You have edited Yaraana, India’s first anthology of gay writing. What was the experience like? Hoshang Merchant: I will take my reader through the dramatic experience of what kind of panic I felt when invited by my intelligent woman-editor at Penguin, who also happens to be my first student ever at Hyderabad. I protested, I cut off the phone; I fled to my sympathetic boss asking what they would do to me, and would I lose my job. My dear, liberal, Tambrahm [Tamil Brahmin] teacher said, like a good resident of Mylapore, “This is an intellectual activity. You are here to do it.” So you see, there are some bright spots in the dark scenario, even in India. Being the cowardly Parsi I am, forever shirking my responsibilities, I decided that my sweet little acolyte, then writing the first-ever thesis on the gay Indian poet Sultan Padamsee, would be a better choice than me to write the book. I rationalized, after all, homosexuality is the way of the future. “No”, said my Tambrahm friend, “You have been asked to do it.” Then started the tedious process of getting the families of dead Indian English writers to accede that someone like Padamsee was indeed gay. (I got the news elliptically from a venerable old Parsi gentleman, who, after years of teaching Padamsee, I suspected of being Padamsee’s lover till the day he [Padamsee] killed himself.) But this is not academic discourse. This is an intuition of a lived life, of an intellect living as a poet and gay [person]. So then you come up with what proof you do have. Then there were living gays, bright luminaries, who refused to state publicly in India that they were gay, while living deliciously gay lives in the West. As you can see, the first enemy is always within.
Now that Agha Shahid Ali is dead, a person whose poetry I teach as if he were Shakespeare, I can briefly sketch for you the heart-breaking pleading correspondence I had with a totally evasive man – no, it was not the fear of losing an inheritance, nor the fear of an outing, nor the fear of paining one’s devout parents, nor incriminating one’s friends, nor falling in the eyes of the holier than thou bhadralok heterosexist so-called literary critics. No, it was something quite else. Amitav Ghosh, in an obituary for Shahid Ali, said, “Ali wanted to be the first poet laureate of a free Kashmir.” Which means, Ali was already courting the Indian nation’s displeasure once. And he did not want to do it twice over – also as a gay man. Not only earn the ire of the Indian nation, but also of the Islamic Fedayeens on both sides of the border.
Yaraana was conceived at Penguin in 1995. I birthed it in 1999. Now, it’s 2008. Read my essay “Aga Shahid Ali, Kashmir and the Gay Nation”, in The Phobic and the Erotic, edited by Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya, and published by Seagull Books in 2007. This is only the story of Indian writing in English. The water gets murkier when the scene shifts to the Indian languages in the linguistically determined states of India. To my knowledge, Konark, not Khajuraho, is the only temple in India which depicts homosexual and heterosexual oral and anal sex. In the land of Konark, in the year 2000, I am expected to believe that there is no homosexual in the state of Orissa. My Oriya students brought to my attention the first and only Oriya gay novel, whose title can be roughly translated as Root and Fruit. The poor author was set upon physically, all the copies of his published book burned in his aangan on the very day of its publication, and belaboured till he was made to burn with his own hands the only extant manuscript of his book in his possession.
What is my trouble as compared to his trouble? But I remember the Cuban gay writer, Reinaldo Arenas, who in the jails of Castro, the darling of the liberal communists, East and West, re-writing Before Night Falls seven times from memory, when finally freed went to New York to die of a “capitalist” disease called AIDS. We namby-pamby intellectuals (and I include myself here) neither have the gumption nor the guts to do what Arenas has done.
How would you define a gay anthology? Would it not mean that all those who are included in it are gay themselves? Yet in Yaraana, you have included the work of a Dalit writer like Namdeo Dhasal, who might not agree to being called gay or even homosexual. I mean, it’s the whole insider-outsider syndrome, this business of voice appropriation. I [R Raj Rao] have said somewhere that Makarand Paranjape may have a gay character in his novel The Narrator, but that doesn’t make him a gay writer.
There are three questions rolled into one here, and I will answer each one of them by turn. One, for India’s first gay anthology, there were slim pickings. Please remember that you are dealing with people who are alone, who may be having thoroughly comfortable private lives in a very traditional society that respects privacy (read social hypocrisy) above all else. Now, in USA or UK, we have volume upon volume of the series Men on Men year upon year, where gay men richly tell their rich stories of heartbreak and fulfilment in a social framework where homosexuality is legalised, but where the minds and hearts of sexualised beings hold the terms of a savage interior. So I had to include stories by heterosexual men and women dealing with fictionalised or real gay characters. I also included a story satirising heterosexuality from the gay perspective. But Penguin dropped it.
About Makarand’s The Narrator, a rival company published it and we could not afford the copyright royalties. There were other Penguin books, but the author was either Sri Lankan or had foreign publishers, which meant paying copyright fees in dollars and pounds. There were Indian gay authors published by Penguin and that would be a duplication of effort. By which I mean, who would read the entire novel if they get all the salacious bits in Yaraana for Rs 200? These are commercial considerations beyond my control. Everywhere, it’s the marketing division and not the editorial division which calls the shots.
