Triangulating Sexual Politics in India

Nishant Shahani's 304-page Pink Revolutions packs in a lot of analysis. The author's goal to cover several political dynamics is ambitious, and each chapter has the potential to be expanded to a stand-alone book. While certainly informative and novel in its analysis, at times, Pink Revolutions seems to be trying to do too much and jumps across arguments and discussions prematurely.Shahani's central research question asks, How can we understand the emergency and visibility of queer politics in India through the lens of globalization and nationalism? Shahani argues that queer politics is central to India's aspirations toward global modernity, and it is impossible to isolate queerness from both globalization and nationalism within India. In short, the simultaneous emergence of queerness and economic liberalization is no coincidence. Thus queer politics provides a useful and important case study to understand politics, aspirations toward global modernity, and development in contemporary India.What is the pink revolution? And is it truly a revolution? The pink revolution itself serves as a double meaning for global modernity and Hindu nationalism. The pink revolution is both about LGBT visibility as well as a reference to Narendra Modi's 2014 election speech, when Modi refers to cow slaughter and the pink, vulnerable flesh of the cow. The pink revolution thus demonstrates the tensions that this book explores at the intersection of the local and the global. The pink revolution is also about how LGBT visibility occurs in the context of India's changing economy and simultaneous rise of Hindu nationalism. There are a number of paradoxes to be explored here. Queerness is seen as global, yet not part of "authentic" Indian culture. Despite this, queer economies have emerged in India. How have these queer economies emerged, and even thrived, despite these tensions? As an alternative to a dialectic, Shahani offers triangles and triangulations to refract and reframe our current understandings of sexual politics to better understand the more complicated entanglements and interdependencies. Each chapter explores how the three forces of global modernity and neoliberalism, Hindu nationalism, and queer politics are entangled, interdependent, and constantly acting on and shaping one another.Our first triangulation in chapter 1 sets the stage to understand the rise of LGBT politics in India: revolution, neoliberal modernity, and domestic sovereignty. As a consequence of the World Bank's and International Monetary Fund's structural adjustment programs in 1991, economic neoliberal reform became conflated with revolution. As India became open to foreign markets and continued to economically liberalize, there was a simultaneous rise in fetishizing the local. Globalization itself became synonymous with revolution, and it is an important context for understanding the contradictions at the heart of the pink revolution, including the local versus the global and the rise of queer visibility despite queerphobia. Shahani opens the book with context; however, the author could have furthered this argument by demonstrating that economic liberalization provoked further cultural anxiety and Hindu precarity. Perhaps to compensate for economic liberalization, there was an increase in religious fundamentalism, localism, and nativism. This anxiety is demonstrated in the phrase "Indian in heart, global in spirit" and the desire to preserve a native, authentic Indian soul while also participating in modernity.Shahani gets to the heart of queer visibility in chapter 2, which looks at queer safety and gay tourism, modernity and worlding, and nationalism and tradition. Shahani argues gay tourism needs to be understood more than just an inevitable consequence of globalization, in which tradition and modernity clash with one another. Rather, gay tourism is part of India's worlding ambitions. Shahani argues that gay tourism emerges at the same time Delhi got a reputation as the "rape capital" of the world. As India became seen as unsafe for women and painted as premodern and antifeminist, gay tourism became a successful zone of safety based on constructions of nonsafety of homophobia and sexual violence against women. Based on and enabled by the constructions of the local as dangerous, the tourism industry marketed safe, queer spaces. Gay tourism, then, became a way for India to redeem itself within modernity, compensate for shame of the label as the rape capital, and avoid the stigma of being premodern. These safety zones legitimize themselves through "aesthetic governmentality"—in other words, by looking safe, they are deemed safe—and therefore legitimate.Shahani situates himself in a variety of literatures, including South Asian studies, globalization and development studies, political economy, queer studies, neoliberalism, Dalit studies, global health, and diaspora studies. This book is impressive in the number of themes it analyzes, including the co-optation of revolution, queer safety, queer privacy, mobility, Hindu nationalism, neoliberalism reform, modernity, and more. I found Shahani's deployment of triangulation theory intriguing and appreciate its theoretical potential to make visible entangled dynamics; however, his analysis, at times, lacked depth, particularly so in the chapter regarding caste, touch, and queerness. Perhaps it is because he is trying to do too much in one book that his analysis can lack clarity. The connections between different chapters, particularly the latter chapters, to the central thesis are less clear. I would have also liked to see more explicit discussion of patriarchy, feminist theory, colonialism, anticolonial and postcolonial theory, and queer failure.Revolution comes in many packages, such as the queer and sexual revolution in India or the rise of Hindu nationalism. Shahani aptly points out how revolution does not necessarily always lead to radical change or progress; rather, revolution exists in uneasy alliances, messy entanglements, and triangulations, and can even result in the opposite of radical progress.