Journeying Into Queeristan: Ushering Inclusivity Into Indian Workplaces

Reading Queeristan feels like you’re sitting across an intelligent, high-spirited and intentionally campy writer, at a friendly café, with Bollywood songs playing in the backdrop. Not just any Bollywood song, but Hema Malini in Naseeb, bursting out of a balloon basket into Mere Naseeb Mein Tu Hai Ki Nahi, shimmering in black with a pink feather boa slunk around her neck. And there’s Parmesh, drawing your attention with an impish chuckle: “I mean, how camp was Manmohan Desai?”

 “Pehle toh, let me tell you a little bit more about myself…” Parmesh says, invoking a disarmingly conversational style that many writers strive to achieve, but rarely have the flair to pull off. Honestly, Queeristan has been one of the more diverting and optimistic books that I’ve read in a long time. And I must admit, that I’ve been somewhat oblivious to the slew of spaces opening up across Indian workplaces and homes and nightclubs – ushering in a kind of tolerance that is rarely reflected in newspaper headlines.

Diving into Parmesh Shahani’s Story

Parmesh grew up in Bombay in the 1980s in a rather typical middle-class home. His mother worked as a clerk at the Bank of Baroda and his father as a store manager at Burlington’s, a clothes shop at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Parmesh was a shy, pimply kid who convinced his parents to buy him copies of the Cine Blitz  since they couldn’t afford foreign magazines. The star-struck little boy ogled at the cute, sleeveless Aamir Khan rather than at the bubbly Juhi Chawla.

Parmesh surreptitiously held hands with his first boyfriend in high school. As the more effeminate one in the relationship, he didn’t mind being called a “homo” by someone who spotted this. But his boyfriend did. Parmesh dated his second boyfriend in 2002 while studying for a second Bachelor’s in education. In public, however, he was still closeted.

In 2003, he entered a Master’s program at MIT. In the more accepting environs of academic Cambridge, he felt at ease with himself. Besides, he was to witness history in the making. In 2004, Massachusetts was one of the first American states to legalize gay marriage. His thesis topic forayed into his past and city: “Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India.”  His MIT stint injected him with self-confidence and a sparky imagination: “MIT made me who I am.”

He danced to Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai with a bunch of other queers from South Asia at a drag party in Boston. His presence at this event was flashed on the BBC and many friends started calling in. But he hadn’t told his Dad yet. So he called his father and said: “Dad, as you know, the BBC is well-known for its journalistic accuracy. If the BBC says I’m gay, it must be true.”

After his MIT degree, he could choose between joining a firm in the U.S., staying on at MIT, or returning to India. But he had also recently watched Swades and felt slightly teary-eyed about giving back to the place that had raised him. Moreover, at that point, he met with Anand Mahindra and his wife Anuradha, and he asked Anand for his advice. Taking him by surprise, Anand straightaway offered him a job at Mahindra’s.

He was appointed the Head, Vision and Opportunities at Mahindra. At Mumbai, he acknowledges feeling unnerved about telling his immediate boss that he was gay. But he did eventually have that conversation and it was much easier than he had imagined. He also helped Anuradha with making the Verve magazine stand out in a competitive glamour market.

Engaging with the Fashion industry sensitized him to how the sector was more welcoming to queers than others. He dismisses the notion that there are more queers in Fashion. They are just less likely to be closeted than in other spaces because the domain has been historically more inclusive. Leading icons like Suneet Varma and his husband, Rahul Arora, or the late Wendell Rodericks and his husband, Jerome Marrel have bolstered timorous entrants.

After a couple of corporate stints, Parmesh briefly detoured into a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. During his doctoral program, he attended a TED India conference as a fellow. He realized he wanted to do something similar to TED, “but completely India-focused.” He had an idea for something called the India Culture Lab, which needed sponsors. Sandeep Murthy of Lightbox introduced him to Nisaba Godrej with an amused: “Both of you are slightly nuts. You might hit it off.”

They did. Parmesh agreed to join Godrej if Nisaba offered to fund the Culture Lab. Within a day, they changed the HR policy to be more inclusive of LGBTQ employees. Vivek Gambhir, the Managing Director of Godrej sent an email to all employees, announcing more inclusive corporate measures after the 2018 judgment.

