‘Queer, for me, is anything that deviates from normative desire’: Saikat Majumdar on his fiction

Saikat Majumdar’s new novel, The Remains of the Body, is a book of strange desires that are imagined as shaping our most cherished relationships. It pushes a question for whom the time has now come – when will queerness stop being a marginal identity in India? While non-normative genders and sexualities become routine on Netflix, our governments start to clamp registration numbers on live-in relationships, and the fate of same-sex marriage is tossed back and forth between the legislature and the judiciary.

Hoshang Merchant, the iconic poet of heartfelt Yaarana, fought his early battles alone, for his gay identity as for his place in the literary tradition. Few have charted the paths he has, and few have lived to tell the tale the ways he has. Merchant started out at a time when this was a hard and lonely battle. He spoke to Saikat Majumdar, the novelist who sees queerness everywhere. Excerpts from the conversation:

You don’t live the queer life but cast a sympathetic eye on it since it’s everywhere. In your new book, The Remains of the Body, bisexuality is spelt out because this is how Californians including some NRIs live. Could you amplify my observation?
I love that you say “you don’t live a queer life” – rather...

Read more