Two, about Namdeo Dhasal, who was introduced to me by Professor Jahagirdar, whose son I taught in 1996. The professor kindly lent me, for one month, his own rare first edition of Namdeo’s Marathi anthology carrying a poem called Gandu Bagicha. (Saleem Peeradina had told me of Dhasal creating a sensation reciting the same poem at Bharat Bhawan in 1984.) In 1996, there was yet no English translation of the poem. So I created one from my rudimentary kaamwali [housemaid] Parsi-Marathi. Namdeo was kind enough to send word through the professor’s son that he liked my translation. Not a question was raised as to what he was doing in a gay anthology. Namdeo was then going through a political crisis of conscience and had quit Ambedkar’s Republican Party, which, according to him, was leaderless, and had joined the Shiv Sena, which shows the kind of shifting sands passions, commitments, lies, writings, etc., are built on, which India’s academia doesn’t have the wit to address.
Please note that someone as gossipy as me had not learnt, until literally yesterday, that Namdeo’s mother was a sex worker in Kamatipura, that against all odds, she sent him to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation schools where he learnt the grammar to write the stories of the Kamatipura prostitutes, in the language of their clients, their pimps, their police exploiters, and about sexuality: Kamatipura offers sexualities of every kind imaginable and unimaginable to the mind of a little son of a female sex worker. Hence, no question arose about the poet’s sexuality, by the poet who knows better than the bhadralok.
Three, as for Makarand, he was my office-mate and was at continuous loggerheads with me when he actually wrote The Narrator. Now, he is my soulmate, which shows that he was only trying to give a very puzzled and vulnerable individual like me some of his karmic insights that he got by way of his Brahman karma. When I read the prologue to The Narrator, I had a frisson, that is, goosebumps all over my body, with a feeling of deja vu. Where have I experienced that before? I went to Makarand’s house once and only once when he was all alone by himself. The doors were open and I moved through those satvik rooms without permission, something Makarand in meditation would have sensed in the other room. So, the encounter between the narrator and the gay persona introduced in the book is given as a frisson felt by the writer, the reader and the character.
Of course, that afternoon when we were watching an Indian English movie on TV, I had no way of knowing all this. But I do remember Makarand keeping on telling me to watch silently, to not jabber unnecessarily as was my wont, because he was probably still in the throes of or prolonging the frisson to write about it later. Makarand did tell me he had based a character in his gay novel on me. But at that time, both of us were young, so Makarand’s gay character turns out to be evil, and I, characteristically, was thankless and un-understanding. He did offer Penguin a lesbian story published in Femina, which they rejected, since Facing the Mirror, a lesbian anthology, was concurrently being published.
Yes. Around the time Yaraana was published (in 1999), Penguin also brought out this anthology of lesbian writing edited by Ashwini Sukthankar. How would you compare your book to hers? Although in your book all contributors have written under their own names, in hers many have used pseudonyms. Is this because it’s harder to be openly lesbian than to be openly gay?
As Shakespeare’s Bottom would say, “All comparisons are odorous.” I cannot judge, but I can tell you that the parameters of the two books were as different as the personalities of their editors. Ashwini, I imagine, is a middle-class, liberal, left-leaning, non-conformist woman, then physically situated in the US. I was the elitist, Western returned, literature professor. Hers was the lived life, mine the life crystallised in literature, as the future gay canon to be taught. The demands on us as editors were vastly different. Even so, courageous literary reviewers, men and women, naively said that there was no Dalit experience in Hoshang, while Ashwini’s was the unspoken sexual suffering of lower-class lesbian women.
Hers was a series of interviews interspersed with narratives. Mine were published, and unpublished or unpublishable stories, crystallised in high prose in all kinds of languages, dealing with all strata of society, for example, a carpenter, a lorry driver and his gay sidekick, the cleaner, albeit written by upper-class men like myself. They had nothing to say about Dhasal or about my own autobiography of a twelve-year-old elite child being sodomised on the beaches of Bombay till the age of sixteen or eighteen, on his way to and from school, by people of all classes. What do the Marxists have to say to that? What could they say? For it’s outside their experience.
As for names, it is not as easy as you make it out to be. I agree that a woman, straight or gay, has it harder than a man, straight or gay, in our chauvinistic society. I see this subterfuge even in elite lesbians of my acquaintance, for reasons of family, honour and so on. I am not making a social revolution. I am interested in literature effecting a change of conscience at one remove, which means, in another generation, not my own. It also means that even when I write a so-called autobiography, it is not the lived life, but writing about the lived life, which is to say, fiction. Nietzsche knew a hundred years ago that there are no facts, only interpretations, something which our middle-class professors have not caught up with yet.
Which brings me to the question of pornography in Yaraana. Pornography, traditionally, over the centuries in all parts of the world, has always been anonymous. I put my name to the pornography I wrote not because it sells (that too!), but because I am a writer who believes in all kinds of writing having equal valency, and also because I am a teacher and gay sex, like all sex, has to be taught because it’s a social construct, my included autobiography amply showing that there was no one to teach me when I began. I also wanted to break stereotypes and myths about my sexuality by having a versatile and fictitious I. If there is too much of autobiography creeping in here, it’s because, in the early stages, the Dalits and gays will get a theory only out of autobiography, as women and Blacks did in the nascence of their respective movements.
Excerpted with permission from Whistling in The Dark: Twenty-Five Queer Interviews, edited by R Raj Rao and Dibyajyoti Sarma, Speaking Tiger Books.
