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A Tale of Old Hyderabad
Hoshang Merchant - The Poetry of Jalwah
Aparajita Roy Sinha
From Hoshang Merchant’s mother’s
side he descends from a line of teachers and preachers. He has a Masters from
Los Angeles and he did his dissertation on Anais Nin from Purdue University,
where he studied Renaissance and Modernism. He has lived and taught in
Heidelberg Jerusalem and Iran where he was exposed to various radical movements
of the Left. His anthology ‘Flower to Flame’ was published by Rupa in ’92. He is
the editor of Yaraana, (Penguin: Gay Writing from India).
I first met Hoshang
Merchant at a wedding dinner at painter Laxma Goud’s house. A few friends were
sitting around relaxing over drinks, while the long tables behind us were being
arrayed with an aromatic biryani dinner. Laxma is a Hyderabadi to the core and
that was one of my first experiences of the warmth of the Telangana heart and
hearth! – liquor flowing, choice food, and company (and conversation) to match.
The white-haired, bearded man in black sitting enigmatically silent, glass in
hand reminded me of artists I’d seen in Bombay where I grew up: urbane,
beautifully attired in kurta, embroidered shawl and jooties. Only his eyes,
alert like a child’s, darted here and there. This mix of childlike candour and
austerity is actually characteristic of the poetry Hoshang writes. Hoshang is a
poet-bard – and bards traditionally sang of truths that others did not know or
were afraid to speak. Children and holy men perform the same service to society
to this day.
Laxma introduced me to Hoshang as the daughter of a film-maker, and
it broke the ice at once. Over the years I have known him Hoshang has surprised
me again and again with his familiarity with the film-world of Bombay, of the
50’s and 60’s. It is a world I love and was intimately connected with. Many
people have a glamour struck, partly voyeuristic image of Bollywood, few have
the patience or imagination to see the tinsel behind the glamour, the real
struggles and heartbreaks underneath the magnum opus tragedies. Hoshang’s gaze
is at the same time both impassioned, and impartial, the poet’s special
felicity. I do not find many people here who can talk with the same sensitivity
as Hoshang can about the films of my father, and other directors of that time
whom he admires such as V. Shantaram, or Guru Dutt, and it drew me to him at
once. One day after he’d known me for some time, he came for lunch and brought
this poem as gift.
Remembering Bimal Roy
He worked silently
So that the birds
could be recorded outdoors
It was the same indoors
So that the lightmen talked
in whispers….
And if the labourer broke his life at the wheel
There was also the
village girl dancing free
So that her voice melted in the mist And you did not
know if she was body or spirit
An entire generation of a new nation Found itself
drinking in this music Not in order to forget, but just to be able breathe…
(The
last line paraphrases Dilip Kumar’s timeless dialogue in the Bimal Roy Devdas,
kaun kambakth hai jo bardashth karne ke liye peeta hai - main to peeta hoon ki
bas saans le sakoon…)
In a few lines Hoshang achieves a precise Japanese style
impression of my father’s social concerns, the elemental human stories he told
using nature and music to give intensity to what could easily have been just
another boring document of suffering or misery. I discovered that we shared not
only love for Hindi cinema but also a childhood in Bombay. He grew up on Pali
Hill where all the film stars had their homes ( his bungalow was opposite
Sadhana’s, next to Dilip Kumar and Pran ) and I, on Mount Mary Hill, a short
crow’s flight away. His memories of his home on the hill by the sea call up
answering echoes – I am not a poet or I too would have written an ode to a
yellow house near the sea, full of high, old trees. The rhythms of his poem
sketch a delightful picture of the potent smells, surprises and high points of
childhood.
26, Pali Hill (circa 1992)
It was cooler
around the turn of the hill
where we smelt and felt the sea
And then we went down…
Past jackfruit banana chikoo guava
Gardenia canna laburnum hibiscus
beds of laceflowers
Till crotons
met us at a green door…..
And so we moved up:
We had just outbid Nimmi
The
Barsaat star….