Much later, at an event in Boston in 2018, Parmesh ruminated on how far he’d traveled, not just geographically but culturally: “I pinch myself sometimes during gatherings such as these. How did a boy from Colaba who grew up in a 250-square-foot-room and went to a 7-rupees-a-month SSC school – St. Joseph’s, Colaba – land up with a jet-set business-class lifestyle that involves crossing from Mumbai to Boston to Vancouver in one effing week?”

A Brief Dip Into The Legal Scene

In 2009, there was jubilation in the Indian queer community after what was known as the Naz verdict. The words of the judgment were inspirational indeed: “The inclusiveness that Indian society traditionally displayed, literally in every aspect of life, is manifest in recognizing a role in society for everyone.”

Four years later, in 2013, this was overturned by the Koushal judgment. Eventually, in July 2018, the antiquated Section 377 was overturned. The argument proffered by the lawyer Menaka Guruswamy was both memorable and historic, mainly addressing a female judge: “It is not just consensual sex between homosexual partners that this Court should recognize, but their love for each other. How strongly must you love knowing that you are unconvicted felons?” Cultural and social luminaries like Chef Ritu Dalmia, the Bharatnatyam dancer Navtej Singh Johar, Aman Nath of Neemrana hotels and the journalist Sunil Mehra threw their weight behind the petition.

Ian McKellen of the Game of Thrones and X-Men fame is one of the biggest gay icons. McKellen himself came out only at 49 and strongly advocates for more gay people coming out. In a video chat with Parmesh, he apologized for the British according the country with Section 377, to begin with. “We are sorry we gave this to you.”

Chipping Away at Age-old Prejudices

Despite this verdict, we cannot be in denial about the discrimination that still abounds. In July 2018, the Mumbai Mirror reported that the young Aniket Patel committed suicide because he was taunted about being gay. Dipankar Gupta, the sociologist, dwells on India’s ‘mistaken modernity’ –  a strong emphasis on technology and consumption, but not so much on liberty or diversity.

In an environment like this, we need exemplars like Parmesh. He uses “jugaad resistance”– a term coined by him to engender change from the inside rather than from without. And he straddles many worlds with ease: the corporate world and the world of activists, artists and others. He discovers intersections. He uses them. He builds bridges, brings in new viewpoints.

On a panel discussion in the Twitter India office, Parmesh insisted that Sonam Kapoor also join the panel. After all, she had played the role of a lesbian in Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Asia Laga and Anil Kapoor, who played her father, had championed her coming out. Before the discussion went live, Parmesh was telling Sonam about how he packs his partner’s dabba each morning. When the panel went live, Parmesh announced that he was an “out and proud gay Indian.”

For jugaad resistance Parmesh says he uses “infiltration and cultural acupuncture.” Cultural acupuncture is a term borrowed from the Harry Potter Alliance – a network of 100,000 Harry Potter fans who use the books to engender real-world changes. Andrew Slack, the founder of the Harry Potter Alliance said “With cultural acupuncture, we will usher in an era of activism that is fun, imaginative, and sexy, yet truly effective.”

As MIT professor Henry Jenkins pointed out to Parmesh, youth activists around the world are deploying characters and icons from popular culture to propagate change. For instance, youth in Hong Kong used elements of Star Wars and Bruce Lee’s karate mantra, “Be water” to resist the Chinese government in 2019.

When Corporate Houses Model Inclusion

Companies like Godrej are leading the way. At Godrej, there are discussions featuring trans activists like Gauri Sawant, whose story was featured in a Vicks ad. At the Godrej Leadership Forum, with 120 senior leaders from around the world, Parmesh has been a chief curator. He ushers speakers like Amitav Ghosh and Kailash Satyarthi to the Forum. He always ensures that a few queer representatives transmit different perspectives.

The Marathi play, Ek Madhav Baug, was hosted at Godrej. The story centers around a mother discovering that her son is gay. And of her reading entries from his diary that dwell on his lonely battles with his sexuality. At the end of the play, held before a large audience at the Godrej campus, many were in tears. One lady told Parmesh that she was compelled to go home and hug her own son, nonjudgmentally.

Among global corporates, IBM is considered a first-mover in LGBTQ inclusion, both abroad and in India. Ritesh Rajani, who grew up in Chennai, hesitated to come out even inside IBM. Though the corporate held Pride meetings and events, he was careful about concealing his attendance from his immediate manager and co-workers. He was afraid that they would start treating him differently. Eventually, he became a part of the IBM D&I team in 2015-16. IBM has started monetizing its consulting practice on Diversity and Inclusion, digging into its own experience for insights.

