Cite this Essay
MLA:
Lama, Bhaskar. “Hoshang Merchant.” Indian Writing In English Online, 30 May 2022, www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/hoshang-merchant-bhaskar-lama/ .
Chicago:
Lama, Bhaskar. “Hoshang Merchant.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 3, 2022. www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/hoshang-merchant-bhaskar-lama/ .
Hoshang Merchant is a trendsetter in Indian poetry, dealing as he does with themes such as gay love and sexuality, which are unconventional for Indian poetry. He is open about his own sexuality, and much of his work revolves around his life experiences. Over the years, most of his poetry collections have been published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata. His poems cover a wide range of topics and themes: from spirituality to sexuality, life and death. They are about his love and longings, his dedication to the people who impacted his life, his travels and the places he has been in. Besides writing poetry, he has also edited anthologies, of which Yaraana: Gay Writing from India (1999) is best known. As a poet, he is of the opinion that “[a] nation’s history will be written not by its politicians but by its poets” (Forbidden Sex/Texts 121).
Born into a Parsi family in Bombay in 1947, Merchant was educated at St. Xavier’s College there, after which he pursued his MA in English from Occidental College, Los Angeles. He later went to the United States for further studies, acquiring a PhD in English Literature from Purdue University. Having completed his studies, he held a teaching position in Israel, and lived in Tehran and Jerusalem for a few years. Having returned to India, he secured a teaching position in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad, where he offered courses such as “Gay Literature and Sexual Dissidence” at a time when these topics were the subject of occasional discussion in Indian universities. He taught at the University for more than twenty-five years and superannuated in 2012. He has published more than twenty-five books of poetry, criticism, and autobiographical fiction.
While pursuing his PhD at Purdue, Merchant wished to work on gay writers, but “there were no openly gay writers” (Rao 15). Finally, he decided to work on the author Anaїs Nin (1903-1977), as she was someone who “talked openly” about her sexuality and “her friendship with young gay men” (15). Merchant attributes his skills in poetry to her: “Ana[ї]s Nin also made me a poet—I learnt to write poetry from her, so to speak” (15). Some of Merchant’s poems are dedicated to her, and in some other poems, Anaїs Nin becomes the subject. For instance, in “Anaїs Nin Watches Uday Shankar Dance”, he writes:
It is 1931, the year of the Paris Exposition –
Artaud has just gone mad
Anaїs has just escaped his laudanum stained lips
She is in the front row
She feels wet around the eyes
and between the legs
(My Sunset Marriage 107)
In the Middle East, he witnessed violence, political turbulence, and killings on the streets, which left a significant mark on his mind. Merchant’s early writings are replete with references to the Iranian Revolution. The following poem, “Iran”, is an example:
Memory comes
as wave upon wave
of fire
Washes over me
Burns into my skin
Burnishes the paper I write on
The flagstones I tread on
In alley after alley after alley
Looking for the nursery
Where heroes birth and die
Birth and die
Cradle to grave
(Sufiana poems 28)
The poet shows the intensity of the horror, imprinted for a long time in his memory. In “Iranian Revolution”, he writes:
On TV three black-veiled women wailed
Like the three Fates
In the snow
With empty petrol cans –
All of the world’s petrol below
***
Now they dance in the moonlight
In the snow
All of the world’s petrol below
them
bursts into flame –
Women are the gates of Hell
Women will make the Revolution
The stars foretell
(My Sunset Marriage 152)
The poet shows that women had to bear the brunt of the Revolution – they “[burst] into flame”. He recounts many of these experiences in the collection Yusuf in Memphis (1991), where he also “evokes many traditions of homoerotic writing, including those of Greek love, modernist English poetry and the Persian-Urdu ghazal” (Vanita 349).
Throughout his career, he composed poems on overtly gay themes and sexuality, although the contexts have changed over time. In his collections from the mid-nineties, such as The Home, the Friend and the World (1995), Love’s Permission (1996), The Heart in Hiding (1996), The Birdless Cage (1997), the poems depict love as intersecting with spirituality and myth. For instance, in “Each Gopi Thinks Krishna Bathes with Her”, when Merchant writes, “My friends are all Krishna / One day I shall be Radha”, the male narrator imagines himself as a woman who invokes the myth of Radha and Krishna to sanctify his love for his beloved (My Sunset Marriage 76). Similarly, the blending of spirituality and love is palpable in “Ibadat”, in which Merchant writes: “God is Truth / All Friday we lay in bed / Our cupped hands were raised in prayer/to Love” (My Sunset Marriage 118).
