Dr. Ruth Vanita is an illustrious and inspirational academic, author and activist who has made vociferous contributions to the field of literature and grassroot activism especially revolving around the theme of gender and sexuality. Having done her graduation and further studies in the literary line, she extended her interest in this vocation through combining philosophy and social revolution with literary forms to produce volumes of poetry, fiction and other various non-fictional tracts. Some of the distinguished titles accredited to her name are the novel Memory of Light (2020), and non-fiction works, Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India 1780-1870 (2012), Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India (2005) and more. Dr. Vanita has extensively researched and actively advocated for the rights and representation of the LGBT+ community as well as various feminist movements. She had co-founded “Manushi: A Journal about Women and Society” in 1978 to give a voice to particularly these issues in the public domain. A devout academician throughout her career, she now teaches English Literature and World Cultures at the University of Montana. However, there is ceaseless encouragement to be drawn from looking upon her work in all walks of life. We are truly honoured to have you ma’am, and extend a very warm welcome.
Kunal: Your contribution to literature has been enormously variegated and profoundly influential. From volumes of Rekhti poetry to novels dabbling into Hindu philosophy as well as social issues to promoting unconventional ideation and writing through Manushi, you’ve gracefully aced all forms of art. In your higher studies you’d chosen English literature as a field of inquiry and continue to engage with it as a teacher. How seminal a part has it played in your understanding of social issues inspiring you to vicariously engage with them through the various mediums you’ve used so far
Ruth Vanita : My doctoral thesis was on love and marriage in Virginia Woolf’s works but was basically on same-sex love in her works, and I think that it was the first dissertation from Delhi University’s English Department on this topic. Then I wrote an essay on love between women in Shakespeare and then I wrote a book called Sappho & the Virgin Mary: Same–Sex Love & the English Literary Imagination, published 1996. I’ve continued to work on English literature, in recent years on the connections between English literature and Indian literature too- for example how Indian texts influence writers like Thoreau.
Kunal: In the literary as well as general discourse, Gender and sexuality being interchangeable terms is one the most common misconceptions we have ingrained since our childhood. Talking from my own personal experience, this is something I for a very long time had this understanding that both of them mean the same thing which was clarified at a very later point of my life. How big of a practical problem is being caused by the initial misinterpretation of terminology according to you?
Ruth Vanita : I have to say, I’ve never come across that confusion . Gender refers to men, women and other genders, and sexuality refers to sexual desire and actually it’s pretty obvious from the words, I think, so I haven’t come across such confusion.
Kunal : Since we are on the topic of definition I would also like to extend it to ask- Could defining things like sexual desires, attraction, love, attachment on their own merit be an enabling exercise in the acceptance of these ideas in specific gender and sexuality contexts?
Ruth Vanita: Well, I would make distinctions between them. When I co-edited the book: Same -Sex Love in India, we distinguished between love and desire… you can love someone and they can be the primary person in your life and there have been cases like this where a man and a woman or two women or two men, live together for many years but may not have any sexual relationship. Desire is somewhat different from love. You can have sexual desire for someone and have sexual interactions with them without loving them. You might love someone else or might not love anyone.
Kunal: Would you agree that the social construct around the behaviour of a particular gender is also reflected in associating certain spaces, activities with a particular gender? And it had a major contribution in restricting many persons to follow their desires in life.
Ruth Vanita: I think you’re talking of what are called gender roles, where women are expected to do certain things and men are expected to do certain things and another gender might be expected to do other things, but these roles vary a lot. They have varied over time and in different societies: both in India and outside India there are many variations. In some of the tribal societies women do most of the manual work and in others they don’t. In many pre-modern societies women did a lot of productive work, when work was home-based, for example, in a family of weavers, the man, the woman, the children all participated in different aspects of the work. There isn’t one role for one gender all over the world. We tend to make the mistake that women always worked at home, doing the housework, whereas the men have always worked outside. That has not uniformly been the case historically either in pre-modern or in modern times.
Kunal: In terms of historically accepted social conduct, we see that in Bhakti tradition, a large number of male devotees, in their work, express themselves as a female yearning for her lover (The supreme being). Would you call it a defiance of the worldly labels to aim for a transcendental effect beyond binaries or does it end up reasserting the labels constructed in the patriarchal order through appropriation?
Ruth Vanita: It’s not an either-or question, it’s not either this or that, and also it is not unique to Bhakti at all. It is found in Christian mysticism as well. It’s called bridal mysticism when you imagine yourself as a bride of God, whether you are a man or woman or transgender or whatever, you imagine yourself as a bride of God if you imagine God as male or in India you can imagine yourself as a friend of God or in a particularly Indian variation you identify yourself as the mother of God, you identify with Yashoda and God is a playful child whom you love unconditionally as parents love children or are supposed to love children. So you can identify as the mother , the friend, the bride, the child. When worshipping a Goddess very often you identify as the child of the Goddess, and the Goddess is the mother. In Islamic mysticism very often both the lover and the beloved are males and in Hindu mysticism God and devotee can be friends like Arjuna and Krishna. They were very close and inseparable friends and would do anything for each other. The divine can also be seen as formless. If the divine is everything, you are the friend of everything as the Gita says.
