Yaraana Read online

  Edited by Hoshang Merchant

  YARAANA

  Gay Writing from South Asia

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Public Meeting and Parting as Private Acts

  Firaq Gorakhpuri

  The Contract of Silence

  Ashok Row Kavi

  Shivraj

  Kamleshwar

  Pages from a Diary

  Bhupen Khakhar

  OPomponia Mine!

  Sultan Padamsee

  Epithalamium

  Sultan Padamsee

  And So to Bed

  Sultan Padamsee

  The Jungle

  Madhav G. Gawankar

  The Slaves

  Hoshang Merchant

  Poems from a Vacation

  S. Anand

  Night Queen

  Mahesh Dattani

  Gandu Bagicha

  Namdeo Dhasal

  Moonlight Tandoori

  R. Raj Rao

  A Mermaid Called Aida

  A Review

  from Waiting for Winter

  Belinder Dhanoa

  Underground

  R. Raj Rao

  Opinions

  R. Raj Rao

  Bomgay

  R. Raj Rao

  Beta

  Rakesh Ratti

  Sunshine Trilogy

  Owais Khan

  from Trying to Grow

  Firdaus Kanga

  from The Golden Gate

  Vikram Seth

  Six Inches

  R. Raj Rao

  Karate

  Adil Jussawalla

  The Raising of Lazarus

  Adil Jussawalla

  Song of a Hired Man

  Adil Jussawalla

  ‘Never Take Candy from a Stranger!’

  Gyansingh Shatir

  from Sheltered Flame

  Iqbal Mateen

  from Yayati

  Vishnu Khandekar

  Desire Brings Sorrow

  Dinyar Godrej

  Under Water

  Dinyar Godrej

  On the Road to Jata Shankar

  Dinyar Godrej

  Apparently

  Dinyar Godrej

  Rite of Passage

  Manoj Nair

  The Sweetest of All

  Frank Krishner

  Knowing Your Place

  Ian Iqbal Rashid

  Diary: Sharjah, 21 June 1993

  Hoshang Merchant

  On Account of a Girl

  Shibram Chakrabarti

  An Answer to the Female Liberationists

  Iftikhar Naseem

  Her/Man

  Iftikhar Naseem

  ‘Nath’ of the Gay Prophet

  Iftikhar Naseem

  from Funny Boy

  Shyam Selvadurai

  ‘Aisa Bhi Hota Hai Kya?’: A Story from Nepal

  Ajay K.C.

  The Country without a Post Office

  Agha Shahid Ali

  Story

  Bhupen Kakhar

  Zib-al-Abd

  Hoshang Merchant

  Dirge

  Hoshang Merchant

  Afterword

  Editor’s Note

  Footnote

  The Contract of Silence

  Editor’s Acknowledgements

  Biographical Notes

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  YARAANA

  Born in 1947 to a Zoroastrian business-family in Bombay, India, Hoshang Merchant graduated second in his BA Class (1968) with a major in English and a minor in the culture of India. From his mother’s family he descends from a line of preachers and teachers. He holds a Master’s from Occidental College, Los Angeles. At Purdue University he specialized in the Renaissance and Modernism. Anais Nin and he corresponded for four years. His book on Nin, In-discretions, earned him a Ph.D from Purdue in 1981, and is published by Writers Workshop which has also published eight books of his poetry since 1989. He helped establish the Gay Liberation at Purdue. 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. He has studied Buddhism at the Tibetan Library at Dharamsala, north India, as well as Islam in Iran and Palestine. Rupa and Co. published his book of poems Flower to Flame in 1992 in the New Poetry in India series. Currently he teaches Poetry and Surrealism at Hyderabad University and is unmarried by choice.

  To my lovers

  past present and future.

  To the past ones for our ignorance

  to the present ones for our struggle

  to the future ones in the hope

  that a new Indian male will birth

  If you should come in dreams to free me of dreams

  Or, give me heart-fire to dream my dreams

  You kill me with your tears of longing

  Someone give your hard-heartedness some watery dreams

  You finished me off with your slightly parted lips

  If not with a kiss at least reply in words to my dreams

  Give us wine if hatred be yours

  If not the cup give us the wine of dreams

  Asad! His limbs swelled with pride

  When he said ‘Press my limbs’

  —Ghalib

  Translated by Hoshang Merchant

  Introduction

  My interest in India’s homosexual literary history is more than personal. It is also more than sociological and more then mere academic interest in a queer aspect of culture studies.

  There is no such beast in zoology as a ‘homosexual’. It is an invention of late nineteenth century European science, half Greek (Grk ‘homo’ = ‘same’) and half Latin (‘sexual’ being Latin in root). It denotes not a person but a category that several sensitive persons, obliging science, have tried to fit themselves into. NRI gays in Trikone (San Jose, California) have concocted a terminology for Gays: ‘Samlingan’ for the sexuality, ‘samlingia’ for ‘homosexual’, i.e., a literal translation of Western terms. Such a term does not exist in India where the practice is not codified, only quietly condoned and above all, not talked about. As Foucault reminds us in History of Sexuality, sex is not modern, talking about it is.

