ (2000).163 As I wrote earlier, I feel that Appadurai’s construct of intersecting scapes resonates most with the nature of my study; and in this book, I have tried to read Gay Bombay as a ‘site for the examination of how locality emerges in a globalizing world…how history and genealogy inflect one another and of how global facts take local form’
    (Appadurai, 1996).164
    The initial approaches to studying global homosexual cultures were of two types. Either the cultures being studied were exoticized by the anthropologists studying them—as something radically different, or, going in the exact opposite direction, Western style gayness was considered to be something universal (Berry, Martin and Yue, 2003).165
    The global queering debates in the academia (which started off between Dennis Altman and his peers in the Australian Humanities Review in 1996 and have been resonating ever since) spurred the creation of work that was not so essentialist in its approach. Altman set the terms of the debate by provocatively writing—
    There is a clear connection between the expansion of consumer society and the growth of overt lesbian or gay world; the expansion of the free market has also opened up possibilities for a rapid spread of the idea that (homo) sexuality is the basis for a social, political and commercial identity…change in America influences the world in dramatic way…
    American books, films, magazines and fashions continue to define contemporary gay and lesbian meanings for most of the world….166
    Although he went on to concede that these non-Western gay movements might ‘develop identities and lifestyles different to those from which they originally drew their inspiration’, Altman’s view came under immediate attack by his peers, for ignoring the hybridity of global-local interactions.
    For example—
    One of the things such as an account of the circulation of ‘Western gay or lesbian identities’ inside global space misses is the notion of