BY Dr. R. Raj Rao
Review of Queeristan: LGBT Inclusion in the Indian Workplace. Author: Parmesh Shahani. Publisher: Westland Business, 2020. Pages 328, hardcover. Price Rs. 699.
Parmesh Shahani calls his book “deeply personal” as well as a business book. Its essence lies in Part Four, where he gives us a five-step guide to make the workplace LGBTQ inclusive. The steps include actively recruiting LGBTQ employees, giving them jobs rather than Instagram filters; introducing strong policies and special benefits for them; creating a friendly work culture within the company; and addressing the concerns of transgender employees.
Shahani says, “I am calling this new, inclusive, intersectional India ‘Queeristan’. I am offering this idea of Queeristan as a redemptive force, as a unifying force, as a way of breaking through the binaries that are all around us and as an invitation to imagine alternative worlds.”
However, Shahani’s use of the word ‘queer’ in the title is problematic. ‘Queer’ connotes sexual radicalism, and Shahani’s subject matter is capitalist and right-wing. In this context, his description of Ruth Vanita as a ‘queer icon’ is off the mark, for Vanita, studiously avoids the term ‘queer’ in her body of work, arguing that “it is deemed wide enough to encompass…unconventional or strange sexual behaviours and self-constructions…[and] could include all sorts of behaviours from fetishism to exhibitionism…”
That Shahani’s universe is capitalist is evident from all the name-dropping that he indulges in. Among other things, he has dinner with Anand and Anuradha Mahindra in Cambridge; meets Wendell Rodericks and his husband Jerome Marrel at their beautiful home in Goa; records a Twitter Blue Room video with Sonam Kapoor; and dances alongside Anu Aga under a moonlit sky at a dinner at the City Palace Hotel, Jaipur. Shahani comes across as a jet-setting executive who is in Boston one day, Vancouver another.
Shahani honestly admits to his privileges and says he questions them. But does he? On the contrary, he, without a hint of irony, uses the BJP’s own pet slogans while depicting a hunky-dory picture of gay India: India Shining (Vajpayee); Achhe Din (Modi). It’s a miracle that Ambani and Adani haven’t found their way into the book.
Shahani is a founder of Godrej India’s Culture Lab in Bombay, and is currently its Vice-President. The Lab, under Shahani’s stewardship has been doing great work, inviting speakers from different walks of life for talks and workshops. Some speakers, though, like Sheetal Amte and the left-leaning P. Sainath seem out of place in the Lab’s corporate environs.
Shahani, unfortunately, is too much a product of the system that has created him. Thus, though he speaks of inclusiveness, this is mainly restricted to the corporate world. When he attempts to step out of this world, and take a close look at say, educational institutions, all he can see is elite institutions: St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, and three Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) at Ahmedabad, Kozhikode and Trichy. He says: “At each campus I go to, I make it a point to ask: How many LGBTQ students and professors are there in the audience, please raise your hands. Do you know how many hands went up in [IIM] Trichy in 2019? Nine. This was the highest number I had ever seen. Nine confident students, willing to share their identity with their peers in a second-tier city in southern Tamil Nadu.”
If this is true, Shahani must be congratulated. In my 30 years of teaching at the Department of English, University of Pune, I have never mustered the courage to ask my students this personal question, partly on account of the voyeurism implicit in it.
There is an obvious link between capitalism and class, and even caste. Shahani, who describes himself as a “privileged savarna” quotes Akshay Pathak who says that caste supremacy in India gets replicated in the queer movement. Pathak shows how the very names of many prominent out-gay men and women in India reveal their high caste: Iyer, Bhan, Gopalan, Tripathi, Nair, Menon, Row Kavi etc. In this context, a Chennai-based queer activist is quoted as saying that “…the existing oppressive social structure transcends into queer safe spaces as well…invariably non-Dalit-Bahujan individuals dominate these spaces.”
Again, Shahani is spot-on when he says, “In India, everything is tied to the idea of family and community.” But he makes the statement uncritically, wishing to have his cake and eat it too. Shahani junks Rahul Easwar’s reactionary view that homosexuality is against family values ( in Arnab Goswami’s TV show—but of course). But then, in endorsing the idea of gay marriage, monogamy, gay parenting, same-class and same-generation romantic and sexual relationships, isn’t Shahani allowing himself to be co-opted by conservative patriarchal values? In fact, this is the fundamental difference between being queer and non-queer in the technical, as opposed to the merely generic sense. Queerness implies a resistance to normativity; a desire to destabilize it. Queerness makes sure that heteronormativity isn’t substituted with homonormativity; one cannot live in Queeristan and be ruled by normative institutions at the same time.
In the title chapter “Queeristan: Other Worlds Are Possible” Shahani talks of, among other things, the law. He says, “Okay, 377 is gone.” But has it really gone? Shahani, like so many others in the gay community, forgets that the reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code is a judicial decision, not a parliamentary amendment of the law. A larger bench than the five-judge bench of the Supreme Court that read down the law in September 2018 can always reinstate it. Shahani believes that “Politicians across Party Lines Stand Up for Queer Rights.” I would seriously urge him to Google all that BJP member Subramanian Swamy has had to say about the legalization of homosexuality in India. The only thing that Swamy can disparagingly and trivially equate the legalization of homosexuality with is the proliferation of gay bars!
Then, Shahani says “In Queeristan, Parental Acceptance is the New Norm”. Really? Parmesh, please do the round of police stations in India to see the number of gay-lesbian suicide and honour-killing FIRs that have been registered.
Next: “In Queeristan, Inclusion Starts Early, in Schools and Colleges.” I don’t believe this! Long after Shahani wrote his book, Dr. Asha Bhandari, Assistant Professor at the National Law University, Jodhpur, who taught a course on Law and Society, called homosexuality an “unnatural disorder” and said that “homosexuals are beasts with filthy mindset and inhumane sexual behaviour.” Furthermore, according to the learned professor, homosexuality results in “weak masculine identity, sexual abuse, sexual addiction, loss of local moral order.” Needless to say, many other academics share Asha Bhandari’s ill-informed and malicious view, although they might hesitate to openly articulate it. In my own university, the LGBTQIA Studies course which I began in 2007 (which Shahani refers to) was unceremoniously discontinued after my retirement in 2017.
Finally, “In Queeristan, Various Books Chronicle Our Multifaceted Lives.” True, but there are also homophobic novels like Shobha De’s Strange Obsession and homophobic plays like Vijay Tendulkar’s Friends Story.
Parmesh is a friend and I don’t mean to be critical of him. I love him. But false optimism needs to be questioned.
Queeristan is a valuable resource to research students in India and abroad. I wish the publishers would have included a bibliography and index at the end. The division of the book into five sections is somewhat arbitrary and leads to overlaps and padding. The book’s hardcover price is slightly steep, but then millennials spend three times that amount in a single evening at malls and multiplexes.
(Dr. R. Raj Rao is the author of the iconic gay novel The Boyfriend, as well as of other gay-themed novels, short story and poetry collections, plays, and nonfiction. He was Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of Pune, and has been a Visiting Professor at Dresden University and Tubingen University, Germany, and Concordia University, Canada. Rao has postdoctoral qualifications from the University of Warwick, UK, and was a Writer-in-Residence at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, USA).
