It took me a while to attend a Gay Bombay party, maybe because I was in the closet for so long, or maybe because my generation had been left so scarred by the looming gloom of Section 377, a colonial-era law that criminalised men having sex with men, punishable by time in prison. I had moved to Mumbai in 2009 after a few years abroad, since the law had just been repealed and it felt like the right time to take baby steps out of the closet. Gay Bombay had been around for a long time – even when homosexuality was a criminal act. It is an amorphous organisation that organises parties and events for the LGBTQ+ community in Mumbai. It is also instrumental in offering networks for role modelling and support groups. Defying the claws of the law while still remaining within legal limits, it created a safe space for everyone who was seeking ways to have fun and community without falling foul of the establishment.
The party I attended was a Diwali one. There was a winter’s nip in the air already, and I remember obsessing over what to wear – tight, sheer clothing like I’d seen in the movies, or would that be giving away too much? Was I there to enjoy myself, to pick someone up or to try my luck at getting picked up? The only references I had to openly gay life were from English and European movies, and I realised that they had nothing to do with our surroundings, our people, our context. I scoured my mind for visual cues, but I had no idea what the gay life of a brown person in the Global South looked like! Walking into the party, I felt nameless, faceless, one of millions and yet subject to scrutiny. Much like the city itself.
A CITY WITH NO NAME
Mumbai was once Bombay. Bombay was once Mombaim, or Bombaym, or one of the many variants this port by the Arabian Sea was called. The Portuguese arrived on the western coast of the Indian peninsula around the 15th century, and this place soon became the centre of colonial hubbub, with ships docking to load and offload goods and travellers from Europe and the Middle East, colonists shipping away the loot to their homelands, Christian missionaries arriving to set up churches and convert local tribals. By the time the British took over the city in the 17th century and named it Bombay, it was teeming with a diverse population, driven by the urge to trade and prosper. Over time, a heady mix of people gave the city many shapes and forms. On the one hand, it is the home of the rich and elite, of celebrities and businesses (the Bombay Stock Exchange, housed in an iconic building on Dalal Street, remained for a long time the only place in India to trade listings).
A vibrant cultural scene brought together artists and afficionados. It is as though New York and Los Angeles merged into a narrow strip of land. On the other hand, poor migrants from across the country turn up in the thousands every day looking for menial labour in the city’s thriving informal sector. This multi-layered blend gives the place a strange obsessive aspiration, with sprawling slums and high-rise buildings looking up and down at each other, and yet a cohesive co-dependence, each faction needing the other to further their dreams.
Responding to the influx of multitudes from all over the country and the emotions that evoked among the local Marathi-speaking population, the local government changed the name to Mumbai in 1995, dedicating the city to its local deity Mumba-devi, whose temple still stands at the centre of its peninsular topography. By then, Mumbai was a city of nearly 14 million people. A bit of the city belonged to everyone, and therefore to no one in particular. The elites, too disdainful of local politics and too prone to a colonial hangover, continue to call it Bombay; the locals had always called it Mumbai; the rest of the country called it Bambai; and the foreign expats sometimes come up with curious concoctions, such as Mumbay.
BOLLY IN MY HOOD
Before moving to Mumbai to live, I’d only been there in passing, as a point of transit, or for short stays. I could hardly be expected to be familiar with its neighbourhoods, its terrains, its landmarks. But yet everything felt known. I’d turn a strange corner and know where I was, would hail a taxi and the names of places would roll off my tongue. And then there was the sea, that eternal stretch of water along both sides of the city, hemming it in, constricting space for feet while expanding the view of the eye. It was as though I was living life in déja vu.
I’m addicted to cinema, and a good chunk of the fare I grew up on was Bollywood, or Hindi cinema, the home of which is Mumbai. The flyover across Marine Drive on which there have been countless fights between the hero and villain is here; the colonial building of the Asiatic Society in front of which a famous dance sequence was shot is here; and the local trains running up and down the spine of the city, on which lovers exchanged looks, called out to each other, passing a surreptitious letter before getting off. Mumbai has captured the fancy of storytellers for generations. The first Indian feature film was a silent movie called Raja Harishchandra (King Harishchandra), made by Dadasaheb Phalke in 1913. Known as the father of Indian cinema, a gigantic mural of Phalke stands proudly on the wall of the MTNL building in Bandra Reclamation. In it, Phalke is looking closely at a film reel, his face stoic, as though almost breathing passion into the celluloid. After that first film, the medium soon tapped into the country’s unquenchable penchant for entertainment. By the 1930s, hundreds of films were being produced every year, including the first Indian sound film, Alam Ara (Ornament of the World), in 1931, a historical fantasy about a king and his two wives, one of whom falls in love with the general and is evicted from the palace. These movies gave flight to the furtive romances and fantastical imaginations that audiences of the time were unable to play out in their real lives. The love for cinema continues to this day, with India producing more than 2,000 movies, making Bollywood the largest film industry in the world.