Other poems reflect longing and desire. In “To an Absent Lover / No-one in Particular”, it is interesting to observe the longing of/for an absent lover when in a foreign land:
Milan without you
is like anything without you
tasteless: unsalted food
Wherever I dig
I dig up your history
our history
The history of mankind
Where are you?
(Bellagio Blues 26)
In another poem from Bellagio Blues entitled “Disappointment and Depression”, the poet speaks of being ignored by a lover who is present right before him but does not notice his gestures: “He avoided eye contact / I sank into a great chair / with a big whiskey glass” (17). Merchant writes about the pain entailed in love affairs, either due to unrequited love or the feelings of loneliness and longing.
Merchant candidly writes about his love and fantasy for his male lovers, for instance, in “12/4/1996” he writes:
This is a fever I’m writing
And the alphabet is of fire
of the djinns
My lover born of fire
fears fire
I, a fire-worshipper
douse him with my waters.
(My Sunset Marriage 120)
In “Dance of Siva”, Merchant depicts the act of love for his lover: “In my bed/ He [Siva] and I have become a pillar / kneeling at prayer / Difficult to separate god from supplicant / We have flowed into each other” (My Sunset Marriage 103). While Merchant is able to write about his feelings, he does not fail to mention the hardships that he had to undergo as a homosexual man. In his poem, “I at 19”, he writes that he “longed” to love and “wished to invent a soul”, whereas “The world broke in / Broke my body in two To make me whole” (Bombay, My Bombay 18). These lines depict the terror that homosexuals undergo as they seek to fulfil the aspirations of the heteronormative world, and the punishments that the world inflicts on them.
In Merchant’s poetry and essays, one can also discern the language of an activist. He has posed questions regarding the safety of homosexuals, sexual or otherwise, time and again. He writes in Yaraana, “Why do those who protest rape never talk of gay rape? Why this conspiracy of silence? The passive gay is subjected to the same humiliation while walking down a street as a woman is in India” (xv). He states that “A world is not given / But made” (The Man Who Would Be Queen 158), and one has to assert one’s existence. For instance, in “Marine ‘Conversation’” he writes: “Let us come up for breath because / We were forever immured behind sea-walls” as we cannot keep “confining ourselves from the World” (Bombay, My Bombay 14). Merchant believes that “intellectual freedom is finally inseparable from political freedom” (Yaraana xvii). He writes in “A Parsi: ‘Mea Culpa’” that life provides an option to leave “idle tears” and to live a “Life that survives on blood / Which has no tears” (Bombay, My Bombay 10). Even when Merchant broaches a political issue, he intertwines it with a love affair as he writes in “Dharamsala Canto”: “A 1,000 have died in Orissa in the heat / And I remember my boy” (Sufiana Poems 69). Merchant writes about the death of the poet Agha Shahid Ali, and the plight of Kashmir, equating them in his poem in “Death of a Poet: 1-1-2002”: “my poem shall burn / Shall burn like Kashmir” (Sufiana Poems 108).
Merchant repeatedly speaks of the deaths of his family members and lovers. He writes that he has understood life by observing death– “So I write to make sense of death” (The Man Who Would Be Queen 161). The following excerpt from “The River of the Golden Swimmer” shows the poet’s response to his sister’s death:
Last month
On the last day
At midnight
My sister died:
A neat end to a neat life
When a childhood playmate goes
The whole world goes
But the leaves are full of children…
(Sufiana Poems 8)
Here, Merchant nostalgically remembers his “childhood playmate”, his sister, after losing whom he feels “the whole world goes”. Merchant poignantly writes about her death in other poems as well, like, “My Dying Sister Writes a New Book”, “My Sister Takes a Long Time to Die” and “Poem for My Sister: The Garden Tomb.”
