by Sally Howard
‘Indian men are ugly on account of the three Hs: hygiene, hair and horrible habits,’ she says. ‘Despite the way they look, they’re always paired off with good-looking women.’
In a 2009 op-ed entitled ‘Why Indian Men Are Still Boys’, Indian journalist Nisha Susan, one of the brains behind the Pink Chaddi protest, defined the all too common phenomenon of the Old Indian Male succinctly. You can almost hear her sigh:
The man who finds it difficult to deal with his girlfriend’s higher income; who assumes all young women are interns or secretaries or have slept their way up the professional ladder; who assumes his teenage sister-in-law does not mind his copping a feel as long as she stays under his roof; who discusses the difference between analytic and synthetic philosophy with his students while forgetting to introduce the wife who brings in tray after tray of coffee.
A few days later, in a Café Coffee Day coffee shop in a district full of jeans-wearing teenagers, we meet 22-year-old Pallab and 34-year-old Lakhan, along with their agent Goutam. Pallab and Lakhan reveal another side of the male–female power coin, selling an idealised male identity back to moneyed female customers. They are male gigolos and strippers, and are among a burgeoning number of young Indian males who work as full-time or ‘flying’ (part-time) sex workers.
Pallab’s reasons for going into casual prostitution are familiar: he needed to support his family back in Madhya Pradesh, but wanted to continue his studies during daylight hours. He began in the business, he tells me, by cruising for trade in the luxuriant botanical gardens of his home city Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). He was 18 and was struck by how easy it all was.
‘I was surprised,’ he tells me. ‘You could see sexual desire in these women’s eyes. They would approach me on a bench and ask for directions, and I’d maybe ask for a light. Then, moments later, the deal would be struck and I’d follow the woman to her car.’
Pallab eventually gave up his studies, moved to Delhi and became a stripper and gigolo full time.
There are few phenomena as indicative of the shift in socially acceptable behaviour underway in India as gigolo parties. Partly driven by the desires of liberal, returnee NRIs, their risqué mood was captured in the Bollywood movie Oops! This 2003 film follows aspiring dancers Jagan and Akash as they are pulled into an underworld of dancing strip for high-society women. It portrayed a scene in its ascendance, a couple of brief years when Delhi nightclubs were offering promotional nights featuring women-only entry and male strippers.
This all changed in 2005 when an Indian television channel ran a hidden-camera exposé on one of the clubs, and a similar ‘ladies night’ made newspaper headlines in the southern city of Chennai. The resultant hue and cry pushed the male strip scene underground, into private homes and out-of-town parties.
But it didn’t suppress the popularity of the trend. Today, it’s not just high-society women who are enjoying the titillation of young, stripteasing males; middle-class women are getting in on the act too. Major cities have unofficial gigolo pick-up points, and ‘male model’ agencies, targeting strip parties, are booming. In a litmus test of these appetites, in a 2012 Indian sex habits survey conducted by India Today magazine, 49 per cent of women respondents reported that they’d like to attend a male stripper show.
And it’s a competitive business. Now in his early 30s, Lakhan tells me of his concerns about younger boys snatching his livelihood: ‘I’ve been doing this for seven years, and now the women like them skinny and younger and younger. Many boys I do these party jobs with are 16, 17.’
Goutam, in a low whisper, chips in to agree. ‘Yes, these days the women like the boys young. Wheatish [pale-skinned] boys, skinny, but tall like in the Punjab.’
I ask Lakhan and Pallab about the challenges of rising to the job.
‘I’m OK, but many of the older men have to take Viagra,’ Lakhan replies. ‘We get it off the internet, but sometimes it’s really amphetamine or talcum and doesn’t work. And you can’t risk having many bad nights. There’s a lot, you know, about reputation in this career.’
I ask him whether he used protection. He nods and pulls out a packet of KamaSutra LongLast. India’s second biggest condom brand, KamaSutras were an edgy product when they launched in 1991, featuring one of the first Indian ad campaigns to emphasise sensuality rather than safety, and starring two top models of the time, Pooja Bedi and Mark Robinson, naked, oiled and bound around each other with a live cobra.
