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...the story of Gogol, the resentful son of Bengali migrants to Boston named by a father whose copy of the Russian's works had once saved him from a train wreck. The story I recount here centers not on an Indian-origin Gogol but on an 'America-returned' Pushkin. But it, too, is an account of hope and the limit to hope, set in the aftermath of a time when India, America, and Russia stood as parallel dreamworlds offering a receptive humanity the future. If it is an account of homosexuality, it is because homosexuality has come to serve as a privileged marker both of hope and its limit in the aftermath of the three worlds. If it is an account told as a song, it is a song in the sense of the Sanskrit gita and how I would render it, as the recognition of an ethical universe one is asked to call into being. I sing in the face of Pushkin's death. Ethics as a performative practice is offered here as a kind of mourning.
The account: two men, Pushkin Chandra and Kuldeep, were found murdered on August 14, 2004, in New Delhi, at Chandra's barsati, a small apartment adjoining his parents' residence. The Chandras lived in a gated enclave known as Anand Lok, the Bliss World, in the south of the giant city. Within days, residents of Delhi, as well as a globally dispersed public stitched together through the consumption of Delhi-based media, were being offered frequent and lurid reporting on what quickly became known as the Pushkin Affair.
The attention was based in part on Chandra's social position; accounts referred to his father's career in the prestigious Indian Administrative Service and to the posh surroundings of Anand Lok. But the extensive coverage emerged primarily because Chandra and presumably Kuldeep were assumed to have enjoyed homosexual (or in newspaper Hindi, samalaingik) relations, and because they were from distinct social classes. Kuldeep was understood to be a Hindi or Punjabi speaker of a 'laboring class' background, and, like at least one of the alleged killers, was noted to be from the uncivil peasant culture of towns dominated by the Jat caste in the state of Haryana, just to the south of New Delhi. Chandra, scion of the Bliss World, had done his graduate training in management in the United States.
This class distinction between the men, registered through what anthropologist Donald Moore has called an "ethno-spatial fix" that here stitched together Haryana, the presumed incivility of Jats, and the inability to speak fluent English, became ipso facto evidence that the crime pointed to a 'nexus' linking wealthy gay men, poor boys, and criminal mafia. The Hindustan Times ran the headline "Pushkin Murder Uncovers Gigolo Trail." The once-staid Times of India was exultant: "Gay Murders Tip of Sordid Sleazeberg." Within hours of the murders, the relation between Chandra and the killers was inverted in the court of Delhi-based media: Chandra became a kingpin of vice, the murderers offered some kind of rough justice, and Kuldeep was as much a victim of Chandra as of whoever garroted them. An instant ethnography of Delhi homosexuality--offered as a violent and predatory demimonde abetted by the international privilege of jet-setting activists--was mobilized on nightly news reports.
The primary evidence of Chandra's criminal career was a cache of erotic photographs, allegedly of men having sex in Chandra's flat and elsewhere, along with pornographic films on disc. Video-disc pornography, imported and homegrown, is widely available in Indian cities and towns--not only, as a decade earlier, in urban border and transit zones like bus- or train-station stalls but also in shops and bazaars at the center. But the photographs, both mementoes of parties and more explicitly sexual shots, were seen by the police as highly suggestive of a nexus linking extramarital sex to trafficking in poor men's bodies. That Chandra, or perhaps Kuldeep, might have just liked to take sexy photos was never publicly contemplated.
Soon a wide range of actors now ubiquitous in large Indian cities--in particular, human-rights activists and representatives of lesbian and gay groups--decried this near-instant inversion of criminality, which led to a smaller second wave of articles by Delhi media, now reporting on themselves. When in late 2004 I interviewed journalists working for the English news channel of the NDTV cable network, one of the agencies that more aggressively pursued the story on the homosexuality-trafficking nexus, they argued it was their more down-market Hindi news channel colleagues who were responsible for this new tabloid style. Rereading newspapers suggested otherwise.
These accusations and counteraccusations were in turn followed by a backlash, a still-smaller third wave of pieces more aggressively condemning Chandra as representative of the criminal-homosexual nexus. In an editorial by Swapan Dasgupta slyly entitled, "The Problem is Not Homosexuality," and widely circulated on Internet sites targeting the South Asian infotech diaspora, the author argues that it is not homosexuality in itself that gives offense but rather the politically correct refusal to recognize its persistent affinity with criminality. The problem, in short, is the nexus.
The effect of all this publicity was pronounced: many of Chandra's friends were subjected to intense police interrogation; family and friends became guilty by association; and the sexual and social lives of men having sex with men in Delhi were curtailed. Large gay parties and the gay night at an upscale pub were all shut down; park cruising and sex work were heavily policed; and AIDS organizations focusing on men having sex with men were attacked in the press as abetting trafficking. Months went by before the coverage abated.
And just as the cloud of the Pushkin Affair finally appeared to be lifting, and Chandra's friends saw a possible end to the interrogations, the academics appeared, asking more questions and trying to make sense of it all: thus my trip to Delhi.
I knew Pushkin; I did not know Kuldeep. Pushkin was the childhood friend of a close friend of mine, and I had briefly met him when he was studying business in the United States. We had other friends in common through overlapping gay and AIDS-prevention circles in both Delhi and Bombay. A number of U.S.-based academics I know had been close to Pushkin's parents.
Writing this essay reflects...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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