This is a piece I had written for Verve last year on the Pride. In it, I explored simply, what it means to be normal. 

Published: Volume 16, Issue 9, September, 2008

A narrow paved lane cuts through August Kranti maidan, separating it into two. On one side, the ground is a dried crusty earth, sporting volleyball nets. On the other side, tufts of green sprout beside a lone stage with a pole. A little after 1.30 pm in the afternoon on August 16, a day after our nation celebrated its 61st year of Independence, a group of people began collecting near the stage. Some of the men wore funny rainbow hats, skirts and jewellery, women’s tees and embroidered jeans, net saris and backless cholis; others were in crocs and shorts, or jeans and formal shirts. Women wearing masks with white paint on their faces chatted animatedly while six drummers hit a few tentative beats, watching the faltering volleyball match. Rainbow flags – a tad more coloured than the miniature national flags stuck at the entrance gate by patriotic chowkidars – fluttered gracefully in the air, as more people carrying placards, banners and leaflets began streaming in.

In the far background, outside the gates, traffic police vans were screeching to a halt. As the cops got busy herding the traffic down the road with their whistles, policemen carrying sticks filed out of blue vans in twos. Quickly and efficiently.

A little after 2 pm, the speeches began. Mumbai’s Gay Pride -the Queer Azadi March - was now officially underway. While chaos reigned beyond the gates with badly-parked press vehicles, shutterbugs and official vehicles competing for space with the startled traffic, inside the maidan, the volleyball players had dropped all pretense of playing ball, staring instead into the other side – the Others’ side.

The atmosphere in the march was electric, and resembled nothing short of a carnival. In the midst of startling colours, drummers drummed out the sort of rhythm that one couldn’t help but jerk one’s head to. Hijras danced bhangra and further, up ahead in the contingent, a student battalion from TISS belted out Bollywood numbers like Aaj kal tere mere pyaar ke charche har zubaan par and Tadap tadap ke iss dil, amidst much fanfare. Difference sparkled and shimmered like a defined entity, and in the space of the two-and-a-half hours that the march lasted, over SV Road down to Girgaum Chowpatty, contingents of the various groups representing Mumbai’s sexual minorities matching step and rhythm, celebrated it with zest.

Locating the carnival

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), a Russian literary theorist understood the carnival as an event that served as an outlet for ‘pent-up’ thoughts and actions that went against the grain of the establishment. Once released, the citizenry could go back to being cogs in the wheel of the great social hierarchy. Like steam, subversion would dissipate once released, he argued, although its presence was vital to the processes of change and social growth. The carnival, he noted, celebrated life and everything related to the body – nothing was taboo, and nothing shocked. And no one was spared. The social order was meant to be inverted, and even though this ‘transgression’ was ‘allowed’, all markers of the normative could be put into use and mocked. Freely.

Which is what happened back on the 16th. However, Bakhtin’s idea of the carnival underwent some extensive revision: The men and women who were out there marching on the streets, waving out to gaping onlookers perched on their balcony railings or those standing on the footpaths, were hardly out to shock, let alone actively subvert. While conventional notions of masculinity and femininity work on the premise of so-called normal heterosexual identity, the carnivalesque spirit of the Pride presented a whole different spin on what it means to be normal. For Kumar, a make-up artist, dressing in drag is something he has been doing for 15 years. He came dressed in a burnished gold figure-hugging dress with a stole of fluffy feathers wrapped over his shoulders. She looked lovely. Edwina, also dressed in drag, wore a black gown with a gold sequined front and heavy eye make-up. “I was adjudged the best-dressed drag queen for consecutive years back in my days,” she said softly, her voice carrying itself over the singing and the drums. This was certainly no steam that was getting dissipated. This was definitely no ‘allowed transgression’. This flamboyance that tore through the honks of traffic was a way of life, a state of mind, simply coming out and spilling into the open, seeking freedom from oppressive laws that refused to acknowledge its normalcy. (Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalises homosexuality, thereby not only reducing being gay to a sexual act, but also generating a hegemonic understanding of what it means to be ‘natural’.)

Meeting the gaze

When French post-structuralist Michel Foucault (1926-84) talked about the way society disciplines our bodies, he emphasised the central role played by, what he termed, social gaze. People act the way they are supposed to act, he opined, under the combined weight of everyone else’s gaze upon them. Which was not to say everyone’s always looking (which, somehow they are), but that everyone’s looking, always. The gaze was meant to get people to conform to acceptable social codes and normative behaviour. But at the march, even as the public gaped and the policemen herded the ever-straying marchers into almost-neat lines, there was little else conforming going on. In a context such as ours, where the dual axes of shame and repression define the self, the existence of alternate sexual preference is a subject still treated with lampooning at best, 10 years imprisonment at worst. Or if it’s a Karan Johar movie, jokes in terribly bad taste. In the interstices of that graph exists a thriving community that redefines conventional markers – lipsticks, cholis, bras, uteruses – and fights its battles every day, against a world order we presume to call straight.

At the march, even as the protestors sang and shouted slogans, their very presence was indicative of their political expression of resistance and freedom. ‘Locating’ their bodies in the streets under a rainbow flag, they revealed that if anyone’s in the closet, it’s us who fail to free ourselves (bodies and soul) of our constructed notions of what it takes to be ‘normal’.