India Week

Sanika: How has the coronavirus lockdown been for you so far? 

Hoshang: It’s been lovely! A poet is always in quarantine. Nobody really wants a poet around. It's like having a mongrel. So we have to live by ourselves and come out with our brilliant prose to wow the world. I stopped being productive long ago so lockdown doesn’t matter much. I am only consolidating my legacy now. 

Sanika: So what occupies your time lately? 

Hoshang: I am trying to get my work translated into Indian languages. There are a lot of gay people in the villages across India - and they need what I said thirty years ago. There are several cultural barriers to talking about or being a homosexual in India. So it's definitely not easy. We have already worked on about 40 pages of the translation of my autobiography in Bangla - especially for readers in Bangladesh. Additionally, one of my students translated some of my poems in Kannada recently, which were recently published.  

Sanika: You have several identities linked to your persona - a poet, a gay man, an Indian, a Parsi, a writer, a provocateur.... Which one do you associate with the most? 

Hoshang: They say that you can take the boy out of India but you can't take India out of the boy. The Parsis are like that. You can send me to Oxford or Cambridge, but I'll come back a Bawaji. This is my identity and I think it's a loveable identity. 

Apart from that, I am not a left winger - a card-carrying communist, and neither am I a right-winger. I do not want to be boxed into any camp or corner. I have my allegiance to myself and my work. All I want is that my work reaches as many people as possible - be it through left, right or center media. But I believe that the time is right. The conversation on homosexuality is opening up in this country. It won't be an overnight change. There will always be a counter reaction from the public. That is to be expected. Just like the women's rights movement through the 60s, 70s and 80s when the men simply did not understand. The first reaction was a spike in divorces - men did not want a liberated person. They did not understand that a liberated person is one less person to carry. She (a liberated woman) would carry herself and I as a husband have to only carry myself. 

You know, people wish I was born dumb. People avoid the truth. I won't. The more we speak, the more people will think. It is also a kind of rebellion against my parents, against authority, and against the repression faced by me and those like me. 

But to come back to your question, my identity is ranked as Parsi, Gay and then perhaps as Indian. Like some psychologists note, 'deep down, a child knows he is gay before he knows about nationality'. 

Sanika: Was that true in your case as well? Did you know you were gay before you knew you were an Indian? 

Hoshang: Arrey, we were repressed so much! We dare not think that we were sexual beings - leave aside gay or straight. We were told we were Parsis, that's all. And Parsis don't have a sex life until we are married, you see. You don't even have sex organs until you are married. I suppose child rearing is much more liberal today. 

Sanika: You personify the idea of 'personal as political'. Do you think so yourself? 

Hoshang: Of course. There is nothing else. Everything is personal and everything is political. One day I told my father that I don't believe in politics. So my father said, "look son, everything is politics. The fact that I am sitting where I am sitting and the fact that you are not sitting where I am sitting... that is the positioning where power and politics play out. Power is politics. The lack of power is also politics. Everything is politics." 

Of course, I don't go out of my way to antagonise people with whatever power I have. I say what I have to say in as polite a language as possible. People react by saying "Hoshang is elite." I say I am an elite but one who has de-classed himself by living in the gay ghetto in Delhi and deconstructing notions of elitism, casteism, privilege, power, powerlessness. But they don't know that. They just see my roots. 

Sanika: When did you realise that you have the power and the potential to create change from your personal politics? 

Hoshang: My students taught me! My students knew more about me than I did about my writing. 

S: What was the reaction to your first book when it came out? 

Hoshang: Oh when my first book was published, I really thought I was going to be lynched. I thought it's going to enrage people. But nothing happened! If you want to kill someone, the best way is to ignore them. This is what happened. Everyone who should have been outraged or interested, ended up ignoring my work until they no longer could. 

Sanika: What about reactions from the gay community in the country? 

Hoshang: I want my books to reach those who don't know they can be open about their identity and not be ashamed. I want my books to reach the most left out man in the most remote village. That's all. In that context I was overwhelmed when one day I got a call from an unknown person on my birthday. He said he doesn't speak English but can read and understand a little. His family was harassing him for being gay and he was on the verge of committing suicide. He found one of my books somewhere and realised that if this old man rambling in the book (me) is still refusing to give up to social pressures and die, then why should he? It was a bolt from the blue. I never thought I could save a life! Beyond this, it doesn't matter what the society, the community, the critics think of my work or me. 

Sanika: Do you have any personal favourites from your work? 

Hoshang: Yaarana is my most famous book so far because it is the most socially relevant work I have produced. But my best writing has come out in Rebel angel which is a compilation of my work over the last 20 years. That book has the best of me from over 20 years. 

Sanika: Was there a reason that you came back to India after living in the US, Germany and Iran? 

Hoshang: I could not write in America or in Germany. I just couldn't find any anchor. Poetry needs roots, poetry is roots. I needed to be rooted and feel my emotions to be able to write. While I was away from India, I was reading a lot of poetry and books of American authors or western writers. The greats of American poetry focus on nature but they avoid emotions like guilt, angst, and their colonial history. I could not do that. I did not find America or Germany to be a land of the free for a young man to be gay. Truth is, social reality takes a long while to change and we have to fight for our worldview every single day. Also, I came back because I was pining for the smells, the sounds, the emotions of India. I needed to be in this environment to write about my angst, my suffering, my love. 

Sanika: What do you think of the queer movement in India?

Hoshang:I steer clear of them. I think it is not pride in its true sense. There is a lack of knowledge and a lack of understanding of what needs to be done from an Indian point of view. Our queer movement is just mimicking the west. I think Professor Ashley Tellis is totally right when he says that he will join the Gay Pride Parade in India only when the chakka** in the streets of Delhi or Hyderabad or Mumbai has some pride in being a chakka. Until then, our queer movement is an elitist, casteist mimicry of America.

And yet, I would say that something is better than nothing. I remember, when I was eleven years old, I learnt the word homosexual from Oxford's Pocket Dictionary. ‘A person who is attracted to his own sex’. Now tell me, what enlightenment coul I get from this only thing that I had in my hand? Today, people can at least go somewhere, ask someone, read something on the internet. That is good progress and we need to keep up. Speaking up, speaking out and making room for different identities in society is helping.

** Chhakka is a term used for Hijras in certain parts of India including Karnataka and Mumbai. They are biological males who reject their masculine identity and identify either as women, or “not-men”, or “in-between man and woman” or “neither man nor woman”. In India, hijras tend to identify as a community with its own initiation rituals and professions (like begging, dancing at weddings or blessing babies). They even have their own secret code language, known as Hijra Farsi, which is derived from Persian and Hindustani (reference Johari, scroll.in, April 2014)