Pink Revolutions: Globalization, Hindutva, and Queer Triangles in Contemporary India 9780810143623, 9780810143630, 9780810143647

Citation preview

Pink Revolutions

Critical Insurgencies A Book Series of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association Series Editors: Jodi A. Byrd and Michelle M. Wright Critical Insurgencies features activists and scholars, as well as artists and other media makers, who forge new theoretical and political practices that unsettle the nation-state, neoliberalism, carcerality, settler colonialism, Western hegemony, legacies of slavery, colonial racial formations, gender binaries, and ableism, and challenge all forms of oppression and state violence through generative future imaginings. About CESA The Critical Ethnic Studies Association organizes projects and programs that engage ethnic studies while reimagining its futures. Grounded in multiple activist formations within and outside institutional spaces, CESA aims to develop an approach to intellectual and political projects animated by the spirit of decolonial, antiracist, antisexist, and other global liberationist movements. These movements enabled the creation of ethnic studies and continue to inform its political and intellectual projects.

www.criticalethnicstudies.org

Pink Revolutions Globalization, Hindutva, and Queer Triangles in Contemporary India

Nishant Shahani

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2021 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2021. All rights reserved. 10

9

8 7

6

5 4

3

2

1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shahani, Nishant, 1976– author. Title: Pink revolutions : globalization, Hindutva, and queer triangles in contemporary India / Nishant Shahani. Other titles: Critical insurgencies. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2021. | Series: Critical insurgencies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identi"ers: LCCN 2021000260 | ISBN 9780810143623 (paperback) | ISBN 9780810143630 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810143647 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Homosexuality—Political aspects—India. | Homosexuality— Religious aspects—Hinduism. | Gay liberation movement—India. Classi"cation: LCC HQ76.8.I4 S53 2021 | DDC 306.7660954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000260

!"#$%#$&

Acknowledgments Introduction. “This Is Not the Morning We Were Waiting For”: Theorizing Pink Revolutions

vii

3

Chapter 1. “Revolutionary” Reform, Reformist “Revolution”

43

Chapter 2. Safe in the City: Gay Tourism in India and the Politics of Worlding

79

Chapter 3. Queer Privacy during Seditious Times: Re-Touching the Case of Ramchandra Siras

109

Chapter 4. Patently Queer: The Late Effects of Illness during Revolutionary Times

145

Chapter 5. Beyond the Banyan Tree: Diasporic Mobility in Passages away from India

183

Afterword. A Delayed Postscript

213

Notes

227

Bibliography

261

Index

279

!"#$%&'()*+($,-

Pink Revolutions begins and ends on notes of quali.ed caution, not the euphoria of political paradigm shifts that a title like “pink revolutions” might immediately invoke. When asked about this book, I am almost too quick to modify expectations and clarify that the “revolution” in the title does not signify glorious radical change or celebrations of progress (as important as those might be). I temper any anticipation that this book applauds benign queer visibility by stressing that it is actually about uneasy alliances, messy entanglements, and knotted triangulations. The book, after all, was completed under the aegis of the Modi and Trump regimes—hardly an occasion for much political optimism and hopeful futures. At the same time, I am reminded of one of the (very useful) reviews of this book that gently suggested a less doggedly defensive tone in my writing, which has tended to be too steeped in paranoid hermeneutics, always anticipating and forestalling critique. While I might not have entirely succeeded at more reparative impulses given this book’s conceptual investments, perhaps these notes of thanks might be a good occasion to take a momentary turn away from default settings of anti-sociality. I am extremely grateful to Gianna Francesca Mosser, former acquisitions editor at Northwestern University Press, for her enthusiastic interest and support of this project. Her comments on the book proposal and early drafts of a chapter were particularly invaluable in the nascent stages of the project. Many thanks to current acquisitions editor Trevor Perri, who took over from Gianna and carefully guided the project to its conclusion (in addition to responding to my various impatient queries). Much gratitude to the Critical Insurgencies series editors Michelle M. Wright and Jodi A. Byrd for their endorsement of the project. Many thanks to all the press staff at Northwestern University Press involved in the production and meticulous preparation of the manuscript: Anne Gendler, Patrick P. Samuel, JD Wilson, Olivia Aguilar, Anne Tappan Strother, and freelance copy editor Paul Mendelson. I am also very appreciative of the feedback from the two anonymous peer reviewers. vii

viii

!"#$%&'()*+($,-

Their comments were encouraging and supportive, but they also pushed for revisions that have made for a stronger book (particularly in the calls for a more capacious citational practice and an added attention to the epistemological implications of my arguments). Of course, the book’s inevitable gaps and /aws are entirely my own doing. I am very grateful to Avantika Bawa who generously agreed to my request to use of an image of her art installation, A Pink Scaffold in the Raan, for the book cover. The installation brilliantly captures the complicated knots, complex linkages, and messy triangles that I am theorizing throughout the book. This book has greatly bene.ted from the valuable feedback I received at the Annual Conference on South Asia held at the University of Wisconsin−Madison, and especially at the Feminist Pre-Conference on Sexuality, Gender, and Sedition organized by Krupa Shandilya and Svati Shah in 2016. Thanks in particular to Geeta Patel, Anjali Arondekar, and Jyoti Puri for their critiques and questions which were provocative and useful. I am very grateful to Wakako Araki for inviting me to present a chapter of the book at the University of Niigata’s Gender and Race Symposium in Japan and to workshop the book’s ideas with students and colleagues there. Putul Sathe at the Research Center for Women’s Studies at SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai, India, offered me an opportunity to discuss the book’s conclusion with students and scholars during my sabbatical year. Many thanks to the students at SNDT, who asked brilliant and complicated questions that forced me to engage with the book’s abstractions in concrete material contexts. I am greatly indebted to Shoba Ghosh, former chair of the English Department at the University of Mumbai, for her support over the years. A section of chapter 4 was based on research conducted at the Mani Bhavan library in Mumbai, where Usha Thakkar and the library staff were extremely kind and willing to help. This book originated more than a decade ago in the latter stages of graduate school (but got put on the back burner due to my preoccupation with a different project that eventually became my .rst book). I owe much to my mentor and dissertation director in graduate school, Kim Emery, whose queer theory class remains a primal scene in my intellectual trajectory. At Washington State University (WSU), I am very grateful for the support of my chairs in the English Department, .rst Todd Butler and then Donna Potts, who have always been strong allies and advocates. From the year that I was hired as a junior assistant professor, my institutional base at WSU in the Department of

!"#$%&'()*+($,-

ix

Women’s Studies—now the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS)—has always been fraught with reshuf/ings and “mergers” due to the budget constraints that plague higher education. But in equal measure, this institutional precarity has much to do with the calci.ed histories of sexism and racism that are entrenched within university life, accompanied by a lack of political will to support feminist, antiracist, and queer work beyond the dull bromides of diversity and inclusion. The program has managed to survive under these institutional constraints in large part due to the vision and unrelenting labor of Pamela Thoma, director of the WGSS. I am also very appreciative of the support of my colleagues in WGSS—Marian Sciachitano and writing group partner Linda Heidenreich. Thanks also to students past and present with whom I have shared so many stimulating conversations and from whom I have learned so much: Lizeth Gutierrez, Mary Jo Klinker, Veronica Sandoval, Leah Wilson, Ras Tanvir, and Heather Ramos. Thanks to Heather and Nazua Idris for their assistantship with sending me research materials when I was working on this project in India. Writing a monograph at times necessitates desirable forms of contemplative solitude, but this seclusion can also foster moments of loneliness and insularity. While writing and researching this book, I was simultaneously working on an edited volume on HIV/AIDS with an inspiring group of scholars, artists, and activists whose contributions served as material and imaginary communities that helped to contravene my moments of isolation. In particular, I am grateful for my coeditors, Alexandra Juhasz and Jih-Fei Cheng, from whom I have learned so much (and continue to do so). What began as a formal academic connection between scholars with mutual interests and overlapping politics, moved into a close collaborative bond that has been nourishing and invigorating. Several friends have offered valuable forms of escape when I needed distance from the book. Many thanks to Porismita Borah, Bimbisar Irom, Ann Christenson, Judy Meuth, Sally McWilliams, Roger Whitson, Pamela Thoma, Jenifer Barclay, Noël Sturgeon, TV Reed, Heather Milton, Krish Sehgal, Robin Nuzum, Kausar Munir, Saroj Merani, Michelle Forsyth, and Pavithra Narayan for various forms of sustenance over the years: intellectual, academic, and social. For the many escapes from conference panels to catch up over fabulous cocktails and dinners, I am grateful to Christina León. Several sections of this book were completed during writing retreats and vacations with Julia

x

!"#$%&'()*+($,-

Cassaniti and Elissa Schwartz. I am so thankful for their companionship, support, and encouragement. I am forever in debt to my dear friend and travel partner, Io Palmer, with whom I have shared so many memorable experiences and cherished conversations, both sacred and profane. Thanks to Emily Garcia, Meg Norcia, and Eric Tribunella for the loving snark, life seminars, and venting sessions. I’m so grateful for our sustained friendship over two decades, and look forward to many more. I continue to be touched by the generosity and kindness of Steve Susoyev, who provided much-needed refuge during dif.cult times. My work continues to be inspired by my grandmothers, who were feminists in their own right without ever describing themselves in those terms. Much love and gratitude to my dearest nephew, Arihaan, with whom I share an obsession for bad horror movies and Souvla’s frozen yogurt with baklava sprinkles. While I will never personally admit it to her, my sister Gitanjali remains the gold standard when it comes to all matters of taste and aesthetics. I am grateful for our love which is unsentimental but unwavering. Thanks to my cat Gator, who is the best .rst pet anyone could ever ask for, and who perfectly balances his combination of aloofness and affection. And .nally, much love and thanks to my parents, Roshan and Govind Shahani. The bulk of this book was written during summer breaks when I returned home to Bombay. My daily routine of writing was fueled with breaks for delicious food (the only thing that fosters a spirit of un/inching patriotism in me) and .ercely competitive games of Scrabble and Anagrams. These small moments have sustained me in profound and memorable ways. I dedicate this work to my parents as a small gesture of my gratitude and love.

Pink Revolutions

!"#$%&'(#)%"

“This Is Not the Morning We Were Waiting For”: Theorizing Pink Revolutions

ye daaġh daaġh ujālā ye shab-gazīda sahar vo intizār thā jis kā ye vo sahar to nahīñ This stained tainted light, this night-bitten dawn, This is not the morning we were waiting for. —Faiz Ahmad Faiz, “Subh-e-Azadi”

Written in 1947, the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poem contravenes the invocations of exuberance that were conventionally conjured at the dawning of India’s independence. This is not the morning we were waiting for. Rather than euphoric possibilities of decolonized futures associated with the radiance of dawn, Faiz summons a sense of bathos through the “tainted light” of “night-bitten” new beginnings that anticipate the painful traumas of partition and the communalist violence of sectarian strife. “This is not the morning we were waiting for” is emphatically direct. But it also conveys a fatigued weariness at the promise of new beginnings, predicated on the premise of false freedoms. It is a rueful recognition that what passes as a revolutionary dawning is not simply an anodyne version of repair, but also a replacement system that conceals the violence inherent within overdetermined optimism. Decades later, in 2019, the Queer Muslim Project of India mobilized the words of Faiz Ahmed Faiz on the occasion of the Indian government’s abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which had formerly conferred special constitutional autonomy on the disputed territories of Jammu and Kashmir. The revoking of Article 370 was part of 3

4

!"#$%&'(#)%"

a long-promised election manifesto by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and it resulted in enhanced surveillance and security measures in Jammu and Kashmir by the Indian military, an exhaustive media blackout that included curfews, the blocking of the internet there, and police arrests of journalists and civilians accused of seditious conduct in the disputed territories. The Queer Muslim Project’s mobilization of Faiz’s lyric in the context of the Indian government’s occupation of Kashmir highlights the manner in which sexual politics can function as a suturing link that brings a variety of ostensibly segregated conversations around nationalism, LGBT rights, and religious fundamentalism into dialogue with one another. Why would a queer-identi*ed activist group in India invoke the decidedly anti-jubilant verse of Faiz only a few months after the Supreme Court of India had partially struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which was precisely the “morning” that several queer activists in India were waiting for? (Section 377 was the colonialera law that criminalized “unnatural” sexual activity between consenting adults. The Supreme Court’s ruling in 2018 that the section’s application to consensual homosexual sex between adults was unconstitutional was interpreted as effectively “decriminalizing” homosexuality in India.) And more broadly, how does this rejection of celebration animate a queer and anti-statist concept of political life which, at *rst, might not immediately or obviously line up with conventional calibrations of sexual politics? By abrogating Article 370, any modicum of autonomy maintained by the disputed territories would now be subsumed under the aegis of the Indian Constitution. The overlay of Section 377’s partial strike-down on to Article 370 does not simply stop short at their numerical proximity. Their complex intertwining formed the basis of the Queer Muslim Project’s dissension beyond the quirk of their coincidental similarity: following the jettisoning of Article 370, certain sections of the Hindu Right adopted the posture of a benign liberalism to celebrate the dawning of democratic possibilities for sexual minorities in the disputed territories. This logic was captured most blatantly for example, in framing the abrogation of 370 as the second successive victory for LGBT rights after the 377 ruling by India’s Supreme Court a few months earlier. By this logic, if the Indian Constitution was now the default law of the land in the disputed territories, queer populations in Jammu and Kashmir would “enjoy” the democratic privileges of queer rights like the rest of the nation.1 By insisting that “this is not the morning we were

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

5

waiting for,” the Queer Muslim Project rejected the co-opted terms of alliance between sexual rights and the nationalistic projects of the BJP administration. Like Faiz’s categorical refusal to celebrate, the Queer Muslim Project clearly articulates these supposedly optimistic queer futures in occupied territories as “smokescreen(s) of rainbow solidarity” that are “ripe with false national pride, misplaced sense of justice, and lack of empathy for those who are suffering.”2 Faiz’s lyrics and their mobilization by queer advocacy in the context of occupation serves as a useful entry point for this book’s theorization of “pink revolutions,” which, as I suggest in the rest of this introduction and the book in general, refers to more than just the jubilant “new” forms of LGBT visibility in a global-oriented, outward-looking India. At the risk of beginning with a gesture of anticlimactic letdown that echoes Faiz’s categorical rejection of euphoria, it might be useful to acknowledge right from the outset that the “revolution” invoked in the title of this book does not celebrate the ostensible actualization or even the exhilarating possibilities of radical change. In fact, it traces the economic and political genealogies through which “revolution” and “reform” are rendered as fungible categories. The term “pink revolutions” does not simply celebrate a kind of benign visibility associated with linear notions of progress that conventionally mark “pink” or queer economies. Instead, for my purposes in this book, the term highlights the messy knots and entanglements through which queer formations emerge in the post-liberalization context of India’s changing political economy when glimpsed against the simultaneous rise of Hindu nationalism. Untangling these knots reveals how the term “queer” gets triangulated by the logics of globalization and the rise of Hindutva (i.e., Hindu nationalism), rendering it both productive and threatening at the same time. I use “pink revolutions” as a term to mark this moment of contradictory con+uence which results in LGBT bodies being mediated by the neoliberal branding of rights, while also being marked by legal, social, or familiar disenfranchisement. Queer politics simultaneously enables and constrains India’s “worlding” ambitions, operating both as an impediment and as a lucrative market. In other words, I am interested in how queer politics get implicated within ideological triangulations where investments in *xed “tradition” and fabrications of the “local” brush up against economic and political agendas that demand +exible modernity and global aspiration. How are these seemingly antithetical agendas resolved and rendered innocuous? What are the ways in which queer politics get triangulated in these efforts at resolution?

6

!"#$%&'(#)%"

In what moments do these projects of incorporation succeed, and in which moments do they remain incomplete? In order to grapple with these questions, one of the axiomatic premises of this book is to depart from an idealized assumption of the sexually nonnormative or gender-variant body in India as alterity tout court, without attending to some of its more uneasy co-optations by neoliberal projects for modernity and alliances with nationalist frameworks. To attend to pink revolutions as a concatenation of global formations, LGBT rights, and religious fundamentalisms, the value of queer hermeneutics as a reading practice in this book necessarily occupies an interstitial framework that accounts for unstable meanings and unpredictable forms; that is, the “tainted light,” to invoke Faiz again, which attends to the political de-animations of queer life, but also to disruptions of value in which queer critique might refract through projects that appear more conventionally aligned to class or caste analysis or to interrogations of nationalism. Such a mobilization of queer critique is not to subsume sexual politics into apparently more urgent categories that are incorrectly framed as more robustly transgressive or political—instead, it is to mine the potential of anti-identitarian critique that contravenes the discreteness of these categories to begin with. Such obfuscations of the “proper object” of queer hermeneutics can admittedly be accompanied by their own sets of problems subtended by epistemological mysti*cations. But for my purposes in this book, the capaciousness of what counts as queer critique has the potential to keep alive the possibility of tracking the collusions and transgressions of sexual politics, and of tracing its stickiness and slipperiness in ways that do not necessarily vacillate from the doomed inevitability of assimilation on the one hand, and from the rei*ed compulsions of triumphant political radicalism on the other. This is not the morning we are waiting for. And so we must, at the very least, refuse its illusions of dawning light and look beyond the false premise (and promise) of its dazzling glare.

Fear of a Pink Revolution: The Bio-Necro-Politics of Cow Protection The conventional associations of the term “pink revolution” inevitably conjure signi*ers that gesture toward radical transformations in sexual citizenship and LGBT political movements. But if, as I suggest above,

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

7

“pink revolutions” does not index these putatively novel forms of queer visibility, I want to begin perhaps more usefully (and perversely) somewhere radically different—a site which, at *rst, might appear quite far removed from the conventional signi*ers associated with the emerging visibility of LGBT politics in India. I begin here not as a way to bracket or subsume queer frameworks, but in fact to highlight their centrality to discursive and political sites that are framed as adjacent to or even outside the purview of sexual politics. In a speech made before the 2014 national elections at a campaign rally in Bihar, the current prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, invoked the phrase “pink revolution” to warn against the Congress-led central government’s investment in meat exporting which was predicated on the ostensibly sacrilegious slaughter of cows: We’ve heard of the Green Revolution, we’ve heard of the White Revolution, but today’s Delhi sarkar [leaders] want neither; they’ve taken up cudgels for a Pink Revolution. Do you know what that is? That’s their game; they’re keeping the country in the dark. I want to ask Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav: do you want to support the people who want to bring about a Pink Revolution? When you slaughter an animal, then the colour of its meat is pink. This is what they call a “Pink Revolution.” And the Centre said with pride that, last year, India has earned the most from exporting meat. Across the countryside, our animals are getting slaughtered. Our livestock is getting stolen from our villages and taken to Bangladesh. Across India too, there are massive slaughterhouses in operation. And that’s not all. The Delhi sarkar will not give out subsidies to farmers or to Yadavs keeping cows but will give out subsidies to people who slaughter cows, who slaughter animals, who are destroying our rivers of milk, as long as they set up slaughterhouses.3

In this speech, the fear of a “pink revolution” morphs from an anxiety around a surreptitious and sinister ploy that “keeps the country in the dark” to a seeming display of empathy over the slaughter of cows— “our animals”—who are framed and humanized as cherished objects of national belonging.4 The gomata (cow) as national treasure is at risk of being lost (or more violently “stolen”) to national outsiders. The invocation of Bangladesh—the apparent and unlawful recipient of our

8

!"#$%&'(#)%"

venerated cows—is not without signi*cance given the anti-immigrant and communalist sentiment that has historically led to the deportation of Bengali Muslims from India back to Bangladesh.5 The “pink revolution” in this context marks an unequal exchange of value that replaces the sacred with the profane—one in which the economic drain of parasitic immigrants is exacerbated by the loss of spiritual and material wealth symbolized by the vulnerability of the sacred animal—its pink +esh cruelly exposed and globally consumed by national outsiders. In this picture of manufactured victimhood, the pink revolution additionally marks the attenuation of national life through economic loss, where cow slaughter and the exporting of meat come to stand in for the anxieties of a global economy that privileges the interests of foreign trade over domestic interests. The logics of the pink revolution are thus marked by a broader political economy that works in tandem with parochial communalist and casteist violence, as exempli*ed by instances of cow vigilantism in which Dalits and Muslims have been accused of cow slaughter and beef consumption. In the above speech, the violence in+icted on the sacred animal through its degradation at the slaughterhouse becomes a microcosm for the simultaneous devaluation of the nation’s economy and (Hindu) identity.6 It is not surprising, then, that the national +ag was used to drape the body of Ravi Sisodia, one of the accused in the 2015 Dadri lynching case, in which a Muslim man, Mohammed Akhlaq, was brutally killed by Hindu gau rakshaks (cow protectors) for allegedly storing beef in his home. Sisodia (who died of the chikungunya virus) was given the status of a national martyr—a “freedom” *ghter who had sacri*ced himself at the altar of Hindu “values.” The whitewashing of Akhlaq’s murder was secured through the nationalist *ction of Hindutva as the wounded victim of the Muslim butcher or Dalit beef eater. The family of Sisodia demanded monetary compensation from the government, along with the prosecution of the Akhlaq family for the primal sin of beef storage and consumption. The above speech thus formed the ideological framework for the normalization of violence under the aegis of cow protection. Hindutva—the predominant form of Hindu nationalism—like the soon-to-be-extinct cow, is framed through narratives of precarity and vulnerability in its conjuring of evaporated milk rivers and subsidyless, impoverished farmers. The reference to dwindling rivers of milk in Modi’s speech is not simply a rhetorical +ourish. Instead, its communalist sentiments are papered over through the ostensibly economic concern over milk

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

9

production, even though the cow is slaughtered for beef after it has ceased to actually produce milk. The inseparability of the pink revolution from its political economy preceded Modi’s speech in the 2005 legal case of the State of Gujarat v. Mirzapur, which mandated the ban on cow slaughter (reversing the 1958 Quareshi vs. Bihar case, which permitted the butchery of cows after they had ceased to yield milk). The Mirzapur case offered the legal and economic justi*cation to consolidate the cow as a site for national cathexis. One of the court af*davits referred to in the Mirzapur case literally mobilizes the logic of animal wealth by comparing cow dung to the Kohinoor diamond (a national prized possession that was stolen from India during colonial rule and is currently owned by the British monarchy). In this context, the sanctity of cow protection assumes biopolitical imperatives—it is tied to the very management of life through the essential value of cow dung and urine as fertilizer and manure for crop production. To preserve the cow, then, is inextricably linked to the right to life itself, as the court af*davit suggests: “[The right to life] can be basically protected only with proper food and feeding, and cheap and nutritious food grain required for feeding can be grown with the help of dung. Thus the most fundamental thing to the fundamental right of living for the human being is bovine dung.”7 While it is tempting to foreground an obvious irony in this investment in animal wealth as a means to preserve the fundamental right to life in the context of lynchings for beef possession, it would be more apposite to recognize the “bio-necro collaboration” that subtends the anxiety around pink revolutions.8 To put it differently, the supposed rationalizations of cow protection that rely on biopolitical imperatives are not simply smokescreens that obscure covert communal violence—instead, they are the very terms by which killing is justi*ed, rationalized, and rendered banal. The apparent incongruity between biopolitical administration on the one hand, and violence in the name of a “fundamental right to life” on the other, is not much of a contradiction at all—the appearance of paradox betrays the productive (if not entirely seamless) reconciliations in the management of life and death. The anxieties around pink revolutions are thus informed by what Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee has called the operations of “necrocapitalism”: a practice that is implicated in “managing general commerce with a sword in today’s global economy.”9 If cow vigilantism is implicated in a kind of necrocapitalism, it must be buttressed by biopolitical rationalities that labor in the same performative vicinity. The challenge to the imagined pink revolution is thus

10

!"#$%&'(#)%"

articulated via a nativist and almost pseudo-Gandhian fetishization of the local—represented in Modi’s speech by the pristine countryside and rural village. This idyllic pastoral space comes to represent a supposedly more humane and authentic India that is under attack by the crimes and corruption of the slaughterhouse. The literal site of meat production is metonymically linked with the central (Congress-led) government—one that sacri*ces the interests of local farmers for the sake of the export trade. The privileging of domestic animal husbandry over foreign investment *nds its juridical justi*cation in similar narratives of cultural essentialism. For example, Article 51A on which the Mirzapur decision was based argues against animal slaughter on the basis of preserving “Indian” values: “For many centuries, Indian society cherished two basic values of life, i.e., ‘Satya’ [truth] and ‘Ahimsa’ [nonviolence].”10 Acquiescing to the pink revolution is thus both economically and morally seditious. But as is the convention with narratives of manufactured victimhood, pink revolution paranoia reveals the work of ideology rather than the material experience of injury. The images of animal cruelty, stolen livestock, and impoverished farmers betray the Modi government’s own investment in globalizing the economy through export incentives, minimum government control, exacerbated market liberalization, and the relaxation of foreign investment restrictions. Since the election of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in 2014 in which Modi led the BJP to a resounding victory, India has actually retained its position as a top exporter of beef despite the campaign concerns over the pink revolution’s depletion of local resources and national wealth. Reports suggest that beef exports have been increasing annually by 14 percent since the year 2011;11 Business Today even reports that the BJP has offered multicrore grants for the expansion and modernization of slaughterhouses.12 Like the management of life that is implicated in the production of death via lynching, the distrust of the pink revolution braids itself with economic imperatives that sustain its expansion. In essence, the “revolution” of meat-exporting has continued in the transition from the Congress-led government to the BJP with a few modi*cations—its pink hues symbolically assuming more saffron-like tones. The apparent contradiction between the fetishization of the local on the one hand while courting foreign markets on the other, constitutes a politics of “new swadeshi” or “superpower swadeshi” that emerged in India in the early 1990s and became an institutionalized practice informing the current Modi-led government after 2014.13 Swadeshi is

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

11

a term that refers to “goods produced in one’s own country.” While swadeshi in its original context was mobilized by Mahatma Gandhi as an anticolonial movement to boycott British goods in favor of an Indian manufacturing revival, the new swadeshi movement retains some of the signi*ers of local revival without necessarily relinquishing the movement’s economic and ideological investments in the “global”; as billboards all across the newly renovated Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai indicate, “Indian at heart, global in spirit.”14 Throughout this book, I will return to frameworks of political economy to understand how the emergence of neoliberalism and a participation in the global economy subtend the politics of the “new swadeshi” so that its mobilization by contemporary Hindutva is not simply reduced to essentialist bromides around the nation’s capacious character—that is, the ostensibly unique coexistence of “tradition” and “modernity” that marks India’s entry into the global marketplace in the twenty-*rst century. Rather than an innocuous and paradoxical idiosyncrasy, I want to suggest that the staging of tradition and modernity as coeval values functions as an alibi for violent hierarchies and parochial nativisms that have crucial implications for queer politics and sexual citizenship. It is this apparent contradiction of global pitted “against” the local—between the de-nationalization of the economy and the renationalization of culture—that sets the stage for theorizations of a different kind of “pink revolution” in this book: that of the emergence and visibility of the LGBT movement in India since the mid-1990s. This emergence has complex and multiple genealogies that I will contextualize throughout the chapters that follow. But broadly speaking, the materialization of sexual politics in India historically has coincided with the very moment when the nation opened its markets to foreign investment and trade, placing globalization and “queer” formations in close proximity to one another—a coevalness that cannot be mistaken for simple con+ation. This positing of “queer” in propinquity to signi*ers of globality is a risky provocation, given the long and vexed postcolonial history of displacing any local non-normative sexual identities or expressions on to geographical and ideological elsewheres: either on colonial imposition, Western decadence, or foreign in+uence in order to preserve “India” as safely and essentially heterosexual.15 But for my purposes, I want to suggest that the placing of “queer” as contiguous with India’s participation in foreign markets reveals more than simple structures of causality or trickle-down consequences. In deliberately mining the multiple meanings of the term “pink revolution,” I highlight

12

!"#$%&'(#)%"

the entanglements between globalization, Hindutva, and sexual politics in order to theorize queer formations beyond structures of absolute complicity or abject alterity. Like the economy of cow protection, “pink revolutions” in the context of sexual politics are feared and mobilized to produce both national *ctions and *ctional nations; but the concern that marks pink revolutions also betrays an investment in their performative potential—as economically viable and nationally productive despite the imagined threats they purportedly pose. Pink Revolutions thus highlights the ways in which queer politics has become a central site for the Indian nation-state’s aspirations to global modernity. Given the historical overlap of economic liberalization after the 1990s with the emergence of burgeoning gay visibility in India, Pink Revolutions offers a framework through which this convergence can become the basis for interrogation rather than uncritical celebration, in order to challenge rather than simply reproduce neoliberal imperatives. Pink Revolutions thus attends to the fault lines rather than the compatibility between sexual politics and economic imperatives of growth that has marked the accelerated development of an “incredible” or “shining” India (terms used by the ruling Hindu centrist party to promote India as a real and imagined community of economic growth). I will examine the place of sexual politics within these contradictions, in which queerness is simultaneously interpellated in the courting of global markets and yet is policed through an investment in the preservation of an “authentically” heterosexual India. The book thus grapples with how queer economies in India are mediated by the joint operations of global capitalism (which theoretically attenuates and abrades local sovereignty) and disciplinary domestic formations (which buttress and lubricate national parochialisms).

Pink Revolutions and the Muted Promise of Queer Epistemologies If sexual politics in this context is not exhausted by the axis of alterity or complicity but shuttles contradictorily between and around circuits of transgression and absorption, what theories or epistemologies of queerness might be operational and valuable for analyzing pink revolutions? How might queer methods and practices of reading account for the shifting contingencies that frame the linked forms of Indian governmentality, economy, and sexual politics? In their meditation on

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

13

the present and future of “queer” as an axis of analysis, Mel Chen suggests that the concept “has been both re-animated and de-animated.”16 The seemingly discrete contexts that subtend both animation and attenuation in Chen’s framework, however, are quite signi*cant. They suggest that the promise of queer’s futurity as epistemology +ourishes “thanks particularly to queer of color, transnational, disability, and trans scholarship” (82). These areas of inquiry thus perform a redemptive function in salvaging an otherwise de-animated queerness whose ontology is reduced to identity in its contemporary manifestations—it has “coalesced, gotten sticky, intertial, lost its animation and its drive in the context of the United States” (82–83). Queer theory’s future can only be sustained “by its modi*cation by something else” (83). Its “transnational” turn is one such possibility of animating recovery through something else, given that Chen’s theorization of de-animation clearly grounds the attenuation of queer theory within the rei*cations of identity in the U.S. context. While Chen’s critique rightly foregrounds the dynamic ways in which queer and trans of color critiques, disability studies, and transnational work have rendered queer theory more vital in the last few decades, I want to push back against the salvi*c register of their argument. According to Chen’s logic, the political vigor of a non-U.S. context ostensibly transforms queer’s attenuated logics into a more robust hermeneutic that forces it to be accountable to new historical requirements and linguistic formations. Even while appearing to depart from the centralizing of U.S. queer theory’s “hold as a homing device,”17 the faith in postcoloniality or transnationalism as an invigorating agent retains what Geeta Patel and Anjali Arondekar call the “spatial fodder for the queer mill” that subtends geopolitical engagements of queer epistemology.18 Rather than faith in the redemptive and supple promise of “queer” as it travels and opens itself up to transformation by the “something else” of geopolitics, what might it mean to sit with its inadequacies and limits? In other words, rather than responding to queer absorptions into power as something to be instantaneously overcome and instrumentalized into political good, what possibilities might a more careful reckoning with the “stickiness” of queer open up for understanding the contradictions of pink revolutions? In his useful essay “Haunted by the 1990s” on the affective genealogies of queer theory, Kadji Amin provocatively contends that the disciplinary logics of queer studies as an academic *eld have “worked hard to keep queer slick rather than sticky, unbound, detachable, and able to reattach itself to an endless array of

14

!"#$%&'(#)%"

new objects and methods.”19 For example, for Amin, even interrogations of homonationalism and homonormativity—two of queer theory’s central objects of critique in its efforts to attach to the “something else” that animates its critical prowess—are informed by an implicit faith in a radical transgressiveness prior to their absorption. For Amin, these critiques have created a kind of theoretical bifurcation which names disciplinary queer formations on the one hand (“queer liberalism,” for example), but still preserves an affective charge of a prior radicality through an “unwillingness to give queer up to its deanimated and defanged contemporary uses” (183). Thus Amin asks: “what is it about queer that allows it to be the name for that which exceeds power, even as it simultaneously designates those gay and lesbian subjects who are the contemporary agents of state power?” (183). Of course, Amin’s critiques are grounded in U.S. mobilizations of queer hermeneutics—but his arguments have important implications for non-U.S.-based forms of queer scholarship. One of the reasons for the inability to detach from queer’s putative promise is, according to Amin, “a set of historical emotions generated within U.S. queer culture and politics around the early 1990s” (184). These affective logics in turn “propel the inchoate method that animates what objects may be claimed as queer” (184). An antidote to queer’s inchoateness is not a call for resolution that would simply replicate the object of critique by refusing to grapple with queer’s failures and disappointments. Instead, wrestling with “stickiness,” according to Amin, might require moving beyond early 1990s U.S.-based queer theorizing as the primal scene of hermeneutic emergence and taking into account varied genealogies that consider different inheritances as affective entry points into future queer theorizations—those that might be less exuberantly antinormative than the promise of subversion and denaturalization. Such considerations of alternative genealogies would open up the geopolitics and demographics of queer theorizing in ways that ful*ll Petrus Liu’s call to not assume that “queer theory automatically refers to a distinct body of theoretical works produced in the 1990s United States.”20 My “attachment genealogy,” to use Amin’s useful phrase, ironically, still remains “haunted by the ’90s.” But it is a haunting that radically differs from its U.S. counterpart. The 1990s that nostalgically animates contemporary queer theorizing in the United States was marked by ACT UP and Queer Nation’s response to AIDS, sex-positive feminism, and theoretical considerations of performativity, materiality, and anti-sociality. My theorization of pink revolutions on the other hand

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

15

is shaped by the affective registers of bathos that I began this chapter with in which reform is framed through the triumph of revolution to maintain national *ctions of democracy and modernity. Orienting the attachment genealogy of pink revolutions in this different direction is not simply a way to resuscitate queer’s tempered radical promise by conjugating it with “something else.” Instead, de+ecting the primal scenes on which hermeneutics is formed contravenes the tendency to mobilize “queer” as an extant theory that we presumably already know, which is then applied to local contexts as it travels across space and time. A queer method that is attentive to difference (without essentializing it) and which reorients the genealogies of hermeneutic categories to account for geopolitical speci*city might release projects working on queer politics in India from the onus of having to end at moments of triumphalist arrival—especially if they are burdened with the task of anti-normativity as work on queer incorporation in the Western Hemisphere gains greater critical currency (a point to which I will return in the next section). To begin with bathos and to mine its critical energies is not a foreclosure of agency or subversive politics as much as it is an attempt to, as Amin suggests, “allow queer to do new kinds of work with different objects and archives in a range of historical, cultural, and geographic contexts.”21 The very title “Pink Revolutions” is an attempt to capture the “stickiness” of queer by mining the multiple meanings of “revolution” rather than signaling achievement or arrival. The con+icting signi*cations of “revolution” as it is mobilized throughout this book gesture toward the triangulations of queer politics with discourses of Hindutva and globalization.22 The term refers not just to the supposed visibility of queer bodies subtending the post-1990s emergence of sexual citizenship through what Akshay Khanna calls “registers of governmentality,” but also attends to the ways in which these “new” juridical, cultural, and epidemiological vocabularies get contradictorily imbricated within the crosshairs of a Hindu fundamentalism that is also marked by national aspirations toward global cosmopolitanism.23 Theorizing the sexual politics of pink revolutions through narratives that cannot be reduced to either assimilative collusion or radical resistance is not to resort to the easy convenience of a middle ground. Instead, it is to grapple with the “sticky” place of queer sexual economies in concomitantly undermining and buttressing national modernity projects. Likewise, to analyze queer politics as a site that gets refracted through these multiple and contradictory formations is not to dilute its performative iterations or

16

!"#$%&'(#)%"

assume that sexual politics accrues critical or political gravitas only when framed through the lens of political economy. The tendency to subsume sexual politics as a political or epistemological “problem” has particular genealogies in the Indian context: an earlier theorizing of sexuality as almost exclusively germane to questions of sexual violence;24 the relegation of queer politics to an arena of the apolitical that must be subsumed by more “urgent” issues;25 and the early emergence of gay visibility via HIV/AIDS politics in which the prominence of queer activism was framed through what Naisargi Dave calls “the cold facts of immunology and risk management.”26 Given this history, it might seem tempting to insist on the distinctive particularity of “queer” as a bulwark against its incorporation and diffusion. And yet, Pink Revolutions suggests the impossibility of isolating queerness from its entanglements within contemporary discourses of globalization and nationalism—what Meera Nanda has described as the “state-temple-corporate complex” that subtends the post-liberal milieu of India’s political economies.27 While queer politics, as I will illustrate throughout this book, is interpellated within the logics of nationalism and globalism in contradictory ways, it would be myopic to frame the discourses of Hindutva and global modernity as always existing in a contradictory relationship to one another. Thus, as I have already pointed out, the logics of cow protection that supposedly perform a valorization of the local are, in fact, strongly tethered to the global export of beef and water buffalo meat. Several theorists of globalization have therefore noted that it is no longer tenable to assume the “end of the nation” in understanding the challenge to discrete sovereignty that is facilitated by the +exibility of global capital—what Saskia Sassen has called the “unbundling” of national sovereignty marked by direct foreign investment and transnational economic linkages.28 The unbundling of sovereignty does not, however, imply the disappearance of the nation-state’s role in political or economic arenas. In “The Local and the Global,” for example, Stuart Hall notes that the nation-state might be in “decline” given the increasing presence of global international capital, but this professed waning is what makes its authoritative scope even more dangerous. He writes: “So when I refer to the decline or eroding of the nation-state, I do not mean that the nation-state is bowing off the stage of history.”29 Hall goes on to articulate the potential proximity between globalization and fundamentalisms, precisely at the moment of its putative disappearance: “when nation-states begin to decline in the era of globalization, they regress to a very defensive and highly dangerous form of national

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

17

identity that is driven by a very aggressive form of racism.”30 Thus, even while the nation-state is more fractured and less stable in its sovereign capacities, its continued endurance despite its purported displacement is particularly relevant to the fractured relationship between national and sexual citizenship.31 From earlier work on the globalization of sexuality that foregrounds the postcolonial nation-state’s dependence on heteronormativity, to more recent work on homonationalism that tracks the incorporation of queerness into state governmentality, the nation still persists as a central arena of continued contestation for sexual politics.32

Homonationalism and After The homonationalist turn in queer studies would appear to assume particular relevance to Pink Revolutions, given my arguments about the productive character of sexual economies for the nation-state. And yet, I want to suggest that frameworks of homonationalism do not completely capture the complexities of this particular folding-in of “queer” into national modernity projects. Jasbir Puar, who has coined the term “homonationalism” to mark “the historical shift in the production of nation-states from the insistence on heteronormativity to the increasing inclusion of homonormativity,” has herself pointed to the limits of the term’s assumed elasticity and the simple application of “homonationalism” without a consideration of context.33 In the concluding section of the introduction to Terrorist Assemblages entitled “Queer Necropolitics,” Puar offers a trenchant critique of queer theory’s mobilization of Michel Foucault as one that is predicated on a critical whitewashing and sidestepping of race. Puar argues that the exclusive focus on the repressive hypothesis critique in queer studies has foreclosed a closer attention to the biopolitical focus of The History of Sexuality. Such an elision has meant that biopolitical questions pertaining to the distribution of life chances (which would inevitably warrant a focus on racializing or colonizing processes) have been ignored in favor of articulating alternatives to sexual repression models. Puar thus calls for a theoretical methodology that centers “race and sexuality simultaneously in the reproduction of living and dying” as a way to counter the privileging of U.S.-centric whiteness in queer theory and politics.34 Almost a decade after Puar’s paradigmshifting critiques in Terrorist Assemblages, the term “homonationalism”

18

!"#$%&'(#)%"

has acquired a fairly widespread degree of critical currency in queer and critical race theory (that the two *elds cannot always be mutually exclusive remains a crucial aspect of assemblage as methodology). But if repressive hypothesis critiques function as replacement systems for biopolitical considerations of sexuality and race, the mobilization of “homonationalism” as a political critique is not always refracted through a consideration of bio-necro intersections in its mobilizations. Instead, the term “homonationalism” has become a shorthand for gay racism despite Puar’s insistence to the contrary. The use of “homonationalism” to foreground the racism of pinkwashing has served important political and critical purposes even in the absence of biopolitical critique. But if the selective mobilization of Foucault has meant an avoidance of race, the critique of sexual exceptionalism disaggregated from bio-necro linkages inadvertently risks recentering the United States, erasing what Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel have called “the convoluted densities of geopolitics”—in this instance, the geopolitical speci*cities of regional or postcolonial sexualities.35 These sexual economies, even while imbricated within nationalist productions of modernity, do not always line up tidily with the assimilative scripts and incorporative logics of homonationalism. As important as the critique performed by homonationalism is (and as politically urgent as it continues to be), the critical split in its practice potentially mimics the limits of a whiteness of masculinity studies that always implicitly privileges hegemonic formations even as it sets out to undermine their dominance. In other words, homonationalism as a conceptual category ends up subsuming an attention to the national speci*cities of sexual economies within a critical terrain of global sexuality studies that has become overdetermined by critiques of North American or European sexual exceptionalism. In trying to frame homonationalism as an assemblaged process rather than “an event or an attribute,” Puar proposes that it marks “a historical shift in the production of nation-states from the insistence on heteronormativity to the increasing inclusion of homonormativity.”36 But if our critical categories are to indeed capture the instrumentalizations of sexual politics in their assemblaged complexity, Pink Revolutions reveals the impossibility of theorizing the relationship between the nationstate and non-normative sexuality via historical shifts that move from being problematic to productive. Instead, there is a deep synchronicity to this movement that can incorporate the subject while rendering it unintelligible at the very same time. Thus, even while theories of

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

19

homonationalism are framed through the logics of assemblage and the refusal of rei*cations, they are implicitly dependent on logics of discretion: homonationalism, writes Puar, “accord[s] some populations access” to the privileges of citizenship “at the expense of the partial and full expulsion from those rights of other populations” (25). Instead, I am suggesting that the absorption of queerness by the nation-state is not necessarily always predicated on the violence of self-other formations— that is, the primal scenes of exclusion and inclusion are braided in more entangled patterns (and sometimes around the same sexual subject) than assumed by the analytical categories of homonationalism. Even while it has usefully highlighted logics of incorporation, the notion of homonationalism can itself ironically perform epistemological modes of incorporation by subsuming every instance of queer instrumentalization under its critical auspices. Thus, rather than following Puar’s call for marking “the divergences and differences that create multiple kinds of homonationalisms,” what might be needed instead is an altogether different critical lens to account for the unpredictable forms that the nexus between national and sexual politics can take (32). Ultimately, I am less interested in a debate around whether speci*c instantiations of pink revolutions in this book should or should not be labeled as “homonationalist.” More signi*cant is an understanding that the “pink” in pink revolutions might ultimately prove to be analytically distinct from the “pink” in pinkwashing. The recognition of this difference allows for the analysis of contradictory and unstable formations in the Indian context that are worth tracking when queerness is unevenly refracted through the prism of national and, at times, even nationalist logics. My critique is thus motivated by the manner in which the notion of homonationalism has come to saturate the *eld of global sexualities in which challenges to North American racial capitalist formations37 and logics of U.S. neoliberalism assume a primal critical stage, eliding what Patel and Arondekar have called an attention “to the nexus of area and sexuality.”38 Arguing for the need to move beyond the U.S. empire as the “traumatic origin story” that animates the methodological impulse of queer studies, Patel and Arondekar call for queer methods that avoid the tendency to simply gravitate toward “the direction in which capital +ows.”39 Pink Revolutions seeks to redirect the object of critique from the totalizing narratives informing U.S. hegemony, not by sidestepping the movement of capital +ow, but by recognizing that these +ows do not have singular origins that are exclusively tethered to North American

20

!"#$%&'(#)%"

contexts. My analysis of the sexual economies in India thus draws and builds on the literature in globalization studies that understands the trajectories of capital +ow as not simple top-down impositions in which the global +attens an already passive local.40 Alternatively, neither does Pink Revolutions paint a picture of a local that is always the agential force of resistance speaking back to a hegemonic global. Thinking beyond these conventional geometries of power and resistance is not to elide the operations of multinational capital or even the destabilizing possibilities of their subversion. But to analyze globalization through a narrative in which the confrontation between Western capitalism and sovereign-threatened regionalism threatens to produce cultural homogeneity or even localized monocultures only offers a partial and provincial account of its complexities. In her anthropological account of transnationality, for example, Aihwa Ong warns against what she calls the “unidirectional” and “totalizing discourses of globalization” that “paper over the actual uneven spread of capitalism, the intertwining of capitalism and state power, the cultural forms of ruling, and the dynamism of cultural struggles in different parts of the world that do not *t their logical schemes.”41 Against those theorizations of globalization invested in the logics of “planetary capitalism,” she calls for transnational analysis that refuses centerperiphery formulations that posit singular modernities which become primal scenes for the rest of the globe. She contends: “we need to attend to how places in the non-West differently plan and envision the particular combinations of culture, capital, and the nation-state, rather than assume that they are immature versions of some master Western prototype” (31). Relatedly, the critique of singular modernity de*ned in purely Anglo/Eurocentric categories also requires a challenge to the positing of postcolonial formations either as sites of opposition, or conversely, as always already brutalized by the inequities of global capital. Such dichotomous formulations erase the operations of what Ong calls the “emergent capitalist powerhouses that are ‘colonizing’ territories and peoples in their own backyards” (35). Similarly, drawing on Achille Mbembe, Ananya Roy argues for understandings of postcoloniality as a site that contains multiple temporalities, “one that cannot be reduced to a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ of colonization, one that is instead constituted of an ‘interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures,’ one where ‘time is made up of disturbances.’ ”42 An attention to these entangled temporalities highlights the assemblaged logics between national and queer politics in ways that critiques

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

21

of homonationalism are ultimately unable to capture in the Indian context. In keeping with the above frameworks that advance more capacious understandings of globalization’s multiple temporalities, I want to theorize postcoloniality as a site of coeval temporalities in which past and present are synchronized in the service of a future India that will be clean, digital, and shining. The rearranged relations of power that inform these aspirations in the service of modernity combine systems of domination and subordination, making it impossible to retain oppositional categories that are formed around clashes between Global North and South. In keeping with Ong’s insistence on the impossibility of theorizing a unitary notion of modernity that is always located in the West, Pink Revolutions situates the global aspirations of the Hindu Right as a primary political and material context in chapters throughout the book. Following the recognition that the postcolonial is the site of contradictory and competing temporalities, I do not theorize the sexual subject simply as the subaltern foil that exposes the gaps in India’s developmental aspirations. Instead, I focus on the simultaneous interpellating and undermining of queer politics, which theorizes pink revolutions without the privileging of sexual subjects at the center of analysis.

Widening Analytical Frames and “Unconscientious” Methodologies An array of questions pushes up against such an endeavor: why theorize a project that centers the “queer and now” marking LGBT politics in India without an evidentiary reliance on the ethnographic experience of queer subjects? What does it mean to theorize the fractured interpellations of queer politics without necessarily privileging embodiments of sexual or gender difference at the center of analysis? Are such circumventions of the subject realistic or even desirable, given the quotidian and institutional forms of disenfranchisement that LGBT bodies in India experience? Does a bracketing of the speci*c and potentially varied experiences, for example, of the kothi sex worker, of the urban gay activist, or of hijra populations (themselves hardly self-contained, monolithic, or always mutually exclusive categories) perform a kind of epistemological +attening when “queer politics” or “LGBT populations” in India are invoked throughout this book?43 Does the emphasis on the productive character of LGBT politics in relation to Indian modernity aspirations risk an elision of the myriad forms of resistance and

22

!"#$%&'(#)%"

organizing among queer activists, lawyers, and community organizers in India that have emerged in the last two decades? Admittedly, the attempt to theorize pink revolutions without privileging “the evidence of experience” potentially risks erasing the lived consequences of oppression, as well as the agency of LGBT activism in India.44 But theorizing beyond the dyad of power/resistance is not to deny the material reality of either. In this context, queer theory and activism in India have much to glean from the women’s movement and feminist theorizations of sexual politics (of course, in making this very claim, there must be a vigilance against the language of supersession or neat epistemic shifts from “feminist” to “queer”). From colonial to postcolonial contexts, feminist scholarship in India has offered nuanced accounts of the political dangers in theorizing agency through overdetermined divides: on the one hand, an empowerment or liberation model constructs what Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose call “a sexually radical and economically autonomous subject”45 that is easily co-opted by the state and NGOs that gesture toward women’s rights, “but in ways that blunt the edge of feminist critiques, offering patronage instead of a fundamental redistribution of resources.”46 On the other hand, feminist legal theorists such as Flavia Agnes and Ratna Kapur have critiqued the demands for a defenseless “disempowered, tragic subject” who must always be legally framed through innocence in order to seek redress from the state.47 Both ends of this dyad have been particularly susceptible to mobilizations and appropriations by Hindu nationalism in which a professed investment in “women’s issues” either serves as an alibi for parochial agendas, or becomes the means through which moralistic and patriarchal protectionist logics around women’s “honor” and safety get legally rati*ed. The insistence on un*ltered notions of agency has not only posited a universal and self-evident upper-class and upper-caste Hindu “female” subject at the center of its discourse, it has also marshaled a form of right-wing militancy in which “strong” and “rebellious” women have participated in pogroms and anti-Muslim riots. As I analyze in more detail in the next chapter, Hindu fundamentalism, while perpetuating a politics of dogmatic essentialism and ethnic *xity, is itself a malleable discourse that shape-shifts and adapts in accordance with the ideological needs of the moment. Ratna Kapur points out that even while anti-Muslim in its nationalist agendas, “the Hindu Right works in and through the discourse of rights, including secularism, equality and free speech.”48 The promotion of women’s equality by the Hindu Right thus suggests a performative semblance

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

23

of moderation, especially in contexts where the aspirations to global modernity require tokenistic gestures toward liberal democracy and universal human rights. Thus, Kapur points to how this discourse of pseudo-feminism “promotes a vision for women that is deeply imbued with dominant sexual ideology, such that the Hindu Right is able to advocate seemingly more moderate positions, while at the same time reinscribing women’s roles within the traditional, culturally bound, patriarchal family, and within sexual normativity.” If the “empowered” woman is overdetermined by an agential framing that is easily co-opted by the Hindu Right, the always already disempowered subject does not fare much better, as witnessed in debates over censorship and obscenity laws. Thus Kapur points out: “the power of censorship will invariably be used to suppress images and presentations of sex and sexuality— not sexist images that depict women in subordinate positions. When sexual expression is framed within the discourse of violence against women, it can be appropriated by the Hindu Right within its discourse of sexual purity and honour.”49 Furthermore, the concern over women’s rights has historically been interlaced with a communalist discourse of “protecting” Muslim women who are victims of the “barbaric” ways of Muslim men—as illustrated in the aftermath of the controversial Shah Bano case, in which the putative concern over women’s alimony rights and the legal demands for women’s protection were hard to disentangle from anti-Muslim sentiments.50 Thus Agnes comments: “even while homes of poor Muslim women were looted . . . in the post Shah Bano phase, .  .  .  while Muslim women were raped under +oodlights in the riots following the pulling down of the Babri Masjid, the mainstream continued to lament over Muslim appeasement and denial of maintenance to ‘poor Muslim women—the Shah Banos.’ ”51 To critique the rei*cations of the empowered or victimized subject is not to claim her disappearance, nor is it to obviously deny the material possibilities of feminist agency or women’s oppression. Instead, it is to attend to the complicated commingling of social movements with projects of global modernization and nation-building—what I am theorizing through the logics of triangulation that subtend pink revolutions. In this regard, the critical and political terrains of Indian feminism overlap and prove instructive to the complex directionalities of queer politics, a point I will return to in chapter 2 of this book. While feminist theorizing provides a useful epistemological and political model to complicate simple geometries of power, I cannot claim that Pink Revolutions entirely sidesteps the quagmires of rei*cation,

24

!"#$%&'(#)%"

given its animations of identity throughout subsequent chapters. From hijras protesting the monopoly patents of global pharmaceutical companies to “seditious” queer suicides on university campuses, the archive that follows cannot simply transcend an investment in identity formations. My efforts to complicate the mobilization of a queer subject who is simply either responding to or being impacted by the triangulated geometries of global capital and religious revivalism is a way to account for the multiple actors and systems at play in the logics of pink revolutions. The triangulations that I critique thus cannot be adequately addressed via logics of singularity that subtend the oppressed or resistant subject. In the context of feminist theorizing, Ania Loomba calls for the positing of critical and political pressure “on the category of woman vis-à-vis other categories”—a widening of analytical frames that I want to similarly mobilize in Pink Revolutions.52 Unsettling such formulations also interrogates the rei*cations of experience that grant a moral and epistemological authority to “subaltern” voices despite the important critical traditions in South Asian, feminist, and queer studies that have usefully challenged the logocentric hermeneutics of unmediated representation.53 Thus, in foregrounding the multiple practices that consolidate the operations of pink revolutions, there can be no recourse to what Gayatri Spivak calls the subject of “conscientious ethnography”—that is, the temptation to recover an abject and supposedly sovereign remainder that resists incorporation.54 In keeping with this more con+icted approach to the ethnography of identity and experience, the book’s predominant (but not exclusive) citational referencing of South Asian critical theorists, anthropologists, historians, journalists, and cultural critics is not a way to gratuitously prop up the identity of non-Euro/Anglo scholars as a simple methodological selling point; nor is it evidence of authenticity as compensation for the avoidance of anthropological proximity as method. The citational impulse instead is a way of reorienting what gets framed as “theory” and what is then extrapolated as illustration. Pink Revolutions thus refuses to treat the queer body in India (or even “India” itself) as only a case study for already extant theory, even while “India” does become the geopolitical “case” by which to explore the collusions between queer, nationalist, and neoliberal desires. Patel and Arondekar critique a tendency that recenters the United States even within scholarship on non-Western regions or hemispheres in which “geopolitics provides the exemplars, but rarely the epistemologies.”55 In addition to foregrounding how the non-West indeed can provide the epistemologies,

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

25

my methodological goals are also to reverse conventional trickle-down approaches that “apply” theory to “experience” or material practice. In other words, rather than assuming “theory” as an already decided epistemological category that is produced in Euro/Anglo contexts and then “applied” to non-Western subjects, I want to ask how the speci*cities of India’s sexual economies provide the geopolitical ground through which queer theorizing might emerge. This book therefore does not self-consciously pose a challenge to the assumed Western universalisms of queer theory in order to foreground recon*gured difference. Instead, I share Petrus Liu’s call to understand queer theory as “a transnational and transcultural practice of which its US instantiation is only part.”56 In Liu’s analysis, he calls into question the very ontological character of what might constitute “theory.” He argues for an understanding of theory “as a product of historically determinate circumstances rather than as a set of timeless principles we can apply to a variety of cultural situations.”57 Such a framework eschews essentialist epistemological purity, but also understands that “theory” might constitute, as it does in Pink Revolutions, a legal judgment, a *ctional text, or even a rhetorical utterance. Of course, the goal of “queer” theorizing in India, and the very use of the term “queer” have the potential to undercut the above critique of who occupies “exemplar” and “epistemology,” if there is no acknowledgment of its U.S-centric genealogy as a *eld of critical inquiry, even when its “attachment genealogies” are diverted in different directions. Is there a way to avoid the trap of the West as a default setting for epistemology (especially if one is considering the location of this book’s own geographies of publishing and distribution)? How can one refuse the uncritical adoption of the term “queer” (one that Neville Hoad suggests can often be “innocent of its own colonizing fantasies”) and still work within recognizable practices of readership?58 I do not claim to resolve these questions. Throughout this book, I shuttle back and forth between the terms “queer” and “LGBT.” Both these mobilizations are discerned in activist and scholarly contexts in the Global South that do not always or axiomatically acquiesce to hegemonic grammars of globalism, even if in several contexts they simultaneously index the conjugation of “queer” with global modernity aspirations (as is the case, for example, of the tourist practices discussed in chapter 2).59 The necessity of this double movement is recognized, for example, in Naisargi Dave’s Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics, in which she points out that the emergence of queer politics in India is

26

!"#$%&'(#)%"

“inseparable from the history of neoliberalism, nongovernmental organizations (NGOS), the politics and anti-politics of development, and the agendas of a modernizing state and a transnational public health apparatus.”60 Dave rightly points to the fact that this convergence between economic liberalization and LGBT visibility was not purely coincidental, but was informed by the political economy of global funding that facilitated (and at times even ideologically mandated) the emergence of certain local taxonomic categories and political agendas over others. And yet “queer” is not therefore jettisoned as a category of analysis or activism even as its terms are interrogated and critiqued. One of the effects of the coeval character of India’s economic liberalization and LGBT visibility has been a constrained understanding of sexual economies through the Manichaean divide between oppression and subversion that I want to complicate throughout this book. At one end is the critique of multinational neo-imperialism subsuming local con*gurations of sexuality under its auspices, in which globalization performs an economic and ideological +attening even as the local bends and adapts to the global;61 at the other end is the “resistance” model that foregrounds the ontology of same-sex indigeneity prior to both colonial logics and global impositions.62 It would be a mistake, of course, to suggest that either spectrum of these critiques is simply misguided or naive: instead, I want to suggest that both, in different ways, are consequences of the shared emergence of sexual politics with the moment of economic liberalization in the early 1990s. The former strategically emerges as a riposte to the globalization-asliberatory formulations in which its spatial and temporal transgressions are desired for producing the elasticity of mobile citizenship. Such modes of +exibility are celebrated (not unlike attempts to redeem colonialism as intrinsically well-intentioned and useful) and then justi*ed as fostering the economic and cultural conditions of +uidity that create mobile subjects. In turn, these forms of mobility are valued as creating the democratic (if nascent) possibilities of sexual citizenship that are in keeping with universalized human rights frameworks. Conversely, the latter insistence on sexual difference in the vernacular is also refracted through the historical overlap with India’s turn to economic liberalization. In this context, difference provides the seemingly compensatory antidote to the perception of complicity between sexual politics and Western in+uence. The recourse to native (and nativist) tradition functions as empirical evidence of proto-queerness—what Arondekar has called the “historical language of search and rescue” in which “the

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

27

promise of archival presence” is instrumentalized for the purpose of liberatory politics and future knowledge production.63 Such salvi*c modes of recovery must, however, be understood (and critiqued) as a kind of subversion under constraints. The insistence on the authenticity of Indian queers (i.e., as something other than products of “Western” imposition) through the recovery of tradition is the most obvious and logical response to the imagined construction of India as a nation that is conceived through the logics of trans-historical heterosexuality. But the recourse to such forms of recovery must also be understood as fueled, at least in part, by the real conditions of economic liberalization informing LGBT visibility. These forms of “melancholic historicism” thus function as ways to rewrite scripts of apparent complicity informing a primal scene of origins that interpellates queer bodies as always already “new” and non-autochthonous.64

Pink Triangles Rather than framing the overlap between liberalization and sexual politics along the axis of power or resistance, I want to return to this moment as a way to historicize and set the stage for the seemingly contradictory logics that subtend pink revolutions. The year that constituted the primal scene for such a historicization is 1991—a temporal marker that inaugurated and institutionalized the denationalization and de-territorialization of India’s economy, but which also, as I will illustrate, launched a newly invigorated renationalization of Indian culture that foreshadowed the emergence of the BJP as a central political force less than a decade later. My description of queer politics as a site that is refracted through the push and pull of nationalism and global modernity is thus a deliberate attempt to foreground the triangular structures that constitute the con+uences of power that I am attempting to theorize. The triangle as a structural and analytical conceit for my arguments throughout this book offers unifying, yet multiple possibilities. The inverted pink triangle has, of course, become a ubiquitous symbol of LGBT pride and safe space not just in the West, but also in its universalization as a global signi*er that has been adapted and adopted in the Indian context at pride marches, protests, and activist celebrations. But if, as I suggested at the very outset, “pink revolutions” as a term does not only mark the emergence of queer progress, then by implication, my theorization of “triangles” in this book is not simply germane to their

28

!"#$%&'(#)%"

conventional signi*ers associated with LGBT visibility. The triangles that I describe throughout the book refract, bend, and divert what we have come to understand as “sexual politics” through more convoluted and circuitous routes, refusing seamless congruity or progressive linearity. In the *rst chapter, I thus begin with the historical primal scene or “genealogy attachment” of 1991 that sets the “revolutionary” stage for the triangulated structures of power that I examine in the rest of the book. As I have suggested throughout this introduction, pink revolutions mark the triangulated frictions and uneasy convergences of queer politics with globalization and nationalism. The chapter thus historicizes and theorizes the meaning of “revolution” in the early 1990s, when the demands of economic liberalization were being framed in these terms as a way to recast market reform as radical and revolutionary. In other words, the ideology of revolution did not simply function to insidiously mask a reformist agenda—instead, I argue more precisely, revolution became restyled as reform, and reform came to be rede*ned as revolution. Chapter 1 thus sets the stage for the *rst set of triangles that I will explore throughout the book. If revolution is the apex of this *rst triangle, its two other ends are the demands for neoliberal modernity and domestic sovereignty—seemingly contradictory, but ultimately congruent and even interdependent. Even while their points of connection are not linearly progressive in their unifying logics, they ultimately assume a triangular form that confers a semblance of shape and coherence. The three corners of the triangle are mutually dependent, each lending the other its organizational and formal relationality. The speci*c content of the triangle’s three corners morphs and shifts, depending on the ideological demands and historical contingencies of the moment, but its structural terms are preserved through continual repetitions. Thus, while the chapter begins with theorizing “revolution” through an “original” triangle of sorts in the early 1990s, it moves across time to consider how triangular structures of revolution are refracted through sexual politics and the emergence of right-wing nationalism. If one of the effects of triangles, as I illustrate in chapter 1, is to render neoliberal reform and revolution as interchangeable entities, then subsequent chapters throughout the book offer material grounds for illustrating the complex negotiations and knotted convolutions through which triangles come to assume their “revolutionary” shape and ideological form. The next four chapters are thus structured through and organized around key analytical conceits—safety, privacy, speed, and mobility—that is, “revolutionary” markers that function as neoliberal

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

29

and reformist tools in a post-liberalization India. Each of these concepts can be thought of as occupying the apex of triangles that connect sexual politics with its two other ends. Once again, the exact form of these other two ends changes with each chapter, but in each case the triangles are “uni*ed” by the seemingly oppositional logics of local and global, old and new, traditional and modern. The triangulated forms ensure that these purportedly divergent logics ultimately work in tandem with one another so that in each instance, their neoliberal logics can be harnessed in the service of pink revolutions. For example, in chapter 2, I look at the nascent emergence of gay tourism in India in the last two decades in order to understand how the marketing of queer “safe spaces” to foreign visitors is not necessarily impeded by institutionalized homophobia, but is in fact buttressed by the very economies of risk and danger it purports to interrogate. In this chapter, the term “pink revolutions” refers to the marketing of safe geographies in the service of gay tourism that get triangulated by India’s global modernity aspirations on the one hand and by the essentialist preservation of its national “character” on the other. The chapter thus closely analyzes tourist groups such as Pink Vibgyor, Indjapink, and Mister and Art House that engage in what Aihwa Ong and Ananya Roy have called “worlding” practices shaping global cities—in this instance, New Delhi, India’s capital, and the central location of the emergence of gay tourism over the last decade.65 In theorizing the triangulation between queer safety, worlding aspirations, and the logics of nationalism, the chapter thus analyzes the seemingly paradoxical coexistence of discrimination against gay men in India with the political economy of queer marketing. I contend that the emergence of gay tourism in India needs to be understood as more than simply a consequence of globalization’s fracturing effects in which tradition uneasily coexists and brushes up against modernity. Instead of understanding the relationship between gay tourism and globalization simply as a mimetic effect of “global” queerness onto a passive local, I propose an attention to the politics of “worlding” around urban Indian centers—that is, the real and imagined geographies through which metropolitan cities such as New Delhi seek to produce what Ananya Roy has called the “global regimes of value” that shape “postcolonial urbanism.”66 If gay tourism participates in “new” India’s revolutionary aspirations, chapter 3 considers those sites that brush up against globalization’s emphasis on hyperconnectivity, foregrounding the “old” that is obscured in shining visions of Indian modernity. This chapter’s focus

30

!"#$%&'(#)%"

on caste politics is a way to contravene globalization’s claims around connection—since the material realities of untouchability quite literally enforce logics of disconnectivity and hierarchical separation. While the ubiquity of globalization supposedly “touches” all our lives, the chapter mines the double meaning of “touch” in the context of both sexual and caste politics in India in order to consider the interfacing between two suicides on university campuses that made public headlines for different reasons: the Dalit student Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad, and the “gay” Marathi professor Ramchandra Siras at Aligarh Muslim University. In analyzing these two cases together, I grapple with a set of theoretical and analytical questions in order to ask what happens when “queer” interfaces with caste and the politics of untouchability. To textually ground this question, I closely analyze the recent *lm Aligarh (2016, Hansal Mehta), which has been praised for its sympathetic portrayal of a gay professor, Ramchandra Siras, whose legal *ght for privacy (and subsequent suicide) after he is caught having sex with another man constitutes the text’s central premise. If the chapter theorizes the “queer” touching of “caste,” just as crucially, I am interested in asking in which moments these forms of relationality are foreclosed and repudiated so that “queer” participates in a theoretical and material untouchability. In theorizing a queer politics of touch, the central triangular conceit of this chapter revolves around the notion of privacy—both in its literal sense, that is, as a private space that is ostensibly the logical and legal domain of queer “touch”; and more broadly, as a private sphere enshrined by the “revolutionary” logics of a postliberalization Indian state, the entry into which is often framed as the end point of LGBT politics in India. What kinds of occlusions are such calls for queer privacy predicated on? What is lost from queer analytical frames when public domains are disavowed in favor of rights to privacy? One of these occlusions that privacy models obscure is the important ways in which Dalit theory and politics have conceptualized private/ public distinctions. For example, in The Cracked Mirror, Gopal Guru analyzes how Brahmanical rule frames the Dalit body as always already public in “grafting cultural symbols” and “rendering the bodies legible” through rituals of social humiliation. But these very forms of public legibility function as privatizing mechanisms of con*nement “that pushed the untouchable into shadow during daytime” and spatially con*ned them to villages.67 In reconsidering these bracketed public contexts that subtend the politics of touch, I turn to an analysis of student activism on university campuses around issues of caste, communalism, and class

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

31

that has been framed by the government as “seditious” and anti-Hindu. In triangulating the notion of privacy with queer politics (via the Siras case) and questions of caste and communalism (through the Vemula case and subsequent student uprisings), the chapter gestures beyond single-issue calls for judicial protection and instead theorizes the “seditiousness” at the heart of a queer politics of touch. More broadly, the chapter is invested in thinking across Dalit and queer theorizing in grappling with what Gopal Guru calls the “transgression of the private and public” that is accompanied by forms of “misrecognition, degradation, and humiliation.”68 Read in tandem with one another, chapters 2 and 3 examine how sexual politics is sutured to the promise of pink revolutions through economies of tourism and privacy rights. But as I have pointed out at the outset of this introduction, pink revolutions name those contradictory logics in which queer bodies, while being interpellated as productive to India’s global aspirations, are also simultaneously marked as foreign/Western others that are inimical to the national *ctions of the Hindu Right. If the previous two chapters thus index a queer will to life, in chapter 4 I examine the necropolitical logics through which “queer” inhabits the death-worlds of HIV/AIDS and delays patients’ life chances and access to medicine. In attending to the temporal logics of access in this chapter, the notion of “speed” is the central triangular conceit explored between globalization (multinational pharmaceutical companies), the Hindu Right (religious leaders who claim to “cure” HIV/AIDS through indigenous medicine), and those queer bodies whose access to health care is deferred through these knotted entanglements. If “revolution” functions as reform in actual material practice, I show how “speed” becomes the metonymic replacement for the laborious mechanisms of delay and protraction that subtend access to health care—what this chapter calls the “late effects” of sexual economies. While globalization’s fetishization of instantaneousness promises time-space compressions and speedy arrivals, this chapter considers the delays in access to generic HIV drugs caused by the legal case *led by the Swiss multinational company Novartis against the government of India. By challenging India’s patent laws, Novartis sought to prevent local drug manufacturers from producing generic versions of anti-cancer and HIV medications at lower costs. It is not without significance that one of the most visible protests against Novartis came from transgender women and hijras, populations that are more vulnerable to HIV exposure and are placed in greater proximity to death by patent

32

!"#$%&'(#)%"

monopolies on drugs. But even while global capital exacerbates their precarity, these bodies are simultaneously disavowed by the nation-state as “foreign”—as indexing and embodying the very global structures that impede their life chances. The second half of the chapter thus elaborates on this geometry of power in which queerness is rendered abject from different sides of the triangulated bind. If on one side of the triangle is the intellectual patent regime of Novartis, the other side is inhabited by the political economy of “alternative” health espoused by Hindu religious leaders, promising “cures” for HIV and homosexuality via indigenous medicines. While biomedicine is framed as the speedy magic bullet cure, “alternative” medicine advocates a more “natural” and wholesome recovery of health (and by implication, of national life). But even as it poses as the alternative to allopathy’s promise of quick*x recovery, like its triangular counterpart, indigenous medicine only further delays access to health care, heightening the risks experienced by already vulnerable populations. If speed, as illustrated in chapter 4, is one of the desirable hallmarks of pink revolutions, in the same ideological vicinity is the exultation of the mobile subject whose +exibility enables the easy mobility between different corners of the triangle. While speed allows for the compression of time, mobility enables the transgressing of space. In the *nal chapter I thus return to the central trilateral framing between sexual politics, globalization, and national identity to critically examine the veneration of the Indian diasporic subject whose mobility is idealized during revolutionary times. More speci*cally, I look at the critical role of the queer Indian diaspora within these triangulations. While the predominant scholarship in this area has framed the queer diaspora as resistant to the logics of restorative nationalism, I analyze narratives representing “passages away from India” that reinscribe familial genealogical scripts. Thus, rather than eschewing the normative locksteps of “family trees,” I examine how queer diasporas work in tandem with logics of mobility and +exible citizenship to construct generative and generational frameworks that are conducive to Hindu nationalism’s globalist scope and ambitions. Moving away from theorizations of queer diasporas as always anti-normative, I analyze how they actually facilitate the mobility of transnational capital through a buttressing of nationalist projects. I show how in certain instances the “global Indian family,” which has historically been constituted via the repudiation of queerness, can now function through its inclusion rather than exclusion. Queerness in these contexts operates as a multicultural alibi for

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

33

the diaspora’s proximity to hegemonic nationalisms. I thus argue for an understanding of Hindu nationalism that is not always already bound by rigidity and stasis, but rather as an adaptive and +exible phenomenon that is strategically capacious during revolutionary times. If this book begins with the economic revolution of 1991, it ends with a brief afterword on the revolutionary judgment of the Supreme Court on September 6, 2018, a partial strike-down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (the colonial-era law that criminalized “unnatural” sexual activity between consenting adults) which effectively “decriminalized” homosexuality in India. I illustrate how triangles assume literal forms in the textual representations that celebrated this moment— for example, in advertisements and political cartoons that depicted the Supreme Court as a prismatic triangle that refracts the rainbow colors of freedom. In many ways, this conclusion replicates the scope and form of the entire book by asking: what is the material afterlife of purported revolutions? For whom is justice still deferred at celebrated points of arrival? What frames are rendered invisible and unintelligible by the very achievement and intelligibility of pink revolutions? I begin and end by grappling with these questions. While the critiques of safety, privacy, speed, and mobility function throughout Pink Revolutions as anchors in each chapter to foreground the triangulations between queerness, Hindutva, and globalization, the separation of these conceptual cornerstones throughout the book’s organizational sequence admittedly belies their mutual dependence and entangled genealogies. The conceptual cornerstones enable the book to ful*ll the methodological goals of not only using “India” as an exemplar, but also of understanding how a theory of triangulation constitutes the epistemological anchor for new forms of conceptual engagement. Throughout these pages, “triangulation” serves to anchor other conceptual contributions: reformist revolution, critiques of analogous thinking, theories of late effects, the epistemology of touch, and critiques of generational thinking. The organizational conventions of discrete chapter divisions are thus somewhat limiting since the triangles highlighted throughout the book, while appearing congruent and self-contained, end up collapsing under the weight of critique, their discrete formations unraveling to reveal fractures and rei*cations that are incongruent and contradictory despite their logics of totality. Their triangular forms are thus not simply descriptive conceits, but actually function ideologically and performatively to hermetically seal them off from interrogation. The closed corners of triangles are efforts to ensure

34

!"#$%&'(#)%"

their coherent resolutions, naturalizing their forms as ahistorical and self-evident. The chapters that follow, even while replicating the triangles’ coherence to some extent through discrete segmented divisions, are ultimately attempts to make their geometric form more amorphous—to loosen the holds of their closed-off, quarantined shapes. If queerness, globalization, and Hindu nationalism exist in a triangular relation, their contours assume the appearance of seamless form and internal unity by papering over fragments, splinters, and internal differences. Framing chapters around the neoliberal cornerstones of a “new” and “shining” India reveals how these neoliberal principles labor to secure their triangulated form. Each chapter thus highlights the tenuous nature of a triangle’s apparent harmony, while simultaneously referencing and building upon the conceptual logic of other triangles in previous chapters. Take, for example, the concept of safety theorized in chapter 1 in the context of gay tourism’s investments in creating cordoned-off queer sanctuaries for Western tourists. The ideological mandates of safety are motivated by risk-averse protectionism for the global tourist in the interests of neoliberal modernity, but they also function as vehicles of privacy and literal mobility (through exclusive chauffeured guided tours, for example) that establish modes of spatial discreteness. These privatized sanctuaries can then be safely bracketed off from a supposedly threatening public sphere. The politics of public “safety” triangulates the mandates of neoliberal modernity and national identity in yet another sense, as I analyze in the same chapter, when New Delhi, the nation’s capital, gets globally framed as an unsafe city for women, in Western eyes. While the chapter focuses on the implications of these framings for LGBT tourism, such an invocation of public safety for women also serves as a useful illustration of the cross-referencing of concepts that I am attempting to highlight. For example, in her essay on the outsourced call centers in Mumbai that have become one of the hallmarks of neoliberal modernization, Aparna Parikh analyzes the state mandates for companies to provide nighttime transportation for women working at these call centers, in order to guarantee their safety from sexual harassment and violence. At the same time, Parikh usefully suggests that these forms of state-accommodated safety for women should not be read as feminist investments in facilitating women’s mobility (literal, in navigating public spaces, and also economic in the movement from private to public spheres). Instead, the regulations that guarantee women’s transportation and speedier access to work to and from the call centers are more

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

35

in keeping with the “demands of the private sector  .  .  . to facilitate the in+ux of global capital”—that is, to guarantee the +exibility and casualization of feminized labor in a post-liberalized economy.69 These facilitations of temporal ef*ciency and mobility—ostensibly for the sake of women’s safety, and in the service of economic privatization—are, according to Parikh, “constituted by a complex interweaving of safety, respectability and convenience, illustrating the contradictions imbued in the meaning of public safety for women who help render Mumbai’s modernization through their labor” (697). If monitored transportation ful*lls the ideological requirements of mobility, privatization, speed, and safety that are the hallmarks of global liberal aspirations in a neoliberal economy, in what sense can these “modern” aspirations and shifting gendered dynamics be reconciled with the ideological dictates of Hindu middle-class morality? How are economic requirements made to line up with these forms of “respectable femininity,” since women working at night contravene conventionally gendered logics of safety and morality? (698). Parikh suggests that “notions of respectability in the Indian context are synonymous with upper-caste, middle-class Hindu women, upon whom also falls the burden to perform their everyday lives in ways that signal respectability” (698). In a similar vein, while “privacy” represents the conceptual triangulation of chapter 3 in the context of the rights-based logics of Indian LGBT politics, by considering the intersections (or lack thereof) with caste politics, the chapter is equally invested in logics of caste mobility (or its absence). Caste, as D. Shyam Babu has pointed out, instantiates logics of *xity: it is “birth-based and primordial, immutable, and immobile.”70 While caste is *xed in its dependence on biological determinism, class, at least theoretically, maintains the illusion of mobility.71 In Mobile Subjects, Aren Aizura rightly suggests that mobility is not simply spatial but also ideological. He writes: “the markers of upward mobility are not limited to geographical relocation: upward mobility also involves assimilation and normalization through a range of disciplinary and biopolitical practices that encourage individuals to transform their inner and outer selves. Both forms of mobility are supposed to confer something important: identity, self-transformation, and reinvention.”72 By forging a conversation between the Siras and Vemula cases, I am thus implicitly asking how an entry into liberal discourses of privacy rights for sexual subjects (marking legal assimilation and normalization, to use Aizura’s terms) is accompanied by constraints on the mobility of Dalit students within increasingly privatized higher educational

36

!"#$%&'(#)%"

institutions. Mobility/privacy triangulate a tale of two suicides in the context of caste and sexual politics—but they also form the ideological basis for the Hindu Right to foreground its progressive credentials through globalized discourses of liberal legalism, while simultaneously constraining the mobility of certain populations whose refusal to remain “stuck” in time is faced with violent and deadly consequences. The conceptual interfacing between triangular conceits recurs yet again in chapter 4, in which “speed” assumes a centralized focus in the context of access to HIV medications; but the precarity of deferred access to drugs simultaneously produces states of vulnerability in which the HIV-positive body in need of health care gets managed and governed through mandates of safety and avoidance of risk (thus circling back to the conceptual premise of chapter 2). My point here is not so much to enumerate additional connections across conceptual triangular cornerstones—indeed, the possibilities for cross-referencing exceed the illustrations above—as much as it is to foreground how the logics of safety, privacy, speed, and mobility get ensnared within one another, disallowing any easy disconnection despite the dictates of chapter-organizing conventions throughout this book. Just as importantly, the conceptual amorphousness and +uidity between categories come to stand in for the elasticity and variegated character of Hindu nationalism, which, as the entire book will illustrate, is far from static or monolithic. In fact, in its ability to adjust and adapt to the neoliberal demands of an increasingly globalized economy, the interconnections between concepts pay attention to Hindutva’s supple bendability—its ability to forge new alliances between different corners of multiple triangles. Finally, to theorize pink revolutions through the deconstruction of triangles is to insist on explicitly suturing an analysis of transnational sexuality to the analytical frames of political economy beyond a globalization-as-backdrop perspective. In her analysis of “risky subjects” and their own triangulation with “insurance, sexuality, and capital,” Geeta Patel has suggested that “too often the literature on transnational sexualities portrays sexuality as being constituted outside capital, outside political economies, outside transnational or global *nance.”73 Instead, Patel insists, “sexuality and capital can be thoroughly integrated and implicated in the constitution of people and subjects.”74 Similarly, in her analysis of the place of Indian activist theater in the age of Hindu fundamentalism, Dia Da Costa offers yet another useful de*nition of political economy as a “palimpsest of interlinkages among structures of

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

37

production” with cultural and political practices, which reveal how “the optimism about seemingly sanitized aspirations and ‘clean’ projects of infrastructural and digital development, creative economy, and smart cities has the blood of class, religious, gender, and caste violence on their blueprints.”75 In both these accounts, there is a refusal to theorize political economy as something that gets abstracted from the intimate (sexuality) or from bodily matter (blood). The task at hand, then, is to adopt an understanding of political economy that can do analytical justice to the depths and scales of the triangulated entanglements between personhood, global capitalism, and the logics of Hindutva. The point is not simply the rather obvious insistence that sexuality is structured by economic realms. As Patel suggests, “it is not merely that capital +ows to elsewhere—from Amsterdam or Hong Kong to Calcutta—as standard accounts of neoliberalism would have it. Finance seems to overtake the elsewheres of oneself.”76 The “elsewheres of oneself” is a provocative phrase to understand how the depth and intimacy of the political and economic get enmeshed in the aspirational and quotidian logics of neoliberalism that simply present themselves as universal and ahistorical. Not surprisingly, Patel traces the intensi*cation of these connections to the early 1990s, a time period “that extends the reach of neoliberal *nancial regimes deep into notions of personhood, sexuality, and community formation.”77 I end this introduction, then, with my earlier invocation of the literal mobilization of the phrase “pink revolution” that indexes the sacrilegious blasphemy of cow slaughter—one of the “palimpsest of interlinkages” that triangulates the intimate and economic with religious, communal, and caste violence. Returning to the earlier meaning of “pink revolution” at this juncture reveals its intimate enmeshing with sexual politics. To put it differently, “pink revolutions” referencing cow slaughter, and “pink revolutions” indexing sexual politics do not simply share analogous logics. Rather than simple likeness, I want to account for a deep embeddedness that gets to how the economic and political triangulate the intimate “elsewheres” of the self.

