Description
Preface
In the summer of 2001, I was offered a writing fellowship at Bellagio. My intuition told me not to travel that Fall. Soon enough, 9/11 happened. After that, there was chaos. Then came the great Indian heat wave in Hyderabad in the summer of 2002, with temperatures soaring to 51ºC and killing a thousand people. It was still spring in Bellagio.
My project was to work on the first part of my Yaarana: Gay Writing from India. The volume on Modern India (Penguin 1999) was a bestseller for two consecutive weeks in Delhi and Bombay in 1999. I had written for 30 years and was now given 30 days to sit and do nothing but write. I took it as a reward. Then there was also my book of travel which needed work. The luxury of the villa, the breathtaking scenery, the service that tended to spoil me, the food and the wine were not conducive to work. At the same time, their impact on the sensitive mind coupled with friendship with other sharp minds could not but be great.
Each day the poems came, and some I showed to Gianna Celli, the Manager at Bellagio, and to Charles Taylor and his wife, Aube. Many, I kept to myself. I present these now as a gift to the Rockefeller Foundation staff and friends who generously let me partake of their hospitality. – Bellagio, Italy, May-June 2002
Hoshang Merchant is India’s pre-eminent voice of gay liberation. Born in 1947 to a Zoroastrian business family in Bombay, India, he graduated in 1968 with a major in English and a minor in the culture of India. On his mother’s side, he descends from a line of preachers and teachers.
Hoshang holds a master’s from Occidental College, Los Angeles, USA. At Purdue University, Indiana, USA, he specialized in the renaissance and modernism. After leaving Purdue in 1975, Merchant attended the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Centre, Massachusetts, USA, 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, Dharamshala, India, and Islam in Iran and Palestine. Since 1979, seventeen of his books of poetry have been published. He recently retired from the University of Hyderabad, India, after twenty-six years of teaching.