It is no surprise that the capital of movies also had a large number of single-screen cinemas. Mumbai was home to some iconic cinemas such as the Eros, Regal, Galaxy and Maratha Mandir (which ran at least one show of a superhit film every day for over 25 years – a world record). These cinemas, some housed in heritage Art Deco buildings, frequently hosted premiers of popular movies, rolling out red carpets for movie stars to walk on. Today, they are an endangered species. The arrival of multiplexes has put many single-screen cinemas out of business. Some are reinventing themselves as hubs of modern entertainment (the Eros is soon to be a shopping centre!), but most have been boarded up and waiting to be turned into malls or flats of the future.
There is an audience that particularly misses single-screen cinemas. Lovers of all ages seek out these halls to canoodle. In a city infamous for its housing crisis and space constraints, these dark air-conditioned enclosures, with the distraction of nondescript films playing, serve as one of the best spots to get intimate – some couples hold hands or kiss, but who is to say that others don’t go further? There are theatres, such as the Chandan in Juhu, that are popular destinations for young couples, especially on weekday mornings. One can even slip a little tip to the usher to keep things private for a while.
BOLLY BELLY
Single-screen cinemas are not the only places where people go to get comfortable. Adult film parlours abound across the city and are deceptively easy to miss. The lanes of old South Mumbai, especially the Kamathipura, Chinchpokli and Grant Road areas, are dotted with such speciality screens, as are the northern suburbs of Mira Road and Bhayandar that serve as homes to migrant labour. These establishments usually take the form of a CD/DVD shop in the front, with cryptic signs or brokers outside inviting customers in. Most customers are male, low-income workers who live in cramped slums. For that reason, the entry ticket is unimaginably cheap (less than a dollar).
In spite of their shabby exteriors, these theatres serve up a wide variety of erotica. Sometimes there are multiple parlours within one such spot, screening different kinds of movies, at different rates. The cheapest are B-movies made on low budgets, usually from North or South India. These tend to have a semblance of a plot and professional actors, though the primary objective is titillation and an unabashed show of skin, especially in song sequences in which actresses gyrate and arouse both the actors and audiences. During such songs, it is not uncommon for the audience to get on their feet and dance to the beat. The titles of these movies are comically suggestive (one example is Peeke Pepsi Lagelu Sexy, which translates to ‘She Becomes Sexy by Drinking Pepsi’), largely serving to attract viewers with their bizarreness, but also cutting through the tension that comes with collectively watching something sensual.
The other kind of film screened is porn, and comes in two forms. There are Indian-made porn films – just montages of random sex scenes, mostly grainy and shot on inexpensive handheld cameras. Theatres for these have no show timings, and one may have to wait and watch a feature-length mainstream film, such as Rocky or Terminator, until the seats are sufficiently full and the rushes are suddenly replaced with erotica. The most expensive parlours are reserved for Western porn, partially because these DVDs are costly to procure, but mostly because these have better production quality and go into the kind of graphic detail that Indian-made porn, no matter how forward, is still too coy to depict.
CHANDNI BAR
Moving beyond the screen, Mumbai has an ample display of live sensuality in its dance bars. These are documented in detail in Suketu Mehta’s book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004). Dance bars started to appear in the city in the 1970s, and soon found custom among the migrant men who moved to the city for work, their families left far away, as well as from locals after a rough day, in desperate need of ways to nurse their loneliness and urges. Why visit a brothel in Kamathipura or pick up a streetworker on Grant Road when you could see beautiful women dance suggestively to the latest hit songs, mouthing sensuous lyrics, inviting touch, yet out of bounds?