In the Name of Love (Triangles) As pointed out at the outset, the anxiety around pink revolutions is a project of necrocapitalism; that is, its investments in the preservation of life are tethered to the violence of lynchings and murder. Rohit De

38

!"#$%&'(#)%"

suggests that the pink revolution illustrates how “the cow has emerged as an index for India’s changing political economy and regulatory politics over the last decade.”78 The ostensible paradox between necro- and biopolitical imperatives plays out in how laws prohibiting beef consumption and production have proliferated at the very moment that is marked by beef ’s consumption. Several critics have pointed to the deleterious impacts of the beef ban on India’s economy—from abandoned stray cattle destroying farmers’ crops, to its effects on dairy economies due to surplus unsold cattle causing radical hikes in the price of milk.79 But if the BJP’s electoral success is predicated on a narrative of accelerated modernity and development, these economic setbacks are mediated through what Charu Gupta has called “intimate politics”80— that is, the process through which economic adversity is not so much circumvented, but renegotiated and refracted through habitual practices that render it banal—for example, discourses of purity of food and eating; the maintenance of good hygiene and health; or the biopolitical management of desire. Following Patel, it is important to emphasize that these modes of intimacy do not exist outside global capital as much as they mystify its pernicious logics. The experience of economic precarity caused by the beef ban is thus not simply sidestepped; instead, it is justi*ed through an infusion into everyday practices and logics of intimacy and desire. For example, in her essay “Muslim Women and the Beef Ban in Mumbai,” Qudsiya Contractor highlights the economic impacts of the beef ban, particularly on the Qureshis, a lower-class religious Muslim community that has historically participated in the beef trade. Contractor highlights how the beef trade functioned as a safety net for a historically poor community, allowing them to defer payments on loans without accelerating interest rates so that much of the beef trade “was not always a business of risk and *nancial losses.”81 The beef ban, however, not only forced Qureshis into nontraditional and low-paying occupations, it also turned the very act of beef-trading into a “risky business owing to harassment by VHP and Bajrang Dal activists” (299). The pushing of the beef trade into a kind of risky business with potentially fatal consequences is of course motivated by communalist and religious logics, given the targeting of Muslim butchers and beef traders. But precisely because Qureshi beef-trading historically functioned adjacent to (if not entirely outside) conventional capitalist logics of pro*t and loss, this forceful entry into discourses of risk also foregrounds the beef ban’s necrocapitalist logics. Like the management of life that is implicated in

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

39

the production of death via lynching, the distrust of the pink revolution braids itself with economic imperatives that sustain its expansion. Making the beef trade risky, then, requires and justi*es the protection of the self from harmful futures in which apparently barbaric Muslim butchers threaten to besmirch the sanctity of national life. As Contractor points out, it is not surprising that “one of the most enduring images splashed across media coverage of the beef ban was that of a Muslim butcher wearing a skull cap, brandishing a blood-stained cleaver [and] cutting meat on a wooden log surrounded by raw meat hanging from every corner of his congested shop” (297). The production of the predatory risky subject functions in tandem with its corollary: the wounded or potentially martyred at-risk subject whose safety and futurity must be ensured through forms of economic and social personhood. Within neoliberal logics, risk thus functions through what Geeta Patel calls “insurance technologies [that] produce notions of family and community constituted as risk pools”; that is, groups with perceived commonalities “that have preconstituted their intimacies with each other” through shared economic and affective investments in managing risk and loss.82 One of these groups, according to Patel, is the right-wing Hindu organization Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), “which has produced its majority community as a minority one [that is] at risk of future extermination” (44). The VHP has thus “jumped on the insurance bandwagon after initially opposing the opening of the Indian insurance industry to foreign capital” (44). Since futurity is the reward for insured Hindutva personhood in this narrative of manufactured victimhood, the VHP’s proposal was to form a life insurance company “to ensure a future for Hindus, and future generations of Hindus” (44). In this framework, the beef ban triangulates communal violence and quotidian gastronomic practices with the political economy of beef—or more speci*cally, the ban justi*es “risk pooling” as an affective and economic insurance practice to preserve Hindu nationalist “safety” and futurity in twenty-*rst-century India, adapting to the “new” but also remaining resolutely familiar to the traditional perception of Hindu persecution by professed Muslim aggression. But what is the place of sexuality within these triangulations? To follow Patel’s insistence on the inseparability of sexuality from political economy, it might be useful to return to the image of the barbaric butcher, terrorizing cleaver in hand, surrounded by the menacing ubiquity of exposed pink +esh. To insure against the criminality of cow slaughter, this image serves as an ideological justi*cation for the beef

40

!"#$%&'(#)%"

ban; it is a threatening omen of a dystopic hypothetical Indian future in which the purity of Hindu identity is not simply sullied, but violently annihilated. If the political economy of the beef ban and the lynchings that accompany its enforcement project their own brutality on to the body of the violent beef-eating Muslim, the depravity of the illicit procurement and consumption of beef not surprisingly gets sutured to logics around sexual avarice and decadence that are displaced on to the Muslim other. As Charu Gupta points out, “the politics of food, nonvegetarianism, and particularly beef-eating  .  .  . were interconnected with the alleged lust of Muslims.”83 Pramod Muthalik, the leader of the Hindu right-wing group Sri Ram Sena (Army of the Lord Rama), famously popularized the term “love jihad” to describe the alleged deceptive act through which Muslim men target Hindu women—feigning love in order to supposedly coerce gullible women into converting to Islam. Like the knife-wielding butcher who reduces the sacred cow to inanimate +esh for the purpose of base possession, the love jihadist performs a kind of communalist cuckolding of the Hindu male. In this phantasmagoric construction that blurs the binaries between fantasy and anxiety, the Hindu male is framed as the victim of a dangerously excessive Muslim sexuality that is aberrant and queer, but he is also the warrior-like righteous defender of Hindu women’s honor and dignity. This schematic construction is yet another (love) triangle that marks pink revolutions. The love jihadist, however, does not simply satisfy his carnal lust and sexual licentiousness; the act of deception also has biopolitical dimensions. For example, the various campaigns against love jihad mounted by the Bajrang Dal—“Bahu Betiyo ki Izzat Bachao” (Save the Dignity of Daughters-in-Law and Daughters) and “Beti Bachao Andolan” (Campaign to Save Daughters)—reveal ideological investments in “protecting” Hindu women from imagined threats of Muslim avarice. But the putative investment in Hindu women’s safety is the narrative through which the campaigns against love jihad manage, as Charu Gupta writes, “the obsession with the numerical strength of Hindus” (306). Such a fetishization is not simply for the sake of an electoral-process numbers game that must secure the Hindu ruling party’s majority, but is also, according to Gupta, an investment in controlling Hindu women’s reproductive practices as a way of securing an Indian futurity that is resolutely Hindu in biopolitical character. Gupta writes: “ ‘Love jihad’ not only constructed a picture of a numerical Muslim increase, but also lamented and mourned the potential loss of child-bearing Hindu wombs due to conversions of Hindu women to

“,-). !. /%# #-0 1%$")"2 30 30$0 34)#)"2 5%$”

41

Islam, accompanied by the loss of greater control over women’s reproductive capacities, in order to enhance Hindu numbers” (306). The call for ghar vapasi (returning back home) by nationalist groups—which can be read as love jihad’s accompanying ideological endeavor—thus functioned as a reconversion process to restore the illusion of an atrophied nation to its essentially Hindu character. Both ghar vapasi and love jihad thus mobilized Hindu women’s child-bearing capacities to naturalize a Hindu restitution through the gendered and communalist logics of biological determinism. Returning home to the nation’s authentic origins contravened the deception of love jihad, and a Hindu renaissance was literally con*gured via logics of rebirth—that is, the Hindu woman’s womb was the “natural” starting point of an urgent renewal. The logics of love jihad dictated that Hindu reproductive futurity had to be defended and safeguarded at all costs against the excesses of the overindulgent sexuality of the Muslim man. His deceptive lust was likened to the insatiable consumption of beef in which the cow, like the Hindu woman, was reduced to an inanimate piece of +esh, animating both fear and aggression. As Charu Gupta points out, eating beef was seen as “responsible for dark thoughts in the human mind, which in turn led to increased violence, and anti-social activities, including interreligious and inter-caste marriages” (296). Even while resolutely and excessively heterosexual, the Muslim love jihadist could thus be read as a queer *gure, or “monstrous,” in Jasbir Puar’s terms, in its “ association with sexual and bodily perversity”—a monstrosity that is inimical to Hindu futurity.84 Contravening conventional understandings of queerness as non-heterosexual, Muslim sexuality, in contrast, is seen as unbridled heterosexual excess—a kind of libidinous immoderation that threatens to disrupt the “natural” arithmetics of the population census that are seemingly rendered precarious in light of love jihad’s threat to Hindu futurity. Finally, if pink revolutions triangulate queerness with Hindutva and globalization, it is not surprising that these constructions of rapacious Muslim sexuality also index the threatening logics of global in+uence. For example, Gupta suggests that the paranoia over love jihad was fueled by anxieties around “a global Islamist conspiracy and the presence of a foreign hand.”85 Love jihad, then, was ostensibly implemented through foreign funds in which the project of luring Hindu women was facilitated by designer clothes, cell phones, and foreign goods—all supposedly Western signi*ers that are alien to authentic Indian culture. These displacements on to the West are, of course, familiar to LGBT

42

!"#$%&'(#)%"

subjects who have historically been refused entry into the ideological *ctions of essential Indianness. For example, commenting on the representation of two Hindu women in a same-sex relationship in the *lm Fire, the Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray asked, “Is it fair to show such things which are not part of Indian culture?”86 It might seem imperative, then, to make claims on behalf of a modern sexual subject who has indigenous roots, to refuse displacements on to the West, to insist on being sutured more intimately to Indian culture. To do so, however, would require a careful distance from the unruly queerness of love jihad and the aberrant monstrosity of its threats to Hindutva logics. What if the path to a still-to-be articulated revolutionary politics refused the logics of ghar vapasi or returning home in any simple sense? What if the central projects of queer politics in India might *nd their most useful articulations in the challenge to Hindu nationalist futurity and its triangulations with globalism? The chapters that follow can be thought of as critical and initial experiments in loosening the triangulated knots and entanglements that subtend pink revolutions.

!"#$%&' (

“Revolutionary” Reforms, Reformist “Revolutions”

The changes that transformed India’s economy from the equity-driven logics of Nehruvian socialism and economic independence to the outward-looking and foreign investment-based economy of the 1990s free-market reforms have been well-detailed and documented.1 Described as a “second independence” that freed the nation from the authority of an overbearing state, the economic reforms included the reduction of tariff rates and customs duties, the removal of licenses on imported goods, the transformation of the telecommunications sector, and the dramatic rise of export industries.2 But rather than simply rehearse the various economic initiatives marking this paradigmatic moment, I want to mark this epistemic shift as yet another sense in which the invocation of “revolution” is mobilized within the triangulated logics of Pink Revolutions. The economic “revolution” of 1991 that opened India’s economy to foreign markets is not antithetical to the provincial localism that is offered today as an antidote to the beef exports that were denounced by Narendra Modi as a “pink revolution.” Even while both appear oppositional—in the former’s outward-looking globalism and the latter’s ostensible investment in localism—they ultimately work contiguously, if not quite seamlessly with one another. Thus, even while Modi warns against the damaging effects of pink revolutions, the calls for “make in India” or “India )rst” that inform beef bans ultimately work in tandem with what Meera Nanda terms “superpower Swadeshi.”3 While this chapter does not attempt a chronological genealogy between the economic “revolution” of 1991 and the Hindu nationalists’ exploitation of “pink revolutions” in the twenty-)rst century, it does set out to ideologically analyze that earlier historical moment. This chapter analyzes how the current rhetoric of “revolutions” functions and builds off 43

44

!"#$%&' (

of that prior moment to manage and reconcile the entanglements and slippery contradictions between sexual politics, globalization, and the state consolidation of the Hindu Right.

“Revolutionary” Precedents Before starting with the early 1990s, it is important to foreground some historical context, even while eschewing exhaustive sequentiality. While 1991 and after constitutes a primal scene for this book to theorize the triangulated logics of pink revolutions, an illustration of a “revolution” from several decades earlier foregrounds the manner in which the word’s meanings were already being skewed and slanted toward both neoliberal reform and communalist ideology. The aftermath of the Green Revolution, initiated in the 1960s as a way to industrialize and modernize India’s agricultural sector, constitutes a useful ideological terrain by which to analyze the later mobilizations of “revolution” in the context of neoliberal reform. The very phrase “Green Revolution,” as Francine R. Frankel suggests, “simpli)es a complex reality . . . [since] it carries the conviction that fundamental problems are being solved.”4 The “problems” in this context refer to the professed investment in ameliorating class hierarchies in rural India—“revolution” was thus a panacea that would ostensibly radicalize grain production by raising agricultural productivity through the use of high-yielding varieties of wheat.5 While the actual material consequences of the Green Revolution only exacerbated economic inequalities between farmers, its agrarian and ecological failures did not simply point to a gap between a theoretical notion of revolution and its practical realities—that is, what it purported to be and what it actually was. More crucially, it foregrounded how notions of “revolution,” from the very outset, were funneled into centralized top-down projects of reformist modernity that precluded the agency of farmers in rural India, thus binding revolution’s signi)ers to distinctly antirevolutionary signi)eds. Such rearticulations of revolution were marked by what Vandana Shiva analyzes as a “shift from local organization and internal inputs to centralized control and external imported inputs [that] restricted the nature of power between the farmers and the government and the state and the centre.”6 Shiva’s analysis does not stop short at foregrounding how “revolutionary” politics was diverted into forms of hierarchical and commercialized relations in the name of economic development—she also points to the

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

45

intimate connections between the Green Revolution and the emergence of communal con+ict in rural Punjab, which was structured in large part by the atomization of relations between farmers and the state and the latter’s demands for homogenization. According to Shiva, the claims of Sikh separatists for an autonomous state could be attributed to “the collapse of horizontally organized diverse communities into atomized individuals linked vertically to state power through electoral politics” (175). The structures of “revolution” thus combined the realms of the economic, political, and cultural. Shiva points out: “The ecological crisis of the Green Revolution is thus mirrored in a cultural crisis caused by an erosion of diversity and structures of local governance and the emergence of homogenization and centralized external control over the daily activities of agriculture food production” (175–76). “Revolution” in this context is not only crisis management, it is crisis measurement— that is, it involves not only the careful reassembling of the fallout from emergency-like conditions, but also uses the term “revolution” as a form of capital or currency in both the literal and ideological senses of the word. It would thus be insuf)cient to suggest that these modes of crises created by the Green Revolution were unintended effects (a point I return to later in this chapter in the context of “newer” revolutionary projects undertaken by the state). Instead, these modes of cultural crisis which precipitated the formation of ethnic claims then served as a pretext to justify the horrors of the pogroms and anti-Sikh riots in the 1980s in which thousands of Sikhs (framed by the state as “militants”) were killed in response to the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. In more abstract terms, the crisis of “revolution” warrants and validates the urgent necessity for action, which then justi)es acts of atrocity that come in its wake and normalizes these forms of barbarism simply as an inevitable and necessary state of affairs. Consequently, the term “crisis” muddies and confounds the very meanings of “revolution” so that instantiations of potentially revolutionary upheaval or moments of resistance to the Indian state are then framed as threatening and even seditious. For example, in more contemporary contexts, it is not surprising that youth protests in Kashmir or acts of stonepelting by civilians to protest the occupation of the contested territories by the Indian Army are framed as terrorist acts of militancy instead of revolutionary efforts in the service of azaadi (freedom) and autonomy. In the above history of “revolution”—one that is structured by the state’s efforts to liberalize India’s economy—the term sits in close proximity not just to economic reform, but also to formations of ethnic revivalism, as is

46

!"#$%&' (

the case of the Sikh separatism that emerged in rural Punjab and which functioned, in Shiva’s terms, to )ll “an ethical vacuum” produced by the Green Revolution (175).7 It is these modes of triangulation—between revolution, liberalization, and religious revivalism—that constitute the crux of this chapter in relation to the economic reforms of the 1990s. The )rst instantiations of “revolution” in this moment were introduced by the ruling Congress Party led by then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and his )nance minister (and subsequent prime minister) Manmohan Singh. While the Congress Party initiated the neoliberal transformations of the 1990s, these structural changes continued in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance governments (under Atal Bihari Vajpayee and currently under Modi) despite their putative emphasis on localism and the fetishization of the home-grown. Once again, my goal is not to exhaustively cover the speci)cities of how these economic reforms were mobilized in relation to shifts in political party or national leadership, that is, from the Congress Party that initiated the economic reforms to the NDA coalitions of the BJP that continued and bolstered these reforms, with a stronger emphasis on cultural nationalism as its convenient but nebulous alibi. Instead, I will set out to understand the ideological and rhetorical mobilization of the term “revolution” in nonrevolutionary discourses of neoliberal reform—in this instance, to describe the politics of the radical deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991.8 I thus want to revisit this moment when India joined the world economy in order to understand the triangulations that subtend pink revolutions analyzed throughout this book. In other words, what are the ways in which the “second independence” constituted a crucial political and economic backdrop for the emergence and visibility of LGBT politics? And how could the global free-market “revolutions” in the early 1990s exist in tandem with the consolidation of nativist logics which saw the BJP form a coalition government at the center of state power until 2004? While not causal in its relation (i.e., economic liberalization did not simply engender sexual politics or the rise of Hindu fundamentalism), the rhetorical framing of globalization as a “revolution” offers a historical and political context to make sense of these contradictions at the core of pink revolutions.

Revolution and the Language of Figuration Figurative language dominates much of the literature documenting the shifting economic landscape of the early 1990s. For example, in

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

47

Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound (the book’s very title, a play on Prometheus Unbound, conjures limitless and unshackled potential), almost every chapter offers new metaphors of arrival, becoming, and blossoming. India has )nally “begun to +ex its muscles” within a global information economy;9 India has always been an airplane, simply waiting to take off; and economic reform in the early 1990s is described as offering a glimpse of “paradise,” enabling India to eradicate poverty so that “the nation will turn increasingly middle-class” (4). In yet another chapter, this historical moment almost assumes a romantic nostalgia when Das refers to it as the “golden summer of 1991” (213). Similarly, in Daniel Lak’s Indian Express—the title once again invoking uncontainable speed and an irrepressible surge of movement—familiar references to “old” and “new” India are accompanied by shifts from sluggish dormancy to vigor and vitality.10 The year 1991 is described as India’s “wake-up call” juxtaposed against a prior moment in which the nation was unable “to wake up from decades of post-independence slumber” (5–7). This earlier inertia is supplanted by a new spirit of enterprise and initiative in which “the country is out of bed and on its way to the of)ce” (7). Prime Minister Narasimha Rao himself echoed this rhetoric when he referred to the new government attempting to “sweep the cobwebs of the past and usher in change.”11 In Arvind Panagariya’s India: The Emerging Giant, the titular reference to India as an emerging superpower that could even overtake China’s GDP is in keeping with these descriptions of radical metamorphosis in which speed, acceleration, and velocity become the dominant temporal metaphors that highlight narratives of growth through the escalation of the nation’s service exports, foreign investment, and telecommunication innovations.12 In the above accounts, )gurative language highlights a kind of linguistic relationality; that is, it attaches signi)ers of novelty, acceleration, and muscle in order to rhetorically bind India to an idea of “revolution” that is ultimately synonymous with economic reform. The designation of 1991 as a “revolution” is thus not just descriptive of extant reality; it is also partially performative—that is, it brings into being that which it names. The recourse to the language of )guration in the above accounts is not without signi)cance, given that it attempts to foreground India’s entry into a new kind of relationality—with the world market, with foreign trade and investment, and with transnational capital and labor. Since globalization itself has been conventionally formulated through rhetorics of relationality and narratives of hyperconnectivity (for

48

!"#$%&' (

example, as a phenomenon that ostensibly shrinks the world through its spatiotemporal compressions), the above language of )guration functions as a way of highlighting a temporal +exibility and spatial elasticity that are at the center of how “stories” about globalization get narrated.13 In other words, the reliance on )gurative language is not simply descriptive or a rhetorical +ourish—instead, it is central to the very narrative and political logics of globalization. In his essay on the triangulated relation between disaster, crisis, and revolution, Eric Cazdyn suggests that the notion of )nancial disaster or market precarity is inextricably interwoven within rhetorics of the relational. The logics of disaster are marked by the loosening of linkages—when things fall apart between signi)ers and signi)eds. He writes: “Disaster is that moment when the sustainable con)guration of relation fails, when the relation between one thing and another breaks down. In )nance [for a capitalist economy], disaster hits when goods cannot be related to markets, when idle capital and idle labor cannot be related, or when currency bubbles burst, replacing so much cold cash with so much hot air.”14 For Cazdyn, even while a notion of “crisis” exists in the rhetorical and ideological vicinity of “disaster,” the two are not completely synonymous, the latter being the more contingent category (649). Crisis, according to Cazdyn, is an obligatory function of the system rather than an unfortunate or unintended consequence. He writes: “Unlike a disaster, there is something necessary about crisis, something true to the larger systemic form. Crises occur when things go right, not when they go wrong . . . systems are structured so that crises will occur, strengthening and reproducing the systems themselves” (649). The centrality of crisis to the very sustenance of the system’s stability is illustrated by the fact that the “revolution” of 1991 took place largely due to the crisis of debt that constrained the Indian economy into a coerced relation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in the form of a bailout loan. Additionally, the radical dip in India’s foreign exchange reserves, a trade de)cit (itself caused by the state-encouraged consumption boom of the 1980s in which exports could not keep up with imports), and a global increase in the cost of oil, as well as the withdrawal of capital from national banks to foreign accounts by nonresident Indians, all served as the occasion for the state’s recourse to the IMF-World Bank loan. If “crisis” functions as a way to augment rather than derail the logics of neoliberalism, the terms of relationality between India and the IMF dictated the withdrawal of the government from public welfare

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

49

and the championing of market reforms as the palliative for the trade de)cit and the depletion of reserves. But as Meera Nanda points out, the weakening of import restrictions and enhanced foreign investment as preconditions for the loan cannot simply be framed “as some sort of neo-imperialist imposition on poor, hapless India.”15 The geometries of power in this context are too complex to be reduced to the dyad of power and resistance. Das’s India Unbound, for example, does not even frame the reliance on the IMF loan as an insidious kind of disaster capitalism; instead, he openly celebrates the fact that the usually “cautious Narasimha Rao realized that the crisis was an opportunity for making bigger changes.”16 Globalization, in other words, functioned as a kind of analgesic when the crisis of debt threatened to sever the possibility of relations between India and the IMF, especially for India’s middle class who were attempting to forge new kinds of linkages with foreign capital. If the constraints that subtended India’s dependence on the global cannot be framed simply as the bludgeoning force of external imposition, then equally the “crisis” was not, of course, simply fueled by local policy. It is not a coincidence that 1991 was the year that marked India’s neoliberal “revolution.” While the year is often framed as a paradigmatic epistemic moment, the economic reforms marking this period were themselves outcomes of broader shifts in IMF policy in the last decades of the twentieth century, when “crisis management” became synonymous with the demand that various developing nations across the globe undertake market liberalization. The IMF, suggests Eric Cazdyn, is “no longer as interested in managing the crisis of various economies but in remaking these economies in advance.”17 As a result, Cazdyn notes, the interests of global bankers and Wall Street get privileged over the economic stability of nations or a class of underpaid and exploited laborers. At this very moment when crisis becomes productive as constitutive of neoliberalism rather than its fault line, “revolution” as a category, according to Cazdyn, is “not only rendered unspeakable but more important . . . unthinkable” (649). The ubiquity of the terms “disaster” and “crisis,” along with their incorporation as props to the system, render revolution a category that “has been driven underground” (649). The events of 1991 both exemplify and complicate Cazdyn’s claims about the unimaginability of revolution. In the elaborate use of )gurative rhetoric to highlight 1991 as a revolutionary paradigm-shifting moment, the binaries between speech and silence collapse. It is precisely

50

!"#$%&' (

the incessant “speakability” of revolution—its elaborate proliferation through metaphors of growth and speed—that renders it unthinkable beyond its co-opted mobilization. This relentless repetition—rather than supposed repression—of the term “revolution” as a break from what Das calls “a rapacious and domineering state” fetishizes the year of 1991 as a kind of mythic horizon for the promise of a new India.18 Revolution is thus rendered unthinkable, even as the word’s continued utterance is continually exploited to connote economic reform. Take, for example, the following passage in which the con+ation of “revolution” with “reform” is made explicit by Das: “We could not escape the liberal revolution sweeping the world. The worldview of young Indians and the business class was the )rst to change after 1991. Slowly it infected the political class as well. This explains why every party that has come to power in the last decade—and every single major party did—followed a reform agenda” (312). In the above instance, reform is precisely what enables “revolution.” At other moments, Das paradoxically agonizes over the reduction of revolution to reform in another sense of the term—that is, the slow, incremental pace of change that constrains the speed of revolution. Continuing the language of )guration, Das mourns the fact that the momentum of the early 1990s in which India could have been a “tiger” was unfortunately squandered, and the country moved more laboriously at the pace of a lumbering elephant (222). Thus, beneath the bravado of India as the new tiger is the rueful recognition of history under the constraints of an overbearing state prior to 1991 that encumbers the proper mobilization of revolution. Once again, the language of )guration re+ects these burdens of history. If 1991 is the year that India emerged from its state of atrophy, its prior investment in an inwardlooking Nehruvian socialism is framed as an era that failed to inculcate “virtues of entrepreneurship and competition” (44).

The Rise of Hindu Fundamentalism (Hindutva) during “Revolutionary” Times The “revolutionary” character of globalization presented a complex predicament for the subsequent emergence of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), the Hindu nationalist party at the center of power through various coalitional governments, )rst under Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1998 and then under the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, in 2014. Given

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

51

the BJP’s emphasis on the local and home-grown, with its concomitant anxiety over Western in+uence and its wariness of “foreignness” as a cultural and economic threat, the embrace of liberalization as the future for Indian modernity became a point of ambivalence for Hindu nationalism when at the helm of state power. The embrace of global markets thus required ideological renegotiation and reconciliation with the investments in essential Indian (Hindu) identity. The paradox at the heart of the “pink revolution” that the introduction began with—that is, the apparent incoherence between the fetishization of cow protection even in the face of increased beef exports—can thus be traced back to this incongruity; that is, the need to reiterate a commitment to the realization of the “revolutionary” potential of a new and global India, with the simultaneous preservation and championing of the domestic and local that would appear inimical to such modernity projects. Before understanding how some of the ideological divergences between outward-looking economic policies and inward-directed religious and cultural nationalisms were negotiated by Hindu right-wing organizations, I want to offer a brief context on the rise of Hindutva during these “revolutionary” times and its eventual consolidation at the center of government. Several scholars and historians have contextualized some of the violent events that marked the visibility of Hindutva’s spectacular emergence from the early 1990s into the new millennium—the Ram Rath Yatra to foster a pan-Hindu national unity; the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992, followed by the communal riots led by the Shiv Sena in Mumbai; the killing of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat following the Godhra incident in 2002; and the protests by Shiv Sena activists following the release of the )lm Fire in 1998, which depicted two Hindu housewives in a lesbian relationship.19 I eschew chronology here not in order to participate in the amnesia around the mass violence of these earlier moments during ostensibly revolutionary times. Instead, by paying closer attention to structures rather than the spectacular nature of events, I am more invested in unpacking the logics that have normalized and bracketed the violence of Hindu fundamentalism that is now either forgotten or simply rendered banal. One of the central claims that underwrites this chapter is that Hindutva does not simply adapt to but in fact thrives during “revolutionary” times. The primary structural feature that facilitates this synchronicity between ethnic chauvinism and liberalized economic reform is the multiplicity of Hindutva’s genealogies, which enable a kind of elastic

52

!"#$%&' (

bendability over regional, geopolitical, and rural/urban divides. Thus, the terms “Hindutva,” “Hindu nationalism,” and “Hindu fundamentalism” are shorthands for phenomena that have multiple agendas and at times even disparate itineraries. Undoubtedly, at various historical moments, points of contestation have produced fractures and )ssures in the Hindu nationalists’ party allegiances and political ideologies. For example, during the 1998 election campaign, Hindutva hard-liners such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the VHP, which were pushing for the building of the Ram Temple on the site of the demolished Babri Masjid, contrasted and even con+icted with a more moderate approach adopted by the Vajpayee-led BJP party, which was attempting to secure a parliamentary majority through a less chauvinistically rabid image than the Ram Temple advocates. These splits in ideology have recurred at other moments too; for example, when the Maharashtra-based Shiv Sena’s nativist emphasis on local provincialism con+icted with the BJP’s greater willingness to court foreign markets. The ideological and tactical differences in Hindutva projects, however, are not simply between a state-centered party and its fringe coalitions. Even within these coalitions, there can be signi)cant divergences in tactics, for instance, in the intellectual and scholarly posturings of the RSS in contrast with the more militant and action-oriented practices of the VHP. Martha Nussbaum argues: “Although both organizations have an ideology of self-denial and asceticism, the RSS supports spiritual values of loyalty, diligence, and self-denial. Whereas the VHP often openly asserts the acceptability of violence as a strategy . . . the RSS tends to express opposition to violence, except in retaliation.”20 As I illustrate in different contexts throughout this book, even while it espouses an ideology that is essentialist, nativist, and dogmatic in scope, Hindu fundamentalism is dependent on plural and polyphonous traditions, in which this very pliability is harnessed in the service of parochial agendas. Thus, what has often been critiqued as its political double-speak or contradictory positions has in fact helped Hindutva to adapt to “revolutionary” times and assume “radical” possibilities by association. For example, one common critique of the ideologically incongruous character of Hindutva is the nonindigenous inspiration it draws from European nationalisms such as Nazi Germany. The argument then can often go something like this: “How can an ideology ostensibly steeped in indigenous tradition borrow inspiration from the very foreign values it appears to eschew?” Such a critique might super)cially expose a hermeneutics of paradox, but does little to understand

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

53

how this apparent illogicality is precisely what makes Hindutva such a powerful and malleable force. While pernicious in its effects, an analysis of Hindutva must account for its resourcefulness and supple nature as it absorbs and adapts across multiple locations and temporalities. Later on, in chapter 5 of this book, I focus on the transnational politics of diasporic mobility that informs Hindutva’s foreign but nationalist appeal. And yet, more local instantiations of Hindutva’s capacious reach are testaments to its +exibility at more granular levels. In “The Vernacularisation of Hindutva: The BJP and Shiv Sena in Rural Maharashtra,” Thomas Blom Hansen suggests that rather than the building of temples, the Shiv Sena’s emphasis on “Maratha valour” and “rustic virtues” lay at the core of its appeal.21 But this very rusticity, which was framed as the heart of “Indian values,” was also combined with an urban aspirational allure. Thus Hansen suggests: “The Shiv Sena’s brash, self-con)dent, ‘street smart’ style represented to many young men in villages and towns the essence of what Bombay’s tantalizing modernity was imagined to be.”22 The emergence of shakhas (branches) in villages to expand the rural base of Hindutva cadres thus became a form of parochial popularism that was mobilized to attend to vernacular speci)cities, but it also became a way to link these forms of particularism to different national and global scales of Hindutva. As a further testament to Hindutva’s adaptation to regional speci)city, in various moments its strategies and agendas have consciously sidestepped their conventional investments and methods in order to appeal to distinctive identi)cations and local particularities. As Tripathi et al. analyze in their essay on the 2016 assembly elections in Assam, the BJP consciously avoided traditional Hindu references to Ram, Ayodhya, and even cow protectionism, and instead focused on local welfare services and adopted Northeastern symbols in its campaigns associated with the Kamakhya and Sankardev-Sattra traditions.23 In this manner, the BJP could boast of secular credentials while simultaneously furthering nationalist agendas.

Gender and the Queerphobic Politics of Hindutva Rather than simple hawkish militancy, Hindu fundamentalism thus functions through a more insidious logic of +exibility that enables the transformation of nationalism into a legitimized electoral party at the helm of state power. It becomes imperative, then, to pay closer attention

54

!"#$%&' (

to how this +exible politics navigates the tensions and contradictions between economic liberalization invested in globalism on the one hand, and nativist nationalist politics on the other. To illustrate this navigation, I begin with a seemingly innocuous moment on July 3, 2014, that brought together the personi)cation of the purportedly divergent ideologies of globalization and Hindu nationalism—the meeting of Facebook’s chief operating of)cer, Sheryl Sandberg, and the newly elected prime minster, Narendra Modi, to discuss the place of social networking as a mechanism to mediate between the Indian government and its people.24 Sandberg’s visit to India marked the culmination of India’s communications and technology revolution—its number of social media users were projected to cross 100 million at the time of her visit. The meeting of Sandberg and Modi marked a reciprocal arrangement—the recognition of India as a lucrative market for the global expansion of Facebook for Sandberg, on the one hand; and the opportunity for the world’s largest democracy to mobilize technological revolutions to link Modi and his constituents, on the other. The logics of hyperconnectivity mediated both instances in this mutually bene)cial exchange. In an interview with NDTV, Sandberg suggested that while the numbers of Facebook users in India had grown exponentially, there still existed a large market waiting to be tapped: “It’s an endless opportunity to grow with very active Facebook users.”25 Similarly, referencing his meeting with Sandberg and the content of their discussions, Modi pointed to Facebook as a tool of democracy that facilitated direct mediation: “Being an avid user of social media myself, I talked about ways through which a platform such as Facebook can be used for governance and better interaction between the people and governments.”26 Facebook as a metonymic substitute for the logics of Indian democracy assumed speci)cally gendered dimensions in this meeting between Sandberg and Modi, not just due to the Facebook COO’s advocacy of lean-in feminism, but also on account of her explicit foregrounding of Modi’s prioritization of education for girls and women. In an op-ed in Business Today entitled “Here’s Looking at You, India: Why Sheryl Sandberg Continues Her Love Affair in India,” Sunny Sen writes in glowing terms about Sandberg’s ability to address and intimately connect with her all-female audience in New Delhi through simple gestures such as a “little shake of the head” or the “squeezing [of] her shoulder blades.”27 At the same event, Sandberg revealed the moment that captured her most memorable impression of Modi—his posting on Facebook of the moment he sought blessings from his mother on winning the 2014 election.

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

55

This relatively benign moment does not simply foreground the triangulations between a “new” India with globalization and the logics of Hindutva, but also illustrates how modes of neoliberal governmentality function in conjunction with rather than in opposition to a Hindu nation. In the association of Modi with direct democracy, women’s education, and the touching gesture of blessings from his mother, Hindutva’s participation in communalist authoritarianism and its complicity in mob violence of the past decades disappear. The Sandberg-Modi partnership is emblematic of how (post)feminist projects are co-opted and mobilized to secure nationalist agendas. As Ratna Kapur suggests, the Hindu Right “takes up issues that have long been part of the feminist agenda, and recasts them in ways that do not challenge prevailing sexual and cultural norms, or women’s traditional roles.”28 Thus, the Hindu Right can commit terrorist acts of rape and murder against Muslim women, but simultaneously be vocal in championing women’s causes and even, as Kapur points out, be active “in condemning rape, domestic violence, dowry, and sexual harassment.”29 As pointed out earlier, rather than framing this adaptability simply as hypocrisy or through a lens of contradiction, it is essential to read these forms of apparent duplicity as part of Hindutva’s multifacetedness—its fractures work to its bene)t rather than its detriment. Given the pseudo-feminist veneer through which Modi’s encounter with Sandberg is framed, it is worth foregrounding the speci)cally gendered logics that not only informed mob violence and riots, but the very project of Hindutva itself. In Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism and Nationalism in India, Sikata Banerjee documents how Hindu nationalist organizations such as the RSS created shakhas—spaces for the daily gathering of young men to participate in a “uni)ed, disciplined [Hindu] brotherhood.”30 According to Banerjee, the shakhas became sites of ideological training in which the virtues of Hinduism were inextricably linked with the performance of hegemonic masculinity in which “ ‘being a man’ was integral for national glory” (78). Hence, the shakhas became centers for martial arts training, discipline, and patriotic inculcation, and the teaching of ancient Hindu scriptures. Through an analysis of RSS founder M. S. Golwalkar’s writings, Banerjee points to the glori)cation of the Indian soldier—the jawan—who was the embodiment of muscular masculinity and powerful enough to combat foreign aggression (usually framed in terms of Islamic aggression). In this scheme, the decades of colonization were the consequence of a forced emasculation—what Banerjee describes as “the effeminate nature bred

56

!"#$%&' (

in them because of centuries of aggressive attacks” (81). But in a postcolonial context, it is the masculinity and virility of the Indian Hindu which can reverse the earlier unequal power geometry of colonial structures. Golwalkar thus constructs a monolithic “West” that comes to stand in for effete femininity by framing the United States as “moving fast on the road to self-destruction” on account of its inferior masculinity, in contrast with the heroism of the jawan (80). The feminization of the United States in Golwalkar’s writing is explicitly noted through a conversation with an American journalist whose clothes Golwalkar describes as “loose” and “fashionable”—signi)ers that, according to him, “betray the effeminate nature of the average American today” (81). For Banerjee, Golwalkar’s derision of effeminacy and the “male focus on fashion” reveals a contempt for atrophied physicality in which the masculinity of the jawan supersedes that of his global counterpart. She thus reads the RSS leader’s contempt for effeminate clothing as re+ecting his belief in the deterioration of “American martial prowess and hence its military supremacy” (81). But in addition to Golwalkar’s misogynistic investment in hegemonic masculinity and his disdain for any associations with femininity, Banerjee ignores the equally obvious and barely veiled homophobia that is germane to Golwalkar’s disgust at the male journalist’s “fashionable” and “feminine” clothing. In her essay “When the (Hindu) Nation Exiles Its Queers,” Paola Bacchetta contends that “queerphobia is one of the pillars of Hindu nationalism,” in which “queer gender and sexuality are constructed as already outside the Hindu nation” and must be “immediately exiled” (150).31 Bacchetta also returns to Golwalkar’s writings in the same book in which, once again, the latter )xates on clothing as a signi)er of feminine arti)ce in a section entitled “How ‘Woman’ Became a Soldier.” In Golwalkar’s anecdote, he warns that “sometimes people have no idea as to what a decisive in+uence the garment would have on the mind”—referring to an incident in which an English soldier after World War I dressed up in drag to avoid military service (150). When forcibly returned to his platoon with the assumption of his “proper” army attire, the soldier reveals a new patriotic resolve to serve his country, jettisoning his earlier act of feminine deception. According to Bacchetta, the anecdote reveals the logics of “processual transformation” that subtend Hindutva ideology, in which there is a “linear progression [from] soldier to husband, to a man in feminine drag, and back to soldierhood again thanks to proper dress” (162). For Bacchetta, this rejection of femininity parallels the Hindu notion of “peeling away maya for self-realization,” which is achieved in

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

57

this instance through the disavowal of queerness (162). The aversion to femininity in men and the valorization of masculine virility are thus expressed in a variety of different contexts, most evidently, for example, after the nuclear tests in Pokhran conducted by the BJP government in 1998. Following the detonation of multiple nuclear bombs by the Indian Army, the Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray proudly commended the performative display of military strength through queer disavowal in declaring: “With these explosions we have shown the world that we are not eunuchs” (162). The queerphobia of Hindutva that is marked by displays of hegemonic masculinity between men is not, however, restricted to an aversion to effeminacy in men. Instead, as displayed in the responses to the )lm Fire (1998), Hindutva logics have also framed lesbianism as “alien” to Hindu (con+ated with Indian) culture. The idea that Fire was “a direct attack on what Hindu culture stands for” was compounded by the director Deepa Mehta’s diasporic subject position as a CanadianIndian. As Gayatri Gopinath has examined in her analysis of the local and transnational responses to the )lm, Mehta’s Canadianness became the convenient frame through which lesbian representation could be framed as “foreign,” “western,” and “inauthentic” to Indian culture.32 Signi)cantly, in his response to the )lm, Bal Thackeray focused in particular on the Hinduism of the lesbian protagonists, questioning why the “stigma” of unnatural sex between them was not mapped on to Muslim women: “Why is it that lesbianism is shown in a Hindu family? Why are the names of the heroines Radha and Sita and not Shabana and Saira?”33 According to Gopinath, Thackeray’s question points to the cultural anxieties aroused among the Hindu Right by the “threat” that queer desire poses to the parochial logics of Hindutva.

Revolutionary Reconciliations If an analysis is to focus on the structural and not just on the spectacular, David Ludden suggests an attention to “everyday environs that imbue Hindutva with diffuse meaning substance . . . where Hindutva takes root, prospers, withers, dies, lives in surrogates, or never arrives.”34 These mutations and recon)gurations in Hindutva’s manifestations are particularly important for understanding how it might simultaneously assume the form of queerphobic threat as illustrated above, but also modify over time to appear progressive, democratic,

58

!"#$%&' (

and even “feminist” in scope. If in the above examples, queer desire is threatening to projects of Hindu nationalism, in this section, I offer an ideological context to understand more contemporary illustrations of the overlaps between sexual and national politics. While I am not suggesting a neat paradigm shift between the queerphobia surrounding the Fire incident and more uneasy contemporary reconciliations, I am interested in the economic and political logics that render Hindutva benign, which in turn allows for unexpected alliances between LGBT visibility and a historically queerphobic and antifeminist state. It is within the unpredictable logics of these collaborations that pink revolutions “take root” and “prosper,” engendering the triangulations of seemingly disparate ideological forces. If the liberalization of India’s economy discussed in the )rst section of this chapter constitutes the political economy of pink revolutions, in what ways are these revolutionary logics reconciled with the emergence of Hindutva? Or to put it in terms of the above illustrations, how did a nativist project enmeshed in parochial localism and the “pillar” of queerphobia come to eventually seamlessly blend with the courting of foreign markets embodied in Modi’s meeting with Sandberg in the name of global modernity and democracy? In his analysis of the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, Achin Vanaik historicizes the emergence of what he calls “the new Modi Regime” as a consequence of (rather than a contradiction of) the investment in neoliberalism.35 According to Vanaik, the post-1980s witnessed the rise of “national-populist bourgeois parties with both left and right factions” which eventually gave way to “free market fundamentalism” and “neoliberal globalization” (347). Vanaik writes: Neoliberal globalization does not diminish the importance of states, but actually requires states to play the crucial role of stabilizers and legitimizers of its expansion. There is thus a dialectic between the international and the national. Growing trans-nationalization of market relations can happily go handin-hand with the assertion of nationally particularist right-wing politics and ideologies. This is where the Indian speci)city of Hindutva comes in, and has disproportionately in+uenced the dominant form of Indian nationalism. (348)

While we see the most obvious culmination of these dialectical formations in the “Modi regime,” they are of course not completely “new,”

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

59

as Vanaik himself theorizes. For example, an important way in which the state functioned as a “stabilizer” and “legitimizer” of neoliberalism was via the rede)ning of swadeshi through what William Mazzarella calls the “rhetorical contortions” of the Hindu Right.36 Literally meaning “of one’s own nation,” the notion of swadeshi as self-rule had been an important anticolonial tactic used by Gandhi in the 1920s to champion domestically produced goods as part of a political boycott against colonial subjugation. But in the hands of the BJP, the mobilization of swadeshi became a way to negotiate the ostensible contradictions between market globalization (with its demands for neoliberal governance) and an insistence on Indian sovereignty (de)ned in nativist and essentialist terms).37 But in many respects, the language of shifting trajectories—from investments in the local to a championing of the foreign—elides the ideological machinations at play that are implicated in more reconciliatory logics operating in tandem with one another. Rather than a framework of supersession in which nativism is supplanted by globalization, the BJP’s success was predicated on and marketed through the language of commensurability—what Shampa Biswas calls the desire “to be modern, but in the ‘Indian’ way.”38 This ability to resolve apparent contradictions allowed the courting of foreign investment even while extolling the demands of swadeshi and warning against the perils of globalization. Take, for example, the BJP leader L. K. Advani’s antiliberalization polemic directed at the Congress in the early 1990s in which the ruling party’s embrace of foreign markets was symptomatic of “dif)dence and helplessness.” On another occasion, Advani bemoaned the “price we have to pay for globalization” and the surrendering of “security interests to attract foreign investments” in response to global demands for nuclear nonproliferation: “Is our sense of self-esteem so low that even a hint of American displeasure can prompt us to go crawling for forgiveness?”39 But even in this form of economic insularism and pseudo anti-imperialist posturing, Advani recognizes the impossibility of a pure sovereignty. While the Hindu Right’s rhetoric of cultural and national exceptionalism touts the need to preserve “authenticity” or the distinctiveness of an “Indian soul,” these logics of provincialism also mandated the creation of material conditions that could foster the liberalization of local and global markets. Thus, at another moment, Advani insisted that “if the world has something to offer us, we too have a great deal to offer to the world” (130). This form of local-global quid pro quo, even while defensive in its insistence on the contributions of Indian exceptionalism, still

60

!"#$%&' (

recognizes the transactional and transnational encounter that a new India is implicated with. Almost a decade later in a speech addressed to the Federation of the Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Advani offers what he calls “a creatively re-interpreted Swadeshi” that articulates a middle ground between “free-for-all capitalism or freedom-killing communism.”40 Advani’s speech does indeed differ from his earlier explicitly anti-globalization assertions by recognizing, and even valuing, the mutual interdependence of nation-states—“the world has become smaller” (much like Sandberg’s recognition of digital hyperconnectivity). Thus, while he acknowledges that India can no longer be “antithetical to cooperation with the international community,” he also reminds his audience that “its cornerstone is national pride and the belief that the India of our dreams has to be built only by our own genius, with our own efforts, and principally with our own natural and capital resources.”41 If the more tempered rhetoric around market liberalization is not merely a paradigm shift from swadeshi to globalization, neither can it simply be explained through political double-speak that panders to the ideological needs of different classes. Thus even though, as Biswas points out, the BJP foregrounds its emphasis on cultural nationalism to workers and party members while remaining more subdued in its appeals to an Indian middle class invested in economic upward mobility, these seemingly fractured trajectories are settled by the rede)ning of swadeshi in which, as Advani puts it, “Indian problems” are resolved through “Indian solutions.”42 Advani’s rede)nition of swadeshi as a kind of new middle ground between localism and globalism works to paper over any glaring discrepancies between commitments to nationalist provincialism and their betrayal by the courting of foreign markets and investments. Throughout his speech, there is a recurring invocation of binaries in order to highlight how their differences are dissolved through the creative potential of contemporary swadeshi. This reinterpreted and liberalization-compatible version of self-rule accounts for both rural and urban India, rejects con+icts between the public and private sectors, and enhances cooperation between national and international communities. As the former )nance minister Yashwant Sinha commented, this newly imagined swadeshi was “pro-Indian without being anti-foreign.”43 In reality, this middle ground between the local and global that modern swadeshi appears to endorse allows for market deregulation and foreign investment while simultaneously enabling the BJP and its

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

61

grassroots af)liates to rally against foreign products, “western” cultural “impositions” like Valentine’s Day, and NGOs with global funding that are “detrimental” to national interests. Aijaz Ahmad describes these mediating practices of the Hindu Right as “symbolic unities” that are indicative of material fractures within the free market itself, which serves to unify “the nation as a single system of exchange and circulation while also fragmenting it into in)nitely competing individuals, )rms, communities, and regions.”44 In other words, the reconciliations of swadeshi are not simply symbolic smokescreens for a seamless and paradox-free market system. Thus, Ahmad suggests, “the market both unites and fragments the nation in a single motion.”45 The double movement of the market that Ahmad references is re+ected in the “middle ground” rhetoric of the new swadeshi. While its purpose is to foreground indigenous credentials in the shifting landscape of dwindling cultural and economic territoriality, the very idea of “a third way” that reconciles global market reform with nationalist logic is far from unique to the Indian distinctiveness that the new swadeshi purports to lay claims to. If the early 1990s in India set the stage for coalitions between ideologies of self-reliant localism and internationalization, the intermediary logics of neoliberalism seeking a different kind of “third way” emerged in the West around the same time in the aftermath of the Reagan-Thatcher era. Through its preoccupation with smaller government, the shrinking of welfare programs, and free market initiatives, neoliberalism couched wealth expansion imperatives in “democratic” logics that masked resource accumulation and its uneven distribution. Lisa Duggan de)nes neoliberalism’s “third way” logics as a way “to combine pro-market, pro-business, ‘free trade’ national and global policies with shrunken remnants of the social democratic and social justice programs of Western welfare states.”46 Duggan further suggests that the shrinking government called for by neoliberal centrism “appealed to ‘civil society’ (or ‘the voluntary sector’) and ‘the family’ to take up significant roles in the provision of safety nets.”47 Thus, the very claims of the new swadeshi’s revolutionary particularity—that is, as a phenomenon distinct from the rest of the globe and germane only to India’s unique ability to offer the moderation of a “third way”—were in fact implicated in the global economic and cultural circuits that it professed independence from. Even though this dependence is rhetorically foreclosed, in practice it is managed and produced in accordance with the “revolutionary” mandates of the new modernity. To suggest, as proponents of the Hindu Right have tried to

62

!"#$%&' (

do, that the new swadeshi is unique to the capacious quality of Indianness ignores how its apparent absorptive ability is shaped by shifts in the global economy. While the new swadeshi is not as autonomous or exclusive to logics of localism as it is made out to seem, embracing “third way” centrism allows the Hindu Right to co-opt the historical and rhetorical power of swadeshi. In this newly mobilized version, a notion of “self-rule” that is far removed from the radicalism of its original context functions through neoliberal rather than anticolonial logics of self-suf)ciency. It is important in this context, however, to more carefully articulate the speci)c performative iterations of neoliberalism, since it does not axiomatically connote the withdrawal of a state governance that is simply replaced by a laissez-faire politics of privatization. Thus, even while neoliberal initiatives enhanced the operations of the free market such as the dismantling of domestic licensing and the removal of trade practice restrictions, the government still played a central role in forging public-private initiatives, as witnessed most prominently in the education sector in which, as Shampa Biswas suggests, “privatization does not mean an end to saffronization”—in fact, it has become the occasion for a radical overhaul of the curriculum informed by the rewriting of history that is justi)ed under the aegis of “local” (Hindu) knowledge systems.48 Thus, Biswas suggests that such understandings of neoliberalism, while encouraging the state to allow the +ourishing of the private sector, simultaneously advocated for the centrality of “the state to use public resources to actively promote a renaissance of Hinduism.”49 Ultimately, the reframing of swadeshi is not merely an opportune adaptation to the demands of neoliberalism; it also serves as an ideal ideological arena, buttressing the Hindu Right’s credentials in ushering India into the twenty-)rst century, while still retaining the quintessential “core” of “Indianness,” always de)ned in essentialist terms. Thus, William Mazzarella suggests that it is crucial to understand globalization as a process involved in “heightening rather than effacing the importance of locality and local identity.”50 One way in which the new swadeshi grapples with the abrading of national sovereignty is through the logics of nativist antecedence—the idea that indigeneity in the form of Sanskritic traditions or Ayurvedic principles anticipates and is even constitutive of any modern idea or institution that is erroneously attributed to the West. Thus, everything from quantum physics to mathematical formulas and encryption technology for wireless communication )nds some philosophical basis in the ancient wisdom of the Vedas and the Hindu heritage.

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

63

Globalization in this context does not directly engender nativism, but it does lubricate its myopic formations, highlighting those moments of asymmetry in which globalization’s supposed transnational “+ows” and temporal +exibilities meet their limits. In this instance, globalization does not produce its purported elastic transgressions; instead it performs a freezing of space and time—a forced push into the fossilization of identity. Such dialectical formations, marked by an ampli)cation of the local amidst an embrace of the global, have crucial ripple effects into arenas of sexual politics. Sexual politics during these “revolutionary” times does not simply exceed political economy, but is shaped by and sutured to current neoliberal logics in complicated and contradictory ways. For example, it is not surprising that the heterosexual family unit serves as a bulwark against globalization’s “unbundling” of territoriality, and operates as a compensatory technique to preserve the perceived loss of national sovereignty.51 Thus, for example, S. Gurumurthy, the co-convener of the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (an RSS af)liate grappling with the economic issues facing the nation), suggests that the “lowest socio-economic unit of society in the swadeshi view is not the individual but the family . . . The unbridled and unbalanced individualism of the West is destructive of community living.”52 Similarly, a BJP memorandum sent to the Rashtrapati Bhawan (Presidential House) expressed concern about the con+ation of modernization with westernization, and warned against the “damage which GATT and Globalization would in+ict on our cultural and civilizational institutions including family and community living which is practically non-existent in the West.”53 The intensi)cation of the state’s role—in contradiction to conventional understandings of neoliberalism—thus makes the nation the site of “community living” and “family values,” propped up against a nebulous construction of “the West” referenced in the memorandum as “the baneful invasion of the Indian mind.”54 But as illustrated above, in material practice, this supposed antagonism toward “the West” ultimately proves to be chimerical. Instead, the anxieties around the in+uence of the global are manifested more immediately on the local level, where gender and sexual dissidents become the scapegoated substitutes for the reassertion of what is considered authentically Indian. In this metonymic schema, queer bodies function as the nation-state’s constitutive outside. Even as they must be foreclosed and rendered abject as foreign threats to the Indian family, they are productive, since it is through their very negation that more useful alliances with the

64

!"#$%&' (

West can be maintained and negotiated. The preservation of localism through essentialist (and heteronormative) logics sets the stage for a more palatable and selective conciliation with “Western” values. Consequently, this ideological safeguarding facilitates the branding of localism and indigeneity so that they can )nd a global audience—not just through the predictable global consumption of yoga and Bollywood, but also increasingly through health and lifestyle products ranging from Ayurveda and holistic medicine to spice blends and organic anti-wrinkle creams. The putative concern about foreign “invasion” is alleviated in this context since it is seen as an engagement with the West, but on terms that adhere to the logics of essential “Indianness.”

“Revolutionary” Returns Given the resurrection of the family as the site of normative citizenship and the repudiation of queerness as the mark of imported contagion, it is predictable that an af)rmative queer politics invested in challenging the foreignness of queer is articulated through the truth effects of historical Indian tradition. Such returns to tradition promise the coevalness of sexual dissidence with indigenous histories and local formations. It is not a historical coincidence that in the decades following the economic “revolution,” several texts exploring India’s queer literary and historical traditions have responded to the supposed incommensurability of national and sexual identities through a return to precolonial literature, ancient indigenous scriptures, and Indian religious texts in order to document the material proof of same-sex desire as not just compatible with, but central to indigenous traditions. For example, Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai’s paradigmatic text Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000) set the stage for a mobilization of the past to counter the lacunas of the present. The abundance of archival historical detail is evidenced, for example, in Urdu traditions such as the ghazal, or the nineteenth-century rekhti poetic form, in which male authors adopted feminine literary personas and idioms. The project thus challenges disavowals of queer both during the pre-independence context of nationalist reform and in the post-liberalization milieu of Hindutva dogma, in which sexuality must be harnessed in the service of normative citizenship. These recuperative historiographies, while strategically useful in rejecting a queer-eradicating impulse from national traditions, work

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

65

through what Anjali Arondekar has called “the presumption that if a body is found then a subject can be recovered.”55 The problem with restorative models, however, is not simply the historiographic limits of presentism or anachronism in which the past is mobilized to legitimize a present, or the present is retroactively inserted into the past. Ultimately, these reclamation projects can end up replicating the structural investments in nativism that they set out to critique. For example, in the context of the women’s movement, Flavia Agnes has pointed to the ways in which accusations of feminism as a “Western” import often led to an overcompensation on the part of some activists to establish the movement’s authentically indigenous bona )des. She writes: “in order to establish the ‘Indianness’ of the movement it relied on Hindu iconography and Sanskrit idioms denoting woman power, thus inadvertently strengthening the communal ideology that Indian, Hindu, and Sanskrit are synonymous.”56 Similarly, the mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik’s Shikandhi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You (2014) seeks to uncover an essentially Indian understanding of queerness to illustrate that it “isn’t only modern, Western or sexual.”57 With the titular reference to subjugated knowledge, Pattanaik’s text articulates its investment in the repressive hypothesis—that is, the silencing of an Indian ars erotica that warrants a reverse discourse of discovery and exposure. But in salvaging a queerness which is always already assumed as suppressed, the project also implicitly articulates its investment in the recuperation of Hindu mythology. Pattanaik writes: “A common reading of Hindu mythology in Western academia tends to be literal and so locates patriarchy in Satya yuga when structure is respected, and queerness in Kali yuga, when structure collapses. This would lead to the conclusion that Hindu mythology endorses Brahminical hegemony.”58 Within Pattanaik’s schema, the presence of queerness can function to exonerate Hindu mythology from its complicity with casteism by highlighting its more plural and progressive genealogies. The investment in queer restoration thus ends up producing its own constitutive abjections. In the sections above, I have illustrated the political economies subtending the seemingly paradoxical emergence of localization in the context of globalization that produced the “revolutions” of the early 1990s and after. While appearing antithetical, the “clashes” between cultural-economic liberalization and political-religious nationalism ultimately function through more chiasmic logics, even while their interdependence is a perpetual work in progress requiring the continued labor of ideological negotiation. These reconciliations, however, are

66

!"#$%&' (

never seamless or complete, and they shape the fractured productions of queerness, simultaneously requiring its foreclosure and production in accordance with the ideological requirements of the nation-state. The chapters that follow in this book index these contradictions within the realm of queer politics against the backdrop of the “revolutions” I have detailed above. Each chapter is an attempt to understand the logics of sexual economies that mark pink revolutions in all senses of the term—that is, the different economic, cultural, and political triangulations of queerness that are fractured within dialectical formations of globalization and Hindu nationalism. In historicizing pink revolutions through the primal scene of 1991 and its aftermath, it should be noted that the chapters that follow— all of which can be considered case studies in the triangulated logics subtending sexual economies—do not offer a chronological narrative from the 1990s until “today.” Nor do they promise exhaustive coverage of the contemporary LGBT movement’s history in India, as if its nuanced speci)cities and contradictions could be captured in singular form. Thus, my arguments about the triangulated contradictions that characterize national sexual economies do not make claims toward a narrative entirety or the political sum on queer politics in India. Consequently, what is periodized as “contemporary” is itself contingent and dependent on scales of temporality that are not simply neutral or unchanging static categories. Even as I put pen to paper (so to speak), political developments, judicial decisions, and new cultural productions in India are shifting the national and geopolitical terrain of LGBT rights. Perhaps there is something apposite about this obsolete metaphor to describe the relationship between political formations and epistemological categories in which the former are always threatening to exceed or supersede the latter. Rather than making a case for the unchanging durability of epistemology, I want to embrace the impossibility of the critical terrain to always “keep up.” Such an “inability” to always stretch across space and time is not axiomatically a critical gap: instead, it can be a useful way to challenge the totalizing narratives of what Arondekar and Patel call “ethnographic salaciousness” that work to buttress the logics of essentialized difference.59 The refusal to claim a de)nite account of what “contemporary LGBT politics in India” entails or comprehensively covers allows for a valuable capaciousness to theorize across and through the divergent terrain of India’s sexual economies—a methodological axiom that is often taken for granted in queer theorizations in Euro-American contexts.

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

67

Pink Revolutions aims to capture at least partial glimpses of the epistemological abundance that informs India’s sexual economies in the twenty-)rst century. The new “scenes” and material contexts that are coterminously emerging while I write this book’s introduction are providing even more up-to-date exemplars of the triangulations of revolution theorized above. Since Pink Revolutions is not invested in offering linear movement histories, it seems appropriate to conclude this chapter with one such illustration, not simply as a way to index the book’s non-chronology, but also to move backwards in time from the vantage point of an always contingent and shape-shifting “now.”

Nationalist Drag An investment in the “now” of sexual politics in India has conventionally pivoted around Section 377 and the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling in 2018. (I myself analyze the “afterlives” of this ostensibly “revolutionary” ruling in more detail in the book’s concluding pages.) But any discussion of the “new” or “now” must necessarily be complicated, since it implicitly assumes the pastness of prior moments—those that cannot simply be relegated to the peripheral edges of history. Thus, it is important to pay attention to some of the critical and political terrain that has already been mapped and continues to be charted by Indian feminists, since it offers not only precedent but also intersection. In Erotic Justice, Ratna Kapur offers a useful compendium of the questions that subtend the reliance on legal strategies as an ostensibly “revolutionary” vision of feminist justice and sexual autonomy that is germane to queer rights and sexual politics as well: “How have these strategies served to reinforce normative understandings about sex and sexuality in the law? In what ways have they upended the transformative vision that inspired such claims, and reinforced methods of domination by encouraging increased regulation and cultural surveillance?”60 Similarly, in the context of women and Indian law, Flavia Agnes offers an important critique that a post-Section 377 “decriminalization” milieu must inevitably grapple with. Writing in the context of the Hindu law reform and speci)cally the Hindu Code Bills of the 1950s, which attempted to codify personal law as value-neutral and secular, Agnes points to the limits of making the state “the main interlocutor in women’s demands for change.” She contends: “This meant that the woman’s fate was tied to the state’s projects of progress and modernization, reducing thereby the autonomy

68

!"#$%&' (

of the woman’s question.”61 These logics of “modernization” are not, of course, simply germane to twentieth- and twenty-)rst-century postcolonial engagements with the state. In the nineteenth-century colonial context, discourses of protectionism were buttressed by social reformers who mobilized legal change in efforts to eliminate practices such as sati and the prohibition of widow remarriage. While the uplifting of women motivated these reforms, feminist legal scholars such as Ratna Kapur have argued that these reformist efforts were “heavily embedded with familialism.” She contends: “Women were assumed to be wives and mothers by nature, and the social evils had to be eradicated in order to protect women in these roles.”62 This mode of legalism that functioned to naturalize women’s supposedly innate vulnerability continues to resonate in contemporary contexts, as witnessed in protectionist discourses around anti-sex traf)cking legislation. Kapur’s analysis reveals how the focus on women’s victimization and its legal redress has only functioned to con+ate sex traf)cking with sex work, creating moral and immigration panics. Thus, Kapur remarks that legal responses to sex traf)cking “have often served as a metonym for using the criminal law to intensify border security, lobby for abolition of sex work, and view gendered migrations primarily in terms of victimization and violence.”63 In the above feminist critiques, the regulatory impacts of law are not simply inadvertent effects of legal reform—they are constitutive of its very enabling structures. Similarly, in much of the existing theorizing on the Supreme Court’s partial strike-down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in 2018, scholars and activists have pointed not simply to the unintended effects of legal reform as queer activism, but also to the regulatory impacts of centralizing the state within conceptions of queer liberation and justice.64 For example, in basing the attempts to reinterpret the colonial-era law under the aegis of privacy rights and the constitution’s right to equality, Jyoti Puri suggests that the partial strikedown of Section 377 by the Delhi High Court in 2009 was shaped on the one hand by how “neoliberal modalities helped imagine a reduced role of the state and advance an individualized, assimilationist, and traditional rights regime.”65 On the other hand, the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2013 that reversed the Delhi Court’s ruling and upheld the constitutional validity of Section 377 in its entirety was also paradoxically shaped by the logics of neoliberalism in which “reaf)rming the state and prolonging governance through legislative intrusions” became imperative (127). Thus, Puri suggests that the reinstatement of the law in 2013 became a way to compensate for the ways in which the logics of

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

69

post-liberalization had eroded the state’s centrality through “the gradual undoing of the developmental state as a means of social redistribution, privatization of infrastructure, greater access to transnational )nance, [and] the rise of NGOs” (141). The material impacts of a queer politics framed predominantly through legislation were still being realized and negotiated in the context of Section 377, especially given its continued constitutionality after the Koushal ruling in 2013. But the interplay between queerness and state governance could already be discerned in a landmark Supreme Court judgment just a year after the court had upheld Section 377 in 2013. This new judgment, in the case of National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India, recognized a third gender as a legal category, thus institutionalizing the fundamental civil rights of transgender persons in the Indian Constitution—a seemingly progressive instance of legislation that was yet imbricated in the process through which queer bodies are simultaneously interpellated and managed in a postliberalization context. I will shortly return to the problems of statism despite the progressive ruling in favor of the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) only a few months after the Supreme Court’s blow to the movement against Section 377. But )rst, I want to highlight events beyond the courtrooms in the aftermath of a “revolutionary” ruling, which, while extralegal in scope, exists in close proximity to the logics of what Puri calls “the interface between state and sexuality” (8). Just a few months after the landmark NALSA judgment, the Mumbaibased LGBT organization Humsafar Trust released a video of a group of hijras (gender-nonconforming people) singing the national anthem on the eve of India’s 69th Independence Day. Entitled Bharatiya hum bhi hain (We Are Indian too), the video purportedly set out to mark the government’s recognition of hijras and transgender communities as marginalized citizens who could receive welfare quotas in arenas such as health care, employment, and education.66 The video begins with the animated )gure of an elegant, sari-clad hijra woman superimposed on the colors of the Indian +ag, with the following captions: “This recognition [the 2014 ruling] of)cially allows them to follow their dream and pursue a career of their choice,” followed by a direct request to “please stand up for the national anthem of the Republic of India.”67 The rest of the video consists of a montage of hijras dressed in the professional clothes of occupations that signify bourgeois respectability: we see Paras in her crisp sari with the accompanying caption informing us that she “could be a teacher,” Madhuri in her robes “could be a lawyer;” Samina

70

!"#$%&' (

“could be a chef,” Shreya a doctor, Rani a police of)cer, and Urmi in her well-tailored out)t “could be a +ight attendant.” In its emphasis on radical potentiality that is yet to be actualized, the video appears to offer reparative hope for the future, even while foregrounding the limits of a present that does not (yet) allow for the materialization of middle-class respectability for hijras. The video received mostly positive coverage in the Indian media. A report in the Daily O website, for example, highlighted the video’s invocation of a constrained present soon to be replaced by a limitless future. The report states: “As the hijras sing Tagore’s timeless song, they invoke the spirit of freedom that their country achieved many years ago but which continues to escape them in spirit. A freedom that would enable them to )nally live lives of dignity thanks to the safeguards provided by the SC judgment. Today, they may not have decent work or an educational degree to support them, but the future looks bright and promising.”68 Both the video and the above description capture the promise of futurity in the present, where deferred dreams sit on the cusp of being realized. Bharatiya hum bhi hain ostensibly offers not only the fantasies of the good life, but also the possibility of full citizenship in which the debts of inclusion are repaid by normative aspirations of neoliberal productivity. In its hopefulness for a better tomorrow, the video clearly recalls the BJP’s 2014 election slogan “Ache din aane waale hain” (“Good days are coming soon”), in which the dreams of better days ahead are embodied through the )gure of soon-to-be prime minister Modi, the humble chai wala (tea vendor) on the precipice of leading the world’s largest democracy. The promise of mobile citizenship for hijras in this “new” India where they can be teachers, lawyers, or police of)cers is thus marked by the apparently more capacious operations of jurisprudence in which queer “freedom” is refracted through the lens of state governmentality. The +exibility that marks (upwardly) mobile citizenship thus exists not so much in contradiction to the gender +exibility of the queer body; instead, this newly mobile subject is incorporated and instrumentalized in the service of a nation-state that mobilizes elastic temporalities to adapt to the international demands of global citizenship, while simultaneously maintaining an essential notion of “Indianness” at the very moment when its ideological terms are in +ux. The promise of social mobility for the hijra that was “rewarded” by the Supreme Court ruling is ultimately transferred onto the putative malleability of Indian law itself. The ruling becomes the occasion through which the Indian state

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

71

marks itself as achieving the hallmark of neoliberal +exibility—its ability to “stretch” and accommodate the queer body. And it is not without signi)cance that the law’s +exibility is then mobilized in the service of an Indian exceptionalism that is resolutely Hindu in nature. For example, in the Washington Post, Rajesh Sampath suggests that India is a more trans-friendly nation than the United States because Hinduism “has infused Indian culture with a mythological diversity that has normalized multiple gender identities.”69 He points to the Supreme Court’s use of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, to justify its decision, since the epic’s representation of Lord Krishna’s gender +uidity offered a “divine justi)cation for transgenderism.” The +exibility of Indian (or Hindu) traditions in this context could thus serve as a pedagogic lesson to the West, according to Sampath: “The West can learn something here. In India, the intrinsic diversity of Hindu culture allowed for a !exibility of judicial review on the gender question. Cultural, social and political assumptions are more easily overturned—and new legal rights to protect minority groups are more easily born—when the system is not hampered by a binary structure. In this case, Hinduism equals diversity, and diversity has given way to the truer essence of democracy.”70 In the above instance, Hinduism’s transgressions of rigid binary structures are emphasized in the service of Indian exceptionalism—to put it more broadly, +exible citizenship, as mediated through the body of the hijra, becomes the conduit through which the nation-state reconciles “modernity” with “Indianness.” In the video, these reconciliations are achieved through the literal superimposition of the queer body on to the national +ag. I want to describe this layering of the queer body onto symbols of citizenship as a form of “nationalist drag.” The word “drag” in this context does not signify in the familiar queer context in a way that would problematically con+ate the hijra’s gender expression with that of drag queens (especially since femininity for hijras is not always intended as an attempt to foreground the arti)ce of gender through ironic camp). “Nationalist drag” in this context alludes instead to the incorporative logics of citizenship-longing: the appearance of hijras in a form of “professional” cross-dressing is an example of aspirational performativity—that is, this drag does not bring into being what it names or performs (Rani doesn’t actually become a police of)cer, and Shreya does not turn out to be a lawyer). At the same time, the video’s nationalist drag is hardly infelicitous simply because the hijras’ dreams of upward mobility are not actualized. Instead, the very emphasis on hijras’ hypothetical futures drags them into nationalism. Nationalist

72

!"#$%&' (

drag thus indexes this sense of ideological coercion that tugs or pulls queer bodies into the seemingly revolutionary potential of a better tomorrow promised by a “new” post-liberalization India. And )nally, “nationalist drag” also references an interminable temporality (that which “drags” on)—in this instance, the protracted promise of a queer utopia in which the posturing of the longue durée works to obscure its normativizing and inclusive logics in the immediate present. The empty anthem of future progress constitutes a temporal drag in which the guarantee of a better future not only permits its perpetual postponement, but also offers concessions in the present as the magnanimous gestures of the state, in+ating its benevolent and benign credentials.71 To use Amy Brandzel’s words, the temporal logics of this nationalist drag can be best described as the “soon-to-come-but-neverarrive inclusion”—a subtle but watered down co-optation of utopia that can only exist as a deferred ideality.72 While the insistence on the nationalist bona )des of the queer body (“we are Indian too”) can be read as a way to foreground its autochthonous character, it is also necessary to read the video as the interpellation of queerness through the prism of national belonging. Seen in this light, the video implicitly represents the violence that mandates of citizenship are predicated on. As Brandzel argues in her polemic “against citizenship,” the political labor that is expended on behalf of citizenship inclusion only serves to normalize its violence “against [an] Other who experiences the full force of the exclusionary technologies of citizenship” (5). In order to understand the effects of citizenship’s ideological dominance, Brandzel rightly argues that “the ever-lingering promise of citizenship has been one of the most resourceful tools for producing and maintaining anti-intersectional, coalitional politics” (4). Brandzel’s point is evinced by the #IAmNotAHijra photo campaign organized by the group Transgender India for the website A Better India in the aftermath of the NALSA decision. The campaign was ostensibly motivated by the attempt to draw attention to the plurality of the transgender umbrella in India. But implicit in this very call for diverse representation as a way to “shut down stereotypes” was a form of horizontal hostility that clearly distanced “transgender” from the more stigmatized category of “hijra.” The campaign consisted of various photographs of transgender Indians holding up signs that read: “I am Trans—and I draw a six )gure salary. I am not a hijra”; “I am Trans— and I am not a sex worker. I am not a hijra”; “I am Trans—and I am a physical trainer. I am not a hijra”; “I am Trans—and I am a surgeon.

