Hoshang Merchant Biography 
Hoshang Merchant is an Indian poet who writes in English. He is also India’s First Openly Queer Poet. He taught English, Poetry and Surrealism at University of Hyderabad since mid-1980s. He authored 20 books of poetry, and four critical studies. The Rockefeller got him Bellagio Blues, Yaraana: Gay Writing from India, Forbidden Sex/Texts, Indian Homosexuality, The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fiction and Sufiana: Poems are among his notable works. Poet, professor, gay, activist and writer - that’s Hoshang Merchant summed up. He published his last work Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant in 2016.
Hoshang Merchant was born in 1947 to a working class Zoroastrian family in Mumbai. When he was sent to a Parsi school initially with his sister, he was the only boy of the class. He later studied at Jesuit school, Xavier's Lads Academy and St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. He completed PhD in Renaissance and Modernism in 1981. He taught English and related subjects since 1970s. He has lived and taught in Heidelberg, Jerusalem and Iran, and has been associated with radical movements of the Left in the 1970s before he moved back to India. He also studies Islam and Buddhism. Since 1989 he started publishing his poetry works and most of those works were published by Writers Workshop in Kolkata.
Since mid-1980s he is settled in Hyderabad where he taught at University of Hyderabad for many years till his took superannuation. He edited India's first gay anthology Yaraana: Gay Writing from India. He has openly admitted that he is a gay, and most of his works are related to this theme. During his academic years, he dreamed of making it big on the celluloid, but he turned a professor and gay activist later.
Published: March 01, 2019
Updated: March 01, 2019