‘So what is your plan B?’ Dimple asks Lakhan, with concern in her voice. ‘What will you do when you’re too old for this game?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says, suddenly looking his full 34 years, the worry registering on his face. ‘I think I’ll have to run my own boys. There’s no work for me back in my village. There’s mining, but it’s dirty and dangerous, run by mafia bosses who bring in their own cheap men from the East. I have my sister’s family to support. Her husband died down the mine. So what do I do, get a 10,000 rupee a month job as a waiter? Watch them starve?’
Nevertheless, he’s disillusioned. If it wasn’t for the money he’d get out of the flesh game, he tells us. ‘Women have become very demanding. Sometimes they shock me with their demands. Sometimes they book me for a weekend, then don’t pay me and threaten to call the police and say I raped them. Sometimes they burn my body with cigarettes.’
Goutam, the men’s agent, looks momentarily ill at ease, but goes on to confide that business is good. ‘Now I run my operations out of Bombay and Delhi the same. My clients are real hi-fi women. They have busy husbands. They can’t get enough of my boys.’
Operating from a laptop on the road and working under a pseudonym, he has over 200 men on his books, most of whom he picks up via personal ads, or by targeting wannabe actors and models through social networking sites such as Facebook. Goutam’s boys cost from around 5000 rupees for a night up to 250,000 rupees for a ‘name’ gigolo, famous South Asian actors and models whose identities he won’t disclose.
Looking at these three men, with their multiple cell phones, tight T-shirts stretched over gym-buffed torsos and crisply gelled hair, I wonder about the implications of India’s booming market for male bodies for sale.
The rise of the Indian gigolo certainly speaks of a new breed of Indian alpha women and a shift in the traditional power balance, at least in some sections of society. These women – a privileged group of moneyed wives often nicknamed the ‘aunties’ – have the economic freedom to seek something apart from a loveless relationship. They are profiting, ostensibly, from the new Indian dream, with their lattice of servants and home help, their free hours and their mod cons.
But in many ways, and in spite of their modernity, these women are consuming the old status symbols: servants, sexy young boys, people of the lower castes who are to be had as readily as a new cell phone. All in all, it doesn’t feel much like progress.
Back in Gulmohar Park, Dimple had asked Roy if he was positive about the future of the modern Indian male. She looked wide-awake and hopeful, as if her future happiness might ride on his answer. Our chai cups had been cleared away by a male servant, who gingerly fished them out from among the literary ephemera that blanketed the desk. Roy seemed small and thoughtful amid his towering landscape of papers and books.
‘The emotional journeys that are being made by Indian men and women are very different,’ he said. ‘And make no mistake. What you’re seeing is two revolutions: a social revolution and a sexual revolution. Change will come – it is coming.’
7 | WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FOR A HIJRA, Gujarat
There are two sorts of persons of the third nature, in the form of a woman and in the form of a man. The one in the form of a woman imitates a woman’s dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty and bashfulness … The one in the form of a man, however, conceals her desire when she wants a man.
—Kama Sutra, Book Two, On Sexual Union, Doniger/Kakar translation, 2002
I’ve left Delhi and am heading to Raj
pipla, a small town in the conservative state of Gujarat. Today’s Rajpipla is sleepy by the standards of this nation of 1.2 billion people, its 50,000 inhabitants scratching a living via agriculture, middle-of-the-road private education and small-scale garment production.
But for many hundreds of years, things were very different. Until 1948, Rajpipla was the seat of the prosperous princely state of the Gohil Rajputs, commanding an area that spanned 1500 square miles, bounded by the Narmada and Tapti rivers, and taking in forests and fertile agricultural plains as well as the agate-rich Saptura mountains.
The Gohil Rajput’s 600-year reign ended in the same way as many of the old Maharajas’. Following Indian Independence in 1947, the Kingdom of Rajpipla was one of the first to accede, in 1948, to the newly created Indian state. The last Maharaja, the anglophile Vijaysinhji, quietly retreated to Old Windsor, his estate in Berkshire, where he died three years later. For many such men the story would have ended in a similarly obscure fashion, but for the efforts of canny descendants to work their remaining assets – personal and property – in the emergent palace-hospitality trade.