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

73

I am not a hijra”; “I am Trans—and I am a daughter, sister, wife and a mother”; “I am Trans—and I am a corporate employee—I am not a hijra.” The conjunctive force of “and” in the syntax of the signs— one that unites the speech-act of self-identi)cation with the qualifying descriptor—succeeds in foregrounding the intended goal of multiple possibilities that are not inimical to trans identi)cations. While the national anthem video interpellates hijras as embodiments of neoliberal potentiality, the #IAmNotAHijra campaign suggests the achievement of this potentiality as already materialized in those who are trans and earn substantial incomes; those who are trans and physical trainers; trans and mothers; trans and daughters. But the very proliferation of this already achieved potential of the trans body that is de)ned through frames of “normalcy” becomes the occasion for the disavowal and rei)cation of the hijra, who can only be represented via the monolith of negation. If the trans body assumes signi)cations of respectability (corporate employees and “not sex workers”), economic upward mobility (six-)gure salaries), and traditional family (daughters and wives), the hijra must exist outside the constellation of these normative signi)ers. It is not surprising, then, that the national anthem campaign is invested in linking the hijra body so closely to the nation-state—its incorporation into frames of nationalism functions as a way to redeem it from those modes of stigmatization that are tethered so closely to sex work and public displays of begging. Nationalist drag—the insistence that “we are Indian too”—can thus be viewed more as an act of recuperation in the face of stigma than a simple or assimilative pledge of allegiance to the normative logics of state power. It is more useful, then, to read these extralegal forms of lateral marginalization as produced by the projects of state governance, even when they are ostensibly progressive or “revolutionary,” like the Supreme Court ruling on gender determination and third-category expressions. In an essay on the state’s production of “proper” legal identities, James C. Scott and his coauthors argue that “there is no state-making without state-naming.”73 They suggest the importance of tracking “the progress of state-making” in order “to trace the elaboration of novel systems which name and classify places, roads, people, and, above all, property.”74 The naming of transgender subjects by the Indian Supreme Court—even while conferring legal recognition and protection against discrimination—is implicated in these larger biopolitical systems of state-making in which information-gathering and data collection undergird what

74

!"#$%&' (

Dean Spade calls “population surveillance” and state security.75 What happens when queer bodies who live in social and economic circuits that have historically been criminalized by the state—who, for example, depend on sex work or begging as systems of survival—can actually begin to be tracked and criminalized by that very state which purports to recognize their right to equality and nondiscrimination? The concerns over how biopolitical state imperatives such as information collection and state-naming can potentially slide into what Foucault calls “apparatuses of security” assume even greater signi)cance in light of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and other Subsidies, bene)ts and services) Act passed by the Indian Parliament in 2016.76 The aadhaar is a twelve-digit unique identity number issued by the Unique Identi)cation Authority of India (UIDAI), and is based on biometric and demographic data collected by that authority; it functions as an authoritative ID card for any Indian who (voluntarily) applies for it. The creation of the aadhaar represents a con+uence of different issues under the BJP-led Modi government: an initiative augmenting the state’s modernity claims toward a new “Digital India;” a post 26/11 measure to track potential crime and terrorist activity; a demonetization tactic that would ostensibly prohibit the +ourishing of black markets; and )nally, a pro)ling mechanism in which the dependence on subsidies and welfare programs could coincide with the relinquishing of privacy rights. It was this last concern that produced yet another “revolutionary” legal judgment in 2017 when the Supreme Court declared that privacy was a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution, a ruling in response to the concern expressed by privacy advocates over the aadhaar’s biometric data collection and potential for state surveillance. Declaring that “privacy is the constitutional core of human dignity,” the judgment borrowed from the nineteenth-century Harvard Law Review issue in which the future U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis formulated what is considered the )rst treatise on privacy rights in the United States. Thus, Chief Justice Jagdish Khehar wrote in the ruling: “The right to be let alone is a part of the right to enjoy life. The right to enjoy life is, in its turn, a part of the fundamental life of the individual.”77 Even though the same Supreme Court had upheld the constitutional validity of Section 377 only a few years prior to the privacy ruling, the language of the 2017 ruling explicitly commented on the need for the right to privacy around matters pertaining to sexual citizenship. If privacy is closely tied to the dignity of the self, sexual

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

75

orientation triangulates with both in the language of the ruling: “Sexual orientation is an essential attribute of privacy. Discrimination against an individual on the basis of sexual orientation is deeply offensive to the dignity and self-worth of the individual.” I will return to the question of privacy and sexual citizenship in chapter 3 of this book, but for now, it is worth noting the signi)cance of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which, according to many LGBT activists, was more capacious in scope than simply the relegation of sexual rights to the realm of private intimacy. As Gautam Bhan suggests, this was not a ruling that lapsed into the logic of “as long as it’s in private, )ne.”78 But while the “right to privacy” ruling of the Supreme Court was considered a blow to the aadhaar’s biometric intrusions, it is not without signi)cance that this very expansive understanding of privacy was implicitly mobilized in protecting the institution of marriage as a discrete zone of intimacy, making marital rape immune from any prosecution. This apparent paradox is, once again, not simply the outcome of benign contradictions marking the push and pull of “tradition” and “modernity.” Instead, the ethical frames that mark the Supreme Court rulings in the context of third-gender recognition and the right to privacy can be more usefully understood through what Chandan Reddy has called “freedom with violence,” in which “every movement to validate a claim of social freedom produces a disparate and adversarial claim by the state elsewhere against what it determines to be irrational cultures and practices.”79 If the interface between state and sexuality produces these modes of freedom that simultaneously engender displacement, it is not unexpected, then, that a Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill introduced in the Lok Sabha (lower house) of the Parliament in 2016 by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has been critiqued as running counter to the spirit of the court’s 2014 NALSA ruling, which recognized a third gender as a legal category. Among the various aspects of this particular instantiation of an Indian “Trans bill” that reneged on the initial promise of the Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling, perhaps most conspicuously egregious were the requirements that mandated how the state would determine which bodies would “legitimately” be recognized as trans. The 2016 bill, while restating the original Supreme Court language in which a transgender person could apply for a “certi)cate of identity” to a district magistrate, also mandated a “screening committee” for the explicit purposes of the “recognition of transgender persons.”80 The persons who would authorize such recognition, according to the bill, would consist of a

76

!"#$%&' (

chief medical of)cer, a district social welfare of)cer, a psychologist or psychiatrist, a representative of the transgender community, and )nally, a government of)cer. On the basis of recommendations made to this collective screening committee, the district magistrate would grant a certi)cate “indicating the gender of such person as transgender.”81 A few months after the introduction of the bill, several local transgender-led activist groups and networks, including the All Assam Transgender Association, Amana (All Manipur Nupi Maanbi Association), Empowering Trans Ability, Sampoorna Working Group (A Network of Trans and Intersex Indians), and Telagana Hijra Intersex Transgender Samithi, published a response detailing the various limits of the newly formulated bill that contradicted the spirit of the NALSA ruling. Among their various critiques, they pointed out that the bill was inimical to the “right to self-determination of gender identity and expression” in its assumptions that transgender identity was axiomatically predicated on surgical and medical interventions, as well as in its systems of gatekeeping that would authenticate the “legitimacy” of which bodies counted as trans. Furthermore, their response pointed to the ways in which the bill con+ated sex and gender in its equation of transgender with intersex identity. Finally, they criticized the erasure of both the trans health care provisions and the caste-based reservation policies in employment and education that had been contained in earlier versions of the bill.82 These logics of gatekeeping—in which trans bodies would have to prove the authenticity of their gender identities and expressions in order to qualify for af)rmative action—have a long and vexed genealogy in the Indian context in relation to suspicions around Dalits and scheduled castes and tribes who supposedly “deceive” the state in order to receive bene)ts (a point I take up in my analysis of the Rohith Vemula case in chapter 3). But the context of the bill also points to a postaadhaar milieu in which an augmented security state demands identity proof in order to differentiate between “unique” and “counterfeit” citizenship. Inevitably, the folding of the transgender body into discourses of national legitimacy must take place on the terms of the state’s nebulous de)nitions of who counts as trans (which is problematically de)ned in the bill as those persons who are “neither wholly female or wholly male”; “a combination of male and female”; or “neither female nor male”).83 The trans bill thus blurred the lines between af)rmative state recognition on the one hand and a form of governmentality on the other. What

“,&-./0%1.2#'3” ,&4.'56, ,&4.'516% “,&-./0%1.26”

77

appears to operate under the aegis of state protection, in effect, has the potential to place already vulnerable trans bodies in even greater proximity to violence, poverty, and criminalization. Take, for example, the following section of the bill that appears to protect transgender persons from forced labor by expanding the punitive powers of the state: “Whoever,—(a) compels or entices a transgender person to indulge in the act of begging or other similar forms of forced or bonded labour . . . shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than six months but which may extend to two years and with )ne.”84 If sex work and begging, however, are the only viable economic options for survival, the bill, in effect, ends up criminalizing the very subjects that it ostensibly sets out to protect. In this light, the aadhaar system’s tracking capabilities and investments in data collection might become ways of counting and therefore “recognizing” trans bodies as “legitimate” citizen-subjects; but it is these very forms of state-naming that also function as technologies of surveillance, making the state the agent of violence at the very moment when it is framed as a benevolent protector. The network of trans activists protesting the bill, for example, has pointed to the detention of several trans women in Bangalore’s “Beggar’s colony,” a “rehabilitation” center that is notorious for deplorable sanitary conditions and human rights violations.85 The anticipated fears around potential criminalization— disguised as revolutionary “recognition”—have also prompted several HIV-positive sex workers (a signi)cant percentage of whom are trans women) to be more wary of accessing state-sponsored HIV treatment at antiretroviral therapy centers that require aadhaar cards to access medicine. What, then, are the limits of a reliance on state recognition and the naming of queer bodies, when these institutional sites become the very occasions for “freedoms” that are inseparable from violence? In what sense are the “pink revolutions” of queer visibility framed and constrained by their emergence within broader economic and political formations? In the chapters that follow, I will grapple with these questions through various sites that exemplify the pink revolution’s triangulated tensions and sticky reconciliations. While these sites highlight different contexts of triangulation, collectively they open up a critical space for theorizing the reformist logics of revolution and the speci)c place of sexual politics in navigating those logics. If the national anthem-singing queer body emerges as the ideal embodiment of pink revolutions, then seditious logics come to constitute what Svati Shah calls the “juridical foil

78

!"#$%&' (

to nation-loving citizens.”86 Shah thus suggests that the time has come to ask “whether inhabiting ‘non-normativity’ ” within rubrics of gender and sexuality “necessarily indicates dissension with the status quo.”87 Such inhabitations, as I suggested in the introduction, are not simply a matter of conferring moral or political credit on a “radical” queer body who is then instrumentalized as the anti-normative bulwark to its nationalist counterpart. Instead, it is to articulate those seditious horizons in which the terms of revolution are not already arranged in accordance with the violent scripts of nationalist belonging.

!"#$%&' (

Safe in the City: Gay Tourism in India and the Politics of Worlding

In an op-ed in 2016 entitled “Overcoming India’s Of)cial Homophobia,” Shashi Tharoor, a former Indian minister of state for human resource development, became one of the few members of the Indian Parliament to criticize the Supreme Court under the BJP government for refusing to strike down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (before its eventual strike-down by the Supreme Court in 2018). But in addition to the arguments around constitutional rights to privacy, freedom, and equality that were jeopardized by Section 377’s then legal and ideological relevance, Tharoor also framed his gay-af)rmative arguments through the language of economic and )nancial exigency. Relying on a study conducted by the World Bank on the )nancial costs of homophobia in India, he articulated the problem of anti-gay legislation as one that is patently uneconomical for the nation: “India suffers a loss of between 0.1% and 1.7% of the GDP because of homophobia.”1 While Tharoor’s piece elides over what speci)cally constitutes the impoverishing effects that homophobia would have on the economy of India, his arguments have become symptomatic of a very speci)c kind of neoliberal branding of human rights that underlies the twenty-)rstcentury politics of a “new” India—that is, the ostensibly progressive view that enhanced bene)ts of progressiveness in the realm of gender and sexuality can (and must) be productively implicated in national growth and economic prosperity. In other words, women’s rights and sexual citizenship become desirable in the context of national modernity projects that have particular appeal to a nation-state that is invested in values of “democracy” more as a kind of global branding than as an investment in social justice and feminist or queer politics. Among the critics of the Supreme Court’s decision were the group Pink Vibgyor, 79

80

!"#$%&' (

a Delhi-based travel agency that caters to gay tourists (predominantly men) visiting India. In an article published in the Economic Times, Rajat Singla, a manager for the travel agency, lamented the plethora of cancellations following what was perceived as the recriminalization of homosexuality in 2013, after the initial strike-down of Section 377 in 2009. His concern—that “people are just afraid of coming to India right now” due to the risk of being branded a criminal because of their sexual orientation—marked the nation’s image as a site of primitive precarity— rather than a zone of safety and modernity—and one in which travel to India by the gay tourist was fraught with risk and discrimination.2 While lamenting the exclusion of LGBT Indians from legal enfranchisement, Singla’s concern simultaneously offers a future in which the queer body is productive and pro)table to the nation’s economy and global reputation. Section 377, then, was the legal stain that impeded India’s aspirations to cosmopolitan modernity, marking the nation as a risky site for queer progress. But the avoidance-of-risk narrative (which would ostensibly be managed via legal decriminalization) that appears to act as a barrier to the progress of burgeoning gay tourism in India betrays a more complicated relationship between geographies of safety and the management of violence. The very concern over queer safety that seemingly curtails the growth of tourism must actually depend on an economy of risk that is resolutely national in character. In other words, the legal upholding of Section 377 in 2013 paradoxically became the ideological backdrop for the emergence and continued success of several niche tourist gay companies in the last half-decade. In addition to Pink Vibgyor, queer tourist companies such as Indjapink, Mister and Art House, Pink Escapes, and Planet Rosa Escapes have all tapped into the emerging gay market in India. They offer LGBT tourists visiting the country not just a luxury experience of “Incredible !ndia” but also, as the Pink Escapes website guarantees, a “discrimination-free” encounter with national monuments, historical sites, and hill stations that always “leave . . . very little to chance” and alleviate any “concerns while considering the Indian Subcontinent for travel.”3 If, as Jasbir Puar notes, “the gay and lesbian tourism industry is indebted to the culturally constructed homophobia of another place,” the spatial sanctuaries offered by companies like Pink Vibgyor are predicated on their distance from these localized constructions through the creation of ideological “safe” zones.4 Homophobia, then, is the ironic fuel that lubricates the proliferation, and arguably even the success, of gay tourism in India. It functions as an enabling constraint for the

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

81

marketing of queer safety rather than acting simply as an oppositional and pernicious force. In this chapter I want to examine how gay tourism in India is implicated in creating these geographies of queer safety through the transforming practices of modernity—what Aihwa Ong has called the “worlding”—that shape New Delhi, India’s capital, and the central location of the emergence of gay tourism over the last decade.5 I’m interested in the paradox of how queer tourism can coexist (albeit uneasily) with the political, legal, and social discrimination that LGBT Indians experience. At )rst, such a divide appears to be simply the consequence of globalization’s fracturing effects in which tradition uneasily brushes up against modernity. But as I have already argued in the introduction, such an explanation of globalization brackets off more complex ideological forces that are at play. Instead of understanding the relationship between gay tourism and globalization simply as a mimetic effect of “global” queerness on a passive local, I propose an attention to the politics of “worlding” around urban Indian centers—that is, the real and imagined geographies through which metropolitan cities such as Delhi seek to produce what Ananya Roy has called the “global regimes of value” that shape postcolonial urbanism.6 In their theorization of worlding experiments that mark metropolitan Asian cities in the twenty-)rst century, Roy and Ong characterize these urban practices of modernity as the “art of being global.” But the art of globalism is strongly tethered to and shaped by the local. In theorizing global aspirations, Ong and Roy are careful not to frame globalization through the lens of “planetary capitalism”; that is, a hierarchical system of global capitalism that produces universalizing effects on a docile local.7 Rather than analyzing the worlding practices of Asian cities as “weak products of Western urbanism,” they propose a framework that recognizes, in Roy’s words, modes of “fractal geography” attending to “private jurisdictions and territorial interests” that do not simply emerge from top-down circuits of power.8 The worlding of cities is inevitably shaped by “world-class” global aspirations, but their material forms have just as much to do with the domestic parochialisms of the local and the negotiations of their governing practices with economic policies, legal systems, and religious practices. In thinking about the worlding practices of a metropolis like Delhi, Roy thus calls for the “provincialization of urban theory”—that is, an attention to the “homegrown” con)gurations that track the contradictory and fractal logics of the city’s spatial geographies and aesthetic appearance through practices such as slum

82

!"#$%&' (

clearance, suburbanization, visual beauti)cation, zoning laws, and the privatization of public land.9 While the above spatial technologies of power operate through statesanctioned forms of urban planning (which, of course, extend and build on nation-building projects), gay tourism as a kind of metropolitan worlding practice appears to be anomalous since it is not mediated or even aided by state-initiated ventures, national capital, or government funding. In fact, the narratives of safety that are essential to the success of gay tourism are in part motivated by their sheltering of the tourist from the city’s heteronormative violence and the state’s discriminatory laws. And yet, I want to suggest that gay tourism in India participates in civic ideals around place and space that make it dif)cult to disentangle its rejection of state homophobia from its simultaneous participation in national modernity projects. These contradictions that ensure queer safety from a homophobic nation-state while drawing on tourist geographies that are resolutely national in scope get played out and negotiated in the worlding practices of the city. Thus, while much of the conceptual focus in this chapter is on the city of Delhi, the politics of geographic scale inevitably extend to the nation state as a whole. The nation-state, as I have suggested in the introduction, assumes a renewed importance under the logics of globalization. I thus examine the implications of the heightened role that the nation-state plays in the context of gay tourism in India. In considering how the worlding ambitions of gay tourism in India interface with geographies of safety and the city’s spatial world-making projects, the historical moment at which this visibility has materialized in India is not without signi)cance. The emergence of gay tourism in Delhi in the last )ve years temporally coincides with the global attention that Delhi (and India in general) have received around the issue of sexual violence and the lack of safety that particularly women in India experience in public urban spaces. Of course, such violence is not germane only to urban contexts in India—and yet, the case that received the most global attention during this time period was that of Jyoti Pandey, a 23-year-old student who was raped on a bus in Delhi and subsequently died; this incident was followed by massive national protests and widespread global coverage in 2012. I bring up this already much-discussed case in the context of gay tourism in India not simply due to their overlaps in time (post-2010) and space (Delhi). Instead, I want to understand how gay tourism in India as a cultural phenomenon paradoxically (and uneasily) exists with the exacerbated visibility of

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

83

sexual violence against women. Speci)cally, I want to suggest that the geographies of safety that queer tourism depends on rely on rhetorics of protection from the danger that proliferates in the vicinity of sexual violence against women. More broadly, I argue that queer tourism operates as a symptom of the nation’s aspirations to modernity precisely at the moment when India is cast as a pre-feminist culture within the global imaginary. The connection between sexual violence and queer tourism is not one of simple correlation, causality, or intentionality. Instead, my investment is in thinking of how queer tourist consumption functions as a nationalist discourse that paradoxically operates amidst homophobic nationalism, preserving the city’s worlding ambitions and the nation’s investment in post-liberal modernity.

Risky Revolutions In this chapter, I propose to unpack the triangulated connections between gay tourism in India, the worlding practices of the nation’s capital, and rhetorics of safety. The emphasis on safety on the part of gay tourism in India is not, of course, exceptional or unique. An analysis of discourses of risk avoidance and the desire for safety play a central role in marketing studies on LGBT tourism. For example, both Pink Tourism: Holidays of Gay and Men and Lesbians (2006) and Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity, and Sex (2002) highlight the central role that LGBT safety plays as the key motivating factor in the continued importance of pink tourism. In addition to being a safe distance away from physical and verbal abuse, queer tourism, according to Pink Tourism author Howard Hughes, “enables gays and lesbians to be themselves.”10 Hughes goes even further and suggests that geographic movement is central to gay identity itself. Gay space in this framework is seen as a desired “elsewhere,” always existing in another place. Arrival at this destination is constitutive of identity formation and community-building. As Jon Binnie suggests, “we travel great distances in order to live in the ways that enhance further contact with one another.”11 The tourist vacation becomes the achievement of 0exible citizenship in which the mobility of the marginalized queer subject can “validate identity by living and playing over a continuous period of time, in gay space or at least a place that is gay-friendly.”12 “Home,” then, is the site of risk; and movement away from the homeland facilitates modes of becoming marked by self-discovery. Gays and lesbians, suggests Hughes, “may

84

!"#$%&' (

well only ‘)nd themselves’ when somewhere other than their home environment.”13 In the above formulations, queerness can only be actualized through diasporic migrancy as an alternative to “home,” which is the site of precarity. But tourist marketing, with an investment in novel destinations and a greater possibility for travel, has simultaneously accounted for potential risks in relation to tourist destinations away from home, especially when the location in consideration is not a conventional “gay” destination like San Francisco or Amsterdam. For example, Tim Roth, the president of a travel consultation )rm catering to the LGBT market, suggests in an interview with Michael Luongo that novelty in the politics of marketing destinations to LGBT tourists plays a crucial role in sustaining the industry’s growth. While the emphasis on innovation is not peculiar to LGBT tourist marketing, the rhetoric mobilized by Roth to taxonomize destinations warrants closer examination. He remarks: “I think destinations that are mature in the gay market need to constantly reinvent themselves. SF [San Francisco] is a good example of a destination that can lose market share because it just assumes that gays and lesbians will be coming in droves.”14 If San Francisco is the “mature” market that needs constant reinvention, by implication, there appears to exist a burgeoning “immature” market that is yet to be discovered. The rhetoric of infantilization in this instance, however, does not discount the immature market, but in fact mobilizes its riskiness as a potentially productive site. While “immaturity” is reminiscent of orientalist tropes that cast the destination as primitive other, the rhetoric of infancy is simultaneously implicated in a racialized erotics of innocence that invites the promise of discovery. Risk, in this context, is fetishized rather than simply jettisoned.15 The investment in risky locations becomes the occasion for an elaborate discourse of safety on how to navigate the potential perils for LGBT tourists while traveling: pamphlets on gay-friendly restaurants, recommendations for safe spaces in local cultures where gay couples can hold hands, and lists of hotels where room- and bed-sharing are acceptable. Predictably, Roth’s hierarchy of destination maturity has its outer limits. In response to the question of how to make a destination gayfriendly, he advises that he “would never recommend a Muslim country to gay people who care about how locals are treated, who care about the government policies, and who care about what could happen to them if it were ever discovered that they are gay. We have too many great options to select from. I don’t recommend going to places where we are

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

85

not welcome.”16 While insisting on the mutual incompatibility of “gay” and “Muslim,” Roth’s purported concern for (presumably gay) locals in Muslim countries is not without signi)cance. Even as it is couched as empathy for the abject plight of non-Western gay subjects, his concern is not entirely altruistic. Roth reveals that a key to the creation of a “gay mecca” in new locales is the involvement of local gay communities. These communities would then function as the interface mediating between “local” gay culture and the Western desire to experience queer space in emerging gay tourist markets, navigating risks and safeguarding the tourist from the potential hazards of the “immature” destination that is always a racialized elsewhere. Thus, for Roth, while these emerging markets are “not gay meccas, . . . they have huge potential in the gay community” (134). The invocation of the by now oft-used phrase “gay mecca” (by Roth, and in general) might seem unintentionally ironic at )rst, given Roth’s insistence on the impossibility of gay tourism in Muslim countries. But perhaps the nonreligious use of the word “mecca,” which no longer axiomatically references the birthplace of Muhammad and the site of the hajj, is indicative of queer secularization that seems essential to its implication in modernity projects such as LGBT tourism. What is in fact ironic, then, is the interview’s concluding comment by Luongo, who invokes the language of benign religiosity by suggesting that LGBT tourism is “like converting, or missionary work. Eventually you don’t have to do it anymore” (134). Emerging LGBT sites, despite (or precisely because of) the risks they might present, can then eventually be converted to mature destinations or “meccas”—and it is this potential that LGBT tourism in India seeks to build on through the worlding practices of modernity that are centered in urban spaces like Delhi.

“Cleaning Up” the Nation’s Capital Before analyzing the speci)c worlding practices of gay tourist organizations in Delhi, the capital of India, I want to chart some of the discourses and contestations around space that have marked the city. Such an understanding enables us to see how contemporary queer marketing builds on the history of urban formations in the context of India’s global modernity aspirations. The spatial history of the city closely re0ects how geographical transformations and changes in urban planning index broader shifts in India’s participation in “the art

86

!"#$%&' (

of being global.” Following Ong’s critique of planetary capitalism, Delhi’s worlding aspirations are not simply replicas of Western models, but reveal local and national experiments in remapping the urban space. The attention to city geography as a tool of national modernity is not a recent phenomenon. In the decade after India’s independence, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) was formed and introduced its )rst Master Plan in 1962 with the help of a Ford Foundation team to plan the future of the city’s housing policies, urban heritage, conservation areas, security and vigilance, and the management of land. Even while the early aims of the DDA were couched in state-governed Nehruvian socialism and its ostensible investment in a nationalized welfare state that would uplift poorer populations in India, the appropriation of village land for conversion into zones of modernity paved the way for post-1990s privatization and the nexus between state and private investments in housing, land development, and city planning.17 In the two decades following liberalization, the Indian government’s focus on beauti)cation and urban aesthetics not only intensi)ed, but it also )ltered through different state actors and private agencies that drew on state imperatives for a cleaner, greener India. For example, after the 1990s, the Delhi High Court’s mandates that ruled in favor of slum removal policies have been defended under the aegis of the state’s investment in environmental protection and the elimination of polluting industries. Citing the risk of hazardous industrial waste, a 1996 Supreme Court order closed more than a hundred factories and moved several beyond the outskirts of Delhi.18 The concern over air pollution, human waste, and the garbage created by slums, however, becomes a justi)cation for the removal and displacement of the poor from urban centers, even while relying on these very populations for cheap labor. By coding the removal of poor slum dwellers through the framework of “health” and “quality of life,” the court orders not only participate in a postindustrial remapping of geography and power, but also facilitate what Amita Baviskar has called “bourgeois environmentalism” among non-state actors in Delhi; that is, the ways in which private citizens and “activists” replicate the state’s techniques of domination under the guise of environmentalism and health. Bourgeois environmentalism, writes Baviskar, “has emerged as an organized force in Delhi, and upper-class concerns around aesthetics, leisure, safety, and health have come signi)cantly to shape the disposition of urban spaces.”19 For example, in the Supreme Court case of Almitra Patel v. Union of India, an environmental activist )led a public interest litigation over

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

87

the city’s failure to implement environmentally protective policies that would ensure a healthy environment in the city. Ruling in favor of the petitioner, the Supreme Court expressed consternation at the “historic city” and capital of India being treated as “virtually an open dustbin” and a “free dumping place for untreated sewage and industrial waste.” Critics of the Supreme Court ruling have pointed to the fact that while Almitra Patel’s litigation was explicitly framed around the issue of solid waste disposal, the ultimate ruling in favor of the petitioner was extended to a justi)cation of slum demolition.20 Targeting the proliferation of slums as a central problem in the case, the court declared that “large areas of public land . . . are usurped for private use free of cost.”21 Slum dwellers are thus castigated as “land grabbers” who become a )nancial and environmental burden on the middle-class citizen taxpayer. Of course, the legal framing of slum dwellers as “land grabbers” obscures the government’s own history of converting public land into private property, witnessed especially after the 1990s when slum clearance and vacant lands became the basis of a thriving real estate market and paved the way for the rapid proliferation of shopping malls, international retail stores, coffee shops, business of)ces, and af0uent colonies. In 2010, for example, the city enhanced its “world-class” reputation by hosting the Commonwealth Games, which became the occasion to conduct a massive makeover of Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport. Since the airport would be the )rst impression that athletes from around the world and global delegates had of the city, massive renovations were conducted to bring it up to par with international standards. The speci)c focus of the transformation centered around arrivals at Terminal T3, which connected to the newly constructed eight-lane Delhi Gurgaon Expressway. The cost of the airport makeover, in the amount of Rs. 12,700 crore (approximately $3 billion), was more than double its initial budget.22 The airport’s much-touted (and internationally recognized) carbon-neutral status served to once again frame government spending on beauti)cation and cleanliness drives through the discourse of environmentalism, obscuring the substantial redistribution of resources away from more urgent needs such as education and public housing. More recently, the CISF (Central Industrial Security Force) personnel who are in charge of airport security received their own makeovers in crisp blue blazers and red silk ties so as to appear more “professional” at terminal gates. The focus on the aesthetics of space is not simply a super)cial investment in surface appearance. Instead, it invites the middle-class

88

!"#$%&' (

citizen to participate in the worlding of the city, in which the demand for clean space and concerns over safety are neutralized as apolitical investments in progress which can then be dissociated from the resettlement of slums or the displacement of the poor from the city. The blurring of state and non-state actors in the creation of Delhi as a modern and sophisticated metropolis is thus facilitated by the dissolution of boundaries between legal discourse and what D. Asher Ghertner has called “rule by aesthetics”; that is, an emphasis on visual geography and aesthetic appearance that functions in tandem with the supposedly objective category of jurisprudence. Ghertner remarks: “In this new, more aesthetic framework, the law crafts )elds of intelligibility by disseminating standardized aesthetic norms. Spaces are known to be illegal or legal, de)cient or normal, based on their outer characteristics. A shopping mall, even if in violation of planning law, is legal because it looks legal. A slum, even if its residents have been formalized at their current location, is illegal because it looks like a nuisance.”23 The mall thus acquires what Ghertner calls “cartographic legibility” in which appearance becomes the ultimate evaluative category, and one that gets con0ated with its use value. According to Ghertner, the privileging of aesthetics as a form of governance releases the state from considering more complex criteria such as “population densities, land-use designations, territorial area, and settlement history” in the process of urban planning.24 The recourse to aesthetics thus does not simply undermine these evaluative criteria—it actually replaces them.

Safe in the City The role of aesthetics in determining the legitimacy of space in Delhi also plays a crucial role in de)ning its geographies of safety. In addition to naturalizing cartographic legibility, aesthetics plays a crucial role in constructing geographical signi)ers of security even while the material reality of safety is yet to be actualized. In 2009, The Times of India reported the Greater Kailash area and CR Park in South Delhi as two of the safest colonies in the city on the basis of unnamed “police sources.” Given the increase of crime in the city, the article assured its readers that “it may help to know which are the areas that are relatively safe.” The police report based its “statistics” on the number of murder cases reported in 2009 and unsurprisingly concluded that centrally located “upmarket areas of Delhi have fared well” while the “outskirts” and

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

89

“areas lying on the borders are most prone to crime.”25 The con0ation of af0uent urban enclaves with safety is thus naturalized—seemingly on the basis of empirical yet arbitrary police )ndings—but this obscures the longer history of state investment in urban development in South Delhi and the forced labor migration to the outskirts of the city, which has led to the trendy reputation of Greater Kailash with its proliferation of boutique hotels, high-end clothing stores, and Tripadvisor-recommended restaurants. Police reports on the safety of the neighborhood thus have more to do with the idealized norms and aspirational aesthetics of what Delhi should look like. The ranking of certain areas of the city as “safe” doesn’t simply describe already extant reality—it performs spatializing practices that symbolically conjure and then performatively rank the city into geographical zones of desirability. The “look” of an area is thus related to the criteria mobilized to mark it as “safe” or “dangerous.” For example, both aesthetics and safety play a crucial role in how the Delhi boutique hotel Mister and Art House markets its unique appeal. Self-described as “India’s )rst boutique gay guesthouse and art gallery for men only,” Mister and Art House is located in the Greater Kailash area, reassuring its prospective clients of an upscale and safe area of the city. If aesthetics and the logics of security operate in tandem with one another, it is not without signi)cance that the hotel’s guesthouse foregrounds its emphasis on visual and artistic perfection. The reviews of the boutique con)rm its luxurious offerings as one of the most prominent gay tourist sites in India, and one of the few that functions as a bed and breakfast as well. “The hotel is situated in a very quiet and safe neighborhood in the city,” one review assures its readers; another marvels at the “one of a kind pink experience”; “very clean, hygienic and absolutely charmante!” The stay at Mister and Art House promises its guests an opportunity to “shun the clutter of the outside world” and yet, as one guest points out, “enjoy vibrant culture, from crazy parties to calm temples.”26 In addition to customized services for guests such as tours of the city (and beyond) with gay-friendly drivers and tour guides, the gay luxury hotel also functions as an art gallery of sorts, foregrounding its “handpicked,” “acute” aesthetics: homoerotic North Indian “gay” miniature paintings, life-size Buddhas that ostensibly enhance serenity, and a plaster of paris statue of a naked maharajah ornately studded with Rajasthani mirror work. While foregrounding the ancient indigenous roots of homoeroticism in Indian art in the guesthouse, the owners still describe their attitude as “bold and modern,” stating: “We don’t hesitate in proving our aesthetic sentiments in the boldest way, even if

90

!"#$%&' (

it may not be considered well by the traditionalists.” Thus, for example, some of the artworks (which are also for sale to guests staying at the guesthouse) are paintings entitled Krishna and His Sakhas that depict the Hindu deity frolicking with his friends, thus highlighting the queer indigenous logics that are ostensibly central to Indian tradition but are erased by the dogma of Hindutva ideology. The art of being global in this context is mobilized quite literally. It would be a mistake to simply dismiss the attention to aesthetics of Mister and Art House as a super0uous or frivolous attention to design that is stereotypically the provenance of gay men. The emphasis on high art in the guesthouse is a version of Ghertner’s “aesthetic governmentality” in which visual signi)ers are mobilized to mark spaces as either spatially legitimate or suspect. While Ghertner’s arguments are germane to the ways in which the “dirtiness” of slums axiomatically renders them legally suspect, in the case of Mister and Art House, a luxurious ambiance establishes the guesthouse’s cartographic legibility. But unlike the aesthetic arguments used to justify the demolition or displacement of slums that works in conjunction with state-sponsored visions of city planning to establish Delhi’s world-class credentials, gay tourism in India must establish its cultural legibility without the mediation of of)cial state support. World-class aesthetics in this context thus does not enforce the legally binding effects of slum clearance or the encroachment of public land by private interests. The criminalization of “unnatural” sex by Section 377 (which was struck down in 2018 by the Supreme Court) in this instance complicated the link between the politics of aesthetics and governmentality. And yet, the legitimacy of legalism still operates in the vicinity of gay tourism’s investments in world-class aesthetics. The “look” of Mister and Art House does not materially confer sexual citizenship on its owners or visitors, given the threat that queer space poses to the heteronormative mandates of nation-building. In this instance, the aesthetic’s relation to the legal is more symbolic than performative. In fact, the emphasis on visual signi)ers of elegance in this context is one that is compensatory in scope—if queerness is perceived to be criminalized, part of its legitimacy is recovered through world-class aesthetics that create an aura of legality even without its material actuality. The legitimacy that accrues around the guesthouse on account of its “world-class” aesthetics is closely tied to its reputation as a safe haven for LGBT tourists. As pointed out earlier, the Greater Kailash neighborhood is safe because it looks safe, even if this illusion of sheltered

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

91

geography is imagined and not real. These signi)ers of safety function as replacements for the stigma that casts India as premodern and backward for its criminalization of homosexuality prior to the ruling on Section 377. Mister and Art House seeks to make tourists feel safe—its assertions of boldness and modernity in aesthetics (despite the disapproval of the “traditionalists”) function to affectively supplant the illegibility of queerness within the domain of law so that the nation can lay claim to its rightful place in progressive modernity. In her spatial analysis of LGBT safety politics, Christina Hanhardt has pointed out that the calls for safe space and protection from street violence on the part of LGBT activists in a post-Stonewall U.S. context were informed by a history of increased policing and privatization of public space that shaped urban policy and neighborhood geography. Hanhardt shows how the demand for street patrols and crime control to ensure the safety of LGBT people was informed by race and class dimensions that were often bracketed off in the call for safe space as a panacea for LGBT vulnerability.27 Thus, LGBT security and safety can often be inadvertently complicit in colluding with the neoliberal state’s investments in “cleaning up” neighborhoods to ensure a high “quality of life.” Enhanced policing at pride events is the most common and contemporary illustration of how the calls for safety collude with policing under the auspices of protecting LGBT people from homophobic violence. The announcement on the part of San Francisco Pride to increase police vigilance at the SF Pride parade in 2016 following the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, led to the withdrawal of Black Lives Matter from the event. The collusion of LGBT safety with policing points to the ways in which queer politics in Western contexts has been folded into the nation-state—in what has come to be called both the homonationalist and homonormative turn in LGBT politics.28 But the sexual economies that underlie the emergence of gay tourism in India do not emerge from the historical context of homonationalist gay assimilation that informs the mainstreaming of gay rights in the United States. Thus, in the Indian context, there can be no appeal to an illusion of state protection, given the vexed relation that queer bodies have to legal systems and law enforcement there.29 In Sexual States, Jyoti Puri points to the con0uence of various laws beyond just Section 377 that criminalize sexuality and institutionalize moral policing. While Section 377 had been historically mobilized only in a few select cases to prosecute consenting same-sex adults, Puri suggests that the state brings together

92

!"#$%&' (

a con0uence of laws that regulate sexuality: from prohibitions of sex traf)cking to laws regulating “vagrancy and public nuisance that are easier to enforce.”30 For example, the Immoral Traf)c Prevention Act of 1956 (which criminalized brothel ownership and public prostitution) was modi)ed in 1986 to include hijras and male sex workers within its purview. Puri points out that despite being already vulnerable to violence, marginalized sexual subjects are further persecuted by these laws, which are “stretched, bent, and rationalized by constables and their senior representatives in the interests of public morality and social order” (69). When systems of the state and law enforcement are perpetrators of violence against dissident sexual subjects, non-state actors assume— and in this instance, pro)t from—the role of creating systems of security and geographies of safety. The emphasis on aesthetics that informs Mister and Art House thus participates in the formalization of these geographies. If the aesthetics of safety replaces state-sanctioned modes of protection, it would appear as if tourist companies like Mister and Art House function outside of or at least apart from the logics of state agencies. Indeed, their very emergence can be traced to the role they play in offering urban sanctuary zones that will protect the potential tourist from the violence of the state. But “the state” is not a monolithic entity that stands apart from private interests. To characterize organizations like Mister and Art House as only playing an adversarial role against state-sponsored homophobia is to foreclose their complicity with and continuation of the state’s regulative powers. Even as it poses as an alternative to the state, gay tourism forti)es it by papering over its inconsistencies—that is, the state’s neoliberal retreat, but also its enhanced regulatory scope in policing sexuality and morality. In Puri’s analysis, the diminishing role of the state in postcolonial India as characterized by the push toward privatization and investment in global capital, only enhances the state’s role in cultural and social realms. She suggests that “regulating sexuality in its various dimensions, such as behavior, marriage, sexual health and disease, fertility, sexual labor, media representations, and the sex industry, are crucial mechanisms through which states are generated and the expansions and modi)cations in governance are justi)ed” (3). In drawing attention to the overlapping operations of gay tourism in India and state governance, one cannot, of course, con0ate their actual manifestations. State violence, criminalization, and the moral policing of sexual subjects are analytically and politically distinct from

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

93

the worlding aspirations of gay tourism. The relation between state regulation of sexuality and gay tourism, then, is one of uneasy contiguity rather than whole-hearted compatibility. Since the retreat of the state, marked by the diminishment of welfare and the enshrinement of market freedom, is accompanied by an enhanced role in the regulation of sexuality, its embrace of privatization allows for the emergence of gay visibility only in those instances where it is safely bracketed off from the public sphere. For example, Indjapink, a tourist organization that offers “luxury gay travel in India,” creates customized gay tourist experiences that promise “private vehicles, a personal host, private specialized guides,” and access to “exclusive gay parties.” Indjapink’s arrangements include gay chauffeurs, private guided tours by gay or gay-friendly male guides, and carefully picked, “extremely stylish,” gay-friendly hotel accommodations.31 The promise of privacy and exclusivity of the gay experience in this instance is not a threat to the heteronormativity of the state—instead, it functions as its world-making and modernist alibi. Gay tourism thus is permissible even within practices of prohibition and policing, since its call for safe geographies and discrete sanctuaries works seamlessly with what Puri calls the Indian state’s “relentless drive to privatize.”32 In other words, the safe space of gay tourism is always already private space—not only well-suited to the the state’s regulatory investments, but also ultimately productive to the nation at large.

Queer Tourism: Modern but “Exotic at Its Best” While the focus on postcolonial urbanism shaping gay tourism in Delhi draws on the metropolis as the central site of world-making, it is simultaneously implicated in different con)gurations of spatial scale that link regional particularities with national geographies. Worlding ambitions by their very de)nition are more capacious in scope even as they are anchored by the cosmopolitan city. Thus, for example, Indjapink, located and based in Delhi, offers daily tours of heritage sites in the city but also specializes in package vacations (advertised as trips into “god’s own country”) across the nation, including elephant rides at Amer Fort right outside Jaipur, guided tours of South Indian weddings and spice plantations in Cochin, and backwater cruises, elephant safaris, and banana leaf lunches in Kerala. Indjapink markets itself as the “insider connection” for the gay tourist, offering to ventriloquize for the

94

!"#$%&' (

nation-state so that it can “open the door to authentic ways of life and deeper insight into the soul of Indian cultures.”33 Implicit in the marketing of Indjapink as the voice of insider knowledge into the “soul” of an exotic India is the non-Indian audience that it primarily caters to. The testimonials on Indjapink’s website, for example, reveal visitors from Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Canada, the United States, Germany, Sweden, and Spain—with only one review from India. The target audience of foreign tourists is even more explicit in the recognition of gay marriage as a global market. Indjapink offers its global clientele the arrangement of wedding ceremonies and honeymoon getaways that are “be)tting [of] Royalty.” In the following description, for example, Indjapink combines familiar orientalist tropes of India in its commitment to the celebration of queer unions: “Seal your vows with bliss and eternal love and experience hues of love exchanging vows with your beloved decked like a prince against a palatial backdrop. Where the elegantly decorated well-lit palace offers a grand welcome. The presence of elephant and camel processions including Local Folk performers, dancers and musicians, Snake Charmers, Puppet Shows, Kalbeliyas, Dholwalas provide no less than a fairy-tale wedding experience.”34 Another Delhi-based organization, Pink Vibgyor, similarly promises celebrations of gay weddings against the backdrop of exotic locales: “Want your wedding in an exotic and unforgettable location? Then Pink Vibgyor can make it happen, whatever your wishes. Be it a magni)cent maharajah’s palace, an imposing historical fort, in a 0ower )lled garden, or just at a palm-fringed beach or on a snow-peaked mountain, all is possible.”35 It is easy to read these descriptions as an attempt to privilege gay marriage as part of tourism’s complicity in homonormative ideals. More striking, however, is the centrality of “Indianness” in the representation of queerness, which is partially a function of the packaged exotica that is marketed to the foreign tourist. Thus, what is celebrated in the above passages cannot be the institution of gay marriage in India, given the heteronormative exclusions on which sexual citizenship is predicated. Instead, it is a wedding experience that takes place against overdetermined signi)ers of exceptional Indianness. Even if the exclusion of LGBT people in India from the institution of marriage entails a kind of social death (in a country that fetishizes both weddings and the system of marriage), Pink Vibgyor and Indjapink restore its displaced centrality through cultural experiences of authentic Indianness. It is not without signi)cance, then, that Indjapink’s branding tagline on its

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

95

website and social media page is the oft-recurring slogan “Watch India Come Alive”—a crucial emphasis on national life as opposed to the necropolitical dimensions of social death that are associated with queer exclusion and risk. The invitation to “watch India” in this instance functions in multiple and contradictory ways: as an incitement implicated in internalized orientalism; as a redeployment of colonial tropes to strategically cater to Western fantasies for pro)t; or as an exhibitionism that appears to reverse the imperialist power dynamics of the ethnographic gaze. In the context of gay tourism, the tagline to “watch India come alive” through images of snake charmers and elephant rides mobilizes oft-repeated orientalist tropes of Indian “tradition”—for purposes that are not quite traditional. Gay tourists who visit India from presumably “mature” locations can bear witness to a queer becoming that is enticingly unknown and embryonic. The risks of unfamiliarity that are associated with “immature” destinations are offset by the more familiar (and rei)ed) tropes of Indianness. The idea of India coming alive assumes an animation from a prior state of dormancy into a new world where the nation-state is no longer incommensurable with queerness. In this light, the queer witnessing of India’s metamorphosis authenticates the nation’s global interconnectedness. The new India that participates in the global economy of queer tourism thus replaces the more antiquated provincialism that existed prior to the economic liberalization of the 1990s. Indjapink’s ad campaign thus becomes an illustration of what Jasbir Puar calls the “optimization of life” that interpellates queer bodies to participate in nation-building projects.36 When Puar asks how queers “reproduce life” and “which queers are folded into life,” she calls for the tracking of those moments where queer bodies “work in the service of management, reproduction, and regeneration” (35–36). The con0ation of India “coming alive” with emerging gay visibility “folds” queerness back into the nation-state—but the idea of a gay Indian subject who functions as the emissary for Indian sexual exceptionalism warrants more calibrated quali)cation in the context of gay tourism in India. For Puar, the U.S. sexual exceptionalism that buttresses homonationalist politics is mediated by the war on terror in which the U.S. nation-state “must temporarily suspend its heteronormative imagined community to consolidate national sentiment and consensus” (3). But in the Indian context, queer subjects are not national subjects who have legal or political currency, at least in the same sense that Puar describes above.

96

!"#$%&' (

Gay tourism is not predicated on the suspension of heteronormativity; in fact, it feeds off its sexual economies of risk, violence, and safety. While Puar’s critique of sexual exceptionalism foregrounds the nation’s selective use of queerness, in the case of Indjapink, the interdependence is reversed—it is queerness that is dependent on the nation-state for its legitimacy and legibility. Globally, the mediation of queerness through nationalist symbols establishes the visibility of India on the gay tourist map as an exotic location in an industry that requires innovative branding, constant reinvention, and continued novelty of location. Locally, Indjapink’s reliance on conventional national signi)ers authorizes queerness as autochthonous, especially as a way to interrogate the homophobic logic that insists on homosexuality as a Western import or a problematic legacy of colonization. With Indjapink, we therefore witness an “emergence of national homosexuality” that is, however, analytically distinct from Puar’s theorization of homonationalism (2). Rather than mobilizing homonationalism as the explanatory category to understand this mutual implication of nation and queerness, gay tourism’s dependence on mobilizing “Indianness” can be more usefully understood in relation to a sexual economy that warrants what Rupal Oza has called “a )delity to nation and place in response to globalization.”37 In Indjapink’s invitation to witness queer possibilities in a “new” India, there is simultaneously the recourse to a constructed antiquity that acquires the patina of time-honored tradition. This production of Indianness and queerness functions together in the service of global branding in which the former is coded as “tradition” and the latter as “modern.” It is thus no longer tenable to understand globalization as the paradox in which the universal brushes up against the particular, or the modern presses on the traditional. The supposed contradiction between a monolithically de)ned tradition and modernity is not globalization’s paradox, in fact, but a way to naturalize its seamlessness. In other words, these “clashes” are essential tools of globalization rather than their unintended consequences. The juxtaposition between “tradition” and “modernity” becomes the means through which the nation markets its identity to secure its place within global geographies of tourism. In his analysis of the cultural politics of branding that informed the “Incredible India” campaign, David Geary suggests that “tourism campaigns are not only economic tools designed to augment tourist revenues, but they also provide a privileged platform for framing geopolitical positions and relandscaping an image of the country as a rising world power.”38 Gay tourism participates in

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

97

this geopolitical branding by staging the “clash” between the traditional and modern with a queer twist. Both Indjapink and Pink Vibgyor exploit these supposed contradictions as intrinsic to the exceptional experience of gay tourism in India. For example, in the advertisement for Pink Vibgyor’s guided tour of Chennai’s spice routes, the very font of the text captures the reconciliation of “traditional Indianness” with queer modernity. Against a backdrop of the Hindu Kapaleeshwarar temple in Chennai, the font style blends English and the Hindi devanagari script characters to advertise “a fabulous 14 nights relaxed gay group tour to the best tourist attractions in South India.”39 The script, while recognizable in English, fuses the letters with Hindi matras (diacritics) as well as the horizontal bar that marks the top of any written Hindi word. The hybrid pastiche of signi)ers in the ad suggests the implausibility of discreteness and the desired inevitability of interconnectedness that marks the new nation in the age of globalization. Modernity, queerness, tradition, and Indianness can thus no longer be neatly disentangled from one another. A similar juxtaposition of tradition and modernity is played out even more explicitly in the marketing campaign of Indjapink ()gure 2.1). For example, the Diwali greeting for Indjapink’s social media page features an image of a hunky shirtless man with conventional good looks and sculpted biceps. With the hint of a bulging crotch and an inviting half smirk, the lure of the image personi)es and sexualizes the invitation to watch India “come alive” through a queer gaze. The tight jeans and exposed torso objectify the male form that is in keeping with the “new” Bollywood iconography over the last decade, in which the male body has assumed greater scopophilic visibility and (homo)erotic attention. This new millennium masculinity of self-spectacle is, however, framed by traditional Diwali iconography, with a diya in the hand of the model and a traditional colorful rangoli design in the background. The rangoli image frames the muscular torso almost as if it were an extension of the body itself, and is reminiscent of the colorful rainbow wings on a Pride parade 0oat. Traditional during Diwali and conventionally done by women, the art of rangoli is considered an auspicious ritual that brings good luck to families. While germane to religious occasions and festivals like Diwali, it is not uncommon to see rangoli designs used today in )ve-star hotel lobbies or as welcome gestures for tourists visiting India. The secularization of ritual thus lends itself to queer reappropriation in Indjapink’s image while simultaneously showcasing the nationalistic branding of gay tourism.

98

!"#$%&' (

Like Mister and Art House’s insistence on “boldness” that coexists with convention, the Indjapink image captures the sexual audacity of a “new” India while refusing to jettison “tradition.” The hunky Diwali greeting does not simply reconcile or adapt itself to tradition. Instead, it cheekily plays with the ostensible incongruity between gay sexuality and Indian tradition, exploiting their apparent inconsistency, while also offering a modern space where they might exist in seamless harmony with one another. Such a “queering” of Indian tradition (however monolithically de)ned) might appear at )rst to interrogate the rejection of LGBT Indians as “inauthentic” or “anti-national.” As pointed out in the introduction (and the chapters to follow), the project of Hindu nationalism—state-sponsored or otherwise—has been at the forefront of narrowly de)ning the ideological terms of “Indianness” around casteist, religious, gendered, and heteronormative exclusions. But Indjapink’s brand of queer nationalism does not serve as a counterpoint to Hindu nationalism’s calci)cation of tradition and modernity; in fact, it sits adjacent to it, replicating its worlding projects through the ideological framework of what, drawing on Shampa Biswas, I referred to in the last chapter as the desire “to be modern, but in the ‘Indian’ way.”40 Gay tourism thus participates in the negotiation between liberal economic policy that courts global markets and the more localized nationalism that manifests itself through essentialist ideas about an Indian “soul” or cultural signi)ers of “tradition.” Gay tourism’s reliance on signi)ers of “Indianness” might at )rst appear simply as archaic remnants of colonial orientalism that are repackaged and sold for Western consumption. But their ef)cacy is a product of globalization’s dependence on nationalist projects rather than the dissolving of nation-state frameworks. Despite their apparent oppositionality, gay tourism and Hindu nationalism partake in a )delity to the nation-state as a way of negotiating the fracturing effects of globalization. In this light, Indjapink’s packaging of queerness through Hindu festivals, religious iconography, and heritage landmarks operates in the same performative vicinity as Hindu nationalism’s selective mobilization of tradition. In her analysis of Hindu nationalism, Biswas suggests that the seemingly oppositional encounter between Hindutva’s investment in foreign capital and its anxieties around “westernization” is one that is reconcilable in material practice. While the BJP ruling party can appeal to its urban upper-class base which has a vested interest in India’s participation in the global market, the party’s moral, religious, and cultural projects of nationalism are carried out by grassroots organizations like

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

99

the Shiv Sena, the RSS, the ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Viddyathi Parishad), and the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad). According to Biswas, the joint—if, at times, uneasy—collaboration between these organizations and the BJP “gives them a measure of organic unity, making it possible for the BJP to project a politically benign face, while the RSS and the VHP carry on aggressive mass campaigns on controversial and overtly communal issues, such as cow slaughter and Ayodhya-like liberation of temples.”41 The contradictions between liberalization and nativist nationalism are alternatively resolved or clash within these different incarnations of Hindu nationalism, depending on ideological convenience and political expediency. For example, in what has by now become an almost annual ritual of violence, various ranks of Hindu nationalists have participated in protests against the “corruption” of Indian tradition through “Western” practices such as the celebration of Valentine’s Day. In her analysis of protests over India hosting the Miss World pageant, Rupal Oza warns against the valorization of local national struggles against globalization, since these protests can often take place via “deeply problematic constructions of gender and sexuality.”42 In the context of the Valentine’s Day protests, groups such as the Bajrang Dal, Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha, and the Hindu Yuva Vahini have harassed couples in public parks and vandalized shops selling Valentine’s Day cards while shouting slogans such as “Bharatiya sanskriti zindabaad” (“Long live Indian culture”) and “Videshi sambyata nahi chalega” (“Western civilization will not do”). However, at a rally organized by the Hindu Samhati on February 14, 2017, the typical resistance to Valentine’s Day was radically reversed. Rather than protest the holiday’s supposedly detrimental in0uence on Indian culture, the organization celebrated the day as a way of challenging “love jihad”— the idea of Muslim men seducing Hindu women into marriage as a mechanism to convert populations from Hinduism to Islam. Valentine’s Day was thus the occasion for Tapan Ghosh of the Hindu Samhati to urge Hindu men to “fall in love” as a mode of reproductive biopolitics to secure future generations of Hindus in India. One of the speakers at the event urged the audience not to “get misled by nicknames like Paltu or Bapi. A Sajjad or Hosen Ali may be their actual names.”43 Valentine’s Day thus becomes the occasion to centralize the Hindu body to combat the deceptive Muslim who commits love jihad as a way of smuggling the immorality of sharia law and triple talaq into the national fabric. The new embrace of Valentine’s Day is indicative of an adaptability that marks Hindu fundamentalism—even if this 0exibility in relation

100

!"#$%&' (

to the global (or what is perceived as “Western”) continues to effect a parochial rigidity through which the nation is imagined and essentialized. Thus paradoxically, there is an elasticity to its dogma that allows the anti-Western nativism of Hindutva to still be aligned with worlding aspirations of Indian modernity. The malleability of Hindu nationalism is an ideological necessity if it is to reconcile the local with the global. Gay tourism operates under the same enabling constraints—that is, through globalization’s demand for 0exibility in which assertions of tradition and modernity can buttress each other rather than appear as irreconcilable contradictions. Even while the project of gay tourism in India is framed as both a sanctuary and a bold alternative to the parochialism of “the traditionalists,” it mobilizes conventional markers of Indian “tradition”—holi festivals, Diwali diyas, and heritage landmarks—in order to be “modern” in an exceptionally “Indian way.” On the one hand, these national signi)ers appear to conform to tourism’s investment in depicting exotic destinations as historically )xed and immobile—what Bandyopadhyay and Morais call an expression of “unchanged Orientalism” that is used to market India as a tourist site.44 On the other hand, like the altered re-signi)cation of Valentine’s Day, Indjapink guarantees a transformative experience that is more in tune with a newer nation-state, while simultaneously invoking its ancient and unchanged essence. It is—as Indjapink’s promotional material promises—“travel with a difference” in a safer, cleaner, shinier India.

“Safety” and the Politics of the Rape Capital The unique combination of “unchanged orientalism” and global modern cosmopolitanism that marks the “essence” of a “new India” is evident in a 2017 newspaper article in the Deccan Herald entitled “Holi Colours Draw Foreign Tourists to India.” The piece begins with an eloquent description that carefully mobilizes the rhetoric of modernity along with traditional signi)ers of the Hindu festival of color: “A penchant for life in technicolor with a dash of herbal colours, crunchy gujias, chilled thandais and soulful ghazals: the heady cocktail is proving to be an irresistible draw for foreign tourists to celebrate Holi in India, say tourism industry experts.”45 The references to gujias, thandais (traditional snacks and drinks), and ghazals (an indigenous poetic genre) conjure up time-honored rituals and ancient sacred customs that are

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

101

blended into a “heady cocktail.” The suggestion of intoxication invokes a more trendy and cosmopolitan image of a nation that is equally at ease with soulful piety and bold irreverence. The word “technicolor” captures this duality, indicating the amalgam of color and brightness that is intrinsic to the Holi festival, but also suggesting the innovation and digital technology associated with a global multinational communications corporation. Rajat Singla, the operator of Pink Vibgyor, is one of the “industry experts” quoted in the article, in which he refers to Holi as providing an opportunity to offer the tourist a “cultural connect.” Commenting on the draw of Holi for tourists visiting India from the United States and European countries, Singla remarks: “They are very eager to participate and so we provide them with white kurtas and herbal colours as well” (Deccan Herald). However, this multicultural interconnectedness betrays a more sober reality of violence that lies beneath the inclusive image of mutual cultural exchange. The article begins with the quali)cation that the tourist industry in India continues to thrive “despite the relatively subdued scenario owing to incidents like the Delhi gang-rape.” The article is referring, of course, to the infamous incident that took place in Delhi on December 16, 2012, which thrust the issue of rape and sexual violence against women in India into national and international headlines. On that day, 23-year-old Jyoti Pandey boarded a bus after an evening out with a friend, Awindra Pandey, in South Delhi. Unable to )nd an auto-rickshaw or public transportation to take them back home, the friends entered an unlicensed bus when one of the bus operators suggested that he could drive the couple back to Dwarka, a neighborhood in the southwest district of Delhi. Once on the bus, the bus operator along with )ve of his friends proceeded to beat up Awindra until he was unconscious, and then they gang-raped and physically assaulted Jyoti at the back of the bus. After the heinous attack, the couple were thrown off the bus and were found unconscious the next morning. The graphic details of the assault were gratuitously and sensationally described in the Indian press over the next few months. The attacks were so vicious that Jyoti succumbed to her injuries two weeks later and died in a Singapore hospital where she was being treated. The incident sparked widespread protests throughout the nation. Angry at the apathy shown by the police and government toward victims of sexual assault and rape, protesters marched to Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit’s house and were beaten by law enforcement personnel. Subsequent protests took place around India Gate and the Indian Parliament.

102

!"#$%&' (

Ultimately, four of the perpetrators received a death sentence and were executed—the )fth attacker was a juvenile who received three years in a reform facility, and the sixth perpetrator was found hanging in his prison cell (authorities assumed the killing was a suicide). The national story quickly became global, with articles about the incident in the New York Times and the Guardian. A BBC documentary about the incident, India’s Daughter, directed by Leslee Udwin, made the rounds of various international )lm festival circuits following a ban in India on account of the fact that the )lm might have supposedly incited violence against women. Violence against women and gay tourism represent diametrically opposite spectrums of India’s sexual economies—the former pointing to horri)c acts of sexual assault and brutal coercion; the latter suggesting a sex-positive embrace of queer safe spaces within the nation-state. And yet, despite their apparent dissimilarity, in this )nal section, I want to conclude by unpacking the implications of their rhetorical proximity in the Deccan Herald’s piece on tourism and the Holi festival. My goal is not to establish a causative link between the two, but to understand how the worlding dimensions of gay tourism assume even greater primacy and urgency at an ideological moment when the city of Delhi (which, in turn, becomes a microcosm for the nation) acquired the global reputation of a “rape capital.” In the context of the greater global media attention paid to sexual violence against women in India, gay tourism’s production of safe geographies does not simply function as a sanctuary for the protection of gay tourists. Instead, it also operates as a compensatory mechanism of worlding in which the nation that is cast as primitive and premodern can be redeemed and then recuperated via the modernizing lens of queer cosmopolitanism. In other words, I am suggesting that gay tourism becomes valuable and productive to the nation in its ability to simultaneously mobilize and offset the shameful image of Delhi as a “rape capital.” These productive capacities of gay tourism are not, of course, intentionally wielded at the moment when India is framed as a pre-feminist site of risk. Instead, they assume a heightened signi)cance when local violence becomes globally intelligible (or unintelligible, as the case may be in this context) and implicated in an international rights discourse that is predicated on the logic of an enlightened state. Gay tourism functions then as a replacement system, restoring the progressive brand of the nation in the midst of global scrutiny by upholding its commitment to the protection of the minoritized national subject.

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

103

The international attention paid to the Delhi rape incident has been critiqued by Indian feminists in terms of how the discourse on sexual violence and rape culture in India predictably lapses into essentialist explanations based on the innate misogyny of Indian men, or into simplistic savior narratives of global sisterhood. In her critique of India’s Daughter, for example, Kavita Krishnan suggests that the documentary, even while well-meaning in intent, ampli)es the narrative of the monstrous Indian patriarch while simultaneously eliding the local history of women’s movements for gender equality in India.46 But in attending to the problems of transnational reception, it is worth noting how the global understanding of the incident was not only restricted to the rhetoric of primitivism where India is framed as regressive and barbaric. In her analysis of the Delhi gang rape, Poulami Roychowdhury suggests that the global coverage of the assault was framed as a clash between “old” and “new” India in order to foreground the nation’s participation in preventing the “violation of modern, rights-bearing subjects.” According to Roychowdhury, in place of international representations of India as backward, what emerged in media representations of the attack was a “new relatively empowered, ‘Third World’ woman—one who not only demands women’s liberation but does so within the con)nes of a global consumer economy.” Consequently, the violation of this “new woman” functions “as a site of international curiosity and scrutiny, while providing a rationale for political claims and legal intervention.”47 The staging of a new India in opposition to an old one is, as discussed earlier, one of the means through which gay tourism secures its exceptional appeal in which the contradictions between tradition and modernity are exploited as exceptionally Indian. In citing the continued promise of tourism in the face of the “subdued scenario” of sexual violence, the worlding of Delhi as a queer sanctuary works to repair the city’s reputation as a risky and violent rape capital. But there is another sense in which the idea of “rape capital” is locally mobilized beyond its obvious connotations. In this broader sense, rape “capital” also refers to the forms of economic, cultural, and political utility that are extracted around sexual violence, as a way of containing its systemic effects, but also as a way to capitalize on the exceptionalizing of the attack. In her analysis of U.S. sexual exceptionalism, Jasbir Puar points to the double meaning of the word “exceptional”—i.e., “that which signals distinction from (to be unlike, dissimilar) as well as excellence.”48 In other words, if the Delhi assault could be framed as anomalous—a solitary stain on an otherwise new and shining India—the

104

!"#$%&' (

nation can be exonerated and elevated as exceptional and continue to participate in a global cultural economy in which the democratic citizen-consumer holds important political and ideological currency. The misogynist responses to the Delhi rape by Indian politicians, religious leaders, and even some voices on the Left foreground how the incident was not isolated or exceptional but deeply embedded in the fabric of rape culture in India—that is, it was a consequence of systemic structural violence against women that cannot simply be blamed on working-class, lower-caste, or migrant men, as was often emphasized in the coverage of the case.49 For instance, Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the Hindu right-wing organization RSS, infamously contended that “rapes occur in India, not Bharat”—suggesting that sexual assaults in urban centers like Delhi were a consequence of “westernization” caused by liberalization. He further remarked: “Where ‘Bharat’ becomes ‘India’ with the in0uence of western culture, these type of incidents happen. The actual Indian values and culture should be established at every stratum of society where women are treated as ‘mother.’ ”50 For Bhagwat, the locus of “actual” Indian values that are devoid of sexual violence is rural India—ignoring, of course, the high incidence of the rape of tribal and Adivasi women in Indian villages across the nation. In attempting to explain Bhagwat’s comments, the RSS leader Manmohan Vaidya ostensibly clari)ed the invocation of “Bharat” as distinct from India as a way to draw attention to “those who kept their original culture.” Like the insistence on constructing homosexuality as a Western import, he further asserted that “rape in India was never heard of, certainly not gang rape, it is an imported concept.”51 Similarly, Kailash Vijayvargiya, a BJP minister in Madhya Pradesh, drew on Hindu mythology and the sacred place of women in the domestic realm to comment on the causes of the Delhi incident: “One has to abide by certain moral limits. If you cross this limit, you will be punished, just like Sita was abducted by Ravana.”52 The Hindu Right’s ostensible “concern” for the safety of women has thus only enhanced the moral policing of sexuality, justifying the continued violence being committed by “anti-Romeo” squads and Valentine’s Day protesters. But the politics of victim blaming was not germane only to the Hindu Right. Kavita Krishnan, for example, points out that leftist columnists like Raj Kishor make for strange bedfellows with the Hindu Right in the linking of women’s freedom to capitalism. Through a watered-down Marxist lens that is presented as a critique of the free market, Kishor accuses feminists calling for women’s freedom as a “consigning [of] women into the )re of capitalism.” Furthermore,

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

105

he suggests that the Indian woman’s entry into the public realm results in her being “draped in the robes of capitalist culture” that results in an incitement of kamukta (lust).53 If these self-appointed spokesmen of “Indian tradition” displace the roots of sexual violence onto the decadent immorality of “Western” in0uence, representatives of an ostensibly “new” India frame the incident as out of sync with a “modern” nation. In a piece entitled “How the Indian Dream Died with the Delhi Gang Rape Victim,” S. Mitra Kalita suggests, for example, that the death of Jyoti Pandey is symbolic of a larger loss—of “upward mobility that de)nes modern India, a palpable sense that you could be Somebody if you study and work hard enough; that your caste, your parents, your gender, might not get in the way after all.” The Delhi rape case thus symbolically contradicts India’s “meteoric rise” and “phenomenal” growth. Even while mourning the passing of the “Indian dream,” the piece ends on a note of cautious optimism: “India’s current crisis has claimed the simple dreams of one woman. But it is not too late for the rest of the nation.”54 In this framework, the nation’s worlding aspirations are only temporarily interrupted by the atrocities against women. The reparative possibilities of upward mobility can thus still restore the promise of a caste-blind and postfeminist Indian dream. It is not surprising, then, that several accounts of the Delhi incident frame Jyoti Pandey through an aspirational lens of social 0exibility that is obstructed by the tragedy of middle-class dreams deferred. An article in the New York Times entitled “Portrait Emerges of Victim in New Delhi Gang Rape” informs the reader that Pandey “was studious, ambitious and about to be married,” was “studying physiotherapy,” and was a “hard-working student who had doggedly pursued a medical education.”55 The middle-class relatability of this framing informed the national and global hypervisibility around the incident, especially in comparison to the lack of outrage around women raped by the Indian Army in Kashmir or Muslim women assaulted during riots by agents of the state.56 In her analysis of the aftermath of the rape, Krupa Shandilya suggests that media reports constructed Jyoti Pandey as “everywoman” even while this universalized category was implicitly framed along caste and class lines. “Everywoman,” Shandilya writes, “is not an empty signi)er” but is “co-opted to mean a Hindu, upper-caste, middle-class woman.”57 Despite the similar class background of Pandey and her attackers, if the former was framed through the lens of middle-class prosperity, representations of the latter worked to con)rm familiar tropes in

106

!"#$%&' (

which criminality becomes intimately linked to poverty. Four of the six men behind the attack lived in Ravi Das colony, a slum in the southern part of Delhi on which the city depends for its vast labor supply of construction workers, vegetable vendors, maids, and rickshaw drivers. Investigative reports attempting to contextualize and comprehend the violence resorted to genealogical tracings of the perpetrators, most typically by mapping their geographies of migration from rural villages in Rajasthan to the urban capital of India.58 While the responses of the Hindu Right tried to shift the horrors of rape on to urban “westernized” India in order to maintain the sanctity of a rural (and authentically national) space, in these accounts, the ontology of sexual violence is mapped onto a temporally primitive India that can no longer exist in its current state of already achieved modernity. In addition to the relegation of violence to the past, the worlding of the city thus also requires the displacement of the assault on to a spatial elsewhere—that is, rural fringes on the margins of the nation rather than the central location of a global metropolis like Delhi. The relevance of place and geography is particularly crucial in the context of rape capital’s sexual economies, given the repeated emphasis in media reports on the moments before the attack on Jyoti Pandey and her friend. Prior to boarding the bus, the couple watched the )lm Life of Pi at a multiplex theater in the Select Citywalk mall located in the Saket District Center, a trendy neighborhood in South Delhi. Citywalk is the embodiment of the “new” India’s leisure economy and marks the con0uence of a wide variety of multinational corporations such as Zara, Calvin Klein, and KFC that occupy the space of the mall. In their analysis of the multiplex theater in India, Adrian Athique and Douglas Hill suggest that its emergence represents a kind of transnational “aspirational architecture” that is central to the postcolonial city’s worlding project. The emergence of the multiplex in the last decade, according to them, “gives physical form to the proscriptions of late capital, and which endows consuming society with a material reality.”59 If the spatial scripts of modernity that de)ne Pandey’s attackers track a movement from the backwardness of the rural village to the squalor of the urban slums, her own navigation of space that night—from the sheltered sanctuary of the mall to the unanticipated peril of the bus—serves as an unfortunate reminder of the menace of an older, more parochial nation that leaves its violent mark on cosmopolitan scenes of middle-class leisure and urbanity. In this picture, the multiplex as the site of urban capital is implicitly coded as a zone of safety and modernity, serving as

+#,& -. %"& !-%/

107

the symbolic microcosm of a life to which Pandey aspired before it was so violently cut short. It is not without signi)cance that before Pandey’s identity had been revealed in the media, some reports temporarily identi)ed her as “amanat,” meaning namesake, treasure, or a valued object. In an economy of rape capital, the construction of Pandey as a cherished property fetishized her death, converting it into national property, even as it sought to absolve itself from any accountability for the violence that led to her death. While refusing to own the stigma of Delhi as a rape capital (in its literal sense), the naming of Pandey as amanat gestured to how violence is not simply contained, but also rendered as an exception to the progress of national modernity projects. Rape capital thus participates in spatial economies of risk and safety that are not structurally dissimilar to gay tourism’s investments in the “art of being global,” as I have suggested earlier. Both negotiate and mobilize constructions of old and new, of tradition and modernity in the service of global experiments in urban worlding that are still locally particular in form and content—and thus modern in distinctly “Indian ways.” Like the safe sanctuaries created by organizations like Indjapink and Pink Vibgyor, calls for the safety and protection of women in the aftermath of the rape sought to effect ways to spatially dissociate violence from idealized urban zones of renewal and aspirational geographies of world-class aesthetics. The aftermath of the Delhi gang rape was marked by renewed calls for the revision of legislation, the enhancement of the Indian carceral state, public hangings, and capital punishment (although the latter was rejected by the recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee). In a different historical and geopolitical context, Christina Hanhardt has argued that urban politics in the United States after the 1960s has “hinged on the operation of violence as an individualized threat that then justi)es calls for forms of state violence, such as criminalization and privatization. Thus, certain lesbians and gay men, as they move out of the category of criminal and turn to the language and strategies of state protection (in the call for rights or responsive policing) necessarily play a key role in this urban transformation.”60 Similarly, the demand for heightened state protection and expanded punitive jurisprudence in the form of the death penalty after the Delhi gang rape made it hard to imagine social change beyond the lens of individualized retribution and punishment. In a post-1990s liberalized India, the justi)cations of criminalization and privatization function under the aegis of safety and modernity. But the participation of gay tourism in the production of safety and modernity in India does

108

!"#$%&' (

not, as in Hanhardt’s framework, necessarily signal the movement of the Indian queer subject outside the domain of criminality—not only because of the criminalization of “unnatural sex” via Section 377 until the 2018 ruling, but also because the LGBT tourist is, for the most part, a foreign traveler. But in de)ning a zone of safety against the violence of the “rape capital,” gay tourism produces aesthetic regimes of security that participate in vigilant and valuable productions of capital for a new and incredible India.

