Announcing the launch of Special Anniversary Edition of Gay Bombay by Parmesh Shahani, Head of the Godrej India Culture Lab

6 April, 2020: SAGE India is proud to announce the second-innings of our bestseller, Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India by Parmesh Shahani.

Parmesh Shahani's rich and revolutionary ethnographic-memoir in an online-offline community, first published 12 years ago, contains academic discussions interspersed with recollections of his own encounters as an openly gay person. This special anniversary edition includes new introductory chapters from renowned academicians working in gender and queer studies such as Professor Ulka Anjaria of Brandeis University and Professor Kareem Khubchandani of Tufts University, who write about the importance of the book as one of the first scholarly accounts of queer life in contemporary India. It also includes an exclusive concluding conversation between the author and Professor Dhiren Borisa of O. P. Jindal Global University, in which they reflect on the future queer histories that still need to be written.

Announcing the release of the Special Anniversary Edition in April, the author says:
"If you'd told me in 2008 at the time of this book's release...that this book was important enough to even consider a second edition of, I'd have wondered what you'd been smoking. I was just so grateful for it to be published in the first place... it feels slightly surreal that this small academic labour of love continues to have an afterlife."

ABOUT THE BOOK
Using a combination of multi-sited ethnography, textual analysis, historical documentation analysis and memoir writing, the book attempts to provide various macro and micro perspectives on what it means to be a gay man located in the online-offline Gay Bombay community in the late 1990s and early 2000s. On a broader level, the book critically examines the formulation and reconfiguration of contemporary Indian gayness in the light of its emergent cultural, media and political alliances. "What is the point of reading this old book about 15 years after it was first written and 12 years after it was published? The first is that queer lives matter. Our stories matter. The lives of people chronicled in Gay Bombay still continue to be relevant...what kind of world are we going to create together now that section 377 is gone?" says the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Parmesh Shahani is Vice President at Godrej Industries Ltd. and the founder of the award winning Godrej India Culture Lab which sparks conversations and collaborations about the changing face of contemporary India. He has guided many of the country's leading companies on their LGBTQ inclusion journeys. He is a member of the FICCI taskforce on diversity and inclusion and a board member of Khoj International Artists' Association. Parmesh holds an MS in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. He has been a TED Senior Fellow, a Yale World Fellow, and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. His second book Queeristan: LGBTQ Inclusion at the Indian Workplace (Westland Books) is scheduled for release in 2020.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
"Finally we have the definitive gay historical document of the city we still lovingly call Bombay. Parmesh Shahani shows us in his quiet Indian way that being gay in India is no Stonewall revolution." - Late Wendell Rodricks Fashion Designer, Goa, India

"This beautifully written debut book, Gay Bombay, merges autobiographical, ethnographic, institutional, and historical perspectives to paint a vivid picture of the emergence of a gay community in modern India." - Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California, Author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

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ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE is a leading international provider of innovative, high-quality content publishing more than 1000 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video.

This release was published on openPR.