All My Masters: An East-West Encounter

By Hoshang Merchant

When you have lived as fully and openly as poet, professor, and gay Indian icon of a generation, Hoshang Merchant, what secrets are there left to tell? Plenty, as it turns out.

And in 'All My Masters: An East-West Encounter', Merchant tells the story of the times and places and people that have made him. Many of them are famous; some of them - until now - barely known. In this wild ride across the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and back to India, Merchant describes himself as 'homeless for 20 years. And yet, it is always clear that he knows exactly who he is.

By turns sharply insightful, wickedly funny, poetic, and tender, 'All My Masters: An East-West Encounter' tells the story of a 'homosexual Parsi, Christian by education, Hindu by culture, Sufi by persuasion'. Any one of those journeys would be enough for most people. However, Hoshang Merchant embraces all of them. And in giving himself the freedom to do so, he hopes to liberate others like him.

Exhilarating and courageous in its honesty, 'All My Masters' is the unforgettable story of many lives in one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Queer Ink
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922605023

Hoshang Merchant

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 has 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, as well as Islam in Iran and Palestine. Since 1979, seventeen of his books of poetry have been published. Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant (OUP 2016) is his most recent publication. He recently retired from the University of Hyderabad, India, after twenty-six years of teaching.

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Preface

An Intellectual Biography

My editor asked for the second part to my autobiography which ends at 60. What excitement is there between old age and death? But an old tree gives sweet fruit.

My student-friend Kona Prakash asked I write an intellectual autobiography à la Pasolini. I am not a great thinker. So I thought of writing about my teachers who gave me thought or taught me how to think.

Once during the Iranian Revolution, I kept my boyfriend in Isfahan alive by giving him money. The child must have felt indebted to me, so he had a dream. He dreamt he rushed me to the hospital after an accident. Ten doctors worked on me and gave me new life.

‘Who are these ten doctors?’ I have asked since then. My teachers, beginning with my mother and my elder sister, who had such a profound influence on my life. Then the women who taught me as a child and as a boy and the American men who allowed a gay adolescent from India to find his life direction.

Then there were great people who were kind to me: Anaïs Nin and Ezra Pound’s family among them. I have seen film stars at close quarters in my childhood and imitated the movie queens as a gay man. But now I get an insight into ‘masculinity’ as constructed by Bollywood. (Dilip Kumar was a neighbor, and I was a mad Raj Kapoor fan: ‘I was Nargis kissed by Raj with closed eyes’ I have written.)

Ginsberg tells us that his mad mother received Nazi messages in her head and found Hitler’s moustache once in the kitchen sink! I as a fan sported Raj’s moustache: ‘Talwar Cut!’ the St Xavier’s College boys screamed.

The problem I think is how to be a man in an age of embattled manhood. Flight from man makes a sissy in the nursery. Shakespeare says there is art in ‘making thirds.’ He is using a musical term. The secret is not to be oppressor or oppressed, but a third thing – a free man. In my case, neither man nor woman but a liberated gay. This book is a filling-in of gaps in my autobiography. It is devoid of sensation. It is a sweeter book. I think the life incidents mirror each other.

Living is so awfully hard!

There are original thinkers (Einstein) and there are disseminators (Anaïs Nin). I would fall in the latter category.

Sidney writes of the three kinds of poets. The first kind is the ant, foraging for ideas; the second, the spider who weaves a gossamer web out of his own entrails; the third kind of poet is the bee, who from nectar of flowers makes honey and who from wax gives light. I forage for ideas, weave my poetic webs out of my own blood-and-gut experiences and I hope my poems both entertain and enlighten my readers.

Writing, too, is so awfully hard. But we take the risk of failing and write as simply and honestly as we can.

Pasolini’s Lutheran Letters (Italy, 1976)

The Argument

What India is passing through now with new-found wealth from globalization, along with its attendant poverty and breakdown of traditional values, Italy passed through in the economic recession of the 1970s. It seems our situations are analogous.

The sins of the fathers are visited on the sons.

The bourgeoisification of the proletariat.

The loss of native tongues thanks to wrong education and television programming.

The pseudo-heterosexualisation of homoerotic adolescence (under false influence of Hollywood.)

The criminalization of politics both in the provinces and the national capital.

The increase in crime among both the genteel and the slum kids and the dependence on drugs due to loss of selfhood attributable to demise of the family and the Church.

The Church, Christian-centric government, Mafia live by old codes. Sounds like the India of today and the Bombay city of my birth. Implicates our Indian families, as well.

These letters are ‘Lutheran’ because they aim at nothing less than a complete ‘Reformation’ of Catholic Italy.

P.S.: Pasolini discusses the Western male’s obsession with long hair.

First he says it is a sign: the sign of the hippie; and all that hippiedom implies viz., non-conformism; defiance, decadence, etc. The human being is reduced to being a sign!

