Hoshang Merchant

Gay Writing from India

Yaraana

An exploration of gay identity in South Asia. From Ashok Row Kavi's autobiographical piece on growing up gay in Bombay to Vikram Seth's brilliantly etched account of a homosexual relationship in The Golden Gate, the stories, poems, plays and prose extracts in this collection cover a range of literary styles, themes and sensibilities. Mahesh Dattani's play Night Queen is significant as one of the first serious attempts at dramatizing homosexuality on the Indian stage; the poems by R. Raj Rao included here are part of a series that formed the basis for the Bollywood film Bomgay; and the poetry of Dinyar Godrej, Adil Jussawalla and Sultan Padamsee is searing in its intensity. Apart from the pieces written originally in English, there are works translated from Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and other Indian languages, which speak of the agony and the joy of being a man in love with other men. Extracts from the work of well-known writers including Bhupen Khakkar, Kamleshwar and Vishnu Khandekar provide a rare insight into the lives of homosexual men in India s small towns and villages. An extract from Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy details an account of growing up gay in war-torn Sri Lanka, while K.C. Ajay, an illiterate taxi driver, gives us an alternate glimpse of love and friendship in Nepal. Pieces such as these along with the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali and Iftikhar Naseem expand the scope of this collection to include writers from South Asia. With wit, passion and courage, these writings bring to the fore the true meaning of yaraana or male friendship and bonding, an often ignored facet of South Asian life and sexuality.

Gay Writing from South Asia

When you have lived as fully and openly as poet, professor, and gay Indian icon of a generation, Hoshang Merchant, what secrets are there left to tell? Plenty, as it turns out. And in All My Masters, Merchant tells the story of the times and places and people that have made him. Many of them are famous; some of them - until now - barely known. In this wild ride across the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and back to India, Merchant describes himself as 'homeless for 20 years'. And yet it is always clear that he knows exactly who he is. By turns sharply insightful, wickedly funny, poetic, and tender, All My Masters tells the story of a 'homosexual Parsi, Christian by education, Hindu by culture, Sufi by persuasion'. Any one of those journeys would be enough for most people, but Hoshang Merchant embraces all of them, and in giving himself the freedom to do so, he hopes to liberate others like him. Exhilarating and courageous in its honesty, All My Masters is the unforgettable story of many lives in one.

An East-West Encounter

All My Masters

Akshaya K. Rath

Gay Icons of India

‘As everyone knows by now, I’m homosexual.’ To write this sentence and to speak it publicly, which is a great liberation, is why I write. Provocative and percipient, The Man Who Would Be Queen is a collection of lyric essays on the self that flaunts itself as autobiographical fiction. In the words of its writer: ‘The art of living is the art of creating life-fictions.’ The first and second sections of the autobiography take us through the garden of delight or the no-man’s-land of childhood, and the circle of hell or the coming of age years; it is in the penultimate section ‘How I write/Why I write’ that the poet achieves the desired garden of bliss. Lyrical and erudite, playful and dark, The Man Who Would Be Queen is a significant landmark in Indian writing, both as the autobiography of a homosexual and of a poet.

The Man Who Would Be Queen

Includes depiction of homosexuality in theater and motion pictures also.

New India's Gay Poets

Forbidden Sex, Forbidden Texts

The book argues that there is no monolithic homosexuality; there are only homosexualities, that is, there are as many reasons for being gay as there are gays. Some people are born gay, some have gayness thrust upon them, and some do, indeed, achieve to great gayness. Representation of homosexuality/homoeroticism, as it is understood today, is thus a western import. The act and public/social discourses on same-sex love are still illegal; it is, according to many, against the Indian ‘tradition’; and a sense of ‘history’ is seriously problematic when we dig out for a past tradition of homoerotic love and desire. Hoshang Merchant, through an examination of texts, films, poetry, attempts to analyse and crack the codes of sexual (mis)conduct in contemporary India, giving short histories of the fate of several gay writers and explaining the difficulties of ‘coming out’.

Hoshang Merchant

Books

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