‘Homosexuality is an uncontrollable feeling,like poetry’

“I have been getting calls from various gay rights groups pledging support,and I am considering taking their offer seriously,” he says.

A poet,Siras got the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad’s award for his 2002 collection,Grass Under My Feet.

“The poem,after which the book is named,talks of the loneliness of a man looking at the full moon,yearning for his lover. It could be called male-dominated poetry,” he says. “The full moon represents a gay lover: all poems are about the love of one man for another,” he says.

Siras,who is also the chairman of the Modern Indian Languages Department at the university,says he has never tried to hide his homosexuality. “It is an uncontrollable feeling,like poetry,” he says.

His marriage lasted barely a month. “The marriage ended for other reasons. It was over before I told her about my sexuality,” says Siras,adding that he first became aware of his sexual orientation when he was about 15 years old.

Siras,who hails from Nagpur,has also published a collection of seminar papers in English on comparative literature and his PhD thesis. The thesis was on 20 political novels of Marathi novelist Gajanan Tryambak Madkholkar. “It took me 10 years to complete my PhD from Nagpur University,” says Siras,who,during that period (1976-1985),went on to obtain an MA in Psychology from the same university.

He also worked as a research assistant in the Department of Linguistics at Ranchi University,but never completed his MA. “Then,in 1985,I got my Diploma in Medical and Social Psychology,” he says. Siras became interested in psychoanalysis while in Ranchi because the library there was well-stocked on the subject.

However,it is comparative literature that caught Siras’s fancy. “It was the exposure to Jadavpur University’s Comparative Literature course that lead me to take up the subject seriously. (Ernest) Hemingway and (Graham) Greene are my favourite English authors,” he says. Siras is extremely appreciative of his family for standing by him. “The university may take away my pension and other allowances,but they cannot deprive me of my family,” he says.