The bars hit their peak in the 1990s – Samudra in Bombay Central, Baywatch in Dadar, Carnival in Worli. By then, these places were the turf of the bhais – gangsters who ran the infamous Mumbai underworld, making loot from smuggled goods, filling the gaps in a socialist economy. Women were provided in the hundreds, and danced in shifts; the shows got sleazier, the clothes, skimpier. If the customers of yore were titillated by a Sridevi-style chiffon saree draped over a curvaceous body, only allowing glimpses of skin every now and then, the gangsters of this later time wanted younger girls, Raveena-style miniskirts and lap dances. But the risks of the profession also increased manifold, with fights breaking out among the gangs, ending with knives and gunshots. There are stories galore of dancers getting involved themselves, becoming girlfriends and mistresses of the bhais, in the hope of being ferried away to Dubai or Bangkok. A burgeoning human trafficking industry fed this steady stream of dancers to the bars with young girls bought in faraway Nepal and Saharanpur and Dhaka.
By the time I moved to live in Mumbai, the bars were nearly dead. I found most of them boarded up, entrances covered in tarpaulin, and parts of the spaces rented out to other businesses. The opening up of the economy, the decline of the underworld, a morally sanctimonious government banning ‘obscenity’ and closing times of 11.30 p.m. all contributed to this fadeout. A more globalised world also meant that the definition of ‘partying’ was becoming more Western – unisex dance floors, disco balls, flashing lights, DJs spinning English pop. As a result, staff lost their jobs, and the dancers rued the loss of their art – seeing themselves as entertainers first, not just commodities of lust. The one visit I made to the Deepa dance bar in Ville Parle was rather disappointing; the ambience was seedy, the alcohol was low-quality local brew, the women seemed disinterested, and the police stomped in promptly at 11 p.m. to shut shop. It has since closed down after an investigation into it as a nexus involving Bollywood, cricket betting and the underworld.
MS MUMBAI
Regardless of the Section 377 law, Mumbai has always had a thriving gay scene. While we in the rest of the country went through parched adolescence, without a clue of where to channel our affections and libidos, Mumbai had cruising spots and parties and communities. The elite felt safe from the law, protected by their privilege; the cinema folk were left alone – known to be avant-garde and culturally wayward in their outlook. There weren’t dedicated queer spaces –the law did not allow them – but, as with any repressed group, a thriving subculture existed.
Bandra train station was one such cruising spot, where men lurked in the shadows, waiting for other men to get off trains and get them off. So was Bandstand by the sea, the loo outside Khar station, a shopping centre on Mira Road, street corners in Dadar and Jogeshwari, the list seemingly endless in a city of 22 million people. But above all, in a country where being gay is both legally risky and socially taboo, there was the two-second rule – if a man looked at you for more than two seconds, it meant he was interested, and you had licence to pursue his attention. And in the absence of private space in the city, you’d have to make do in between the boulders that run along the coastline, braving the saline seawater nibbling at your feet, or in the backseats of taxis and tuk-tuks, making out with your beau while the driver reprovingly or lustfully watched the steamy scene in the rear-view mirror. Another popular spot, albeit one in motion, is the ‘two by two’ on the Mumbai local train, i.e. the second door of the second carriage of the train. It is a well-known cruising location for gay men, who fondle and rub up against each other in the crowded space, especially during peak times; there are of course all kinds of men on the train, so it is probable that one will end up having a few distasteful experiences – but it is no secret that the thrill of taking risks blossoms from the shadows of what is forbidden!
The legalisation of homosexuality in 2009 led to a flurry of long-awaited activity to claim spaces for the LGBTQ+ community. Gay fashion stores such as Azaad Bazaar and D’Kloset appeared almost immediately. The KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival has showcased queer content and talent since 2010. The Mumbai Pride, a fixture in the city’s calendar since 2008, has been a potent platform for not just activism around gay rights but also wider civil rights issues impacting the country. In 2020, the police denied permission for the parade, as they feared its use as a forum lobbying for equal citizenship rights for minorities under threat in the current political climate.
But back to my first gay party! This turned out to be way more laissez-faire than I’d imagined – there were lots of men, of all kinds, and some women. The venue had two halls, one DJ playing Western pop hits, the other jamming on Bollywood music. If someone wanted the story of the two Mumbais in a microcosm, this would be it – on one side was the English-speaking crowd grinding butts with a generous smattering of white expats, and on the other were those who would rather dance to the mataks and thumaks of Hindi and Marathi songs. I stood in between the two halls, trying to decide which suited me better. In the end, I followed the music, the thumping bass of Bollywood too seductive for me to want to shake my body to anything else.