I wish to thank the generosity, patience and compassion of my own family especially my parents and sisters and of friends as well as that of my colleagues and students at Hyderabad University. Most of my students are in the media now. For the new Yaraana I’m indebted to my editor, Sivapriya.
I also feel a profound love for the new generation of India’s gays growing up less confused and stronger than my own generation. Blessings!
April 2010
Hoshang Merchant
Footnote
The Contract of Silence
* Bombay Dost is the first magazine for homosexuals to be published in India. It was founded in 1990 by Ashok Row Kavi.
Editor’s Acknowledgements
My gratitude to the following:
Firstly to V.K. Karthika, a former student of mine and associate editor at Penguin India, for dreaming up this book and thinking of me ten years since I taught her as an editor for India’s first gay anthology.
To S. Viswanathan for his support.
To Mughni Tabassum for help with Urdu poetry.
To Aloka Parasher Sen for advice on Ancient India.
To K. Narayana Chandran for much advice and encouragement.
To Padmakar Dadegaonkar for help with the Marathi novel.
To Mamta Sagar for help with the Kannada section.
To my student-friend N. Vardarajan, MA (Philosophy), for trekking to the library for me for months.
To Rajendra Gowd for typing this manuscript.
To A. Giridhar Rao for all his help.
Lastly yet most importantly to Jameela Nishat who took an active interest at every stage of the book’s progress to completion, and for a decade of unstinting friendship and support.
Biographical Notes
Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940. He studied and worked abroad—mostly in London and Oxford—between 1957–69, with two longish stays in Bombay during that period. He returned to India in 1970 and decided to stay on. He is the author of two books of poems—Land’s End (1962) and Missing Person (1976).
Agha Shahid Ali, recently dead, wished to be the Poet Laureate of a free Kashmir. Born in Agra, educated in USA, his last posting was at Amherst.
Ajay K.C. is a twenty-five-year-old illiterate tourist taxi operator in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Ashok Row Kavi was born in 1947, in Bombay. He graduated from the University of Bombay with an honours degree in Chemistry. Subsequently, he dropped out of engineering college and switched to theology. He acquired a post-graduate diploma in theology from the Ramakrishna order and started his career as a journalist in 1974 with the Indian Express, and was the chief reporter with the Free Press Journal from 1984 to 1989. In 1991, he founded Bombay Dost, India’s first gay magazine.
Belinder Dhanoa was born in Shillong. She studied English Literature at the North Eastern Hill University before going on to take a Master’s in Art Criticism from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda. She is working at present towards a Ph.D in Comparative Arts at the University of Rochester, New York. Belinder Dhanoa has written several books for children.
Bhupen Khakhar (b. 1935) is a qualified chartered accountant who after retirement distinguished himself as a painter and teacher of the Baroda School. The Baroda School, led by Khakhar and Gulam and Neelima Sheikh, is characterized by city-scapes peopled by men and women engaged in scenes of daily living. Though trained in Western techniques and languages, Bhupen Khakhar writes in his native tongue, Gujarati.
Dinyar Godrej (b. 1965) grew up in Indore, India. His formal education was at St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, and St Anne’s College, Oxford. For his informal education, he is indebted to his family and some exceptional friends. He has worked, among other things, as a freelance writer and teacher.
Firaq Gorakhpuri née Raghupati Sahay (1896–1982), Urdu’s foremost poet, was an influential teacher of English Romantic poetry for decades at Allahabad University. In his lifetime, it was an open secret that Firaq was a homosexual. It was also a well-known fact that he never wrote a gay line. The ghazal included in this anthology, taken from the literary periodical Sabras (Hyderabad), is the only ‘gay poem’ of Firaq’s the editor could find.
Firdaus Kanga first appeared in print in Kaiser-i-Hind, a now defunct Bombay Parsi rag, with an evocative piece on a male childhood friend. Then came the success of Trying to Grow, his courageous confession of being gay, the break with his now horrified but till then supportive Parsi mother and the success with the liberal English establishment for whom it is de rigueur to love an outsider, for Kanga is an outsider thrice over, immigrant, handicapped, gay—and an artist.
Frank Krishner is based in Patna and writes for the Times of India.
