Description
Everyone tumbles through these pages: parent and prostitute, lover and charlatan, Jew and Turk, madman and saint, fornicator and abstainer, the geisha and the devadasi, as well as the Mumbai starlet. Here’s God’s plenty. Devoured by a voracious appetite, spewed out as poems by a compulsive energy. This is modernism with its pants down, uncle Ezra lending arse at a wayside inn, Kala Ghoda, Bombay; this is Bombay pretending to be Paris, paan-stained and all. This is convent English giving Mumbai Marathi a well-deserved kick in the pants; this is the Parsi queen desperately mimicking Sultan Padamsee if not Jean Genet. My sunset marriage represents the life of Hoshang Merchant told through the best poetry he has written over forty years, selected and introduced by the poet Kazim Ali.
ISBN 978-9385186516
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.
