Background
Hoshang Merchant was born in 1947 to a Zoroastrian business-family in Mumbai, India. On his mother’s side he descends from a line of teachers and preachers.
( The book argues that there is no monolithic homosexuali...)
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’.
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Hoshang Merchant was born in 1947 to a Zoroastrian business-family in Mumbai, India. On his mother’s side he descends from a line of teachers and preachers.
Merchant was educated at Saint Xavier"s College, Mumbai. Thereafter at Purdue, he studied Renaissance and Modernism, and for his Doctor of Philosophy (1981), wrote a dissertation on Anaïs Nin. Since leaving Purdue in 1975, Merchant has attended the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Centre, Massachusetts, and lived and taught in Heidelberg, Iran and Jerusalem where he was exposed to various radical student movements of the Left.
Most of his writings are in English. He has a Masters from Occidental College, Los Los Angeles He has lived and taught in Heidelberg, Jerusalem and Iran where he was exposed to various radical movements of the Left.
Merchant is openly gay.
Writers hop in Kolkatta, India has published seventeen books of his poetry since 1989. The hop also is bringing out his collected works.
Rupa and Company published his book of poems Flower to Flame in 1992 in the New in India series. The Rockefeller got him Bellagio Blues (2004).
Yaraana: Gay Writing from India (Penguin, 1999), Forbidden Sex/Texts (Routledge, 2009), Indian Homosexuality (Allied, 2010), The Manitoba Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fiction (Penguin, 2012) and Sufiana: Poems (2013) are among his notable works.
Merchant superannuated from the University of Hyderabad where he taught and Surrealism. Since the mid-80s, Hoshang Merchant has made his home in Hyderabad, where he taught English at University of Hyderabad. He has written 20 books of poetry, and four critical studies.
He edited India"s first gay anthology Yaraana: Gay Writing from India.
( The book argues that there is no monolithic homosexuali...)