The Gohil Rajputs did manage to adapt one of their properties, the 1910 Rajpant palace complex, into a luxury hotel. Now painted flamingo pink, with white Corinthian columns, the hotel is popular for local weddings and conferences attended by quiet Gujarati businessmen. This is where Dimple and I have arrived, dusty after the onward journey from the hub railway line at Miyagam Karjan, for an audience with the Gohil Rajput, who’s responsible for keeping not only Rajpipla but the old Indian royals on the world map: Manvendra Singh Gohil, Vijaysinhji’s grandson, India’s first openly gay prince and the champion of third genders, the social group within which hijras, or eunuchs, are the most famous tier.
I’d heard Manvendra Singh Gohil’s name a number of times over the years, during my visits to India and back in the West. I’d learned that in 2002, after a nervous breakdown, Singh Gohil had come out to the Indian public; and that the subsequent scandal had caused him to be excommunicated from the Gohil Rajput clan. I’d heard news reports about his social activism and had seen his campy 2007 outing on the Oprah Winfrey special ‘Gay around the World’, the first of two appearances on the show of a woman who’s become one of Singh Gohil’s several Western patrons.
I’d also seen him in glossy magazine spreads, got up in royal silks and turbans, often being interviewed about his earliest homosexual experiences, which were fumbled and conducted with his personal servant boy when Gohil was aged 12. Recently, I’d noticed that stories about Singh Gohil had focused on his ambition to adopt an heir, a decision Western reports had vaunted as ‘the first gay adoption in India’ … ‘Gay man in India adopts child! A first!’
I’ve thought since how these reports say much about our narrow interpretation, in the West, of homosexuality and Indian society. Because it’s not a first at all, as far as Singh Gohil and his new ‘gay son-in-law’, young University of Bristol–educated engineer Deepak, are concerned.
‘In many of India’s old gender-variant communities, effeminate men would become mothers,’ says Singh Gohil, as we sit with views out to the seven acres of elevated palace grounds, the river at their feet a gleaming tributary of the Narmada that once transported the agate that made much of his forebears’ wealth. At the door, a waiter looks on, chewing a toothpick with the nonchalance of a movie cowboy.
‘There is an ancient ceremony of third genders. I plan to do it with Deepak,’ Singh Gohil explains. ‘I will squeeze milk into his mouth to signify that “this is my milk; you are my child”, and he will become my son. Many third-gender communities have had traditions like this for centuries: the Launda tradition in Bihar [the neighbouring Indian state to Uttar Pradesh, where Varanasi is located], for example, in which an older third-gender man adopts a younger soncum-servant as his charge. Like those young twinkly twank boys in the US …
‘The Britishers broke the third genders,’ he continues. ‘They called third genders “a breach of public decency” and placed them under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act. This meant that, right up to Indian Independence, hijras were under constant surveillance and could be searched and arrested without warrant …
‘So, it was a moral crusade. But it was also about power. After the Sepoy Mutiny the Britishers looked at who was influential. And, at the time, the third genders held the power. They had money, and their own tax structures and communities, or guranas, like royal courts. Some of the guranas had a heritage that could be traced back for 800, 1000 years. They had their own languages and idiolects. And there were different groups: the Koti, the Alis and the Hijras, with their own rich cultures and traditions.
‘It’s always been the case that the castrated hijra is most respected,’ asserts Gohil. ‘Today there are three kinds of third genders: mahbet hijras, or mother’s bed hijras, who were born with confused genitals and were often given to the hijra community as children, or gravitated towards it themselves as older children or teenagers; nirwath hijras, who have male genitals but consider themselves female, they undergo the transition to become hijras, with some being castrated, some not; and naviyug or “new era” hijras, these are like the Bangkok ladyboys, they have breast implants and hormones, sometimes penises, sometimes not.’
