Talk:Ismail Merchant

message: There is no mention of Ismail's wife : Parmesh Merchant in this article. Was Ismail a closet homosexual, with James Ivory as his partner? One can't say for sure. However, it is important to point out that he was married, and his wife's name is Parmesh.
:: Google searches for "Ismail Merchant", wife, and Parmesh brings up a grand total of 2 hits - one on Yahoo!, the other on Hollywood.com. Google search for "Ismail Merchant" and Parmesh brings up 5 hits, 3 of which have unrelated uses of the word Parmesh; the other two being the Yahoo! and Hollywood.com hits. This is highly suspicious. I think Parmesh is an Indian male name. Some obituaries mention that Ismail never married; no obituaries mention Parmesh. The Yahoo! and Hollywood.com pages are wrong. Bwithh 21:56, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  What about Ismail's wife Parmesh? 

message: Regarding queries over Ivory's relationship with Merchant as romantic life partner,
this is public knowledge, and I am copying and pasting a reply below that I wrote some time ago to another
user who queried the same thing about Merchant:
Most newspaper obituaries of Ismail Merchant did not address directly his romantic
relationship with James Ivory. A notable exception was the Los Angeles Times - one of the three major US national newspapers.
Please see this link to the obit article in the LA Times archives:
*Obituary of Ismail Merchant, LA Times, May 26 2005
Note how the first line of the article excerpt describes James Ivory as Merchant's life partner in addition to being a professional partner. The full article (I have the full article from a commercial database with restricted access) ends with the line:
"In addition to Ivory, Merchant is survived by sisters Saherbanu Kabadia, Sahida Retiwala, Ruksana Khan and Rashida Bootwala." 
i.e. Ivory is treated with greater priority in that final sentence than Merchant's 4 sisters, and the use of "survived" indicates a personal relationship.
There was some unhappiness in the LGBT community that most obituraries censored or used euphemisms for the personal relationship between Merchant and Ivory
e.g. The original Guardian obit (there were 2) used a pointed and emphatic last line "He did not marry."
Please see also this column from the Washington Post, another of the major 3 US national newspapers
addressing this unhappiness about the censorship:
*"Question Celebrity", Washington Post, June 26 2005
and this one from the LGBT newspaper, The Washington Blade:
*"News organizations ignore gay filmmaker’s sexual orientation"
see also these blog posts:
*http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2005/05/ismail_merchant.html
*http://www.nicksflickpicks.com/2005/05/rip-ismail-merchant.html
Bwithh 22:33, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Romantic relationship with Ivory

message: When did he start using Merchant as his last name, and why? Because of the last name I always mistakenly thought he was a Parsi. Ahassan05 16:45, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merchant 

message: Did he hold British citizenship? If so, when did he acquire it? Nietzsche 2 (talk) 21:19, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Citizenship

message: This article leaves open several questions that need to be addressed: When did he meet Ivory? Where did he meet Ivory? How long after meeting did they begin living together? When did he change his name to "Merchant"? Why did he change his name to "Merchant"? Nick Beeson (talk) 14:20, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Questions

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thread_title:  External links modified