Gyansingh Shatir (b. 1935) was born to a Sikh carpenter family in Gurdaspur, Punjab. Urdu was the official language in pre-Partition Punjab. Shatir’s Urdu, which is self-taught, has a lot of Punjabi idiom in it. An engineer by training, Shatir took eighteen years to write his autobiography of 650 pages which brings him up to the eighteenth year of his life. Joycean in its Urdu-Punjabi coinages, it is an Indian Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1998.
Ian Iqbal Rashid (b. 1965) is a creative and critical writer who has been published in many magazines and journals in the UK and in North America. He also reviews literature and film regularly for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio 4’s Kaleidoscope. His poetry publications include Black Markets, White Boyfriends and Other Acts of Elision, Song of Sabu and The Heat Yesterday.
Iftikhar Naseem lives in Chicago, and was born in Faislabad. He is Pakistan’s first gay poet.
Iqbal Mateen is a retired state government employee and lives in Nizamabad. The book Sheltered Flame (Cherag-e-Tehe Daman) was denied state recognition because of its controversial subject of a prostitute and her gay son.
Kamleshwar is one of the best-known contemporary fiction writers writing in the vernacular in India. He has won numerous awards for his work. The Hindi novel, The Street with Fifty-Seven Lanes, created a furore when it first appeared in 1976 because of its homosexual overtones.
Madhav G. Gawankar is in his thirties and lives in Dapoli on the Konkan coast. His gay stories have been accepted in many mainstream Marathi publications.
Mahesh Dattani is India’s foremost English playwright writing currently for the stage. His plays include Dance Like a Man, Bravely Fought the Queen, Final Solutions, Tara and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai. Dattani teaches in the drama workshop at Portland University, Oregon, every summer. He has his own company, Playpen, and lives in Bangalore.
Manoj Nair is a young journalist working with the Hindustan Times in New Delhi.
Namdeo Dhasal is a Dalit Marathi poet. He recently left Ambedkar’s party to join the Shiv Sena.
Owais Khan works for an MNC computer major, as a Business Manager. Officially named Mohammed Owais Khan by his doting, yet domineering single mother, he took his time before he called himself gay. Since then, apart from starting, helping, and running gay support groups in Hyderabad, New Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and Calcutta, he has initiated LGBT India, the nation-wide network of LGBT groups. In his remaining time, apart from writing poetry, he is also writing a novel. He is currently based in Bangalore.
R. Raj Rao was born in Mumbai. His father was from Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh and his mother a Sindhi. Raj Rao first studied commerce, then wrote an MA thesis for Bombay University on the concept of beauty in Tagore and Whitman, under Nissim Ezekiel. He then worked at National College, Bandra, as a lecturer. Raj Rao was later appointed Reader in Pune University and sent abroad (to Leeds) to study Caribbean Literature. He has several published poems and stories to his credit.
R. Raj Rao also writes plays and is currently working on a biography of Nissim Ezekiel.
Rakesh Ratti’s poetry is a heart-rending example of the anxiety of a homosexual living in the diaspora. For an Indian homosexual emigrant to America, life can be extremely difficult, for he is part of a minority within a minorit
y within a minority. The poem anthologized here is taken from a recently published book edited by Ratti himself.
S. Anand (b. 1972) is the author of a book of poems published by Writers Workshop (Calcutta) which won the Best Prize for Poetry awarded by the Shaeffer Pen Company of the USA through the Workshop. He also authored, at seventeen, a beautiful memory-poem, Saligrama, about his grandfather which is still unpublished. Currently a journalist with Hyderabad’s Deccan Chronicle, he is interested in the Dalit critique of Brahminism.
Shibram Chakrabarti is the foremost Bengali humorist of his generation. Widely known to be homosexual, Chakrabarti never emerged from the closet in his lifetime.
Shyam Selvadurai was born into a Tamil family in Sri Lanka. His autobiographical first novel, Funny Boy, deals with growing up gay in a bourgeois family. The ethnic strife that separates him from his Sri Lankan lover is characteristic of most east European and Eastern nations today. He lives in Canada.
