The critic as artist

In his exquisite hybrid of memoir and literary criticism, Partial Recall, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra mourned that English India has become a nation without a literary memory – very little is done in the desultory landscape of reviews, literary festivals, and academic conferences by way of remembering how literary traditions come into being and are sustained. Only a handful of poets, essayists, and novelists have tried to articulate a sense of the larger literary landscape in which they see themselves. Over the last few decades, India’s first openly gay poet, Hoshang Merchant, has carved out the trajectory of his literary lineage with genuine love, hate, and passion, not only tracing his own affinities with figures as varied as Anais Nin and Bhupen Khakhar, but also writing, with a remarkable play of light and shadow, on the works of Meena Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali and other poets from Kashmir, from Palestine, and the simultaneously charged and repressed currents of sexuality flowing through the diverse spaces of India – gay culture, Parsi society, pornography, teacher-student relationship, the lives of children, poetry, painting, autobiography. The flaming queen of Indian English poetry has created an entire tradition of passionate interdisciplinary literary and cultural criticism, bringing to life that captivating phrase coined by Oscar Wilde: “The Critic as Artist”.

I hosted him recently at Ashoka University, where I bombarded him with questions in a public conversation attended by students, faculty members, and visitors from outside the university. Funny, gracious and passionate, Hoshang had much to say. I started with the question about his essays, where he meets many texts and writers. Is that him being a reader, a critic, or is that his way of carving out a tradition for himself as a poet – as TS Eliot did? It was indeed, he affirmed. He’d wanted to be a great poet since the age of 20 – “I wanted to change my name from faggot to poet.” As an Indian-English writer of Parsi origin, he’d always felt welded to both the Indian and the Western traditions. But there was also his sexual identity – “I wanted to start a gay literary tradition for Indian writing in English but I wanted to be mainstreamed, not marginalised.” A writer in the “Orphic vein” who wished to stay away from the “demotic”, he “loved Whitman’s bardic yawp” but “shuddered at Burroughs.” Life in American graduate school gave him a lifelong admiration of Anais Nin’s writing, which provided a unique sinew to his prose.

Identities followed soon – being Parsi, being gay. Did Parsi feel like a diasporic identity, howsoever rooted in India? Hoshang disagreed – they were fully assimilated Parsis – “not one of the chichi London Parsis.” His mother tongue was Gujarati, and his family’s “DNA shows 90% similarity with the local Gujarati population.” That being said, they were English-speaking, and looked to the West. An essentially cosmopolitan identity created an affiliation with the category of World Poetry, deepened by his discovery of Hyderabad Urdu and Sufism. Coming out, on the other hand, was never an option as he was never in the closet in the first place. “I was a dead giveaway and I could never pass for straight.” But the real struggle was to find gay literary voices which were kept hidden by “heterosexist teachers”. One could talk about a male lover only if they managed to pass them of as female, as Proust did with Albert/Albertine. After a point, however, he turned to political writing in prose, as “poetry was too frail to answer the homophobic onslaught of Indian society.”

Are such onslaughts the reason why there is so little erotic writing these days, particularly in contemporary Indian English literature? That is a deception, Hoshang reminds us, because there is a great tradition of erotic writing in India which goes far beyond the merely sexual. “The Burton mistranslation of the Kama Sutra shows it as a sex manual,” he says, “whereas it’s a tantric text written by a Rishi to teach sensual pleasures in life namely touch, taste, smell, sight and sound.” It takes a diseased Puritan eye to see all of this as pornography. Even Marquis de Sade (from whom sadism gets its name) saw a liberation philosophy in the act of orgasm that was marginalized by the abstract rationalism of Rene Descartes in the European Enlightenment. It took Jean Genet and Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to rediscover Sade in the twentieth century. It is in fact the dominance of puritan colonial role models that keeps us from producing good erotic writing even now. There are exceptions, of course – Aubrey Menen’s “tales of mother incest”, Kamala Das’s tales of adultery, and R Raj Rao’s “schoolboy sex”, which was “teeny bopperish” but deserved attention as there was hardly any gay writing at that time.

Freud, Merchant insists, foregrounded erotic life as the true life – and that is indeed the truth, even though Freud is terribly unfashionable now. Barthes pointed out that Freud is at least good for one thing – telling stories. But the erotic is all over literature that endures. “Anais Nin’s soft focus pornography,” he says, “invited me to try my hand at soft focus gay porn which are collected in the Secret writings of Hoshang Merchant.” He was also influenced by the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima’s “masterly porn saga”, In The Realm of the Senses. “I wanted to write like that,” he says, “not to shock but to bestow a human realisation on my reader after ploughing through the sewers.” This is why I take the Krishna-Sudama story and rewrite it as a gay love reverie.

Just like film, painting has drawn passionate response from Hoshang, particularly the painting of Bhupen Khakhar, whom he describes as “the first openly gay painter in India”, one who came out “before any gay Indian writer did.” And Hoshang has translated the sinews of Khakhar’s paintings into deeply felt ekphrastic poetry. “The blood of the Ahmedabad carnage of 2002,” he says, “seeped into Bhupen’s canvas and onto the soaked pages of my Bhupen poems.” Khakhar cried out Hoshang’s name the night he died – the dead man’s nurse later told the poet. “Art is useless,” Hoshang goes on to say, “but if the artist has lived your life before you in his own life and expressed it on canvas then his experience enters your dreams and explicates for you the conundrums of your waking nightmare which then you can retranslate to a dream in your poem.” It is this responsiveness to others’ art that makes Hoshang’s criticism deeply artistic. In the end, the senses and the intellect are eternally inseparable for the rebel angel of Indian literature, shaping the unique formulation of the sensualized intellect that makes criticism a work of art.

Saikat Majumdar’s novels include The Scent of God (2019) and The Remains of the Body (2024)