Reviewed by Kishore Kumar
By Hoshang Merchant
Penguin, 1999
Rs 200
Readers of this column will remember that in reviewing a certain anthology earlier, I had lamented how certain anthologies are born – and die – like water bubbles in a turbulent stream. Yaraana – Gay Writing from India unfortunately belongs to that lot, and quite clearly so.
First things first. Mr Merchant contradicts himself in the very first page of his introduction when he abhors the term ‘homosexual,’ but immediately, and quite unrepentantly, talks about a ‘homosexual play’. He goes on to talk about ‘a vast literature of homosexuality’ in medieval Islamic culture soon after harping about the term homosexual being an invention of late nineteenth century European science. Expressing detest for the term homosexual when applied to a person but labeling a piece of art homosexual, brings to one’s mind the hilarious but insightful joke played by Phoebe Buffay (in TV serial Friends), when she tells Chandler Bing that people think he’s gay because he has ‘homosexual hair.’ It is only pitiful that such insight is absent here.
The failures of this anthology however, are far from being merely semantic. The next point raised in the introduction, quite abruptly, is regarding the origin and mindsets of homosexual men. Citing neither sources nor references, Mr. Merchant gives his insights. The existence of gay women is conveniently left out. And most Indian men are dubbed to be bisexual, being forced into heterosexual marriages, however furtively continuing their same-sex affairs.
A conspicuous absence from the book is that of love as a central theme. That leads to a question – what is the basis on which the various pieces included in this anthology were selected? There is a brief note at the end of the introduction which tries to answer this question, but doesn’t do it enough justice. The criteria of selection are unclear and the time frame is vague. In other words, the anthology sets out with no stated aim, and hence does not fail any of them.
The book, however, has its moments of glory in some of the pieces included. Those by Vikram Seth and Ashok Row Kavi stand out for their quality, and some of those by Raj Rao also captivate. Many of the other pieces not only fail to captivate, but are also quite painful to the mind. If anyone would like to read what most of the book has to offer he would do better to lay his hands on a copy of Letters to Penthouse.
‘I am humbled to have been entrusted with defining the historic moment for India’s homosexuals through their literature, old and new, heroic or pedestrian, lovely and lovelorn or rough and ironic.’ The romance in the sentence to be found in the introduction just ends there. Mr. Merchant blissfully gambles away this trust. Erratic chronicling and a lopsided and damaging portrayal of the LGBT community together should give this book a life of about twenty years, not more.
Being a young Indian gay man who has had as normal a childhood as is imaginable, has been in the surreptitious adventures of adolescence and then has been in love, I should say that I indeed related to the stories in this book, but only sparsely and briefly. This, in my opinion, is the greatest of this book’s failures – the inability of its pages to reach out to a vast majority of young gay and lesbian people who languish behind their formidable closet doors.
Go ahead. Read this book. Given the scarcity and inaccessibility of LGBT literature, you might as well read it for its presence in every major bookshop. But let it be neither your first read among the anthologies of LGBT-themed works, nor the only one.
