Forgive me, for in writing about the celebrated queer Indian poet and writer, the 76-year-old Hoshang Merchant, I include a little bit about myself on occasion. This indulgence isn’t about me alone but to borrow a few lines from Hoshang’s own wealth of writing, “These are mythologies. I may sound narcissistic each time I use ‘I’, but the mythologies take us out of ourselves and make us join the stars.”
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It is an indisputable fact that Hoshang has been crucial, critical and completely responsible for the idea and identity of modern queer Indian poet-writers. And I’m sure that every queer poet-writer in independent India has their own story to tell of his enduring influence; and owes him a whole lot even if they don’t know better.
Hoshang Merchant | Photo Credit: Tarun Bhartiya
At first, there is this undeniable feeling of being the “only queer in the village” on discovering one’s own queerness. It is delicious, delicate but also a deeply lonely feeling. Quickly, it is followed by a hungry search to find others who can testify to this desire, this deviation too. On one of these hunts for evidence, I found a copy of Yaarana: Gay Writing from South Asia at my friend’s house. I’d been reading myself and force-fitting my feelings into heterosexual texts — I still haven’t stopped — but this anthology edited by Hoshang gifted me with yet another vocabulary to colour my own world. It showed me that I’m not the first nor will I be the last queer person in any village. Such a relief, a release.
Eating up the world
Later, devouring Hoshang’s poems at first, and then his prose, it was like being led by a wicked and witty guide and being introduced to queer writers from around the world and across time. It wasn’t just the grand ones, Hoshang has always had the generosity and gentleness to introduce us to even those hiding in the background. He seems to have taken on the task of eating up the world through its written word. He digests it and is able to craft it again with his life and love experiences revealing something else about our world. “We think we are geniuses, or because we have great experiences, we can become poets but great literature comes from a tradition,” he crisply states on the phone from his Hyderabad home.
Hoshang Merchant | Photo Credit: Tarun Bhartiya
“Just like Spanish literature has to make sense of Cervantes, English literature of Shakespeare and American literature of Tennyson, Hawthorne and Whitman,” he explains. So too, Hoshang had to make sense of his writing. He picked figures conducive to him because he was “working between two traditions: the Indic and the Anglo-American”. He set out to make sense of “Whitman and Ginsburg from America, Anaïs Nin from the European set because she read all of the European poets”. And putting together Yaarana gave him the roots of Indian erotic writing “in Bhakti poetry and in the homo-eroticism of the Urdu ghazal”.
“Since, we have to manoeuvre ourselves because we are writing modern poetry in a modern language, which is English, compared to the histories of other languages in India. So, we have to make sense of that too,” he adds. And so, for Hoshang, “queer writing isn’t about sex” but instead, he hopes it is read as “writing by a queer person living in a straight society”. Queer writing for him is a way for queer people to make this society accommodate them. And for him, his practice of reading everything to make sense of this world isn’t “an act of snobbery” as might be assumed by some. Instead, it allows him to “talk to everyone, not just the queer ghetto” through his writing because “the ghetto isn’t giving me any trouble,” he says.
Every conversation with Hoshang is mischievous and meaningful, never mundane. In one phone-call, he can travel between “the shaky masculinity” of pornography to the cleverness of Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer who “gave good advice, which Oppenheimer did not take”. He talks about teaching English at a university in Iran for two years during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, being in Palestine as a professor during the Intifada in 1987, to presenting arguments “for homosexuality being home-bred in every culture” but his dislike for homo-normativity and gay marriage.
The witness
My access to him and his availability to me isn’t something I forged but I hope I continue to be granted it for a long time to come. More than a decade ago, in December 2010 was the first time I met him. As a 24-year-old queer poet, I was invited to read at Chennai’s annual Poetry with Prakriti Festival. This was the first time I was travelling out of Bengaluru to read my poetry; I was thrilled at this opportunity but also quite convinced that no one would come to any one of my readings. Honestly, it was much like this. Though, I did have two constant figures present at each of my readings: the first, a set of silk-sari clad aunties, friends who sat together and offered the reason (“we like him”) for showing up to each one of my readings, including on an evening of brutal rain. The second, Hoshang Merchant, seated in the front. Striking, signature silver long hair and beard. He was kind, he was attentive. He was a witness. And in my poetry and prose, I’ll just have to continue to make sense of that.
Alliance Francaise of Madras and Prakriti Foundation will celebrate Hoshang Merchant with a panel discussion on August 16.
The author is Bengaluru-based poet and writer.
