Same Sex Love in India

By Ruth Vanitha and Saleem Kidwai
Kishore Kumar
Some anthologies are born like water bubbles – conceived by chance in a fit of unbridled, perverse passion – and pass into oblivion in much the same way – while nobody is looking. Some others are conceived in the sweet lucidity of love, are executed meticulously and with erudition, and remain to be remembered as wholesome indices to a genre through the ages. Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History is a work that belongs to the latter group. The masterful execution of the work becomes all the more laudable if one considers that it is the first time the subject has been treated so comprehensively.

Same Sex Love in India By Ruth Vanitha and Saleem Kidwai

The anthology traces, not the actual history of homosexual love in India, but the literary representation of homoeroticism in various Indian languages. Sex is not what the book deals with, but love: love between men and love between women that has been expressed in tones of poetic excess, beautifully written, running the gamut of emotions from pathos to bliss. A loving and passionate attachment between any two persons may not find sexual expression, and hence love, not sex.

The book is divided into four parts, based on historical periods. The first deals with ancient Indian materials, ranging from the Mahabharata to Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra, expounding the virtues of friendship and love between men and love between women. The next part is a collection of writings from medieval India, in the Sanskritic traditions. This part presents a collection of writings from Sanskrit and other Indian languages including from the Puranas and the Krittivasa Ramayana. The third part deals with medieval Indian materials from the Perso-Urdu tradition, ranging from the lovesick verses of the Baburnama, to the poetry of ‘Madho Lal’ Hussayn and to those of Mir Taqi ‘Mir’. The fourth part, dealing with modern Indian materials, draws from a large body of works in Indian languages including English, written after the late eighteenth century: from an excerpt from ‘Firaq’ Gorakhpuri (Urdu) to Vikram Seth’s poetry (English), from Ismat Chughtai’s Tehri Lakeer(Urdu) to Vijay Tendulkar’s Mitra’s Story (Marathi).

Each of these sections begins with an introduction by the editors, summarising the social conditions of the age, placing the pieces that follow in perspective. These section introductions, along with the extensive footnotes and endnotes with references and explanations, make the book invaluable. These are the actual pointers to the painstaking scholarship that has gone into the book.

Intended for a wide audience – Indian and foreign, gay and straight – the book largely succeeds in the aims the editors have set for themselves, despite some lacunae, namely the absence of writings from some Indian languages. As the editors say in their preface, they have tried to make accessible several little-known texts along with those written by eminent authors. Another aim of this work, of great import, is to dispel the popular myth that homoerotic inclinations and ‘homosexuality’ as such, are alien to Indian culture. By bringing forth excerpts from Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist texts as well as from nonreligious and modern Indian writers, it shows how same-sex love has always been part of Indian culture, and how homoerotically inclined individuals have “contributed in major ways to thought, literature and the general good,” and have been respectable citizens of society in their time. This flies in the face of every brand, size and shape of self-proclaimed moral police who say homosexuality has no place in India’s culture.

This reviewer opines that the greatest success of this book however, comes from the fact that young Indian homosexuals brought up in the midst of the modern misfortunes of societal and institutional homophobia, after reading this work, would walk away with a sense of pride, shattering the feelings of guilt, shame and self-loathing that they have hitherto accepted as unconquerable.