Though Merchant was not very fond of his father as his “father’s house is closed” to him, he writes that his “[d]eath is enormous as our sea” in “Death Poem in Three Parts” (My Sunset Marriage 52). His mother’s death deeply saddened him and he laments her death in “Mother”: “Dead Mother return to me / Tell me, if you know, something I must learn” (Sufiana Poems 84). He believes that his mother played a significant role in making him “complete”. While Merchant writes of the death of his beloved, he reveals the intersection of loss and longing. For instance, in “Death Poem in Three Parts”, he writes:
Every face appears his face to me
Every walk suddenly his to me.
How sweet once his house-water
Now his well seems unwell to me.
Like a slave struggling to be free
He appears bound in bed to me.
At every walk he appears sudden to me.
Only I had clothed my ghost
Now all flesh appears rotten to me…
Every face appears his face to me.
(My Sunset Marriage 52)
Travel is a central theme in Merchant’s poems, and some of his poetry collections are named after places he visited or lived in: Bellagio Blues (2004), Pondicherry Poems (2005), Bombay, My Bombay 1955-2005 (2006), Goa! (2007), and Shillong Suite (2010). Merchant documents a child-like curiosity and fascination for new places in his travel poems. For instance, in “The road to Pondicherry from Madras”, he writes:
I see the Sea
With a child’s eye
Though I have a wizened beard now
I’m still that child
Who longs to cut out his heart at sea…
(Pondicherry Poems 11)
The poet is captivated by small serendipities unfolding before him, and he observes them carefully. In “The Bells of Bellagio”, he writes:
The bells of Bellagio
They go down and up
Down and up up up up
Ding-dong, sing-song gong
Mechanical sexton: A sex-
-ton goes up and down
up and down
(Bellagio Blues 7)
We note how he aligns the chiming of the bell (implying a religious act/moment) with sex, and also plays on the word “sex-ton”.
In Merchant’s poems, the poet’s conspicuous presence ensures that the key images and themes revolve around him. For instance, in “An Old Bearded Poet Walks the City”, he writes:
Causing consternation
Among grown bachelors walking their mothers…
Rain clings to his long hair
his rabbit-fur beard.
Who does he think he is? – Leonardo! Durer! Aurobindo! Tagore!
(My Sunset Marriage 183)
The poet makes his own presence and appearance clear with comparisons made to other historical personalities. Even the city (Shillong), ostensibly the subject of the poem, is subsumed under his persona.
It is likely that Merchant undertakes a self-fashioning in order to deal with taboo themes and topics, and the only way he can do so is by connecting them with his life and experiences. In many poems, he orchestrates his love for the beloved, where he is the centrepiece of the poem. Merchant also projects a vulnerable self in love, one who is unacceptable to society, and thus leading to struggle and heartbreak, like in “Broken Love” and “To an Absent Lover/ No-one in Particular”. In “Pyassa/ Thirst” where the poet writes “I became that helpless girl in my bed” (Homage to Jibananda Das 6), and in “Each Gopi Thinks Krishna Bathes with Her” he writes, “One day I shall be Radha” – these lines show the poet’s desire to become a female beloved to his male lovers.
Merchant has also edited anthologies of prose and poetry. His Yaraana: Gay Writing from India (1999), considered the first gay anthology from India, brought him into the limelight. The main focus of the book, which includes some translated pieces, is India’s literary history of homosexuality. Merchant writes that this book is more than personal: “it is also more than sociological and more than mere academic interest in a queer aspect of culture studies” (xi). Some of the important writings that appear in this volume are those of Ashok Row Kavi, Sultan Padamsee, Mahesh Dattani, R. Raj Rao, and others. A decade later, Merchant expanded the volume to Yaraana: Gay Writing from South Asia (2009). In this volume, the author has included writings of Shyam Selvadurai (an extract from his novel Funny Boy), Agha Shahid Ali, and Iftikhar Naseem, thereby expanding the scope of this volume to South Asia.
His book Forbidden Sex/Texts: New India’s Gay Poets (2009), “attempts to investigate Indian discourse on the ‘love that dares not speak its name’ to propose a historical dis/continuity” (xviii). It is divided into three sections: “Book of the Self – Introduction”, “Book of the World – Introduction”, and “Book of the Soul – Introduction”. In the first section — “Is Homosexuality Indian?”– the author tries to situate homosexuality ––. In the second section, he discusses literature written in different Indian languages, theatre, and films, and examines the theme of homosexuality in them. In the third section, he deals with other authors/poets and their writings, some of who include Sultan Padamsee, Jehangir Bhownagary, Adil Jussawalla, R. Raj Rao, Agha Shahid Ali, Vikram Seth, Suniti Namjoshi, and others. This book is significant as Merchant brings to the forefront the work of people who have played a vital role in bringing societal changes to the understanding of gender and sexuality.
