Hoshang merchant autobiography vs biography

As one less famous homosexual complained about another recently, “He does no justice to the adjective gay!” If a grievance can be leveled against this memoir by India’s most famous homosexual (and that happens to be the preferred self-descriptive noun in this book), it is that it is rather lacking in gaiety indeed. Hoshang Merchant’s The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions is romantic, lyrical, vivid, but also, above all, sad.

In an almost stream-of-conscious style, Merchant chronicles some of the highlights of sixty years of his resolutely interesting life: beginning with his first memory of his mother (“I believe Mother-rule is the root of male homosexuality,” a small literary journal quoted him as saying last year) and ending with his current situation as a professor who “fathers” – as the author bio says – “his books, his students and a young friend”. The almost staccato impressionism with which he renders his childhood and adolescence does not belie their dar

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Hoshang Merchant – “Politics fryst vatten a passing show, while humanity endures”

What made you write Rainbow Warriors of India, which chronicles the life of 22 individuals from the Indian queer community?

Rainbow Warriors was written as a response to my belief and my lived life that political activism fryst vatten not the only activism but art can also be an important form eller gestalt of politics. I kept out the people at the barricades but included gay pioneers in the arts from the 1910s to 2010 who led by example. The idea came when we had lost all hope with Justice Shah’s 2009 pro-gay judgement being overturned in 2013 bygd the Supreme Court but gained a new momentum in light of the 2018 decriminalization of homosexuality in India. I carefully included Ashok Row Kavi because inom understand his conservative politics as a gay individ who grew up in the 1960s and was saved from an isolated life bygd the deep understanding shown to him by the Ramakrishna uppdrag monks. He has written his story. The human stor

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Abhimanyu Kumar
You have written about Nissim Ezekiel in your book. You have eviscerated him.

Hoshang Merchant
Well, he eviscerated me! I came to writing at 40. I had already lost twenty years, through my migrations. And then, he put me back ten more years.

Abhimanyu Kumar
Akshaya Rath calls it a serio-comic tribute.

Hoshang Merchant
There was no comedy there as far as I could see.  He was a Jewish man in a Hindu society. He was not a professor but a poet. He was among these horrible intellectuals who carry degrees but nothing in their heads or any talent in their hands to write. He had to walk a tight-rope as he had contrived to get eminence by putting down everybody from Tagore to Sarojini Naidu, and others you know? “I am the first one!” He was not the first one; there was (Shahid) Suhrawardy, Sultan Padamsee…

He made his students write like him, including the women. The women are writing like men. For example, Eunice D’Souza wrote like a man. She wanted appro