Later, he sees the long-haired tribe as a part of a ‘parampara’ (he uses the Sanskrit word but spells it with an initial ‘S’). That means, ‘like our Sadhus’ drop-outs from society and, I may add, gender roles.

‘How does one generation break away from a preceding one and what does it gain or lose by doing so?’ asks David McCullough in a Paris Review ‘Biography’ interview.

This book has taken inspiration from the Paris Review interviews on biography.

Leon Edel, whom I met at Purdue, discusses his James biography.

Biography is a form of carpentry. Biography is not a mere assemblage of facts, mere use of lumber and nails. It is an artwork.

The biographer has to show the link between talent and achievement: the ways in which we make dream into reality.

‘Transference’ works in the writing. One is in love with one’s subject. An objective biography asks that we go beyond our loves and hates.

There is identification of biographer and his subject. The ‘queen’ Lytton Strachey writing about queens.

James destroyed his letters (as I did) to frustrate biographers but letters of James to others survive. Even a person who ‘confesses all’ can be a secretive person. You may not know the last page of an ‘open book’.

Biographers know their subjects better than the subjects ever knew themselves. Modern obsession with sex will reduce biography to porn. In the old days, love (sex) was a way to spirituality.

You have to be careful of the family (‘not give too much mental anguish’). Hermione Lee, Woolf ’s biographer, says ‘A biographer has to be completely ruthless. You have to write as if everyone involved in the story is dead.’

Time can obfuscate truth: for example, Thoreau became Gandhi after the latter’s re-reading of Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’. Leon Edel says Thoreau was a disliked man in Concord so he went to Walden, nearby. At Purdue, Edel told us, ‘Thoreau could always run back to his grandma’s cookie jar’!

Conditioning, that is determinism, plays a part in everyone’s life. We show our pre-disposition in what we wear, how we furnish our rooms. Even in my cross-dressing days I never wore make-up (Parsi Puritanism); my homes are sparsely furnished (anti-capitalism: Shaw said, ‘Under capitalism money is not a means to an end but an end in itself ’).

Psychology is a tool for literature. Anaïs Nin said, ‘I never use the words lesbian, schizophrenic etc.’ She showed these symptoms in her characters poetically. The tendency to delude ourselves (rationalization: for example, of my behavior in Palestine), the need for pleasure, avoidance of pain belong to literature.

Sex, affection, love are necessary. But we make love into literature.

‘What do you want? Literature or love?’ my teacher Virgil Lokke asked me. ‘Both,’ I said. ‘You can’t have both,’ he said wisely. I settled for literature.

James’s homoeroticism came out in his homosociality with men, his letters in old age to younger men, his friendship with older women (in my life, Mary Rachewiltz, Mrs Connolly). Only in his last three novels when he was old could he write of love (Edel).

All writing is a matter of form. (Or breaking form as in my autobiography!) Edel for his own biography wished ‘to select certain specific areas of memory’ (as I have done here).

Michael Holroyd, in his interview, says that a biography is not a prosecution of its subject nor is a biographer the subject’s defense attorney. Irony may be used, though, for criticism.

Nissim Ezekiel used to tell us that satire is a form of sympathy.

Is there something like ‘autobiographical fiction’? The great biographers say, ‘No, we don’t invent. That’s for the novelists! But we do invent life-fictions. We live life as we create fiction and to write a life would be writing fiction-about-fiction.’

Marxism

The first Marxist I met was Manfred Metzner, in Heidelberg. (At Occidental College, Aditi Nath Sarkar, a grandson of the historian Jadunath Sarkar, wore a red kurta from his coolie strike in Calcutta. I had no sympathy.) At Heidelberg I tried reading Marx. I bet most Hyderabad Marxists haven’t read Marx. Manfred was beaten up by drunk GIs from the NATO base in Heidelberg. You can’t sue them. The military court gave inadequate compensation and he still gets headaches.

Manfred saw NATO in West Germany as virtual occupation. He understood that the USSR had literally occupied East Germany. He called his politics ‘of the non-ideological Left’.

Of course, you cannot be ‘left’ without ideology. The German Marxists were consumers. Pasolini said of the Italian youth of the left: ‘They plant a bomb in the morning and go shopping evenings’! Manfred’s friends proved themselves selfish. I had come to Germany because I was refused a visa to Israel due to my wish to work for Palestine.

Now, I was prepared for Palestine. The leftish movements ranged from ‘Islamic Marxists’ up to the atheists. Islamic Marxism in Arab lands was the old Baath Party (socialistic: education of masses, women’s education consolidate decolonization.)

But the seven PLO factions were vicious. An unlettered vendor in the Jerusalem souq told me: ‘When Israel couldn’t do anything against the PLO, they divided us into seven factions.’ The Indian Left supported the British during ‘Quit India’ (1942). Divide and rule.

