With such a build-up, the reader is entitled to expect an author at the heart of his powers, a ‘maverick’, to borrow again from Chaudhuri, bringing us truth and beauty from a hitherto unilluminated corner of Indian life. The literary landscape would be poorer without him.’ ‘Raj’, Amit Chaudhuri writes in a blurb that appears on the cover of Rao’s third and most recent novel, Lady Lolita’s Lover, is ‘an excellent writer. Rao was also a productive academic, a professor of English at Pune University, introducing a course on LGBT literature in 2007, one of the first in the country, and an activist described by colleagues as an ‘icon’. His first novel, The Boyfriend, was unashamed, a study of love via the toilets of Churchgate station.
Six of his poems, Waspish and closely observed, inspired Bomgay (1996), the late Riyad Vinci Wadia’s short film, often described as India’s first gay film. For a time it looked as if he might be that figure, an Indian Genet who would bring queer identity, the objectification of young working class men, an entire homosexual subculture of cruising spots and anonymous public sex into the mainstream. I’d like to imagine R Raj Rao as an Indian Trocchi, scornful of the staidness, the conventionality of so much Indian writing in English, the self-congratulatory upper middle-class bleating of our literary establishment. It was a Situationist call to arms to the disaffected and the marginal to stage a coup, to take over the mainstream. Lesbianism and sodomy, Trocchi declared in Edinburgh, were the only things that interested him-the base, so to speak, of his writing. Trocchi was Scottish himself, a Glaswegian who had edited a radical literary magazine in Paris and was sunk in heroin addiction and squalid sex in New York, a life that provided the material for his rambling, disjointed, yet somehow beautiful novel Cain’s Book. Alexander Trocchi - in what should have been a staid discussion on a staid topic in staid Edinburgh in 1962 (a staid year if we’re to believe Philip Larkin who insisted in his poem Annus Mirabilis that ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / … Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP’)-provoked sputtering anger, even abuse, from other writers on a panel to discuss Scottish writing with a cavalier dismissal of the country and its writers as provincial, their work akin to “stale porridge”.
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