!"#$%&' (

Queer Privacy during Seditious Times: Re-Touching the Case of Ramchandra Siras

Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can be so only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. One may want to, or manage to for a while, but despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about “my sexuality” or “my gender,” as we do and as we must, we nevertheless mean something complicated that is partially concealed by our usage. As a mode of relation, neither gender nor sexuality is precisely a possession, but, rather, is a mode of being dispossessed, a way of being for another by virtue of another. —Judith Butler, Precarious Life

The understanding of globalization as ubiquitous and inescapable has typically relied on the language of touch and intimate contact to explain shifts in spatial and temporal scales. Globalization purportedly “touches” all lives, even those who occupy spaces that are “remote” or seemingly far removed from centers of power, production, or pro)t. The operation of global capital is understood as effecting a compression of proximity that performs a more intimate touching between “global” and “local,” as in the case of the foreign tourist visiting an LGBT-friendly India as discussed in the previous chapter.1 Even for those theorists who are more attuned to the fractal and dispersed effects of globalization, or who reject the static meanings of “local” and “global,” the 109

110

!"#$%&' (

geometries of interconnectedness assume a central place in understanding transnational *ows of bodies and capital.2 But what can we make, then, of those bodies under globalized logics who have historically been stigmatized as “untouchable”? How are these bodies both interpellated and disenfranchised under the professed universality of globalization’s touch? Against the seemingly unanimous mobilization of touch as a prevailing descriptor of globalization’s spatial and temporal elasticity and hyperconnectivity, I want to provoke a dissonance that is not so much antithetical to, but beside (if not completely outside) the parameters of touch: the practice of untouchability against Dalit communities in India.3 (“Dalits” is an umbrella term for members of the “lowest” castes in India who have traditionally been subjected to untouchability.) In 2015, a matrimonial column in The Mid-Day, a daily Mumbai newspaper, became an ostensibly de)ant *ashpoint for post-Koushal gay visibility in India when Padma Iyer, the mother of gay activist Harish Iyer, disregarded heteronormative conventions by posting an ad for a potential groom on his behalf. The ad stated: “Seeking 25–40, WellPlaced, Animal Loving, Vegetarian, GROOM for my SON (36, 5’11”) who works with an NGO, Caste no Bar (Though IYER Preferred).”4 While initially applauded for its *outing of matrimonial tradition, the ad subsequently received much social media backlash for its participation in caste hierarchies—the desire for an Iyer groom, despite the quali)cation of “Caste no Bar,” indicated a preference for an uppercaste Tamil Brahmin. In subsequently explaining and defending the motivations for the ad, Harish Iyer suggested that the intent was to use “disruptive advertising” as a way to “invade the heteronormative domain of marriage”—and that the reference to caste was simply an ironic mimicking of narrative conventions that mark traditional matrimonial columns (Outlook India). In Iyer’s response, casteist logic was also mainly attributed to his 85-year-old grandmother who tells her grandson: “Pullaiyyo ponno problem illai . . . anna nallai iyer pullaiaa irundha nalla irrukum (‘It doesn’t matter if it is a boy or a girl, it’d be nice though if he is a good Iyer boy’)” (Outlook India). The logic of Brahmanical privilege or cultural proscriptions around untouchability is thus eradicated from the present and relegated to a past historical moment—as humorously attributed to a caricatured and comically antiquated older generation. Iyer writes, “We found it pretty amusing that one could give up their prejudices with regard to sexuality, but not their preferences where caste goes” (Outlook India). The casteist logic

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

111

is then exonerated through a seemingly politicized gesture—Iyer suggests that queer visibility in the context of caste preference in the ad in fact served as a politicized antidote to the invisibility of gay Brahmins. The ad, he suggests, “was a way of saying there were enough samples of queer men in every caste, creed, religion, country and region, that one could actually have advertisements for their speci)city” (Outlook India). The very erasure of intersectionality thus ironically becomes the occasion to preempt critique by mimicking a rather predictable posturing of intersectionality rhetoric—what Jasbir Puar has called “gestural intersectionality that can perform a citational practice of alliance without actually doing intersectional research or alliance.”5 Iyer’s response quali)es his motivations by purportedly acknowledging the visibility of an intersectional subject (who still predictably appears as cis-gender and male). The preference for an Iyer groom is no longer symptomatic of naturalized caste privilege; instead, it is interpreted as asserting queer visibility across varied vectors of class, caste, and national identity. Given the limits of this response, it seems insuf)cient to merely call for recognizing multiple subject positions (queer and Dalit, or Dalit queers, for example) as a panacea for single-issue politics—a response that structurally replicates the limits of Iyer’s quali)cation by restricting political discourse to inclusive representation. My point in opening with this anecdote, then, is not simply to bestow political or epistemological authority on marginal subjectivities through the body that simultaneously transgresses caste hierarchies, (cis-)gender normativity, or compulsory heterosexuality—or even to make a politically imperative but fairly well-rehearsed call for broader alliances within progressive social movements. In a limited way, the ad ultimately serves as a negative illustration—a caution against the problems of gay tunnel vision and respectability politics. But if the intersections between sexual politics and Dalit/caste studies are to move beyond a simple instrumentalization of intersectionality as a performance of political capital, then their encounter with one another—as epistemological, political, and social categories—calls for a response that theorizes the interfacing of untouchability and queerness beyond an understanding of intersectionality as additive categories or the multiplication of identities. Put differently, in this chapter, I want to ask what happens when “queer” touches the category of caste; when queer is touched by caste; conversely, where it recoils from such touching; and )nally, when and where caste has always already been touched by sexual economies that

112

!"#$%&' (

mediate queerness. Rather than making the queer Dalit body a fetishized object of study as an antidote to Hindutva politics or caste-blind normative queerness, I want to build on what Lucinda Ramberg has called “the sexual politics of Dalit studies” in order to theorize a queer economy of touch that refuses occlusions around both sexual subjectivity and caste critique.6 In her essay on the politics of queer time and Dalit religiosity in South India, Lucinda Ramberg, for example, has suggested that a “sexual politics of Dalit studies” can be unpacked through an attention to temporal “asynchronicity inhabited by those deemed backward.” Ramberg’s ethnography draws attention to the overlapping political projects of queer and Dalit studies. She writes: “They share a secular modern conception of human subjectivity; privilege epistemologies of the margin; and denaturalize and resignify embodied stigma to mobilize forms of political and social transformation.”7

Queer Dalit Studies and the Politics of Touch In addition to the above connections that Ramberg makes, I am suggesting that an attention to the epistemology of touching has the potential to outline convergences and productively theorize the fractures between queer and Dalit politics. My broader goal is to articulate the potential of queer theoretical and political frameworks that could resist rather than collude with the projects of exceptionalism and nativism that underlie the agendas of Hindutva casteism. In keeping with my arguments in previous chapters in which globalization is not simply a supranational force that is imposed on Indian sovereignty, but one that gets provincialized and triangulated via local particularities, this chapter examines more broadly how domestic formations around caste and sexual politics push against the nation-state’s imagined unity as well as its purported participation in global and “revolutionary” modernity. By pitting globalization’s reliance on tropes of tactility in tension with regional prohibitions around touch, my point is not simply to draw attention to the disjuncture between global rhetoric and local particularity; it is also to highlight how the unbundling of the nation-state under conditions of globalization continues to, as Aihwa Ong points out, “discipline, control, and regulate all kinds of populations, whether in movement or in residence.”8 The questions I pose about the capacities of touch are, of necessity, subjunctive in scope—what Saidiya Hartman calls “a grammatical

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

113

mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities.”9 How might queer and Dalit projects, through a political and epistemological touching, to use Butler’s phrase, come “undone” by one another? How might they be understood as “ways of being for another,” or indeed, “by virtue of another”?10 The emphasis on the speculative partially hints at material realities and political projects that might have already happened in the past, or have yet to be actualized in the present or future. The mobilization of touch in this context plays on the double meaning of the word: “touching” denotes methodological contact between theoretical inquiries and political practices that have been framed as discrete; but it also acquires more literalized connotations that allude to how the tactile experiences of touching (or its corporeal refusals) are performative in their production of stigma, shame, violence, and pleasure. The violence of untouchability that is central to caste exclusion constitutes the primal scene through which hierarchies around space, employment, education, marriage, and religion have been ingrained and institutionalized—even while the logics of developmentalism that mark Indian modernity must insist on their obsolescence and irrelevance in the present. The emphasis on touch also allows a critique of how privacy rights frame the “revolutionary” possibilities of LGBT rights in India. If sexual touch is conventionally thought of as that which is exclusively relegated to a private domain, what counterpublic modes of touching might contravene such a narrowly construed framing? I thus want to suggest that both queer and Dalit studies have much to offer in grappling with the question above. If queer theory has offered a discourse that refuses to accept the lines of heterosexuality as natural or neutral, Dalit studies has implicitly highlighted the central place of violent heterosexism in the naturalization of caste difference. To think of Dalit studies as a framework that offers a critique of heterosexism is to account for the myriad ways in which touching becomes a site of intense regulation, following which all discourses of intimacy are folded into proscriptive realms of careful and violent scrutiny. Implicit in this mutual collaboration of heterosexism with untouchability must be a Foucauldian understanding that taboos around touch are not simply negative or prohibitive in scope, but productive in terms of their elaboration of discourses around sex, desire, and marriage.11 The productive rather than a simplistically restrictive understanding of touch in this context is most obviously illustrated by the sexual violations that Dalit women experience at the hands of upper-caste men despite the interdictions around touch. The multiplication of discourses around sex and

114

!"#$%&' (

untouchability is mediated through caste imperatives that, according to V. Geetha, “normalize the sexual rapacity of upper-caste men, and protect the chastity of upper-caste women as well as punish the erring desire of untouchable men and contain the irrepressible sexual otherness of untouchable women.”12 In the context of epistemology, both queer and Dalit studies have foregrounded the centrality of touch and sensation in the alternative constitution of stigma and mutual relationality. In “Phenomenology of Untouchability,” Sundar Sarukkai, for example, complicates Western constructions of touch that reduce its multiple meanings to the axiomatic assumption of physical contact. In the material expression of caste hierarchies, however, de)lement is no longer predicated on physical touch, since untouchability becomes “a quality that inheres in the object.”13 Physical contact is thus no longer a prerequisite for Brahmanical notions of purity to have performative uptake when untouchability, according to Sarukkai, “gets carried into the ontology of a sense.”14 To put it in the Foucauldian language of individual speci)cation that has familiar resonances for queer studies, the untouchable becomes a kind of “personage” or “case study” through an incorporation of interiority: an untouchability of the soul.15 Through such proscriptions, it would appear as if the phenomenology of untouchability participates in a logic of anti-relationality that is stretched to its extreme limits. But in thinking through the phenomenology of touch in the context of Dalit studies, the logic of relationality cannot be avoided even as it is mediated by the violence of untouchability. According to Sarukkai, what makes untouchability unique in the Indian context is the way in which the not-touching of the other is, in essence, a rendering of the self as untouchable as well. He writes: “in the most essential sense, untouchability is actually about the always-present, potential untouchability not of another but of oneself.”16 Responding to Sarukkai’s formulation of Brahmanical law as a discourse that functions through its inability to “touch itself,” Milind Wakankar points out that if this touching of the self were possible, “it would at once af)rm and exceed its relation of difference to itself.” But instead, this failed touch of the self is externalized onto the body of the de)led Dalit: “Brahmanism is forced to cede to the not-to-be-touched Dalit the measure of negative self-relation that is required to imagine a notion of the uniquely individual.”17 In recalibrating the ontology of untouchability, these Dalit theorizations of touch do not con*ate radically incommensurate experiences of stigma and privilege, but instead theorize the relational dimensions of

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

115

self and other that get obscured through the personi)cation and consequent interiorization of untouchability. Even while “untouchability” might super)cially suggest a kind of non-performativity, it is crucial to recognize its performative iterations through repeated practices that bring into being that which they name. The internalization of de)lement is integral to what Butler would call the “reiterative and citational” logic of performative practice.18 The endurance of untouchability in this context is guaranteed via the repronormative and anti-queer logic of generational continuity; in other words, the lockstep of caste descent is enabled and propped up by its hereditary nature. Judith Butler’s mobilization of relationality as a way of coming “undone” by one another through touch (or even via its possibility) serves as a useful counterpoint to the generational repetition and insistence on impenetrability that marks the non-relational logic of untouchability. And while Butler is not theorizing in the register of political economy, I return to the idea of touch as dispossession to counter the rei)ed rhetoric of touch that subtends discourses around globalization. As Butler reminds us, we miss something when touch is repudiated; but also, more precisely, when we turn our bodies away from the shattering effects of dispossession. Thus, the mere materiality of touch cannot be privileged as the panacea to untouchability. In other words, my argument is not simply to compensate for the gap caused by “what is missed” through its replacement via a metaphysics of substance—in this context, the queer touching of the Dalit subject. Instead, it is to inquire what we can theorize beyond a recuperative impulse when we reckon more seriously with what is missed in stories about queer desire which, as I want to suggest, can also be read as primal scenes of (missed) touching.19

Primal Scenes of Missed Touch The opening scene of Aligarh (2016, Hansal Mehta) depicts an older man being taken home in a rickshaw in the middle of a winter night on the dimly lit streets of the North Indian town from which the )lm gets its title. Upon arrival at his home, there is no typical drop-off and exchange of money for what appears at )rst to be a quotidian activity. Instead, the driver matter-of-factly follows the man to his apartment. For an extended period of cinematic time, the camera simply lingers on the outside of the apartment—a light appears to switch on, and then off

116

!"#$%&' (

again. The suggestion of a sexual encounter between the two men takes place beyond the frames of the )lm. Its existence might only be apparent to those viewers with prior diegetic knowledge of the )lm’s premise, which is based on real-life events. At one level, this deliberate distance from the zone of domestic privacy appears to productively disable any scopic visual consumption of interiority that marks the viewer’s will to see. At another level, however, the very opening of the )lm becomes the )rst occasion through which an encounter with queer desire is marked by absence. Admittedly, the intentional averting of the viewer’s gaze cannot axiomatically be indicative of missed touch; touching does indeed take place even in the absence of our ability to witness its dispossessive transgressions. This touching is met, as we will soon learn, with violent consequences. However, if the undermining of our gaze forestalls a scopophilic response, how does it simultaneously suture the viewer’s preempted voyeurism to missed touch? In what ways does this opening encounter with missed touch ultimately launch a different set of averted triangulations in the )lm (with caste and class) in which non-contact implicates queer encounters with the violent performance of untouchability? Critically and almost universally lauded for its sensitive portrayal of Ramchandra Siras, a Marathi poet and professor at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Aligarh depicts the events of the last few months of his life leading up to his mysterious death—which was proclaimed by police to be a suicide. Siras’s story was thrust into national headlines when he was suspended from his job as a professor of Marathi literature in the Department of Modern Indian Languages on grounds of “gross” misconduct. On the night of February 8, 2010 (referenced in the opening scene of the )lm), a group of three men forcibly entered the professor’s apartment where he was involved in an intimate sexual encounter with the rickshaw puller. After )lming the encounter, the men, who were suspected to be af)liated with a local TV station’s camera crew, threatened to expose Siras in the media, claiming that they had received complaints about the professor’s “immoral” and inappropriate conduct. The very next day, the local media published various reports of the incident, after which the professor was of)cially suspended from AMU. A public relations of)cer who represented AMU suggested that the incident was a stain on the character of the university that “no institution of repute [could] overlook.”20 Along with his suspension, Siras was also ordered to leave the premises of the university quarters where he resided. On February 24, Siras was served a formal charge-sheet

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

117

with a statement that he had “indulged himself [sic] into immoral sexual activity and in contravention of basic moral ethics while residing in Quarter 21-C, Medical College, AMU, Aligarh, thereby undermin[ing the] pious image of the teacher community and as a whole, tarnishing the image of the University.”21 Aligarh’s central plot revolves around the emergence of Siras (played by Manoj Bajpayee) as a reluctant activist for the gay rights movement in India just a year after Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was declared unconstitutional by the Delhi High Court.22 The )lm poignantly juxtaposes Siras’s bewilderment at his newly imposed public role with the familiar comforts of his private life, spent in the solitude of his apartment surrounded by the joys of poetry and the music of classic Bollywood songs sung by Lata Mangeshkar.23 Deepu Sebastian (played by Raj Kumar Yadav), a journalist who befriends Siras, serves as his (and the viewer’s) mediator between the interior world of solitude and the public arena of law and social justice that he is unwittingly thrust into. The viewer’s own will to knowledge is sutured via the character of Deepu, whose initial prurient curiosity is transformed into a more perceptive empathy by the end of the )lm. The )lm concludes with the April 1 ruling in which the Allahabad High Court ordered the reinstatement of Siras in his job at AMU, along with the mandate to return him to the campus accommodations that were rightfully his until his retirement. A week after the landmark legal judgment, Siras was found dead in mysterious circumstances. Traces of poison in his system raised suspicions that he might have been murdered. His death was of)cially ruled a suicide by the police, however, and the case remains unresolved on account of lack of evidence. The critical reception of Aligarh has picked up on its emphasis on the violation of individual rights—Subhash K. Jha called the )lm “acutely thought-provoking” in its representation of “a homosexual man’s right to privacy.” He suggests that the )lm “constructs a passionately persuasive case for an individual’s right to use his private space as he wills.”24 Similarly, Apurva Asrani, the screenwriter of Aligarh, has commented that at the crux of the story is the “yearning for privacy and for dignity” for Siras. He continues: “I don’t think you owe anyone an explanation about your sexuality. What transpires behind closed doors and involves consenting adults is nobody else’s business.”25 If Jha and Asrani point to the centrality of privacy violation within the narrative of queer intimacy, Hansal Mehta (the )lm’s director) insists on the purportedly universal desire for privacy in order to disaggregate it from the )lm’s queer

118

!"#$%&' (

speci)city. While foregrounding his support for the decriminalization of homosexuality, Mehta also suggests: “what happened to Siras could happen to us. This )lm is not on homosexuality but it is on the right to privacy. No one has the right to interfere in our personal lives.”26 The zone of privacy is thus con)gured as the ideal location and expected site of touch.

Touching in Public(s) Later on in this chapter I will return to a more detailed analysis of the idea that the injury in Aligarh originates from the violation of (queer) intimacy—that is, the desire to touch and be touched “behind closed doors” as a universal right that ought to be recognized within progressive conceptions of legal justice and Indian modernity. But before unpacking the ideological terms on which queer touch is predicated in the context of the )lm, it is crucial to push against the notion of touch and queer intimacy as one that is predicated on divisions between private and public, ghar and bahir, or home and the world. It is worth recalling the important critiques that Indian feminists have made of how simplistic distinctions between private and public have always functioned to the detriment of women; most obviously, for example, in the legal refusal to recognize marital rape as a form of sexual violence, since its relegation to the domestic sphere exempts it from the purview of the state. These feminist critiques have implicitly warned against making the private sphere the idealized sanctuary from which the violence of public domains might be contested—since the “private” is in fact saturated with sexual violence that is exonerated by familialism and domesticity. In the context of my arguments about Aligarh, I want to suggest that the politics of touch cannot exclusively be the domain of private sex and conjugality (or even love and romance) despite authorial intentions that view the emergence of queer visibility through the lens of privacy rights. Such separations, as David Eng suggests, only serve “to consolidate and separate the private domain of the bourgeois home from the public realm of work, society, and politics.27 Thus, in those moments where queer touch appears to be exclusively about privacy rights, what are the public, or even the global terms of intimacy’s emergence? And what exclusions and hierarchies enable its consolidations? In the above authorial framing and critical reception of Aligarh, sexual citizenship is conceptualized in negative terms—the right not to be violated, or the

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

119

right to be left alone in private as the foundation for individual dignity. But the very pleasures of privacy that must be quarantined from injury and violation are also marked by a Brahmanical logic in which the stigma of untouchability denies entry into the sanctity of the private domain. In this context, the above sanctuaries of the private (which are always at risk of being transgressed) might not even be accessible to begin with, given the interdictions around caste hierarchies. In an essay entitled “Of Garbage, Modernity, and the Citizen’s Gaze,” Dipesh Chakrabarty contends that the public/private dichotomy that much of bourgeois Western modernity is predicated on proves untenable in the postcolonial Indian context, in which ostensibly private activities such as changing clothes, urinating, sleeping, and defecating continue to be performed in the open. Chakrabarty writes: “The street presented, as it were, a total confusion of the ‘private’ and ‘public’ in the many different uses to which it was put.”28 For Chakrabarty, the public character of these activities contravenes both colonial civilizing missions and postcolonial modernity aspirations. The subversive resistance to sterilizing the unruliness of the public sphere is thus a refusal to acquiesce to the ideal of a disciplined public good which underlies nation-building projects. Chakrabarty’s reading of the public domain as a marker of resistance, however, has been critiqued by Dalit scholars for romanticizing the open bazaar as a space that is always resistant to hierarchies of caste difference. For example, in “Untouchability, Filth, and the Public Domain,” Valerian Rodrigues suggests that the “absence of cleanliness in the public domain often results in creating sanitized islands begetting hierarchies and ranked orders of different kinds.”29 According to Rodrigues, the public sphere cannot be read as one that is always marked by resistance—in fact, it is informed by anxieties around impurity and caste contagion, in which lower-caste bodies cannot be touched, but must expunge the bazaar of dirt and )lth through their labor practices. Thus, while Chakrabarty might be right in pointing to the amorphous character of public-private distinctions, his analysis precludes an understanding of how privatized zones—or “sanitized islands”—operate within public domains in order to maintain caste differences. These secluded pockets do not simply replace the public good with private pro)t. “Sanitized islands” operate under the auspices of and through public domains, exploiting the slipperiness between public-private distinctions and buttressing their inchoate meanings. For example, Rodrigues points to the state’s private outsourcing of sanitary services which draws on exclusively lower-caste

120

!"#$%&' (

workers, “particularly Dalit women, or those who have become de-caste in the context of urban mobility” (120). The persistence of dirt in the public domain therefore is not “a protest against bourgeoisie civility,” but demonstrates how upper-caste populations have created privatized sanctuaries within the bazaar away from the “)lth” of public life (120). What would it mean to consider the private zone of touching in Aligarh as a kind of “sanitized island”? What forms of “)lth” in public might require regulating in order to seclude safety within this ostensibly private zone of touch? Rather than reading the Siras case as a call for the preservation of privacy, it might be more productive instead to understand the violence in*icted on him as a consequence of his failure to maintain the sanctity of the private from the “)lth” of the public. In other words, his transgressions are marked by logics of contamination— his inability to preserve the “purity” of his domestic space in the act of queer touching, which must then be met with immediate expulsion. To read the Siras case beyond what Aligarh allows—that is, as one which exceeds a narrative of privacy protection—necessitates a more elaborate consideration of the public contexts that mark the politics of touch. I want to turn then to a public domain, which at )rst might seem to have little to do with the violation of intimacy marking the private encounter between Siras and his lover: the site of the public university and student movements, which have become one of the most vexed urban platforms for struggles around caste politics in India since the “revolutionary” 1990s. What would it mean to reconsider Aligarh’s emphasis on privacy while taking into account this fractious public arena, thus reorienting the )lm’s interior focus outwards? While the protests in 1990 that arose over the government’s announced intention to implement the recommendations of the the Mandal Commission report could mark the primal scene of caste politics in relation to government jobs and higher education in India, I want to fast-forward almost two decades later to a more contemporary moment that coalesced—like the case of Ramchandra Siras—around yet another suicide or institutional killing.30 In 2016, the Hindu Right’s experiments in saffronization, privatization, anti-af)rmative action politics, and compulsory nationalism all came to head in a tragic and violent fashion when Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD student at the University of Hyderabad, took his own life. A few months before the tragic incident, Vemula and )ve other activist friends were suspended and prevented from entering their hostels and using public spaces of the university on account of their participation in ostensibly “anti-national” activities

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

121

on campus. As members of the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA), Vemula and his friends had frequently clashed on campus with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the Hindu nationalist student wing of the RSS, who were known for their disruptions of )lm screenings documenting human rights violations, and their protests against “westernized” activities that supposedly denied the essential character of Indian (i.e., Hindu) tradition and culture. While various chapters of the ASA have been active throughout the country in documenting caste abuse and the mistreatment of Dalit students on university campuses, ironically, it was not caste discrimination, but the ABVP’s communalist agenda—what Vemula called “the blood thirsty nationalism”—that sparked the central con*ict between the two groups at the University of Hyderabad.31 In 2015, the ASA protested the death sentence of Yakub Memon, a Muslim who was accused of collaborating with the masterminds behind the 1993 bomb blasts in Mumbai. Given that the largest percentage of Indian citizens killed by capital punishment are Dalits and Muslims, the ASA planned a protest called “Resistance Gathering against Capital Punishment: In the Wake of Death Sentence to Yakub Memon.” A poster at a rally held up by one of the ASA students read: “Public conscience is Brahman conscience. Satisfy with Muslim blood: ASA-UOH.”32 A couple of days after these protests, the ABVP disrupted a screening of the )lm Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai, which sympathetically depicted the victims of anti-Muslim riots by Hindu fundamentalists in 2013. The ASA at the University of Hyderabad joined various other Dalit activists in denouncing the violence of caste Hindu politics. Much of this activism in the service of anti-communalist ideology was a way of distancing Dalit politics from its co-optation by Hindutva logic against the fabricated common enemy of the Muslim minority. A member of the ASA articulated these coalitional endeavors as efforts at “creating a universal language of discrimination” in order to counter the supremacy of Hindu nationalist ideology.33 While the ASA’s protests were branded as anti-national and anti-Hindu, the real threat that the group posed on campus was their ability to, in Arundhati Roy’s words, make “connections between caste, capitalism, and communalism.”34 Accused of assaulting an ABVP member (who was later discovered to have faked his injuries), Vemula initially responded to his suspension with proud de)ance: “To all my friends, Ambedkarites and comrades, I am happy to say that I got suspended for a semester by U of H, because I am vocal against ABVP and RSS backed systems. And I am happier to say that I am not terri)ed or paralyzed.”35

122

!"#$%&' (

In a poignant photo that circulated in the news media following his death, Vemula is pictured with two friends carrying assorted remnants of their private possessions: a suitcase, a mattress, a blanket, a bag full of clothes, a couple of towels. The “private,” in this instance, quite literally spills over into the public. The humble belongings in their hands are dwarfed by a giant-sized portrait of the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar, held by Vemula. Epitomizing a demand for accountability in the midst of forced precarity, the photograph also illustrates the university’s enforcement of dispossession that is privative in intent.36 The students’ suspension from the university was accompanied by orders to campus security for locks to be placed on the hostel room doors of Vemula and his friends. In addition to the material realities of the lost accommodations and scholarship funds that poor )rst-generation students depended on, the symbolic dimensions of removing Dalit students from the university’s premises were not lost on students in the ASA. In a Facebook post, they remarked: “Isn’t this similar to a dominant caste ostracizing a Dalit household from the village; here, )ve senior research scholars who happen to be from Dalit background are outcast from the day-to-day activities of the university space.”37 The protests organized by Vemula and his friends highlighted the stubborn persistence of caste hierarchies that permeate urban campuses and educational institutions, despite their theoretical transformations via reservations. Their ejection from campus also foregrounded that these hierarchies at urban centers of higher learning are not as far removed from those in rural villages (with their supposed stranglehold on the antiquities of untouchability) as presumed. Importantly, their protests were not framed simply as demands for reentry into the private zones from which they had been jettisoned. More ambitiously volatile and public in scope, their demands were aimed at transforming the political and intellectual climate of their campus by challenging the university’s casteist conscience. While ignited by con*icts with the ABVP, their demonstrations and hunger strikes on the university’s campus were the culmination of years of political unrest and discriminatory practices experienced by Dalit students: administrative biases, faculty elitism, punishment of dissent, denials of fellowships justi)ed via the logic of “merit,” and the increasing “Indianization” (or saffronization, more accurately) of the curriculum. It would thus be myopic to view Vemula’s suicide as simply a consequence of his suspension or harassment by the ABVP and the university administration—instead, his encounters with caste Hinduism and parochial nationalism on the University of Hyderabad campus

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

123

were informed by a more institutionalized history of violence that preceded the events of 2016. In the days following Vemula’s death, various political groups on campus joined the ASA to form the Joint Action Committee in order to protest the reinstatement of Vice-Chancellor Appa Rao Podile. The vice-chancellor had a vexed history with Dalit students and soon came to personify the institutional biases behind the cause of Vemula’s death.38 Protesting his reappointment, the students surrounded his private residence where the administrator was having a meeting with an executive council comprised mainly of ABVP students. In the clashes that ensued, some of the chancellor’s private property was destroyed, leading to the involvement of law enforcement. Media reports of the event stressed the vandalism and loss of private property as justi)cation for police intervention, with no attempts to address the larger systemic conditions that motivated the protests to begin with. Several women involved in the demonstrations documented instances of sexual abuse and harassment by the police. The ripple effects of Vemula’s suicide were not contained within their local context. Only a few weeks after Vemula’s death, progressive and leftist students at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) began distributing *iers for an event under the aegis of a protest “against the Brahmanical collective conscience.”39 The event combined its challenge to caste Hinduism with the commemoration of the anniversary of Afzal Guru’s death—one of the accused in the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, who was sentenced to be hanged by India’s Supreme Court without a fair trial.40 Like at the University of Hyderabad, the JNU events were spurred on by students with discrete yet shared investments in interrogating Hindutva and nationalistic projects. Historically, these political investments have taken the form of rallying for the rights of Kashmiri self-determination, challenging casteist educational policies, or protesting the state’s apathy toward violence and sexual assaults of women. JNU has therefore been closely monitored by RSS members and ABVP groups who have attempted to check its purported “anti-Hindu” and seditious activities. Commenting on the threat that student counterpublics posed to the nationalist Hindutva agendas, Arundhati Roy has suggested that “such an alliance proposes, even if only conceptually, the possibility of a counter-mobilisation, a sort of reverse engineering of the Hindutva project. It envisions an altogether different coalition of castes, one that is constituted from the ground up, instead of organized and administered from the top down: Dalit-Bahujanism instead of Brahmanism.”41

124

!"#$%&' (

Anticipating the power of these inchoate but powerful alliances to undermine the hegemony of Hindu nationalism on college campuses, the ABVP demanded both police and media presence to monitor “treasonous” elements at JNU. When a Zee TV camera captured some groups of students in masks shouting “Pakistan Zindabad” (“Long live Pakistan”) and “Kashmir ki azadi” (“Freedom for Kashmir”) as responses to the ABVP’s nationalist chants of “Bharat Mata ki Jai” (“Victory for Mother India”), the soundtrack of the footage was superimposed onto a different student rally headed by Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the JNU Student Union (the student branch of the Communist Party of India). While Kumar’s own slogans of “azadi” were made in the context of freedom from communal violence and caste hierarchies, the manipulation of the footage allowed the dismissal of any dissident voices as anti-Indian—Kumar and two other students were subsequently arrested on charges of sedition. For Hindu nationalists, JNU epitomized what the current BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, characterized as “a blot on education.”42 Signi)cantly, to maintain this narrative, the Hindu Right has deployed the rhetoric of dissident sexuality in order to portray the university as a seditious site that warrants regulation and management. For example, a 200-page dossier submitted to the university’s administration, and prepared by the ABVP along with faculty members who were BJP sympathizers, contends: Over one thousand boys and girls students [sic] have been )ned from Rs. 2000/- to Rs. 5000/- for consuming alcohol, for indulging in immoral activities in their hostels. On a casual glance at the gates of the hostel one can see hundreds of empty alcohol bottles. Sex workers have been openly employed in hostel messes, where they not only lure JNU girls into their organized racket but also pollute the boys. How come big and high brand cars are moving round the hostels particularly in the night hours. Some security staff is also involved in this racket. Freshers are particularly inducted in this ring of vice by luring through money, sex, drugs and alcohol, so that they become tied up with the cause of foreign agencies.43

The document goes on to name certain progressive faculty members for “actively recruiting young minds in JNU campus and elsewhere by addicting them to night parties/revelries, alcoholism . . . In this process JNU

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

125

has become a den of organized sex racket . . .” One of the contributors to the dossier, Sanskrit professor Hari Ram Mishra, drew links between the need to contain the viral spread of communist ideology on campus and the rampant proliferation of illicit sexual activity: “so many girls are found to be present in the hostel rooms meant only for boys. Who knows where these girls are from?” Mishra called for the university administration to install CCTV cameras in hostels in order to “sanitise the hostels [without which] the university cannot be run properly.” Similarly, the discourses of sex and sedition are mutually and violently implicated with each other in BJP minister Gyandev Ahuja’s concern over “illicit activities” committed “with our sisters and daughters,” noting 10,000 cigarette butts and 4,000 beedis that were found daily on the JNU campus, along with 50,000 pieces of bones left by decadent meat-eaters, 2,000 wrappers of chips and namkeen, and 3,000 used condoms.44 These salacious )ctions of student recruitment and decadent drugfueled orgies mobilize casteist and normative logics of gender and sexuality in order to construct a seditious subject who undermines the progress of nation-building projects. In addition to anxieties around ideological “pollution,” the desire to “sanitise” the campus of subversive elements draws on stigmatized taboos around the touching of impure lower-caste bodies—which is especially relevant given the increased number of Dalit and OBC students in the student population of JNU over the last decade. It was this desire to “cleanse” the university that led to the physical removal of Rohith Vemula and students of the ASA from the hostel premises and the university. In her analysis of sedition and the Hindu Right, Arundhati Roy has suggested that of)cial attempts to contain the ASA and the student protests on college campuses at all costs were motivated by the government’s antagonism to the intellectual activity and countercultural thinking that emerged in those public spaces. The students’ activities did not involve political parties that could be contained through bribes, political mainstreaming, and co-optation—instead, their transgressions were threatening precisely because they were not institutionalized. Thus Roy asks: “What do you do with an idea that has begun to drift around like smoke? You try and snuff it out at its source.”45 The recourse to con*ating subversive ideas with seditious sex was one way to “snuff” the ideas out at their origin. It is not without signi)cance that the consternation around uncontainable and hedonistic sex, typically mapped on to women’s bodies in these examples, centers around the repeated invocation and explicit imagery of erotic abundance and

126

!"#$%&' (

illicit touch: group sex, decadent parties, “dens” of organized sex, sexual activities in hostels, and perhaps most vividly, the *agrant and shameless panoply of used condoms. The surplus of illegitimate touch in these (imaginary) encounters constitutes the “blot” on the university’s public reputation—and is reminiscent of the dishonor that Siras purportedly brought upon Aligarh Muslim University by transgressing heteronormative conventions. In all these invocations of carnal abundance, the )lth of sexual activity transgresses the idealized and antiseptic space of privacy marking the domestic bedroom, which functions as a replacement symbol for both the university and the nation. Narratives of excess thus operate as regulative instruments of access—in terms of which bodies can occupy the physical space of the university, and also of how the university itself is reframed as a zone of privacy that must be guarded against immorality. Sexual excess from the public domain that spills over into the private domain—in this case, the college campus as a “sanitized island”—potentially de)les its stainlessness and marks it as seditious. In the dossier submitted to the JNU administration, the anxiety around national and sexual dissidence points to a parochial return to provincialism in which challenges to Hindutva and Brahmanical logic are marked as anti-Indian. The concern over young students driving “high brand cars” who are lured into seditious activities while acquiescing to “foreign agencies” suggests a suspicion of the West that has typically marked Hindutva logic. In this ideological construction, dissent is an outcome of Western elitism that is counterproductive to nationbuilding, borne out, for example, in the recent government crackdown on NGOs accused of links to “anti-national” left-wing organizations.46 This insular logic is often articulated via an ostensibly anticolonial rhetoric that is framed as a radical antidote to the universals of globalization. In particular, these anti-globalist postures are most visibly articulated in the realm of curriculum revisions in which postcolonial indigeneity becomes the framework through which nativist assertions are consolidated. Take, for instance, the political writer and Hindutva supporter Francois Gautier, who in “The Great Hindu Revolution of Narendra Modi” extols the virtues of an educational climate in which Hindu history is recognized as the default setting for all knowledge production and intellectual thought in India. He contends: It is important that Hindu children know their history, their poets, such as the great Kalidasa, who is on par with Shakespeare or Homer; their warriors, such as Maharana Pratap,

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

127

Shivaji Maharaj and many others, who are as good, if not more visionary and more spiritual than Napoleon; their heroines, like the Rani of Jhansi, or Ahilyabai of Indore, or Chennama, who easily compare with Joan of Arc; their philosophers, such as Sri Aurobindo, whose depth, height and knowledge is as wide and much greater than Nietzsche or Kant; their artists, whose sculptures, such as the dancing Nataraj, or architects, who built the Meenakshi temple or the Rajasthan palaces, are so beautiful that they even survived the holocaust of repeated savage and bloody Muslim invasions—see the Hampi/Vijaynagar statues, every one of which the noses and ears have been chopped, but which still retain their ethereal beauty . . . ? In this way, they will grow up proud to be Hindus, wile [sic] retaining Hinduism’s broad outlook and tolerance . . . Most of Hindu kids are brought up in schools and universities that mostly teach them western subjects and concepts and even Indian history is viewed through the negative western prism. As a result, not only do not they grow-up as Hindus . . . but they become clones, good only for export.47

Gautier’s saffronization of Indian history and intellectual genealogy serves as a testament to problems with conceptualizing the “local” as an abject category that is a passive consequence of global hegemony. Similarly, it is no longer feasible to conceive of the local as an antidote to “westernization” even as it masquerades as a challenge to globalization’s neo-imperialist tendencies. Gautier’s return to Hindu nativism betrays how the saffronization of the curriculum, while appearing to eschew a “western prism,” is buttressed by globalism and Western support. For example, the local educational campaigns of “Indianisation, Nationalisation, and Spiritualisation” carried out by the BJP since the 2000s are accompanied by more global campaigns of groups such as the American Hindu Education Foundation and the Texas-based Vedic Foundation. These foundations have tried to rewrite history textbooks that reference the caste system by claiming that these mentions are illustrations of “anti-Hindu bias.” Similarly, local attempts to indigenize knowledge production that point to the forgotten Vedic roots of modern mathematical and scienti)c thought are ironically propped up by Western global markets that are invested in pro)ting from orientalist authenticity and New Age fantasies of difference. The nativist attachments that narratives of sedition depend on often betray an intimacy with the very structures of globalism that they appear to reject. In her analysis of globalization

128

!"#$%&' (

and educational reform in India, Sangeeta Kamat suggests that curriculum development within Indian universities navigates an “indigenist cultural ideology” at the very moment when it must play a crucial role in the global market.48 For Kamat, rather than viewing globalization as an economic and cultural phenomenon that obliterates difference, it is more usefully theorized as dependent on the “organization of diversity” (281). Thus, drawing on Stuart Hall, she contends: “Within the representation of diversity, though, it is the ‘self-representation of the dominant particular,’ that is, the culture of dominant groups within distinctive locales, that comes to occupy center-stage” (281). The university has become one of the central stages through which Hindutva ideology has demanded the production of docile subjects in the service of compulsory nationalism and moral citizenship. These productions of nationalist pedagogy are constituted by disavowals of the West and are predicated on ideologies that combine saffronist discourses on seditious sex with communalist and casteist violence.

Analogy and Untouchability The above public domains that mark the university as a contested site of struggle appear far removed from the private landscapes of intimate touch that I began with. But if the Indian university, as I have suggested above, is closely tied to the production of national and moral culture via exclusions based on caste and normative sex, then the suicides of both Rohith Vemula and Ramchandra Siras can be read as modes of touching that are connected through cognate narratives. What, then, would it mean to revisit the Siras case as read against the public domains that mark the “dominant particular”? I will respond to this question through a return to Aligarh in the concluding section of this chapter, but in considering these dual suicides in tandem with one another, it is )rst important to theorize their connection beyond the simple analytical and rhetorical fulcrum of analogous thinking. To frame the cases of Siras and Vemula as analogous with one another is to implicitly insist on their untouchability—that is, on the cleaving-apart of subjectivity in which “queer” is posited as a rei)ed identity category that sits adjacent to, or is “just like” “Dalit.” Analogy as the antidote to the problem of non-intersectionality (in the gay matrimonial ad, for example) does little beyond simply acknowledging the existence of an always discrete category. Thus, while appearing to forge

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

129

a correlation between two entities, analogies are implicitly attached to an investment in autonomy that is more exclusionary and privatizing in scope than is apparent from its perceived relationality. In other words, the elements within analogies remain self-contained and discrete in the very act of comparison. But for the purposes of my argument, the problems with analogy extend beyond just the pitfalls of method that preempt the “touching” of identity categories. In her analysis of the limits of analogous thinking, Miranda Joseph points to the complicity of equivalence or “just like” rhetorical formulations in the economic logics of global capitalism. While Fordist modes of capitalist accumulation are predicated on structures of consumption and production that pit nations against one another via binary logics of development and underdevelopment, the post-Fordist era operates via linkages of analogy (while still retaining the binaries of discrete national exceptionalism). Thus, Joseph contends that nation-states “initiate a comparative discourse” in which they “can be ranked in relation to one another . . . [so] that some division of tasks will be to the advantage of all.”49 Of course, this seemingly egalitarian participation in modes of production and consumption forecloses the radically different hierarchies both between and within nation-states. In other words, developmental disparities get elided precisely because of analogy’s assumed equivalence. Crisis intrusions in global capitalism, after all, are pronounced at the very moments of non-relationality—when “touching” fails to take place via the carefully crafted scripts of analogy. As Eric Cazdyn points out in his analysis of disaster, crisis, and revolution, the apparent seamlessness of globalization is threatened “when the relation between one thing and another breaks down.” In the context of )nancial disaster, this crisis in connection happens “when goods cannot be related to markets, when idle capital and idle labor cannot be related.”50 It is no wonder, then, that one of the most frequently repeated qualifying phrases that characterizes globalization is the seemingly innocuous bromide “in our increasingly connected globe . . .” that prefaces almost any “global” initiative, from the marketing of international )nancial investments to online educational endeavors at universities. In this phrase, the language of compulsory relationality is used to perform and then consolidate the rhetorical equivalence that marks analogical thinking. In other words, the limited explanation of globalization as one that is exclusively marked by time-space compression can be explained by the limits of analogy’s elisions. The illusion of relationality that marks analogy obscures the fracturing effects of globalization and its complicity in

130

!"#$%&' (

structures of disconnection and untouchability. As Joseph points out: “the deployment of analogy in globalization discourses legitimates differences of wealth and wage rates in cultural differences and elides the global processes by which various sites have been forcibly arranged on the ladder of so-called development or modernization or civilization.”51 Globalization, as I have already suggested, is not antithetical to Hindutva’s nativisms; similarly, Hindu nationalism, despite its attachment to an essentialized provincialism, cannot simply be theorized as a bulwark against global capitalism. In fact, as pointed out in chapter 1, they are both chiasmic in their dependence and sustain each other’s mutual investments in developmental models. The “forced arrangements” that mark globalization’s use of analogy can thus be discerned in the governing logic of the Indian state’s investments in development, witnessed most conspicuously in the government’s initiatives to ban large-denomination currency notes in “surgical strikes” against money laundering and corruption. The analogy of militarization to describe Modi’s developmental schemes was highlighted by the prime minister himself in a speech he gave at a camp held in 2016 in Vadodara, where he was distributing aid equipment to disabled children and teenagers.52 In the speech, Modi boasts about the large sums of black money that were declared following government anti-corruption campaigns, which were achieved “without launching surgical strikes.” He then continues: “If we do surgical strikes, you can imagine what all will come out?” The analogy between militarization and economic development was a reference to the border confrontations with Pakistan just a month prior in which the Indian government claimed to have initiated military attacks against launch pads in the disputed territories of Kashmir. The resemblance to military strength and precision works to consolidate the idea of Modi as a )nancial maven whose economic acuity would make India comparable to the global superpowers—the comparative discourse that is at the crux of the economic analogy. Thus, in his speech, he goes on to extol the virtues of Indian economic exceptionalism that enable the nation-state to participate in the ranking of accelerated global development: “Today, in the entire world, one thing about this country is being praised—the world says that India is the fastest growing economy  .  .  . Be it World Bank, IMF or credit-rating agencies, the entire world says in one voice that India is developing very fast.”53 But if analogies are predicated on elision, this representation of rapid development and accelerated modernity obscures the hierarchies that initiatives like “Digital India” are predicated on.54

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

131

The unaccounted fallout from the demonetization of banknotes led to catastrophic consequences—the decimation of informal sectors, the serpentine queues to make cash deposits (which led to several heatrelated deaths), and the denial of medical services in hospitals to those with no access to electronic funds. The “surgical strikes” of demonetization ultimately ended up mostly targeting India’s poor rather than those peddling black money, which, as several Indian economists have pointed out, does not exist exclusively in the form of hard cash to begin with. But the analogy between surgical strikes and developmental logics does not exhaust the comparative framework within this ideological scheme. As mentioned previously, the occasion for this analogy was the distribution of adaptive equipment for disabled communities. Thus, Modi’s commitment to the plight of divyangs becomes inextricably linked to the investments in development: “Solution to all problems lies in development. Only through development can illiteracy, disease, poverty be removed.”55 And it is, by the logic of analogy, only via development that disability can also be rehabilitated. If analogies work to erase, such foreclosures also function by incorporation—that is, when one category is subsumed by another under the aegis of its apparent capaciousness. In this context, analogy works to replace disability with developmental narratives in which the elimination of poverty, illiteracy, and disease is likened to the eradication of disability. Meanwhile, the apparent investment in the “removal” of disability (as opposed to the structures that inform able-bodiedness) has been accompanied by the Ministry of Home Affairs releasing elaborate guidelines on how disabled populations can show appropriate respect for the national anthem in venues such as movie theaters. The disabled are thus not exempt from mandatory expressions of patriotism and are ordered to not move during the national anthem, “maintaining the maximum possible alertness physically.”56

Toward a Public Framing of Queer Touch As illustrated above, analogy proves not just insuf)cient but counterproductive to a theorization of touch that seeks to move beyond the incorporative logic of comparison and hierarchy. To return, then, to where I began: how can we articulate a non-analogous framework in which queer is “undone” by caste—that is, when the two, to use

132

!"#$%&' (

Butler’s language, are given over to one another?57 I want to suggest that a model of relationality that theorizes touch beyond the logics of private intimacy might begin to provide some answers to this question. To articulate these relational logics in terms of my textual investments: how would the framing of Aligarh as a universal narrative that calls for the “desire to be left alone” shift when refracted through the case of Rohith Vemula—that is, through contexts that demand attention to public proscriptions around the politics of touch? In highlighting the particular instance of Vemula’s suicide as an illustration of caste violence at institutions of higher learning in India, it is important not to single it out as exceptional—not even at the University of Hyderabad, the speci)c university from which he was suspended. One of the several reasons why Vemula’s case in particular became such a focal *ashpoint around the issue of caste discrimination on campuses nationwide was a suicide note—described by Arundhati Roy as reminiscent of “a great piece of literature”—that he left behind which was soon reproduced in media reports and op-eds.58 Written with poetic poignancy, the note captured quotidian aspects of Vemula’s character in his love for science and nature, but also suggested something of a metaphysical quality in his attempts to imagine the impossible—the “glorious thing[s] made up of star dust”: I always wanted to be a writer. A writer of science, like Carl Sagan. I loved Science, Stars, Nature, but then I loved people without knowing that people have long since divorced from nature. Our feelings are second handed. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs colored. Our originality valid through arti)cial art. It has become truly dif)cult to love without getting hurt. The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust. In every )eld in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living. I am writing this kind of letter for the )rst time. My )rst time of a formal letter. Forgive me if I fail to make sense. May be I was wrong, all the while, in understanding [the] world. In understanding love, pain, life, death . . . My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past.59

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

133

I quote Vemula’s suicide note as an entry point into analyzing its relation with the Siras case in order to see how these two instances of institutional violence are “undone” by one another. But this attempt at queer touch with caste is quali)ed by necessary methodological stutters. Two distinct but related epistemological problems await: )rst, in revisiting these conjugated archives of death, I am reminded of Saidiya Hartman’s powerful provocation in the essay “Venus in Two Acts” when she confronts her own ethical conundrums that occasion her engagement with the Venus Hottentot archive, the dead Black woman with no self-produced record. “How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?” she asks, in making sense of an archive that is at once abundant yet sutured through absence and silence.60 Can one ever avoid the problems of instrumentalization in revisiting archives of death in which subjects are inevitably ventriloquized through teleologies of recovery?61 Anjali Arondekar’s critique of archival resuscitation—“the presumption that if a body is found, then a subject can be recovered”—takes on more literal necro-like dimensions in the context of encounters with dead subjects.62 Second, and relatedly, is the lure of analogy that beckons in this context—the easy temptations of “just like” formulations that link Siras and Vemula: for example, the aesthetic appeals of writing, the struggles against rei)cation in which “value” is reduced to identity (untouchable and gay), the desire to love without hurt, the rejection of mind/body dualisms, the “fatal accidents” of birth that mark their precarity, the attempts to transgress the “nearest possibilities” presented to them, and ultimately, the loneliness that proves too painful and violent to bear. But to analogize this “likeness” between Siras and Vemula is to ironically repeat the very modes of injury that reduce them into votes, numbers, or things, to use Vemula’s own language. Miranda Joseph, once again, is instructive here. Analogies, writes Joseph, make “the other known”— that is, they use the assumed internal coherence of one category as a fulcrum to level the other, reducing it to, in Vemula’s words, “nearest possibility” and “immediate identity.” Analogy, Joseph writes, “moves the inchoate subjects . . . to the grounds of the (supposedly) known, choate, object; positions the unseemly in relation to the seemly.”63 Resisting the enticement to analogize becomes one way to avoid replicating—however momentarily and incompletely—the grammar of violence that is intrinsic to encounters with dead subjects. The avoidance of analogy cannot, of course, make salvi)c claims to redress or reparation. But it can allow a relief from the inevitable rei)cations one

134

!"#$%&' (

brushes up against in entering an archive that is also a mortuary.64 If analogies insist on the stability of foundational knowledge of their categories, their rejection permits the inchoateness that Joseph references above. Against analogy’s trump card of easy comprehension, such performances of incoherence become necessary in order to contravene claims of making the Other known—Vemula from his suicide note, and Siras through his memorialization in Aligarh. And while these refusals of absolute and exhaustive knowledge can never be ideal antidotes to redress the violence that these men encountered, they do offer, as Hartman acknowledges, “a way of living in the world in the aftermath of catastrophe and devastation” (3). In place of analogy, different ways of understanding discrete categories are needed to theorize a politics of touch. In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman proposes the idea of “critical fabulation” as one way to not only “tell an impossible story” but also “to amplify the impossibility of telling” (11). For Hartman, it is only a subjunctive mode of speculation—“the conditional temporality of ‘what could have been’ ”—that attends to the problems of rei)cation in representation (11). The hypothetical temporalities that inform such accounts remove the burdens of mimetic )delity from those narratives that seek to )ll in the gaps of untold or “impossible” stories. Critical fabulation allows a brush against the archive’s )ctional “truths” that are inevitably predicated on seemingly truthful )ctions. This speculative mode sits beside what we supposedly “know”—namely, that which passes as veri)able fact. The effects of originality, as Vemula reminds us, are often achieved through arti)cial art. These )ctions of )delity disguised as truth in the intertwined stories of Vemula and Siras are mediated through doctored Facebook posts; through the manipulation of protest footage branded as seditious; through “real” footage of Siras and his lover “caught” in the act of “immoral” sex. Against these veri)able “facts,” captured through “technologies of truth,” are the deceit and duplicity of queerness and caste transgression. Siras’s “fraudulence” is what must be exposed by the furtive cameras that invade the private sanctuaries of his bedroom. The video footage captures the ostensibly “real” facts that expose the desecration of the university’s private property caused by the scandal of queer sex. The tangibility of proof must verify these indiscretions, which, while taking place in literal zones of privacy, have public and political implications. The performance of authenticity continues to haunt Vemula even after his death. A commission set up by the Human Resource Development

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

135

Ministry investigating Vemula’s death claimed that his Dalit status was a deceitful fabrication simply to avail himself of reservation “bene)ts” around employment and education. Against such technologies of truth production, the value of speculation lies in its refusals to claim authority over subjects who can no longer speak for themselves. In the context of Aligarh, the value of the subjunctive in thinking about its protagonist assumes particular relevance, given the ambiguity that surrounds Siras’s death. Even his literary legacy—the prize-winning, Whitman-like titled Grass Under My Feet—remains hard to locate, with its illusiveness referenced in the )lm several times. The )lm’s own critical fabulations thus re-create the words of Siras’s poetry in the lines: “O beloved moon, fear not the dawn that separates us / For we will meet again when the world goes to sleep”—an ode to the moon imagined as a queer lover who fears the dawning of the light.65 But the value of subjunctive thinking for my purposes turns elsewhere in revisiting the Siras case as that which cannot be contained by the logics of queer privacy. Speculation is valuable in thinking through what remains at the edges of the )lm’s frames— that is, the lower-class Muslim rickshawallah Irfan, who barely makes it into the )lm’s diegesis, but whose presence haunts its central actions. Throughout the )lm, he is a shadowy )gure who is reduced to his profession—often brought up as “the rickshawallah.” At other times, he is framed as a mere extension of Siras, referred to as the protagonist’s Muslim lover or, more euphemistically, as his “friend.” Signi)cantly, despite its investment in the preservation of privacy against institutional or state intrusion, Aligarh remains relatively uninterested in a representation of intimacy between Siras and Irfan. The )lm bookends and contextually situates the story of Siras through the contrasting legal outcomes around Section 377 (prior to the landmark Supreme Court decision in 2018), with little narrative time devoted to the unknown history or relationship between the two men. Aligarh begins by foregrounding its temporal proximity to the 2009 Delhi High Court decision that “declared Section 377 as unconstitutional, effectively decriminalizing homosexuality.” (This information appears on-screen right after the opening credits). Similarly, the )lm concludes with a reference to Section 377, informing viewers of the Supreme Court’s reversal of the High Court decision in 2013. The “recriminalization” of homosexuality that ends the )lm is implicitly tied to the professor’s death, which, at a broader level, is also indicative of the demise of Indian democracy and the constitutional failure to guarantee

136

!"#$%&' (

the right to privacy. Between the legal framings that begin and conclude the )lm, Irfan appears only in three brief scenes—one in which the couple is intruded on, another in which Irfan insists on a darkened room before he and Siras have a sexual encounter, and )nally in a moment of suggested lovemaking with Siras toward the end. Irfan is literally the )lm’s silent subaltern: the script offers him a total of four speaking lines that we see only in *ashbacks. Thus, even while the origins of violation lie in the proscriptions around touch between men, the )lm performs a kind of textual untouchability—it forecloses the relationality of touching in its bracketing off of Irfan. What does Irfan’s literal containment within the space of privacy have to do with a politics of touch? Put differently, or subjunctively, what if Irfan were removed from these sanctuaries of privacy into the “dawning of the light,” not as an act of epistemological outing, but as a way of highlighting the messy public economies of caste and class that subtend sexuality? Put speculatively, what might it mean to circle around the narrative margins of the )lm and nudge them more insistently into sharper focus as a way to decenter rather than recover? What public economies of caste—refracted via class and communal logic—might begin to touch queerness once these edges begin to unravel? In an interview about the )lm, Aligarh’s scriptwriter, Apurva Asrani, himself con)rms: “The )lm is about Siras and what happened to him, not their relationship.”66 Thus, while Aligarh bears witness to Siras’s experiences after his relationship with Irfan is exposed, it chooses to evade how these modes of injury touch Irfan. Even while Irfan is at the receiving end of injustice within this primal scene of privacy violation, he can and must—for the sake of the )lm’s narrative logic—only occupy the place of absent center. In keeping with subjunctive logics, my intent here is not to )ll in missing gaps with a recourse to the “real”—that is, to restore Irfan to the center via a metaphysics of substance. There can be no compensation for the narrative’s lack of details about who Irfan was, or what the precise nature of his relationship with Siras might have been. Media accounts, for example, have tried to piece together some semblance of a narrative, not to center Irfan’s perspectives, but as a way to sensationalize narratives of difference in two senses: the exceptional case of a gay scandal on a university campus at one level; and a reveling in the drama of difference between radically disparate entities at another level—that is, a love affair between Hindu and Muslim, middle class and lower class, “respectable” professor and “ordinary” rickshaw driver.

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

137

In various twice-removed accounts, Irfan is reported to have attempted suicide after constant police harassment about the Siras case; other reports paint the picture of Irfan as nostalgically remembering the tenderness of his relationship with Siras; yet another account paints a picture of )nancial convenience or exploitation in which sexual favors were exchanged for money that Irfan needed for his sister’s wedding. It is insuf)cient to simply suggest that the “precise” nature of the relationship between Siras and Irfan is unknown. More useful might be to interrogate the very notion of monolithic coherence of a relationship in which the lines of desire, economics, and orientations are blurred even when mediated by the putative veracity of )rst-person accounts. Does Irfan suggest a money contract to frame queerness as simply a function of poverty in order to deny desire? Or might his claims of economic convenience have something to do with his fears of criminalization for “unnatural sex”? In what ways do his class status and Muslim identity exacerbate these fears, given what Jyoti Puri calls the “stunning displacement of sexuality and criminality onto religious-cultural groups” in India in which poor Dalits and Muslims are always already hypersexual and dangerous?67 These speculative questions offer some hints as to why Aligarh forecloses Irfan’s place from the center of its narrative. If Aligarh must make its case for the legality of homosexuality and the right to privacy against the injuries caused by Section 377 prior to its 2018 strike-down, then the intimation of money exchange interrupts the seamless story of privatized intimacy that is unfairly and illegally intruded upon. An acknowledgment of the hypothetical )nancial contract between Irfan and Siras would thus contaminate the )lm’s hagiographic reading of the latter—not simply through a rethinking of romantic intimacy between men, but also via the essentially foreclosed account of the discrete social locations that the two men inhabit. The constitutive bracketing of Irfan, however, becomes the basis for the )lm’s diverted gaze toward another relationship between two men. If Siras and Irfan cannot constitute the )lm’s romantic core, Deepu—the plucky and ethical journalist—steps in and functions as a substituted switchpoint for Irfan. Ironically, it is Deepu himself who tries to locate Irfan in the slums of Aligarh in an attempt to interview him—a futile endeavor that must necessarily fail in the context of the )lm’s need to keep Irfan outside its diegetic frames. The search for Irfan only ends in violence—the cost of well-intentioned but doomed recovery—when Deepu gets roughed up for his intrepid journalistic persistence. Irfan can never be found within the )lm’s narrative constraints, since his

138

!"#$%&' (

recovery would demand a more unsettling but capacious stretching of queerness. The failed search guarantees the absence of Irfan from the )lm’s temporal present, allowing Deepu to then become the central )gure who most intimately shares affective and narrative space with Siras. In a scene that operates via conventional romanticized visual tropes, we see the two men take an intimate foggy boat ride during which Deepu asks Siras for a sel)e together, and points to how handsome the professor is. The hints of homoeroticism between Siras and Deepu operate as a kind of repressed metonymy in which intimacy between the two men substitutes for the representation of a more dangerously complicated union with Irfan in which queerness is touched by the messy material realities of class, caste, and communal difference. Signi)cantly, the homoeroticism of the relationship between Siras and Deepu is safely undercut by the clear establishment of Deepu’s heterosexuality toward the end of the )lm (where he makes out with a female colleague). While there can be no touching between Siras and Deepu beyond erotic hints, their relationship is structured in the )lm through a series of analogies that serve to universalize their narrative logic. For example, we see Deepu struggle to protect his privacy when his landlord and her pushy daughter refuse to respect his personal space within the con)nes of his rented apartment room. If analogies, as mentioned earlier, are privatizing in their scope despite their apparent relationality, it seems only )tting that the parallels between Siras and Deepu function as a way to universalize the )lm’s investment in the autonomy of the private sphere. Analogy’s parallelisms ensure a safe distance even as they draw elements into closer proximity with one another. Analogy thus preserves the delicate balance of homoeroticism in Aligarh in which proximate elements are drawn together in their similarity, but must never touch. Thus Siras’s desire for dignity and privacy is just like Deepu’s own struggles for a room of his own. “Hetero” and “homo” can be compared and con*ated through “just like” formulations, but the binaries can never be deconstructed. Instead, their analogous character reframes the Siras case via the logics of liberal humanism in which the material speci)city of queerness gets abstracted in the service of a universal desire for privacy—an abstraction that is predicated on the )lm’s constitutive substitutions. The seamlessness of this replacement system is threatened only momentarily when the two have a lunch date where Deepu offers to share his food with Siras, to which the professor replies: “tumhara haath lag gaya, nah? . . . (you’ve touched it, haven’t you?) . . . this is non-veg,

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

139

we are Brahmins.”68 When Deepu suggests that he doesn’t understand religious or caste distinctions, Siras contends that “dharm samajne walle cheez nahi hain”—that rationalizing faith actually sacri)ces its purpose.69 In the above moment, the clean lines of analogy that establish the symmetry between Siras and Deepu threaten to collapse, albeit only momentarily. If analogy is predicated on separation via sameness, the sharing of meat threatens to contaminate these separate spheres. After all, the investment in vegetarianism is predicated on Brahmanical prescriptions around touch and proximity in which the eating of meat represents a source of pollution. Signi)cantly, at this very moment in the )lm when discourses around purity are safely negotiated by its two protagonists to maintain the strict terms of analogy, Siras notices a bruise on Deepu’s face, and questions him about the origins of the wound. The distinguishing mark, as the viewers of the )lm are already aware, was a consequence of his scuf*e during his search for Irfan. If the rest of the )lm is marked by analogy’s spatial separations, I want to read these two moments in Aligarh—the rejection of meat and the recognition of a wound—in close proximity to one another so that they “touch” in ways that are more transgressive than the rest of the )lm allows for (or is even aware of). And it is in this one moment of the )lm’s acknowledgment of caste difference, however *eeting, that we can read caste (and Vemula, by association) back into the exegesis of the Siras case in order to rethink the framing of queer politics as one that is predicated on constitutive forgettings. In his analysis of queer intimacy and racial forgetting, David Eng has argued that under conditions of U.S.-led globalization and neoimperialism, “every narrative articulation of freedom is haunted by its burial, by the violence of forgetting.”70 Thus, globalization operates through a celebration of capitalism as freedom, assuming the guise of neoliberal multiculturalism. The bracketing of race haunts such progressive accounts by registering its absent presence as a “melancholic trace” which only “appears as disappearing.”71 While Eng’s analysis is useful in pointing to modes of color blindness that inform queer liberalism in the United States, the constitutive absences that mark globalization do not necessarily have their origins only in “U.S.-led” systems of domination as described above. To think about caste as the constitutive absence that haunts India’s investment in developmental modernity is not to make simple analogies with race—the very term “caste” is derived from casta, meaning “race,” a word used in the sixteenth century by the Portuguese to describe India’s social strati)cations. While the brutal

140

!"#$%&' (

violence of caste is manifested on a daily basis—for example, through lynchings for the transport or consumption of beef, or through sexual violence against Dalit women—its appearance is also predicated on its perpetual disappearance. In other words, caste is both exceptional but also rendered ordinary to the point of its relegation to a distant place (rural villages) and time (a less developed past). In “Caste Lives On, and On,” Prayaag Akbar suggests that caste’s persistence as a mode of forgetting is enabled by its operations not simply as varna (hierarchy) but also as jati (endogamy). Jati functions as a mode of privatization by hermetically sealing itself off not only through disciplinary acts of prohibition, but also through seemingly caste-neutral and benign rituals of food consumption, arranged marriage, and seemingly benign “community” practices.72 It is worth recalling how the “universal language of discrimination” demanded by Vemula and other members of the ASA was a way to push back against naturalized endogamous rituals on college campuses. These calls for universalism did not operate via analogous con*ations that dematerialized their speci)city (i.e., the universal right to privacy that Siras deserved, “just like” everyone else). Instead, the ASA’s articulation of a “universal language” was a way to link Brahmanical ideology with the projects of Hindu nationalism that implicated both caste and communalist logics. Through this universal language, one can read Aligarh’s reference to the politics of food purity as that which maintains caste endogamy; simultaneously, it is also what implicitly references the macabre violence in*icted on Muslims under the aegis of cow protection—what Supriya Nair calls the “work of collective )ction” in which “a gang of imagined victims” in*icts “vengeance on an imagined criminal in an inversion of truth.”73 This moment of dissonance between Siras and Deepu, however, is quickly resolved through the “violence of forgetting,” to invoke Eng again. Irfan’s presence in this scene is hinted at only through the “melancholic trace” of the wound that must eventually heal and then disappear. The wound is also a consequence of touch in its more brutal avatars, leaving its mark as a reminder of a once-violent past that must be expunged from the present. It is not different, then, from the bracketing of caste that haunts the nation’s political present, which, despite its brutal frames, can only be acknowledged via euphemistic trace—its appearance as disappearance. Thus, the recognition of the wound on Deepu’s face becomes precisely the moment when it metaphorically begins to fade. Siras’s investments in maintaining caste purity through

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

141

vegetarianism ultimately only foreground benign contradictions—that is, the Brahmanical logics preventing him from touching food “contaminated” by a meat eater, which do not stop him from having sex with a non-Brahmin, lower-class Muslim. With Deepu, the irony of this investment in caste decorum only functions to humanize Siras’s contradictions rather than to point to the violence of these hierarchies. In foregrounding the absence of Irfan via the presence of the wound in the above analysis, my point is not to make a case for the liberal cause of enhanced visibility via the representation of queer intimacy, or even of gay coupledom; what is at stake is not the desire to see Irfan and Siras together on screen, as if unmediated visual representation is axiomatically transgressive. Instead, the point is to highlight the ideological terms through which the centering of Siras and the bracketing of Irfan are narrated through what David Eng has called the “racialization of intimacy” that haunts narratives of queer progress.74 In her analysis of sexuality, the state, and anti-sodomy laws in India, Jyoti Puri argues that governance practices around Section 377 have not only impacted gay men and hijras, but also Muslims who are seen as “inherently hypersexual and criminal.”75 Drawing on Ania Loomba’s arguments on how discourses of religion operate as a form of racialization in postcolonial India, Puri’s ethnography of the Delhi police reveals law enforcement’s insistence on the idea that “unnatural sex crimes are mostly committed by Muslims.” For Puri, these contemporary assertions that are mobilized in the context of unnatural sex draw on broader intertwined “genealogies of race and communalism” in which race is not simply the product of phenotypical difference, but of “cultural discourses that produce the body as the site of unequal difference.”76 Puri’s arguments are exempli)ed by media accounts of the police harassment that the reallife Irfan encountered, leading to a suicide attempt that must, however, remain beyond the narrative boundaries of the )lm. It is this logic of racialized bracketing that it is at the heart of Aligarh’s arguments for queer freedom in the service of a touching that must take place behind closed doors. And if social belonging is predicated on the right to privacy, its guarantees can only be achieved through the promise of legal decriminalization. But there is yet another sense in which the subsuming of racialization into the logics of privacy is performed through the Siras case via the logics of touch. In his analysis of racialized intimacy, David Eng suggests that for nineteenth-century Europeans’ notions of personhood, intimacy in a private domestic sphere marked the very essence of subjectivity. He writes: “Ideals of privacy in bourgeois

142

!"#$%&' (

domesticity were thus con)gured as the individual’s possession, to be politically protected, as in ‘the right to privacy.’ ” Eng draws attention to the “history of intimacy as property and possession” that was dependent on slavery and the labor of colonized subjects.77 It is thus ironic that some critics of Section 377 adopted an ostensibly anticolonial posture that condemned the law because of its seemingly archaic colonial genealogies. If we are a postcolonial nation, the argument goes, then Section 377, a colonial inheritance, was incompatible with the seamless telos toward democratic Indian modernity and postcoloniality. But in founding this argument on right-to-privacy claims with their implicit investments in domestic property and possession preservation, the argument paradoxically relies on the very colonial logics that it appears to contest. In this light, Aligarh’s focus on the property and home as a scene of violation—that is, the apartment on AMU premises that Siras is forced to vacate as a result of his sexual transgressions with Irfan— reconstitutes the primal scene of injustice as one that denies Siras the legal claims over his inalienable right to property. The cleaving-apart of sexuality from the racially in*ected categories of class, caste, or religion frames this exclusion as abjection from bourgeois domesticity rather than one which has a longer, violent history in the Indian state’s complicity in the creation of landlessness, residential segregation, housing discrimination, and rural displacement. In theorizing the racialization of intimacy, Eng suggests that “the right to be left alone from state interference, surveillance, and criminalization is a negative liberty that does not . . . require the material redistribution of resources” on the part of the state.78 It is worth recalling that the protests on university campuses recently, in part, began when administrators prohibited a group of young Dalit students from using their hostels and the university’s public space, as captured in the photograph of Vemula with his belongings in public. At the time of his death, Vemula was displaced from his accommodations on campus and was using the hostel room of Uma Maheshwara Rao, a senior ASA leader. But the students’ demands were not limited to the rallying against negative liberties—that is, the spatial exclusions from campus—instead, they were invested in creating the “universal language of discrimination” referred to earlier, which was “not just about Dalits” but about creating “a counter political space” that had “the potential to question the hegemony of Hindutva politics”—and encourage the “coming together of marginalized communities.”79 By rethinking the Siras case through this assemblaged “language of discrimination,” it might be possible to move

+,&&' -'./#01 2,'.34 5&2.%.6,7 8.9&7

143

beyond the universalizing of queers as juridical citizens who are deserving of the nation’s privacy protection through constitutive bracketings and racialized forgettings. Instead, a queer politics of touch might allow us to think through both the queerness of sedition and the seditiousness of queer that must be at the heart of sexual politics.

!"#$%&' (

Patently Queer: The Late Effects of Illness during Revolutionary Times

In chapters 2 and 3, I analyzed how rather than a uniform threat to the nation-state, sexual politics is framed—however contradictorily and ambivalently—as a site of modernity, productive economy, and privacy for a “new” India during “revolutionary” times. While the constraints around LGBT tourism or the suicide of Siras obviously do not suggest a politics of arrival for queer bodies or the absence of disenfranchisement, both instances require disavowals around death (literal in the case of Siras, symbolic and social in the instance of tourism) for the generation and recuperation of queer life. The embrace of queer life in the instance of gay tourism is promised by its inclusion into a productive economy and its participation in a global politics of worlding. In the case of Siras, queer futures can be secured through the achievement of privacy rights—that is, the tragedy of queer death can be averted via the case’s folding into the cause for egalitarian jurisprudence, securing the the promise of life via the right to be left alone. But as scholars of biopolitics have suggested, to theorize the management of life as disconnected from the necropolitical investment in death becomes untenable in the face of their mutual dependence.1 In other words, their coexistence functions in the service of uneven mortality distribution, with the cultivation of life serving as an alibi for the logics through which more vulnerable populations are placed in greater proximity to death. Refusing the simple distinctions between biopolitics and necropolitics, Jasbir Puar has suggested that the “distancing from death is a fallacy of modernity, a hallucination that allows for the unimpeded workings of biopolitics.” Thus, Puar contends that “the 145

146

!"#$%&' (

biopolitical will to live” is always carried out against the backdrop of “necropolitical violence” through systems that include “health, hygiene, environment, medicine . . . mortality (stalling death, the elongation of life), illness.”2

The Necropolitics of Revolution If previous chapters have focused on the ways in which queer bodies are ambivalently sutured into the nation-state’s will to “revolutionary” modernity via safety and privacy rights—that is, through technologies of life—in this chapter, I want to consider the implicit “death-worlds” that circulate within and around these technologies.3 More speci*cally, I focus on technologies of health, and the political economy of medicine and illness that subtends the management of queer bodies in the context of the emergence of HIV/AIDS in India in the early 1990s. While this chapter analyzes the ways in which queer bodies are placed in greater proximity to death (even as they have been willed to life elsewhere) during these “revolutionary” times, it further examines how queerness is framed by the nation-state as a source of risk and ill-health. To put it differently, even as queer bodies are rendered more precarious through their proximity to death, they are simultaneously interpellated as *gures who pose risks to life and the health of populations, thus representing a symbolic death to the nation. I thus grapple with the process through which queer bodies, in being framed as ideological *gures of immorality, also come to occupy the symbolic and material logics of national mortality. A double movement marks this braiding-together of “immorality” with the necropolitics of mortality— queer lives are rendered precarious by the violent force of necropolitics on the one hand; but they also ironically come to be framed as the very origins of necropolitical violence on the other. Of course, this double movement is not as contradictory as it might appear: the framing of vulnerable bodies as sources of terror serves to justify their disposability. Their imagined threat not only fails to register their precarity, but also serves to deny their humanity—an important precondition not simply for the disciplining of subjects, but also for making the violence of necropolitics appear banal, as an unfortunate but negligible by-product of modernist imperatives of health and wellness. As Puar writes, “Death becomes a form of collateral damage in the pursuit of life.”4

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

147

To materially ground my arguments, I want to frame this chapter with two brief and seemingly disconnected illustrations that foreground this double movement through which queer bodies are linked to death and disease. On January 29, 2007, a group of HIV-positive hijras in New Delhi held signs protesting Novartis, the Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company. The protest—organized by various health advocacy groups, HIV patients’ organizations, and LGBT rights activists—was a response to a writ petition *led by Novartis in the Madras High Court against the Indian government in 1998 to prevent local drug manufacturers from producing generic versions of anti-cancer and HIV medications. In doing so, Novartis was challenging the constitutionality of Section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act (1970), which would deny the company the sovereign power to control the intellectual rights over its drug innovations. For one week across various local news and national media venues, this image of HIV-positive hijras captured the con+uence of a variety of distinct yet intersecting issues: intellectual property rights, sexual citizenship, globalization, transnational economic policies, the political economy of HIV activism, and health advocacy. The protest signs included slogans like “People before Pro*ts” and “Don’t Shut Down the Pharmacy of the Developing World”—but perhaps the most conspicuous visuals among these contained the phrase “Drop: The Case in India” with the word “Drop” repeated three times in a bold, almost ominous font. Through a kind of visual onomatopoeia, the “o” in the word was replaced by a simulated drop of blood, combining the logics of legal governmentality and national sovereignty with the literal matter of life. In this situation, the operations of global capital defer people’s access to medicine, producing necropolitical conditions of vulnerability for queer bodies. In a different context, however, queer bodies are framed by the nation-state as the very embodiments of global capital through the rhetoric of disease—they are portrayed as a kind of foreign malaise that penetrates the supposed purity of the national body. For example, around the same time as the Novartis case, the self-proclaimed Hindu guru and Ayurveda entrepreneur Baba Ramdev warned his growing devotees (who included various government of*cials) that the Delhi High Court’s ruling that struck down Section 377 in 2009 would prompt nationwide protests from his followers. Insisting that homosexuality was a disease that could “be treated like any other congenital defect,” Ramdev recommended a treatment of “yoga, pranayama, and other meditation” as a way to cure homosexuality—a panacea that included

148

!"#$%&' (

recommendations for breathing techniques, the slow chanting of “Om,” and forms of meditation based on Vedic scriptures.5 Commenting on Section 377 prior to its partial strike-down by the Supreme Court in 2018, Ramdev further suggested that such “unnatural acts . . . if allowed to sustain will have catastrophic effects on the moral fabric of society and will jeopardize the institution of marriage itself. This offends the structure of the Indian value system, Indian culture and traditions, as derived from religious scriptures.”6 One of the numerous “catastrophic effects” that homosexuality unleashes on the sanctity of Indian tradition is the spread of HIV/AIDS, which becomes associated with the queer body in this framework. Not surprisingly, then, Ramdev’s taxonomy of yoga postures and breathing techniques has also been controversially offered as a “cure” for HIV, with pranayama having the potential to generate the normalization of CD4 counts and the reduction of viral loads. Yoga, Ayurveda, and breathing exercises in this framework are not just immunizations from HIV—they are also, by logical extension, inoculations against homosexuality, and its decadent in+uence on Indian (Hindu) tradition. A variety of disavowals and con+ations accrue around the desire to cure both AIDS and homosexuality through the antidote of “Indian” medicine and tradition. If AIDS and the queer body index one another, their association is simultaneously predicated on disassociation from the nation in which both come to represent modernity, globalization, and Western in+uence in contradictory ways. In addition to serving as a framing device for this chapter, the placing of these two illustrations in proximity to one another illustrates one of the central claims of Pink Revolutions as theorized in the introduction—how despite being productive to the “worlding” ambitions of the nation-state during “revolutionary” times, queer bodies are simultaneously threatening at a moment when the economic agendas of Hindutva brush up against its investments in ideological provincialism. The desire for global modernity even while interpellating queer bodies must then simultaneously manage these very bodies in order to preserve the nation’s health, in an ideological but also in a more literal medical sense. I will show how the nationalism of tradition serves as a panacea for “global” or “foreign” impositions (in this case, AIDS and the queer body) on a supposedly passive and resistant local. These mobilizations of “Hindu” tradition as a “cure” depend on eschewals of transnationalism that, in practice, are central to the branding of localism in the direction of and dedication to global markets. I thus offer an

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

149

analysis of the political economies subtending these eschewals in the context of “alternative” medicine that attends to the health of national life through heteronormative rehabilitation.

Late Effects and the Politics of Delay But *rst, I want to return to the image of queer bodies protesting pharmaceutical companies in the context of the Novartis case. I begin here for multiple reasons—as I have suggested above, an attention to the sexual economies of medicine shifts the focus from the queer will to “life” to the necropolitical investments that are implicit in such mobilizations. Furthermore, the Novartis case becomes an entry point into an analysis of how biomedical inequalities and the global economies of pharmaceutical industries inadvertently engender the popularity of “alternative” medicine and the return to local and heteronormative parochialisms. To put it differently, how are queer bodies triangulated within the medical economies of “home” (indigenous “cures”) and the “world” (global pharma)? The image of the hijras protesting Novartis draws attention to how the demand for medication is a queer issue—not simply in the sense of the identity ontology of vulnerable subjects, but also within the broader sexual economies in which such demands are implicated. What might it mean to theorize sexual politics in India as a matter that is patently queer? At one level, the adverbial framing of the phrase emphasizes the queerness of the nation-state, and serves as rejoinder to the homophobia that is espoused and institutionalized by legal systems, right-wing politicians, and Hindu fundamentalist leaders. But “patently queer” also assumes more literal mobilizations. While a useful conversation about the relationship between queer politics and left-wing legalism has been a productive outcome of the discourse around Section 377 in India, the emphasis on sovereign law and colonial genealogy has meant an exclusive focus on legalism that works to implicitly bracket off other dimensions of queer politics in India. For example, as suggested in the previous chapter, anti-Section 377 activism’s investment in the privacy rights ostensibly guaranteed by legal protection has failed to consider the vulnerabilities of queer populations who don’t enjoy caste or class privileges or who rely on sex work in a public sphere. In moving beyond a con+ation of queer activism in India with legal decriminalization, I want to consider the place of queer politics in a site which, at *rst,

150

!"#$%&' (

might appear to have nothing to do with queer issues: that of intellectual property rights and drug patent politics. The Novartis case marks the ful*llment of the economic liberalism that began in the early 1990s, but it also reveals a fracture in the ostensible inevitability of those neoliberal imperatives. As pointed out in the introduction, one of the predominant descriptors of a new and “revolutionary” India has been the rhetoric of heightened speed and unbounded velocity that are propelling the nation into the twenty-*rst century. The oft-repeated identi*cation of India as one of the “fastest-growing” economies is the most literal demonstration of this emphasis on accelerated growth. For example, William Nobrega and Ashish Sinha begin their investor primer Riding the Indian Tiger: Understanding India—The World’s Fastest Growing Economy (2008) with a Kafkaesque scenario of agonizing bureaucratic delay that is framed in temporal terms of slow motion and protracted deferral: “Imagine living in a country in which it took 10 years to receive permission to buy a car, 8 years to receive permission to buy a motorcycle, or 11 years to get a license for a phone line for your apartment.”7 But in the rapid transition from socialism to capitalism, the shackled economy is given a new lease on life. The frustrating time lags are replaced by new symbols of speed, hustle, and momentum—the familiar and ferocious tiger in the book’s title—but also by a rather long drawn-out metaphor of a rolling boulder that epitomizes economic growth: When you think about India, imagine a boulder. When you *rst attempt to move a boulder it will not budge. Then, after some time, you begin to rock it back and forth, slowly gaining some forward momentum. At a certain point the boulder will begin to roll—slowly at *rst, but continuously gaining speed. Before you know it it’s not possible to stop the boulder, and the path it takes can no longer be in+uenced by external forces.8

If the rolling boulder gathering speed and momentum is the prominent microcosm of new India, then the Novartis case highlights how such narratives of escalation are not simply in opposition to or are replacements for signi*ers of delay, but actually produce structures of belatedness, postponement, and deferral—what I call the “late effects” that structure sexual economies. What are the ways in which global capital slows down and defers access even as it operates through revolutionary narratives of speed and time-space compression?