It’s a testament to the deep roots of their tradition that hijra communities survived the crackdowns of the Raj and the continuing ignominies ever since. The latter are very real. Today, most hijras live at the margins of society, eking out a living as sex workers; performing as musicians at ceremonies (typically on the birth of male babies); begging, or soliciting money with menaces. The April hijra festival in Koovagam, Tamil Nadu, when hundreds of thousands of third-gender women meet to reenact the story of the god Krishna disguising himself as a woman to marry Aravaan, a great warrior who was about to be sacrificed, has in recent years deteriorated into a prostitution fair and an opportunity for gangs of young Indian men to attack and sexually harass the hijras.
Violence against hijras, especially at the hands of the police, is widespread and brutal. However, an unhappy relationship with authorities is by no means universal. In 2006, for example, the city of Patna in the northern state of Bihar announced that hijras, known for their effective scare tactics, would thenceforth accompany its city revenue officials to collect unpaid taxes, receiving a 4 per cent commission on collected debts. And in October 2012, a case was put before the Indian Supreme Court to give hijras official status as a third gender and prevent them from being a ‘legal non-entity’, denied access to education, healthcare and public spaces.
As a social campaigner, Singh Gohil sees all of these sexually ‘other’ characters – gay men in the new definition, sexual outsiders in the old – as his kin. In 2009, he and a group of campaigners that included Indian novelist Vikram Seth and Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen vigorously campaigned for an amendment to section 377 of the 1860 Indian penal code, which had criminalised gay sex – as it had any sexual activity that was determined ‘against the natural order’ (non-vaginal or inter-gender). They scored a triumph, and a historic judgment, when the High Court of Delhi gave legal effect to the decriminalisation of same-sex sexual behaviour among consenting adults. The amendment effectively undid the 150-year-old legislation against homosexual acts instituted by the British.
However, as Singh Gohil is keen to point out, the battle is not yet won. Immediately a flurry of appeals was filed against the legalisation. Campaigns were fronted by prominent Indian personalities, including Hindu holy man Swami Ramdev, a pop spiritual leader known for his mass yoga camps, television shows and claims to cure cancer via the medium of breathing exercises. Ramdev had said, in advance of the judgment, ‘This verdict of the court will encourage criminality and sick mentality. It is against our Vedic system! This is breaking the family system in India. Homosexuality is not natural and can be treated. If the government brings this law, I will take this matter to the streets of Delhi in protest.’ And he did. Ramdev also added – in
an echo of the Christian ‘gay conversion’ camps that proliferate in the American Midwest – that he could cure homosexuals of their ‘illness’ within six months using ‘yoga, pranayam and other meditation techniques’.
It was an offer that Singh Gohil publicly accepted. ‘I said I’d give him six months with my gay family. I said, “You try to convert me, and if you can’t you need to withdraw your petition from the High Court.” So we invited Ramdev to Rajpipla, and we didn’t hear a thing. It was all bluster.’
I wonder if Singh Gohil shares the key idea of ‘Indian sex guru’ Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, or Osho, whom we’ll meet later, that sexual repression within religion inevitably leads to an unhealthy obsession with sex? As an illustration, I tell him, Deepak and a wide-eyed Dimple something I’d heard from an Iranian artist based in London who had been designated a ‘religious pervert’ by the Tehrani authorities for the crime of having Western women, with exposed décolletages, as Facebook friends. He had told me about the peculiar work of a select cadre of Shiite ayatollahs based in the Iranian capital who spend their days ruminating on rhetorical sexual quandaries, for example: ‘There’s an earthquake in my house and my aunt falls through the ceiling onto my erect penis. Is this halal, or is it haram?’
Singh Gohil smiles and considers this, as he signals our departure with a flick of the regal wrist to a nearby waiter. We drain our milky morning coffees and head out through the hotel’s marble-floored reception. On the way we pass through a gloomy drawing room that’s littered with heavy Victorian tables, royal portraits and black metal European-style statutory; and then a banqueting hall, in which a 24-seat dining table is overlooked by photographs of Maharajah Vijaysinhji’s exploits at the races and polo. As we stand at the crested portico of his fantasy palace, awaiting a driver, Singh Gohil draws breath and responds.