  I use the term ‘homosexual’ as a descriptive term, descriptive of a sexual practice and of its concomitant world view (because you are what you do or don’t do in bed) much as I use the words ‘lesbian’ or ‘prostitute’ as descriptive nouns rather than as words of opprobrium. I must admit I have trouble with the word ‘gay’. ‘Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse’, was a self-hating taunt in the sixties’ homosexual Broadway play Boys in the Band. I have known reasonably happy homosexuals though I do not consider myself one. I have also known other unhappy homosexuals just as I have known terribly unhappy heterosexuals. So, the term ‘gay’ is nonsensical. I resent gay as a category as it is a political one. Octavio Paz says gay liberation and women’s liberation are political movements and have nothing to do with human liberation (which is the precinct of art). I fully agree with Paz. Every culture looks at this group in its own way. Islam’s strict strictures on any sex outside heterosexual polygamous marriage and strict social segregation of the sexes has spawned both homophobic guilt plus a vast literature of homosexuality.

  My youth goes like this

  Time just goes like this

  Green green glass bangles

  beside my bed

  My blouse is on fire

  My youth just goes like this

  Who is to tell him, that Aulia Nizammuddin

  You try now, I’ve be
en trying all the time

  Time just goes like this

  My youth goes like this.

  ‘Bandhish’ by Amir Khusro (1253–1325)

  India’s Hindu culture which is a shame culture rather than a guilt culture, treats homosexual practice with secrecy but not with malice. Many educated Indians confuse ‘homosexual’ with ‘eunuch’. They think homosexuals lack sexual organs or cannot sustain erections. Many passive homosexuals even today are forced to live with eunuchs if not become eunuchs through castration. I have known educated passive gay men from elite families who think it a shame to ask for any penile gratification from their macho partners. You can call it a state of voluntary mental self-castration. The passive homosexual, however, is possessed by the mother-image. They have learnt their mothers’ childhood injunctions against having sex with women. Mother, however, forgot to say, ‘Do not have sex with men either.’ And the gay son found a way out of his woman-conundrum. This prohibition/obedience syndrome breeds an ambivalent attitude in the young boy towards mother in particular and to women in general. Either you worship the Madonna or the Mother Goddess as in Latin (or Hindu) cultures or you denigrate women as in the Anglo-Saxon (or Muslim) cultures. These opposing tendencies are marked in the homosexual sub-culture. Either gay men love older women (Liz Taylor/Rekha) or impossibly unavailable women (Madhuri Dixit/Marilyn Monroe) or women martyred like themselves, their mothers, or Meena Kumari, or again, Monroe. It is not an accident that most of these icons have gay image-makers. They are literally an invention of the gay man, viz., the dress-designer, hair stylist, choreographer or the make-up man. In that sense Hollywood culture is a creation of the gay male. Gay men have created impossibly alluring women who may never be seduced like one’s own mother. They have fed the fantasies of the general populace for generations. Pop culture is a creation largely of homosexuals.

  New York University’s Performance Theory department is largely run by gays. In essence performance theory states that sexuality, or one’s sexual persona, the way one comes onto society or projects one’s sexuality socially is only a performance. Gay sex, all sex roles, all genders are a performance. Bachchan’s macho man is a performance. Meena Kumari’s suffering woman is a performance. All women suffering like Meena, our mothers included, with all due respect to them, are performing. Gender is socially constructed.

  In India, the MTV culture has done the country’s homoerotic culture a disservice. It has projected plastic women like Sophiya Haq and Alisha Chinai onto the adolescent male imagination, depriving them of the solaces of yaraana. Secondly, it has projected the West’s gay sub-culture in its worst light by highlighting its lunatic fringe as if it were the mainstream. Your baker, butcher, banker, bus conductor, neighbour or brother could all be very ordinary and also very gay. It has also caused a backlash. While encouraging homosexuals to come out of the closet and increasing tolerance and acceptance it has also caused an increase in the display of physical or verbal abuse against homosexuals and put closet homosexuals on the defensive. It has also put many young men out of the gay circuit, forcing them prematurely into the arms of women.

  Another heart-wrenching aspect of homosexual liberation in India is the distance and sometimes outright hostility between gays and women. Gays and women are fighting the same oppressor, the macho male. Ideally I should be joining hands with the prostitute my bisexual lover frequents in teaching him a lesson or two in liberation but instead I beat her out of my house because I see her as a competitor. Old habits die hard. My woman colleague fighting for her rights instead of respecting me for identifying with women even to the extent of referring to myself in Hindi in the feminine gender mocks me because she herself identifies with the male establishment which patronizes her. That is where the power lies. But power is never given away, it has to be snatched.

  In a superficially politicized world a gay faces poignant choices. James Baldwin had to choose between his Black community and his White lovers. (He played out the sado-masochistic White Master/Black Slave saga over and over in his lovemaking and in his stories.) The blacks rejected him as did the white liberal establishment for his psychological inability to make love to a black man. In our context today, a Selvadurai has to choose between his Sri Lankan citizenship and a Tamil lover in an island-nation torn by ethnic strife. This makes for good literature even if it’s a bad life.