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

151

Late Effects and the Politics of Delay The focus on deferred temporality is informed most viscerally by the “late effects” produced by multinational companies like Novartis that have fatal implications for people’s access to drugs caused by the delay in clinical trials, the slow process of drug approvals, and prolonged patent custody battles over orphan drugs. The word “delay” also conjures up the belabored time lags of court cases that sustain the livability of some lives and the disposability of others, and the bureaucracies of global governmentality that suspend the optimization of some lives. These mechanisms of delay further allude to the ways in which “lateness” also implies the belated participation of certain populations within “democratic” politics that renders them a step behind—always already removed from the present tense of (post)modernity. But beyond the obviously indexical and political illustrations of lateness, I am also invested in narrating the “story” of India’s “revolution” by analyzing the temporal logic of late effects in the midst of overdetermined signi*ers of speed and unbounded progress. To put it differently, an investment in understanding globalization as a transgression of space must be accompanied by an attention to its stretching-out of time.9 Such a rethinking cannot be in the form of a simple paradigm shift from a spatial to a temporal lens if the fundamental semiotics of time remains unchanged. Thus, in place of the conventional spatiotemporal descriptors that accompany contemporary globalization narratives—immediacy, instantaneousness, ef*ciency, speed, and transgression—what if the signi*ers in its place were delay, drag, atrophy, stagnancy, and deferral? An attention to globalization’s “late effects” runs counter to its supposed logics of +exibility and spatial mobility which have become hallmarks of the state in India in a post-liberalization milieu. The operations of such a belated temporality assume signi*cance in this context, in which the +exible adaptability of global capital has come to be valued even while its very desirability simultaneously produces a rigid statism that is grounded in a regional return to provincial nativisms and Indian “values” which have crucial implications for sexual politics. What, then, are the paradoxical consequences of economic and ideological mobility that operates in the same performative vicinity as cultural and political in+exibility? And how are Indian sexual economies implicated within the temporal logics of late effects, which in turn are mediated by the joint operations of global capitalism and disciplinary national formations?

152

!"#$%&' (

My attention to the “late effects” of globalization that structure the sexual economies of India implicitly draws on and extends queer, postcolonial, and postmodern accounts of temporality; but for the purpose of theorizing delay in relation to India’s sexual economies, what is perhaps most valuable is the scholarship on Asian anthropologies that has offered ethnographic accounts of globalization through what Aihwa Ong has called “zones of variegated sovereignty.”10 For example, in her critique of Arjan Appadurai’s work on cultural globalization, Ong departs from his understanding of “mediascapes” that highlight globalization’s spatial and temporal transgressions. Instead, Ong proposes that any account of globalization is incomplete without an attempt to theorize the political distinctions between “the power of mobile and nonmobile subjects” (11). For Ong, the emphasis on de-territorialization effaces “the political economy of time-space compression and gives the misleading impression that everyone can take equal advantage of mobility and modern communications and that transnationality has been liberatory, in both a spatial and political sense, for all peoples” (11). Ong’s emphasis on the “variegated” zones of globalization thus foregrounds its calibrated speci*cities. If +exible citizenship marks the cultural and political logics of globalization, it becomes crucial to map its asymmetrical spatiotemporal structures in order to understand how this mobility produces the structures of boundedness and immobility that inform Indian modernity. Such an understanding would eschew the homogenization of the Indian state as a passive site on which the monopolies of the global regime perform their unidirectional +ows. Ong thus calls for a mode of “nomadic thinking” that carefully tracks the uneven spread of global capitalism and the complicities between nation-states with such uneven +ows, as well as the cultural and economic struggles that are implicated within their logics (244). The underside of +exible citizenship is thus constituted by the in+exible relations that are “stuck” in time. In the Indian context, +exible citizenship that is predicated on the embrace of development and global initiatives has been accompanied by the rise of parochial nationalisms that tether various populations to already existing modes of structural violence, state management, and biopolitical governmentality. These limited sovereignties are not simply the undesirable outcomes of +exibility or delayed modernity, but are in fact constitutive of a “shining” or “digital” Indian modernity which illustrates Ong’s important reminder that “capitalism is no longer centered in the West” (31). The particular con*gurations of relations between capital,

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

153

culture, and nationalism are not simply the product of an “immature version” of a “master Western prototype,” but are a consequence of a very particular interfacing between transnational linkages and local regionalisms (31). In his anthropology of the state in India, Akhil Gupta illustrates Ong’s call for an analysis of non-Western modernities by examining the Indian state’s biopolitical management of poverty. In considering the impact of neoliberal economic policies on the poor in India, Gupta asks: “Will the poor continue to be ‘targets’ of programs intended to shore up the legitimacy of ruling regimes but that make little difference to whether they live or die? Are the programs to care for the poor in place precisely to inoculate us to the political possibility of their death becoming a scandal?”11 In his analysis, state-sponsored programs that ostensibly alleviate poverty in India are marked by rationalized structures of bureaucracy, corruption, and red tape that inde*nitely postpone their purported aims, resulting in chronic states of disenfranchisement. He asks: “After more than 60 years of development efforts by the postcolonial state, why do so many of India’s citizens continue to be subjected to the cruelties of endemic hunger and malnutrition and to be deprived of such basic necessities as clothing, shelter, clean water, and sanitation?” (3). Gupta’s ethnography illustrates how the welfare of populations in India is shaped both by narratives of state development and by transnational formations. Gupta uses the term “global governmentality” to foreground this form of regulation which, at one level, is “deeply tied to the conduct of populations within the boundaries of the nation-state” (235). But global governmentality also indexes transnational narratives of progress and development that Gupta traces to a post-World War II historical context through institutions such as the World Bank which “have made the poor a global category at the same time they have insisted that national governments are responsible for the solution to poverty” (239). Gupta’s model of transnational governmentality thus considers how state policies under conditions of postcoloniality are structured by (but not mechanically reduced to) globalization formations. Late effects are thus underlain by the developmental imperatives of state policy, which are in turn informed by the transformation of India’s economy to make it more IMF-compatible with global market reform. In speci*cally addressing the temporality of the uneven distribution of life chances that is the result of state policies and programs, Gupta asks: “How does one think about not only deliberate acts of violence such as police brutality, but also political, administrative, and

154

!"#$%&' (

judicial action or inaction that prevents poor people from making a living, obtaining medical aid, and securing such necessities of life as food, clothing, shelter, and sanitation? Why is faster, more effective state intervention not forthcoming to relieve the suffering of millions of the poorest and most disempowered?” (5). For Gupta, temporal delay thus marks the conditions of precarity contradicting Indian modernity, in which poverty is inextricably tied to the red tape of state biopolitics. In the above frameworks, the temporality of globalization is theorized in relation to shifts in governmentality, global policy, and the uneven distribution of life chances. But the term “late effects” has its roots in the discourse of contemporary medicine that indexes a more literal link between globalization and illness. In the language of epidemiology, “late effects” refer to the delayed time lag between the initial onset of a chronic condition and the persistence of symptoms even after the acute phase has ostensibly run its due course. Late effects are not simply the deferred effects of an original condition, but can often be caused ironically by the very treatment intended as an antidote. For example, in the early attempts at treating HIV, AZT therapies—initially thought to impede the reproduction of the virus—proved to be so toxic (and costly) that several users either became dependent on transfusions or would show further signs of degeneration after an initial period of stability. The focus on antiretroviral drugs—perceived to target the more “acute” phase of compromised immunity—meant that signi*cant resources were diverted away from the treatment of opportunistic infections that proved to be equally fatal in AIDS patients. The temporality of medical administration in this context is analogous with geopolitical technologies of power in which the management systems of treatment organizations operate in ways that are structurally similar to state intervention. In attending to and administering life chances, the Indian state similarly does not facilitate or ameliorate the optimization of HIV-positive people’s living; in fact, such a mode of biopolitical management is tied more fatally and inexorably to death or the necropolitical. For example, acute delays, shortages, and out-of-stock drugs at ART (antiretroviral therapy) centers in India have compromised the putative progress of HIV accessibility despite progressive narratives about the containment of AIDS-related deaths reported by NACO (National AIDS Control Organization) in the last decade.12 In 2014, the central government merged the DAC (Department of AIDS Control) with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, diluting the speci*c material needs of persons living with HIV, reducing the number

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

155

of training staff at ART centers, and compounding the shortage of the free supply of drugs. A legal notice *led by the Lawyers Collective on behalf of the Delhi Network of Positive People details instances of patients in rural areas receiving dosages for less than a week, forcing them to make repeated trips to urban centers or risk long delays in access to vital medicines. In the context of global governmentality, the persistence of late effects is symptomatic of the political life of globalization under conditions of Western modernity, which promises economic development as its treatment. And yet, despite the apparent formal connections between the logic of epidemiology and the realm of the political, analogy, as already theorized in chapter 2, is ultimately inadequate since it presumes structural dissimilarity even as it draws attention to congruity in meaning. The late effects of illness do not contiguously replicate the workings of geopolitical inequities; treatment, which administers the time of living and dying, is not symbolic of global formations as much as it is a mode of geopolitics itself. Thus, in the context of HIV/AIDS, Eric Cazdyn writes: “the global pandemic is not only the most perfect metaphor for globalization; it is globalization.”13 It is useful to preserve the symbolic and literal relation between delay and globalization through the mobilization of the concept of “late effects”—to suggest the fatal delays to medical access in India, but also to foreground the postponed life chances that circulate around the post-liberalized Indian state’s aspirations to modernity.

The Novartis Story of Globalization The Novartis case serves as a useful illustration of this indexical relation between global governmentality, state biopolitics, and the political economy of medicine. India’s patent laws were codi*ed through the Indian Patents and Designs Act in 1911, before independence from the British in 1947. As subaltern critics have amply demonstrated, the postcolonial nation-state replicated modes of governmentality from British India, which in the case of a newly independent nation meant unaffordable medication in the midst of abject poverty.14 The passing of the Indian Patents Act in 1970 repealed the earlier law, preventing product patents, and reducing the term of the patents from 16 to 7 years. The local generic market was fueled during this time period under government regulations that precluded monopoly markets, restricted the role

156

!"#$%&' (

of multinational companies, and reserved a large percentage of drug production for indigenous industries. (Currently, India is one of the largest producers of cheap antiretrovirals, which are used locally and exported to African nations as well.) The economic self-suf*ciency of post-independence India pharmacy reduced its dependence on medical imports, and eventually made it one of the largest exporters of cheap drugs in the Global South. This era of relative economic sovereignty radically shifted when India joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) and was pressured into a product patent regime, ostensibly to reward innovation and foster original research in medicine. In 1994 India capitulated to the TradeRelated Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement at the Uruguay Round of the WTO, which required that patents be awarded for twenty years to facilitate cutting-edge innovation and scienti*c expertise in drug development. The WTO set up different timelines for developing countries to become TRIPS-compliant, and India accordingly amended its patent laws in 1995. The temporal overlap between the liberalization of domestic Indian markets toward a free trade model and the demand for the antiretrovirals that manage HIV is not without signi*cance. Antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV must be taken for the rest of the patient’s life, since the drugs cannot completely eradicate the HIV virus from the body, and this has created a mode of chronic time—what Eric Cazdyn refers to as a “prescriptive meantime”—in which the temporality of illness is stretched out and maintained rather than eliminated. In a post-TRIPS era, patients’ prolonged dependence on antiretrovirals thus fostered a market system in which chronic treatment generated larger demand for the drugs and for a longer period of time.15 The temporal life of drug management thus accentuated the demand for patent control. In order to regulate the proliferation of patents on life-saving drugs, the Doha Declaration in 2001 was passed, facilitating a degree of malleability in how developing countries implemented the TRIPS agreements. The declaration thus contended that TRIPS “can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO members’ right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all.”16 In March 2005, India amended its Patents Act to include Section 3(d), which, while complying with the TRIPS agreements, would not offer patents to “new” drugs produced by trivial modi*cations to the molecular structures of older ones (a practice called “patent evergreening”). The patent amendment of Section 3(d)

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

157

thus prevented drug companies from *ling for property rights based on marginal tweaks to existing drugs’ particle size, chemicals, salts, esters, or even the combination of two or more drugs. The practice of “evergreening,” however, underscores how biotechnology and discourses of science buttress global capitalism’s abrading of national sovereignty. In attempting to secure exclusive marketing rights for its anti-cancer drug Gleevec, Novartis argued that Section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act was a violation of the TRIPS agreement, and therefore in con+ict with WTO criteria of patentability. Under global capitalism, writes Cazdyn, “if what marks the supplementary logic of modern biopolitics is the denationalization of citizens and the seizure of rights  .  .  . then what marks the emerging bioeconomics is a justi*cation for inequality based on the logic of the market.”17 Corporate personhood thus co-opts the rhetoric of rights violation in which the denaturalization of citizenship is accompanied by the formation of a quasi supranation-like entity. While it is only the nation-state that can conventionally approach the WTO for breaches in agreements, the logic of a nation is usurped by Novartis in its invocation of TRIPS. The unraveling of local sovereignty does not take place under conditions of the nation’s disappearance as much as its substitution by corporate personhood.

“Incredible” Innovations: The Indian State Post-Liberalization Despite the pressures of global capital on local economies as explicated above, the Novartis case cannot be narrated only through a Manichean divide between global capitalism and a homogenized local whose access to medicine is deferred through bioeconomic imperatives. The new millennium push toward free market optimism through “India Shining” propaganda has fostered a local investment in a product patent regime by the defenders of industry monopoly and economic competition. These groups are, as a local legal representative of Novartis termed it, *rmly against the state’s “fatwa” on innovation and healthy competition. The communalist invocation in this context is not without signi*cance, since economic prosperity is articulated against the primitivism of Muslim populations—both in and out of the nation—that a progressive India must leave behind and de*ne itself against. As Junaid Rana points out, in contemporary geopolitical imaginaries, “India is celebrated as a vital democracy and growth economy that is a global competitor, while Pakistan is thought of as a failed state with nuclear

158

!"#$%&' (

capabilities constantly on the brink of running amok.”18 Neoliberalism in this context is predicated on a selective “secularism” that obscures the investment in de*ning India as Hindu. The emphasis on innovation on the part of Novartis AG that brackets its delayed and deferred access is, of course, not simply about corporate greed and pharmaceutical market monopoly. It is also about the role of an investment-friendly Indian state in a post-liberalization milieu that facilitates and regulates +ows of global capital, challenging the idea that globalization is marked by the disappearance or simple retreat of statehood. Even while the Novartis legal battle has been framed as a case that pits a multinational company against the Indian government, it would be simplistic to theorize the nation-state as merely a beleaguered entity that is axiomatically resistant to the hegemony of the global. Such a view lapses into what Ong calls the “top-down model” of power geometry that informs some classic theorizations of globalization.19 Thus, for example, the Indian government is complicit in creating the conditions for patent “innovation” even as it *ghts the Novartis case in the legal domain. Echoing Novartis’s emphasis on patents as pathways to innovation, a joint statement released by India and the United States after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s *rst bilateral summit with President Barack Obama extols “the need to foster innovation in a manner that promotes economic growth and job creation,” with particular reference to intellectual property governance.20 In order to move beyond the current stalemate, the future vision of partnership between the nations would rely on the ostensibly neutral auspices of the Trade Policy Forum “to promote a business environment attractive for companies to invest and manufacture in India and the United States.”21 The renewed relationship is branded by the slogan “Chalein Saath Saath” (“Let’s Walk Together”); here, the indigenous cultural framing of the Hindi phrase shores up an Indian modernity predicated on global investment, while simultaneously offering a distinctly local +avor. This mode of neoliberal branding is not simply a way of localizing global governmentality in which local cultural speci*city adapts or makes concessions to the global. The too easy dichotomizing of Indian modernity that follows such a local/global split does much to inform what Sanjay Srivastava has called the “dual economy model of modernisation theory” which is invoked most simplistically, for example, in the “car and bullock cart on a city road” bromide, or more recently the rural Indian villager with a smartphone.22 The neat coexistence of tradition and modernity in these images is yet another dimension of +exible citizenship, in which

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

159

their shared invocation effaces what Srivastava calls the “evolutionary schema” that marks Indian modernity.23 In other words, the contradictory coexistence of “tradition” with the modern that is mapped on to this local/global schema is explained through narratives of authenticity and national exceptionalism instead of being understood through critiques of class, caste, and communal or other hierarchical divisions that would foreground how Indian modernity is predicated on modes of structural and economic violence. Agreements such as the Trade Policy Forum thus become the means through which such divisions are exacerbated under the aegis of neutrality, obscuring their investments in the weakening of patentability criteria (and thus encouraging evergreening practices) and in aggressive patent appeasement policies. Thus, the BJP can champion economic prosperity based on principles of Western modernity (which cannot include the primitivism of religious minorities) and at the same time reject LGBT Indians as products of degenerate Western morality. The contradictions within these local-global relations are replicated in the arena of intellectual patent litigation as well. On the one hand, the generic local pharmaceutical industry must defend its indigenous patent policies in order to protect the public’s access to cheap drugs; on the other hand, the Confederation of Indian Industry, along with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Of*ce, propose the adoption of a local version of the U.S. Bayh-Dole Act (also called the Patent and Trademark Law Amendment Act of 1980), which provided federal funding but guaranteed educational institutions exclusive ownership and licensing of their innovations. This was in order to promote the university-corporate nexus that instantaneously commercializes research for pro*t. Thus once again, globalization’s late effects do not subsume the nation as much as they fracture it, creating an India in which Novartis generates wealth for local shareholders, but also an India in which slow death is imminent for those whose access to drugs is deferred. This fracturing effect of global capitalism masquerades as spatial and temporal +exibility, and is consequently often celebrated as globalism’s ability to remake itself in the image of the local. But a challenge to global capital’s “adaptability” while acknowledging its duplicity doesn’t quite go far enough in unpacking its perniciousness. As Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan have suggested, the concept of “transnational +ows” in globalization studies potentially “ignores inequities as well as those aspects of modernity that seem *xed or immobile.”24 Rather than thinking of globalization as merely making concessions to the local, its

160

!"#$%&' (

“+exibility” can be understood as a mode of biopiracy. The Novartis case illustrates how the argument for a more rigid drug patent regime on the part of multinational companies is coeval with the plundering of biodiversity that has threatened local agrarian economies and traditional knowledge systems. The commercial branding of seeds and the bioprospecting of natural remedies is thus not simply a matter of cultural appropriation, but one of economic theft that has inextricable ties to the necropolitical—what Vandana Shiva has called “the suicide economy of corporate globalization,” in reference to the alarming rates of farmer suicides in rural India that emerged as a consequence of land-grabbing and coercive monocultures.25 The exploitation of biodiverse sources thus takes advantage of an intellectual patent regime that is selectively mobilized under global capital’s late effects: when neem, ayurveda, and siddha health therapies are commercialized for global use, for example, such an exchange is predicated on the supposed mutual reciprocity and liberating potential of free markets. Conversely, India’s ostensible lack of respect for international intellectual property laws (as described by Novartis) is simultaneously framed as a transgression of international regulation and a threat to future innovation and research. While the former is naturalized as an inevitable consequence of progressive time, the latter is problematized as modernity’s temporal deferral. Consequently, global “+exibility” in the Indian context has compelled indigenous economies to enter into patent legislation to protect biodiversity through the licensing of natural resources, even though it is this very rights regime that works to weaken local sovereignty in the Novartis case. The ideological terms of the intellectual patent regime are thus always already structured in favor of global industries, even while community trade lobbies have increasingly resorted to mobilizing patents for the purposes of biodiversity protection. When legalism and legislation become the arena through which sovereign agency is negotiated, discourses of authenticity and originality often become the only strategic resources available with which to challenge patent regimes. Thus, for example, the attempt to trademark traditional knowledge systems or products requires a compulsory documentation of original sources that obscures more syncretic histories or hybrid local formations. Backed by international economic institutions such as the WTO and the IMF, such forays into patent jurisprudence are inevitably biased toward the dictates of the Washington Consensus (i.e., the set of economic prescriptions and reform policies promoted for developing nations by the World Bank, the IMF, and the U.S. Treasury Department) which mark neoliberal branding.

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

161

The implicit coercing into legal protectionist mechanisms as a response to biopiracy not only obviates more capacious patent models, but is also caught up in the unintended regulatory effects of conceptualizing postcolonial agency purely as a matter of legalism and modern constitutionality. The Novartis case thus forces a deeply dialectical response to the late effects of globalization—on the one hand, local models of sovereignty replicate structures of legal bureaucracy and Western modernity; on the other hand, recourses to native essence offer selective accounts of the nation’s past and limit the plural possibilities of the future in contexts that are not simply germane to patent rights. The ripple effects of these dialectical formations spill over into the arenas of gender and sexual politics in ways that do not simply exceed political economy; instead, they are sutured to neoliberal formations, postcolonial contradictions, and the rigid temporalities of late effects through structures of being and feeling that are not immediately transparent or explicitly articulated. In the arena of HIV activism and discourses around same-sex behavior in India, these contradictions are engendered by globalization and the liberalization of India’s markets, but are also problematically sutured to its material, discursive, and ideological formations. While the global funding of NGOs has often dictated the distribution of resources and even privileged the circulation of categories for these funds, the post-liberalization milieu has also created the possibility, as demonstrated by the Novartis protests, for AIDS activism in India to participate in global struggles around patient rights, sexual citizenship, and access to medicine.26 For example, the GFATM (Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria) initiated in developing nations in 2002 was not simply the consequence of G8 summits and United Nations special sessions, but more accurately was a result of the demand for cheaper access to antiretrovirals by local activists and health advocacy groups in India and South Africa. This mode of international accountability also operated at more local levels when groups working at the intersections of HIV activism and LGBT politics (such as the Humsafar Trust, Lawyers’ Collective, and AIDS Research Foundation India) advocated not just for the availability of cheaper generic medicines, but also for counseling and con*dential health advice for queer populations in order to ensure a daily consumption of drugs that would preempt the need for more expensive second-line drug regimens. If the priorities of global funding mark the emergence of HIV activism in India, issues such as patent rights and intellectual property triangulate with sexuality and Indian modernity, constraining and

162

!"#$%&' (

shaping the manifestations of queerness in Indian political culture.27 Like patent legislation activism that mobilizes a post-TRIPS milieu to its advantage through an authentic return to origins, an af*rmative queer politics gets articulated through the truth effects of historical Indian tradition, promising the coevalness of sexual dissidence with indigenous histories and local formations. It is not without signi*cance that in addition to the activist voices that rallied around the repeal of Section 377, the most visible mode of anti-homophobic rhetoric in the Indian context is articulated through a return to the Kama Sutra, Hindu scriptures, tenth-century Khajurao temple carvings, precolonial literature, and ancient Indian mythology in order to document the material proof of same-sex desire as not just compatible with, but central to indigenous traditions. The tangibility of this historical evidence, even while articulating a queer lineage that has its own discrete ontology, cannot completely carve out the autonomous tradition which it seems to cathect. The investment in historical tradition as an evidentiary response to queer erasure is thus indirectly connected to a global political economy that engenders provincial nativism and lubricates its myopias. The return to sovereign queer tradition is ironically mediated by conditions of dwindling sovereignty under globalization’s late effects. These are moments of asymmetry in which narratives of globalization’s supposed transitional “+ows” and temporal +exibilities meet their limits. In this instance, the late effects of globalization do not produce their purported elastic transgressions; instead they perform a freezing of time—a forced push into the fossilization of identity.

Neoliberal Governmentality and the Romance of “Alternative” Medicine The attachment to localism and the return to origins—whether to stave off a pro*t-driven intellectual patent regime, or to document the “authenticity” of indigenous sexuality—produce modes of agency that are always constrained, and ultimately replicate the structures of the very (trans)nationalist discourses they set out to critique. In what sense, then, can the “contestation” of global governmentality constitute a complicity that creates death worlds for queer bodies under the auspices of preservation of life, health, and well-being? As global discourses of patent monopoly and pharmaceutical pro*teering have deferred access to medication since the turn of the twenty-*rst

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

163

century, the same period has witnessed the heightened proliferation of alternative medicine and therapeutic markets that include Ayurveda, yoga, Unani, Siddha products, formulas, and meditation techniques. Framed as cheaper, more “traditional,” and as offering greater access to poor populations than allopathic medicine, the recent popularity of these treatments can be attributed to the “god market” that has accompanied Hindu fundamentalism, as well as state-sponsored tax cuts and proprietary patents for those medicines using “indigenous” and “natural” ingredients.28 It is not without signi*cance that the liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s was accompanied by more protectionist measures such as the creation of the Department of Indian Systems of Medicine and Homeopathy in 1995 by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare; the department was expanded and renamed in 2003 as the Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha, Homeopathy). Charged with efforts to protect the “natural” wealth of India’s indigenous systems of medical knowledge, the new ministry developed a Traditional Knowledge Digital Library in 2001 as a way to preempt modes of biopiracy and the co-optation of “natural” medicines through patenting by multinational pharmaceutical companies. One of the undertakings of the digital library, for example, was to translate Sanskrit shlokas (verses) describing Ayurvedic formulas so that certain medical formulas and properties could be widely legible and therefore understood as protected indigenous knowledge in relation to international speci*cations. These efforts to protect traditional medical systems from biopiracy and to resist unfair patent monopolies are, of course, crucial endeavors, given how technologies of global governmentality such as evergreening and patent regulation defer access to medicines. At the same time, as suggested throughout this book, the theme of monolithic resistance that resolutely stands up to oppressive structures of power can often obscure ideological machinations at work, and conceal how “liberatory” local formations can themselves be central locations of supremacy and domination despite their appearance as peripheral or “alternative.” Thus, in response to the monopolies through which non-allopathic treatments are mediated,  the elevation of “natural” and “indigenous” medicine as a site that supposedly offers alternatives to global pharmacology warrants rethinking and critique. What are the ways in which national discourses around indigenous medicines rely on the very transnational discourses they purport to jettison? And how do queer or HIV-positive bodies become the material placeholders and symbolic disavowals through which these eschewals are negotiated?

164

!"#$%&' (

If the temporal logics of late effects offer a central analytical lens through which to understand the regulation of medicines via patents, the framework of delay similarly operates (albeit in contradictory ways) at different ideological and epidemiological registers around the political economy of “alternative” treatments.  In perhaps the most literal illustration of the temporal life of medicine, the popularity of Ayurvedic treatments in place of allopathic ones in India can be attributed to the long time it takes for people in rural areas to  access medicine— requiring high transportation costs and long periods of time away from work in order to travel to the urban centers where most ART centers are located.29 More immediately accessible Ayurvedic treatments thus serve as replacements, circumventing the protracted amount of time and money required to access biomedical treatments and antiretrovirals from public-sector hospitals. At another level, however, the immediacy of ISM (Indian systems of medicine) and “alternative” treatments functions in conjunction with narratives of temporal endurance and the stretching of time. In epidemiological contexts, alternative or “natural” remedies are framed as more holistic and long-term antidotes than biomedicine—for example, in the context of HIV/AIDS, the use of Ayurvedic remedies is propagated as a way to productively delay the use of antiretroviral therapies in order to treat opportunistic infections and reduce HIV viral loads, despite a statement released by India’s National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) foregrounding its skepticism regarding Ayurveda’s ef*cacy in treating HIV.30 The binary between the supposedly more permanent and long-lasting treatment afforded by traditional remedies in opposition to the quick-*x solutions of biomedicine is not, however, a recent ideological formation. It can be traced back to a colonial legacy in which Western medicine was used as an imperialistic tool to civilize native systems of medicine. As Chandrima Chakraborty remarks, the “crystallization of this binary legitimized the British impetus in colonial India to develop and expand biomedical educational institutions, hospitals and clinics,”31 while dismissing indigenous systems as not only ineffectual but also barbaric, unscienti*c, and backward. Similarly, in her essay on the use of Ayurveda in the treatment of HIV/AIDS, Cecilia Van Hollen foregrounds how the Gandhian dictum that “to study European medicine is to deepen our slavery” still mediates understandings of illness and the body in India in the twenty-*rst century. Van Hollen points to the temporal narratives underlying these binaries— Gandhi “constructs an opposition between biomedicine as a quick *x to

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

165

alleviate symptoms but with only temporary effects versus indigenous Indian medicine’s more holistic and spiritual approach . . . that gets to the root cause of the problem.”32 In this schema, the temporary effects of biomedicine also function as late effects: their immediacy and their inadequacy in producing long-lasting antidotes ultimately engender yet another kind of delay—one that postpones a more “wholesome” and “natural” recovery of the authentic healthy self. In failing to attend to the deeper sources of ill-health (i.e., “the root cause of the problem”), biomedicine’s +aws are not only its temporary effects that dissipate with time, but also its side effects that derail the restoration of good health, and by implication, of “normal” life. Gandhi’s views on allopathic medicine, even while offered in the context of his anticolonial critique, are worth quoting in detail since they set the stage for contemporary discourses and co-optations around medicine and ideology: How do these diseases arise? Surely by our negligence or indulgence. I overeat, I have indigestion, I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine, I am cured. I overeat again, I take his pills again. Had I not taken the pills in the *rst instance, I would have suffered the punishment deserved by me and I would not have overeaten again. The doctor intervened and helped me to indulge myself. My body thereby certainly felt more at ease; but my mind became more weakened. A continuance of a course of medicine must, therefore, result in loss of control over the mind.33

In the above lines, the occurrence of disease is deeply ensconced in a moralistic framework in which illness is a form of punishment for the +aws of immoderation and excess. But what is also noteworthy is that these forms of weakness—both ethical and epidemiological—do not only inhere in the health-negligent body; they are reinforced by the administration of Western medicine which secures immediate effects under the guise of cure, but ultimately only encourages a more protracted abandonment of good health and living. The Western cure, in other words, implicitly endorses and exonerates indulgence through a reliance on the illusion that instant remedies no longer require moderate restraint and the care of the self. The split between mind and body that structures Gandhi’s ideas on traditional and modern medicine circles around other binaries in this oppositional framework: between East and West, natural and unnatural, endurance and atrophy, responsibility and negligence, morality

166

!"#$%&' (

and immorality. The imperatives of good and long-lasting health that are secured by traditional medicine thus get attached to the nationstate in light of the historical resistance to biomedicine’s deployment as a colonial instrument. The persistence of this ideological legacy—in which biomedicine’s temporary immediacy is pitted against Ayurveda’s permanent durability—plays out in a post-“revolutionary” context after 1991, in which the links between nation and alternative medicine are exploited by self-appointed spiritual leaders, swamis, and god men, whose contemporary popularity constitutes what Aya Ikegame and Jacob Copeman have called the emergence of “guru governmentality” accompanying the liberalization of the nation’s economy.34 Drawing on Foucault, Ikegame and Copeman note that the phrase “guru governmentality” signals the ways in which “the Indian state now ‘borrows’ from or harnesses the guru-devotee relationship to ful*l certain governmental ends” (289). “Guru governmentality” functions as a technology of the state through which it de+ects any responsibility for the improvement of people’s life chances and the alleviation of suffering by paying attention to structural inequalities, and replaces such investments with a more individuated politics of personal healing, selfimprovement, and spiritual salvation. While guru governmentality, with its strong indigenous and localized investments, might appear as the oppositional foil to global governmentality discussed in the previous section, their operations are more contiguous than might seem at *rst glance. Rather than understanding these twin modes of governmentality as a local/global split, they are more usefully theorized as replicating each other’s structural logics. In both instances, an attention to social problems and investments in the public good are refracted and resolved through logics of the free market (in the case of global governmentality) and the betterment of the self through alternative medicine and indigenous spiritualities (in the case of guru governmentality). Thus, Ikegame and Copeman rightly suggest that these modes of governmentality do not so much signal a withdrawal of the state as they mark a relocation to different spheres of “de-statized” modes of administration (289). These new forms of governance are unique in that they are neither completely delinked from nor wholly dependent on forms of state authority—instead, their mutually bene*cial “social contract with the state” allows for relative autonomy, while also absorbing and distributing the state’s mechanisms of control across different spheres.35 This malleability of +exible governance is particularly conducive to the global circulation of “authentic” or “alternative” localisms, so that

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

167

indigenous medicine can be both resolutely national and economically transnational in scope. This is not dissimilar to the “Indian at heart, yet global in spirit” mantras which function not simply as nationalistic bromides, but as ways to paper over the contradictions of discourses (such as an alternative medicine economy) that are deeply enmeshed in the very transnationalism that they appear to reject. For example, while the teachings of the spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar are based on and shaped by “traditional” indigenous philosophies—Hindu scriptures, the principles of sudharshan kriya (breathing techniques), and the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—the scope of his teachings is aimed at Western audiences and markets, as evidenced by the popularity of the globally renowned Art of Living Foundation, the spiritual organization started by Shankar that boasts more than 350 million followers worldwide. In yet another instance, Baba Ramdev describes his spiritual teachings in a language that is a seamless amalgam of “old” and “new”: “while pranayamas strengthen the software of the body, asanas [yoga postures] empower its hardware.”36 Thus, the global marketing of “natural” Ayurvedic remedies, spiritual teachings, and forms of Vedic wisdom—what Joseph Alter calls a kind of “transnational nationalism” subtending traditional medicine— foregrounds how national discourses of authenticity betray their transnational aspirations.37 As Alter points out, the contemporary investment in “alternative” medicine and therapies constitutes “the paradox and irony of a nationalism that depends on but seeks to transcend—or elide—a transnationalism that makes it possible.”38 And yet, even while “transnational nationalism” appears paradoxical in formulation, it is well in keeping with the spirit of pink revolutions that thrive on the management of supposed contradictions as their essential claims to exceptionality. The fetishization of hybridity that encompasses “old” and “new” fusions thus only bolsters the nation-state’s claims of capaciousness which can uniquely resolve the oppositional claims of tradition and modernity. In the context of medicine, these conciliatory resolutions that inform revolutions are often framed as attempts to articulate a “middle ground” between allopathy and traditional Indian therapies, creating a uniquely hybrid model of “medical pluralism.” For example, in an essay arguing for the use of Ayurvedic therapies in HIV/AIDS treatment in India, Catherine Thomas advocates for “collaboration between and cross-education of Allopathic and Ayurvedic practitioners,” creating a “more comprehensive, integrative care for HIV-positive patients

168

!"#$%&' (

in India.”39 Thomas usefully points to the various material constraints that poor populations have in accessing antiretroviral treatments— the unaffordability of allopathic treatment, the rural dependence on Ayurvedic medicines, and the aforementioned geographic distance to ART centers. But rather than articulate the conditions that could enhance medical security and easier access to ART, Thomas resorts to combined cultural and biomedical rationales for the use of Ayurvedic treatments. Citing its greater “cultural appropriateness” in treating opportunistic infections and reducing viral loads, Thomas explains how Ayurveda provides a useful treatment regimen even in the absence of a classi*cation system that accounts for HIV infection: “the symptomatic manifestations of different stages of AIDS can be seen as kshaya (de*ciency) symptoms, including maji shukra ojakshaya (full-blown AIDS). As a result of these understandings, vaidyas have adapted their practices for dealing with this new disease” (5). In this adapted framework, vaidyas (Ayurvedic medical practitioners) do not completely jettison the uses of biomedicine—instead, they modify epidemiological frameworks through Ayurvedic classi*cation systems so that they are more compatible with “traditional” forms of medical knowledge production. Thomas concludes: “while ART can be used to prolong life, Ayurvedic medicines can be used to improve quality of life by diminishing or eliminating less severe side effects” (5). Even though there has been little conclusive epidemiological data on the ef*cacy of traditional Indian medicine in managing HIV, and despite NACO’s of*cial statements expressing skepticism about the use of Ayurveda and homeopathy as treatments, cultural logics operating through medical rationales become central justi*cations for this judicious “middle ground”—a suitably hybrid or plural option of traditional medicine and allopathy. While the idea of a “third way” between biomedicine and traditional treatments appears as the path of reasoned compromise, not only is it predicated on dubious epidemiological assumptions and cultural essentialisms, it also gives egregious medical recommendations and “cures” a veneer of pragmatic respectability. In arguing for the mobilization of Ayurveda in HIV treatment, Thomas suggests that “since many Ayurvedic and AYUSH healers are already in place and are often well-respected members of rural communities, they could serve as invaluable sources for healthier sexual behaviors in their communities” (11). Subsequently, since traditional healers are supposedly more sensitive to the needs of indigenous communities, they would be in a better position to recommend testing as well as allopathic routes of treatment.

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

169

While couched in the language of cultural speci*city and sensitivity (making it hard to argue against), Thomas’s call for a moderate middle ground of medical pluralism as one that ultimately promotes “healthier sexual behaviors” betrays its rehabilitative and normalizing logics in which sexuality is a problem that requires management and containment through therapeutic and spiritual imperatives. In many ways, the investments in moderation in Thomas’s framework are in keeping with traditional medicine’s philosophies of good health, in which self-control and temperance are highly valued as antidotes to the supposed excesses and immoderations of modern living. Temporal logics once again mediate these ideas about medicine and modernity, in which the tensions and anxieties of a fast-paced and competitive world are assuaged by the natural remedies of traditional treatments. In his analysis of modernity and indigenous medicine in India, Martin Bode points to the Indian pharmaceutical company Zandu’s publication Swasth Jivan (Healthy Life) as a medical treatise that offers a useful illustration of the role of Ayurveda in slowing down the hectic pace of modern life. In the publication, westernization—represented by city life—has undermined, in the vaidya’s words, “the three pillars of health which are: wholesome diet, undisturbed sleep, and ‘sexual abstinence,’ i.e. the practice of sexuality according to social rules which usually means marital sexual relations.”40 Zandu’s Ayurvedic products thus constitute the antidotes to what Bode calls “the ills of modernity” (196). They offer natural remedies that assuage the toxicity of “modern” lifestyles which are mired in excess and addiction. Thus, the speed and indulgence of modern life and “Western” in+uence can only be cured by a return to the natural healing powers of traditional Indian medicine. Recalling the Gandhian critique of colonial medicine, the use of allopathy in such a framework is rejected for a variety of reasons. From an epidemiological perspective, it causes further degeneration of the body by its use of toxic chemicals and the non-natural composition of its drugs. From an ideological perspective, if the very roots of ill-health lie in the decadence and avarice of the West, then Western medicine is not just antithetical to cure, but also exacerbates the very symptoms of disease. As Bode points out, “Indian indigenous pharmaceuticals provide a vehicle to criticize Westernisation while also offering a solution for the health hazards caused by ‘modern things’ such as fast food, alcoholic drinks, and excessive ambition” (196). Such critiques of westernization, however, also ironically function in the service of alternative medicine’s Western popularity and

170

!"#$%&' (

circulation beyond local contexts. The critiques of allopathy espoused by Indian gurus and spiritual leaders such as Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar have found a receptive global market—a popularity that has as much to do with the secular demand for alternatives to organized religion in the West as with an orientalism that informs the discourses of New Age spirituality and the care of the self. What is deemed more “culturally appropriate” and rooted in Hindu traditions in the Indian context gets culturally appropriated and secularized in its Western context. These shifts in meaning from East to West, however, do not necessarily follow traditional hierarchies of cultural appropriation that assume power differentials between the “appropriator” and what is being appropriated. Instead, their operations are more codependent and mutually pro*table, both literally and ideologically. Thus, the anti-Western provincialism in which natural medicine purports to offer antidotes to the anxieties caused by the pace of globalization and the dissemination of “modern things,” operates simultaneously with the transnational circulation of alternative medicine across global markets.

The Queer Infections of “Modern Things” What, then, is the place of “queer” within “modern things”? The very vague and nebulous nature of the category of “modern things” makes it an empty (but promisingly capacious) signi*er—or at the very least, one whose signi*eds are always in +ux, depending on context and convenience. In the above section, for example, “modern things” serve as a foil for indigenous treatments, and are mobilized as the medical and ideological crisis that necessitates the service of traditional medicine’s reparative possibilities. Within this schema, “modern things” come to stand in for everything from westernization, indulgent lifestyles, arti*ce, and immodesty to the causes of failing health, the frenetic frenzy of contemporary life, and addictions to drugs and alcohol. It is within these frameworks of failure and disavowal that queer bodies get imbricated, absorbing the multiple meanings of “modern things” and assuming the associations of excess, foreignness, immoderation—and most signi*cantly, of sickness in need of cure—along the way. The ideological associations between the queer body and illness which have become central to curative discourses in traditional Indian medicine have, of course, also been fueled by the dual emergence of AIDS and of LGBT rights precisely at the historical moment of “revolutionary”

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

171

changes in the Indian economy—that is, the shifts associated most explicitly with India’s exposure to and participation in “modern things.” The history of LGBT politics in India was tethered to AIDS in the early 1990s in a way that reversed its earlier epidemiological conventions in Western contexts—that is, the detection of seroprevalence due to a perceived demographic commonality among gay men. Instead, as Nivedita Menon has pointed out, the material reality of AIDS in India necessitated a “speaking” about non-normative sex, laying the groundwork for the early impetus to challenge Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (a point I will return to at the end of this chapter).41 If queerness and AIDS are mutually indexed by one another in this historical moment of modernity, then the geographies of transmission and prevention that are intrinsic to AIDS in turn index the logics of globalization. AIDS, as pointed out earlier via Cazdyn, does not simply analogize globalization—it is constitutive of its central logics.42 The historical and ideological triangulation of globalization with AIDS and queerness marks sexually deviant and sick bodies as that which can never be autochthonous. These bodies are always already foreign, having traveled into—or in this case, “infected”—the nation from another time and place. As Cazdyn writes, globalization signals the ways in which “money, goods, people, information, and disease travel more +exibly and at speeds hitherto unimaginable.”43 Cazdyn’s formulation applies with slight modi*cations in the context of pink revolutions: while the speedy and +exible facilitation of money, goods, and information must indeed be facilitated, the anxiety over the easy mobility of disease during this moment of national rejuvenation becomes the occasion to manage which kinds of people can come to inhabit the symbolic and material boundaries of national and sexual citizenship. I return, then, to the second illustration at this chapter’s outset to highlight this management of queer bodies under imperatives of national wealth and health through the popularity of Baba Ramdev’s indigenous pharmaceutical and “lifestyle” empire, Patanjali Ayurveda Limited—one of the most successful companies of India’s FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) sector over the last decade. Ramdev is described by the New York Times as the Indian who created a “yoga empire, a product and symbol of the New India, a yogic fusion of Richard Simmons, Dr. Oz, and Oprah Winfrey, irrepressible and bursting with Vedic wisdom.”44 Ramdev’s marketing of himself as a global doyen of yoga and Ayurveda has culminated in a multi-crore international industry that includes the creation of an Ayurvedic College, as well as

172

!"#$%&' (

regular appearances on devotional television channels such as Astha TV. The Ramdev phenomenon is the most apt expression of nationalist transnationalism—its global reach is not contradictory to, but is in fact buttressed by its claims to swadeshi philosophies and local sourcing. One of the most successful products sold by Patanjali (whose expansive product range includes everything from hair oil and face scrubs to Ayurvedic tonics and lentils) is “desi ghee” (Indian clari*ed butter), which is ostensibly made exclusively from the milk of Indian cows. While products like ghee and lentils appear far removed from the realm of medication and HIV treatment, they become attached to the business of healing sickness through the aura of Ramdev’s investments in improving the quality of everyday life. The sacrosanct source of Patanjali ghee plays an integral part in the product’s nutritive value—its consumption is claimed to enhance memory and intellect while also facilitating digestion and weight regulation. The product thus simultaneously attends to the well-being of both the mind and the body. If one of the mobilizations of “pink revolution” paranoia is the purported concern over the preservation of life through the sanctity of the holy cow, then the restorative and medicinal properties of Patanjali products like desi ghee come to represent the essence of life itself—that which self-cures and rejuvenates the body from the ills of modernity. In such a biopolitical framework, Ramdev’s life-af*rming products and teachings come to represent the achievement of health and wellness, not simply as symbolic microcosms of the good life, but as the literal curative technologies through which health is restored. If AIDS indexes the material realities of globalization and the distribution of crisis across space and time, Ramdev’s treatments act as prophylactic barriers against the invasion of disease and the foreignness of “modern things.” The signi*er of “naturalness” that underlies Ayurvedic and other alternative treatments is not without signi*cance, since it inevitably +oats around the antithesis on which it rests—the “unnatural” foreignness of the queer body. The rejection of queerness as an anomaly of the nation-state or as exceptional to indigeneity is thus strengthened by the rhetoric of naturalness that circulates around alternative medicine. In this framework, homosexuality is the consequence of an aberrant lifestyle or behavioral weakness on the one hand, as well as a bodily infection and physiological sexual imbalance that demands cure on the other. This interplay of constructivist (“made that way”) and essentialist (“born that way”) narratives functions in conjunction with Ramdev’s

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

173

own dual focus on indigenous healing through the practice of yoga and the administration of Ayurveda. For example, Patanjali’s wide array of products includes several treatments that promote sexual health, almost exclusively for cis-gender men—shilajit Ayurvedic capsules made from mineral compounds of crushed Himalayan mountain rocks that naturally promote testosterone; sanda oil made out of a combination of fennel, nigella, and mustard seeds for the rejuvenation of the libido; and a chyawanprash mixture made out of amla (gooseberries) that detoxi*es the body and promotes fertility. The attention to the enhancement of (presumably) heterosexual vigor and libido in these products, however, extends to the treatment of queer bodies, which are conceptualized as a state of weakened and degenerated heterosexuality that can be restored to its apriori state of normalcy with the aid of these products.45 At the same time, the discourses of self-improvement and healthy lifestyles that are tied to nation-building in Ramdev’s framework translate into a greater emphasis on behavioral remedies as a response to the “problem” of sexual deviance. If an Ayurvedic remedy can treat queerness as a congenital condition or a physiological trait, then yoga and pranayama techniques function as a panacea for “bad mental habits” and psychological imbalances caused by the anxieties and corruptions of modern living.46 In such practices, meditation and proper breathing techniques enable a mastery over the “bad habit” of queerness and unproductive sex. The promise of heteronormative rehabilitation through yoga thus functions both epidemiologically and ideologically as a nation-building tool at a moment of “revolutionary” change. In her essay “The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor: Reviving Faith in Yoga,” Chandima Chakraborty points to how Ramdev exploits the idea of the imbalanced body as a symptom of cultural disease: “For him, the malaise of the human body is a re+ection of the malaise of the national body in a globalizing era. In his view, the construction of the yogapracticing citizen will enable a reconstruction of the ‘true’ Indian self that has been lost in modernity.”47 Queerness thus represents national atrophy—the weakened body that is no longer its own master, undermined by the alien in+uence of the West. The curative powers of yoga are thus instrumentalized in the service of managing the sovereign self. In turn, yoga’s achievement of physical and mental balance serves to restore the national body, as it recovers from the “crisis” of foreign decadence and global dependence. The vacillation between constructivist and essentialist understandings of the queer body are not so much contradictions as they are testaments

174

!"#$%&' (

to the convenient malleability of Ramdev’s discourse. Like the physical +exibility of limbs and body parts involved in the asanas or postures of yoga, his philosophy of cure is predicated on an ideological elasticity that can stretch between and reconcile seemingly irreconcilable and oppositional frameworks. In this regard, Ramdev successfully creates a model of moderation and balance (both medically and ideologically) that is in keeping with the logics of global (and guru) governmentality. As I have already suggested, such “middle ground” reconciliations are the hallmark of pink revolutions, since they allow for returns to parochial localisms while simultaneously depending on and pro*ting from the global circuits of foreign capital. The pliable logics of Ramdev’s discourse on alternative medicine can be witnessed in the proliferation of more localized counterparts that peddle in both behavioral and medicinal rehabilitation. For example, like Ramdev, the yoga expert Shiv Kumar Mishra—owner of Mumbai’s Shiv Holistic Yoga, whose clients include industrialists, cricketers, and Bollywood stars—foregrounds the connections between lifestyle changes and the body’s hormonal balance in offering antidotes to homosexual behavior: “Yoga is not like a Crocin you take for a headache,” suggests Mishra. “It is a lifestyle. But if you do it well and sincerely, you will begin to see the result in six months. Yoga’s holistic approach helps maintain hormonal balance and gives you better control of your mind and body. And that could help overcome homosexuality.”48 Mishra’s rehabilitative framework repeats the juxtaposition between traditional treatment’s holistic long duration and the quick-*x transience of allopathy. Paradoxically, these narratives of temporal protraction coexist with the logics of speed and immediacy that inform the production of Ayurvedic products and medicine. The classi*cation of Patanjali’s products, for example, as fast-moving consumer goods signals their quick shelf life and over-the-counter immediate access—in contrast to the late effects that mark access to ARTs. This quickness is exploited by traditional “healers” who have claimed more immediate “cures” of HIV/AIDS, as in the case of the Ayurvedic doctor Bhoop Narain Mandal, who declared an ancient family tradition as offering a magic bullet remedy that had already cured twelve HIV-positive patients through the “dhanvantri” method of Ayurveda, or the controversial “Immuno QR” Ayurvedic tablet distributed by Fair Pharma, which is said to increase CD4 cells. In 2003, groups such as the Indian Network for People living with HIV/AIDS, the HIV Positive People Welfare Society, and the Positive Women’s Network petitioned the High Court of Kerala to ban

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

175

Immuno QR, pointing to the links between pharmaceutical companies and doctors who provided false diagnoses and certi*cates to the CEO of Fair Pharma in order to accelerate the immediate availability of that “cure.” Traditional Indian treatments thus balance the promise of instant access and speed with slower narratives of long duration and holistic recovery—and these juxtapositions and “contradictions” reinforce alternative medicine’s management of life and death for a “new” India during revolutionary times.

“Our Medicines Are Totally Gay”: The Queer Life (and Death) of Patent Politics If traditional Indian medicine associates the HIV-positive body with the emergence of queerness as conditions that require management and treatment, it might seem logical to argue for their disentanglement from one another. At the same time, while such an extrication proves historically untenable, it also obviates the possibilities of understanding the relation between queer “immorality” and the biopolitical logics of national mortality argued for at the outset of this chapter. I will conclude, then, by invoking the historical overlap between the Novartis ruling and the 2013 Koushal vs. Naz Foundation case, which reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Their temporal overlap does not highlight a neat ideological symmetry—and yet, it does foreground a relation between queer politics and HIV activism as marking a useful (if at times vexed) intersection. I map these intersections not to conclude with rei*ed gestures to queer agency, but to counter the dismissal of AIDS and queer politics as symptoms of “modern things” that must be disavowed in order to manage the contradictions of revolutionary times. On April 1, 2013, the Supreme Court of India ruled against the patent monopoly in Novartis AG v. Union of India, marking an epistemic moment for generic Indian drug companies to produce accessible anti-cancer and HIV drugs, while simultaneously upholding the constitutionality of the 2005 amendment to domestic patent law. But the legal victory over Novartis does not translate into a case for the liberatory potential of postcolonial statism in India. Instead, the rejection of Novartis’s patent application was a consequence of decades of media attention paid to the dangers of evergreening. And equally importantly, the victory over Novartis was due to the health initiatives and literacy

176

!"#$%&' (

programs of organizations such as the Delhi Network for Positive People and the LGBT-focused Bharosa Trust; to a coordinated effort on the part of groups like the CPAA (Cancer Patients AID Association) and the Indian Network of People Living with AIDS to forge links with local scienti*c communities; to the HIV outreach programs and legal advocacy work of the Naz Foundation and the Lawyers Collective HIV/ AIDS unit; and to years of political work by feminists, artisanal clusters, and environmental activists who were aware of the dangers of a privatization/patent regime nexus. Some of the legal claims that Novartis AG advanced within juridical contexts to foreground its supposed commitment to medical access—for example, its investment in patient assistance plans that distribute free medicines to thousands—had already been challenged in extralegal contexts by health advocacy groups that pointed to the non-sustainability of private industry donations and the convenience of cost-ef*cient tax write-offs enabled by such corporate charities. These groups also pointed to the central fallacy informing the defense of a patent regime for medical development—the claim that links patent protection in direct proportion to drug innovation— showing instead how innovation rates over the last decade had been falling, despite the proliferation of patent applications. The Supreme Court’s dismissal of Novartis’s patent claims was thus informed by the con+uence of broader movements in which biopolitical critiques of globalization were mutually imbricated with sexual politics, AIDS patient advocacy, and social policy debates around intellectual property rights. The importance of avoiding the romance of legal triumph that posits local legal systems as a panacea for the hegemony of the evils of Western industry is especially crucial, given the temporal overlap of the Novartis case with the capricious fate of sexual minority rights in the Indian Penal Code. Even as it was lauded for its progressive landmark decision in the arena of intellectual patent rights, just a few months later, the Supreme Court dealt a severe blow to LGBT rights in the Koushal vs. Naz Foundation decision when it reversed the Delhi High Court’s 2009 strike-down of Section 377. While the 2009 decision had been perceived as a paradigm shift for the queer movement in India, the later reversal baf+ed LGBT activists in its turnaround of the momentum that had built up after the earlier legal “victory.” These ostensibly contradictory trajectories, however, are not anomalies of state jurisdiction; they are, in fact, central to its operational logic, in which the alleviation of suffering in one context is concomitant with the institutionalization of violence in another, seemingly discrete context. Thus, the very state

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

177

that upheld the constitutionality and local sovereignty of Indian patent laws on the grounds of public health and the affordability of HIV medication, was paradoxically complicit in refusing to distribute condoms in jails on the grounds of its supposed endorsement of homosexuality. Attempts at HIV prevention (which would, in this particular case, have meant acknowledging the existence of sex between male prisoners) were dismissed by the authorities as an imposition of “Western solutions” on the Tihar Jail in Delhi—yet another version of the rejection of “modern things” that also characterizes alternative medicine’s foreclosures.49 The state, as Junaid Rana points out, cannot be conceptualized as a monolith—it is “an abstracted cast member with many roles,” assuming “different identities and names.”50 The state that ruled against Novartis, thereby facilitating access to HIV prevention through locally produced and generic drugs, is also the state that arrested three men for having sex in a public park in Lucknow (one of the men was an outreach worker for the Bharosa Trust, an NGO working on HIV prevention). The police consequently raided the of*ces of the Naz Foundation and Bharosa, con*scating safe-sex materials, condoms, and instructional videos that were considered “lewd” and “pornographic.” But to merely explain away these contradictions through the narrative of hypocritical double standards marking modern state power in India would not only elide more structural geopolitical and ideological complexities that inform globalization’s late effects, but also obviate an attention to the intersections between sexual citizenship and the political economy of medicine. The seemingly contradictory trajectories of legalism become ways to manage the conditions of possibility for subjects of the state—whose material relations, in turn, are always constrained by global capital’s late effects. If globalization creates conditions that are conducive to the fracture between national and sexual identity, the symptoms of such a macro-political split are mapped on to the local and get articulated through the state’s displacement of unintelligible bodies. Within such a political and psychic schema, queer lives are metonymically linked to the foreignness of the supranational, as borne out by the illustration of the alternative medical industry. Consequently, if national culture is coerced into legitimizing its claims over local sovereignty, the rejection of global capitalism is accompanied by the abjection of those bodies that are deemed inauthentic and foreign. But instead of returning to the authenticity of indigenous archives to shore up the evidence of sexual/national commensurability, the Novartis case offers a more useful cognitive map—not simply to foreground the commensurability of

178

!"#$%&' (

“Indian” with “queer” (however contingently de*ned), but to understand how the imperatives of living and dying under global capitalism are intimately linked to queer bodies and LGBT politics. The con+icting legal outcomes of the Novartis case and Section 377 have obscured (and therefore managed) their assemblaged histories, framing critiques of globalization and access to drugs as matters pertaining to the agency of national sovereignty while coding the challenge to sodomy laws (most visibly at least) around identity politics and privacy rights. Such a split is further exacerbated by linking the former to “life and death” politics, while casting the latter out of the bio-necro nexus that marks global capitalism. But the two law cases’ genealogies and emergent mobilizations are intimately connected despite the typical separation between the “economic” and the “cultural” that underlies the logic of neoliberalism. Like India’s patent regime that was an institutional inheritance of British colonial rule, Section 377 was also a relic of British colonial laws codi*ed through various legal commissions in an attempt to replace the +uidity of precolonial traditions. Thus, the broader ideological legacies informing both cases render any absolute notion of sovereign agency untenable, and constrain the possibilities of both into representational structures that are already partially determined in advance. These (im)possibilities are mediated through the late effects of globalization under which local practices emerge—not through some transcendent oppositional praxis, but through friction, delay, and instability. The death worlds that have emerged through AIDS necessitate the framing of Indian sexual economies in relation to the necropolitical, while also foregrounding the access-to-medicines movement as a queer matter. Achal Prabhala facetiously but accurately remarked, “Our medicines are totally gay” in an op-ed entitled “The Year We Said Yes to Patient Rights but No to Gay Rights.”51 Prabhala quite accurately draws attention to the commonalities that shaped both movements through the work of groups like the Naz Foundation and the Lawyers Collective, as well as individuals such as Anand Grover, the lawyer who fought both cases on behalf of patient rights and sexual minorities. And yet, Prabhala’s assertion that the “contemporary access-to-medicines movement was built on the back of gay rights movements”—which in turn was in+uenced by ACT UP’s mobilization of queer communities around the issue of medical access—papers over some of the messier histories not just between and within both movements, but also in relation to global-local formations.52

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

179

For example, the emergence of a discourse around sexual politics through AIDS was still in keeping with a negative understanding of sexual citizenship that gained visibility through medicalized “at-risk” categories which, in turn, sought legitimacy within the domain of urgent “life or death” politics. Thus, access to medicine and health care functioned as the queer eradicating *lter through which sexual politics was subsumed. Additionally, the overlap between the emergence of AIDS and the liberalization of India’s economy also meant that nonpro*t organizations often relied on global capital and securing grants from various international agencies, raising concern among activists about international donor funds dictating the terms of local grassroots politics. The dif*culties in offering a cognitive map of queer totality lies precisely in the complex contradictory *ssures that inform late capitalism, which at once enable and constrain. Queer formations under the logic of late effects are thus symptoms of these contradictions: the material realities of AIDS enable a discourse around non-normative sexuality even as these conditions of possibility are bound to the necropolitical; although queer identity is medicalized by what Naisargi Dave terms “the cold facts of immunology and risk management,” its mediation through AIDS prevents a depoliticized lapse into a rhetoric of neutrality (which is always implicated in the logic of compulsory heterosexuality).53 These contradictions are exacerbated under the logic of global late effects that require an understanding of how AIDS transcends geographical boundaries (rhetorics of non-difference); but they also necessitate an attention to how epistemological and epidemiological categories are mediated by local, cultural, and historical speci*cities (narratives of non-sameness) without such mappings of local particularity lapsing into imperialist essentializations of difference.54 After the 1990s, Indian sexual politics has thus had to negotiate both the limits and possibilities of an LGBT movement that is couched under the aegis of HIV awareness. One of the consequences of such a framing has been a fractured discourse around Section 377 that initially argued for its strike-down on the grounds of HIV activism, but then increasingly resorted to identitarian claims and the right to privacy—which is ironic, given that the initial impetus for the strike-down was motivated by the criminalization of gay consensual sex. For example, Ila Nagar and Debanuj DasGupta foreground how the impetus for the strike-down of Section 377 was informed by neoliberal discourses of individual rights in which the queer subject was interpellated “to become a responsible, productive citizen of modern India.”55 The conferring of rights-based

180

!"#$%&' (

guarantees legislates the demands for the non-risky “rights-bearing, responsible individual, self-policing his/her own sexual conduct.”56 In other words the law’s protective benevolence is a transactional encounter between the queer body and the state in which rights are exchanged for personal responsibility as the panacea for HIV/AIDS. I want to conclude, then, by returning to the image of hijras protesting the Novartis patent claims invoked at the outset, which gestures toward the conditions of possibility that subtend sexual futures under the logic of global late effects. The image resonates not as some simple notion of subaltern resistance, but offers a cognitive map for queer totality in which local sexual formations refuse to be dismissed as frivolous or as a hegemonic consequence of “modern things” or “Western” imposition. The idea that queer politics is discrete from “life or death” issues (and is therefore less urgent) has a long and vexed history in the context of India’s postcolonial sexual economies, and has led to odd alliances between the homophobia of national leaders and Hindutva conservatives on the one hand, and the orthodox economic determinism of women’s movements and left-wing politics on the other. From “not in our culture” assertions by religious leaders, to the Parliament member Pritish Nandy’s urging that people “not waste  .  .  . valuable national time” discussing trivial issues such as homosexuality, to Communist Party member and head of the NFIW (National Federation of Indian Women) Vimla Faroqui’s arguing that Westernization and neoliberal policies have opened the +oodgates of non-normative sexuality—the elevation of sexual citizenship to the realm of the political has been denounced either as a threat to an essentialized Indian nationalism, as in the case of alternative medicine discussed above, or as a trivial concern that must be subsumed under the more urgent vector of class analysis.57 The Novartis case, however, disallows the simplistic erasure of sexual politics from indigenous local formations or temporal markers of urgency. The queer participants in the Novartis protests index a political economy of life and death in which patent regimes, economic restrictions, and structural adjustment programs produce what Eric Cazdyn has called “the already dead” who haunt a “global abyss” in which “the subject . . . has been killed but has yet to die.”58 Instead of being interpellated as foreign or modern subjects that disrupt authentic tradition, queer bodies are both ideologically and materially linked to local formations. These queer subjects are displaced by global capitalism—they are not “modern things” that are framed as agents of global capitalism. Under the logic of late effects, these queer bodies are rendered disposable by a

,#%&-%./ 01&&'

181

drug-pro*teering patent regime. To foreground such aggregations is not to legitimize the place of queer politics through hierarchies of political virtue by subsuming it under the ostensibly more politically imperative category of health care. Instead, it is to recognize, as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan contend, that “sexual subjects are produced not just by the politics of identity or social movements, but by the links between various institutions that accompany these social movements.”59 Thus, sexual citizenship in this context is not solely a performative effect of legalism, but a constrained production of possibilities through multiple and intersecting sites of local particularities. The Novartis case highlights the emergence of queer politics beyond privatized models of legal citizenship such as Section 377, which often become the only political barometer to measure the temporality of “revolutionary times”—that is, “how far we have stepped into the twenty-*rst century.”60 Left out of such markers of Indian modernity are queer populations who don’t enjoy the bene*ts of class, caste, and English-speaking privilege, as well as those who don’t have material and symbolic access to the private sphere. In this context, “access to privacy” refers not simply to a discreet zone of sexual activity, but also to the privatization of medicine that defers access to treatment. In the months preceding the Supreme Court decision on drug patents, the managing director of Novartis India ironically defended the company’s property rights claim on the grounds of future access, insisting that “thousands of public health needs  .  .  . [go] unmet each day simply because there is still a cure out there waiting to be found.”61 The future promise of cure, in these words, almost seems to acquire a utopian ontology that obscures mechanisms of delay. The ultimate horizon of utopia can never materialize in the present but only serve as the domain of possibility for the future; but in this instance, the deferral of cure is only temporary—its promise can supposedly be actualized in the here and now through the liberating panacea of patent regimes. If late effects are the symptoms of global capitalism, then the “treatment” promised by a patent rights regime ultimately only strengthens the very system that poses as a cure. The “cure is out there” rhetoric relies on a politics of time where “lateness” is no longer associated with the time of drug approvals, clinical trial delays, and the deferral of access; instead, such a notion of delay secures the ideological terms of temporality in favor of global capitalism in which the challenge to patent regimes gets linked to the postponement of cure. Thus, even while the privileging of a medical “meantime” over a revolutionary cure fuels the

182

!"#$%&' (

pharmaceutical economies of companies like Novartis, the desire for a cure is not exempt from the temporal logic of delay. Quite predictably, then, the anticipatory promise of a cure merges seamlessly with the rhetoric of future economic optimism in the CEO’s words: “We have the opportunity to become a major global competitor—a modern knowledge-based economic titan, rather than a mere copycat supplier to the developed world.”62 The imminence of cure, only delayed by the resistance to an intellectual rights regime, simultaneously invokes discourses of innovation and novelty that patents will ostensibly preserve. The stigma attached to “copycat” subjectivities under global capitalism returns to an ideological narrative in which nonWestern queers are dismissed as mimetic dupes of Western subjects. Such dismissals operate through the contiguous operations of multiple frames. Globally, queer formations in non-Western contexts are always already “delayed,” making belated arrivals onto the cosmopolitan and secularized scenes of modernity. Locally, the temporal framing of traditional medicines as immediately accessible and holistically durable engenders nativist *ctions in which queer bodies are copycat intrusions from the West, thus requiring nationalist antidotes. But these delayed local formations emerging from conditions that are fracturing, debilitating, and even fatal have continued to “waste” national time. In reality, though, the scripting of these queer futures is patently a matter of life and death.

!"#$%&' (

Beyond the Banyan Tree: Diasporic Mobility in Passages away from India

If speed as illustrated in the last chapter is one of the hallmarks of pink revolutions, mobility operates relatedly in the same conceptual vicinity. In considering the spatiotemporal registers of pink revolutions, in this chapter I want to shift attention to a theorization of the place of “queer” in a framework that indexes various modes of mobility and migration—the scattered logics of the diaspora.1 Queer and diasporic projects overlap in ways that are not only contained by additive logics of otherness. In addition to their coeval investments in politicizing desire and exile, they both apply epistemological pressure on reductive rei)cations (often manifested in the form of questions such as “Where are you from?” or “What made you this way?”) in order to contravene an ontogenic and etiological obsession with origins. For example, in her part-memoir, part-genealogical family history, Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents, Minal Hajratwala engages with the historical and personal contours of leaving one’s homeland through a sprawling narrative of ancestral migration from British-occupied India to geographies of dispersal across the globe that include Fiji, South Africa, Canada, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia, and ultimately to an account of her own childhood and subsequent queer awakening in the midwestern suburbs of the United States. The literal and symbolic journeys that constitute diasporic and queer experience in Leaving India are not, however, only theorized in relation to her identity as both a lesbian and a second-generation Indian immigrant in the United States. Through the recollection of the past, Hajratwala moves from the inchoate 183

184

!"#$%&' (

recognition of difference to an understanding of geographic dispersal as a kind of queer affect. In a passage that is framed through the retrospective recognition of difference, Hajratwala recounts an experience of looking through old class photos and ruminating on the futility of a “which one am I?” game with friends and lovers in the present, given that her difference is unambiguously evident through the conspicuity of her brownness amidst the ubiquity of whiteness: Every picture has only one brown girl. Here she is with babyish pigtails, here with a sixth grader’s version of a sophisticated braid; here with eyeglasses, now braces; embarrassing shadow of mustache; eyeliner and lipstick; straight teeth, feathered hair, contact lenses. Which one am I? The answer is clear, yet I hardly recognize myself. I was a foreigner to everyone around me, and therefore to myself as well.2

The evidence of the marked body is inescapable, most prominently to the author herself, and is internalized as odd, queer, and excessive—for example, in the embarrassment created by the supposed incongruity of facial hair, a sign of both racial difference and gender transgression. It is in this moment of retrospection—marked not by the conventional logics of rose-tinted nostalgia, but by the memory of shame—that the author points to migration as a kind of queer movement, as well as a queerness that is in*ected by migratory logics. Re*ecting on the experience of absorbing her own sense of self as a foreign other, Hajratwala asks: And was this queer feeling a part of my destiny, a quirk of history, or some mixture of both? Was it the rich soil in which a certain sense of being different would later take root? Was it a predictor of how I would choose to live my life? Whatever its nodes and branches, in Michigan my sense of being an alien would come into sharp focus. (303)

In the above lines, the recognition of difference, however alienating in childhood, becomes the fertile ground for the author’s understanding of her queerness. In other words, diasporic experience forms the “rich soil” that ultimately enables queerness to “take root.” The metaphors of growth and germination—the “nodes and branches” that bring queerness into focus—are not without signi)cance in a book that theorizes

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

185

diaspora through the genealogical tracing of familial histories. While the family tree can often be the most predictable heteronormative conceit of generational logic, in this context, its rhizomatic branches represent a diasporic dispersal that is ultimately indistinguishable from queerness. Thus a few pages later, Hajratwala writes: I have come to understand that queerness is a migration as momentous as any other, a journey from one world to the next. My earliest sense of alienation feels, now, like a source: a dual twining root of both my queerness and writing. (335, italics added)

Once again, the botanical metaphor of roots recurs in the author’s understanding of queerness as a kind of diaspora (and diaspora as a kind of queerness), and functions as a way to reconcile what Hajratwala calls her “warring selves”—that is, the arti)ce of the “good Indian child” of Hinduism against the rebellions of queer transgression (334). Her “roots” in this context do not evoke the singularity and immutability of )xed origins; instead, they conjure the braided logics of “dual twining” that unsettle discrete separations of race/national origin from sexuality. Hence the author’s thrill at acquiring a tricolor poster of India’s *ag with the proud declaration of “Indian and Lesbian” in English, Gujarati, and Hindi; or the refusal on the part of the Hajratwala family to Americanize her )rst name to make it more pronounceable. Emphasizing its Gujarati intonations (mee-nalr), her very name linguistically embodies the collapsing of ostensibly separate parts, “somewhere in the borderland between l and r.” Thus the very utterance of her name invokes in the author “the sensation of integrating language itself” (335). I begin this chapter with Hajratwala’s account of queer diaspora because Leaving India serves as an apposite illustration and extension of the triangulated logics that I have analyzed throughout this book between globalization, national identity, and sexual politics. While Pink Revolution’s geographic and geopolitical boundaries have thus far been limited to the con)nes of the Indian nation-state, such a frame could appear to risk a kind of political and epistemological anti-relationality that might seem particularly out of place in the context of globalization’s intensi)ed interconnections and the mobility of transnational capital. The grounding of Pink Revolutions in the nation-state is not, however, simply an unintended accident—instead, it is to capture the double movement of India’s post-liberalization period in which a withdrawal

186

!"#$%&' (

of the state is in fact one that is spurred on and buttressed by the state itself. In this chapter, then, I want to shift attention to the queer politics of diaspora as a way to inquire into the transnational logics that subtend diasporic mobility—what I call “passages away from India” in the context of the post-1990 “revolutions.” While such a “shift” might seem to imply a weakened nation-state or a turn to post-nationalist logics, I ultimately foreground how passages away from India are in fact resolutely nationalist in scope in that they are consequences of newly emerging “generative” (and generational) mobile negotiations between the nation-state and its diaspora. Rather than theorizing diaspora as always already subaltern, I illustrate how these forms of “long-distance nationalism” get conceptualized through heteronormative logics of generational bloodlines in which familial “roots,” family trees, branches of lineage, and the “rich soil” of the nation-state function as the ideological agents of pink revolutions.3 I analyze how passages of mobility away from India are predicated on the repetition of patrilineal logics in which generational transference between parents and children becomes the default structural logic that shapes the relationship between nation and diaspora, or home and the world. What, then, is the place of queerness within “family trees” whose expansive branches extend across the globe? If diaspora and queerness are chiasmic in structure, does their mutual imbrication, as Hajratwala muses at one point in Leaving India, “break the link of generations”?4 Or are they absorbed into generational scripts of material and ideological inheritance that fortify the nationalist scripts of Indian modernity and mobility?

Rethinking the Romance of Queer Diaspora In cultural studies, the scholarship that most usefully brings queer theory to bear on diasporic experience is Gayatri Gopinath’s important book Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. For Gopinath, the value of queer diasporas lies in their anti-essentialist logics—the “mobile uprootings” that embrace “impurity and inauthenticity” and contravene notions of national purity.5 Like Hajratwala’s suggestion that queer diaspora constitutes a generational “break,” Gopinath foregrounds the “nonreproductive potential of the notion of diaspora.”6 In other words, passages away from India can become the site at which the linear logics of family trees don’t proceed in predictable generational locksteps. Thus Gopinath suggests: “The critical

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

187

framework of a speci)cally queer diaspora, then, may begin to unsettle the ways in which the diaspora shores up the gender and sexual ideologies of dominant nationalism on the one hand, and processes of globalization on the other” (10). For Gopinath, queer diasporas are thus critical of the nation-state and globalization, since both “queer” and “diaspora” occupy the ontology of “bad copies” or poor imitations. In such a framework, “queerness is to heterosexuality as the diaspora is to the nation”—their distance from or indifference to the “original” allows them to exfoliate the calci)ed layers through which the nation-state and heterosexuality centralize themselves as the norm (11). In her introduction to Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Aihwa Ong offers a more tempered reading of diaspora’s potential to resist the violence of global capitalism. For Ong, the diasporic subject’s mobility across borders as embodying the promise of liberation has become overdetermined, much like abstractions such as “the working class” or “the subaltern.” According to Ong, the privileging of the diaspora as an oppositional anchor that *outs the logics of provincial territoriality fosters a kind of problematic cosmopolitanism in which the unruliness of mobile subjects is endowed with transgressive capacities. Diaspora as the ontology of resistance thus forecloses not only the boundedness of the nation-state’s continued logics of territorialization and governmentality, but also overdetermines the diasporic subject’s role in undermining rather than bolstering nationalistic projects. Thus Ong writes: “In our desire to )nd de)nite breaks between the territorially bounded and the de-territorialized, the oppressive and the progressive, and the stable and the unstable, we sometimes overlook complicated accommodations, alliances, and creative tensions between the nation-state and mobile capital, between diaspora and nationalism, or between the in*ux of immigrants and the multicultural state.”7 In place of “de)nite breaks” from )xity to mobility, Ong calls for an attention to “speci)c histories and geopolitical situations” that account for the “disciplinary structures” that create boundedness in some contexts and “*exible citizenship” in others (17). Their coeval operations are not discrete formations but mutually constitutive—the transnational mobility of some subjects is enabled by the compelled immobility of others. It should be noted that Gopinath’s theorizations of transnational mobility do indeed attend to some of the “disciplinary structures” that subtend the politics of diaspora and their links to parochial nationalism. In her introduction, she points to how Hindu nationalist organizations

188

!"#$%&' (

exploit a kind of restorative nostalgia for the homeland as a way to consolidate ethnic parochialisms that are sustained and even engendered by the )nancial support of the NRI (non-resident Indian) diasporic subject. She thus refers to the “terrifyingly exclusivist de)nitions of communal belonging” that can exist between nation and diaspora and which are predicated on the “erasure of Muslims from the space of the (Hindu) nation.”8 However, explicitly queer diasporas always remain outside the provincial logics that inform the potential co-optation of the diaspora into absolutist nationalism. Since they always already offer alternative value, queer diasporas, for example, “challenge nationalist ideologies . . . exploding the binary oppositions between nation and diaspora”; and they constitute a “collective project of decentering whiteness and dominant Euro-American paradigms in theorizing sexuality both locally and transnationally.” If conventional diasporic formations are attached to oedipal forms of generationality, their queer instantiations jettison the “dependence on a genealogical, implicitly heteronormative reproductive logic,” and reject their oedipal logics of repetition. For Gopinath, theorizing diaspora as queer and queer as diaspora enables each of these to further politicize—and usefully tweak—the other: “If ‘diaspora’ needs ‘queerness’ in order to rescue it from its genealogical implications, ‘queerness’ also needs ‘diaspora’ in order to make it more supple in relation to questions of race, colonialism, migration, and globalization.”9 For an analysis that is committed to its self-described investment in impurity and an eschewal of authenticity, “queerness” in Impossible Desires is instrumentalized and reproduced as a pure and contradictionless category tout court, uncontaminated by and always resistant to the logics of dominant nationalism and corporate globalization. Gopinath’s account of queerness as “rescuing” the pitfalls of an uncritical diaspora tends to lapse into an “idealization” of alterity in Rey Chow’s sense of the term—that is, idealization not simply in terms of the valorization of otherness, “but also in the sense of turning-into-an-idea.” Chow explains: “Often, in the valorization of non-Western ‘others,’ we witness a kind of tendency to see all such ‘others’ as equivalent, as a mere positive, positivist idea devoid of material embeddedness and contradiction.”10 While Chow acknowledges the impossibility of making “a clean break with idealism,” she recommends a reading practice that tracks its “alluring traces and remnants”—a critical method I want to adopt in complicating the idealized frames that subtend Gopinath’s understandings of queer diaspora.11 My attention to moments

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

189

in which diasporas—even those that are queer in their articulations of dispersal—work in tandem with state power and nationalist logics is not motivated by denying the potential of diasporic disruptions. Rather than undercutting Gopinath’s provocative analysis, I want to push up against and expand on what appears in Impossible Desires as only a subsidiary and parenthetical quali)cation. In Gopinath’s framework, the question of diaspora’s provincial dimensions makes way for the more central argument about its liberatory practices. In leaving behind the onus of reading diaspora as axiomatically subversive, my goal is not to invest in the simplistic faith of a reverse discourse in which diaspora is always tainted by complicity with nationalism. Instead, it is to engage in an “ethics after idealism” that can begin to calibrate the moments when queer mobility serves the interests of *exible citizenship during “revolutionary” times. What forms of boundedness get repudiated in narratives of mobility? How do passages away from India also become generative (and generational) sites of modernity and queer arrival? And how do projects of Hindu nationalism, despite their professed antipathy to local queer formations, link themselves to these logics of transnational dispersal and movement?