In 2010, Merchant published Indian Homosexuality: Ancient India to Contemporary India, where he writes about the history of homosexuality before and after the arrival of the British in India. The book is divided into four sections: “Ancient India”, “Medieval India”, “Contemporary India: Vernaculars”, and “Contemporary India: Indian Writing in English”. The first section consists of the excerpts taken and paraphrased from ancient texts such as the Mahabharata and the Kama Sutra. In the second section, the author briefly talks about some of the works written during the Mughal rule by poets such as Amir Khusro and Ghalib. The third section consists of folktales and writings in Indian languages. In the fourth section, the author talks about the works of writers such as Sultan Padamsee, Agha Shahid Ali, Vikram Seth, and others. In the opening of the fourth section, Merchant writes on homosexuality in India:
Homosexuality as it is known in the West does not exist in India. Most men are bisexuals. Or, to put it another way, most homosexuals get married due to societal pressures. Some commit suicide. Most adjust to a double life, so do their wives. (103)
In The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions (2011), a collection of lyrical essays, Merchant writes about his life, his struggles, and what writing means to him. He calls it “autobiographical fictions”. Thomas C. Spear writes that in autofiction “national identity intersects with a writer’s struggles for self-definition” (89), as “the individuated figure of autobiography is impossible without the collective” (104). Along these lines, Merchant writes about various factors, places, and people, who contributed, positively and negatively, in making him who he is/becomes. When Merchant talks of his life, the content is embellished with excerpts from authors, thinkers and spiritual/religious texts that inspired him. For instance, one can find numerous extracts from Nietzsche, Proust, Schiller, Han-shan, Auden, Lorca and others, and texts like Plato’s Symposium and The Upanishads.
Merchant also unpacks the writer’s life in sections such as “How I Write”:
I write my poems on the streets, in buses, while shopping or teaching, in my head….Proust had his cork-lined room; Anaїs Nin her fireproof bunker. It is luxury to say poets write about nature. They do not. They write about culture. (The Man Who Would Be Queen 163)
His latest publications are Paradise isn’t Artificial (2021) and All My Masters: An East-West Encounter (2021).
Kazim Ali writes that Merchant has been treated unjustly by the literary world, and yet has garnered support:
Though he has been overlooked in many contemporary and defining anthologies of Indian Anglophone writing both in India and around the world, he has never lacked for an audience and his devotees have always known and understood deeply his achievement as a poet of the deepest ardour and his impeccable commitment to the craft of poetry. (18)
Other poets such as Pritish Nandy appreciate Merchant’s poems. In a letter to Merchant, Nandy writes, “Some of your poems are very powerful. I like them very much. It is time these poems saw print” (quoted in The Man Who Would Be Queen 101).
Merchant considers himself “India’s intellectual gay” (Forbidden Sex/Texts xix). He writes that the anti-colonialist, postmodernist European heroes Pasolini and Genet are his role models (Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant 157). He is comfortable in his own skin and refers to himself as “she”, as “both hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity of Indian society and films repel [him]” (Rao 17). Merchant writes that a guiltless life does not make the literary, and it is the same in the context of gay literature: “[T]o be without guilt is to be totally non-literary. Because gay guilt produces gay literature and it is literature that life imitates. No gay literature in India, no modern Indian gay” (Forbidden Sex/Texts 5). Merchant opines that it is not possible to theorise gay life in India on the lines of Western “Theory”. Instead, he “lives [his] life as an Indian gay in India, write[s] about it and then leave[s] it to NRI’s in the West to theorise about gay lives in India” (Forbidden Sex/Texts xix).
Merchant has left an indelible imprint in Indian English poetry by candidly writing on topics considered taboo, making a space for himself through his remarkably unconventional poems. His writings represent the causes and the concerns of homosexuals, be it his prose or poetry. As his works reveal, he has been very active as a homosexual voice – in writings as well as on the ground – it can be said that Merchant is a pioneering gay activist of India.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank the reviewer and the coordinators of IWE Online Project for reviewing my write-up and providing feedback/comments.