  I would here like to include two local news stories that appeared in the press recently. A forty-nine-year-old teacher, a Christian, bashed the head of his eleven-year-old Muslim boy-student for refusing his homosexual advances. The teacher was given a mere one-year jail sentence. In another incident, a fourteen-year-old castrated an eleven-year-old boy for refusing to satisfy his urges. The eleven-year-old’s organ was reattached by a microsurgery involving forty stitches. Would not education of both the offender and the victim solve the problem of gay rape? Is gay rape any different from a woman being raped? 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. In the land of political correctness they snigger behind my back these days. What’s the difference?

  The difference is that a passive homosexual is nominally a man while a woman is a woman, man’s other. The passive homosexual, discarding male heterosexuality and lacking any other discourse, becomes a woman, caricatures a woman. He is caught in a binary bind: you can either be master or slave, no third thing which is a free agent, the creation of which is any liberation movement’s goal.

  This hatred of the homosexual, I think, goes back to the Judaic, Zoroastrian, Christian, Islamic injunctions against oral or anal sex as being ‘unproductive’, ‘sterile’. The fertility/sterility duality is economic in origin. It has something to do with production—production of babies who become men who produce more babies for whom more baby-food and baby-shoes have to be produced. In times of scarcity these same babies termed ‘men’ at sixteen will march to war and become cannon-fodder. The homosexual refuses to be a part of this brutality. His sex-play is not for creation but mere recreation. He has, therefore, to be crushed.

  Marriage, then, at least for the homosexual, is passé. Love in a dark world is not. 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. One would imagine in such cases the husband continues his pre-marital sex habits and a divorce does not ensue. There is no greater misery in such marriages than in most Indian marriages which are arranged. Yet, youthful friendships up to but not including homosexuality are common for India’s men. They call it yaraana or dosti. It is a blutbruderschaft, a blood brotherhood, a bond between males of equal stature and social standing usually.

  The heterosexuals have learnt ‘living-in’ and the ‘sex-club’ culture from the homosexuals. Homosexuals have learnt about love from heterosexual literature at school, for love is a literary genre. Now we are producing our own homosexual literature. Worse, like Pater and Housman and Arnold, we have contributed to mainstream high culture while masquerading under straight poses. The problem with India’s gay literary elite is that most of them (here I’m talking of Indian writers in English) are still in the closet. Some do not wish to be identified as gay in a gay anthology as it would limit the literary scope of their work. Fair enough. But fear of a witch-hunt is the main cause. Certain authors, Anais Nin for instance, are heroes because they stand up and speak about their condition and about how they overcame it through art (not politics, but art), thereby inspiring others like myself in a similar condition to try to transcend our destinies. Because anatomy is no longer destiny, as Genet would have us believe. That does not mean the gay writer does not write his struggle or is not seen publicly struggling. My detractors tell me, ‘You are a textbook case of why a young man would choose not to become homosexual.’ In reality no one can be in
duced to ‘become’ homosexual. ‘I had no more choice in my sexuality than a Negro does in choosing his skin colour,’ Genet wrote. This bespeaks a humility before the mystery of our sexualities that all our knowledge has still not solved. And, there is no remedy for a closed heart.

  The new gay academic mafia, like the feminist or communist academic mafias, tends to fit all literature into a form of their own special pleading. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus and there is a literature above one’s own special pleading, the sonnets of Shakespeare, for example, being products of genius rather than homosexual mania.

  Lest I be accused of intellectual bad faith I have to add that intellectual freedom is finally inseparable from political freedom, and what Pier Paolo Pasolini’s communist gay poetry could not achieve for the Firulian peasant was achieved by the bourgeoisification of the peasant under Italy’s post-War free market.

  In this book I try to avoid the old categories and of course will commit the sin of inventing newer and I hope, broader and less offensive categories of the literature of male bonding, as found in India.

  The oriental male, like the oriental gods, is polymorphous perverse. Sexuality in the East has always been a continuum rather than a category. There are a variety of gods in the non-Islamic East and it is nothing but arrogance in this world to say there is only one god or to say there is only one sexual play.

  I, a male homosexual Parsi by religion, Christian by education, Hindu by culture and Sufi by persuasion, have come upon the myth of the birth of Hariputra, variously known as Harihara, Shashta, Ayyannar or Ayyappa. Vishnu and Shiva (in the form of Mohini) coupled after the amrit manthan or Churning of the Oceans to issue a new god-child, Lord Ayyappa. In the temple at Thanjavur two priests ritually enact the copulation of the male gods, one cross-dressed as female with priests enacting the roles of the god’s parents, Uma and Maheshwar, as they bless the marriage. In other Tamil Nadu temples the male priest cross-dresses to become Parvati to perform the linga abhishek or the ritual oblation to the linga. The mother-goddess chanting pre-Dravidian chants at Kerala’s Theyyam is, of course, well known. The priest there wears a breastplate showing female breasts.