In Iran my good students were leftish. They were also ‘five-time namazi’ and some were gay. These contradictions vented themselves on a well-meaning but ignorant outsider like me. Ayatollah Shariat-Madari spoke standing holding a gun!

‘It’s his cane!’ the opposition mocked. President Bani-Sadr was caught calling the CIA from a public booth and exiled. His wife blew up her legs making bombs. The Mullahs stole the revolution of leftist students.

Every movement is in need of disciples. I was prepared for India’s champagne socialists. In response to India’s poverty, I chose poverty. My so-called Marxist friends rented from a Raja who was Nehru’s friend; I slept on the floor! I was labelled politically obscene! Now I am ‘the horrible Hoshang’:

‘What does a decolonized Indian wife say to her husband?’

‘Colonize me!’

I use humor against my adversary who has no sense of humor.

I did meet with the sociology professor when I was sacked from Poona University.

Now as a white-collar worker you know what a blue-collar worker faces daily! (I knew it as an ‘unemployable’ gay man!)

He was worth his weight in gold. Salt of the earth. He set Vasanthi Raman on the road to Yerwada jail during the Emergency. (She was his student; my sister’s friend and she had learnt Parsi prayers at our school!) The Hyderabad feminists having played out their Western feminism and pseudo-Dalitism co-opted gays.

What better catch than Hoshang?

But no one can catch Hoshang. The old-fashioned word for it is ‘integrity’: not to be involved with any movement in order to keep your independence.

My Politics

I am repelled by lies. Truth-telling is not only Zoroastrian but Puritan American. Tennessee Williams’ grandfather, a Methodist preacher, taught him not to lie. So, the grandson broadcast his homosexuality.

Is it ethical to expose those in the closet? The sooner closets are voluntarily shattered, the sooner cruelty to gays will end. To live in the closet is cruelty to oneself. Authors’ homosexuality is often an ‘open secret’.

Should everything be said? It is not necessary to say ‘I love you’ like Americans. The Prophet said: ‘When you love, love gently; when you hate, hate gently.’ Love is a big burden to give someone to carry.

Am I Indian? Culturally Parsis share the Middle Eastern mind space (monotheism). They are Indianized. In South India I wore Indian clothes (too hot here), became vegetarian, went about barefoot indoors. All three were taboo in my father’s house (though father never ate beef ).

Am I American? The truth-telling is American (also basically, Zoroastrian). But the extreme new-fangledness of life in America (gay marriage) and its extreme freedom (sexchange) repelled me. To that extent I am Oriental.

My poetic imagination was not satisfied by the puritanical Parsi liturgy. I loved the Catholic church, the Hindu temple, even the beauty of the great mosques of the world. Protestant churches in the Tirol repelled me.

Am I right-of-centre? Parsi conservatives would make me so. But this right/left debate is simplistic. If I am repelled by Zionist atrocity in the West Bank, Palestinian peasant politics also repel me. This neither makes me anti-Semitic nor a traitor to the Palestinian cause. It was never my cause.

My cause was and will always be gay liberation.

Today we don’t need to debate if an author is gay because we don’t

write from the closet as Henry James did. But Edel warns, ‘Biography

will become pornography.’

Home

My Mother (1914–1969)

‘My mother, vast as Asia’

—George Barker

As for every child, my mother was my first guru. She was born in Navsari (then Baroda state) to a poor Parsi priest and his beautiful wife, who came from a rural land-owning family from Bulsar. They had mango orchards. It was the time of the First War.

My mother told tales of great wealth in her maternal grandfather’s fiefdom in Nargole village. They had horses, houses, servants. Mother would be given a chicken bone slung around her neck as a pacifier as she crawled on her grandma’s kitchen floor. As she grew older, she would take Granny’s loose gems to the seashore to play with and come home without them. Granny, lamp, and sieve in hand, would sieve the sands and find them.

At 13, she saw Gandhi go to Dandi to make salt. When she was married off at 17 to a man twice her age, she came with him to Bombay, was delivered of a girl, and went to Bhatkhande’s music classes at Prarthna Samaj (she would walk there from Fort) and to the Theosophy Society. She wore Khadi and a flower in her hair. On lonely days she played the ‘dilruba’.

This was what she was made of. Then came a BA from SNDT University (she changed from music to literature) and teacher training. She taught at the Parsi school at Dadar we attended as children. The teachers remember her as always smiling. She said it was her ‘Mona Lisa secret’, she was carrying Father’s child (which she lost). She was by now divorced from her first husband.

We saw her teaching logs. Teaching a lesson on Japan in 1945 she told the girls how Japan was the first Asian nation to answer Western imperialism. Miss Nagarwalla,