The Banyan Tree’s Promise: Generating Life, Generational Longings I will grapple with these questions in the following sections and return to Hajratwala’s combination of queer memoir and family genealogy in this chapter’s conclusion. But )rst, I set the stage for this analysis by theorizing the Indian diaspora in relation to Hindu nationalism—a mutual dependence that I characterize as one that is both “generative” and “generational.” It is only by understanding how generational logics of diaspora become generative for nationalist projects, that we can begin to engage in an understanding of diaspora that moves beyond the limits of idealism. Pairing the words “generative” and “generational” together to theorize diaspora highlights their proximity in meaning, even as their distinct connotations do not make them entirely synonymous. The idea of productive capacity is central to both terms—with “generative” alluding to procreative possibilities, and “generational” referring to patrilineal logics of lineage that require the passing-on of inheritance and family name. The preservation of what is deemed “generative” is guaranteed by the presumed continuity of generations—most

190

!"#$%&' (

literally material wealth, but also symbolic notions of blood, honor, and heritage. Feminist critiques of generative/generational logics have importantly drawn attention to how women’s bodies become the literal and symbolic vessels through which notions of national futurity, economic prosperity, and religious morality are consolidated.12 In addition to the tropes of “heroic mothers, chaste wives, and celibate warriors” that mark generative/generational logics, their smooth operations are also predicated on hetero/repronormative repetitions that guarantee patrilineal continuity.13 In this section, then, I want to bring feminist and queer insights to bear on the relation between nation and diaspora in order to track the implications of their mutual dependence for a “new” and “revolutionary” India. It is not without signi)cance that this generative relation between “home” and the “world” is framed, like Hajratwala’s theorization of queer diaspora, through germinative and botanical metaphors. For example, in the museum exhibition and accompanying publication Live Like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience, the banyan tree becomes the central trope to describe the Indian diaspora’s assemblaged heritage and capacious presence across the globe.14 The exhibit, displayed at and curated by the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Pennsylvania in 1996, included collections of historical documents, along with displays of photographs and artifacts donated by the Indian American community. The collection displayed embroidered fabrics, statues of the goddess Durga, and other “objects of memory” such as cricket bats, paan (betel nut) boxes, and traditional Indian kitchen utensils. In the accompanying volume, the exhibition’s curator and editor, Leela Prasad, acknowledges the potential problem with the extended arboreal metaphors in documenting this history of migration—the “rootedness” of homeland from which diaspora can only always ever be cut off could implicitly instantiate hierarchical logics; or even more potentially problematic, the language of “roots” itself could connote a )xity that cannot quite capture diaspora’s deconstructive scope—that is, its ability to undercut the binaries between “original” and “copy.” And yet, Prasad suggests, the trope of the banyan tree preempts these critiques of )xity, offering a more *exible and bendable model of diaspora: Arching over as many as four acres sometimes, and ever widening, it is one tree that de)es boundedness, in space and in time. For many Indian communities, it is a symbol of never-ending

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

191

life. With its widespread aerial roots that give rise to newer and newer trunks, which over generations, make it almost impossible to tell the “mother trunk,” the banyan contests the myth of the “authentic original.” At the same time, it symbolizes the undeniable importance of the idea or experience of India in the imaginations of Indian Americans, and the facility to be able to belong simultaneously to many continents.15

Prasad’s description perfectly encapsulates the mutually imbricated logics of generative and generational thinking. The banyan tree is the symbol of “never-ending life” for Indian communities, and emblematizes the procreative promise of continuity despite dislocation and dispersal across space. The etymological history of the word “banyan” that Prasad references further underscores its generative possibilities associated with the creation of wealth—its seventeenth-century usage derived from the anglicization of baniya, a term for the merchant community of western India involved with moneylending and banking. In this biopolitical conjugation of wealth with matters of life and futurity, the extensive sprawl of the tree’s roots—its capacity to produce “new trunks . . . over generations”—consolidates the diaspora as a symbol of endurance and preservation over time. Since the banyan tree’s extensive reach (which can often envelop up to four acres) is “ever widening” and in constant *ux, it eschews the logics of singularity that are conventionally implicated in root metaphors. Thus, in Prasad’s description of the banyan tree’s roots, the mother trunk no longer assumes primacy, allowing a genealogical tabula rasa even while still investing in narratives of generationality. This “dual twining”—the interfacing of continuity logics with a postmodern eschewal of origins—is a form of strategic mobility that is manifested in various political, cultural, and economic arenas as a kind of ideological elasticity (as foregrounded throughout this book via illustrations like the muscled queer hunk against the rangoli backdrop, or the new swadeshi economics of Ayurvedic medicine). In Live Like the Banyan Tree, these reconciliatory practices assume a seemingly more benign form in which the capaciousness of the banyan tree’s roots contains the multitudes of the Indian diaspora. For example, in one of the exhibit’s photographs an Indian mother, dressed formally and traditionally in a sari, helps her daughter get ready for a dance recital. In the background of the photograph, but occupying a place of symbolic and prominent presence, is an American *ag. The patriotic allegiance to the adopted

192

!"#$%&' (

nation thus seamlessly exists side by side with the representations of Indianness that are quite literally framed through mother-daughter logics of generationality. Photographs of wedding ceremonies become yet another way to foreground the diaspora’s elastic logics of adaptation. Throughout the exhibit’s collection and reproduced in Prasad’s edited volume are images of “mixed” wedding ceremonies and marriage rituals as markers of how the Indian diaspora’s roots continue to spread, adapt, lose their “mother” trunk, and yet still produce new generative adaptations—to “newer and newer trunks.” The photographs foreground matrimonial institutions that still conform to convention (e.g., ads for arranged marriages that adhere to casteist scripts), but also those that supposedly defy endogamous rituals (photos of Hindu-Christian and Hindu-Muslim weddings, or of Indian women marrying American men). The marriage contract, then, is no longer moored by ontologies of tradition—instead, it facilitates modes of *exible citizenship and continuity in its framing as a signi)er of adaptation and generative possibility. Much of the exhibition and its accompanying catalog celebrate these modes of ideological elasticity and social agility that allow the Indian American community to preserve its roots but also adapt and engender new ones. Throughout the volume, the community is lauded and heralded in many different ways: they have brought “with them extraordinary professional and business talents” (5), “Indians have truly arrived in America,” and “the immense richness of Indian American life” is continuously revealed through its generative abilities (11). Commenting on this celebratory tone in his review of Live Like the Banyan Tree, Frank J. Korom points to the problem of what he calls the exhibit’s “positive essentialism,” which “muf*es the voices of subaltern members of the community.”16 For Korom, the focus on diasporic success stories axiomatically privileges upper-class communities and obscures the lives of working-class Indian Americans who might work as taxi drivers or factory laborers. While Korom acknowledges the emphasis on a wider class spectrum of Indian Americans in the accompanying catalog, the main exhibit’s visual domain is given a greater primacy over the more marginally adjacent quali)cations in the catalog. As a result, writes Korom, “while visitors are offered the possibility of leaving with a better picture of Indian Americans, they might not exit with a balanced one.”17 In a similar vein, Korom points to the predominance of Hindu representations throughout the exhibit—through images and artifacts from Hindu temples, the rituals of Hindu wedding ceremonies, the giant

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

193

statue of the goddess Durga, and the quotidian paraphernalia of pujas (worship ceremonies). While nominal gestures to other religions make an occasional appearance, they serve as exceptions to the dominance of an exceptional Hinduism that remains apolitical and compassionate in character, functioning outside the scope of its right-wing expressions at “home.” In the context of the exhibit, Hinduism assumes the sanitized signi)ers of cultural diversity and a benign multiculturalism in which the visual presence of Indian Americans functions as an antidote to white supremacy through representations of religious difference. The parochial political projects of Hindutva must necessarily remain exegetic and outside the hagiographic frames of display in order to preserve celebratory logics and bracket off the unruly messiness of communal violence. In her response to Korom’s critique, the curator of Live Like the Banyan Tree, Leela Prasad, points to the importance of complicating the coherence of subalternity, especially in relation to the labor practices of the Indian diaspora. Arguing that “class is hardly a transparent category,” Prasad points out how class categories eschew )xity and are always in *ux in the context of diasporic experience, so that “an individual who has been an engineer before immigrating could be a gas station owner in the new context, a teacher a newspaper seller, a chemist a restaurant owner, or a farmworker a restaurant owner.”18 On the one hand, Prasad’s critique usefully points to how discrete power geometries are confounded by the migratory entanglements of global capitalism, so that labor practices do not axiomatically index class positions in any predictable fashion. On the other hand, Prasad’s illustrations of labor *uctuations constitute a kind of bootstraps mythology in reverse that still preserves its investment in structures of self-suf)ciency and adaptability. While Prasad’s quali)cation around the contingency of labor categories foregrounds the demands for compliance and *exibility that global systems of labor make necessary for immigrant survival, her elation at Indians having “truly arrived in America” simultaneously frames their new (and working-class) occupations as signi)ers of sacri)ce in which assimilation into the American dream is achieved at all costs, even if it requires the “devaluation” of labor that is purportedly more “skilled.” Prasad’s critique betrays her incredulity at the demands for depreciated labor made upon engineers and professors who must now work as taxi drivers or farmworkers. But it also reveals her awe at the agility of these compromised adaptations in which *exible labor is idealized under conditions of transnationality. As Aihwa Ong suggests, “*exibility,

194

!"#$%&' (

migration, and relocations, instead of being coerced or resisted, have become practices to strive for.”19 Not surprisingly, then, Prasad responds to Korom’s critique of the exhibit’s implicit religious and professional class uniformity by taking recourse to logics of *exibility and *uidity. She contends that Korom’s “category-based approach to diversity” leads to an insistence “on organizing the display around airtight religious, ethnic, or professional categories [that] would have meant devaluing in great measure the checkered, *uid situational and artistic understandings of self and community among Indian Americans.”20 In Prasad’s response to Korom, categorical *uidity becomes a riposte to the critique of representational absence. In large measure, the exhibit’s intent is to offer a visual and material archive of objects that can accurately represent the generative and “*uid situational” logics of the Indian diasporic experience. At the same time, the monumentalized form of these visual testimonies, whose aim is to bear witness to representational *exibility, undercuts the very *uidity it purports to index. Korom’s critique is aimed at representational gaps in content— that is, the exhibit’s visual scope cannot adequately encompass the subaltern experience. Similarly, Prasad’s response is also framed within the con)nes of this representational register when she foregrounds its capacious and *uid possibilities that are foreclosed by Korom’s critique. Even while their positions appear as antithetical, both Prasad and Korom’s critiques of each other are ironically united in their demands for and assertions of representational veracity. For Korom, a more accurate practice would include “subaltern subjects” in its visual account of the diaspora. Prasad’s response, while complicating the )xity of subaltern categories, also insists on the visual complexity of the exhibit’s representational practices embodied, for example, in displays of religious difference. Both Korom’s critique and Prasad’s response are marked by a faith in the remedies of representation—and in both instances, these representational antidotes fail to account for the very structural forms through which subaltern recovery is called for. The argument for a “better picture of Indian Americans” betrays an understanding of the very form through which claims for “alternative” images are mediated—that is, the primacy of the museum display as the visual conduit for a “better” politics. What gets lost in these conversations on the most effective way to capture the truth of the Indian American experience is the problem with what Rey Chow calls the seductions of “projectional idealism,” in which the artifacts and objects of the exhibit’s display function as

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

195

monumentalized forms.21 The objects in the exhibit (and the critique that they are not adequately subaltern) thus function as what Chow calls a “desire for a pure otherness in pristine luminosity.”22 If Prasad is critical of how class operates as a transparent category in Korom’s critique, this very transparency is ironically bestowed on the diasporic artifacts in the exhibit that are endowed with the veracity of material evidence—one that stands in for an indisputable visual proof of difference. The experience of “seeing” these objects thus becomes the epistemological ground around claims for the transparency of knowledge production. As Joan Scott has remarked in her critique of experience as evidence: “Knowledge is gained through vision; vision is a direct apprehension of a world of transparent objects.”23 In similar ways to direct encounters with these objects in the exhibition, Prasad writes of the attempts of second-generation Indian Americans to return to their roots by visiting India as a mode of “direct apprehension.” She contends: “Relatives in India, the sounds of Indian languages, the colors, and the stories are all familiar in varying degrees, but there is a need to know these in more ful)lling and ‘)rst-hand’ ways.”24 To “live like a banyan tree,” then, is to summon the evidentiary logics of “)rst-hand” encounters in order to rely on more authentic and “ful)lling” forms of knowledge that are obscured by the banyan tree’s ever-expanding and bifurcated branches. The various passages back to India that Prasad describes, however, can never completely ful)ll their intended promise of recovery. Not only do “homelands” inevitably prove to be imaginary, but “)rst-hand” returns fail to deliver on the salvi)c promise of unmediated experience. Thus, even while these returns to the homeland “help gain a perspective on one’s Indian affections and disaffections,” a sense of bathos is built into these encounters—they end up, as Prasad acknowledges, only “af)rm[ing] their American roots.”25 The objects in the exhibit thus function as metonymic substitutes that offer replacements for the failures of direct encounters with “home.” If there is a realization that passages back to India cannot quite compensate for the melancholic loss of “original” roots, then the “transparent objects” of the exhibit function as viable alternatives for mediations with home. The exhibit thus operates as an archive of recovery—one that labors to efface its ontology as one that is also an archive of loss. As Anjali Arondekar has pointed out, what is made visible in the archive “paradoxically discloses the very limits of that visibility.”26 Thus Arondekar argues for “an urgent need to complicate the very stakes of our archival mediations, especially given their mobilizations within a shifting (and

196

!"#$%&' (

often reactionary) language of political exigency.”27 Arondekar speci)cally frames this critique of recuperative language of loss and recovery in the context of the politics of the Hindu Right, whose selective returns to the past inform the logics of parochial nativism in the present—from the rewriting of Indian history textbooks to the mobilization of archaeology and DNA research in order to assert India’s “original” Hindu ancestry.

Recuperating the Diaspora for Hindutva during Revolutionary Times It would be simplistic to con*ate the Live Like the Banyan Tree exhibition with the fascist politics of religious fundamentalisms—in fact, the catalog accompanying the exhibit offers an explicit critique of the Hindu right wing in Vinay Lal’s contribution.28 However, my attention to both the formal and conceptual framing of the exhibit is to foreground how the invocation of the banyan tree as a metaphor for the diasporic experience is predicated on generative and generational logics that are central to the operations of Hindu fundamentalism. In this section, then, I want to turn more explicitly to how this generational and generative rhetoric becomes the basis for the Hindu Right to renegotiate its relation with the diaspora. Once again, by returning to the “revolutionary” moment of 1991, I contend that this historical marker indexed a pivotal point in the nation-state’s relationship with the Indian diaspora, which shifted from India’s inauthentic “illegitimate child” to the more useful construction of the reformed prodigal son. Generational scripts thus play a central role in manufacturing a politics of “long-distance nationalism,” shifting the ideological terrain of the diaspora from a politics of betrayal and in)delity to that of loyalty and )liality. At his inaugural address in 2003, the newly elected BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, consolidated a decade-long shift to galvanize India’s large global diaspora into a more productive relationship with the nation by celebrating Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Day of the Indians Abroad), a day to recognize the achievements of non-resident Indians across the globe. In a speech that is noteworthy for the generational logics through which this Indian diaspora is articulated, Vajpayee remarked: “I have always been conscious of the need for India to be sensitive to the hopes, aspirations and concerns of its vast diaspora. It is like a parental charge. It is also an obligation derived from our

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

197

civilizational heritage.”29 Vajpayee’s framing of the diaspora’s relation to the homeland as a “parental charge” is not without signi)cance. It is a rhetorical shift that replaces the diaspora’s signi)ers from logics of national abandonment to that of paternal adoption. The overlap between nationalism and globalization through familial logics is not coincidental—instead, it is a relation that is carefully curated so that structures of de-territorialization can be reconciled with the logics of reterritorialization in a mutually bene)cial relationship. But the parental charge that Vajpayee promised was not inaugurated with the election of the Vajpayee-led BJP government, even if the mainstream entry of the Hindu Right into state governance marked a more explicit communalization of the nation’s relation with the diaspora. Instead, Vajpayee’s familial rhetoric can be historicized to the early part of the 1990s investment in rede)ning the relationship between sovereign domesticity and global )nance. As discussed in chapter 1, the “revolution” of 1991 was inseparable from the logics of the debt-fueled crisis that prompted India’s dependence on IMF and World Bank loans. The crisis was at least in part precipitated by the transfer of capital from Indian to foreign banks on the part of Indians living abroad, which led to the devaluation of the Indian currency. In an attempt to assuage the anxieties of non-resident Indians and to encourage the growth of foreign investments, then, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh proposed budget reforms that would restore the nation’s economic well-being. Singh declared the importance of enhancing “the ef)ciency and international competitiveness of industrial production, to utilize for this purpose foreign investment and foreign technology to a much greater degree than we have done in the past, to increase the productivity of investment, to ensure that India’s )nancial sector is rapidly modernized, . . . [and] to attain an adequate technological and competitive edge in a fast changing global economy.”30 This internationalist emphasis on foreign investment and trade was not a seamless transition for a country that was not only deeply ensconced in the logics of economic independence mediated by Nehruvian socialism, but also suspicious of an acquiescence to global forces that invoked colonial logics of foreign domination and loss of sovereignty. It was in this context that the Indian diaspora would play a crucial role in reconciling an outward-looking economy of deregulation with a bounded model of national sovereignty that would preserve the agency of localized governmentality. This reconciliation interpellated the non-resident Indian as “the domestic abroad,” in Latha Varadarajan’s

198

!"#$%&' (

words—a newly emerging function that allowed the nation-state to assert an autonomous postcoloniality while still rejecting the putative provincialism of pre-“revolutionary” economic insularity.31 According to Varadarajan, these economic and ideological contradictions were negotiated through local and global reconciliations: “the government had emphasized that the foreign capital infusion needed to revitalize the Indian economy would not come from ‘foreigners.’ It would come from ‘Indians,’ the NRIs, who despite not residing in India, or for that matter, having Indian citizenship, would play a crucial role in shoring up India’s foreign exchange reserves in the short run as well as in the long-term restructuring of the Indian economy.”32 If the early 1990s marked a break between different economic “generations” (from Nehruvian socialism to market liberalization), then the Indian diaspora functions as a conduit of continuity to smooth over epochal disconnections between “local” and “global.” While generational temporalities immediately invoke the suggestion of discrete and periodized gaps, logics of continuity simultaneously circulate around their performative vicinity. In fact, the notion of generations as paradigmatic breaks coexists with connective scripts that must line up in linear lockstep in order to preserve continuity even within purported logics of discontinuity. “Revolutionary” change in 1991, in other words, while invested in a temporal divergence, was also predicated on a papering over of epistemic breaks, especially when the goal was one of market “freedom” and reformist containment rather than a radical redistribution of material resources. This smoothing over of the shift from localism to globalism was thus predicated on familial scripts of repronormative generationality in which the Indian diaspora had to be strategically absorbed back into the nation-state, their “foreignness” no longer carrying the semiotic weight of inauthenticity, but instead functioning as the occasion for productive homecomings. In other words, the diaspora at this historical moment functioned as a technology of generational exchange: while non-resident Indians pledged their )lial duty to the nation, the nation reciprocated by bestowing its benevolent “parental charge” on its exiled children. It is not without signi)cance that this mutual relationality has been described by some as a kind of jugalbandi between then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh that saved the economy.33 This reference to the intertwining of solo artists in a harmonious duet in Indian classical music functions as an indigenous framing to obscure the dependence on foreign markets and global )nance. More than a

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

199

decade later, on the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas holiday, Vajpayee used the very same language to describe the harmonious “melody” between India and its global diaspora: “Pravasi Bharatiya Divas itself is a celebration of the jugalbandi between the 22-million strong Indian Diaspora and your motherland . . . Together we constitute the Global Indian Family. Together, we are announcing the arrival on the world stage of a Shining India, an India that has resolved to regain her past glory and indeed surpass it, an India that will both be an economic powerhouse and a major contributor to humanity’s all-sided evolution to a higher level.”34 While the particular contexts in which the harmony of jugalbandi is referenced are different, the earlier invocation lays the foundations for the one to follow—the “revolutionary” initiatives of Rao and Singh lay the groundwork for the symbiotic relationship between the nation and its diaspora. When Vajpayee invokes the generational logics of the “Global Indian Family,” he is not simply resorting to symbolic gestures of collective unity. The term “jugalbandi” also refers to the material politics of giftgiving and remittances exchanged between Indians abroad and resident Indians as a means to achieve the status of the “economic powerhouse” referenced above. In his analysis of the economy of the gift, Georges Bataille suggests that the act of gift-giving, rather than an innocuous gesture of benign generosity, is one that is actually imbued with “the ‘acquisition’ of a ‘power.’ ”35 He writes: “Gift-giving has the virtue of a surpassing of the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given, the subject appropriates the surpassing: he regards his virtue, that which he had the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now possesses.”36 Bataille’s analysis of the gift as one in which “virtue” accrues around the gift-giver thus suggests that the social capital gained in the act of giving exceeds the value of the gift itself. While his formulation usefully points to how the logics of gift exchange on the part of those who give are never neutral, it assumes a power geometry that is predicated on the passive innocence of gift recipients. The gift-giver’s magnanimous largesse, however, runs parallel to the receiver’s own virtue-building, which is premised not only on the capacity to receive and the benevolence of return, but also in the creation of incentives that make gift-giving both necessary and mutually bene)cial. For example, the post-liberalization milieu of 1990s India witnessed the creation of reforms to facilitate “gift” giving through investment incentives and the overriding of restrictions. Schemes such as the relaxation of the Foreign Regulation Act of 1973 were not without their

200

!"#$%&' (

critics from opposing parties, who were anxious that non-resident Indian populations would exploit the easy exchange of )nance to launder black money. Latha Varadarajan documents some of these anxieties, ranging from concerns over the use of India as a tax-free haven to questions about the futility of relying on national “traitors” to “save” the nation from its impending economic crisis.37 In fact, Varadarajan foregrounds how the opposition squarely blamed non-resident Indians for precipitating the economic crisis in the )rst place, thus refuting the idea of them as potential saviors whose investments could serve as a miraculous panacea. Indrajit Gupta, a member of the Communist Party of India, argued: “You expect these people, who have gone out of the country, who left the country in order to make more money abroad, that they will suddenly become patriotic . . . because of your appeal to them?”38 By reframing the diasporic Indian through generational logics of a parental charge endemic to the ancient Indian “heritage,” foreign investment and remittances could be recast simply as gift exchanges between familial generations. This hereditary framing served a dual purpose—the reliance on foreign investments to “rescue” an economy in crisis could be articulated in nationalist terms of family unity rather than as a threat to India’s post-independence autonomy and national sovereignty. In other words, the liberalization of India’s economy was no longer a threat to local sovereignty if global investment was predicated on the logics of “keeping it in the family.” Additionally, by reimagining diaspora as the future generation of family, the global Indian could be rebranded away from the )gure of national abandonment—the traitor who deserts the motherland for greener (and foreign) pastures—and toward the role of an emissary of local globalism who was essential to the needs of “revolutionary” times. Rather than unpatriotic )gures who have forsaken the national family, the diaspora comes to embody the mobility of *exible citizenship in which, as Aihwa Ong suggests, mobile transnational subjects “respond *uidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions.”39 In her analysis of the global Indian, Varadarajan contends that through this new interpellation of the Indian abroad, the government did not have to relinquish its claims to postcoloniality by appearing to acquiesce to global organizations like the IMF. Instead, she suggests that even in the midst of the nation’s worst economic crisis, the hailing of the global Indian’s success was mobilized as proof of the nation’s arrival as a novel participant in the spoils of modernity—the “triumphal

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

201

claims” that “Indian entrepreneurs were ‘second to none’ and that India ‘had come of age.’ ”40 Or in generational terms, India’s prodigal son who had once squandered his allegiance to his parental/paternal charge was now all grown up, and ready and willing to return the favor through gift economies of remittances and investments. If gift economies, as suggested above, are not innocuous and in fact are predicated on a mutually bene)cial politics of virtue-building, the exchange between the nation and its familial charge continued in an endless cycle of reciprocity and expectation, the culmination of which led to the introduction of dual citizenship initiatives in the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2003. With the exception of voting or standing for elections, the non-resident Indian was now a de facto citizen who could own and invest in property in the homeland. While these amendments to the contours of Indian citizenship enabled the mobility of non-residents in literal ways through the jettisoning of visa requirements, they also facilitated a model of *exible citizenship through the seamless *ow of capital and transnational linkages. Given these practices of *exibility that have informed the shifts in technologies of citizenship, it would be inadequate to understand the emergence of the Hindu Right—and its subsequent establishment as a major political party that formed the government in 2003—as one that consolidated its power through logics of stasis and )xity, even if its actions have often been characterized by homogeneity and rigidity. There is a certain malleability to its parochial logics that allows for more adaptable and context-speci)c understandings of identity and belonging. Thus, Smitha Radhakrishnan suggests that “transnational Hindu organizations that aim to propagate and raise awareness about Hinduism play a key role in adapting Hinduism to global conditions of mobility and diasporic belonging.”41 These adaptive logics are clearly discernible, for example, in Prime Minister Modi’s speech delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in which he mobilized a Sanskrit phrase found in the Upanishads, vasudhaiva kutumbakam (literally translated as “the world is one family”). In Modi’s invocation, familial logics combine with the familiar understanding of globalization as a force that shrinks the world, collapsing differences and bridging distances. Signi)cantly, the return to ancient Hindu scriptures in the invocation of vasudhaiva kutumbakam is not in the service of a parochial attachment to the past, but in that of a fastdawning futurity that is marked by “technological revolution” and rapid development. The understanding of globalization as refracted through

202

!"#$%&' (

vasudhaiva kutumbakam perfectly embodies the “dual twining” of roots referenced earlier, combining past and future, local and global, and thus facilitating the formation of a global pan-Hindu identity in which the diaspora plays a crucial role. Christophe Jaffelot and Ingrid Therwath use the term “western Hindutva” to describe this form of ideological reconciliation—that is, a mobilization of long-distance nationalism that “is a carefully crafted graft )rst developed in the motherland and then methodologically spread around the world to serve ideological and strategic purposes.”42 Thus, the Sang Parivar (the family of Hindu nationalist organizations) composed of groups such as the VHP and the RSS has paid close attention to the creation of global networks of Hindutva that function as ideological support systems for the Hindu Right “at home.” It ultimately becomes dif)cult to understand the internationalization of Hindutva through static core-periphery models in which the diaspora simply mimics the structural logics of the Right in the “motherland”— since, in fact, the diaspora can be the )nancial source that buttresses communalist logics at “home,” for example, in the building of temples. And yet, there are some crucial distinctions in their operational logics given the different material contexts in which Hindutva works at “home” and “abroad.” For example, Jaffelot and Therwath foreground the logics of caste-blindness in the attempts to construct a pan-Hindu identity among diasporic Hindus abroad as a unifying strategy—one that exists in sharp contrast to some of the more divisive ideologies back “home” that are manifested around caste and sectarian lines.43 The more pronounced cohesion in the construction of a pan-Hindu identity abroad also has something to do with the shared experience of marginalization that often accompanies minority status in a white-dominated Western context. Sucheta Mazumdar, for example, points to the ways in which diasporic Indians legally consolidated their emergence in the context of U.S. multiculturalism through census registrations under the category of “Asian American” in order to access )nancing for small businesses and mobilize anti-discrimination legislation for housing loans.44 The self-interpellation of minority status that mobilizes multiculturalism against real forms of disenfranchisement exists, however, in tandem with the funneling of diasporic capital in the service of parochial nationalism in the “homeland.” To qualify, it would be simplistic to suggest that the crossover between those in the diaspora who might, for example, rally against orientalist representations of Indians or the cultural co-optation of yoga,

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

203

and those who ideologically and )nancially support Hindutva projects, is one that seamlessly coincides. Instead, my point in drawing attention to the potential for partial overlap is to foreground how appeals to minority status in a Western context can function as cover-ups that obscure complicity with nationalist discourses. Additionally, I am not simply rehearsing the argument that diasporas can be resistant to and simultaneously complicit with nationalism—instead, more precisely, I am suggesting that appeals to minoritized status under the aegis of multiculturalism can function as an alibi for collusion with the regressive project of Hindutva.

What’s Queer Diaspora Got to Do with It? With the above understanding of diasporic complicity with nationalism in mind, I want to return to and complicate Gayatri Gopinath’s formulation of queer diaspora referenced at the outset. For Gopinath, when “queer” and “diaspora” are considered in their mutually intersecting logics, they generate a discourse that is theorized as always resistant to the hegemonic logics of both nation and heterosexuality. To quote the same passage one more time: “If ‘diaspora’ needs ‘queerness’ in order to rescue it from its genealogical implications, ‘queerness’ also needs ‘diaspora’ in order to make it more supple in relation to questions of race, colonialism, migration, and globalization.”45 In other words, “diaspora” and “queer” rescue one another: if “queer” complicates diaspora’s attachment to genealogy, “diaspora” attends to queer’s slippage into the default setting of whiteness and Euro/Anglocentrism. Like gift exchanges, they are mutually salvi)c in their functions. I am interested in Gopinath’s contention that “queer” and “diaspora,” when considered as mutually implicated, make each other “more supple.” For Gopinath, the value in the production of elasticity lies in the eschewal of generational scripts. Thus, an introduction of queer frameworks into diasporic contexts “rescues” the latter from their attachment to the language of roots and the essentialist constructions of origins. In exchange, diaspora offers “queer” a seemingly more capacious possibility to move beyond the tunnel vision of single-issue politics. “More supple” is thus indicative of an enhanced *exibility that gets equated with presumably “better” politics—for example, the rejection of oedipal logics or the decentering of whiteness. In trying to complicate this model of queer diaspora as always already resistant to dominant scripts

204

!"#$%&' (

of generationality, I am suggesting that “queer” can in fact function as a multicultural alibi for diaspora’s complicity with parochial nationalisms. In other words, what are the ways that the diaspora’s *exibility (its enhanced “supple” character) operates in the service of the very generational scripts that are purportedly eschewed in its encounters with queerness? Or to put it differently, what are the ways in which Hindutva adapts to forms of global modernity and *exible citizenship precisely by absorbing queerness into the diaspora? In which moments do the “dual twinings” of queer diasporas require a more careful disentangling? For example, Seeta Lakhani’s Hinduism for Schools, which is prescribed as a textbook to cover GCSE (General Certi)cate of Secondary Education) requirements in the United Kingdom, illustrates why a more cautious approach to the queer diaspora’s supposed transgressions against generational scripts might be warranted. Funded by the Vivekananda Centre in London, the book emphasizes its “greater emphasis on the contemporary version of Hinduism, in contrast to what have now become antiquated versions.”46 The project is part of a larger endeavor by groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad to globalize the teachings of Hinduism via educational projects and the rewriting of textbooks through a hagiographic lens of Hinduism’s spiritual contributions. What is noteworthy about Lakhani’s text is the seemingly benign tone which insists on Hinduism as a “living religion” that is constantly evolving and adapting—a stance far removed from the blatant saffronization of history in India which led to the removal of the renowned historian Romila Thapar from the Indian Council of Historical Research within a few months of the BJP’s ascent to power in 1999. In other words, Lakhani’s text embodies a logic of protean *exibility that betrays its investments in the production of covertly rigid essentialisms and )xities. Additionally, the textbook’s participation in a nationalist pan-Hindu project at a global scale is obscured by its selfpositioning as a corrective to the logics of racial and religious prejudice that Hindus living abroad might experience—that is, the essentialist stereotypes of all Indians running corner stores and living in extended families, or the reduction of Hindu religious practices to “naked sadhus” and “bizarre peripheral cults” (100). This insidiously tempered version of Hinduism is most explicit, for example, in the quali)cation of the caste system, which, in its British diasporic context, is articulated as nothing more than a “benevolent clan system.” Lakhani insists that “no hierarchy exists between these clans” even while “there is an understandable preference to marry

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

205

within the same clan” (99). Returning to the scriptures in the Rigveda, Lakhani suggests that in its original essence, caste is to be understood more accurately through an analogy with physiological difference: just as different parts of the body function differently for a holistic performance of the full body, people belonging to different castes mobilize their unique skill sets for the improvement of a larger societal good. The “true” purpose of the caste system that informs this unadulterated and purportedly original form of Hinduism is thus simply a “fair division of labour based on age and ability” which generates a kind of societal equilibrium, rather than the forms of division that have been unfairly mapped on to the caste system (and by implication, generalized on to Hinduism in its entirety) (99). In Lakhani’s framework, Hinduism is maligned not because of gau rakshaks or “beef lynchings,” but because the notion of hereditary caste “is a stick used for beating up Hinduism in the west” (99). While admitting that hereditary caste is an “atrocity,” Lakhani is at pains to point out not only that such a generational system was a misreading of the original scriptures of Hinduism, but also that “every modern proponent of Hinduism has sharply rebuked the practice of a hereditary caste system” (99). Additionally, her analysis exonerates the practice of caste by universalizing it as a social and economic practice that is germane to all societies. Assuming a pseudo-postcolonial logic, she suggests how a hereditary caste system is not unlike the institution of monarchy in the United Kingdom, in which heirs assume their rightful place on the throne simply by virtue of their birth into the royal family. While Lakhani is not wrong to point to the logics of generational privilege that monarchy is predicated on, it becomes the narrative through which the caste system gets exonerated and normalized rather than a way to foreground its antiquated, regressive, and violent logics. Hinduism for Schools thus urges its readers to pay attention to only the descriptive ontology of Hinduism but not its performative iterations—that is, an understanding of Hinduism’s “true” nature by what it says rather than what it actually does—in yet another version of the seductions that mark the “pure otherness in pristine luminosity” discussed in the context of Live Like the Banyan Tree. More signi)cantly for my arguments in this chapter, I am interested in how Hinduism for Schools mobilizes queerness as a way to “rescue” the Hindu diaspora, to return to Gopinath’s formulation. It is not without signi)cance that in the very next section following Lakhani’s quali)cations of caste as a benign and misunderstood system, she

206

!"#$%&' (

turns to a commentary on the place of homosexuality within the ethical frameworks of the Hindu religion. Lakhani’s analysis is radically different from the common refrain espoused by Hindu religious leaders and BJP politicians in India that forecloses the very existence of LGBT people. In contrast to the homophobic mantra that insists on the incommensurability between queerness and religious and national identity, Lakhani in fact points to their harmonious compatibility. She thus suggests that Hindu traditions reveal the logics of accommodation instead of rejection: The theory of reincarnation says that we, as “souls,” transmigrate into different bodies after we die. Our character accompanies us into our next life. Therefore a person who has been male for many lives would have developed “male tendencies” in his character. If for any reason, he is then born in a female body he will feel seriously disjointed. Hence we )nd many gay people protesting that they feel trapped in the wrong body. This person who is now in a female body continues to be attracted to other females, as he still possesses a male mind . . . Gay people are as spiritual as the rest of the community. Hindus do not think that they are sinners destined to go to hell. (100)

It is not surprising that the inclusive accommodation of “gay people” into Hinduism in the above passage does not fare radically better than their outright exclusion—from a return to nineteenth-century sexologist models of “inversion” to the chiasmic relation between biology and destiny that makes gender essentialism seem axiomatic and inevitable. But even if one were to bracket off the “explanations” of queerness as misguided attempts at inclusion, what is especially noteworthy is the instrumentalization of queerness in the service of a capaciously progressive Hinduism that is plural and expansive in scope. For Lakhani, such a framing of Hinduism as a plural and adaptable tradition that is able to absorb and accommodate queerness seems especially crucial if it is to stay relevant “in a world that has become a global village” (2). Including queerness as a phenomenon that is congruent with ancient Hindu teachings is thus part of a modernizing and secularizing mission on the part of the diaspora’s participation in mobile citizenship—one that places a premium on *exible capital and de-territorialization. If Hinduism can be unmoored from the )xity of putative tradition, it can be more compatible with transnational capital and global modernity.

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

207

“Hinduism for schools” can thus be a mobile *oating signi)er that is open to newer kinds of interpretations and mobilizations and yet be instrumentalized in the service of essentialist ethnic identi)cations. It is not without signi)cance, then, that in Lakhani’s attempts to frame queerness as a phenomenon that is easily reconcilable with Hinduism, the liminality of transmigration becomes a way to explain the ontogeny of queerness via reincarnation. While conventionally queer temporality is framed as something that would challenge the logics of rigid generationality, in this context, those logics are in fact buttressed by scripts of generational repetition. Such a compatibility is achieved through a seemingly more malleable logic of reincarnation as a kind of transmigration in which journeys into the next life replicate the very logics of queer diasporas—the blurring of origins, the passages into new unknowns, the experiences of disjointedness, and of being “trapped” between two worlds. While queer diasporas are conventionally resistant to generational scripts (as suggested by Gopinath), in this reimagining of generationality as reincarnation, they become conveniently contiguous. Given that the very purpose of Hinduism for Schools is the dissemination of Hinduism to future generations of children in the diaspora, the preservation of tradition is endemic to its ideological purposes. At the same time, the book’s preservation of tradition is achieved through repetition with a difference—and the folding-in of queerness into this tradition becomes an important tool of its vision for a more updated and “revolutionary” understanding of Hinduism. If the target audience of Hinduism for Schools is second-generation diasporic Indians who are attempting to reconcile the twining selves of dual worlds, Minal Hajratwala’s Leaving India is recounted from that very perspective, even though her memoir does not share Lakhani’s hagiographic readings of Hinduism that bracket off its violent and communalist mobilizations. For example, at the very outset, Hajratwala warns her readers not to “let anyone tell you they have the ‘correct’ version of Hinduism.”47 But even while Hajratwala’s understandings of identity are far removed from the parochial logics of Hindutva, the story of queer diaspora is not too dissimilar from the experience of disjointedness described above in Hinduism for Schools. Hajratwala describes the splitting of her queerness and Indianness as a “construction of two selves” that “felt exhausting, necessary, and oddly familiar” (326). The source of this exhaustion is the break in worldviews between different generations of the diaspora, framed around a split between past and future, Indian and Western:

208

!"#$%&' ( One generation’s grounding may be the next’s limitation. The daughters reject the mothers’ comfort food, their ways of feeling beautiful, the yards of silk and slashes of kohl. The sons do not want women who will serve them tastes of home, but women who will lead them into new worlds . . . sooner or later, a generation diverges, and makes its own way further into the new world than the parents’ )rst dream envisioned. Perhaps each migrant should be warned at the border: Your children will become foreigners to you; are you prepared? It would cut the rate of chosen migration by half. (312)

The entry into “new worlds” and the cleaving apart of generations that renders children as “foreigners” is further compounded by Hajratwala’s queerness, which she describes as a migration “away from a community of migrants . . . a particular kind of disorientation, a dual displacement” (329). If Lakhani returns to the ancient Hindu philosophy of reincarnation in order to reconcile the “problem” of queerness and Hinduism, Hajratwala returns to the )gure of Ardhanarishvara—the androgynous half-male god and half-female goddess who offers a way to resolve what she calls the “prickly sensation of traveling between worlds that seem forever irreconcilable” (339). The divine being of Ardhanarishvara is invoked at the very outset of the memoir when the author is visiting a family genealogist with a book of information on her ancestors that contains her father’s drawing of “a curving *owering family tree” (5). Functioning as a microcosm for the logics of patrilineal generationality, the book contains a list of “thirteen generations of of male names” including that of her grandfather, who, “at the tree’s root, rises thickly into his lineage of sons who begat sons” (6). If the protagonist’s queerness threatens to disrupt generational continuity and thus jeopardize the root-like foundations of the family, it is in the )gure of Ardhanarishvara that Hajratwala )nds the indigenous potential for queer genealogy that promises to resolve the displacement caused by incompatible selves. Through the “union of opposites” that Ardhanarishvara represents, the protagonist )nds a kind of queer surrender in the renewed promise of genealogy: “I have incarnated this deity . . . if the genealogist is correct, she/he is my direct ancestor” (7). Logics of mobility mark this queering of Indian tradition in pronounced ways. “Traveling between worlds” ultimately is no longer an occasion for disorientation and confusion, but one of “worldly joy” and “spiritual liberation” (7). The journey to reconciliation—its framing as a

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

209

voyage, which is itself a metaphor for travel and spatial transgression— culminates in a recognition that the “gap is itself the illusion,” that Indian and lesbian, tradition and modernity, swadeshi and globalization, local and global are always already chiasmically embedded within one another, like the inseparable twining roots of the banyan tree. The dissolution of these binaries allows Hajratwala to reject the truncated logics that separate queerness from Indiannness, and which would render her very existence an aberration. But this reconciliation also replicates the same structural logics of diaspora’s investments in *exible citizenship in which “rootedness” and mobility must operate in tandem with one another in the service of “revolutionary” times. Once again, these queer reconciliations function as liberal alibis for the more insidious logics through which projects of Hindu nationalism can adapt to the economic mandates of “worlding,” while still mobilizing the logics of provincial insularity at “home.” These logics of *exibility and mobility are woven into the very form of Leaving India, which organizes its concluding chapters by formally replicating the diasporic logics of dispersal and spatial scattering. In chapter after chapter, the setting for the protagonist’s encounters with various branches of her family shifts back and forth between India, Toronto, Hong Kong, South Africa, New Jersey, London, Iowa, Fiji, Michigan, and San Francisco. The very multi-locational structure of the book thus replicates the mobility of the diasporic subject whose *exibility across borders is valorized as the microcosm of globalization’s spatial transgressions. In a special issue on “The Global Indian” in India Today, Aroon Purie similarly frames the entrepreneurial spirit of the Indian abroad to celebrate Indian diasporic exceptionalism through the logics of geographical dispersal: “What links the astronaut on our cover with the Punjabi sheep farmers in New Zealand? What connects white-collar techies in Silicon Valley to the Indians who seem to have a monopoly on 24-hours stores in Britain? . . . It is the will to succeed.”48 In contrast to these representations of hypermobility that narrate the story of diaspora as one of *exible citizenship and the expansive sprawling of roots, it seems useful to end with an account that brushes up against such celebrations of de-territorialization. Amidst the polyphony of movement between different geographies, Hajratwala does momentarily acknowledge that “it is no coincidence  .  .  . that the poorest members of my family are those who still live in India.”49 One such family member is Jaydeep, the teenage son of a cousin who lives in Kalyan, a town north of Bombay. Jaydeep’s story is one of desperation and failed

210

!"#$%&' (

ambition—a deeply ingrained desire to make his own passage away from India to achieve global and entrepreneurial success, but one that ultimately ends in immovability and dreams permanently deferred. Jaydeep is described as belonging to the generation of India’s middle-class youth who have inherited global aspirations as the default setting for success. If an earlier generation of midnight’s children straddled the edge of preand postcoloniality, liberalization’s children mark the turning point from provincial to “revolutionary” times. Jaydeep is enamored of “America’s tall buildings,” is obsessively familiar with dollar/rupee exchange rate *uctuations, and is overly familiar with the names of U.S. states and cities. In the book’s protagonist, Jaydeep sees the glimmer of migration’s actualization—that is, Hajratwala becomes a potential conduit for his passage away from India. But unlike her own journey, Jaydeep’s story is one of being stuck in space and time. When his global aspirations fail to take root, his e-mail exchanges with Hajratwala become confused, aggressive, and even abusive. She thus writes: “His last e-mail to me was so furious that it was barely incoherent.” Hajratwala ends all communication with Jaydeep after these tense and confusing exchanges, but still experiences a feeling of guilt at what she must inevitably renounce in India as she returns to the United States. The “crime of abandonment never quite leaves us,” she writes, foregrounding her guilt over her easy mobility, which is accompanied by her helplessness to rescue Jaydeep from his impoverished immobility (367). But the “story of not-diaspora” can exist only as a parenthetical aside. Jaydeep’s irrational anger becomes the occasion to highlight the predicament of diasporic conscience that never fades away, in which the charge of inauthenticity always casts the “global” Indian as the nation’s bastard child (367). In ultimately reconciling diasporic queerness with the “roots” of her Indiannness, Hajratwala is able to cast off these shackles of illegitimacy, and she concludes her memoir with the celebration of the Hindu festival of Navratri at one of the plentiful options at her disposal—either a temple in Fremont, or the Oakland Coliseum. While far removed from its “original” locations, signi)ers of Indianness need not be anchored to static signi)eds. Hajratwala thus writes: “If we could track one tiny mirror’s journey, all that it re*ects and refracts, we might see the world entire” (381). The narrative of diasporic reconciliation must thus ultimately subsume the story of Jaydeep’s boundedness. His is a story of ungerminated roots and truncated branches that can never extend beyond the limits of geography, at precisely the moment when globalization offers the theoretical promise of national transgressions, of seeing “the world entire.”

+&,-./ %"& +#.,#. 0'&&

211

Jaydeep’s protests can only be understood as incoherent dissent— the ramblings of a perpetual malcontent. But perhaps it is in this very inarticulate and disjointed incoherence that we might )nd something more akin to a queer critique of globalization which cannot be incorporated into the generational logics of mobility and *exible citizenship. What if we were to narrate the story of “revolutionary times” through the queerness of this incoherence? What might we glean from paying attention to globalization as a process that generates immobility and disconnection rather than *exibility and easy movement?

!"#$%&'%(

A Delayed Postscript

Why do people walk into the disciplinary regime of the state? —Gopal Guru, Humiliation: Claims and Context

While I was completing the writing of Pink Revolutions in fall 2018, the Supreme Court of India rendered its own “revolutionary” judgment on Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, striking down its criminalization of consensual sex between same-sex adults, and thus effectively decriminalizing homosexuality in the eyes of the law. Deepak Misra, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, succinctly suggested that the interpretation of Section 377 to criminalize same-sex sexual activity between consenting adults was “irrational, arbitrary, and indefensible.”1 On the occasion of the landmark judgment, it seems appropriate to bookend Pink Revolutions with the dual and seemingly discrete meanings invoked in the title of this book. If “pink revolutions” at the very outset referenced the sacrilege of cow slaughter via the logics of Hindutva, in this concluding moment, the phrase captures the legal triumph celebrated by the Indian LGBT community that will ostensibly lead to “revolutionary” queer and Indian futures. In this brief afterword, I will revisit some of the celebratory rhetoric in the immediate aftermath of that 2018 legal triumph in light of the triangulation between queer politics, nationalism, and globalization that I have theorized as marking pink revolutions throughout this book. To offer an afterword of this kind is partially a function of the book’s generic conventions that require concluding thoughts, but in this instance, it also serves to address, however inadequately, what arrived quite literally after the book’s word. What follows in these concluding pages is a replacement for an earlier version of a conclusion that I eventually rejected and revised in favor of what is to follow. Initially, 213

214

!"#$%&'%(

the motivation behind the revision was to account for a material present that superseded the book’s limits. But as I rewrote, I recognized that this “cancellation,” or what Gayatri Spivak calls “writing under erasure,” became crucial both conceptually and formally to the broader scope of the book itself.2 This afterword thus becomes a belated commentary on the rest of the book’s “present” that happened prior to the landmark Supreme Court ruling. Of course, the afterword will ultimately and inevitably be received as an already occurred past at the moment of its future reception. Put more simply, I am trying to point to the afterword’s temporality as one that is axiomatically marked by a kind of “delay” in various senses of the term—straggling signi)ers that can never quite keep up with always shifting signi)eds. If we are to believe globalization’s story about itself, the world is moving forward at high rates of speed. If India lives up to its designation of what Adam Roberts calls the “superfast primetime ultimate nation,” its pink revolutionary futures will be marked by augmented growth and ever-greater momentum.3 Perhaps, then, the recognition of delay and belatedness, of never quite being able to keep up, is one way to contravene the triumphant narratives of accelerated growth that obscure those who are immobile and stuck in time (like Jaydeep in the previous chapter), those who experience temporal lags in access (to medicines, as illustrated by the Novartis case), and those who are denied the spoils of modernity due to state-sanctioned hierarchies (Vemula and Siras, in their encounters with casteist and homophobic universities). It is only appropriate that the after word recognizes the belatedness that structures its very form. While this afterword attempts to offset the rest of the text’s inability to keep up with context through the vantage point of a more “caught up” present, it will still be marked by an inevitable inadequacy. There is a temporal lag when events take place at breathtaking speed and are always exceeding and overtaking their “original” framings, highlighting an obsolescence that can still hopefully and paradoxically be relevant. In her preface to and translation of Of Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak references the notion of sous rature—a concept that Derrida mobilizes via Hiedegger to cross out words of a text while still foregrounding the act of cancellation, making legible the very act of illegibility. Writing about her attempt to translate the term sous rature, Spivak contends: “My predicament is an analogue for a certain philosophical exigency that drives Derrida to writing ‘sous rature,’ which I translate as ‘under erasure.’ This is to write a word, cross it out, and then print both word and deletion.”4 The relationship of words to

! +$,-.$( /'0#01%23#

215

meaning is one that is always already twice removed, with the latter always exceeding the former. To put it in temporal terms, language is overtaken by the contingencies of the concept, and thus it is always delayed and belated (just like this afterword). Yet Spivak writes that sous rature is “inaccurate but necessary,” that “language is twisted and bent even as it guides us.”5 Thus delay is constitutive of the very mechanisms through which meaning is apprehended. There are several ways in which the above theorization of delay marks this afterword on Section 377 (beyond the logics of methodology or the very form of “after” words). Section 377’s belated strike-down in 2018 is itself seen as a deferred entry into the time of Indian modernity (“)nally we’ve entered the twenty-)rst century”), when archaic colonial-era laws are signi)cations of colonial hangovers and impediments to markers of sovereign postcoloniality.6 For many activists, the decision’s triumph was experienced in pointedly temporal terms—a kind of “)nally,” “about time,” and “at last.” While the decision had been marked by perpetual delay, September 6, 2018, was the day of eventual arrival—the moment when pink revolutions were actualized. But the relief and joy marking this epistemic shift from anticipation to arrival can never quite detach itself from the logics of delay. If delay, returning to the above theorizations, is constitutive of language, then in what sense can some of the representations of triumph function as a kind of sous rature? How are the performances of jubilation at this revolutionary moment of delayed arrival both “necessary” and yet “inaccurate” at the same time? What specters of delay still haunt the moment of revolutionary arrival? It is worth noting that Spivak’s understanding of “writing under erasure” cannot simply be con*ated with a theorization of the mechanisms that produce invisibility. While the words are crossed out, they are still written, even through their visible cancellation (hence my own framing of this afterword as a kind of necessary but inadequate rewriting through literal cancellation). Thus, in critiquing the responses to revolutionary legal judgments, I am not suggesting that these responses are either unwarranted or unnecessary. To use Spivak’s own words, my critique is not simply an “exposure of error.” Instead, it is “the critique of something that is extremely useful, something without which we cannot do anything.”7 In critiquing this epistemic moment of pink revolutions, I am not pointing to the myopias of celebration or asserting that these expressions of joy are overdetermined or ensconced in ideological naivete. By writing this after word, I am asking instead about after worlds—that is, what is yet to come and what remains to be done after the striking-down

216

!"#$%&'%(

Figure 1. Supreme Court Victory. Rainbow ray of light from Supreme Court of India. Copyright © artist illustrator Mir Suhail.

of Section 377. In considering the afterlives of legal victories, I am crossing out “words” not as an act of erasure, but as a way to understand how structures of unintelligibility might haunt the very moments of purported legibility. Or to put it differently, what is lost when we supposedly arrive? To return to the lyric by Faiz Ahmad Faiz at the outset, what is foreclosed when we rest in the aftermath of the morning’s tainted light? One of the most iconic and poignant images marking the Supreme Court’s revolutionary ruling was a much retweeted and widely published drawing by the political cartoonist Mir Suhail (see )gure 1). The drawing poignantly captures a visual representation of “pink revolutions,” depicting an image of the Supreme Court of India with a beam of white light entering from one wing of the building’s structure. From the other end of the building’s wing, the beam is then gloriously refracted and magni)ed as a bright rainbow light (reproduced here in black-and-white), signaling the achievement of radical transformation. The tricolored Indian *ag stands in the center of the building’s dome, functioning almost as if it were the prism-like conduit for this magni)cent transformation. The image, of course, is a play on the classic scienti)c illustration of light dispersion through triangulated optics in

! +$,-.$( /'0#01%23#

217

Figure 2. Section 377 Courtroom Scene. Judge with Indian Constitution. Illustration copyright © Manjul, Cartoons Communications.

which white light gets dispersed and fractured into its component colors. The image powerfully encapsulates the logics of triangulation that are endemic to pink revolutions that I theorized in the introduction. Suhail’s image appropriately depicts the central wing of the Supreme Court building that was constructed on a seventeen-acre triangular plot of land—its very geography indexing the trilateral logics discussed throughout the book between queerness, nationalism, and globalization. In a more literal version of Suhail’s drawing, the East India Comedy group contributed its own celebration of the judgment, tweeting a diagram-like image of the prism in which the original white light represents Section 377, the triangle epitomizes the Supreme Court, and the refracted rainbow is marked with “#love wins.” In this image, the celebration of legal institutions is not simply due to their production of sexual citizenship, but their engendering of intimacy in which the primacy (and privacy) of love override all else. The image thus achieves what Lauren Berlant has called a mode of “national sentimentality” that paradoxically has the effect of repudiating the political “on behalf of a private life protected from the harsh realities of power.”8 The sentimentalizing of national culture is achieved in yet another image ()gure 2)

218

!"#$%&'%(

Figure 3. Scales of Rainbow Justice. Scales tilting in favor of LGBT Victory. Copyright © artist illustrator Mir Suhail.

drawn by the political cartoonist Manjul, who depicts a judge with a copy of the Indian Constitution in front of him. The entire image is sketched in black and white except for a conspicuous dash of rainbow color on the triangular-shaped band called a “jabot” worn around his neck. The contrast in colors (not reproduced in the black-and-white version here) echoes the earlier depictions in which the triangles of revolutionary justice transform the mundane into the spectacular. In this particular representation, the state is no longer a symbol of red tape or bureaucratic governmentality in which judicial inaction delays the achievement of justice or exacerbates the precarity of vulnerable populations. Instead, the state is humanized as the architect of a love that, after protracted deferment, can )nally speak its name. In various representations, then, judicial signi)ers are imbued with the afterglow of rainbow-colored iridescence. For example, in another sketch by Suhail ()gure 3), the multicolored scales (color not reproduced in this version) of justice tilt to the left, foregrounding what Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala call a “point of arrival” that marks state-centered queer activism in India, which is always illusory in scope despite the insistence on a politics of ful)llment.9

! +$,-.$( /'0#01%23#

219

The points of arrival that accompany epistemic moments of legal victory thus make a critical afterward/word even more imperative if the challenge to Section 377 is read through a more capacious lens of gender and sexual justice than the mere securing of consensual “gay” sex through the discourse of privacy rights. In this light, the scholarship written prior to the “revolutionary” judgment is not redundant or antiquated—in fact, it assumes greater critical importance. For example, in an essay written just after the Delhi High Court struck down Section 377 in 2009, Jyoti Puri reads rape law (Section 375) in conjunction with sodomy law in India in arguing for a more “genderqueer” lens that considers the legal “victory” around 377 in light of feminist engagements with the law in India. Puri not only points to the entwined histories of challenges to rape and sodomy laws in India—some of the earliest challenges to Section 377 appeared in the 1993 draft of rape law reform—but also points to the manner in which rape and sodomy laws “militate against . . . forms of violence but each in its own way also becomes sexual violence itself.”10 For example, judicial framings of Section 375 enshrined the sanctity of marital “privacy” by exonerating the familial sphere from the occurrence of rape and sexual violence. As Puri remarks, “rape law is biased toward sexual violence that occurs outside the realm of the family and especially the marital relationship” (213). And it is precisely this realm of familial privacy that the Supreme Court decriminalization recentered in its victorious 2018 ruling. In yet another political cartoon, Sorit Gupto depicts the legal triumph by illustrating two men hand-in-hand, one of them holding his )ngers aloft in a “V” for victory sign (yet another triangular symbol of sorts, albeit inverted), and the other carrying an enlarged judge’s gavel to which is attached a rainbow *ag. The speech balloon above the image contains the words “Happy Delayed Independence,” which metonymically links the repurposed judge’s gavel (now a holder for the makeshift rainbow *ag) to a pride that is both proudly nationalist and queer in scope. While the Supreme Court’s enabling of “delayed independence” suggests the temporality of protracted suspension that makes the revolutionary judgment much overdue, its very belatedness also signals the ultimate triumph of arrival points. The path to pink revolution thus marks the trajectory of progress and maturity. The refractions of rainbow light from triangles in the above images are thus marked by a kind of limitless progression and linearity, suggestive of boundless futurity and growth. Their “vigor” is implicitly contrasted with other former British colonies whose protracted delays have not

220

!"#$%&'%(

produced their own pink revolutions.11 Take, for instance, the headline of a report in the Daily O a few weeks after the Supreme Court ruling that declared: “While India Celebrates Partial Strikedown of Section 377, Pakistan Continues to Suffer.”12 The piece goes on to document a variety of brutal assault cases against transgender people in Pakistan, marking the country as a site of primitive risk and violence. Thus, while the fate of Pakistan’s queer population hangs in hazy suspension, that of India’s is marked by giddy arrival and democratic potential. The temporal contrast is also played out through literal con)gurations of growth and linear models of development in which Pakistan is marked by an unruly and primitive infancy, in contrast to India’s matured arrival at the altar of legal progress. Not surprisingly, then, the markers of development that accompany the response to the ruling also recall maturity scripts in a different sense—that of economic growth indexing the pro)tability of a globalization-oriented India. In the aftermath of the September 6 ruling, food delivery start-ups such as Zomato and Swiggy, which have become ubiquitous markers of “Digital India,” joined in the celebrations of the Supreme Court’s strike-down of Section 377. Along with an image of a seven-tiered, rainbow-colored slice of cake, Swiggy tweeted a message of solidarity with those celebrating the ruling which said: “It’s not been a piece of cake, but we got there.” The double meanings are not simply restricted to the “piece of cake” pun, but also to the arrival points of “getting there,” which alludes to the deliverance of justice against all odds, and also implicitly to Swiggy’s own promise of food delivery that transgresses space and time. Swiggy thus becomes a microcosm for globalization’s time-space compressions in which the instantaneousness of food delivery subsumes and eventually overcomes all signi)ers of delay and lateness. Not to be outdone, the rival fooddelivery company Zomato India tweeted its own celebratory message (“Let’s get one thing straight, love is love”) with its version of the tiered cake—in this instance, a rainbow-colored burger. The image of the burger has indexed a kind of globalism ever since McDonald’s became ubiquitous in India after the revolutionary mid-1990s. But in order to reconcile with local tastes and ideological demands, McDonald’s India immediately launched the “McAloo” potato burger, foregrounding its investment in adapting to local “tradition.”13 Through McDonald’s’ experiments in local reconciliation, the burger is thus no longer exclusively a signi)er of the West, but instead a more malleable symbol of global-local *exibility that can acclimate

! +$,-.$( /'0#01%23#

221

to different ideological needs depending on the requirements of the cultural and material context it might have to navigate. Thus, Zomato’s tweet indexes both globalism (India has )nally “caught up” to the West) and localism (the celebration of exceptional Indian democracy). The image’s appeal lies in its celebration of pink revolutions—in this instance, queer “love” which also stands in for the love of the burger—a love which must, however, carefully safeguard against any proximity from another kind of pink revolution in the burger’s association with beef consumption if it is to appease Hindu sentiments. In yet another image that triangulated the logics of temporality with the rainbow “queering” of the Supreme Court building and the power of global branding, the Indian comedy group All India Bakchod’s Instagram page displayed an image of the Supreme Court building awash with a rainbow-colored )lter. The text on the image boldly proclaims: “Believe in something, especially if it should have been done a long fkn time ago” [sic]. Below this message of solidarity is the familiar logo of the Nike swoosh with a marginally altered trademark slogan, “Just did it.” Like several expressions of celebration after the ruling, this image mobilizes a politics of time to express incredulity at the logics of delay, making the ruling something that should have already been achieved “a long fkn time ago.” Temporal drags, however, are compensated not simply by the victorious culmination of )nal arrival, but also by the brand association with a global sportswear company like Nike, which conjures a logic of time that is far removed from the laborious protraction of prolonged delay. Instead, athletic speed and the muscular performativity of achievement become the visual frames that signal the dawning of a new India that has )nally rejected the ossi)cations of antiquated tradition. In a New York Times op-ed entitled “India’s Battle for Same-Sex Love” just a few months before the imminent Supreme Court decision, author Sandip Roy similarly frames LGBT rights in India in the familiar terms of a tug-of-war between antiquity and modernity, or once again, a temporal lag in which “India’s Supreme Court is playing catch-up in a society that seems to have largely moved on.”14 Like the Instagram post in which the Nike swoosh stands in for India’s )nal entry into global modernity, Roy invokes the world as a kind of global witness—those in power recognize that “the world is looking at India,” optimistically anticipating what would eventually be actualized only a few months later: “If Section 377 falls, there will be celebrations not just in India, but also in San Francisco, Toronto, and London.”15 Roy’s supposition is predicated not simply on the material presence of Indian queers in

222

!"#$%&'%(

the diaspora who would welcome the eschewal of state-sanctioned homophobia, but also on the place of India as a nation that is politically and economically connected with the rest of the globe, actualizing its own branding as the world’s largest democracy. India’s political and economic relations with other global entities hint at the possible emergence of new kinds of triangles that might be forged in the service of national futurity and projects of aspirational modernity. Take, for example, yet another avatar of triangular structures—the emergence of “growth triangles”—a concept that has been mobilized in the context of Southeast Asian nation-states to signal relations of economic reciprocity and foreign management between countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. In her analysis of the politics of *exible citizenship, Aihwa Ong de)nes growth triangles as “zones of special sovereignty that are arranged through a multinational network of smart partnerships and that exploit cheap labor that exists within the orbit of a global hub such as Singapore.”16 In keeping with the logics of globalization that both underscore and decentralize the role of the nation, the labor forces in these new zones of sovereignty are accountable to the requirements of private industry rather than to nation-states (the fact that these two entities are symbiotically linked, however, also mediates these “new” rules). While the geographic location of India and its political con*icts with neighboring nation-states prevent the exact replication of the ASEAN countries’ mutual cooperation, it is worth noting that Modi’s economic agendas have often drawn inspiration from Southeast Asian contexts, most obviously, for example, the Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission), which shared its vision with “Keep Singapore Clean” campaigns. While the politics of comparative Asian modernities is beyond the scope of my arguments, it is worth noting how India-Pakistan tensions have been mediated by a triangular connection with Chinese investments in economic growth in which the formation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has been perceived as excluding India’s participation in development projects. Arguing for India’s inclusion in a growth triangle of sorts, former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti asks: “Why can’t we be partners in economic growth and share the bene)ts of projects like CPEC? Let us move beyond skirmishes. It would make the region a hub of emerging economic opportunities leading to cooperation in trade, commerce, tourism, adventure across the region.”17 Throughout Pink Revolutions, I have illustrated how the economic is closely braided into the intimate—and so India’s desire for partnership with China

! +$,-.$( /'0#01%23#

223

indexes a participation in new models of modernity in which sexual politics plays a crucial role. In this light, the expressions of celebration detailed in this afterword must be seen as more than simply projects of corporate pro)teering around newly emerging modes of queer visibility in which Indian companies are capitalizing (quite literally) on the global visibility of the Supreme Court’s ruling. Once again, it might be useful to return to the months just prior to the epistemic moment of “victory” to understand the ideological terms on which modes of sexual belonging were being articulated. On July 22, 2018, The Times of India published “Proud to Be Gay” in which it interviewed several out Indian LGBT personalities marked as prominent “professionals.” If the aspirational logics for hijras singing the national anthem (analyzed in chapter 1) are framed through their desire for inclusion in “respectable” professions, in this conversation—mostly with lesbian and gay entrepreneurs, CEOs, )lmmakers, doctors, fashion designers, writers, and software engineers—inclusion into professional respectability is a fait accompli (“already did it,” to put yet another variation on the slogan in the Instagram post). And yet, despite all of these individuals having reached the apex of success in their chosen professions, their disenfranchisement through Section 377 is articulated as the only remaining stumbling block that obviates their inclusion into full citizenship. Parmesh Shahani, the head of the renowned cultural ideas platform Godrej India Culture Lab, points to these mechanisms of exclusion despite being “an honest taxpaying and law-abiding citizen”: “all these years, I’ve felt less than equal. As someone who deeply loves his country and considers himself a patriot, it is not a good feeling to have this law that makes me a second-class citizen. To think that the law criminalises something as basic as who you choose to love is constitutionally and fundamentally wrong. How can loving someone be a crime?”18 In the above words, disenfranchisement is expressed in affective terms—as “not a good feeling,” divorced from any material articulation of political economy or criminal persecution. “Feeling bad” is a consequence of the criminalization of gay sex, but more accurately in the above framework, it represents an unequal system of exchange that refuses to grant full citizenship to those like Shahani who don’t get their “due share” despite having never “broken the law” and having paid their fair share of taxes. In the realm of feelings, Section 377 is thus framed as a matter of unrequited love in which national desire is met by an indifferent nation-state from which Shahani yearns nothing more than

224

!"#$%&'%(

simple acknowledgment. The affective arguments continue in the next paragraph of the Times of India interview when Shahani suggests that if only Section 377 were repealed he would “feel validated, respected, and included.” Once again, the generational framing between young and old India is invoked, suggesting that college-age Indians “think it’s dumb to have anything like 377 in the year 2018.” Thus, while the nation’s heart is in the right place, its laws are once again passé and out of step with global standards—and are playing catch-up to its more current cosmopolitan and modernist inclusivity. If the celebrations of the Supreme Court’s ruling were framed in the language of national sentimentality, it is not surprising that Shahani resorts to the humanizing of corporations in his concluding remarks. Commenting on the importance of LGBT-friendly policies in India’s major industrial companies, Shahani suggests that “there are already 30–40 companies in India that have adopted LGBT-friendly policies. Once 377 goes, I can guarantee that there will be a hundred more such companies that come out.” Not only are corporations thus framed as beacons of accelerated development and freedom (which the lagging courts must draw level with), they are also humanized as those that might be able to “come out”—the double meaning of which is not without signi)cance. Not all of the responses to or rationales for striking down Section 377 were framed in terms of the affective or sentimentalizing rhetoric described above. In a viral tweet immediately after the ruling that particularly resonated with postcolonial critiques and colonial historical accounts that have foregrounded the genealogies of sodomy laws, Shahmir Sanni suggested that it would be myopic to read the Supreme Court decision simply as India )nally “catching up” to the West: “From gay Su) lovers to Hindu transgender women. India’s sexual *uidity was always a dirty, barbaric concept to its western invaders, and it is crucial for the LGBTQ community here in the west to understand this. This isn’t India becoming ‘westernised.’ It’s India decolonizing” (@shahmiruk, September 6, 2018). In addressing the “LGBTQ community here,” Sanni’s audience is the United Kingdom, the very site at which one can genealogically trace the colonial codi)cation of Section 377 in nineteenth-century British-ruled India. His critique thus implicitly addresses the irony of the United Kingdom welcoming India into the “westernized” democratic club of nations which have stepped into the twenty-)rst century through progressive jurisprudence. Even though Sanni is right to complicate a reading of the ruling as a mimetic copy of a supposedly progressive West, the desire to frame the revolutionary

! +$,-.$( /'0#01%23#

225

judgment through the singular lens of resistance performs its own elisions and foreclosures.19 As I have argued throughout Pink Revolutions, center-periphery geometries of power often risk overdetermining the non-West as a site of resistance. The reading of the Supreme Court ruling as a symptom of decoloniality erases its operations as an apparatus that continues colonial projects under the alibi of postcoloniality through which it forestalls insurgent practices. The sweeping gesture that reads the Supreme Court verdict through the lens of “India decolonizing” thus works to subsume a moment in which colonial triangles in the occupation of Kashmir (between militant Indian nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, and global investments in the occupied territory) brush up against the triangulations of pink revolutions in which the latter can then serve as smokescreens for the former. In a tongue-in-cheek response to the ruling that revealed a more tempered reaction than the euphoria of supposed decoloniality, another Twitter user wrote: “Now all Indians can love people of any gender from their caste” (@iimcomic, September 6, 2018). Perhaps in a wittier and certainly more pithy form than this afterword, the tweet gets at the crux of what I have been trying to gesture toward in these concluding pages—a consideration of the detritus of the law’s afterlife that still remains in the wake of euphoric pronouncements. I do not want to simply jettison such modes of euphoria, given the long labor of queer activism that led to the verdict—which should, of course, be framed as an outcome of such labor and not the magnanimous character of India’s judicial system. Instead, I want to brush these modes of euphoria up against not just the failure of state redress in other contexts, but the state’s mobilization of law to produce violence and sites of dispossession. Modes of apparent redress can then actually function as a “re-dressing” of the law so that forms of coloniality can pass as revolutionary decoloniality, even as law is mobilized by the state to buttress nationalism through charges of “sedition” against dissenting subjects. How, then, do these celebrations of “Indian freedom” in the context of “queer love” become a way of dragging us back into nationalism (to return to a phrase I used in chapter 1)? This framing of pink revolutions as a kind of dragging—in its invocation of temporal delay and a “drag” on time—runs counter to its temporal logics of speed and achievement—as voiced in the expressions “)nally,” “at last,” and “just did it” used in the celebrations above. The push-and-pull of delay and speed gestures toward multiple temporalities that subtend Indian postcoloniality—time that is “made up of disturbances” to re-quote Ananya Roy from the introduction.20 It is

226

!"#$%&'%(

only when we recognize these temporal clashes as disturbing forms of bio-necro collaborations rather than as benign reconciliations of “old” and “new” or of local and global that we can begin to unravel the triangulated knots of pink revolutions. Rather than “walk(ing) into the disciplinary regime of the state,” what might it mean to contravene the logics of nationalist drag? To imagine a different kind of revolution that might allow us to “drag” the nation in multiple senses of the term? Rather than pledging allegiance to the Indian *ag in the age of sedition charges, compulsory patriotism, and Hindu fundamentalism, the time has come to drag ourselves out of nationalism even as we are seduced by its inclusive accommodations. This is not the morning we were waiting for.

!"#

%$Introduction 1. See, for example, the piece in OpIndia.com, “LGBT Rights Advocacy Group Trolled by People from the LGBT Community for Celebrating the Complete Integration of JK.” On the occasion of the removal of Article 370, the authors write: “The LGBT community has a special reason to celebrate the abolition of the provisions. Until yesterday, homosexuality was still a criminal offence in Jammu & Kashmir since the state had a separate constitution.” The authors lament the “trolling” of the advocacy and support group Queer Hindu Alliance, who tweeted out in support of the government’s abrogation of Article 370 with the following message: “From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, India is one #IndiaForKashmir #Article370.” The tweet was accompanied by an image of the map of India, draped and crowned with a saffron robe. (The supposed “trolls” were responses that condemned the use of LGBTQ politics as a way to justify the government’s draconian and militaristic policies in disputed territories.) Along similar lines, the journalist Abhijit Mujumdar tweeted: “Two great leaps for India’s LGBTQIA community in the last one year. One, consensual gay sex decriminalized. Two, end of #Article370 means now that law applies same-sex couples in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. Both under a ‘Hindutva’ government. #StandWithPride.” 2. Queer Muslim Project, “Collective Statement by the Queer Muslim Project.” 3. Shoaib Daniyal, “How Narendra Modi Helped Spread Anti-Beef Hysteria,” Scroll.in. 4. For a more detailed analysis of the growing export of beef even amidst the enhanced regulation of cattle slaughter, see Rohit De, “Who Moved My Beef? Regulatory Changes and the Pink Revolution,” Business Line. See also Radha Sarkar and Amar Sarkar, “Sacred Slaughter: An Analysis of Historical, Communal, and Constitutional Aspects of Beef Bans in India,” Politics, Religion & Ideology, 4. 5. Jyoti Puri, Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India, 158–61. 227

228

!"#$% #" ()*$% +–,-

6. Shoaib Daniyal points out that Modi repeated the same speech containing conspiracy theories about cattle slaughter in Ghaziabad, a mere 20 kilometers away from Dadri, the site of the mob lynching. 7. State of Gujarat v. Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab Jamat, 2005. 8. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 35. 9. Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, “Necrocapitalism,” Organization Studies 29, no. 12 (2008): 1541–63. Banerjee’s theorization of necrocapitalism as “managing general commerce with a sword” uses the words of Jan Coen, the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company in 1775, who insisted on the essentially militaristic nature of trade and commerce. 10. State of Gujarat v. Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab Jamat, 2005. 11. TCA Sharad Raghavan, “India on Top in Exporting Beef,” The Hindu. 12. Namit Hans, “Despite All the Politics, India’s Share in World Beef Export Increases,” Catch News. 13. William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, 4; Meera Nanda, The God Market: How Globalization Is Making India More Hindu, 53. 14. The emphasis on global spirit at the international airport in Mumbai signi&cantly came at the same time as the rechristening of the airport as Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport  as a way to honor the legacy of Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Maratha warrior king who has become a symbol of Hindu pride. 15. See Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Gopinath points to the homophobic reception of the &lm Fire (1996, Deepa Mehta) by national media and Hindu political leaders, who objected to its representation of two Hindu housewives’ love affair as a Western phenomenon that “has very weak links to the true Indian milieu,” 132. 16. Mel Chen, Queer Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, 82. 17. Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel, “Area Impossible: Notes toward an Introduction,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 153. 18. Arondekar and Patel, “Area Impossible,” 155. 19. Kadji Amin, “Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory’s Affective Histories, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 181. 20. Petrus Liu, Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, 15. 21. Amin, “Haunted by the 1990s,” 185. 22. The term “Hindutva” is used interchangeably throughout the book with the phrase “Hindu nationalism”—a political, cultural, and religious ideology that seeks to rede&ne India as a Hindu nation.

