Born Parsi, Sufi of heart and Christian in suffering, Buddhist in his detachment, and Hindu in his sensuality, Hoshang Merchant’s life and poetry weave together faith, exile, and longing into a rich mosaic of devotion and defiance.
Merchant’s poetry is at once intimate and expansive, capturing the contradictions of a life lived across geographies, histories, and desires. My Sunset Marriage (Navayana), a collection of 101 poems,is quintessential Merchant—modernist yet steeped in Indian voices, global in its gaze yet intensely personal.
A poetry of exile and embrace
Merchant, born in 1947 in Bombay, has often called himself an exile, not just geographically but within his own culture. A Parsi by birth, an openly gay man in a society that long denied queer existence, and an academic who has spent years between India, Iran, Palestine, and the United States, and now Hyderabad, his poetry carries the weight of multiple displacements. My Sunset Marriage moves fluidly across these terrains—from the lush sensuality of his Bombay childhood to the political tumult of the Iranian Revolution, from Hindu mythology to the devastations of Gaza. His poetry refuses containment.
I ask him if he considers himself a poet of exile, or if poetry itself is his true home. His response was characteristically layered: “My exile was for 14 years, as predicted in my horoscope, like Lord Rama’s. When I became a tax-paying citizen of India in 1995, my exile should have ended. But queers weren’t legally recognised until 2016. I felt my contribution wasn’t recognised. Now it is—but only as queer poetry. The entire personality of a poet makes his oeuvre. Why should only one aspect be singled out if a gay man writes poetry?”
This refusal to be pigeonholed defines My Sunset Marriage. Consider the lines:
"Krishna and Sudama
Were classmates
One became king
One remained a poor Brahmin"
Here, Merchant reworks the classical story of Krishna and his childhood friend Sudama, imbuing it with the ache of queer longing, the asymmetry of power, and the loneliness that so often follows love. His ability to interlace myth with deeply personal themes is his signature, turning gods into lovers and history into the backdrop of desire. Merchant says that“mythology allows the poet to live a self-created heightened reality.If we humanise the gods, then we humans walk with gods. There's no shame in invoking a god who loves his childhood companions.”
Merchant’s poems, though modernist in form, pulse with Hindustani rhythms, Parsi inflections, and Persian echoes. The title My Sunset Marriage itself plays with irony. It suggests a marriage at its twilight, an impossible union, perhaps Merchant’s own, to a world that rarely welcomed him with open arms.
The loneliness of endurance
One of Merchant’s recurring themes is the intersection of queerness and exile. His poems oscillate between defiant celebration and quiet grief:
"So like some Alexander I crossed Hamadan
And back into the heart
Of Tehran, where my lover and I
Were bored no more
Looking up into the sky"
This is the power of My Sunset Marriage—it refuses to be just an elegy. It is an epistolatory book to cities and people and idols interlaced with survival, of stolen joys, of defiantly lived lives. Even when he writes of loneliness, it is not the loneliness of defeat but of endurance, of a man who has lived, lost, and still finds himself composing verse.
The importance of a reprint
That Navayana, a publishing house focused on caste and marginality, has chosen to reprint My Sunset Marriage,first published in 2016, reframes Merchant’s work within a discourse of marginality and rebelliousness. Merchant’s poetry, like Dalit writing, has always existed outside the mainstream, resisting assimilation into a homogenised literary canon. He dismissed caste as a concern in his work, saying, “The pansexuality of queer love doesn’t ask the caste of the lover before engagement in love. Parsis don’t have caste. But we are class conscious.”
This reprint gestures toward a broader solidarity—a recognition that queerness, caste, and class are all part of India’s complex social fabric. In a world increasingly defined by binaries—between nations, identities, and ideologies—Merchant’s work remains fluid, a poetic bridge between cultures, queerness, and exile.
The book cover, designed by the talented Akila Seshasayee, features Indie matchbox art depicting two male parakeets sweet on each other—an aptly whimsical touch that perfectly complements Merchant’s poetry.
Merchant’s words remind us that poetry, at its best, is not just about beauty but about bearing witness—to our joys, our losses, and our endless search for home.
I ask Merchant what he thought was the most beautiful aspect of love and the worst. His response was profound: “The worst aspect of love is its egotism, which reaches its apogee in the heterosexual unitary family. The glory of love is that by learning sacrifice—which is to say, learning to give up—we humanise ourselves and glimpse spirituality denied us in our profane world.”
In the closing lines of one of his poems, Merchant writes:
"We forge again a body with broken words, with soul”.
In My Sunset Marriage, those words come alive—aching, defiant, and unforgettable.