Kunal : As we see, many couples prefer binding themselves together in traditional ways in terms of marriage which is why the proposal to get the law to support same sex marriage currently pending in Delhi High court. While defying ‘established societal norms’, at the same time there is an attempt to give their relationship a ‘traditionally defined label’, how would you explain this juxtaposition?
Ruth Vanita : Firstly, I don’t know what a traditionally defined label is, because marriage has changed drastically over the centuries and is still changing. In some societies, a man owns everything, even his woman, and that has changed. Property rights, custodial rights, divorce rights have changed so marriage today is unrecognisable as marriage 500 years ago or even 100 years ago. Even though we use the same word marriage, it is not the same thing. It is completely transformed if you compare it to marriage in the bible or marriage in the Hindu epics or, as I said, even marriage 100 years ago. Some societies are polygamous, some are polyandrous, some are monogamous. There is a whole range of types of marriage. Same-sex marriage is yet another change. I wrote a book, Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India, published in 2005 so that was a long time ago. It is based on the fact that from 1980s onwards I had been collecting newspaper reports of young r same sex couples running away together and either getting married by religious rituals, mostly Hindu rituals, or by committing joint suicide together, leaving notes stating that they wished to be cremated or buried together, A few of these cases became famous, most were not. They occurred all over India and are still occurring.
The most interesting thing to me about them is that these were low income/working class women, poor, mostly women, though there were some men. They are low income, non-English speaking and young. Also, they have no contact with any movement, the idea of getting married to each other came to them just from their own feelings. Most of them did not know words like gay or lesbian or feminist or anything, most of them did not have any contact with any movement and yet they did the same thing all over the country and Nepal too, in various places, in small towns and villages. They were fisherwoman, they were farmworkers, they were students, they were nurses. The other interesting thing was that while in most cases the families of course disapproved at first, in some cases violently separated them and married them off to partners of the other sex yet in other cases families came around. After discussing the matter, they actually helped to arrange the weddings. In the case of two policewomen, Leela and Urmila in 1987, Urmila’s family in a Madhya Pradesh village arranged a wedding reception for them, to console them after the police suspended them from their jobs. Jaya and Tanuja in 2001, in Patna – the family actually arranged the marriage of the two women. At the same time, one of the women’s sister got married to a man in a joint ceremony performed by a Hindu priest with 200 guests, so that was extraordinary. These are just regular ordinary families; they are not exceptionally liberal or progressive or anything so what were they thinking?
I interviewed, and a couple of journalists also interviewed some of the priests who performed these marriages and asked them what they were thinking and they gave extremely interesting answers. Not only the priests but even some the friends of the family, in one case in 1987 the neighbour of a family in a village said, “Where in the scriptures is it said that only a man and woman can marry? Marriage is the union of two spirits, two aatmas, why can’t two women get married?”
So the desire, which you call a traditional label, the desire to be a couple, whether you like it or not, whether we like it or not, is a desire that most humans experience. Whether we approve or disapprove doesn’t matter, most human beings wish to form couples.
Call it marriage or call it by any other name, they want to be known as a couple. There are some who don’t want to be and so of course they should not be forced to marry. But most human beings do end up living in couples and that’s true all over the world and through history, polygamy and polyandry apart. Now the point is once they settle down together, they want and need community support, without which no one can live.
In the modern world, the state, the government gives many rights to people who are married and doesn’t give those rights to people who may be living together for 20 or 50 years. If you are two women you will not get any of those rights, but if you are a man and a woman, today you get married tomorrow you get a whole range of rights, which you don’t even think about because you take it for granted – this is my husband, this is my wife, we can get a visa, we can open a joint account, we can buy a house together, if he is ill and she goes to the hospital she is the most important person to make decisions. You never think about these rights, you take them for granted. The fact is that it is not about tradition, it is about real, everyday life, where you want your everyday rights and that is what people want, whether or not the movement or the leaders or activists or theorists want it. For example, in America, when the movement for marriage equality started, it was not started by the LGBT movement. Many movement leaders were not in favour of it. Some thought it was too soon to make this demand and others thought marriage was, as you were suggesting, a patriarchal and heteronormative institution. In 1975 it was two men, who went and got themselves registered to get married and there was a case around that. So as early as 1975 this demand was raised. When the law actually changed, it was through a case filed by two women. They filed it against the advice of some movement leaders. So, the movement for marriage equality arises from the grassroots, it arises from people, not from movements. The desire from marriage equality comes from people who are living together and not getting the rights which they should get. Not having these rights makes their lives very difficult, and hence the court cases that are being filed.
Kunal: I think the anecdote that you gave of Madhya Pradesh in the 1980s was so appropriate, it was so surprising for me- the amount of acceptance by people and just seeing them as a couple- two individuals who want to be together, are in love and want to be together and are accepted; that is so remarkable.
