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These edited excerpts from the Preface of the Bengali translation of Hoshang Merchant’s book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions by Sourav Roy are reprinted here with permission from the translator.

During Hoshang Merchant’s 75 years over 50 printed and 38 electronic books (poetry, prose, critical studies, edited volumes, translations, interviews) have been published. His writings have been translated into Hindi (often by himself), Telugu, Malayalam, Croatian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Italian and Esperanto. But until I translated this book, just a handful of his poems had been translated into Bengali. Widely read, circulated, critiqued, reviled and admired by a literati audience, Merchant has long been surrounded by Bengal and Bengalis. Almost all of his books in the 1990s (and some in the 2000s) were published from Calcutta. 

Any probing about why it took so long for him to be published in Bengali is deflected by the author with replies that make for good jest and good copy, but not substantive answers. Our year-long joint struggle to find a suitable publisher for the Bengali translation of The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions is perhaps an answer. The inequity between the worlds of English and Bengali language cuts both ways.

Other obstacles dawned on me gradually while translating the book. Uninhibited and specific on sex, love and its entanglements, Merchant’s book exposes the poverty of contemporary Bangla vocabulary and tests its Victorian limits.

The text of The Man Who Would Be Queen... is deeply queer not just because of the sexual orientation of the author. It expectedly reflects Merchant’s decades-old legacy of being openly and unapologetically gay in words and deeds, pain and joy. It’s about a man who doesn’t think of himself as a different species — neither better nor worse than any heterosexual.

Simultaneously white and black, the queerness of this text absorbs and reflects all the colors of the rainbow. Those expecting a straightforward march of his gayness and creativity will move in circles. Those expecting a saucy, barely-legal tell-all will find a mirror held to their faces. Those expecting a past example of an Indian gay life will get very non-Indian, futuristic lessons. And those hoping to find a gay icon will find feet of clay, willingly exhibited. 

In an interview with Serish Nanisetti of The Hindu immediately after the judges of the Supreme Court of India struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (criminalizing homosexuality) in 2018, Merchant shared an anecdote: "There were these boys from Aurora College, Hyderabad who would throw stones at me while I was walking. After some time, I began throwing the stones back at them. One day I asked myself, what are you doing Hoshang? You are a professor, why are you behaving like a lunatic? And I stopped throwing stones; later one of the boys became my student.”

In my late teens, I would devour the Katha Prize Stories volumes (15 in all), annual English translations of select stories from Indian language magazines. They were at one time considered more authentic literary representations of India as compared to Indian writers who wrote in English. Only two percent of India reads English. The number of books translated from Bengali into English in India over the last few decades, as compared to the number of English books translated to Bengali, only underlines this paradox. The number of potential readers in Bengali, not just in India but in Bangladesh as well, might far outnumber their English counterparts, but by real numbers English often wins because the Bengali publishers’ distribution networks rarely match theirs. 

So when a queer man’s autobiography in English is translated into Bengali, does it find more readers? More queer readers? More Bengali readers who can’t read the English original? Or more Bengali readers who can but somehow haven’t gotten around to reading the English book when it came out in 2011? The important question perhaps should be whether it attracts new readers. 

When a man’s life, a queer life, lived in English (also in Gujarati, Hindi, Farsi, Urdu, French but not in Bangla) is translated into Bengali, does it become a Bengali queer autobiography? Even a casual search for autobiographical fiction written originally in Bengali by queer men brings up quite a few results. But except the very recent ones, how many of these books are currently available to buy and read? Even if they are available in libraries and archives, how many non-queer readers want to read them and how many queer readers know where to read them? 

Merchant led a remarkable riches-to-rags life of mind and body whose troughs and peaks are beyond our imagination. Very few, even of his generation and privilege, got to travel, work, love, suffer, write and experience so much across the world. His political views will rankle with many. His views of trans politics are dated. His views on sex and love and marriage are often not politically correct enough for the respectable neoliberal queer. Merchant never cared, and cares even less now. 

Merchant reminds us that Yaraana: Gay Writing from South Asia (Penguin 1999), the literary anthology edited by him, was second on the India Today Bestseller list in both Bombay and Delhi for two weeks, without any promotion. This was one year before the historic Same-sex love in India: Readings from Literature and History by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai was published. On account of more queer representation, more cultural content and more favorable legislation now, our queer lives in India haven’t gotten significantly better or very different now. Nor has the hunger to see our lives reflected in literature been sated. In the same 2018 interview cited earlier, Merchant says: "In this judgment the court has not decriminalized all kinds of sex. It has read down the law to legalize sex between consenting adults in private. The operative word is ‘private.’ 

"When I was in Iran, I heard a joke. A couple was caught in a place of worship by the priest. He admonished them saying: ‘You have no shame, you have no God, you have no religion, you have no manners, you have no country.’ The youngsters listened and finally asked, ‘Sir, have you finished?’ ‘Yes,’ replied the priest. ‘Sir we have everything,’ said the couple. ‘We just don’t have a place.’”