Sultan Padamsee was a painter and a writer and acted in plays. His poetry is the link between the poetry of Aurobindo and Ezekiel. Aurobindo’s mysticism is translated into Padamsee’s Christianity (crucified Christ, the javelin-thrusting centurion, Magdalene et al). Ezekiel’s wry irony is reminiscent of Padamsee. Sultan died at the age of twenty-three.
Vikram Seth was born in 1952. He trained as an economist and has lived for several years each in England, California, China and India. He is the author of The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse, From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet, A Suitable Boy, An Equal Music, Arion and the Dolphin (a libretto), Three Chinese Poets (translations) and four volumes of poetry, including Beastly Tales from Here and There.
Vishnu Khandekar (1898–1977), an illustrious writer in Marathi, was awarded the Jnanpith a year before his death for his novel, Yayati.
Copyright Acknowledgements
GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT IS MADE TO THE FOLLOWING FOR PERMISSION TO REPRINT COPYRIGHT MATERIAL)
Ashok Row Kavi for ‘The Contract of Silence’ from Uncertain Liaisons edited by Khushwant Singh and Shobhaa Dé, published by Penguin Books India; Rupa & Co. for ‘Shivraj’ from The Street with Fifty-Seven Lanes by Kamleshwar, translated by Jai Ratan; Katha for Pages from a Diary by Bhupen Khakhar, translated by G.N. Devy, from Katha Prize Stories vol. 2; Writers Workshop for ‘O Pomponia Mine’, ‘Epithalamium’, ‘And So to Bed’ from Poems by Sultan Padamsee; Madhav G. Gawankar for ‘The Jungle’; Hoshang Merchant for ‘The Slaves’; S. Anand for ‘Poems from a Vacation’; Mahesh Dattani for Night Queen; Namdeo Dhasal for ‘Gandu Bagicha’; R. Raj Rao for ‘Moonlight Tandoori’ from One Day I Locked My Flat in Soul City; Parsiana for ‘A Mermaid called Aida’; Belinder Dhanoa for the extract from Waiting for Winter published by Penguin Books India; Bombay Dost for ‘Underground’, ‘Opinions’ and ‘Bomgay’ by R. Raj Rao; Alyson Press, Boston, for ‘Beta’ by Rakesh Ratti; Bombay Dost for ‘Sunshine Trilogy’ by Owais Khan; Firdaus Kanga and Ravi Dayal Publishers for the extract from Trying to Grow; Vikram Seth for the extract from The Golden Gate, published by Penguin Books India; R. Raj Rao for ‘Six Inches’; Adil Jussawala for ‘Karate’, ‘The Raising of Lazarus’, ‘Song of a Hired Man’; Gyansingh Shatir for ‘Never Take Candy from a Stranger!’; Nusrat Publishers for the extract from Sheltered Flame by Iqbal Mateen, translated by Taqi Ali Mirza; Vishnu Khandekar for the extract from Yayati, translated by Nilesh Jahagirdar, published by Popular Prakashan; Gay Men’s Press for ‘Desire Brings Sorrow’, ‘Under Water’, ‘On the Road to Jata Shankar’ and ‘Apparently’ by Dinyar Godrej from Twenty Something: Poems by Dinyar Godrej, Pat O’Brien and Tim Neave; Manoj Nair for ‘Rite of Passage’; Frank Krishner for ‘The Sweetest of All’; Coach House Press, Canada, for ‘Passage from Africa/A Pass to India’ from The Heat Yesterday by Ian Iqbal Rashid; Hoshang Merchant for ‘Diary: Sharjah, 21 June 1993’; the estate of Shibram Chakrabari for ‘On Account of a Girl’; Iftikhar Naseem for ‘An Answer to Female Liberationists’, ‘Her/Man’ and ‘Nath of the Gay Prophet’; Ajay K.C. for ‘“Aisa Bhi Hota Hai Kya?”: A Story from Nepal’; the estate of Agha Shahid Ali for ‘The Country without a Post Office’ from Poetry; Bhupen Kakhar for ‘Story’; Hoshand Merchant for ‘Zib-al Abd’ and ‘Dirge’.
From Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai (McClelland and Stewart, 1994). Copyright © 1994 Shyam Selvadurai. With permission of the author.
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Yaraana Page 22