At the RISE job fair in Bangalore, Pankajam Sridevi, the Managing Director of ANZ India was inspired by a mother’s acceptance to drive changes in her own organization. The now well-known mother, Padma Iyer, had created a stir by placing a Matrimonial ad seeking a groom for her son, Harish Iyer. On Faye D’souza’s Mirror Now prime-time show, Harish expressed his gratitude to his mother: “Thank you, for holding my hand when I had no other hand to hold.”

Contending with Privilege

Parmesh is acutely aware of his own privileges and of the cultural capital that has been his lot because of the spaces he has occupied and the experiences he has had. They are, as he notes, part of his ‘habitus’ – the term deployed by Pierre Bourdieu to describe embodied cultural know-how that is inscribed into one’s being because of particular experiences. He admits that he has all three forms of cultural capital that Bourdieu identifies – the embodied one, because of the way he looks and sounds. The objectified one – the home he lives in, the car he drives et al. The institutional one – the places he has studied at (MIT), his relationship to a broad-minded corporate house like Godrej. “I am well aware that this book was written, published and distributed because of these very privileges.”

But he uses these privileges to champion the voices of the marginalized: “I write. I question. I share. I amplify. I try and create infrastructures of possibility. I learn, constantly.”

His Appeal to Corporates

The Urbz think tank founders, Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove talk about “circulatory urbanism” – of villages that reside in cities and vice versa, especially with the infiltration of cellphones to all places. In a similar manner, Parmesh defines “circulatory queerness” as a constant flow and exchange between local and global forces.

Being an Indian queer is a specific experience and workplaces need to be sensitized to the particulars of that culture. As Parmesh astutely observed at a talk in Franklin Templeton, most Indians who enter corporate jobs have not had the opportunity to explore their personal interests and identities inside family settings. Having been subjected to a series of punitive tests and exams from LKG till their Master’s degrees, they have rarely had the space for self-examination and expression.

This kind of suppression is likely to have been worse for those who are queer or divergent in other ways. So they enter the workplace with the cognitive capacities to handle various jobs, but without the emotional maturity and self-confidence to express their various talents and proclivities. As a result, “in India, the workplace needs to function in loco parentis, as a custodian.” Human Resource departments may need to bridge the gaps that families fail to fill.

For queer employees, the workplace may end up being the first and often only place, where they are comfortable being out of the closet. Moreover, specific considerations must be planned for queers: for instance, trans employees may need help with housing (since landlords may be reluctant to rent out to them). Or with identifying safe hospitals or trusted surgeons. If an employee’s partner is on the company’s insurance, this fact may need to be tactfully hidden from the family, if the employee has not disclosed his or her orientation at home.

Moreover, corporates should not wait for employees to come out before formulating policies. Creating queer-friendly policies is likely to assure employees that the space is caring and safe enough for them to come out.

Queerness is Not A Western Import

In Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You, the mythologist Devdutt Patnaik observes: “Hindu mythology makes constant references to queerness, the idea that questions notions of maleness and femaleness. There are stories of men who become women and women who become men, of men who create children without women and women who create children without men.”

Devdutt emphasizes that queerness is not a Western import. In all probability, heightened levels of homophobia have more to do with a colonial/colonized mindset. In ancient stories, there was far more acceptance of gender fluidity.

Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, a leading hijra activist and the author of Red Lipstick: The Men in My Life talks about why the Ramayana holds a special place for Hijras in India. When Rama was sent into exile, many of his devoted followers tried to follow him into the forest. However, at the edge of the forest, he turned around and requested all men and women to return to their homes. Since the hijras did not consider themselves men or women, they continued to wait there for fourteen years till Rama’s return. The King/God was so touched by their fealty, that he blessed the ever-faithful Hijras – because of which Hijra blessings are often sought on special occasions.

Trans people also played an important role in Mughal courts. Some of this is documented in anthropologist Gayathri Reddy’s With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India.

Devdutt told Parmesh one evening in 2019: “Don’t ever forget, queerness is an Indian construct; inclusion is an Indian construct. In our culture, empathy for the unfamiliar is key, it is the responsibility of the strong to care for the weak, the responsibility of the majority to ensure that the minority feel included.”

With animated voices like Parmesh championing the cause, hopefully, many more Indian workplaces will heed such appeals. Surely, as a nation, we can be the change we want to see in the world.

References

Parmesh Shahani, Queeristan: LGBTQ Inclusion In The Indian Workplace, Westland, 2020