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Udayan

Hoshang Dinshaw Merchant was born in 1947 to a Parsi business-family in Bombay. He was educated at Bombay, Los Angeles, Purdue  and Jerusalem.  Now a Professor of Poetry and Surrealism at the Hyderabad Central university, Merchant is widely known for his gay anthologyYaarana- Gay Writing from India. Being an openly gay academician hasn’t been easy for  Merchant- he had been beaten up by goons, and barred from entering the men’s rooms. But the eccentric man’s indomitable spirit has shown him through tough times, on more than one occasion. He lives in a Muslim housing complex in Hyderabad and talks freely about sex, politics and literature. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 40% [?]

Vikram Tyagi discusses ‘Quarantine’ a recently released collection of gay themed short stories with its Indian American writer Rahul Mehta. The stories and characters explore the lives of young Indian gay men in the United States- how their ethnicity and their sexuality interweave into riveting narratives. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 40% [?]

By Ruth Vanitha and Saleem Kidwai
Kishore Kumar
Some anthologies are born like water bubbles – conceived by chance in a fit of unbridled, perverse passion – and pass into oblivion in much the same way – while nobody is looking. Some others are conceived in the sweet lucidity of love, are executed meticulously and with erudition, and remain to be remembered as wholesome indices to a genre through the ages. Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History is a work that belongs to the latter group. The masterful execution of the work becomes all the more laudable if one considers that it is the first time the subject has been treated so comprehensively.

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Popularity: 73% [?]

Kishore Kumar

In The Symposium, Plato discussed love as motivating the search for the forms, as a philosophical and spiritual exercise. This book is considered one of the foundations of western civilisation. More than two thousand years after Plato, Walt Whitman wrote his Leaves of Grass, which was hailed as the definitive work of early American poetry. When his employer read the book, he sacked Whitman for being “the author of an obscene book” because it had some explicitly homosexual content.

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Popularity: 8% [?]