(26 Pali Hill is now where Sunil Dutt stays. It was re-numbered
and became No. 58 in the 70’s.)
Somerset : 58, Pali Hill
Not a tree left and a Rs 50 fine from the
Nature society
A wall or a warren of flats
Where the sea was
Not a shard of light
Not a whiff of breath
bats in rafters
from the trees
Someone suggested that there appears to be no attempt on Hoshang’s part to
“grapple with realities around” him, only a “craving for the past and for the
future,” Hoshang replied, “Down with reality! But the preceding poem has a dark
and graphic broodiness. Hoshang’s irrevocable pain and
loss is entangled with the memories of his mother being dragged through the
divorce courts of Bombay. Hoshang’s father married again, a mere girl, two years
older than Hoshang, dispossessing his four children. Childhood’s end. The
darkening of light. When the walls of Bombay closed round Hoshang he fled to
America (the ultimate dream merchant) with money from his mother, believing that
the liberal west was the place for his emerging gay identity (nothing could be
further from the truth)
- fled Bombay’s changing skyline,
Bombay’s coarsening materialism, a breakdown mirrored by the spectacle of his
father abandoning his mother for another woman.
Snakes from Eden
in our garden
Bombay’s dying?
Bombay’s dead!
Hoshang’s mother died soon after, before he could
return to India. A recurring guilt haunts Hoshang’s poems about her.
Mother
You
fought and you gave up
Doing naturally what came best to you - dying
as a lark
at morning
rising forsakes its nest…
Now I forsake you Sweet Mother, Forgive me
“Bombay was not the same afterwards,” comments Hoshang, and one does not know
when exactly paradise was lost – when Mrs. Merchant and her children were forced
to leave the “green house built athwart a hill.” or when Bombay revealed itself
to him as the crass and friendless city it has become today, where all is trade,
friendship, even love and sex, and everything (starting with Bollywood ofcourse)
is in the grip of the mafia, For Hoshang at least, his parents’ divorce coloured
everything he ever did or thought – even it must be said, his sexual choices.
“My effeminacy antagonised Father.
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I usually ran into the house to tell my English governess
During their fights I stood square
between mother and him. Disturbed by my sign of maleness he aimed at my
genitals.” The breakup seems to have left scars on all four children, not least
on an emotionally deprived, gentle woman-boy - by his own admission, from the
beginning, “mamma’s boy”. “I was the only boy in school,” he writes in his
autobiography.“ Mother had decided I wouldn’t swear or be rough. I sang, danced,
cooked and sewed. But I could not thread needles… at home I dressed in a sari
and sang and danced under a cherry tree with my sister. My parents did not like
this.” So much for childhood, for many of us the defining patterns of our
existences.
Hoshang Merchant has been teaching English at Hyderabad University
for fifteen years. In 1999 he was one of the first academics to offer a course
on Literature of Sexual Dissidence to MA students as an elective. Hoshang says
the great influence in his life has been Anais Nin, French poet and writer. He
discovered her through her Diaries, when his sister presented one of them to him
in America. Forever indebted to Anais Nin, it was her courage and brutal honesty
in writing about her love life and sexual preferences which inspired him to
become a writer and write frankly about himself. He began a correspondence with
her that ended only when she died at the age of 73 in Los Angeles in 1977. In
Dharamshala, studying Buddhist texts, Hoshang dreamt of her impending death….
Hoshang is the first Indian poet to have publicly acknowledged his gayness, or
homosexuality. In India, you are laughed at, abhorred, or ignored if it is known
or understood you are gay. Popular Indian cinema is a good indicator of the
general attitude. But you are not crucified, as gays were in the universities of
the west when Hoshang went there. “ India’s Hindu culture which is a shame
culture rather than a guilt culture, treats homosexual practice with secrecy but
not with malice.” (But ) Islam’s strict strictures on any sex outside
heterosexual polygamous marriage and the strict segregation of the sexes has
spawned homophobic guilt and a vast literature of homosexuality.”