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,-–,/

229

23. Akshay Khanna, Sexualness, 6 24. I am referring here to important feminist anthologies such as A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of India, edited by Mary E. John and Janaki Nair, in which “sexuality” is almost exclusively framed as the patriarchal logics accompanying mandates around honor and respectability for women in India. While the book’s editors usefully analyze the violence through which Indian women bear burdens of caste, communal, and national mandates, the speci&c violence of heterosexuality within the volume often goes unmarked and under-theorized. 25. In attempting to temper the volatile discussions around the &lm Fire in the Indian Parliament, Pritish Nandy suggested that the very conversation did not merit discussion: “Let us not waste the valuable national time in either defending . . . lesbians or driving them underground” (quoted in Naisargi Dave, Queer Activism in India, 151–52). 26. Naisargi Dave, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics, 40. 27. Nanda, The God Market, 3. 28. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents, 81. While Sassen theorizes the “unbundling” of nation-states as the hallmark of globalization, other theorists of globalization have warned against assuming the disappearance of the nation-state. See Eric Cazdyn’s The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness and Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, both of whom foreground the nation-state as an important entity that still mediates the scope and shape of sovereignty. 29. Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Dangerous Liaisons, 177. 30. Hall, “The Local and the Global,” 178. 31. While a comparative focus is beyond the scope of Pink Revolutions, it is not without signi&cance that the relationship between national and sexual citizenship was being prominently negotiated in the last &fteen years of the twentieth century and has continued into the &rst two decades of the twenty-&rst century in various countries in the Global South, at the very moment when the nation-state was being perceived as fading in prominence. In actual practice, the nation-state’s importance was being asserted by a form of transitional and transnational nativism that simultaneously propped up and undermined sexual politics. Thus, whether the nationstate patronized or repudiated sexual rights, its primacy as the central arbiter of citizenship was still guaranteed either way. While the speci&cs of national con&gurations make simplistic con.ations untenable, one of

230

!"#$ #" ()*$ ,/

the central arguments of Pink Revolutions—that it is limiting to analyze ethnic and nationalist revivalisms as only and always operating through censorious and repressive logics—resonates beyond the Indian context of Hindu fundamentalism. For example, in Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran, Afsaneh Najmabadi points to how in the years following the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic made transsexual lives “impossibly hazardous” while also leading to their “of&cial sanction” (6). The emergence of transsexuality as a state-recognized category is thus marked by ambiguities that are both prohibitive and productive in scope. The very existence, for example, of the Tehran Psychiatric Institute, which offered gender-con&rming surgery, indicates for Najmabadi the manner in which transsexuality had “been taken up as a legitimate category of being” (16). And yet, she writes, “the criteria for establishing belonging in that category, and its very legitimacy as a distinct category, is a matter of considerable debate, concern, and ambivalence in multiple domains” (16). The recognition of a third gender category by the Supreme Court of Pakistan in 2009 is yet another illustration of a certi&cation process—in this instance, a government-issued identity card—through which an Islamic republic both recognizes and interpellates the queer body. As Faris Khan points out: “Registrants were given the choice of entering one of three groupings for their national identity cards: male (khwaja sira), female (khwaja sira), and khunsa-e-mushkil (which roughly translates as a person who is born with indeterminable genitalia)” (159). It is not without signi&cance that following this mode of state certi&cation and recognition, seven transgender candidates contested the Pakistani general and assembly elections in 2013—another instance of “nationalist drag” that I analyze in chapter 1. And &nally, the scholarship on queer politics and the occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel has theorized extensively on how Israel has mobilized LGBT rights and visibility as a form of nationalist propaganda that obscures apartheid-like conditions in the occupied West Bank territories. In addition to Jasbir Puar’s theorizing of homonationalism already discussed in this chapter, the work of Aeyal Gross has pointed to projects of nationalist branding that mobilize gay rights in order to frame Israel “as democratic and liberal, primarily in contrast to its regional neighbors” (Gross, “The Politics of LGBT Rights in Israel and Beyond,” 85). He references a 2010 Supreme Court decision ruling in favor of a Jewish Pride community center which had been denied &nancial aid by the municipality. In the court’s verdict, one of the justices refers to the importance of conferring the privileges of sexual citizenship in order to foreground the place of Israel as an exception to “the situation in the overwhelming majority of

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,/–01

231

Middle Eastern states near and far,” and speci&cally refers to the plight of the “Iranian homosexual” (quoted in Gross, 85). While the speci&cs of these national contexts differ in important ways, the broader shifts in political economy that inform sexual politics in the Global South reveal the coexistence of both exceptional support and heightened precarity—a newly visible form of state-informed recognition that circulates in the same ideological vicinity as exacerbated devaluation. In her analysis of the relation between discourses of sedition and sexual politics across various South Asian contexts, Svati Shah suggests that these proximate negotiations of nation-building with sexual politics are not about “showing that all contemporary South Asia is comparable or in strict juridical alignment.” Instead, collectively these connected geopolitical and nationalist projects reveal “what meaning discourses and rubrics of feminism, gender-queerness and queer sexuality can make for understanding the production of nationalism at a time when the foil of ‘anti-nationalism’ is so critically present.” 32. See Dennis Altman’s Global Sex for an early theorization of globalization and sexuality. In Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar coins the term “homonationalism” to theorize the politics of sexual exceptionalism in the United States. 33. Jasbir Puar, “Homonationalism as Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities,” Jindal Global Review, 26. Puar foregrounds the importance of understanding homonationalism as “a process, not an event or an attribute,” so that the term’s theoretical mobilization does not lapse into a form of “historical rei&cation.” 34. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 34. 35. Arondekar and Patel, “Area Impossible,” 153. 36. Puar, “Homonationalism as Assemblage,” 26. 37. The exception to the North American or Eurocentric focus of critiques that interrogate homonationalist logics is, of course, a focus on how Israel’s pinkwashing politics obscures the occupation of Palestine. 38. Arondekar and Patel, “Area Impossible,” 159. 39. Arondekar and Patel, “Area Impossible,” 156. 40. I mainly draw on Aihwa Ong’s theorizations of globalization in Flexible Citizenship in which she critiques monolithic constructions of modernity, arguing that “capitalism is no longer centered in the West but distributed across a number of global arenas” (31). See also J. K. GibsonGraham’s feminist critique of globalization in The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, in which they argue against readings of globalization that assume the masculine penetration

232

!"#$% #" ()*$% 01–0,

of an always feminized construction of localism. They argue for a queer framework that “can help to unsettle the consonances and coherences of the narrative of global commodi&cation” (144). In “Querying Globalization,” Gibson-Graham provocatively suggest that as an alternative to the penetrative models of classic globalization theory, the time has come to ask “how might we get globalization to lose its erection” (7). Gibson-Graham are therefore invested in how structures of resistance get effaced when globalization’s domination is naturalized as axiomatic and inevitable. While the mapping of “resistance” to the triangulations that I critique is beyond the scope of this project, I remain sympathetic to Gibson-Graham’s critique of overdetermined symmetries in globalization studies. In the &eld of transnational sexuality, Tom Boellstorff theorizes a model of globalization in his essay “Dubbing Culture,” which resists the simple notion that Western models of lesbian and gay identity are neatly mapped on to “local” cultures in a symmetrical fashion. Boellstorff argues that while it is important to pay attention to systems of unequal power relations and domination, “theory must not render domination as determination” (225). 41. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 241 42. Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, eds., Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, 330. The question of postcoloniality inhabiting multiple registers is also signi&cant when considering the need to theorize a more capacious and complicated understanding of subalternity, as called for by Dalit scholars and activists. In Dalit Studies, for example, Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana push back against the erasure of Dalit experience in accounts of subaltern radicalism and political struggles. These authors write: “Questions of caste discrimination were (and are) a crucial part of everyday life in modern India, but they remained on the margins because of the way the category of the subaltern subject was formulated. The unquali&ed use of the term ‘subaltern’ to mean peasant had tended to ignore the world of Dalit peasants and laborers within agrarian society and their exploitation and subjugation by the landlords and the subaltern peasants” (14). In other words, the center-periphery models of postcoloniality that posit a monolithically de&ned “subaltern” in contradistinction to colonial logics, actually end up having the effect of .attening epistemological and political categories. Thus, Rawat and Satyanarayana suggest the importance of moving beyond “the dominant conceptual framework de&ned by the binary of colonialism versus nationalism” in South Asian historiographies (10). 43. The identity category “hijra” is sometimes used interchangeably (albeit problematically) with “kothi,” another term that taxonomizes

!"#$% #" ()*$% 00–0-

233

indigenous gender variance within the Indian context. While the circulation of kothi could be theorized in relation to the emergence of NGO visibility around HIV prevention, the term hijra (or “eunuchs” in colonial classi&cations) has a historical signi&cance in the Indian context that dates back to the seventeenth century. Aniruddha Dutta refers to the circulation of these classi&cation systems as illustrations of “prominent vernacular categories of Indic gender/sexual difference with reference to broader debates on identity, (post)colonialism and modernity in postcolonial and South Asian historiography.” For a more detailed analysis of the genealogies and current circulations of these categories, see Aniruddha Dutta’s “An Epistemology of Collusion: Hijras, Kothis and the Historical (Dis)continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern India.” 44. Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry. 45. Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose, “South Asian Feminisms: Contemporary Interventions,” in South Asian Feminisms, 6. 46. Loomba and Lukose, “South Asian Feminisms,” 2. 47. Ratna Kapur, Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism, 9. 48. Kapur, Erotic Justice, 44. 49. Ratna Kapur, “Postcolonial Profanities: The Legal Regulation of Free Speech in India,” in The Phobic and the Erotic, 225. 50. In the controversial 1985 lawsuit of Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum, colloquially referred to as the Shah Bano case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of her maintenance request following the divorce from her husband. After the 1984 general elections, Congress leaders urged then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to overturn the decision to maintain Islamic law; this led to the passing of the Muslim Women Act of 1986 which reversed the Supreme Court decision, maintaining that a divorced woman would be entitled to maintenance only ninety days after the divorce, in accordance with the dictates of Islamic law. 51. Flavia Agnes, “Introduction” to Women and Law in India, xliii. 52. Loomba and Lukose, South Asian Feminisms, 19. 53. I am referring here to works such as Gayatri Spivak’s in.uential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and Anjali Arondekar’s critiques of archival truth and colonial historical record in For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. 54. Gayatri Spivak, “Theory in the Margin,” 172. 55. Arondekar and Patel, “Area Impossible,” 152. 56. Liu, Queer Marxism, 15. 57. Liu, Queer Marxism, 6.

234

!"#$% #" ()*$% 0-–2,

58. Neville Hoad, “Queer Theory Addiction,” 135. 59. In both academic and political contexts, the mobilization of the term “queer” has become commonplace in the Indian context. See, for example, Dave’s Queer Activism in India. The epistemological trajectories and mobilizations of the word “queer” in the Indian context are not without their critics. In their introduction to The Global Trajectories of Queerness: ReThinking Same-Sex Politics in the Global South, editors Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala suggest that an uncritical use of “queer” erases a more speci&c analysis of those moments in which its mobilization is imposed and others in which there might be a more “productive negotiation” of its usage “on the ground” (19). 60. Dave, Queer Activism in India, 10–11. 61. The scholarship on globalization and sexuality that epitomizes a model of dialectical clashes between West and non-West is Dennis Altman’s work in the book Global Sex and essays such as “Rupture or Continuity: The Internationalization of Gay Identities” and “Global Gaze/Global Gays.” In these works, Altman critiques the &gure of the “global gay” representing modernity, which .attens and imposes its universalized logics on to local tradition. Altman’s work has been critiqued by several, including Tellis and Bala, who argue that his frameworks rehearse “a classic racialized and imperialist move of classifying the native as incapable of identity, only of practices, while the modern Western subject has identity, even as he cautions against ideas of Western superiority” (The Global Trajectories of Queerness, 13). 62. An illustration of the “resistance” model analyzed in more detail throughout this book is that of the mythologist Devdutt Patanaik, whose work is invested in unpacking queer subtexts embedded in Indian (and mostly Hindu) mythology. 63. Anjali Arondekar, “In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts: Sexuality, Historiography, South Asia,” Differences, 99. 64. Arondekar, “In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts,” 99. 65. Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities. Roy and Ong draw on Gayatri Spivak’s notion of “worlding” which, according to the authors, challenges “the recuperation of subaltern subjects” (9). 66. Ananya Roy, “Conclusion: Postcolonial Urbanism, Speed, Hysteria, Mass Dreams,” in Worlding Cities, 312. 67. Gopal Guru, “Experience, Space, and Justice,” in The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory, 86. 68. Gopal Guru, Humiliation: Claims and Context, 1.

!"#$% #" ()*$% 2-–3,

235

69. Aparna Parikh, “Politics of Presence: Women’s Safety and Respectability at Night in Mumbai, India,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 697. 70. D. Shyam Babu, “Caste and Class among the Dalits,” in Dalit Studies, 233. 71. Of course, formulations that con.ate class with mobility and caste with rigidity betray more complex and intertwined genealogies of subjectivity and capital in which class and caste are negotiated in both discrete and entangled ways. See, for example, Juned Shaikh’s “Translating Marx: Mavali, Dalit and the Making of Mumbai’s Working Class, 1928–1935,” in which he reveals how translations of Marxist thinking (speci&cally Marathi translations of the Communist Manifesto) both obfuscated and forged alliances between class and caste. On the one hand, translations of the Manifesto drew on elite literary Brahmanical traditions that maintained caste dominance and foreclosed links to working-class politics. On the other hand, Shaikh reveals quotidian intersections of caste and class in the daily lives of mill workers, forged in part due to the “common goal of surviving industrial work” (71). The need to create accessible public housing also forged important links between Dalit and communist movements. 72. Aren Z. Azuria, Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment, 17. 73. Geeta Patel, “Risky Subjects: Insurance, Sexuality, and Capital,” Social Text, 25. 74. Patel, “Risky Subjects,” 25. 75. Dia Da Costa, Politicizing Creative Economy: Activism and a Hunger Called Theater, x. 76. Patel, “Risky Subjects,” 28. 77. Patel, “Risky Subjects,” 28. 78. Rohit De, “Who Moved My Beef?” Hindu Business Line. 79. See Amy Kazman, “Modi’s India: The High Cost of Protecting Holy Cows,” Financial Times. 80. Charu Gupta, “Allegories of ‘Love Jihad’ and Ghar Vapasi: Interlocking the Socio-Religious with the Political,” Archiv Orientalni, 296 81. Qudsiya Contractor, “Muslim Women, Caste and the Beef Ban in Mumbai,” in Gender, Caste and the Imagination of Equality, 299. 82. Patel, “Risky Subjects,” 43. 83. Gupta, “Allegories,” 296. 84. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 38. 85. Gupta, “Allegories,” 295.

236

!"#$% #" ()*$% 30–33

86. Sheela Raval, “If You Allow Fire, Then Allow Nathuram Godse also: Bal Thackeray,” India Today, 1998.

Chapter 1 1. See Itty Abraham, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics; Arvind Panagariya, India: The Emerging Giant; Baldev Raj Nayar, The Myth of the Shrinking State: Globalization and the State in India; Sunil Khilani, The Idea of India; Jackie Assayag and C. J. Fuller, eds., Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below; Ritty A. Lukose, Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India; and Rupal Oza, The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization. 2. Gurcharan Das, India Unbound, xi. 3. Nanda, The God Market, 53. The “Make in India” program that was launched by the Modi government in 2014 illustrates Nanda’s notion of “superpower swadeshi” in that it emphasized local manufacturing even while promoting foreign investment. 4. Francine R. Frankel, India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs, v. 5. The context of rural India that is the primary geographical site for theorizing the Green Revolution warrants a clari&cation on what is perhaps the less stable geopolitical arc of Pink Revolutions. One of the anonymous peer reviewers of this book accurately pointed out in their feedback that among “the biggest challenges of writing about queer politics in India is that most such writings have largely focused on urban and monolingual (read English-language) iterations of queer subjects and desires.” Pink Revolutions admittedly participates in implicitly centralizing the urban and monolingual as the unnamed site of theorization. And yet, throughout this book, more convoluted trajectories jostle against these apparently stable default settings. For example, the book references regional and vernacular variations of Hindutva that contravene simple rural/urban divides; Marathi literature that appears in Aligarh only via English translation constitutes the crux of the &lm’s aesthetic center; urban geographies of LGBT tourism, while safely ensconced within apparently privatized geographies of a major Indian city like Delhi, betray anxieties over “transgressions” from adjacent villages outside the city’s limits; and “major” urban centers (like the nation’s capital) differ from less “mega” cities like Hyderabad, the location of university protests (discussed in chapter 3). These sites of micro and macro protest “spill over” into one another so that student activism

!"#$% #" ()*$% 33–34

237

at one location serves as the political map for another location. While the subtitle of Pink Revolutions inadequately but necessarily invokes “India” through an overly broad brushstroke in order to geopolitically frame the project in terms of an area focus—such an invocation, to use Arondekar and Patel’s term, quite literally is always a kind of “area impossible”—this is an unavoidable error of catechresis that grounds as much as it totalizes (or in fact totalizes precisely as it grounds). The book’s overly generalized titular gesture inevitably tends to subsume what Arondekar and Patel call “the frisson between global traf&c and local habits” (“Area Impossible,” 152), but the chapters that follow attempt to do some justice to the “densities of geopolitics” (153) through an attention to vernacular variance and regional particularisms, attending to difference without ultimately essentializing it. 6. Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution, 175. 7. While Shiva’s claims draw attention to the relation between “revolution” and ethnic revivalism in the context of Sikh separatism, it would be a mistake to con.ate Sikh separatism and Hindu fundamentalism in offering the genealogy of Green Revolutions for their more contemporary pink counterparts. Given the radical divergences in their scope and their vastly differing locations and histories in relation to state power, my goal here is to point instead to the structural connections between modernity projects and the rise of ethnic revivalism. 8. While this chapter sets out to frame the year 1991 as the historical context for how reform is framed as revolution, like all attempts at periodization, it is important to note that this remains a partial history. In some contexts, the early 1990s can be framed as actually initiating radical shifts in Dalit visibility, as accounted for in the recent volume Dalit Studies, edited by Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana. In the introduction, the editors frame the liberalization of the early 1990s not purely through the lens of the emergence of Indian neoliberalism, but through signi&cant shifts in public debate around caste struggle. They write: “with Indian economic liberalization in the 1990s, new institutional and formal public spaces have become available as sites of debate. The new political economy has created new opportunities for Dalit writers and activists. The rise of the Internet, an explosion in vernacular media, and the growing availability of resources outside the state framework have all helped Dalits gain public attention through literary productions, print media, and social media mobilization” (7). For Rawat and Satyanarayana, globalization has facilitated transnational dialogue between Dalit activists and African American civil rights issues in the United States, and has further fostered solidarity across borders with the Dalit diaspora. The editors, however, do not theorize this

238

!"#$% #" ()*$% 3/–-,

Dalit emergence in the early 1990s as immune from the conversations around neoliberalism and the absorption of radical critique. Commenting on D. Shyam Babu’s analysis of caste and class among Dalits in the same volume, they foreground the simultaneous emergence of a Dalit bourgeoisie in the 1990s that desired class assimilation, thereby brushing up against the continued structuring role that caste played in Indian society (25). 9. Das, India Unbound, ix. 10. Daniel Lak, India Express: The Future of the New Superpower. 11. Quoted in Das, India Unbound, 215. 12. In India: The Emerging Giant, Arvind Panagariya details the economic successes of the Indian economy in the early 2000s, suggesting that the upward trends “almost rival the performance of the Chinese economy” (8). 13. In their introduction to The Anthropology of Globalization, editors Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo describe globalization as a “world in motion, of complex interconnections,” one that creates “dense networks of &nancial interconnections,” resulting in “spaces where various cultures converge, clash, and struggle with each other” (3). 14. Eric Cazdyn, “Disaster, Crisis, Revolution,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 647. 15. Nanda, The God Market, 37. 16. Das, India Unbound, 215. 17. Cazdyn, “Disaster, Crisis, Revolution,” 654. 18. Das, India Unbound, xi. 19. The Ram Rath Yatra (chariot journey) was a rally organized by the BJP in 1990 and led by L. K. Advani, who was the president of the party at the time. Advani led several processions throughout North India, galvanizing the support of kar sevaks (volunteers from various af&liate Hindu organizations across the country), which led to several riots and the arrest of Advani. The increasing violence over the next few months ultimately culminated in the destruction in 1992 of the Babri Masjid, a mosque in Ayodhya that was considered by Hindu nationalists to be the birthplace of Rama. Kar sevaks planted saffron .ags at the site of the mosque, clashing with police and paramilitary forces. Riots broke out once again in several cities, including Mumbai and Delhi, in which more than 2,000 people lost their lives. The sites targeted during the riots were predominantly Muslim households and businesses. The riots involved mob violence, the rape of Muslim women, and arson. For a more detailed analysis, see Achin Vanaik’s The Rise of Hindu Authoritiarianism. Almost a decade later, the legacy of the Babri Masjid’s destruction reemerged in the context of a train-burning incident in Godhra in 2002 in

!"#$% #" ()*$% -0–-/

239

which Sangh Parivar members returning from an Ayodhya pilgrimage were killed in a train &re. The cause of the &re remains ambiguous—some suggest a Muslim mob, while others intimate that a mere accident was at the root of the incident. The then chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, called for a state shutdown to protest the deaths, and a cavalcade display of martyred Hindus. The riots that ensued resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries of Muslims. Once again, the sexualized nature of the violence against women was particularly horri&c. In Nikita Sud’s Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and the State: A Biography of Gujarat, she points to the “&lming of mass rapes, atrocities on pregnant women, and the coercion of Muslim men to view this torture” (166). See also Tanika Sarkar, “Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu Rashtra,” for a more detailed analysis of the gendered and sexualized nature of the pogroms in Gujarat. 20. Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, 57. 21. Thomas Blom Hansen, “The Vernacularisation of Hindutva,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 179. 22. Hansen, “Vernacularisation of Hindutva,” 184. 23. Vikas Tripathi, Tamasa Das, and Sandhya Goswami, “National Narrative and Regional Subtext,” Studies in Indian Politics, 66. 24. The general elections of 2014 marked a victory for the National Democratic Alliance, enabling the BJP to form a majority government in India with Narendra Modi as prime minister. 25. Shweta Rajpal Kohli, “Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on Her Favourite Post by PM Narendra Modi,” NDTV.com. 26. “Meeting with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg Very Fruitful, Says Modi,” TheNewsMinute.com. 27. Sunny Sen, “Here’s Looking at You, India: Why Sheryl Sandberg Continues Her Love Affair in India,” Business Today. 28. Kapur, Erotic Justice, 47. 29. Kapur, Erotic Justice, 47. 30. Sikata Banerjee, Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism and Nationalism in India, 78. 31. Paola Bacchetta, “When the (Hindu) Nation Exiles Its Queers,” Social Text, 143. 32. Gopinath, Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. In the chapter “Local Sites/Global Contexts: The Transnational Trajectories of Fire and ‘The Quilt,’ ” Gopinath analyzes various local and global disavowals that reject the mutual compatibility of “Indianness” and “queerness.”

240

!"#$% #" ()*$% -/–4+

33. Quoted in Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 157. 34. David Ludden, Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India, xiv. 35. Vanaik, The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism, 343. 36. Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 12. 37. See Salim Lakha, “From Swadeshi to Globalisation: The Bharatiya Janata Party’s Shifting Economic Agenda,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, for a more detailed analysis of the negotiations between globalization and local sovereignty. 38. Shampa Biswas, “To Be Modern, but in the ‘Indian’ Way: Hindu Nationalism,” in Gods, Guns and Globalization, 107. 39. Quoted in Biswas, “To Be Modern,” 131. 40. “Swadeshi 2.0 Can Reboot Economy,” The Economic Times. 41. “Swadeshi 2.0,” The Economic Times. 42. Biswas, “To Be Modern,” 125. 43. Quoted in Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 11. 44. Aijaz Ahmad, “In the Eye of the Storm: The Left Chooses,” Economic and Political Weekly, 1336–37. 45. Ahmad, “In the Eye of the Storm,” 1337. 46. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality, 9–10. 47. Duggan, Twilight of Equality, 10. 48. Biswas, “To Be Modern,” 52. 49. Biswas, “To Be Modern,” 57. 50. Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 5. 51. Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents, 81. 52. Quoted in Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 8. 53. Biswas, “To Be Modern,” 132. 54. Biswas, “To Be Modern,” 132. 55. Arondekar, For the Record, 3. 56. Flavia Agnes, “Women’s Movement in a Secular Framework,” Economic and Political Weekly, 1124. 57. Devdutt Pattanaik, Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You, back cover description. 58. Pattanaik, Shikhandi and Other Tales, 6. 59. Arondekar and Patel, “Area Impossible,” 155. 60. Kapur, Erotic Justice, 50. 61. Flavia Agnes, “Introduction,” in Women and Law in India, xxxiii. 62. Ratna Kapur, “ ‘Faith’ and the ‘Good’ Liberal: The Construction of Female Subjectivity in Anti-Traf&cking Legal Discourse,” in Sexuality and the Law, 231.

!"#$% #" ()*$% 4+–/3

241

63. Kapur, “ ‘Faith’ and the ‘Good’ Liberal,” 231. 64. See, for example, Arvind Narrain’s “No Shortcuts to Queer Utopia: Sodomy, Law, and Social Change,” in The Phobic and the Erotic; and Puri, Sexual States. The challenge to Section 377 as the central site of LGBT activism has also, however, been complicated by activists and scholars who have warned against the unintended regulatory effects of collapsing social justice with a narrowly conceived understanding of jurisprudence. South Asian feminist critiques of the state, for example, have pointed to the long history of how the demand for protective legislation has only ended up working against the best interests of women, given the long history of gendered state violence. In a similar vein, LGBT activists have also drawn attention to the limits of an investment in legal reform prior to the wider mobilization of social movements—what Arvind Narrain has called the “over-juridi&cation of social struggle” (255). Finally, the emphasis on the right to “private” consensual sex meant that decriminalization would only impact those whose sexualities were cordoned off within this privileged zone of intimacy, leaving sex workers, kothis, and gay men harassed for having public sex and still vulnerable to state criminalization and pathologization. 65. Puri, Sexual States, 127. 66. “Jana Gana Mana” (the national anthem), sung by hijras, YouTube. 67. “Jana Gana Mana,” YouTube. 68. Vikram Johri, “Why a Group of Hijras Singing the National Anthem is Inspiring,” Daily O. 69. Rajesh Sampath, “India Has Outlawed Homosexuality. But It’s Better to Be Transgender There Than in the U.S,” Washington Post. 70. Sampath, “India Has Outlawed Homosexuality.” 71. Elizabeth Freeman, “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations,” New Literary History, 727. 72. Amy L. Brandzel, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative. 73. James C. Scott, John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias, “The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 4. 74. Scott et al., “Production of Legal Identities,” 4. 75. Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, 14. 76. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, 45. 77. Julie McCarthy, “Indian Supreme Court Declares Privacy a Fundamental Right,” NPR.org.

242

!"#$% #" ()*$% /-–+2

78. Gautam Bhan, “Gautam Bhan on Right to Privacy and Its Links to Section 377,” Daily O. 79. Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality and the US State, 30. 80. National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India. 81. National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India. 82. “Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) 2016 Bill Responses from Sampoorna WG and Other Trans & Intersex Communities,” Sampoorna (blog). 83. National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India. 84. National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India. 85. “Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights).” 86. Svati Shah, “Sedition, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Identity in South Asia,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 1. 87. Shah, “Sedition, Sexuality,” 2.

Chapter 2 1. Shashi Tharoor, “Overcoming India’s Of&cial Homophobia,” Project Syndicate. Tharoor’s numbers are cited on the basis of preliminary results of a World Bank study entitled “The Economic Costs of Homophobia and the Exclusion of LGBT People: A Case Study of India.” Given the tentative nature of these initial &ndings, the study explicitly quali&es its data with the request to not cite its conclusions as de&nitive. 2. Rajat Singla, “How Supreme Court’s Decision on Restoring Section 377 Impacts India’s Image,” The Economic Times. 3. Pink Escapes. 4. Jasbir Puar, “Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel, and Globalization,” GLQ, 107. 5. Aihwa Ong, “Introduction: Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global,” in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, 1. 6. Ananya Roy, “Conclusion: Postcolonial Urbanism,” in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, 312. 7. Ong, “Introduction,” 6. 8. Roy, “Conclusion,” 310 and 326. 9. Roy, “Conclusion,” 310. 10. Howard Hughes, Pink Tourism: Holidays of Gay Men and Lesbians, 22. 11. Jon Binnie, “Invisible Europeans: Sexual Citizenship in the New Europe.” Environment and Planning, 240. 12. Hughes, Pink Tourism, 51.

!"#$% #" ()*$% +3–++

243

13. Hughes, Pink Tourism, 52. 14. Thomas Roth and Michael Luongo, “A Place for Us 2001: Tourism Industry Opportunities in the Gay and Lesbian Market: An Interview with Thomas Roth of Community Marketing,” in Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity, and Sex, 132. 15. See “Gay Men’s Holidays: Identity and Inhibitors” in Hughes, Gay Tourism. Hughes suggests that while risk avoidance is the traditional framework of analysis for much of LGBT tourism, uncertainty and risk might in fact serve as a paradoxical motivation to explore the lure of the unknown. 16. Roth and Luongo, “A Place for Us 2001,” 133–34. 17. Amita Baviskar, “Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power, and Identity in the Making of Metropolitan Delhi,” International Social Science Journal, 90. 18. For a more detailed analysis of jurisprudence, urban governance, and the treatment of squatter settlements in Delhi, see V. Dupont and U. Ramanathan, “The Courts and the Squatter Settlements in Delhi—or the Intervention of the Judiciary in Urban ‘Governance,’ ” in New Forms of Urban Governance in India, 312–43. 19. Baviskar, “Between Violence and Desire,” 90. 20. In “Rule by Aesthetics,” D. Asher Ghertner documents a shift in the structures subtending public nuisance law. Given the failures of the Delhi Development Authority and Municipal Corporation to clean up the metropolis, the early 2000s saw a shift from public institutions as bodies of management in charge of city cleanliness and general aesthetics to private parties. Ghertner writes: “the courts increasingly began accepting petitions under public interest litigation from private parties . . . claiming that neighboring slums were interfering with their quality of life and security. That is, concerns of a distinctly private nature were granted legal standing as matters of public purpose” (Ghertner, “Rule by Aesthetics,” in Worlding Cities, 287). 21. Quoted in Anuj Bhuwania, Courting the People: Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India, 84. 22. See Tarun Shukla, “Regulator Pulls up Delhi Airport for High Cost of Makeover,” Livemint, April 25, 2011. The report suggests that the escalating expense followed the privatization of the airport in 2006 without any interventions by the Ministry of Civil Aviation or the Airports Authority of India, who were relegated to the role of “stakeholders” in the makeover process. 23. Ghertner, “Rule by Aesthetics,” 288. 24. Ghertner, “Rule by Aesthetics,” 289.

244

!"#$% #" ()*$% +5–,11

25. Dwaipayan Ghoshi, “GK, CR Park among 24 Safe City Colonies,” The Times of India. 26. All quotes are from the Mister and Art House website. 27. Christina Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence. 28. For a detailed analysis of “homonormativity,” see Lisa Duggan, “Equality Inc.,” in The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Duggan theorizes homonormativity as the “new neoliberal sexual politics” that promotes “privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (50). Relatedly, in Terrorist Assemblages, Jabir Puar coins the term “homonationalism” to signal how queer bodies are folded back into the nation-state which buttresses narratives of “progressive” exceptionalism. 29. By pointing to the impossibility of legal protection in the Indian context, I am not therefore suggesting that such a vexed relation is absent in the U.S context (especially for bodies of color and the violence they experience at the hands of law enforcement) or that such a comparative lens yields the latter as more progressive. The cultural visibility and state recognition of LGBT bodies in the U.S. context has resulted in an uneven distribution of access and a mainstreaming of queerness that does necessarily change material conditions for the most vulnerable. 30. Puri, Sexual States, 12. 31. All quotes are from Indjapink’s website. 32. Puri, Sexual States, 5. 33. Indjapink website. 34. Indjapink website. 35. Pink Vibgyor website. 36. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 35. 37. Rupal Oza, “Showcasing India: Gender, Geography, and Globalization,” Signs, 1068. 38. David Geary, “Incredible India in a Global Age: The Cultural Politics of Image Branding in Tourism,” Tourist Studies, 37. 39. Pink Vibgyor website. 40. Biswas, “To Be Modern.” 41. Biswas, “To Be Modern,” 112. 42. Oza, “Showcasing India,” 1069. 43. “Hindu Body Uses V-Day to Fight Love Jihad,” The Times of India. 44. Ranjan Bandyopadhyay and Duarte Morais, “Representative Dissonance: India’s Self and Western Image,” Annals of Tourism Research, 1008.

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,11–,1/

245

45. “Holi Colours Draw Foreign Tourists to India,” Deccan Herald. 46. Kavita Krishnan, “Nirbhaya Film: Solidarity Is What We Want, Not a Civilizing Mission,” Daily O. 47. Poulami Roychowdhury, “The Delhi Gang Rape: The Making of International Causes,” Feminist Studies, 283. 48. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 3. 49. See Debolina Dutta and Oishik Sircar, “India’s Winter of Discontent: Some Feminist Dilemmas in the Wake of Rape,” Feminist Studies. The authors document how demands for retribution have become a platform to pathologize economically underprivileged men. Thus, in the context of the Nirbhaya case, they suggest that the “migrant, working-class identity of the perpetrators resonated with the middle-class anxiety over the enemy other—a sentiment that has been fueled by, among others, Delhi police advertisements across the city that single out ‘cooks, drivers, maids, watchmen, nannies’ as potential criminals whom employers should guard against” (297). 50. Shamik Ghosh, “Rapes Take Place in India, Not Bharat, Says RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat,” The Times of India. 51. “Indian Culture War Breaks Out over Delhi Gang Rape,” The Guardian. 52. After much criticism in the press, the BJP minister apologized for his misogynistic comments. See “After Laxman Rekha Warning to Women, BJP Minister Withdraws Remark,” NDTV.com. 53. Krishnan, “Nirbhaya Film.” 54. S. Mitra Kalita, “How the Indian Dream Died with the Delhi Gang Rape Victim,” Quartz. 55. Niharika Mandhana, “Portrait Emerges of Victim in New Delhi Gang Rape,” New York Times. 56. Arundhati Roy has pointed to the selective outrage around incidents of rape and sexual assault in which sexual violence committed by the Indian Army or the police has not galvanized national attention or visible protests like the Nirbhaya case. See Roy, “Police, Army Rampantly Use Rape as a Weapon,” DNA India. 57. Krupa Shandilya, “Nirbhaya’s Body: The Politics of Protest in the Aftermath of the 2012 Delhi Gang Rape,” Gender & History, 468–69. 58. Amol Sharma and Krishna Pokharel, “In Delhi Slum, Tales of the Rape Suspects,”Wall Street Journal. 59. Adrian Athique and Douglas Hill, The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure, 130. 60. Hanhardt, Safe Space, 18.

246

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,15–,,3

Chapter 3 A section of chapter 3 originally appeared as “Queer Intimacy during Seditious Times: Revisiting the Case of Ramchandra Siras,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ), special issue on “Sedition, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Identity in South Asia,” ed. Svati Shah, no. 20 (2019). I am very grateful to Svati Shah for the invitation to participate in the issue. 1. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, in which he theorizes globalization as “time-space compression,” 284. 2. See Aihwa Ong in Flexible Citizenship, who theorizes globalization and transnationality as “the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space—which has been intensi&ed under late capitalism” (4). 3. In trying to theorize untouchability and peripheral sites that get foreclosed through globalization’s narratives of touch and hyperconnectivity, I am not suggesting, however, that these bodies are “untouched” by globalization in any simple sense. In fact, my claims in this chapter around the interfacing between queer and Dalit politics on campuses across the country are theorized against the backdrop of the increasing privatization of education, which in turn is linked to logics of transnational capital and the global imperatives of economic development. “Untouchability,” of course, refers to caste hierarchies in this context, but in theorizing the term in tandem with globalization, the goal is not to theorize Dalit bodies as “untouched” by globalization. Instead, it is to foreground the intensi&cation of hierarchies and disconnections under the logics of globalization that contravene its professed investments in unifying differences through tropes of connectivity (such as the global village or transnational handholding multiculturalism). 4. Harish Iyer, “The Boy’s Caste: An Arranged Gay Marriage,” Outlook India. 5. Puar, “Disability,” TSQ, 78. 6. Lucinda Ramberg, “Backward Futures and Pasts Forward: Queer Time, Sexual Politics, and Dalit Religiosity in South India,” GLQ, 223. 7. Ramberg, “Backward Futures,” 223. 8. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 15. 9. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, 11. 10. Judith Butler, Precarious Life, 23–24. 11. See the critique of the repressive hypothesis in Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. 12. V. Geetha, “Bereft of Being: The Humiliations of Untouchability,” in Humiliation: Claims and Context, 100. Critiques of sexual violence against

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,,3–,,/

247

Dalit women by upper-caste men do not, however, exhaust the complexities of Dalit critique that are centrally constituted by the works of Dalit feminists, who point to the dangers of framing Dalit critique through singular categories. See Urmila Pawar, “What Has the Dalit Movement Offered to Women?”; and Sharmila Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Reading Dalit Women’s Testimonies. 13. Sundar Sarukkai, “Phenomenology of Untouchability,” in The Cracked Mirror, 166. 14. Sarukkai, “Phenomenology of Untouchability,” 167. 15. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 43. 16. Sarukkai, “Phenomenology of Untouchability,” 189. 17. Milind Wakankar, “Topics of the New Dalit Critique,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 404. 18. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, 3 19. It would be a mistake, however, to con.ate queer discourse on touching as always already about desire or discourses on pleasure. For example, see Iain Morland’s “What Can Queer Theory Do for Intersex?” in which he argues that queer theory’s “assumption of a sensorial basis to cultural critique, which is exempli&ed by the queer touch, .ounders when confronted with the desensitized intersex body,” GLQ, 285. 20. Manjari Mishra, “Aligarh Muslim University Professor Suspended for Being Gay,” The Economic Times. The quote is attributed to Rahat Abrar, the public relations of&cer of AMU. 21. Arvind Narrain, “Justice for Siras: A Collection of Media Reports on the Case of Late Aligarh Muslim University Professor, Dr. Srinivas Ramchandra Siras.” 22. While India’s Supreme Court ordered the Delhi High Court to revisit the Naz petition that culminated in the landmark 2009 Naz Foundation v. Govt. of NCT of Delhi ruling, which effectively entailed the decriminalizing of homosexuality, in the 2013 case of Koushal v. Naz Foundation, the Supreme Court overturned the Delhi High Court case, effectively reinstating Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code until the recent 2018 decision. 23. For a more detailed analysis of Lata Mangeshkar’s ideological role as the voice of nationalism on the soundtrack of Aligarh, see Nishant Shahani, “Queer Intimacy during Seditious Times: Revisiting the Case of Ramchandra Siras” in SAMAJ’s special issue on “Gender, Sexuality and Sedition” edited by Svati Shah. 24. Subhash K. Jha, “That Lata Connect,” Syndication DNA. 25. Udita Jhunjhunwala, “Nobody Deserves a Life of Loneliness for Consensual Sexual Choices: Aligarh Director Hansal Mehta,” Scroll.in.

248

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,,+–,00

26. “Aligarh about Right to Privacy, Not Homosexuality: Hansal Mehta,” The Indian Express. 27. David Eng, The Feelings of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy, 11. 28. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Of Garbage, Modernity, and the Citizen’s Gaze,” Economic and Political Weekly, 542. 29. Valerian Rodrigues, “Untouchability, Filth, and the Public Domain,” in Humiliation: Claims and Context, 108. 30. The Mandal Commission (named after parliamentarian and social reformer B. P. Mandal) was established under Prime Minister Morarji Desai in 1979, and its recommendations were implemented under the V. P. Singh government in 1990. The Mandal Commission’s report proposed an expansion of quota reservations for employment and education to lowercaste Hindus as a form of redress to attend to caste discrimination and uneven economic opportunities. The report sparked widespread protests from upper-caste students, including various incidents of self-immolation on college campuses. In the introduction to Dalit Studies, editors Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana have suggested that one of the valuable outcomes of the Mandal controversies “was to bring into focus the dominance of Indian academia by caste Hindu intellectuals from relatively homogenous economic, cultural, and educational backgrounds.” As a result, “caste became a recognized legitimate political category and a modern and living one, as opposed to its prior representations as primordial, backward, and reactionary” (4). 31. Praveen Donthi, “From Shadows to the Stars: The De&ant Politics of Rohith Vemula and the Ambedkar Students Association,” The Caravan. 32. Donthi, “From Shadows to the Stars.” 33. Quoted in Arundhati Roy, “My Seditious Heart: An Un&nished Diary of Nowadays,” The Caravan. 34. Roy, “My Seditious Heart.” 35. Quoted in Donthi, “From Shadows to the Stars.” 36. See Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, 3. The authors suggest that dispossession is “both forcible and privative.” They foreground the dialectical nature of its privative force, however. On the one hand, dispossession is a form of forced anti-relationality—it “is precisely what happens when populations lose their land, their citizenship, their means of livelihood.” But these very experiences also attest to the very “basis of relationality [since] we do not simply move ourselves, but . . . are moved by others in ways that disconcert, displace, and dispossess us” (3).

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,00–,2,

249

37. Donthi, “From Shadows to the Stars.” 38. Donthi’s essay documents current Vice-Chancellor Appa Rao Podile’s hostility toward Dalit students, which began when he was a chief warden of the university and sought to privatize food services on campus, which would have adversely affected poorer Dalit students. Podile was the administrator who of&cially suspended Vemula. For several Dalit activists, he personi&ed caste Hindu policies on campus. In 2017, Podile was awarded the Millennium Plaques Honour by Narendra Modi at the Indian Science Congress amidst renewed protests. 39. Donthi, “From Shadows to the Stars.” 40. On December 13, 2001, the Indian Parliament was attacked by terrorists. Gunmen charged into the Parliament building and opened &re while several politicians were inside. Afzal Guru was one among several found guilty of the attack and was sentenced to death, a sentence upheld by both the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India. Guru was hanged in Tihar Jail in 2013. 41. Roy, “My Seditious Heart.” 42. Quoted in Donthi, “From Shadows to the Stars.” 43. JNU dossier quoted in Donthi, “From Shadows to the Stars.” 44. JNU dossier quoted in Donthi, “From Shadows to the Stars.” 45. Roy, “My Seditious Heart.” 46. The Modi government revoked the licenses of several NGOs involved in human rights and social justice causes to access international funding over suggestions that these organizations facilitated seditious activities. 47. Francois Gautier, “The Great Hindu Revolution of Narendra Modi,” The Economic Times. 48. Sangeeta Kamat, “Postcolonial Aporias, or What Does Fundamentalism Have to Do with Globalization? The Contradictory Consequences of Education Reform in India,” Comparative Education, 280. 49. Miranda Joseph, “Analogy and Complicity: Women’s Studies, Lesbian/Gay Studies, and Capitalism,” in Women’s Studies on Its Own, 272. 50. Cazdyn, “Disaster, Crisis, Revolution,” 647 (italics added). 51. Joseph, “Analogy and Complicity,” 273. 52. “PM Modi Warns of ‘Surgical Strikes’ against Black Money and Corruption,” The Times of India. 53. “PM Modi Warns.” 54. “Digital India” refers to government initiatives adopted in 2015 to facilitate enhanced Internet connectivity and electronic infrastructure, especially in rural India. 55. “PM Modi Warns.”

250

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,2,–,31

56. Moushumi Das Gupta, “Government Guidelines for Disabled during National Anthem: Maintain Maximum Alertness Physically,” Hindustan Times. 57. Butler, Precarious Life, 31. 58. Roy, “My Seditious Heart.” 59. Quoted in Roy, “My Seditious Heart.” 60. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 4. I use Hartman’s questions in this section of the chapter despite the useful methodological caution offered by Arondekar and Patel in “Area Impossible” around the concern that “the pervasive understanding of race as understood primarily through the history of the transatlantic slave trade” becomes overdetermined as “the background against which all representations of racial formation take place” (156). I mobilize Hartman’s questions about trauma and representation more as methodological provocations rather than as an attempt to analogize disparate geopolitical and historical contexts. 61. I would like to thank Jyoti Puri for her question at the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin, about the epistemological problems with writing about death in response to my presentation, which prompted me to think about the question in this chapter. 62. Arondekar, For the Record, 3. 63. Joseph, “Analogy and Complicity,” 275. 64. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 4. 65. Aligarh, dir. Hansal Mehta. 66. Suprateek Chatterjee, “Rickshaw Puller Is Scared for Life as ‘Aligarh’ Reveals His Identity as Homosexual,” Huf&ngton Post. 67. Puri, Sexual States, 81. 68. Aligarh, dir. Hansal Mehta. 69. For a more detailed analysis of caste scripts and the politics of food, see Gopal Guru’s “Food as a Metaphor for Cultural Hierarchies.” In his analysis, Guru suggests that caste regulations around food do not only revolve around prescriptions for the self, but for others as well. He suggests that jhootan (leftovers) and dead cattle were considered as staples for untouchables. Gopal writes: “The Untouchables were at the receiving end of the discarded resources; the Jhootan, cast off cloth, and dead cattle. The irony is that the Untouchables produced food grain but were denied the legitimate share of it” (11). Taste and touch in this framework thus exist in the same political and epistemological vicinity. 70. Eng, The Feelings of Kinship, 11. 71. Eng, The Feelings of Kinship, 9–10. 72. Prayaag Akbar, “Caste Lives On, and On,” Aeon.

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,31–,-1

251

73. Supriya Nair, “The Meaning of India’s ‘Beef Lynchings,’ ” The Atlantic. 74. Eng, The Feelings of Kinship, 42 75. Puri, Sexual States, 75. 76. Puri, Sexual States, 85. 77. Eng, The Feelings of Kinship, 44. 78. Eng, The Feelings of Kinship, 35. 79. One such “coming together” of marginalized communities could be discerned in yet another challenge to privacy politics in the activisms of the feminist collective Pinja Tod (translated as “Break the Cage”). Pinja Tod was forging connections between gender, sexuality, and public access in attempting to combat the curfews imposed on women on campus hostels under the logics of safety and security. In demanding the literal breakingdown of locks, these groups were also insisting on the ability to access public space without harassment. The movement was not simply restricted to equal access, but also framed its demands within the context of Dalit protest and compulsory nationalism. When faced with harassment and counterprotests from members of ABVP shouting “Bharat Mata ki Jai” (Long Live Mother India), Pinja Tod protested by insisting that “We won’t be Mother India. Nationalism cages women.”

Chapter 4 A section of chapter 4 originally appeared as “Patently Queer: Late Effects and the Sexual Economies of India” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23, no. 2 (2017): 195–220. Many thanks to the editor at that time, Elizabeth Freeman, for her valuable feedback on drafts of the essay. 1. Michel Foucault is most closely associated with his scholarship on biopolitics in works such as “Society Must Be Defended.” In contemporary queer studies, Dean Spade’s Normal Life examines how modes of biopolitical governmentality become ways of “administrating gender.” 2. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 33. 3. Achille Mbembe and Libby Meintjes, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 12. 4. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 32. 5. “Yoga Can Treat Homosexuality, Says Baba Ramdev,” Rediff.com. 6. “Yoga Can Treat Homosexuality,” Rediff.com. 7. William Nobrega and Ashish Sinha, Riding the Indian Tiger: Understanding India—The World’s Fastest Growing Economy, ix. 8. Nobrega and Sinha, Riding the Indian Tiger, ix.

252

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,-,–,--

9. For an analysis of temporal delay in queer studies, see Elizabeth Freeman’s “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations,” in which she offers an understanding of “temporal drag” in which “retrogression, delay, and the pull of the past” continue to mediate the life of queer performativity. For Freeman, the temporal life of drag and delay animates the queer present by accommodating disavowed political histories. In this context, the delayed hauntings that subtend identity constitute a queer kind of afterlife that “might propel us to a barely imagined future” (743). If Freeman negotiates a way of thinking through and beyond generational logic (even while preserving its accumulated detritus), subaltern theorists in the &eld of postcolonial studies have similarly grappled with the temporal politics of structural inheritance and generational thinking in the context of the newly formed nation-state. “Temporal drag” in this context describes the constrained pull of the colonial past on the present that forecloses any epistemic break; but it also hints at how the corruptions of inherited structures—what Gayatri Spivak calls “enabling violations” in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason— gesture toward a practice of postcolonial delay that does not simply lapse back into repetition without a difference (33). Perhaps the most explicit reference to “lateness” is found in Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (with its titular reference to late capitalism). Even though his treatise on postmodernism is framed through the temporal logic of “late capitalism,” Jameson admits at the very outset that “it is not . . . [his] favorite slogan” and therefore replaces it at various moments with less temporal references to “multinational capitalism,” “the world system,” or simply just “postmodernism” (xviii). Perhaps it is the aversion to generational thinking, as well as the logic of periodization, that an invocation of lateness implicitly conjures up, requiring such overt theoretical caution. And thus Jameson’s explanations of “lateness” as a shift from “older convulsions of modernization and industrialization” to novel forms of mediatization and the transnationalization of capital are not clearly historically periodized through epistemic paradigm shifts—they are both “less perceptible” and yet “more permanent” and “all-pervasive” (xviii). 10. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 22. 11. Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, 38. 12. “India Records 57 Percent Drop in New HIV Cases,” DNA India. 13. Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 117. 14. See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse; and Ranjit Guha, Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society.

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,-4–,43

253

15. Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 51 16. World Trade Organization, “Declaration on the Trips Agreement and Public Health,” 2001. 17. Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 153. 18. Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora, 6. 19. In Flexible Citizenship, Ong critiques the work of Arjan Appadurai as an illustration of a top-down anthropology of globalization in which the global is framed as the political and economic agent pressing down on the local (in which the local is always already merely cultural). For Ong, such a model fails “to capture the horizontal and relational nature” of contemporary globalization” (4). 20. White House Of&ce of the Press Secretary, 2014, “U.S.-India Joint Statement.” 21. White House Of&ce, “U.S.-India Joint Statement.” 22. Sanjay Srivastava, Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class, and Consumption, 33. 23. Srivastava, Passionate Modernity, 33. 24. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” GLQ, 664. 25. Vandana Shiva, “The Suicide Economy of Corporate Globalisation,” Countercurrents. 26. For a more detailed analysis of the role of NGO activism in the context of queer and HIV politics in India, see Dave, Queer Activism in India, in which she documents some of the divisions between queer activists in India over the role of NGOs. On the one hand is the view that “NGOs have created in India altogether new sexual identity categories in order to carve a niche in a competitive funding &eld.” On the other hand, she also documents voices that foreground the role that NGOs play in “enabling public conversations on previously unspeakable issues such as HIV and sexual risk” (128). 27. See Lisa Rofel’s Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Rofel foregrounds how a consideration of intellectual property law and consumption “triangulates” the legal arena with divisions between forbidden and permissible desires (138). 28. Nanda, The God Market. 29. Catherine Thomas, “The Role of Ayurvedic Therapies for HIV/AIDS Care: A Comprehensive Review of Literature,” Journal of Global Health Perspectives, 7. 30. The statement read as follows: “There is an urgent need to look for cost-effective alternatives to antiretroviral drugs in the indigenous system

254

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,43–,/2

of medicine like Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha apart from Homeopathy . . . At the same time, it is necessary to be vigilant against unscrupulous persons claiming a cure for HIV/AIDS by magic remedies.” Quoted in Thomas, “The Role of Ayurvedic Therapies,” 4. 31. Chandrima Chakraborty, “The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor: Reviving Faith in Yoga,” International Journal of the History of Sport, 1172. 32. Cecilia Van Hollen, “Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Politics of ‘Traditional’ Indian Medicine for HIV/AIDS,” in Asian Medicine and Globalization, 92. 33. Quoted in Van Hollen, “Nationalism, Transnationalism,” 92. 34. Aya Ikegame and Jacob Copeman, “Guru Logics,” Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 289. 35. Nandini Gooptu, “New Spirituality, Politics of Self-Empowerment, Citizenship, and Democracy in Contemporary India, Modern Asian Studies, 972. 36. Quoted in Gooptu, “New Spirituality,” 952. 37. Joseph Alter, “Ayurvedic Acupuncture—Transnational Nationalism: Ambivalence about the Origin and Authenticity of Medical Knowledge,” in Asian Medicine and Globalization, 21. 38. Joseph Alter, “Introduction: The Politics of Culture and Medicine,” in Asian Medicine and Globalization, 6. 39. Thomas, “The Role of Ayurvedic Therapies,” 1. 40. Quoted in Maarten Bode, “Indian Indigenous Pharmaceuticals: Tradition, Modernity, and Nature,” in Plural Medicine, Tradition, and Modernity 1800–2000, 196. 41. In Seeing Like a Feminist, Nivedita Menon suggests that the emergence of AIDS activism in India in the late 1990s, while often “acting as a code for homosexuality,” emerged prior to the activism around Section 377, through sex worker unions such as the Durbar Mahila Samanways Committee and sex education projects such as Sangli and SANGRAM in order to prevent the spread of the epidemic (99). 42. Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 117. 43. Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 117. 44. Lydia Polgreen, “Indian Who Built Yoga Empire Works on Politics,” New York Times. 45. See Benjamin Law, Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East. Law’s non&ction travelogue documents his “adventures” as a way to “reach out to [his]  .  .  . fellow Gaysians: the Homolaysians, Bimese, Laosbians and Shandykes” (2). In the chapter devoted to his travels in India, Law encounters a guru whom he calls “one of the most powerful and in.uential men in

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,/2–,+2

255

India” (277). While never mentioning Ramdev by name, Law’s descriptions of the yoga guru’s claims to curing HIV and homosexuality make it clear who he is referring to. 46. Law, Gay Asia, 285. 47. Chakraborty, “The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor,” 1177.  48. “Yoga Helped Many Accept Their Sexual Orientation,” Rediff.com. 49. Kai Friese, “Safe Custody: Tihar Jail Bans Condoms,” India Today. 50. Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 15. 51. Achal Prabhala, “The Year We Said Yes to Patient Rights but No to Gay Rights,” Mint. 52. Prabhala, “The Year We Said Yes.” 53. Dave, Queer Activism in India, 40. 54. See Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS. Patton points to the need to mine the possibilities of paradox in the context of AIDS education, arguing that it “requires holding in tension the idea that HIV does not discriminate between people and the idea that AIDS has been, from the very beginning, constructed as a gay disease” (114). 55. Ila Nagar and Debanuj DasGupta, “Public Koti and Private Love,” Contemporary South Asia, 431. 56. Nagar and DasGupta, “Public Koti,” 431. 57. Quoted in Dave, Queer Activism in India, 152 and 116. 58. Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 163. 59. Grewal and Kaplan, “Global Identities,” 11. 60. Elizabeth Flock, “The Law Breaker,” Forbes India. The quote is from Anjali Gopalan, the founder of the Naz Foundation, on how the repeal of Section 377 would mark an entry into a global modernity of sorts for India. 61. Business Standard Reporter, “Are Product Patents Anti-Consumer?” Rediff.com. 62. Business Standard Reporter, “Are Product Patents Anti-Consumer?” Rediff.com.

Chapter 5 1. See Jana Evans Braziel and Annita Mannur, “Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies,” in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. According to the authors, “theorizing diaspora offers critical spaces for thinking about the discordant movements of modernity, the massive migrations that have de&ned this century—from the late colonial period through the decolonization era into the twenty-&rst century” (3). The authors also foreground the importance of de&ning the

256

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,+3–,50

terms of the “scattered logics” subtending diaspora—a point that is central to the conceptual intervention of this chapter. Mannur and Braziel write: “Important distinctions still need to be made, then, between the political risks entailed in different forms of movement and migration . . . How, for example, do constructions of nation, diaspora, and transnation differ for different transmigrational groups—exiles, refugees, immigrants, and migrants? How are voluntary diasporic subjects different from those whose lives have been mapped by exile, refugee camps, mass migration, and economic immigration?” (15). While this chapter does not assume to answer all of these important questions, I do wish to pay attention to these internal differences within the notion of diaspora in order to more carefully calibrate its contextual underpinnings. 2. Minal Hajratwala, Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents, 303 3. Benedict Anderson, “Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics.” 4. Hajratwala, Leaving India, 331. 5. Hajratwala, Leaving India, 4 and 7. 6. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, 11. 7. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 16. 8. Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 10–11. 9. Rey Chow, Ethics After Idealism, xxi. 10. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, xxii. 11. In the context of Indian feminism, see Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial Indian History. 12. Banerjee, Make Me a Man, 139. 13. The metaphor of the tree has been a familiar trope in Hindu mythology. As Itty Abraham points out in How India Became Territorial, “To address the range of Hindu practices, the votaries of Hindutva . . . would constantly resort to metaphors of unity in diversity. The most potent of these was the tree with many branches but with only one trunk: the central trunk had roots embedded deep in the soil of the Hindu homeland” (116). 14. Leela Prasad, Live Like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience, 12–13. 15. Frank J. Korom, “Reviewed Work(s): ‘Live like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience’ by Leela Prasad,” Journal of American Folklore, 72. 16. Korom, “Reviewed Work(s),” 72.

!"#$% #" ()*$% ,50–011

257

17. Leela Prasad, “Gatekeeping ‘The Subaltern’? A Response to Frank J. Korom’s Review of the Exhibition ‘Live like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience,’ ” Journal of American Folklore, 74. 18. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 19. 19. Prasad, “Gatekeeping,” 75 20. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, 23. 21. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, 32. 22. Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry, 775. 23. Prasad, Live Like the Banyan Tree, 22 (italics added). 24. Prasad, Live Like the Banyan Tree, 22. 25. Arondekar, For the Record, 3. 26. Arondekar, For the Record, 4. 27. Vinay Lal notes that the Hindu diaspora in the United States is comprised of several supporters of “Hindu militancy” in India: “They rejoiced in the destruction on 6 December 1992 by Hindu militants of a sixteenthcentury mosque, and have poured much money into the construction of a grand new Hindu temple in Ayodhya, and they contribute generously to the activities of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad” (47). In the very next paragraph, Lal assures readers that “there is reason to be hopeful” about the progressive contributions of the Indian diaspora, through the contributions of queer activists of Indian origin like Urvashi Vaid and prominent Asian Indian academics like Gayatri Spivak. Vinay Lal, “Establishing Roots, Engendering Awareness: A Political History of Asian Indians in the United States,” in Live Like the Banyan Tree. 28. Sujata K. Dass, Atal Bihari Vajpayee: Prime Minister of India, 277. 29. Latha Varadarajan, The Domestic Abroad: Diasporas in International Relations, 11. 30. Varadarajan, The Domestic Abroad, 11. 31. Varadarajan, The Domestic Abroad, 22. 32. H. R. Venkatesh, “Narasimha Rao & Manmohan Singh Best Described as a Jugalbandi,” The Quint. 33. “A Jugalbandi,” Outlook India. 34. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume 1, 61. 35. Bataille, The Accursed Share, 69. 36. Varadarajan, The Domestic Abroad, 22 37. Quoted in Varadarajan, The Domestic Abroad, 23. 38. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 6. 39. Varadarajan, The Domestic Abroad, 34.

258

!"#$% #" ()*$% 01,–001

40. Smitha Radhakrishnan, Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class, 174. 41. Radhakrishnan, Appropriately Indian, 44. 42. Christophe Jaffelot and Ingrid Therwath, “The Sangh Parivar and the Hindu Diaspora in the West: What Kind of ‘Long-Distance Nationalism’?” International Political Sociology, 280. 43. Sucheta Mazumdar, “The Politics of Religion and National Origin: Rediscovering Hindu Indian Identity in the United States,” in Antinomies of Modernity, 224. 44. Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 11. 45. Seeta Lakhani, Hinduism for Schools, 2. 46. Hajratwala, Leaving India, xv. 47. Quoted in Varadarajan, The Domestic Abroad, 42. 48. Aroon Purie, “You Can Find Indians in the Most Unlikely Places,” India Today. 49. Hajratwala, Leaving India, 351.

Afterword For permission to use images and illustrations in the afterword, thanks to Mir Suhail, and Cartoons Communications. 1. “Supreme Court Strikes Down Law Criminalizing Homosexuality,” The Hindu. 2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” in Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida, ix. 3. Adam Roberts, India: Superfast Primetime Nation. 4. Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” ix 5. Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” ix. 6. Flock, “The Law Breaker.” The quote is from Anjali Gopalan, commenting on the strike-down of Section 377 by the Delhi High Court in 2009. 7. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 5. 8. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, 11. 9. Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala, The Global Trajectories of Queerness: Rethinking Same-Sex Politics in the Global South, 21. 10. Jyoti Puri, “Genderqueer Perspectives,” in Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law, 204. 11. In Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dave points to the ABVA’s (AIDS Bhedbav Virodhi Andolan) 1994 petition against Section 377 in which it resorted to “an uncharacteristic homonationalist display”; the

!"#$% #" ()*$% 001–00-

259

ABVA asserted that the law was making India keep the “backward company of Pakistan, Malaysia, and Singapore” (173). 12. Pathikrit Sanyal, “While India Celebrates Partial Strikedown of Section 377, Pakistan Continues to Suffer,” Daily O. 13. McDonald’s in India does not use beef in its burgers and assures Indian consumers that the kitchens that make its chicken patties are carefully sequestered from vegetarian-only spaces. 14. Sandip Roy, “India’s Battle for Same-Sex Love,” New York Times. 15. Roy, “India’s Battle.” 16. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 222. 17. Quoted in Harsh V. Pant, “Will India, China, and Pakistan Ever Move beyond Skirmishes to Be Partners in Economic Growth?” This Is Money. 18. “Proud to Be Gay,” The Times of India. 19. The framing of jurisprudence as the site of queer decolonization (which is often de&ned in economic terms, as exempli&ed in the Swiggy and Zomato ads) dovetails seamlessly with the nationalist and even internationalist bromide of India as the “world’s largest democracy.” In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla draws close attention to the relationship between the law and political economy, illustrating how an effective form of sophisticated jurisprudence is viewed as an essential requirement for market stability and India’s unique relation to democratic exceptionalism. Conventional historiographies have narrated colonial history through the lens of indigenous adaptability—that is, like the railways and the English language, colonialism conferred the endowment of law, which was then “translated” in accordance with vernacular needs. Birla’s account of the beginning of the twentieth century, however, paints a more complicated picture in which vernacular or indigenous practitioners of capitalism were seen as impediments to progress within legal discourses attempting to standardize market practices. Birla’s account thus charts “the legal production of ‘the market’ as a supra-local object of governance, as an abstract model for the public, and as a stage for cultural politics” (3). The colonial history of Indian law and its central place in the constitution of markets make the contemporary assertion of legalism as a site of decolonialism worthy of a genealogical unpacking. 20. Roy, Worlding Cities, 330.

!"#$"%&'()*+

Abraham, Itty. How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Agnes, Flavia. “Introduction” to Women and Law in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. “Women’s Movement in a Secular Framework.” Economic and Political Weekly 29, no. 19 (1994): 1124–28. Ahmad, Aijaz. “In the Eye of the Storm: The Left Chooses.” Economic and Political Weekly 31, no. 22 (1997): 1336–37. Aizura, Aren Z. Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. “A Jugalbandi.” Outlook India, January 9, 2004. https://www.outlookindia .com/website/story/a-jugalbandi/222557. Akbar, Prayaag. “Caste Lives On, and On.” Aeon, April 20, 2017. https:// aeon.co/essays/how-india-deludes-itself-that-caste-discrimination-is -dead. Aligarh. Directed by Hansal Mehta. DVD, 2017. “Aligarh about Right to Privacy, Not Homosexuality: Hansal Mehta.” Indian Express, February 11, 2016. https://indianexpress.com/article /entertainment/bollywood/aligarh- about- right- to- privacy- not -homosexuality-hansal-mehta/. Altman, Dennis. “Global Gaze/Global Gays.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1997): 417–36. ———. Global Sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. ———. “Rupture or Continuity: The Internationalization of Gay Identities.” Social Text 48 (1996): 77–94. Amin, Kadji. “Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory’s Affective Histories.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 44, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2016): 173–89. Anderson, Benedict. “Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics.” Wertheim Lecture, Center of Asian Studies, Amsterdam, 1992.

261

262

!"#$"%&'()*+

Arondekar, Anjali. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. ———. “In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts: Sexuality, Historiography, South Asia.” Differences 25, no. 3 (2014): 98–122. Arondekar, Anjali, and Geeta Patel. “Area Impossible: Notes toward an Introduction.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 2 (2016): 151–71. Assayag, Jackie, and C. J. Fuller. Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below. London: Anthem, 2005. Athique, Adrian, and Douglas Hill. The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure. New York: Routledge, 2014. Babu, Shyam D. “Caste and Class among the Dalits.” In Dalit Studies, edited by Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Bacchetta, Paola. “When the (Hindu) Nation Exiles Its Queers,” Social Text 61 17, no. 4 (1999): 141–66. Bandyopadhyay, Ranjan, and Duarte Morais. “Representative Dissonance: India’s Self and Western Image.” Annals of Tourism Research 32, no. 4 (2005): 1006–21. Banerjee, Sikata. Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005. Banerjee, Subhabrata Bobby. “Necrocapitalism.” Organization Studies 29, no. 12 (December 2008): 1541–63. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume 1. Cambridge: Zone Books, 1991. Baviskar, Amita. “Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power, and Identity in the Making of Metropolitan Delhi.” International Social Science Journal 55, no. 175 (2003): 89–98. Baxi, Upendra. “The (Im)Possibility of Constitutional Justice: Seismographic Notes on Indian Constitutionalism.” In India’s Living Constitution: Ideas, Practices, Controversies, edited by Zoya Hasan, E. Sridharan, and R. Sudarshan, 31–63. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002. Bhan, Gautam. “Gautam Bhan on Right to Privacy and Its Links to Section 377.” Daily O, August 24, 2017. https://www.dailyo.in/voices/right-to-pri vacy-sexuality-section-377-fundamental-rights/story/1/19151.html. Bhuwania, Anuj. Courting the People: Public Interest Litigation in PostEmergency India. Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

!"#$"%&'()*+

263

Binnie, Jon. “Invisible Europeans: Sexual Citizenship in the New Europe.” Environment and Planning, A29 (1997): 237–48. Birla, Ritu. Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Biswas, Shampa. “To Be Modern, but in the ‘Indian’ Way: Hindu Nationalism.” In Gods, Guns, and Globalization: Religious Radicalism and International Political Economy, edited by Mary Ann Tétreault and Robert A. Denemark. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. Bode, Maarten. “Indian Indigenous Pharmaceuticals: Tradition, Modernity and Nature.” In Plural Medicine, Tradition, and Modernity 1800–2000, edited by Waltraud Ernst, 184–203. London: Routledge, 2002. Boellstorff, Tom. “Dubbing Culture: Indonesian ‘Gay’ and ‘Lesbi’ Subjectivities and Ethnography in an Already Globalized World.” American Ethnologist 30, no. 2 (2003): 225–42. Boyce, Paul. “ ‘Conceiving Kothis’: Men Who Have Sex with Men in India and the Cultural Subject of HIV Prevention.” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 26, no. 2 (2007): 175–203. Brandzel, L. Amy. Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016. Braziel, Jana Evans, and Annita Mannur. “Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies.” In Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, edited by Evans and Mannur, 1–22. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Business Standard Reporter, “Are Product Patents Anti-Consumer?” Rediff .com, March 28, 2008. https://www.rediff.com/money/report/debate /20080327.htm. Burke, Jason. “Indian Culture War Breaks Out over Delhi Gang Rape.” The Guardian, January 15, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013 /jan/15/india-gang-rape-women-attitudes. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Precarious Life. New York: Verso, 2006. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Malden, MA: Polity, 2013. Cazdyn, Eric. The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. ———. “Disaster, Crisis, Revolution.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 4: 647–62. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Of Garbage, Modernity, and the Citizen’s Gaze.” Economic and Political Weekly 27, no. 10–11 (1992): 541–47.

264

!"#$"%&'()*+

Chakraborty, Chandrima. “The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor: Reviving Faith in Yoga.” International Journal of the History of Sport 24, no. 9 (2007): 1172–86. Chatterjee, Suprateek. “Rickshaw Puller Is Scared for Life as ‘Aligarh’ Reveals His Identity as Homosexual.” Huf,ngton Post, July 15, 2016. http:// www.huf,ngtonpost.in/2016/03/02/prof-siras-partner_n_9364260.html. Chen, Y. Mel. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Chow, Rey. Ethics After Idealism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Contractor, Qudsiya. “Muslim Women, Caste, and the Beef Ban in Mumbai.” In Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality, edited by Anupama Rao, 257–73. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2018. Da Costa, Dia. Politicizing Creative Economy: Activism and a Hunger Called Theater. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Daniyal, Shoaib. “How Narendra Modi Helped Spread Anti-Beef Hysteria.” Scroll.in, October 6, 2015. https://scroll.in/article/760006/how-narend ra-modi-helped-spread-anti-beef-hysteria. Das, Gurcharan. India Unbound. New York: Viking, 2000. Das Gupta, Moushumi. “Government Guidelines for Disabled during National Anthem: Maintain Maximum Alertness Physically.” The Hindustan Times, January 19, 2017. https://www.hindustantimes .com/india- news/maintain- maximum- alertness- physically- govt - guidelines- during- national- anthem- for- differently- abled/story -3I1cEeMvBWfDMQwzJLr7bI.html. Dass, K. Sujata. Atal Bihari Vajpayee: Prime Minister of India. New Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2004. Dave, Naisargi. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. De, Rohit. “Who Moved My Beef? Regulatory Changes and the Pink Revolution.” Business Line, November 18, 2013. https:// www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/who- moved- my- beef /article22995192.ece. Doctor, Vikram. “How Supreme Court’s Decision on Restoring Section 377 Impacts India’s Image.” The Economic Times, December 13, 2013. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation /how-supreme-courts-decision-on-restoring-section-377-impacts-indias -image/articleshow/27251990.cms. Donthi, Praveen. “From Shadows to the Stars: The De,ant Politics of Rohith Vemula and the Ambedkar Students Association.” The Caravan,

!"#$"%&'()*+

265

April 30, 2016. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/from-shadows -to-the-stars-rohith-vemula. Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality. Boston: Beacon, 2004. Dupont V., and U. Ramanathan. “The Courts and the Squatter Settlements in Delhi—or the Intervention of the Judiciary in Urban ‘Governance.’ ” In New Forms of Urban Governance in India: Shifts, Models, Networks and Contestations, edited by I. S. A. Baud and J. de Wit, 312–43. New Delhi: Sage, 2008. Dutta, Aniruddha. “An Epistemology of Collusion: Hijras, Kothis and the Historical (Dis)continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern India.” In Gender History across Epistemologies, edited by Donna R. Cabaccia and Mary Jo Maynes, 305–29. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. Dutta, Debolina, and Oishik Sircar. “India’s Winter of Discontent: Some Feminist Dilemmas in the Wake of Rape.” Feminist Studies 39, no. 1 (2013): 293–306. Eng, David. The Feelings of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Flock, Elizabeth. “The Law Breaker.” Forbes India, December 26, 2009. http://india.forbes.com/article/person-of-the-year-09/the-law-breaker /8082/2. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. ———. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. United Kingdom: Picador, 2009. ———. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 1997. Frankel, R. Francine. India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971. Freeman, Elizabeth. “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations.” New Literary History 31, no. 4 (2000): 727–47. Friese, Kai. “Safe Custody: Tihar Jail Bans Condoms.” India Today, May 31, 1994. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/tihar-jail-bans-condoms/1/293411 .html. Gautier, Francois. “The Great Hindu Revolution of Narendra Modi.” The Economic Times, March 21, 2017. https://economictimes.indiatimes .com/blogs/francois-gautiers-blog-for-toi/the-great-hindu-revolution-of -narendra-modi/. Geary, David. “Incredible India in a Global Age: The Cultural Politics of Image Branding in Tourism.” Tourist Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 36–61.

266

!"#$"%&'()*+

Geetha, V. “Bereft of Being: The Humiliations of Untouchability.” In Humiliation: Claims and Context, edited by Gopal Guru, 95–107. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. Ghertner, D. Asher. Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Ghosh, Shamik. “Rapes Take Place in India, Not Bharat, Says RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat.” The Times of India, January 4, 2013. https://www.ndtv .com/india-news/rapes-occur-in-india-not-bharat-says-rss-chief-mohan -bhagwat-509401. Ghoshi, Dwaipayan. “GK, CR Park among 24 Safe City Colonies.” The Times of India, December 19, 2009. https://timeso,ndia.indiatimes .com/city/delhi/GK-C-R-Park-among-24-safe-city-colonies/articleshow /5354576.cms. Gibson-Graham, J. K. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. ———. “Queering Globalization.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society 9, no. 1 (1996): 1–27. Gooptu, Nandini. “New Spirituality, Politics of Self-Empowerment, Citizenship, and Democracy in Contemporary India.” Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 3 (2016): 934–74. Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 7, no. 4 (2001): 663–79. Gross, Aeyal. “The Politics of LGBT Rights in Israel and Beyond: Nationality, Normativity, and Queer Politics.” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 46, no. 2 (2015): 81−152. Gupta, Akhil. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Gupta, Charu. “Allegories of ‘Love Jihad’ and Ghar Vapasi: Interlocking the Socio-Religious with the Political.” Archiv Orientální 84, no. 2 (2016): 291–316. Guru, Gopal. “Food as a Metaphor for Cultural Hierarchies.” Center for the Advanced Study of India, Working Paper Series, No. 09–01. October 2009. ———. Humiliation: Claims and Context. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai, eds. The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.

!"#$"%&'()*+

267

Hajratwala, Minal. Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents. Boston: Houghton Mif.in Harcourt, 2009. Hall, Stuart. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity.” In Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Hanhardt, Christina. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Hans, Namit. “Despite All the Politics, India’s Share in World Beef Export Increases.” Catch News, October 6, 2015. http:// www.catchnews.com /national- news/amidst- all- the- politics- india- sshare-in-world-beef-export-increases-1443797546.html. Hansen, Thomas Blom. “The Vernacularisation of Hindutva: The BJP and Shiv Sena in Rural Maharashtra.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 30, no. 2 (1996): 177–214. Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Carribean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2: 1–14. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. “Hindu Body Uses V-Day to Fight Love Jihad.” The Times of India, February 15, 2017. http://epaperbeta.timeso,ndia.com/Article.aspx?eid= 31812&articlexml=IDENTITY-POLITICS-Hindu-body-uses-V-Day-to -15022017004017. Hoad, Neville. “Queer Theory Addiction.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007): 511–22. “Holi Colours Draw Foreign Tourists to India.” Deccan Herald, March 27, 2018. http://www.deccanherald.com/content/321996/holi-colours-draw -foreign-tourists.html. Hughes, Howard. Pink Tourism: Holidays of Gay Men and Lesbians. Cambridge: CABI, 2006. “India Records 57 Percent Drop in New HIV Cases.” DNA India. Indjapink. http://www.indjapink.co.in/. Iyer, Harish. “The Boy’s Caste.” Outlook India, December 21, 2016. https:// www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/the-boys-caste-an-arranged-gay -marriage/298292. Jaffelot, Christophe, and Ingrid Therwath. “The Sangh Parivar and the Hindu Diaspora in the West: What Kind of ‘Long-Distance Nationalism’?” International Political Sociology 1, no. 3 (2007): 278–95. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

268

!"#$"%&'()*+

“Jana Gana Mana Sung by Hijras.” YouTube (link expired). Jha, K. Subhash. “That Lata Connect.” Syndication DNA, December 1, 2016. http://dnasyndication.com/showarticlerss.aspx?nid=rxssuE7A17Y NLiKRDgGclxUuCh6I%20CFIP4tVljqVLmCw. John, E. Mary, and Janaki Nair. A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of India. London: Zed Books, 2000. Johri, Vikram. “Why a Group of Hijras Singing the National Anthem Is Inspiring.” Daily O. Joseph, Miranda. “Analogy and Complicity: Women’s Studies, Lesbian/ Gay Studies, and Capitalism.” In Women’s Studies on Its Own, edited by Robyn Weigman, 266–92. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Kamat, Sangeeta. “Postcolonial Aporias, or What Does Fundamentalism Have to Do with Globalization? The Contradictory Consequences of Education Reform in India.” Comparative Education 40, no. 2 (2004): 267–87. Kalita, S. Mitra. “How the Indian Dream Died with the Delhi Gang Rape Victim.” Quartz, January 9, 2013. https://qz.com/42148/how-the-indian -dream-died-with-the-delhi-gang-rape-victim/. Kapur, Ratna. Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism. London: Glasshouse, 2005. ———. “ ‘Faith’ and the ‘Good’ Liberal: The Construction of Female Subjectivity in Anti-Traf,cking Legal Discourse.” In Sexuality and the Law: Feminist Engagements, edited by Vanessa Munro and Carl Stychin. New York: Routledge, 2007. ———. “Postcolonial Profanities: The Legal Regulation of Free Speech in India.” In The Phobic and the Erotic, edited by Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Kazman, Amy. “Modi’s India: The High Cost of Protecting Holy Cows.” Financial Times, November 22, 2017. https://www.ft.com/content /63522f50-caf3-11e7-ab18-7a9fb7d6163e. Khan, A. Faris. “Khwaja Sira Activism: The Politics of Gender Activism in Pakistan.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 2 (2016): 158–64. Khanna, Akshay. Sexualness. New Delhi: New Text, 2016. Khilani, Sunil. The Idea of India. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Kohli, Rajpal Shweta. “Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on Her Favourite Post by PM Narendra Modi.” NDTV.com, July 3, 2014. https://www.ndtv .com/india-news/facebook-coo-sheryl-sandberg-on-her-favourite-post-by -pm-narendra-modi-583080.

