Of Love, Longing and Exile

Hoshang Merchant's My Sunset Marriage weaves rage, queerness, memory and myth into a luminous poetic testament to love

- SUDHA G TILAK

ORN 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 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.