The old Bombay Dost last put out an issue in 2002 (with Sridhar Rangayan and myself as guest editors), then went into hibernation. The brand name was kept alive with a Yahoo!-hosted listserv as well as fortnightly Sunday High events, where even today the community comes together to watch queer-themed films, listen to queer authors, and talk about current affairs (no pun intended). As long as the name was alive, there was hope that
Bombay Dost would return. Every so often, the core Bombay Dost team (at least those still Mumbai-based: Ashok Row Kavi, Suhail Abbasi, Sridhar, Vivek Raj Anand and myself) would try to think of ways to turn this hope into reality: Can we resume it in its original quarterly avatar? Or as a Diwali special annual issue?
Lack of funds was the biggest stumbling block, and our commitment to Humsafar Trust and to our respective full-time careers weren’t making things easier. About five years ago, we even managed to re-launch Bombay Dost as a webzine, but the project ran into problems and fell by the wayside. Meanwhile, we discovered there’s a squatter on the domain name (the new one’s www.bombaydost.co.in). The squatter was trying to extort a huge sum of money from us, which only reaffirmed that the magazine lives on in the LGBT consciousness — people were still looking for Bombay Dost, online. Last year, in Delhi, Vivek had met scholar Saleem Kidwai, who said that Bombay Dost cannot die! It marked the beginning of the gay movement in India and we must revive it.
Many born in the 1980s and later are probably unaware what the magazine meant to the previous generations; they may have only heard its name, like some of the people who have written for the re-launch issue — even the editor of this issue, Vikram Phukan
(he’s in his 30s), had not laid eyes on a copy until August 2008!
Vikram was introduced to me (over the phone) by Bhushan Sharma, who’s written a lovely short story in the new issue and with whom I had become acquainted a year ago per chance. In fact, Bhushan and Vikram were also now becoming friends. An IT professional, Vikram was just settling down in Guwahati-Shillong after a long UK stint, for more literary pursuits. We had long, long-distance phone chats, often about a queer-themed project on which he is very keen. He decided to come down to Mumbai to take part in the annual Independence Day-plus-1 queer march (Queer Azaadi Mumbai, or QAM). During his Mumbai visit, it seemed to me that Vikram’s sensibilities to gay issues were in sync with the Bombay Dost team, even though he had only casually met two of us.
Post-QAM, Vikram was planning to be in Mumbai again in November-December,
for personal reasons. He would have no place to stay, except his cousins’s, that too only for a few days. But he had a chance meeting with a close Delhi-based friend from his college days. The friend was just passing through Mumbai and told Vikram he could stay
in his guesthouse when he was in the city later that year. The place was ideal for his creative writing plans.
Vikram returned to Guwahati but not before he had become involved with , albeit as programmer of the films we showed at the Sunday High events. One late-October day, Vivek Raj Anand called me with some urgency. He was in the middle of a United Nations Development Programme workshop representing Humsafar, and “a young cute kiddo” from Kolkata, Anupam Hazra, had just finished a presentation.
During the presentation, he had spoken emotionally about Bombay Dost and what it had meant to the community. At the workshop, UNDP asked Vivek how they could support Humsafar; Vivek asked them if they could help revive the magazine. UNDP loved Vivek’s idea and he called me so that I could work on a budget for all-colour, 40-page
Bombay Dost issue.
Almost at the same time, I received a text from Vikram — who knew nothing of this development — asking if he could pitch to edit Bombay Dost! We had no idea then about how we would manage to produce it, given the distance and many uncertainties, but my
immediate response was: “Yes!”
Meanwhile, Bhushan, a friend and I took a short Goan holiday we had planned a month in advance. There, I met Alok Johri, someone I had only exchanged emails and talked with, and whose paintings and photographs I had seen online. On meeting Alok, one of the things that immediately struck me was that we already had one feature in the bag for the new Bombay Dost. The rest was hard work, but things were beginning to fall into place. All of this was ‘luck by chance’.
*Bombay Dost is available at Oxford Bookstores and Humsafar offices in Mumbai, People Tree in Delhi, Lakshya Trust in Surat/Baroda/Rajkot, Sarathi Trust in Nagpur and SAATHII in Kolkata. It is a half-yearly with the next issue due in October, it can be ordered online from www.bombaydost.co.in.
— This piece first appeared in the Spring 2009
issue of Trikone magazine (www.trikone.org).
nitin.karani@gmail.com