This study of queer relationships examines why homosocial bonds are so widely accepted in India

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11 hours ago

Cultural differences between East and West make for some comic scenarios. Take the observed case of Indian men holding hands on the streets. No one thinks of this as odd because the men, after all, belong to the same gender (male) and hold hands in a spirit of camaraderie. In the West, people do not see it this way. There, if men held hands on the street, they would be making a statement about their gayness. Thus, Westerners who come to India for the first time often think of it as gay-friendly.
An American homosexual once said to me, 'In my country, I can walk hand in hand with my boyfriend only in the village [Greenwich Village in New York City] or on Castro Street [San Francisco]. Here, in India, you can do it anywhere, anytime.' The American was right in his observations. However, he was wrong in his assumptions. Men do not hold hands in India for sexual or romantic reasons. They hold hands because they are homosocial. Confusions happen on account of heterosexism, which does not regard sexual attraction as gender-neutral. A man can only be sexually attracted to a woman, and a woman can only be sexually attracted to a man. In India, heterosexism often leads to the segregation of the sexes till marriage (and even after it), resulting in same-sex bonding among people.
Homosocial segregation sometimes helps men and women to discover their homosexuality. It then becomes their alibi. Heterosexism must be contested, for it is based on easy generalisations and it straitjackets people. However, getting rid of it altogether also has its pitfalls. It can lead to a situation where all touch is perceived as sexual, as often happens in the West.
The jail is a vibrant homosocial space for same-sex sexual activity. Prison cells are always single-sex or monosexual enclosures where prisoners cannot make contact with people of the opposite sex. However, within these enclosures, prisoners are often huddled together. Student hostels in India are also monosexual spaces, like jails. In America, dorms, as they are called there, are no longer places where the genders are forcibly kept segregated. That is to say, a male student may choose to live with either a male or female roommate, and vice versa. If this still does not happen in American jails, it is because a jail sentence is meant to be punitive, and part of the punishment is to deprive prisoners of the solaces of sex.
In the world of Indian cinema, superstar Amitabh Bachchan remains the uncrowned prince of homosociality. I say this because in the 1970s, he changed the grammar of Hindi cinema from romantic to homosocial. Much has been written by me and others about Bachchan's homosocial films of the 1970s. One film, Sholay, has merited so much discussion about its queer subtext that whole dissertations have been attempted on it in Indian and foreign universities. In fact, I have myself given PowerPoint presentations on just one song from the film, which sees the two yaars, Jai and Veeru (Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra) ride together on a motorbike, even as iconic playback singers Kishore Kumar and Manna Dey sing the song 'Yeh dosti hum nahi todenge' to which they lip-sync. One of the questions that I ask in my PowerPoint presentation is, for example, whether the line 'khana peena saath hai, marna jeena saath hai' in the song implies marriage, because it sounds exactly like a marriage vow.
Almost 40 years after Sholay and his other homosocial films of the 1970s, we saw an ageing Bachchan in a homosocial role again, in the film Shamitabh. The title, which is a fusion of the first names of the two male actors in the film, Dhanush and Amitabh, speaks for itself. In Shamitabh, Bachchan gives the voice-impaired Dhanush his voice. But this is only a pretext for the two men to get together, hobnob with each other in the most solitary of settings such as a graveyard, a vanity van, and even a washroom where no one is around, and have 'lovers'' squabbles. The washroom scene in the film is worth commenting upon. In queer theory, the washroom is a political space, a cruising site. Here, Bachchan sits on a potty in the washroom and sings for Dhanush, who is lip-syncing just outside the washroom door.
The homosocial bond that Amitabh Bachchan formed with other male actors on the screen was intensified by the presence of an all-male audience that had gathered to watch him. It engendered a sort of homoeroticism in the dark of the movie hall. Anyone who has been in a conventional cinema hall in India knows the conditions that prevail. In those days, the seats were narrow and cramped, worse than economy class seats in a Boeing 747, so that a maximum number of patrons could be accommodated. Air conditioning, more often than not, was nonexistent; even if the theatre was air conditioned, the air conditioners did not work on account of power cuts in the city. There were a few electric fans in the auditorium (though there were plenty of human ones). As a result, body odours and the odour of betel spit permeated through the theatre and added to the sleazy atmosphere.
If one took a look at the audience as the movie was showing (as I have frequently done), one was likely to find young men sprawled all over each other, clasping hands, putting arms around each other's shoulders and waists, even a leg on a leg, and more. Few of these men might have been consciously gay. Nor would they dare to exhibit such behaviour if it were their womenfolk that were seated next to them. Same-sex closeness, as pointed out earlier, exists in every walk of Indian life, especially among the lower and lower-middle classes. What conspires to give this a sexual colouration is, of course, that social mores do not permit men and women to be demonstrative with each other in public. Sex is strictly for procreation, not for recreation. Also, sex has little to do with love and romance.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was still in my 20s, studying – and later teaching – in colleges in Bombay. I had, by this time, discovered that I was gay. I often bought a ticket and went to an Amitabh Bachchan movie (yes, in those days he was my favourite actor, too, and I even imitated him, our lankiness uniting us), not just to see him but also in search of sexual adventure. Though the degree and intensity of my experiences varied, I rarely came back disappointed. At times, I went to the movie with a guy I had picked up at a park or a public loo, and throughout the movie we merely held hands. At other times, I found myself seated next to someone I fancied.
I have spoken of homosocial segregation helping men discover their homosexuality. Such homosexuality, as we have seen, is dismissed by some queer theorists and activists as being merely 'situational'. Yet, I have spoken earlier of homosexual men using homosociality as their alibi. There is a silent pact at work here between homosociality and heterosexism. Heterosexism may be said to be the safety valve that prevents homosocial behaviour from being read as homosexual.
In India, two people of the same sex can be as 'physical' with each other as they please and yet not be called homosexual. But two people of the opposite sex cannot be 'physical' with each other and not be called lovers. This is exactly what I demonstrate in my PowerPoint presentation of the Sholay song (referred to earlier). Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra are taken to be mere yaars because both of them belong to the same gender. However, if we retained the lyrics and visuals of the original song and replaced Dharmendra with Hema Malini (who also acts in the film), would it still be possible to say that Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini are mere yaars (in the homosocial sense of the term)?
Some heterosexual men detest the idea of homosociality being appropriated by gay men to camouflage their homosexuality. Such men want homosociality to retain its overtly nonsexual nature so that it is possible for two men to be buddies, without suspicion of their homosexuality being aroused in the minds of people. This, of course, is a Western reading of homosociality, caused by its divorce from heterosexism. Divorced from heterosexism, homosociality runs the risk of being interpreted as homosexuality, which some Western heterosexual men resent.
In India, where heterosexism prevails in all walks of life, homosociality does not run the risk of being interpreted as homosexuality. The desirability of heterosexism, however, remains debatable. In queer theory, heterosexism is the objective correlative of what sexism is to feminists. If sexism smacks of gender bias, heterosexism hegemonises the definition of 'natural,' tyrannically seeing all gays and lesbians as 'unnatural.' Heterosexism, thus, encourages gays and lesbians to remain closeted rather than to come out, because it is in the closet alone that it would serve them as a safety valve. Raj Ayyar's notion of yaari, discussed earlier, is founded on the ambivalence that heterosexism combined with homosociality makes possible. It is a hallmark of Indian culture that defines our bonding patterns globally.