“My youth goes
like this / Green green glass bangles beside my bed / My blouse is on fire / Who
is to tell him, that Aulia Nizamuddin / You try now, I’ve been trying all the
time/ Time goes just like this …”
Bandish, by Amir Khusro
In India some people assume an innocence about the existence of homosexual love
that is at variance with reality, for many Indian texts, including some ancient
ones, refer to the practice - termed the “literature of male bonding,” which
Hoshang talks about in his introduction to “Yaraana”, an anthology of
contemporary gay writing in India (Penguin, ed. Hoshang Merchant). The east has
always been more liberal than the west – there is a place for everything under
the sun, as Hindu philosophy claims. “India is divided fourteen times into
fourteen languages” bemoans Hoshang elsewhere. Language and faiths jostle each
other in India. Both akaar and niraakar coexist, as do the carnal and the
divine, Shiva and Shakti, pirs and djinns, Buddha and Dalit and Christ. If this
seems ambivalence at its worst, and you long for the clarity of black and white,
then the eastern experience – and poets and their poetry, for that matter, much
of the artists’ world - is, I am afraid, not for you. Hoshang is Parsi and he
responds to all the varied cultures that an immigrant community would absorb.
The ancient mythologies and richly textured wisdom of Hindustan fascinate him,
as does the stoic Christian faith. “I, a male homosexual Parsi, Christian by
education, Hindu by culture, Sufi by persuasion…..” is how he describes himself.
So you find a rich and wholesome potpourri of all these influences in his poems
- this blurring of identity/boundaries in someone like Hoshang, with his Iranian
past buried inside him (Iran being historically poised on the meeting point of
Muslim-Jew-Parsi- Christian) is what makes his poetry so reflective of the
juxtaposing of opposites that I have described above. Add to that the gender
bend, the mix of female and male. The influence on Hoshang of Sufism is endemic.
The poetry of the Sufi mystics which came to India via Arabia and other
countries of the Orient, holds God to be the only male. Therefore all men must
be female. And of course, all sufi poetry is love poetry, God is the beloved,
and the ‘devotee’ is always, always, female. Hoshang’s poetry is simple and
direct (unlike his prose – his work on Anais Nin is a good example - which is
scholarly and full of political and classical references) The Bellagio poems
which await publication are really a culmination of Hoshang’s many years as
teacher and aesthete. “In the summer of 2001 I was offered a writing fellowship
at Bellagio. The luxury of the villa, the breathtaking scenery, the service that
tended to spoil one, the food and 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.” The Little Theatre did a reading of the Bellagio
Blues in Hyderabad two months ago. Judging from the many beautiful poems written
by Hoshang while in Bellagio, the scenery did have an impact. The following is
my favourite. Song like, it captures the place, the beauty, Hoshang’s sufi
musings, and the pull of Christ in Italy with “breathtaking” ease.
Memories of Bellagio
I sit on a rounded stone on the pier
I hear the bells toll
The wind blow
The littlest pine-needle stir
All in unison
Who stirs the wind the
pine the bell in unison?
I breath in and out: one with the pine, the bell, the
wind
Remember lake Galilee/where those
who believed in the body drowned!
Remember the fish and fisher on the lake
Hauling in a shoal of stars from
lake-bottom…..
Who am I? An old man on a lake
with a promontory behind him still
to climb
I begin climbing: The bell, the wind, the pine-needle
keep me company
I
am the gasping fish; I am the low glow of the fire-worm
I am alive; I did not
come here to die;
I halt for breath, for pause, for thought——
Who am I? Before
this lake——
A shade, a shadow of a shade
A ripple on the water
A cloud upon a
river
My own breath upon a mirror
Who will the boatman take?
I hear the cry of
the mockingbird
I begin to climb the promontory.
Why do you write poetry, Hoshang Merchant? Poetry is a way of confronting loss, of breaking down walls,
he answers. It’s my freedom.
*Jalwah: Revelation, a sufi term.
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