!"#$"%&'()*+

269

Korom, J. Frank. “Reviewed Work(s): ‘Live like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience’ by Leela Prasad.” Journal of American Folklore 114, no. 451 (Winter 2001): 70–73. Krishnan, Kavita. “Nirbhaya Film: Solidarity Is What We Want, Not a Civilizing Mission.” Daily O, March 3, 2015. https://www.dailyo.in/politics /kavita-krishnan-nirbhaya-december-16-indias-daughter-leslee-udwin -mukesh-singh-bbc/story/1/2347.html. Lak, Daniel. India Express: The Future of the New Superpower. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008. Lakha, Salim. “From Swadeshi to Globalisation: The Bharatiya Janata Party’s Shifting Economic Agenda.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 25, no. 3 (December 2002): 83−103. Lakhani, Seeta. Hinduism for Schools. Middlesex, UK: Vivekananda Centre London, 2005. Lal, Vinay. “Establishing Roots, Engendering Awareness: A Political History of Asian Indians in the United Sates.” In Live Like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience, edited by Leela Prasad, 43– 48. Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 1999. Law, Benjamin. Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East. Noida: Random House India, Noida University Press, 2014. Lawyers Collective. National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India, 2012. https://www.lawyerscollective.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04 /Transgender-judgment.pdf. Liu, Petrus. Queer Marxism in Two Chinas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Loomba, Ania, and Ritty A. Lukose. “South Asian Feminisms: Contemporary Interventions.” In South Asian Feminisms, edited by Loomba and Lukose. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Ludden, David. Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Lukose, Ritty A. Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Majumdar, Abhiit. Twitter post, August 2019, 7:09 a.m. https://twitter.com /abhijitmajumder/status/1162003384133541888. Majumdar, Shyamal, and P. B. Jayakumar. “ ‘Glivec Is Not the Issue, R&D Protection Is’: Q&A/Ranjit Shahani.” Business Standard, June 14, 2013. https://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/-glivec-is-not-the-iss ue-r-d-protection-is-107083101024_1.html.

270

!"#$"%&'()*+

Mandhana, Niharika. “Portrait Emerges of Victim in New Delhi Gang Rape.” New York Times, December 31, 2012. https://india.blogs.nytimes .com/2012/12/31/portrait-emerges-of-victim-in-new-delhi-gang-rape/. Mazumdar, Sucheta. “The Politics of Religion and National Origin: Rediscovering Hindu Indian Identity in the United States.” In Antinomies of Modernity, edited by Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar, 223–60. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Mazzarella, William. Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Mbembe, Achille, and Libby Meintjes. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 11–40. McCarthy, Julie. “Indian Supreme Court Declares Privacy a Fundamental Right.” NPR, August 24, 2017. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo -way/2017/08/24/545963181/indian-supreme-court-declares-privacy-a -fundamental-right. Menon, Nivedita. Seeing Like a Feminist. New Delhi: Zubaan Penguin, 2012. Mishra, Manjari. “Aligarh Muslim University Professor Suspended for Being Gay.” The Economic Times, February 18, 2010. https://economictimes .indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/aligarh-muslim-university-pro fessor-suspended-for-being-gay/articleshow/5586879.cms. Mister & Art House. http://misterandarthouse.com/. Morland, Iain. “What Can Queer Theory Do for Intersex?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15, no. 2 (2009): 285–312. Nagar, Ila, and Debanuj DasGupta. “Public Koti and Private Love: Section 377, Religion, Perversity, and Lived Desire.” Contemporary South Asia 23, no. 4 (2015): 426–41. Nair, Supriya. “The Meaning of India’s ‘Beef Lynchings.’ ” The Atlantic, July 24, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017 /07/india-modi-beef-lynching-muslim-partition/533739/. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Nanda, Meera. The God Market: How Globalization Is Making India More Hindu. Delhi: Random House India, 2009. Narrain, Arvind, “Justice for Siras: A Collection of Media Reports on the Case of Late Aligarh Muslim University Professor, Dr. Srinivas Ramchandra Siras.” https://justiceforsiras.wordpress.com. ———. “No Shortcuts to Queer Utopia: Sodomy, Law and Social Change.” In The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India, edited by Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharya. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007.

!"#$"%&'()*+

271

Nayar, Baldev Raj. The Myth of the Shrinking State: Globalization and the State in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. Nobrega, William, and Ashish Sinha. Riding the Indian Tiger: Understanding India—The World’s Fastest Growing Economy. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2008. Nussbaum, Martha. The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Cambridge: Belknap, 2009. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. ———. “Introduction: Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global.” In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 1–26. New Jersey: Blackwell, 2011. OpIndia. “LGBT Rights Advocacy Group Trolled by People from the LGBT Community for Celebrating the Complete Integration of JK.” https:// www.opindia.com/2019/08/lgbt-rights-advocacy-group-trolled-by-people -from-the-lgbt-community-for-celebrating-the-complete-integration-of -jk/. Oza, Rupal. The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization. London: Routledge, 2006. ———. “Showcasing India: Gender, Geography, and Globalization.” Signs 26, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 1067–95. Panagariya, Arvind. India: The Emerging Giant. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pant, Harsh V. “Will India, China, and Pakistan Ever Move beyond Skirmishes to Be Partners in Economic Growth?” This Is Money, March 31, 2017. https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article -4366212/Will-India-China-Pakistan-economic-partners.html. Parikh, Aparna. “Politics of Presence: Women’s Safety and Respectability at Night in Mumbai, India.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 25, no. 5 (2017): 695–710. Patel, Geeta. “Risky Subjects: Insurance, Sexuality, and Capital.” Social Text 24, no. 4 [89] (2006): 25–65. Pattanaik, Devdutt. Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You. New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2015. Patton, Cindy. Inventing AIDS. New York: Routledge, 1990. Pawar, Urmila. “What Has the Dalit Movement Offered to Women?” In At Cross-Roads: Dalit Movement Today, edited by Sandeep Pendse, 83–94. Mumbai: Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, 1994. Pink Escapes. http://pinkescapes.in/. Pink Vibgyor. http://www.pinkvibgyor.com/.

272

!"#$"%&'()*+

“PM Modi Warns of ‘Surgical Strikes’ against Black Money and Corruption.” The Times of India, October 22, 2016. https://timeso,ndia .indiatimes.com/india/PM-Modi-warns-of-surgical-strikes-against-black -money-and-corruption/articleshow/55001323.cms. Polgreen, Lydia. “Indian Who Built Yoga Empire Works on Politics.” New York Times, April 18, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/world /asia/19swami.html. “Police, Army Rampantly Use Rape as a Weapon: Arundhati Roy.” DNA India. http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-police-army-rampantly-use -rape-as-weapon-arundhati-roy-1783670. Povinelli, Elizabeth, and George Chauncey. “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally: An Introduction.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 4 (1999): 439–49. Prabhala, Achal. “The Year We Said Yes to Patient Rights but No to Gay Rights.” Mint, December 28, 2013. http://www.livemint.com/Leisure /bU4iPXTXQCtV2gHmSQo6LL/Legislation--The-year-we-said-yes-to -patient-rights-but-no.html. Prasa, Sanyal. “After Laxman Rekha Warning to Women, BJP Minister Withdraws Remark.” NDTV, January 4, 2013. https://www.ndtv .com/india-news/after-laxman-rekha-warning-to-women-bjp-minister -withdraws-remark-509388. Prasad, Leela. “Gatekeeping ‘The Subaltern’? A Response to Frank J. Korom’s Review of the Exhibition Live like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience.” Journal of American Folklore 114, no. 451 (Winter 2001): 73–75. ———. Live Like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience. Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 1999. “Proud to Be Gay.” The Times of India, July 22, 2018. https://timeso,ndia .indiatimes.com/home/sunday- times/proud- to- be- gay/articleshow /65088845.cms. Puar, Jasbir. “Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel, and Globalization.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, no. 1–2 (2002): 101–37. ———. “Disability.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2 (2014): 77–81. ———. “ ‘Homonationalism as Assemblage’: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities.” Jindal Global Review 4, no. 2 (2013): 23–43. ———. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Puri, Jyoti. “Genderqueer Perspectives: Sameness and Difference in Sections 375/6 and Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.” In Law Like

!"#$"%&'()*+

273

Love: Queer Perspectives on Law, edited by Arvind Narrain and Alok Gupta, 203–27. New Delhi: Yoda. ———. Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Purie, Aroon. “You Can Find Indians in the Most Unlikely Places.” India Today, January 13, 2003. https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/editor-s -note/story/20030113-editor- in-chief-aroon-purie-on- global- indians -793658-2003-01-13. Queer Hindu Alliance. Twitter post, August 5, 2019, 12:37 a.m. https:// twitter.com/QueerHA/status/1158280775663595520. Queer Muslim Project. “Collective Statement by the Queer Muslim Project on Abrogation of Article 370.” August 8, 2019. http://orinam.net /statement-tqmp-art370/. Raghavan, TCA Sharad. “India on Top in Exporting Beef.” The Hindu, August 10, 2015. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-on-top -in-exporting-beef/article7519487.ece. Ramberg, Lucinda. “Backward Futures and Pasts Forward: Queer Time, Sexual Politics, and Dalit Religiosity in South India.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, special issue, “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” edited by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel, vol. 22, no. 2 (2016): 223–48. Rana, Junaid. Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Rawat, Ramnarayan S., and K. Satyanarayana, eds. Dalit Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Reddy, Chandan. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality and the US State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Regde, Sharmila. Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Reading Dalit Women’s Testimonies. New Delhi: Government of India, 2007. “Rejecting Patents on Chemical Derivatives Is Tantamount to ‘Fatwa’ on Innovation: Novartis.” The Hindu, February 17, 2007. http://www .thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/rejecting-patents-on-chemical -derivatives-is-tantamount-to-quotfatwaquot-on-innovation-novartis /article1798210.ece. Roberts, Adam. Superfast Primetime Ultimate Nation: The Relentless Invention of Modern India. New York: Public Affairs, 2017. Rodrigues, Valerian. “Untouchability, Filth, and the Public Domain.” In Humiliation: Claims and Context, edited by Gopal Guru, 108–23. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

274

!"#$"%&'()*+

Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Roth, Thomas, and Michael Luongo. “A Place for Us 2001: Tourism Industry Opportunities in the Gay and Lesbian Market: An Interview with Thomas Roth of Community Marketing.” In Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity and Sex, edited by Stephen Clift, Michael Luongo, and Carry Callister. London: Continuum, 2002. Roy, Ananya. “Conclusion: Postcolonial Urbanism.” In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 307–35. New Jersey: Blackwell, 2002. Roy, Ananya, and Aihwa Ong, eds. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Roy, Arundhati. “Police, Army Rampantly Use Rape as a Weapon.” DNA India, December 31, 2012. https://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-poli ce-army-rampantly-use-rape-as-weapon-arundhati-roy-1783670. ———. “My Seditious Heart: An Un,nished Diary of Nowadays.” Caravan, April 30, 2016. https://caravanmagazine.in/essay/seditious-heart -arundhati-roy. Roy, Sandip. “India’s Battle for Same-Sex Love.” New York Times, July 17, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/opinion/india-same-sex-love.html. Roychowdhury, Poulami. “The Delhi Gang Rape: The Making of International Causes.” Feminist Studies 39, no. 1 (2013): 282–92. Sampath, Rajesh. “India Has Outlawed Homosexuality. But It’s Better to Be Transgender There Than in the U.S.” Washington Post, January 29, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01 /29/india-has-outlawed-homosexuality-but-its-better-to-be-transgender -there-than-in-the-u-s/?utm_term=.60791c46fb3f. Sangari, Kumkum, and Sudesh Vaid. Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial Indian History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Sanyal, Pathikrit. “While India Celebrates Partial Strikedown of Section 377, Pakistan Continues to Suffer.” Daily O, September 10, 2018. https://www.dailyo.in/variety/section-377-gay-rights-trans-rights -pak istan- homosexuality- lgbtqia- transphobia- khyber- pakhtunkhwa/story /1/26568.html. Sarkar, Radha, and Amar Sarkar. “Sacred Slaughter: An Analysis of Historical, Communal, and Constitutional Aspects of Beef Bans in India.” Politics, Religion & Ideology 4, no. 17 (2016): 329–51. Sarkar, Sumit. “Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva.” In Making India Hindu, edited by David Ludden, 270–93. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.

!"#$"%&'()*+

275

Sarkar, Tanika. “Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu Rashtra.” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 28 (2002): 2872–76. Sarukkai, Sundar. “Phenomenology of Untouchability.” In The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory, edited by Sundar Sarukkai and Gopal Guru, 157–99. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: New Press, 1999. Scott, C. James, John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias. “The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 1 (2002): 4–44. Scott, Joan. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–97. Shah, P. Svati. “Sedition, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Identity in South Asia.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ), special issue on “Sedition, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Identity in South Asia,” edited by Svati Shah, no. 20 (2019). Shahani, Nishant, “Queer Intimacy during Seditious Times: Revisiting the Case of Ramchandra Siras.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ), special issue on “Sedition, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Identity in South Asia,” edited by Svati Shah, no. 20 (2019). Shaikh, Juned. “Translating Marx: Mavali, Dalit, and the Making of Mumbai’s Working Class, 1928–1935.” Economic & Political Weekly 46, no. 31 (July 30, 2011). Shaikh, Nermeen. “Interview with Joseph Stiglitz.” In The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Global Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Shandilya, Krupa. “Nirbhaya’s Body: The Politics of Protest in the Aftermath of the 2012 Delhi Gang Rape.” Gender & History 27, no. 2 (2015): 465–86. Sharma, Amol, and Krishna Pokharel. “In Delhi Slum, Tales of the Rape Suspects.” Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2012. https://blogs.wsj.com /indiarealtime/2012/12/29/in-delhi-slum-tales-of-the-rape-suspects/. Sheela, Raval. “If You Allow Fire, Then Allow Nathuram Godse Also: Bal Thackeray.” India Today, December 21, 1998. https://www.indiatoday .in/magazine/interview/story/19981221-if-you-allow-,re-then-allow-nat huram-godse-also-bal-thackeray-827560-1998-12-21. Shiva, Vandana. “The Suicide Economy of Corporate Globalisation.” Countercurrents, April 5, 2004. http://www.countercurrents.org/glo -shiva050404.htm.

276

!"#$"%&'()*+

———. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. Shukla, Tarun. “Regulator Pulls up Delhi Airport for High Cost of Makeover.” Livemint, April 25, 2011. http://www.livemint.com/Home-Page /fcxrE2X9TkPA9qbSMGLFfN/Regulator- pulls- up- Delhi- airport- for -high-cost-of-makeover.html. Sircar, Oishik. “Spectacles of Emancipation: Reading Rights Differently in India’s Legal Discourse.” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 49, no. 3 (2012): 527–73. Skuy, David. “Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862.” Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 3 (1998): 513–57. Spade, Dean. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In The Postcolonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grif,ths, and Helen Tif,n, 28–37. Routledge, 2006. ———. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. “Translator’s Preface” to Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida, i− lxxxix. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ———. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 2008. Srivastava, Sanjay. Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class, and Consumption. New Delhi: Routledge, 2007. State of Gujarat v. Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab Jamat, 2005. https:// archive.org/stream/SC_judgement_on_cow_slaughtering_2005_india /Supreme%20Court%20Judgement%20on%20GOHATYA_djvu.txt. Sud, Nikita. Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism, and the State: A Biography of Gujarat. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. “Supreme Court Strikes Down Law Criminalizing Homosexuality.” The Hindu, September 26, 2018. https://www.thehindubusinessline.com /news/national/homosexuality-decriminalised/article24879339.ece. “Swadeshi 2.0 Can Reboot Economy.” The Economic Times, February 13, 2009. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation /swadeshi-2-0-can-reboot-economy-advani/articleshow/4121228.cms. Tellis, Ashley, and Sruti Bala. The Global Trajectories of Queerness: ReThinking Same-Sex Politics in the Global South. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015. Tharoor, Shashi. “Overcoming India’s Of,cial Homophobia.” Project Syndicate, April 11, 2016. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary /overcoming-india-s-official-homophobia-by-shashi-tharoor-2016-04 ?barrier=accesspaylog.

!"#$"%&'()*+

277

Thomas, Catherine. “The Role of Ayurvedic Therapies for HIV/AIDS Care: A Comprehensive Review of the Literature.” Journal of Global Health Perspectives, Edition 1, 1–13 (2012). http://jglobalhealth.org/article/the -role-of-ayurvedic-therapies-for-hivaids-care-a-comprehensive-review-of -the-literature-2/. “Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) 2016 Bill—Responses from Sampoorna WG and Other Trans & Intersex Communities.” Sampoorna (blog). http://sampoornawg.wixsite.com/sampoorna/single-post/2017/01 /18/Transgender-Persons-Protection-of-Rights-2016-Bill—-Responses -From-Sampoorna-WG-and-other-Trans-Intersex-Communities. Tripathi, Vikas, Tamasa Das, and Sandhya Goswami. “National Narrative and Regional Subtext: Understanding the Rise of the BJP in Assam.” Studies in Indian Politics 6, no. 1 (2018): 60–70. Vanaik, Achin. The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism: Secular Claims, Communal Realities. London: Verso, 2017. Van Hollen, Cecilia. “Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Politics of ‘Traditional’ Indian Medicine for HIV/AIDS.” In Asian Medicine and Globalization, edited by Joseph Alter, 88–106. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Varadarajan, Latha. The Domestic Abroad: Diasporas in International Relations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Venkatesh, H. R. “Narasimha Rao & Manmohan Singh Best Described as a Jugalbandi.” The Quint, January 9, 2015. https://www.thequint.com /news/business/narasimha-rao-and-manmohan-singh-best-described-as -a-jugalbandi. Wakankar, Milind. “Topics of the New Dalit Critique.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 33, no. 3 (2013): 403–8. White House Of,ce of the Press Secretary. “U.S.-India Joint Statement.” 2014. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-of,ce/2014/09/30/us-india -joint-statement. World Trade Organization. “Declaration on the Trips Agreement and Public Health.” 2001. https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/minist_e/min01 _e/mindecl_trips_e.htm. “Yoga Can Treat Homosexuality, Says Baba Ramdev.” Rediff.com. http:// news.rediff.com/report/2009/jul/07/yoga-can-treat-homosexuality-says -baba-ramdev.htm. “Yoga Helped Many Accept Their Sexual Orientation.” Rediff.com, July 10, 2009. https://www.rediff.com/news/2009/jul/10yoga-helped-many-acce pt-their-sexual-orientation.htm.

!"#

%$Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations. Aadhaar Act on biometric data, 74–77 A Better India website, 72 ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Viddyathi Parishad), 99, 121–26, 251n79 ACT UP, 14–15, 178 Adityanath, Yogi, 124 Advani, L.K., 59–60 aesthetics, safety and, 87–93 Agnes, Flavia, 22, 65, 67–68 Ahmad, Aijaz, 61 AIDS activism: and gay visibility, 16; in U.S., 14–15; and Novartis protests, 24, 31–32, 147; organizations in, 155, 161–62, 174–82, 253n26; and queer politics, 175–82, 253n26, 254n41 AIDS Research Foundation India, 162 Aizura, Aren, 35–36 Akbar, Prayaag, 140 Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha organization, 99 Akhlaq, Mohammed, lynching of, 8, 9, 10 Aligarh (Mehta): homoeroticism in, 137–39; Irfan character in, 135–38; and politics of touch, 30, 120, 134– 42; Siras case depicted in, 115–18, 135–38, 140–42, 236n5, 247n23 Aligarh Muslim University: in Aligarh &lm, 116–18; Siras and, 116–17, 30, 126, 132 Allahabad High Court, 117 All Assam Transgender Association, 76 All India Bakchod comedy group, 221 Almitra Patel vs. Union of India, 86–87 Alter, Joseph, 167 Amana (All Manipur Nupi Maanbi Association), 76 Ambedkar, B. R., 122 Ambedkar Students Association (ASA), 121–26, 140, 142 Amer Fort, 93

American Hindu Education Foundation, 127 Amin, Kadji, 13–15 analogous thinking: and homoeroticism, 138–39; and triangulation, 33; and untouchability, 128–31; and violence, 133–34 anti-Muslim activities: around Babri Masjid, 51, 52, 238n19; around cow protection, 7–11, 38–40, 140, 205; Hindu women taking part in, 22–23; and “love jihad,” 40–42, 99; rape as, 104–5, 238n19 “anti-Romeo squads,” 104 Appadurai, Arjan, 152 Ardhanarishvara, half-male god and half-female goddess, 208 Arondekar, Anjali: on the archival, 133, 195–96; and difference, 66; on “ethnographic salaciousness,” 66; on geopolitics, 18; and protoqueerness, 26–27, 64–65; and queer epistemology, 13, 24; on queer methodology, 19; on the subject, 65 ART (anti-retroviral therapies), 154–55, 155–56, 161, 168–69, 174 Article 51A of Indian Constitution on animal slaughter, 10 Article 370 of Indian Constitution on Jammu and Kashmir: effect on queer rights, 3–6, 227n1; and Section 377, 4–5 Art of Living Foundation, 167 ASEAN countries, 222 Asrani, Apurva, 117–18, 136 Astha TV, 172 Athique, Adrian, 106 authenticity: of Indian queers, 27; and “Indian soul,” 59–60; orientalist, 127–28; and sovereignty, 160–61; and Vemula case, 134–35 Ayurvedic College, 171–72

279

280 Ayurvedic principles: health and lifestyle products based in, 64, 147–49, 160, 162–70, 172–75; nativist reference to, 62–63 AZT therapies, 154 Babri Masjid, destruction of, 51, 52, 238n19 Babu, D. Shyam, 35 Bacchetta, Paola, 56–57 “Bahu Betiyo ki Izzat Bachao” (Save the Dignity of Daughters-in-Law and Daughters) campaign, 40 Bajrang Dal organization, 38, 40, 99 Bala, Sruti, 218 Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 190 Banerjee, Sikata, 55 Banerjee, Subhabrata Bobby, 9, 228n9 baniya merchant community, 191 Bano, Shah, legal case brought by, 23, 233n50 banyan tree trope, 189–96, 209, 256n13 Bataille, Georges: on the gift, 199–200 Baviskar, Amita: on bourgeois environmentalism, 86–87 beef: ban on, 38–40; export by India, 10–11, 16; and lust, 40 Berlant, Lauren, 217 “Beti Bachao Andolan” (Campaign to Save Daughters), 40 Bhagwat, Mohan, 104 Bhan, Gautam, 75 Bharatiya hum bhi hain (We Are Indian too) video, 69–72 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP): in Assam, 53; and beef controversies, 10, 38; and diaspora, 196–97; educational campaigns by, 127–28; emergence and liberalizing reforms of, 27, 46, 50–53; grassroots organizations in, 98–99; Modi and, 4, 70, 74; in National Democratic Alliance, 10; nationalism of, 5, 50; and nuclear tests, 57; patent policy of, 159; and swadeshi, 59–61; and Thapar removal, 204; Vajpayee and, 52, 196–97 Bharosa Trust, 176, 177 Binnie, Jon, 83 biopolitical, the: and chances at life, 147, 153–55; and cow vigilantism, 9–10; and drug patents, 176; and “love jihad,” 40–42; and poverty, 153; and state-making, 73

("#$% bioprospecting of natural remedies, 160 Biswas, Shampa: on BJP, 60; on desire for modernity, 59, 98–99; on saffronization, 62 Black Lives Matter, 91 Bode, Martin, 169 bodies: Dalit, 30; “foreign,” 32; of hijras, 71; HIV-positive, 36, 175; LGBT/queer, see queer bodies; lower-caste, 119, 125; and mind, 133; transgender, 73, 76–77; transnational 'ows of, 109–10 Bollywood, 64, 117 Brahmanical ideology: on Dalit body, 30; on food purity, 114, 138–41; and hegemony, 65; and Hindutva, 126, 40; on untouchability, 110, 119 Brahmin people: and food purity, 138– 39; gay, 111; and marriage, 110–11; and sex, 141 Brandeis, Louis, 74 Brandzel, Amy, 72 Business Today, 54–55 Butler, Judith: on dispossession, 115, 248n36; on epistemological touching, 109, 113, 115, 132 Calvin Klein brand, 106 capitalism, global: and analogy, 129; bionecro nexus in, 178; communalist violence in, 8, 9, 10; and deferred access to medicine, 147; and disciplinary domestic formations, 12, 16; and economic changes of 1991, 47–48; “late effects” in, 151–52, 159–60; North America in, 19–20; and precarity, 32; and sexuality, 36–37; transnational 'ows of bodies in, 109–10 caste: and access to treatment, 181– 82; and body, 125; as constitutive absence, 139–40; and food, 114, 138–41, 250n69; and mobility, 35, 235n71; “queer” undone by, 131–32; as rei&ed identity category, 128–31; and sex, 113–14; as term, 139; and touch, 110–15, 131–34; in U.K. textbook, 204–7 “Caste Lives On, and On” (Akbar), 140 caste politics: and cow slaughter, 7–9; pan-Hindu identity in, 202–3; and queer touch, 131–34; and sexual violence against women, 104–5; student movements in, 120–28; and

("#$% trans rights, 76; triangulated with privacy and queer politics, 31, 35; and untouchability, 30, 110–12; and “women’s issues,” 22–23 Cazdyn, Eric: on analogy, 129; on crisis and disaster, 48–50; on globalization, 171; on HIV/AIDS, 155, 180; on temporality of illness, 156–57 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 119–20 Chakraborty, Chandrima, 164, 173 “Chalein Saath Saath” (“Let’s Walk Together”) slogan, 158 Chen, Mel, 13 Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, 11 China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), 222–23 Chow, Rey, 188–89, 194–95 CISF (Central Industrial Security Force), 87 citizenship: Brandzel on, 72; and corporate personhood, 157; and diaspora, 198, 200–201, 204, 206, 209; 'exible, 32, 71, 83, 152, 158– 59, 187, 189, 192, 200–201, 209, 211, 222; and homonationalism, 19; marginalized, 69; mobile, 26, 70, 206, 211; moral, 128; national, 17, 229–31n31; of non-resident Indians, 201; normative, 64; predicated on violence, 72; queer, 143; sexual, see sexual citizenship; transgender rights and, 76–77 Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2003, 201 class: and access to treatment, 181–82; and diaspora, 192–93; and legal protection, 149; and mobility, 35, 235n71; and sexual violence against women, 104–5 colonization: and emasculation, 55–56; labor under, 142; and modes of apparent redress, 225–26 Commonwealth Games, 87 communalism: in Hindutva, 55; rise of, 51; and prosperity, 157–58; and targeting of beef traders, 38–39; violence of, 8–10, 104–5, 120 Communist Party of India, 124, 180, 200 Congress Party, 46, 59 Contractor, Qudsiya, 38 Copeman, Jacob: on “guru governmentality,” 166

281 cow vigilantism and lynching, 7–11, 38– 40, 140, 205 CPAA (Cancer Patients AID Association), 176 Cracked Mirror, The (Guru), 30–31 crisis: as constitutive of neoliberalism, 47–50; vs. disaster, 48–50; and modernity, 200–201; as “revolution,” 45–46; and scripts of analogy, 129 DAC (Department of AIDS Control), 154–55 Da Costa, Dia, 36–37 Daily O, 220 Dalit/caste studies: private/public distinctions in, 30–31, 111, 112; rei&ed identity categories and, 128– 31; and sexual politics, 111–15 Dalit people: “deceiving” state to get bene&ts, 76; mobility of, 35–36; and Muslims, 137; and untouchability, 110; Vemula case and, 30, 76, 120– 21, 134–35, 142, 249n38; women as, 113–14, 140 Dalit politics: cow vigilantism in, 8; mobility and privacy in, 35–36; and queer politics, 112, 246n3; student movements in, 120–26, 251n79; suspicion in, 76; touch and, 112– 15; untouchability practice and, 110; Vemula case in, 120–21, 142, 249n38 Dalit theory: Dalit body in, 30–31; queer subject in, 111–12 Das, Gurcharan: on con'ation of revolution with reform, 47, 49, 50 Das, Tamasa, 53 DasGupta, Debanuj, 179–80 Dave, Naisargi: on emergence of queer politics in India, 16, 25–26; on immunology, 179 De, Rohit, 37–38 death: through AIDS, 178–82; disavowals around, 145; due to drug patents, 30–31, 145, 153–54, 159–60, 176–82; and non-Western modernities, 153–54; politics of, 178–82; and recovery, 133, 250n61 Deccan Herald, 100 delay, mechanisms of: and access to health care, 31, 147, 153–55, 164– 65, 174–75, 178–82; and Supreme Court victory, 221–22, 252n9

282 Delhi: aesthetics of safety in, 88–93; Commonwealth Games in, 87; gay tourism in, 82, 85–96, 106, 236n5; as “rape capital,” 34, 100–108; slum clearance in, 86–87, 88; worlding in, 82–83, 85–88 Delhi Development Authority (DDA), 86 Delhi Gurgaon Expressway, 87 Delhi High Court: decision on Section 377, 68, 80, 135, 147–48, 176, 219, 247n22; on slum removal, 86 Delhi Network of Positive People, 155, 176 Department of Indian Systems of Medicine and Homeopathy, 163 Derrida, Jacques: on writing under erasure, 214–16 diasporas: banyan tree trope and, 189–96, 209; and economic reforms after 1991, 196–200; familial connections in, 185–89, 201–2; 'exible model of, 190–91; “generative” and “generational” linkages in, 189–99; and global capitalism, 187; and Hindutva, 32–33, 53, 189–203; “homelands” in, 195–96; Indian American community in, 190–96, 202–3; “long-distance nationalism” in 186–89; and mobility, 183, 208–11; politics of, 151–55, 189–203; queer, see queer diasporas; representation in, 194–95; remittance payments due to, 198–203; and speed, 183–86; subject in, 187, 208–11, 255–56n1; in United Kingdom, 204–7 difference: New Age fantasies of, 127– 28; in queer method, 15 “Digital India” initiative, 74, 130–31, 249n54 Dikshit, Sheila, 101–2 disability, “removal” of, 131 disaster as “revolution,” 48–50 discrimination: based on caste, 121– 23, 132, 232n42, 248n30; and gay tourism, 80, 81; language of, 140, 142–43; legislation against, 202; and privacy, 74, 75 diversity, dominance in, 128–31 Diwali iconography in gay tourism marketing, 97–98, 100 Doha Declaration, 156 Duggan, Lisa, 61

("#$% East India Comedy group, 217 economic development, hierarchical relations in, 44–45 economic “revolution” of 1991, 27–28, 43, 46–51, 66, 196–200, 237nn7–8 Economic Times, 80 Empowering Trans Ability, 76 Eng, David: on public vs. private domain, 118; on racialization of intimacy, 139–43 environmentalism, domination through, 86–87 epistemologies: queer, 6, 12–17, 25; and sexual economies, 66–67; of touch, 33, 112–15 Erotic Justice (Kapur), 67 ethnography: of Delhi police, 141; of identity and experience, 24–25; “salaciousness” in, 66 exceptionalism: and analogy, 129; and casteism, 112; diasporic, 209; Indian, 59–60, 71, 259n19; sexual, of U.S., 95, 103–4 experience: diasporic, 193–95, 202, 24, 207, 210; and gay tourism, 85, 89, 93, 97, 100; rei&cation of, 24–25; and the subject, 21–22; of temporal lag, 214, 215; and touch, 113, 114– 15; of violence, 82, 244n29 Facebook: India as market for, 54–55, 58, 60; in protests, 122; in Siras and Vemula accusations, 134 Faiz, Faiz Ahmad, 3, 4, 6, 216 family: and citizenship, 64; in diaspora, 185–89, 201–2; “values” of, 63 Faroqui, Vimla, 180 Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce, 60 feminism: and “Indianness,” 65; and law, 67–68; leftists on, 104–5; pseudo-, in Hindutva, 55, 57–58; and public/private distinction, 118; and queer tourism, 79, 83; and risk, 102; sex-positive, 14 feminist politics: around access to HIV medication, 179; across communities, 23, 251n79; around marital rape, 118; around Section 377, 219 feminist theory: and “genderqueer” lens, 219; on generative/generational logics, 190; on legal protection of women, 67–68; and queer theory, 22–24

("#$% &guration, language of, 46–50 Fire (Mehta), 42, 51, 57–58, 104, 228n15, 229n25 Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Ong), 187 Ford Foundation, 86 Foreign Regulation Act of 1971, relaxation of, 199–200 Foucault, Michel: on “apparatuses of security,” 74; and “guru governmentality,” 166; Puar on, 17– 18; on taboos around touch, 113–14 Frankel, Francine R., 44 futurity: and insurance, 39; national, 190–96; reproductive, 40–41 Gandhi, Indira, assassination of, 45 Gandhi, Mahatma: on medicine, 164– 65, 169; swadeshi movement led by, 10–11, 59 Gautier, Francois, 126–27 “gay mecca” phrase, 85 gay tourism: companies serving, 80; and the exotic, 93–96; and gay wedding market, 94–95; inclusion in economy, 145, 222; as metropolitan worlding in Delhi, 82, 85–96, 102, 106; in Muslim countries, 84–85; and pink revolutions, 29–30, 31; and safety, 34, 81, 83–84, 88– 93, 236n5, 243n15; and Section 377, 79–80, 90, 108; and sexual violence against women, 83, 101–8; “tradition” vs. “modernity” in, 96– 100, 105–6 Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity and Sex (Clift, Luongo, and Callister, eds.), 83–84 GCSE (General Certi&cate of Secondary Education), United Kingdom, 204 Geary, David, 96–97 Geetha, V., 114 gender: and alterity, 6; and caste, 111; cis-, 173; con'ated with sex, 76; and morality, 35; third, legal recognition of, 75, 230n31; transgression in, 184; and varied experience of queer subjects, 21, 232n43 “genderqueer” lens, 219 genealogies: of attachment, 14–15, 203–4; diaspora’s attachment to, 203; of economic changes after 1991, 28, 51; entangled, 33; of heteronormativity, 185; of Hindutva,

283 51–52, 127; of pink revolutions, 11; queer, 208; of queer theory, 25 generative/generational thinking: and diaspora, 189–96, 198; in feminist theory, 190; and triangulation, 33 GFATM (Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria), 161 ghazal literary form, 63 Ghertner, D. Asher: on aesthetic governmentality, 88, 90 Ghosh, Tapan, 99 Gleevec anti, -cancer drug, 157 globalization: and analogy, 129–30; disconnection generated by, 211; and economic changes of 1991, 47–48, 50–51; and fetishization of speed, 31; and 'exibility, 100; and fundamentalism, 16–17; and identity, 62–63; “late effects” of, 151–52; Modi and, 10, 50–51; and Novartis, 155–57; regionalism in, 20–21; and sovereignty, 63; and touch, 109–10, 115; triangulated with AIDS and queerness, 171–82; triangulated with queer politics and Hindutva, 5–6, 11–12, 15–17, 28, 33–34, 41–43, 58–61, 66, 213–26; triangulated with sexual politics and national identity, 32, 185–86; “unbundling” of territoriality by, 16, 63, 229n28; and worlding, 2, 29– 30, 81–82 Godhra incident, 51, 238n19 Godrej India Culture Lab, 223–24 Golwalkar, M.S.: on masculinity, 55–57 Gopinath, Gayatri, 57, 186–87, 203, 205–6, 228n15, 239n32 Goswami, Sandhya: on BJP in Assam, 53 governmentality: aesthetic, 88, 90; and chances at life, 147, 153–55, 251n1; “guru,” 166 Grass Under My Feet (Siras), 135 Greater Kailash neighborhood, 88–89, 90–91 “Great Hindu Revolution of Narendra Modi, The” (Gautier), 126–27 Green Revolution, 7, 44, 236n5 Grewal, Inderpal, 159–60 Grover, Anand, 178 Guardian, the, 102 Gupta, Akhil, 153 Gupta, Charu: on anti-Muslim politics, 38–42

284 Gupta, Indrajit, 200 Gupto, Sorit, 219 Guru, Gopal: on private/public distinctions, 30–31; on the state, 213 Hajratwala, Minal: on diaspora, 183–86, 189, 190; on Hinduism, 207–11 Hall, Stuart: on dominance in diversity, 128–31; on global capitalism, 16–17 Hanhardt, Christina: on safety, 91; on violence, 107–8 Hansen, Thomas Blom, 533 Hartman, Saidiya, 112–13, 133–34 Harvard Law Review, 74 “Haunted by the 1990s” (Amin), 13–15 “Here’s Looking at You, India: Why Sheryl Sandberg Continues Her Love Affair in India” (Sen), 54–55 hermeneutics: of paradox, 52–53; queer, 6, 14, 15; of representation, 24 Hill, Douglas, 106 hijras (gender non-conforming people): government recognition of and bene&ts for, 69; mobile citizenship of, 70–72; protests against Novartis by, 24, 31–32, 149, 180; and Section 377, 69, 141, 223; and sex work, 72–73, 92; stigmatization of, 72–73; and varied experience of queer subjects, 21, 232n43 “Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor, The” (Chakraborty), 173 Hindu Code bills of 1950s, 67–68 Hindu fundamentalism. See Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) Hinduism for Schools (Lakhani), 204–7 Hindu religion: in diaspora, 192– 93, 201–2, 204–7; elements in gay tourism marketing, 97–98; Hajratwala on, 207–11; health practices and, 32, 148, 162–70, 172–75; LGBT people and ethical framework of, 206–8; nativist reference to traditions of, 62– 63, 104, 228n14; queerness in traditions of, 64–65, 71, 90 Hindu Right. See Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) Hindu Samhati organization, 99 Hindutva (Hindu nationalism): “alternative” treatments for HIV/ AIDS promoted under, 32; Brahmanical ideology in, 140–41;

("#$% casteism in, 112–13; and cow protection, 7–12; and diaspora, 32–33, 53, 189–211; emergence in neoliberal “revolution,” 50–53, 58–61; 'exibility/elasticity of, 33, 36, 51–55, 57–58, 99–100, 130–31, 201–3; and gay tourism, 98–99; “generative” and “generational” linkages in, 189–90; ghar vapasi (returning back home) message of, 41; history and, 126–28, 204; masculinity in, 55–57; and “nationalist drag,” 225–26; and new swadeshi, 10–11; personhood under, 37, 39; and “queer,” 203–11; queerphobic politics of, 53–58, 180, 206; sedition and, 125–26; as term, 228n22; triangulated with queer bodies and speed, 31, 36, 146–49; triangulated with queer politics and globalization, 5–6, 11–12, 15–17, 28, 33–34, 41–43, 58–61, 66, 213– 26; and Vemula protests, 120–26; violence of, 51–52; women under, 22–24, 55, 104–5 Hindu Yuva Vahini organization, 99 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 17–18 HIV/AIDS: “alternative” treatments for, 32, 149, 162–70, 172–75, 182; and condom distribution, 177; delay in access to medicines for, 31–32, 36, 145–62, 175–82; and gay visibility, 16; and “modern things,” 170–75; and Section 377, 170, 175–82; “third way” treatments for, 168–69; and unequal life chances, 153–55, 162 HIV Positive People’s Welfare Society, 174–75 Hoad, Neville, 25 “Holi Colors Draw Foreign Tourists to India” (Deccan Herald), 100 holi festivals, 100 “homelands,” return to, 195–96 homoeroticism: in Aligarh, 137–39; in Indian art, 89 homonationalism: and gay racism, 18; Puar on, 17–19, 95–96, 230n31, 231n32, 244n28; in queer politics, 91; in queer theory, 14, 17–21, 231n37; as term, 17; in U.S., 95 homonormativity: in queer politics, 91; in queer theory, 14, 244n28; in tourism, 94

("#$% homophobia: alliances of right and left through, 180; &nancial costs of, 79–80; in Hindutva, 53–58, 180; and “safe zones,” 80–81; statesponsored, 92 homosexuality: criminalization of, 80– 81, 91, 135, 227n1; “cures” for, 32, 172–74; decriminalization of, 33, 118, 135, 213, 247n22; in ethical frameworks of Hinduism, 205– 6; treated as disease, 147–49; as Western import, 96, 104 “How the Indian Dream Died with the Delhi Gang Rape Victim” (Kalita), 105 Hughes, Howard, 83–84 Human Resource Development Ministry, 134–35 Humsafar Trust, 69, 162 hyperconnectivity: and globalization, 110; logics of, 54, 60; and modernity, 29; narratives of, 47–48, 246n3 #IAmNotAHijra photo campaign, 72–72 identity: de-animated queerness as, 13; ethnography on, 24–25; Hindu, 51–57, 202–3; Indian, 51, 59–60, 62–63, 183–84; lesbian, 183–84; national, 32, 177; rei&ed categories of, 128–31; sexual, 177–78; transgender, 75–76; and visibility, 11–12 Ikegame, Aya: on “guru governmentality,” 166 Immoral Traf&c Prevention Act, 92 “Immuno QR” tablet, 174–75 Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Gopinath), 186–87 “Incredible India” campaign, 96–97 India: accelerated growth of, 150– 53, 214–15; aspirations to global modernity, 11–12, 21–22, 54–57, 83; beef export by, 10–11, 16; British rule in, 11, 155, 164, 178, 183, 224–25; de&ned as Hindu, 156; drug industry in, 155–57; educational reform in, 127–28; exceptionalism of, 59–60; as gay wedding destination, 94–95; history of, 126–28, 204; idea of “revolution” in, 47; as market for Facebook, 54–55; participation in “modern

285 things,” 171–75, 180; queerness in traditions of, 26–27, 64–65, 90, 208; remittance payments of emigrants from, 198–203; as “shining,” 12, 34; state violence in, 142–43; worlding ambitions of, 5–6, 93–94, 96–97 India: The Emerging Giant (Panagariya), 47 Indian American community, 190–96, 202–3, 257n27 Indian Army, rape by, 105–6, 245n56 Indian Constitution: Article 370, 3–4; and BJP, 4; depicted in cartoon, 218; right to equality in, 68; transgender rights in, 69, 73–74 Indian Council of Historical Research, 204 Indian Express (Lak), 47 “Indianisation, Nationalisation, and Spritualisation” campaigns, 127 “Indianness,” 62, 65, 96–99, 207–11 Indian Network for People Living with HIV/AIDS, 174–75 Indian Parliament, 74, 75, 79, 101, 123, 229n25, 249n40 Indian Patents Act of 1970, 147, 155–57 Indian Patents and Designs Act of 1911, 155 “India’s Battle for Same-Sex Love” (Roy), 221–22 India’s Daughter (Udwin), 102, 103 “India Shining” campaign, 157–58 India Today, 209 India Unbound (Das), 47, 49, 50 Indira Gandhi International Airport, 87 Indjapink, 29, 80, 93–98, 100 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 48–49, 153, 160, 197 intersectionality: analogy vs., 128–29; rhetoric of, 111 intimacy: in Aligarh 135–38; and law, 217–18; racialization of, 139–43; regulation of, 113–15; and touch, 118–22 Iyer, Harish, 110–11 Iyer, Padma, 110 Jaffelot, Christophe, 202 Jammu and Kashmir: and CPEC, 222; queer rights in, 4–5; selfdetermination of, 123, 124, 225 jati (endogamy), 140

286 Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), 123–26 JNU Student Union, 124 Joseph, Miranda: on analogous thinking, 129, 133 jugalbandi (gift exchange), 199–200 Kalita, S. Mitra, 105 Kamakhya tradition, 53 Kama Sutra, the, 162 Kamat, Sangeeta, 128 Kapaleeshwarar temple, 97 Kaplan, Caren, 159–60 Kapur, Ratna: on disempowered subject, 22, 23; on feminist justice, 67, 68; on Hindu Right, 55 KFC brand, 106 Khanna, Akshay, 15 Khehar, Jagdish, 74 Kidwai, Saleem: on queer literary tradition, 64–65 Kishor, Raj, 104–5 Kohinoor diamond, 9 Korom, Frank J.: on diaspora, 192–95 kothi identity, 21, 232n43, 241n64 Koushal vs. Naz Foundation ruling, 69, 175–78, 247n22 Krishna, Lord, gender 'uidity of, 71, 90 Krishna and His Sakhas, painting, 90 Krishnan, Kavita, 103 Kumar, Kanhaiya, 124 labor: of colonized subjects, 142; 'exibility of, 35, 193–94; and growth triangles, 222; and migration, 192–94 Lak, Daniel, 47 Lakhani, Seeta, 204–7 late effects: of illness, 145–82; and medicine, 154–55, 164–65, 174– 75; and politics of delay, 151–55, 178–82; of sexual economies, 31; theorization of 151–52, 252n9; and triangulation, 33 law: on animal slaughter, 10; British colonial, 178, 223–24, 259n19; criminalizing “unnatural sexual activity,” 4, 33, 67–68, 70–71, 80, 135, 140, 147–48, 175–82, 213–26; on gifts, 199–200; and intimacy, 217–18; limits of regarding LGBT rights, 149–50, 225–26, 259n19; and patents on HIV/AIDS medicine,

("#$% 147, 155–62, 175–82; on sexuality, 91–93; and sexual violence against women, 23, 75, 107–8, 118, 219, 233n50 Lawyers Collective, 155, 176, 178 Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (Hajratwala): diaspora in, 183–86, 189, 190; family-tree metaphors in, 183; Hinduism in, 207–11 lesbians: as “alien” to Hinduism, 57; in Fire, 51, 229n5; identity as, 183– 84, 232n40; and language of state protection, 107; and representation, 57; as subject, 14; “respectable,” 223; and tourism industry, 80, 83, 84; and tradition, 209 LGBT politics. See queer politics liberalization, economic: and city planning, 86; and diaspora, 196– 200; globalism vs. nationalism in, 54, 58–61, 65–66; and HIV/ AIDS, 157–62, 178–82; and LGBT visibility, 26, 27; and queer tourism, 95, 98; as “revolution,” 45–50 Liu, Petrus: on queer theory, 14, 25 life: of cow, 172; and futurity, 191; queer, 145–47; politics of, 178–82; preservation of, 172–73; unequal distribution of chances at, 153–55, 162 Live Like the Banyan Tree (Prasad), 190–96 Live Like the Banyan Tree exhibition, 190–96, 205 local, the: and economic/political agendas, 5–6; and export trade, 10; and foreign markets, 58–61; as force of resistance, 20; and global capitalism, 16–17, 26, 158–59, 174, 178–82; and globalization, 26, 62, 65–66, 100, 234n61, 253n19; market for, 64; and nativism, 62–63; and traditions, 5–6 “Local and the Global, The” (Hall), 16–17 Loomba, Ania, 22, 24 Ludden, David, 57–58 Lukose, Ritty A., 22 Luongo, Michael, 84, 85 Madras High Court, and Novartis, 147 Mahabharata, the, 71 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 167

("#$% Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism and Nationalism in India (Banerjee), 55 Mandal, Bhoop Narain, 174–75 Mandal Commission, 120, 2n3048 Mangeshkar, Lata, 117 Manjul (cartoonist), 217, 218 marriage, gay: caste and, 110–11, 128– 29; exclusion of Indian people from, 94; India as destination for, 94–95 Mathias, Jeremy: on state-making, 73 Mazumdar, Sucheta, 202 Mazzarella, William, 59, 62 Mbembe, Achille, 20 McDonald’s brand, 220–21 Mehta, Deepa, 42, 57–58 Mehta, Hansal, 30, 117–18 Memon, Yakub, 121 Menon, Nivedeta, 170 methodology: queer, 19; “unconscientious,” 21–27 Mid-Day, The, marriage ad in, 110–11, 128–29 Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha, Homeopathy), 163 Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 154–55, 163 Ministry of Home Affairs, 131 Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, 75 Mishra, Hari Ram, 125 Mishra, Shiv Kumar, 174 Mister and Art House, 29, 80, 89–92, 98 Mobile Subjects (Aizura), 35–36 mobility: banyan tree trope and, 189–96, 209; and caste, 35, 120, 235n71; and Dalit women, 120; and diaspora, 32, 183–211; and 'exible citizenship, 187, 189, 192, 200–201, 209, 211; Hajratwala on, 208–11; for the hijra, 70–73; hyper-, 209; ideological, 35–36; as key analytical concept, 28– 29, 33–36; and “late effects” of globalization, 151–52; and pink revolutions, 183, 185; and rape, 105; and safety, 34; and sexual citizenship, 26; and speed, 32, 183; and tourism, 83; and transcontinental capital, 185–86; transnational, 187–88 modernity, global: and center/periphery formulations, 20; and geographies

287 of queer safety, 81, 107–8; and Hinduism, 206–7; “ills of,” 169– 70; India’s aspirations toward, 11–12, 21–22, 25–26, 200–201; and nation-building, 23–24; and neoliberalism, 58; spatial scripts of, 106–7; and touch, 112–13, 119–20; and tradition, 11, 100, 158–59 “modern things,” queer infections of, 170–75 Modi, Narendra: and Article 370, 3–4; and ASEAN countries, 222; and BJP, 4, 70; on cow slaughter, 7–9, 10, 43, 228n6; on familial logics, 201– 2; and globalization, 10, 58; and Godhra incident, 51; and liberalizing reforms, 46, 50–51, 58–59; military analogies used by, 130–31; and Obama, 158; and Sandberg, 54–55, 58; and UIDAI, 74 Mufti, Mehbooba, 222 Muhammad, 85 Muslim people: and Babri Masjid, 51, 52, 238n19; and beef, 38–42; and capital punishment, 121; and cow lynchings, 7–11, 140, 205; and Dalits, 137; erasure of, 188; “love jihad” attacks on, 40–42, 99; rape of, 105–6; seen as primitive, 157– 58; sexuality of, 41, 141; Siras’s lover as, 135; and women’s rights, 23. See also anti-Muslim activities “Muslim Women and the Beef Ban in Mumbai” (Contractor), 38 Muthalik, Pramod, 40 Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai, &lm, 121 NACO (National AIDS Control Organization), 154–55, 168 Nagar, Ila, 179–80 Nair, Supriya, 140 Nanda, Meera, 16, 43, 49, 236n3 Nandy, Pritish, 180, 229n25 National Democratic Alliance, 10, 46 National Legal Services Authority (NALSA), 69 National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India, 69, 74–75 nationalism: cultural, 46, 51; and diaspora, 186–89; and education, 128; Hindu, see Hindutva (Hindu nationalism); homo-, see homonationalism; and liberalization, 98; and non-normativity, 78;

288 nationalism (continued) queerness as alibi for, 32–33; religious, 51–53; “transnational,” 167; triangulated with sexual politics and globalization, 32, 185– 86; triangulation with worlding and safety, 29–30, 34 “nationalist drag,” 71–72, 225–26, 230n31 nation-building: and global modernization, 23–24; and public vs. private sphere, 119–20; and queer bodies, 95–96 nation-state: and analogy, 129; and branding of democracy, 79–80; and citizenship, 17, 229–31n31; and corporate personhood, 157– 58; double movement in, 185–86; and gay visibility, 95–96; and mobile subject, 70–71; and nonnormative sexuality, 18–19; queer bodies and, 63–64, 172–75; queerness of, 149; regulation by, 112–15; “unbundling” of, 16–17, 63, 229n28 nativism: and casteism, 112–13; and Hindutva ideology, 52; and Indian history, 126–28 Navratri festival, 210 Naz Foundation, 175–78, 247n22 Nazi Germany, 52 NDTV, 54 necrocapitalism: and beef ban, 37–40; and pink revolutions, 9–10 necropolitics: and late effects, 178– 82; Puar on, 17–18; of revolution, 146–49 Nehruvian socialism, 50, 86, 197–98 neoliberalism: and beef exports, 10; branding of rights in, 5–6, 79–80; crisis as constitutive of, 47–50; and 'exibility, 36; globalism vs. nationalism in, 58–61; and Hindutva, 36, 50–53, 58–61; IMF and, 48–49; and LGBT visibility, 26; and mobility, 28–29; and “Modi regime,” 58–59; Patel on, 36– 37, 39–40; and privacy, 28–29; rede&ned as “revolution,” 28–29, 45–46; and safety, 28–29, 34; and Section 377, 68, 178; selective secularism of, 157–58; and speed, 28–29; and swadeshi movement, 10– 11, 60–62, 63; “third way” in, 61;

("#$% triangulation of principles in, 34; of U.S., 19. See also liberalization, economic New Age spirituality, 170 New Delhi. See Delhi New York Times, 102, 105, 171, 221 NFIW (National Federation of Indian Women), 180 Nike brand, 221 Nobrega, William, 150 Novartis: and globalization, 155–57, 159–60; late effects and, 149–50; patents on HIV drugs of, 147–50, 155–62, 175–82, 214; protests against, 24, 31–32, 147, 161, 175–82 Novartis AG v. Union of India, 175 NRI (non-resident Indians), 188, 197–203 Nussbaum, Martha, 52 Obama, Barack, 158 “Of Garbage, Modernity, and the Citizen’s Gaze” (Chakrabarty), 119–20 Ong, Aihwa: on center/periphery formulations, 20, 231n40; on diaspora, 187, 200–201; on 'exibility, 193–94; on growth triangles, 222; on power, 158; on regulation, 112–15; on sovereignty, 152–53; on worlding, 29, 81–82 “Overcoming India’s Of&cial Homophobia” (Tharoor), 79 Oza, Rupal, 96, 99 Panagariya, Arvind, 47 Pandey, Awindra, 101 Pandey, Jyoti: rape and murder of, 82– 83, 101–103, 105–8 Parikh, Aparna, 34–35 Patanjali Ayurveda Limited, 171–74 Patel, Geeta: and difference, 66; on “ethnographic salaciousness,” 66; on geopolitics, 18; and proto-queerness, 26–27; and queer epistemology, 13, 24; on queer methodology, 19; on sexuality and political economy, 36– 37, 39–40 patent/intellectual property rights and HIV medication: for “alternative” treatments, 163; deaths due to, 30–31, 145, 153–54, 176–82; “evergreening” in, 156–57, 163,

("#$% 175; Novartis and, 147–50, 155–62, 175–82; protests against, 24, 30, 147, 175–82 Pattanaik, Devdutt, 65 personhood, under Hindutva, 37, 39 “Phenomenology of Untouchability” (Sarukkai), 114 Pink Escapes, 80 “Pink Revolution” around anti-beef consumption: and cow vigilantism, 8–10, 140; and desi ghee product, 172; and Hindu identity, 51; McDonald’s and, 220–21; and meat exportation, 7–8, 11–12; Modi and, 7–10, 43, 228n6; and necrocapitalism, 9–10; as triangulating the intimate and economic with violence, 37, 140 pink revolutions, around LGBT rights: and “alternative” healing, 167; as entanglements through which queer formations emerge, 5–6; and evidence of experience, 20–21; and gay tourism, 29–30, 31; genealogies of, 11; intelligibility of, 33; and queer epistemologies, 6, 12–17; and state recognition, 77–78; and striking down of Section 377, 213–26; and triangulation, 23–24, 36–37, 213 pink triangle symbol, as global signi&er, 27 Pink Vibgyor, 29, 79–80, 94, 97, 101, 107 pinkwashing, 19 Planet Rosa Escapes, 80 Pink Tourism: Holidays of Gay Men and Lesbians (Hughes), 83–84 Podile, Appa Rao, 123 police: of Delhi, 141; at pride events, 91; and Section 377, 91–92,141; and the state, 91–93, 107 “Portrait Emerges of Victim in New Delhi Gang Rape” (New York Times), 105 Positive Women’s Network, 174–75 Prabhala, Achal, 178 Prasad, Leela, 190–96 Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Day of the Indians Abroad), 196–97, 199 precarity: and accidents of birth, 133; and cow protection, 8–9, 38; and delay, 154; and disaster, 48; and HIV drugs, 32

289 privacy: and gay tourism, 93; as key analytical concept, 28–29, 33–36, 53; and politics of touch, 136– 37; right to, see, privacy, right to; racialization of, 139–43; and safety, 34, 80; vs. the public, 118–28; and sexual touch, 113; and Siras case, 117–18 privacy, right to: limits around sexual citizenship, 74–78; and marital rape, 75; and Section 377, 68–78, 135–36, 241n64; Siras &ght for, 30, 135–36; triangulated with caste and queer politics, 31, 35 “Proud to Be Gay” (Times of India), 223–24 Puar, Jasbir: on exceptionalism, 103–4; on gay and lesbian tourism, 80; on homonationalism, 17–19, 95–96, 230n31, 231n32, 244n28 public vs. private sphere, 118–28 Puri, Jyoti: on criminalization of sexuality, 91–93, 141; on Delhi High Court 2009 decision, 68–69; on “genderqueer” lens, 219 Purie, Aroon, 209 Quareshi vs. Bihar case, 9 “queer”: as axis of analysis, 13; and buttressing of nationalism, 203– 11; and diaspora, 183–89, 203–11; epistemologies of, 12–17; and globalization, 11; and Hindu ethical framework, 206–8; and Indianness, 207–11; and “modern things,” 170– 75; in non-Western contexts, 182; as rei&ed identity category, 128–31; “stickiness” of, 13–14, 15; as term, 5, 25, 234n59; triangulated with AIDS and globalization, 171–82; undone by caste, 131–32; whiteness as default in, 203 Queer Activism in India (Dave), 25 queer bodies: Dalit, 112; as disposable, 180–82; disenfranchisement of, 5–6; and Hindu Right, 31; and HIV/AIDS, 146, 170–75; instrumentalized, 78; and mobile subject, 70–71; and mortality, 146; and “nationalist drag,” 71–72; and nation-building, 95–96; as “new,” 27; as outside of nationstate, 63–64, 172–75; productive and pro&table, 80; triangulated with Hindutva and speed, 31, 36, 146–49

290 queer diasporas: as buttressing nationalism, 32–33, 203–11; and value, 186–89, 203 queer economies: in India, 12, 16; and pink revolutions, 5; as “Sticky,” 15 Queer Muslim Project, 3–6 Queer Nation, 14–15 queer politics: and challenges to casteism, 30–31, 112; and constitutive forgetting, 139; and historical Indian tradition, 64–65; HIV/AIDS activism in, 175–82, 253n26; homonationalist and homonormative turns in, 91–92; and legislation, 69; and modernity in India, 21–22; and Section 377, 67–69, 213–26, 241n64; around touch, 30, 112, 134–43, 246n3; triangulated with Hindutva and globalization, 5–6, 11–12, 15–17, 28, 33–34, 41–43, 58–61, 66, 213–26; triangulated with privacy and caste, 31, 35, 131–43; and worlding, 5–6 queer subject: as not national, 95–96; varied experiences of, 21–22 queer theory: capaciousness of, 66–67; centralized in U.S., 13–15, 16; Dalit studies and, 112–15; and feminist theory, 22–24; homonationalism in, 14, 17–21; homonormativity in, 14; in India, 15–17, 25–27; transnational turn in, 13–17 Qureshi people, participation in beef trade, 9, 38–39 Radhakrishnan, Smitha, 201 Ramberg, Lucinda, 112 Ramdev, Baba: pharmaceutical and lifestyle “empire” of, 147–49, 167, 170, 171–74, 255n45 Ram Rath Yatra, the, 51, 52, 238n19 Rana, Junaid, 157–58, 177 rangoli design in gay tourism marketing, 97–98, 191 Rao, Narasimha, 46, 49, 197, 198 rape: in Delhi, 34, 100–108, 245n49; of Jyoti Pandey, 82–83, 101–3, 105–8, 245n49, 245n56; limits of law on, 219; marital, 75, 118, 219; of Muslim women, 105–6; of tribal and Adivasi women, 104 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 52, 55, 63, 99, 104, 120–26, 202 Reddy, Chandan, 75

("#$% rekhti poetic form, 64–65 relationality: and analogical thinking, 129–30, 138; anti-, 185; Butler on, 115, 248n36; and jugalbandi interaction, 198–99; and stigma, 113–15; and touch, 132, 136; in triangles, 28; and untouchability, 114–15 representation: as antidote, 194–95; of diversity, 128; hermeneutics of, 24; of Indianness, 192; and law, 178; lesbian, 57; rei&cation in, 134, 250n60; of religious difference, 193; as transgressive, 141 resistance: and the local, 20; as model, 26, 232n40, 234n62; and power, 22 “Resistance Gathering against Capital Punishment” protest, 121 “revolution”: crisis and disaster as, 45–46, 48–49; economic changes of 1991 as, 27–28, 43, 46–50, 196, 237nn7–8; and incoherence, 211; multiple meanings of, 15; necropolitics of, 146–49; reformist understandings of, 28–29, 33, 49– 50, 77–78; rhetoric of, 43–53; as term, 46 Riding the Indian Tiger: Understanding India—the World’s Fastest Growing Economy (Nobrega and Sinha), 150 rights: to equality, 68; to gender identity, 76; Hindu Right discourse on, 22– 23; human, 26; to life, 9; neoliberal branding of, 5–6, 79–80; to privacy, see privacy, right to; sexual, 75; women’s, 22–24 Rigveda, the, 205 risk: and communalism, 38–39; economies of, 29; and gay tourism marketing, 84–86, 243n15; in insurance, 39; management of, 179; and the subject, 36, 39 Roberts, Adam, 214 Rodrigues, Valerian, 119–20 Roth, Tim, 84–85 Roy, Ananya: on global regimes of value, 29, 81; on multiple temporalities, 20–21, 225–26, 232n42; on worlding, 29 Roy, Arundhati: on communalism, 121; on Hindutva, 123; on sedition, 125– 26; on Vemula, 132 Roy, Sandip: on LGBT rights, 221–22 Roychowdhury, Poulami, 103

("#$% safety: aesthetics and, 87–93, 243n20; and gay tourism, 34, 81, 83–84, 88–93, 243n15; Hindutva on, 22– 23, 40–42; and HIV medication, 36; as key analytical concept, 28– 29, 33–36; and mobility, 34; and neoliberalism, 34; pink triangle symbol and, 28; policing and, 91; triangulation with worlding and nationalism, 29–30, 34; of women, 34–35, 40, 100–108, 251n79; zones of, 80–81, 106–8 “saffronization”: of curriculum, 122; of Indian history, 126–28, 204; and privatization, 62; and Vemula case, 120, 121 Same Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (Saleem and Vanita), 64–65 Sampath, Rajesh, 71 Sampoorna Working Group, 76 Sandberg, Sheryl, 54–55, 58, 60 San Francisco Pride parade, policing at, 91 Sang Parivar organizations, 202 Sankardev-Sattra tradition, 53 Sanni, Shahmir: on Supreme Court decision, 224–25 Sanskritic traditions, nativist reference to, 62–63 Sarukkai, Sundar, 114 Sassen, Saskia, 16 Scott, James C.: on state-making, 73 Scott, Joan, 195 Sebastian, Deepu, 117 Section 377 of Indian Penal Code (on “unnatural sexual activity”): and Article 370, 4–5; Delhi High Court partial strike-down in 2009, 68, 80, 135, 147–48, 176, 219, 247n22; and gay tourism, 79–80, 90, 108; “genderqueer” lens on, 219; hijra and, 70–71, 140, 223–24; and HIV/ AIDS, 171, 175–82; legal strategies and, 67; other laws on sexuality and, 91–93; partial strike-down by Supreme Court in 2018, 4, 33, 67–68, 175–82, 213–26; policing and, 91–92,141; and queer politics, 67–69, 241n64; and sexual violence against women, 75, 108, 219; and Siras case, 117, 135; and theorization of delay, 214–26; upholding of in 2013, 69, 80–81, 135, 247n22

291 sedition: and Hindu Right, 123, 125– 26, 249n46; JNU and, 124, 126; and politics of touch, 30–31; protest as, 134; queerness of, 143; and queer suicides, 24; resistance as, 45; and revolution, 78; and sex, 124–26; students charged with, 124 Select Citywalk mall, 106–7 Sen, Sunny, 54–55 sex: and caste, 113–14; criminalization of, 4, 30, 108, 179–80, 241n64; and feminism, 14; and gender, 76; and public vs. private domain, 118; queer, 134–35; seditious, 125–26, 128; “unnatural,” 33, 57, 90, 108, 137; unproductive, 173 sexual citizenship: and aesthetics, 90–91; and AIDS activism, 161, 171, 177, 179; in Aligarh, 118–19; and economic prosperity, 79–80; and gay marriage, 94; hijras and, 147; and homonationalism, 19; and mobility, 26; and modernity, 79; and national citizenship, 17, 229–31n31; and pink revolutions, 6–7, 171; and privacy, 74–78, 118–19; production of through multiple sites, 180–81; and Section 377, 217, 223; and tradition vs. modernity, 11; and triangulations of queer politics, Hindutva, and globalization, 15 sexual economies: caste and touch in, 111–15; “late effects” in, 150–55; and nationalism, 18–21, 229n24; triangulated logics and, 66; violence against women vs. gay tourism in, 102–8 sexual politics: and Dalit/caste studies, 111–15; “late effects” in, 151– 55, 161; and nation, 16–21, 231n31; and neoliberalism, 63; as “problem,” 16; triangulated with and globalization and Hindutva, 11–12; triangulated with national identity and globalization, 32, 185–86; and the West, 26–27 Sexual States (Puri), 91–93 sexual violence against women: Dalit women and, 140; in Delhi, 82–83, 100–108; and gay tourism, 82, 102– 8; and limits of rape law, 219 sex work: anti-sex traf&cking legislation and, 68; criminalization of, 77, 92;

292 sex work (continued) hijras and, 72–73, 92; lack of legal protection in, 149, 241n64; and queer subject, 21; and state, 73, 74 Shah, Svati, 77–78, 231n31 Shahani, Parmesh, 223–24 Shandilya, Krupa, 105 Shankar, Sri Sri Ravi, 167, 170 Shikandhi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You (Pattanaik), 65 Shiva, Vandana, 44–45, 46 Shiv Holistic Yoga, 174 Shiv Sena organization, 42, 51, 52, 53, 57, 99 Siddha therapies, 160, 163 Sikh people: pogroms against, 45; as separatists, 45–46, 237n7 Singh, Manmohan, 46, 198 Singla, Rajat, 80, 101 Sinha, Ashish, 150 Sinha, Yashwant, 60 Siras, Ramchandra: in Aligarh &lm, 116–18, 135–38, 140–42; delay and, 214; as “dishonoring” university, 126; and language of discrimination, 142–43; and politics of touch, 134–43; suicide of, 30, 117, 128–32; suspension from job, 116–17; and Vemula, 35–36, 128– 34, 139–40 Sisodia, Ravi, 8 South Asian scholars, centering of, 24–25 sovereignty: abrading by new swadeshi, 62–63; and authenticity, 160–61; and deregulation, 197–98; and global capitalism, 12, 16, 20; “late effects” and, 152–53, 162 Spade, Dean, 74, 251n1 speed: and diaspora, 183–86; and HIV medication, 36; as key analytical concept, 28–29, 33, 35–36; and mobility, 32, 183; triangulated with queer bodies and Hindutva, 31, 36, 146–49 Spivak, Gayatri: on conscientious ethnography, 24; on writing under erasure, 214–15 Sri Ram Sena organization, 40 Srivastava, Sanjay, 158–59 state, the: aesthetics and, 88; apparent redress by, 225–26; criminalization by, 107–8; domination through environmentalism by, 86–87; and

("#$% “guru governmentality,” 166; and law enforcement, 91–93, 107; legal recognition by, 73–74, 76– 77; and neoliberalism, 68–69; as non-monolithic, 177; and public vs. private sphere, 119–20; and sexuality, 75; violence of, 142–43 State of Gujarat vs. Mirzapur case, 9 student protest movements: around caste, 120–28; and queer/sexual politics, 140, 142, 251n79 subaltern, the: and generational linkages, 187, 194–96, 252n9; and rei&cation of experience, 24, 232n42 “Subh-e-Azadi” (Faiz), 3, 4, 6 subject: colonized, 142; Dalit, 115; dead, 133; diasporic, 187, 208– 11, 255–56n1; feminist theory on, 22–24; and institutional links, 181–82; intersectional, 111; mobile, 32, 35, 70–71, 152; national, 95– 96; non-Western, 25; queer, see queer subject; recovery of, 133; “risky,” 36, 39; sexual, 35–36; subaltern, 194; transgender, 73–74, 76–77; transnational, 200–201; victimized, 23 Suhail, Mir, 216–18, 216, 218 suicide, queer: and Siras case, 115–18, 128–32; as touching, 128–29; on university campuses, 24, 30, 120, 132; and Vemula case, 120–26, 128–33 Supreme Court of India: and Aadhaar Act on biometric data, 74–77; depictions of in media, 33, 216–20, 216, 217, 218; partial striking down of Article 377 in 2018, 4, 33, 67– 68, 178–82, 213–26; on polluting industries, 86; and third-gender recognition, 75, 230n31; upholding of Section 377 in 2013, 69, 80–81, 135, 247n22 swadeshi (“goods produced in one’s own country”) movement; Gandhi and, 10–11; “new,” 11, 61–63, 191, 236n3; and transnationalism, 172 Swadeshi Jagaran Manch organization, 63 Swasth Jivan (Healthy Living) magazine, 169 Swiggy brand, 220–21, 259n19

("#$% Telagana Hijra Intersex Transgender Samithi organization, 76 Tellis, Ashley, 218 temporalities: of after word, 214–15; and alternative remedies, 164–65, 169– 70; of delay, 151–55, 159–60, 162, 181–82, 214, 252n9; entangled, 20–21; of illness, 156–57; multiple, 20–21, 225–26, 232n42; and speed, 214 Terhanian, John: on state-making, 73 Terrorist Assemblages (Puar), 17–19 Thackeray, Bal, 42, 57 Thapar, Romila, 204 Tharoor, Shashi, 79 Therwath, Ingrid, 202 Thomas, Catherine: on Ayurvedic HIV/ AIDS treatments, 167–69 Times of India, The, 88–89, 223–24 touch: in Aligarh &lm, 116–18; Butler on, 109; double meaning of, 30; epistemology of, 112–15; and globalization, 109–10, 115; and intimacy, 118–22; politics of, 134– 43; and public vs. private sphere, 118–28; queer, 115, 131–43; stigma and relationality in, 113–15 Trade Policy Forum, 158, 159 Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, 156–57 tradition: and economic/political agendas, 5–6; health practices and, 32, 148, 162–70, 172–75; and the local, 5–6, 29–30; and modernity, 11, 100, 158–59; recovery of protoqueerness in, 26–27, 64–65, 90, 208; queering of, 208–11; and sexual violence, 105 Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, 163 Transgender India, 72 transgender people: activist groups supporting, 72, 76, 77; Novartis protests by, 31–32; in Pakistan, 220; proposed “certi&cate of identity” for, 75–76; rights of, 69, 73–77, 230– 31n31; stigmatization of hijras by, 72–73 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 75–76 transgender subjectivity, nationalist cooptations of, 73, 77, 230n31 transnationality: of 'ows of bodies, 109–10; of labor, 193–94; mobility

293 in, 187–88; of nationalism, 167; in queer theory, 13–17; of subject, 200–201; and swadeshi, 172 triangle symbols: in media after Supreme Court decision, 33, 217– 19; pink, 27 triangulation: of AIDS, globalization, and queerness, 171–82; between caste, privacy, and queer politics, 31, 35; between globalization, sexual politics, and national identity, 32, 185–86; between personhood, global capitalism, and Hindutva, 37, 39, 58; between queer bodies, Hindutva, and speed, 31, 36, 146–49; between queer politics, Hindutva, and globalization, 5, 11–12, 15–17, 28, 33–34, 41–43, 58–61, 66, 213–26; between safety, worlding, and nationalism, 29–30, 34; and pink revolutions, 23–24, 36–37; and structures of power, 28; theorization of, 27–29, 33–34, 36– 37, 213 Tripathi, Vikas: on BJP in Assam, 53 Udwin, Leslee, 102 Unani remedies, 163 Unique Identi&cation Authority of India (UIDAI), 74–77 United States: accused of feminization, 56; Bayh-Dole Act of, 159; homonationalism in, 91, 244n29; Indian American community in, 190–96, 202–3, 257n27; neoliberalism of, 19; queer theory centered in, 13–15 University of Hyderabad: student protests at, 121–26; Vemula suicide at, 30, 120, 132–33 untouchability: and analogy, 128– 31; and caste politics, 30, 110–12, 125–26, 246n3; and Dalit communities, 110, 125; and public vs. private sphere, 119–20; violence of, 113 “Untouchability, Filth, and the Public Domain” (Rodrigues), 119–20 U.S. Patent and Trademark Of&ce, 159 U.S. Treasury Department, 160 Vaidya, Manmohan, 104 vaidyas (Ayurvedic medical practitioners), 168–69

294

("#

%$Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 46, 50, 52, 196–99 Valentine’s Day, protests over observance of, 60–61, 99–100, 104 value: of the gift, 199; global regimes of, 29, 81; and queer diasporas, 188, 203; reduced to identity, 133 values: of “democracy,” 79; “family,” 63; in Hindu Code bills, 67; “Indian,” 10, 53, 104, 151; “Western,” 64 Vanaik, Achin: on “Modi regime,” 58–59 Van Hollen, Cecilia: on medicine, 164–65 Vanita, Ruth: on queer literary tradition, 64–65 Varadarajan, Latha: on diaspora, 197– 98, 200 varna (hierarchy), 140 Vedic Foundation, 127 Vedic traditions, 167 Vemula, Rohith: as Dalit, 120–21, 134– 35, 142, 249n38; delay and, 214; protests following death of, 123–26; removal from university, 120–23, 125, 142–43, 249n38; and Siras, 35–36, 128–34; suicide of, 30, 120, 122, 128, 132–35 “Venus in Two Acts” (Hartman), 133–34 “Vernacularisation of Hindutva, The” (Hansen), 53 Vijayvargiya, Kailash, 104 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) organization, 38–39, 52, 98–99, 202, 204 visibility, queer: across caste, class, and identity, 111–12; and gay tourism, 93, 95–96; in India, 16, 26; and liberalization, 26; and pink revolutions, 5 Vivekananda Centre, London, 204

West, the: effect on family, 63; and effete femininity, 56; fantasies of India in, 95; and feminism, 65; Hindutva in, 202; medicine of, 164– 65; and rape, 104–5; and sexual politics, 26–27; and Valentine’s Day observance, 60–61, 99–100 “When the (Hindu) Nation Exiles Its Queers” (Bacchetta), 56–57 women: Dalit, 113–14, 140, 246n12; in feminist theory, 22–24; Hindu, 40–42; HIV-positive, 174–75; and homophobia, 180; and Indian law, 67–68; movements of, 22–24; Muslim, 23, 38, 51, 105–6, 239n19; “respectability” and, 35; rights of, and economic prosperity, 79–80; safety of, 34–35, 40, 100–108, 251n79; sexual violence against, see sexual violence against women; tribal and Adivasi, 104 World Bank, 48–49, 79, 160, 197 worlding: in Delhi, 82–83, 85–88; and gay tourism, 81–86, 92–93; India’s ambitions to, 5–6, 93–94; Ong on, 81–82; and queer diaspora, 209; and sexual violence against women, 102–8; triangulation with safety and nationalism, 29–30, 34 World Trade Organization (WTO) 156– 57, 160

Wakankar, Milind, 114 Washington Consensus, 160 Washington Post, 71 “Watch India Come Alive” slogan, 95

Zandu pharmaceuticals, 169 Zara brand, 106 Zee TV, 124 Zomato brand, 220–21, 259n19

Yadav, Raj Kumar, 117 “Year We Said Yes to Patient Rights but No to Gay Rights, The” (Prabhala), 178 yoga: and “bad habit” of queerness, 173–74; cultural co-optation of, 202–3; global consumption of, 64, 167; as prevention/cure for HIV/ AIDS, 148, 163, 255n45