Mumbai
It is a day in late November in Mumbai that our journey through India begins. But unlike Europe at this time, it is anything but cold. The facades, rickshaws and temples making up one of the most populous cities in the world are as colorful and dazzling as the people we meet. The LGBTIQ community here may live covertly, but you can see the places where they meet: clubs and discos like Kitty Sue, and legendary party venues that Johann, Palash and Neha tell us about. It quickly becomes clear to us that, as it is in much of the rest of the world, celebration in India is a form of liberation for the oppressed – a possibility to exchange ideas, to let oneself drift, to forget the worries and fears of everyday life.
Mumbai is the heart of the LGBTIQ movement. The place where Ashok Row Kavi, who has been one of its figureheads since the late eighties, calls home. He takes us on an annual candle walk in memory of those who lost their lives to HIV, and walks us through his memories of a time when gay rights made a leap forward. We meet Navin, a gay comedian whose jokes centre on his sexuality. He satirises and reveals the homophobia of others by breaking taboos and chatting on stage about his sex life. We meet Ganesh, who dedicated himself to the fight against HIV after he almost died from it. In Mumbai we meet the extremes, the extremely rich and the extremely poor. More than half of its inhabitants live in slums, without water supply or sewerage, next to ultramodern shopping malls with glass facades and cafés, not unlike those which can also be found in Neukölln. Mumbai is where many of the scripts for Bollywood films are written. Bollywood is a byword for love stories, full of emotion, passion and beauty. By contrast, there is often very little tolerance here for non-traditional forms of love and identity, as the actor Palash Dutta tells us.
Mumbai
It is a day in late November in Mumbai that our journey through India begins. But unlike Europe at this time, it is anything but cold. The facades, rickshaws and temples making up one of the most populous cities in the world are as colorful and dazzling as the people we meet. The LGBTIQ community here may live covertly, but you can see the places where they meet: clubs and discos like Kitty Sue, and legendary party venues that Johann, Palash and Neha tell us about. It quickly becomes clear to us that, as it is in much of the rest of the world, celebration in India is a form of liberation for the oppressed – a possibility to exchange ideas, to let oneself drift, to forget the worries and fears of everyday life.
Mumbai is the heart of the LGBTIQ movement. The place where Ashok Row Kavi, who has been one of its figureheads since the late eighties, calls home. He takes us on an annual candle walk in memory of those who lost their lives to HIV, and walks us through his memories of a time when gay rights made a leap forward, as we will cover later in the book. We meet Navin, a gay comedian whose jokes centre on his sexuality. He satirises and reveals the homophobia of others by breaking taboos and chatting on stage about his sex life. We meet Ganesh, who dedicated himself to the fight against HIV after he almost died from it. In Mumbai we meet the extremes, the extremely rich and the extremely poor. More than half of its inhabitants live in slums, without water supply or sewerage, next to ultramodern shopping malls with glass facades and cafés, not unlike those which can also be found in Neukölln. Mumbai is where many of the scripts for Bollywood films are written. Bollywood is a byword for love stories, full of emotion, passion and beauty. By contrast, there is often very little tolerance here for non-traditional forms of love and identity, as the actor Palash Dutta tells us.