Pride Month | Ruth Vanita: ‘It is a gift to be born in India, I’d like to be reborn in India’

Indian publishers were hesitant to publish Same-Sex Love in India in the late 1900s. Now all of them have become not only willing but very eager to publish [books] on LGBT themes and will publish pretty much anything anyone writes (except poetry!). LGBT themes are regularly taught in curricula. I have been asked to speak on my work not only at Delhi University (where the subject was never mentioned when I studied there) but at other universities and small colleges in small towns all over the country. It has become a very popular subject for research even though most of the research is unfortunately on English texts or texts that have been translated into English.

You note in the book that this collection of poems was written over four and a half decades. Do you shelve poems for a while, then revisit them years later? Where do you keep this repository of poems for this long a time? What does your writing process look like?

That was actually a miscalculation and [is] incorrect. Most of the poems were written after my first collection, A Play of Light (Penguin, 1994), so they were written over a period of three decades. Many of these poems have been published over these decades in anthologies and online journals. I’ve done a bit of editing for the book but not much.

A poem generally begins when a line comes into my head, for example, ‘Love is the robe that keeps no one warm.’ I then build the poem around the line. For some reason, these lines often have nine syllables, which is just short of the blank-verse line.

One doesn’t often find translations of others’ works in their collection of poems, what compelled you to make that choice? Then how did you choose which poet to translate and include in The Broken Rainbow?

The book contains 49 of my own poems and only three translations. I translated these poems because I love them. I selected translations that matched the themes of the sections in my book and placed one translation at the end of each section.

In one of the ghazals, you write that “India [...] threatens to out me”. As someone who divides time between the US and India, and probably loves both, what does India mean to you? What sort of relationship do you share with her?

In this poem, ‘Ghazal for My Son, Four Years Old’ I am playing with the idea of ‘outing.’ I was ‘out’ in India much before this poem was written (in 2010). I was ‘out’ at least as early as 1996, when my first book, Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination appeared, and certainly by 2000 when Same-Sex Love in India appeared.

The term ‘out me’ is used with reference to my son beginning to understand what India means to me: ‘India, ebbing in his dark, dark eyes, / Beckons, incriminates, threatens to out me.’ I moved to the US when I was 40, much later than most people do, and the reason I moved was that I had found it impossible to establish a long-term relationship in India at the time. But half my heart remains in India. I come to India usually twice a year, and my wife and son come once a year. We have a flat and an entire set-up in India. As I once told an American student who asked, India would be my home even if I had lived elsewhere for a hundred years. It is a gift to be born in India, and I would like to be reborn in India.

Could you share your views on the ongoing fight for marriage equality? Do you see it as a first step towards achieving more rights?

Yes, I think it is the first and most important right, which must be followed by the right to non-discrimination at work (in the US, people have, sometimes, been fired from their jobs the day after they marry). One reason I say it is the most important right is that the demand did not come from above or from movement leaders. The demand first came from hundreds of non-English-speaking, low-income couples, mostly women, who have been getting married by religious rites or committing joint suicide as a form of marriage (leaving suicide notes saying they would be married in the next life) ever since the 1980s when there was no marriage equality anywhere in the world, and no LGBT movement in India. These couples were in villages and small towns all over the country. They include Dalits, tribals, factory workers, fisherwomen, [and] agricultural labourers. As early as 1993, Vinoda and Rekha, two village girls in Maharashtra, aged 18 and 21, went to the Registrar of Marriages and presented themselves as bride and groom. The 2023 edition of my 2005 book, Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India, contains a list of these couples with names and places. They are the pioneers of the marriage equality movement. Of course, it is not an exhaustive list.

In one of the poems you write, 'Words are weak magic, disobeyed by dreams'. What then makes or compels you to do words?

The words of poetry have always been considered magical. The earliest love-spells, both in ancient Greece and in ancient India, are in the form of verses, magic incantations. A poem calls on someone, a lover, a friend, a God, a reader, [or] a place, trying to draw that being to oneself. In the poem you quote, I am playing on that idea, saying that a poem is not sufficient consolation for a sad person, but the fact that I write the poem anyway and offer it to her as consolation indicates that the idea of insufficiency is ambiguous, not absolute. Often, the existence of a poem contradicts what it seems to say.

I’ve been writing verse since I was seven years old, and it fulfils a part of my imagination that functions in a different way from when I wrote prose.

It is interesting that in the poem Dawn at the Rampur Library, you use ‘Colourful’, ‘Elegant’, and ‘Daring’ as “rough translations” to refer to the pen-names of Urdu poets Rangin, Insha, and Jur’at but you use azaan and koyal as is in the same poem. Your thoughts on this? 

Almost everyone in India knows what an azaan and a koyal are, so there is no need to translate them. Rangin, Insha, and Jur’at are not the real names of the poets. They chose these as pen-names, so the meanings of the words were important to them. Most people do not know the meaning of ‘Insha’ — they might mistake it for Insha’allah, which is not the meaning here. By choosing ‘Insha’ as his pen-name, the poet played on his given name ‘Insha’allah’, with another meaning of ‘Insha’, which is Stylish or Elegant. My poem, likewise, plays on the meanings of their pen-names, to describe the poets and their poetry but also gestures towards my experience and imagination of them as I read their poems in handwritten manuscripts: ‘And in high-ceilinged rooms, / poets revel – colourful, daring, / elegant – ever awake, they laugh, / they speak astounding words, in faded ink.’

Could you recommend to our readers a book that they should read this pride month other than yours and why?

Suniti Namjoshi’s The Conversations of Cow (1985, The Women’s Press Ltd) is not only a pioneering lesbian work but a wonderfully playful, funny, thoughtful little novel. It considers love, sexuality, animals, and being human, and draws on thought[s] from all over the world, including Upanishadic thought, ancient Greek narrative, and modern feminism, but with a very light touch.

What are you working on next?

I have just completed a book, A Woman More Worth than Any Man: History and Vision in Nine Plays of Shakespeare. Two other books are in press. One is a novel, A Slight Angle, which will appear from Penguin in 2024. It is about a group of friends and relatives, who are what would now be called gay, lesbian, and straight. It is set in urban India in the 1920s and ’30s. The other book, On the Edge: A Hundred Years of Hindi Fiction on Same-Sex Desire, is a collection of 16 stories and excerpts from novels, translated and introduced by me. It will appear from Penguin in August 2023.