Hoshang merchant autobiography

Indian poet

Hoshang Dinshaw Merchant (born 1947) is an Indian poet.^[1] He is a preeminent voice of gay liberation in India^[2] and modern India’s first openly gaypoet.^[3][4] Merchant is best known for his anthology on gay writing titled Yaarana.^[5]

Early years and education

Merchant was born in 1947 to a working class Zoroastrian family in Mumbai, India.

He was educated at Xavier's Lads Academy and St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. He has a Masters from Occidental College, Los Angeles. At Purdue, he studied Renaissance and Modernism, and for his PhD (1981), wrote a dissertation on Anaïs Nin. He has lived and taught in Heidelberg, Jerusalem and Iran where he was exposed to various radical movements of the Left.^[6] Merchant is openly gay and is as old as India' independence.^[7][8]

Writers Workshop in Kolkata, India has published seventeen books of his poetry since 1989.

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