The secrets of a boys’ hostel

Author, academic R Raj Rao needs no introduction. He was associated with India’s first gay film (Riyad Vinci Wadia’s BomGay in 1996) and published the country’s first gay novel (The Boyfriend, 2003). He is also a poet and was part of India’s gay rights movement much before the country was comfortable discussing alternative sexual identities.

As his new novel Hostel Room 131 (published by Penguin) hits bookstores across the country, the author talks about gay writing in India.

Hostel Room 131 is being marketed as a gay novel. This is the politics of minority writing, where the issue is foregrounded. How do you negotiate the issue, and more importantly, what’s the novel is about?

I guess what you mean is that the ‘issue’ is foregrounded, as opposed to the art. This is a view that I have been resisting for years. My training is in literature. Form is much more important to me than content. Anyone who has taken the trouble to go through my entire body of work, will see for himself how much experimentation there is. That my book is a gay love story is only incidental.

You are a committed gay rights activist. Do you think fiction can help further the cause?

I don’t think I am a gay rights activist. It’s true that at one time I enjoyed describing myself that way. But over the years, I have come to realise that my identity is primarily that of a writer — someone who deals with representation. Gay activism has no time for the kind of transgressive aesthetics I deploy in my work. It is too involved with serious day-to-day issues like AIDS, the law, etc. That is why the Queer Studies Circle, which I started in 1999, flopped. Of course, art and activism are two sides of the same coin, as I’ve frequently said.

In the Western literary tradition, gay writers have found a place in the mainstream, examples being Alan Hollinghurst, Edmund White, David Leavitt. Not so in India. Please comment.

Oh, it will take ages for India to confer mainstream status to gay writing. However, the fact that major trade publishers such as Penguin India have been publishing authors like Ruth Vanita, Hoshang Merchant and myself, whose work is overtly gay, is a good starting point.

You have mentioned somewhere that you believe in the permanency of art, as opposed to ephemeral human existence. How does this reflect in your writing?

One of the ways in which you might interpret that statement is that, to me, art dictates how I must lead my life. My relationships in particular are tailor-made to provide the raw material for my books. They’re subversive and radical, to say the least, and intrigue most people.

Is all marginal writing autobiographical? How do you fictionalise your life? The plotline of Hostel Room 131 bears an uncanny resemblance to one of your early short stories. Please comment.

I guess most marginal writing does have a strong autobiographical streak. You are correct. Hostel Room 131 is a sort of fleshing out of my short story Confessions of a Boy Lover. However, the novel builds on the story, and charts territories that were completely beyond the scope of the original story.

It’s more than a year since the historic Delhi High Court verdict reading down Section 377. Have you observed any marked change in society’s attitude

toward the queer identity? Do you think Hostel Room 131 will find more readers than The Boyfriend did, now that we are more aware?

I’ve been asked this question many times. And my answer is: Social attitudes take very long to change. However, the Delhi High Court judgment has certainly made us more visible to heterosexuals.

Traditionally, a non-heterosexual narrative almost always ends in tragedy, death or departure. But your new novel ends on a happily-ever-after note. Is this wish fulfilment, or there is a larger agenda at play?

I beg to differ. Queer narratives do not always have to have unhappy endings. This is something that would entirely depend on the demands of each individual story. As for Hostel Room 131, the ending can be interpreted as both happy and not so happy. To say that because a novel is a gay novel, it must end in tragedy, is to put the cart before the horse.

The blurb of the novel reads: “The author of The Boyfriend returns with

another irreverent look at India’s gay subculture. Deadpan humour and farce come together in this entertaining love story, giving us a glimpse of what really goes on in a boys’ hostel.” Can you explain this ‘irreverent look?’

Good question. The ‘irreverent look’ is where my literary strategy lies, pun intended. A writer is, and should be, a spectator of rather than a participant in life. If heterosexual writers can be spectators, and

observers, why not us? This is also related to what you said earlier about the ‘issue’ in gay writing being foregrounded, as against the ‘art.’

In your fiction, you seem to be laughing at the Indian gay community while you are very much a part of it. How important is humour to you?

Laughing at the gay community? Didn’t you know that self-deprecatory humour is the only real type of humour? Jonathan Swift, who is my ultimate guru, compared it to seeing one’s face in a convex or concave mirror, and being horrified by its distortions. The art is the distortion. Otherwise, it’s mere propaganda.

You are certain of your sexual identity. But when it comes to your writing, you are a bit of a dilettante, moving from one genre to another. Can you explain that?

No, I’m no dilettante. I spoke at the beginning of this interview about experimentation being important to me.

The different genres of writing that I’ve tried my hand at, as well as the different ways in which I’ve executed each individual short story, poem or play, are all a part of the desire to experiment. My calling, you may say, is that of a literatteur.

— Udaysanker Sarma wrote his MPhil thesis on Queer theory from the

University of Pune. He is currently working on his first novel.