Works Cited:
Ali, Kazim. “Introduction.” My Sunset Marriage, by Hoshang Merchant, Navayana, 2016.
Merchant, Hoshang. Bellagio Blues. Otherwise Books, Spark-India, 2004.
—, Bombay, My Bombay. Writers Workshop, 2006.
—, Forbidden Sex/Texts: New India’s Gay Poets. Routledge, 2009.
—, Goa! Writers Workshop, 2007.
—, The Home, the Friend and the World. Writers Workshop, 1995.
—, Indian Homosexuality: Ancient India to Contemporary India. Allied Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2010.
—, Love’s Permission. Writers Workshop, 1996.
—, The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions. Penguin Books, 2011.
—, My Sunset Marriage. Selected and Introduced by Kazim Ali. Navayana, 2016.
—, Pondicherry Poems. Writers Workshop, 2005.
—, Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant, edited by Akshaya K. Rath, Oxford UP , 2016.
—, Shillong Suite. Writers Workshop, 2010.
—, Sufiana: Poems. New Delhi: HarperCollins. 2013.
—, editor. Yaraana: Gay Writing from India. Penguin Books, 1999.
—, editor. Yaraana: Gay Writing from South Asia. Penguin Books, 2009.
—, Yusuf in Memphis. Writers Workshop, 1991.
Rao, R. Raj. “An Interview with Hoshang Merchant.” Whistling in the Dark: Twenty-One Queer Interviews, edited by R. Raj Rao and Dibyajyoti Sarma, Sage, 2009, pp. 1-18.
Spear, Thomas C. “Autofiction and National Identity.” Contemporary French and Francophonic Studies, vol. 2, issue 1, 1998, pp. 89-105.
Vanita, Ruth. “Hoshang Merchant: Poems for Vivan (English)”. Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 249-351.
PUBLICATIONS BY THE AUTHOR
Poetry
Flower to Flame. Rupa & Co., 1989.
Stone to Fruit. Writers Workshop, 1989.
Yusuf in Memphis. Writers Workshop, 1991.
Hotel Golkonda: Poems 1991. Writers Workshop, 1992.
The Home, the Friend and the World. Writers Workshop, 1995.
Jonah and the Whale. Writers Workshop, 1995.
Love’s Permission. Writers Workshop, 1996.
The Heart in Hiding. Writers Workshop, 1996.
The Birdless Cage. Writers Workshop, 1997.
Talking to the Djinns. Writers Workshop, 1997.
Selected Poems. Writers Workshop, 1999.
Bellagio Blues. Otherwise Books, Spark-India, 2004.
Homage to Jibanananda Das. Aark Arts, 2005.
Pondicherry Poems. Writers Workshop, 2005.
Bombay, My Bombay. Writers Workshop, 2006.
Juvenilia. Writers Workshop, 2006.
Alif/Alpha Poems for Ashfaque. Writers Workshop, 2006.
Goa! Writers Workshop, 2007.
Sufi Tree. New Allied Publishers, 2008.
Shillong Suite. Writers Workshop, 2010.
Collected Works, Volume 1: Hyderabad Quartet. Writers Workshop, 2011.
Collected Works, Volume 2: Jonah Quintet. Writers Workshop, 2012.
Sufiana: Poems. New Delhi: HarperCollins. 2013.
Collected Works, Volume 3: Place/Name: A Sextet. Writers Workshop, 2014.
My Sunset Marriage. Selected and Introduced by Kazim Ali. Navayana, 2016.
Collected Works Volume IV: The Book of Chapbooks. Edited by Akshaya K. Rath. Writers Workshop, 2018.
Paradise isn’t Artificial. Red River, 2021.
Anthologies, Edited Books and Others
In-Discretions: Anais Nin. Writers Workshop, 1990.
Yaraana: Gay Writing from India. Penguin Books, 1999. (Edited)
Forbidden Sex/Texts: New India’s Gay Poets. Routledge, 2009.
Yaraana: Gay Writing from South Asia. Penguin Books, 2009. (Edited)
Indian Homosexuality: Ancient India to Contemporary India. Allied Publishers, 2010.
The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions. Penguin Books, 2011.
Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant, edited by Akshaya K. Rath, Oxford UP , 2016.
All My Masters: An East-West Encounter. Queer Ink, 2021.