Ruth Vanita: In the updated edition of Love’s Rite, due to come out next summer, another wonderful case I write about is of two tribal women, Thingring and Roinathy, in North East India. They were persecuted in their own village and they had to leave. They went and settled in another village and they lived there for many years together and got the respect of the community and then in early 2000s the community actually asked the local candidate who was standing for election to give these women the rights they should have because they are members of the community. Why don’t they have any rights? Both candidates had to say “we will consider it”. These women were interviewed by journalists and they talked about living together, one is a farm worker, the other a domestic help, very low-income as the whole village is. That’s just one example of many, of local and communal acceptance even though the society at large or the government many not accept. Of course, on the flip side, there are lot of cases of families persecuting the couples, separating them and driving them to suicide, there are also cases of male couples been driven to suicide, so both happen.
Kunal: You have endeavored from the beginning to combine scholarly research with grassroot activism. In this regard, what is your take on Bollywood attempting to educate the audience on the LGBTQ issues? Now Bollywood is one very strong medium in India and there has been a huge change…I don’t want to say overhaul, because there is a long way to go but the manner in which the LGBTQ community was represented in cinema has changed, do you think it will have an impact on the audience vis-a-vis the ordinary citizens of the country?
Ruth Vanita: Yes, definitely. I wrote a book, called Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema (2017). It’s not primarily about LGBT issues but there is a chapter on men, the male friends of the courtesans and their very interesting relationships. Yes, I think a film like Shubh Mangal Zyaada Savdhan offers wonderful insights both in itself and also acknowledges the earlier films that had portrayed male relationships, whether it was Dosti or Sholay or many other films where you see men as inseparable friends, singing songs to each other, in a way that is not found in other world cinema. I call it Bombay cinema not Bollywood, because Bollywood suggests that Bombay cinema is an imitation of Hollywood, which it is not because there are unique features in Indian cinema like close male-male friendships which are not found anywhere else or the courtesan character. The independent courtesan or tawaif character is unique to Indian cinema. And of course, the songs. Having so many songs in every movie is unique to Indian cinema. Yes, I think cinema has an impact that is immeasurable. The gay male and even female community have been very much into Bombay cinema from the 70s. For one thing, cinema emphasizes love, love of any kind – romantic, friendship, parental. It isn’t just heterosexual love but all kinds of love that is depicted as the ultimate good. I think a film like Shubh Mangal Zyaada Savdhan and the other films that have come out, the mainstream films that have come out will have much more impact than many other things, because so many people see them. Over time, if more such films are made, they will affect young people and even older people.
Kunal: I think just like sharing my own personal anecdote I remember that when I was going to watch Kapoor and sons And the entire conversation that happened in the end , you know about Fawad Khan’s character And it’s been closeted and you know like having a gay member in the family, it did initiate a conversation it was quite important conversation for at least my family to have and you know when you see those characters on screen like they are no longer just caricatures but they are real people and you recognize them as real people and I think like yeah I completely agree with you cinema does a very strong impact on the minds of the people in understanding that that these are not just things on screen but these are real people with real stories.
What, in your view, could be the reason for suppressing the research on the open acceptance and broad mindedness of our traditional societies even in the highest academic circles? (Because as we see even highly educated people aren’t aware of the basic understanding around LGBTQ community and oppose it irrationally). In most University curriculum there is an abject dearth of queer literature and even if it is present there are radical texts that are forgone in favour of a more socially appleasing structure. Do you believe any such politics of discretion is underway or do you actually see an adequate improvement in academic circles towards the acceptance of the LGBT+ community?
Ruth Vanita: I think there has been an astonishing change. Many universities now have sexuality studies of some kind in addition to gender studies. Delhi University syllabus includes a number of texts. When I was a student in the early 70s, works by E.M Foster, Shakespeare, were taught without ever mentioning that a writer was gay or bisexual, or that a poem was written by a man to a man. That is less the case today. When I published my first book in 1996 Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same sex love in English literary imagination, I remember I went back to Delhi University, and my professor who was teaching there at the time, put up the cover of my book on the notice board. I think our teachers had a kind of classical liberalism of accepting different perspectives. In the last 25 years, I have been asked to speak at different Universities, even small-town universities now that it is on zoom, in north Bengal etc., on same-sex relations in literature and history. People are pretty open to the subject now, I think. Things have changed and are still changing in academia.
Kunal: Because you just mentioned DU I would like to share with small anecdote very quickly. I was a student at the Delhi University as well. I graduated from Ramjas in 2016 and actually one of the first lectures that I attended on LGBTQ was conducted by the English literature department and I think that was the moment; I think it was my first month in college and till the time you are in school you are sort of in a cocoon. You don’t know, you don’t have a lot of opinions. You are not aware of a lot of things at least I wasn’t and college specially in Ramjas, the English department gave me that shot of exposure into so many different areas and the understanding and the acceptance of LGBTQ was one of them and I’m glad that it happened that the academic circle did provide me with that level of understanding.
Ruth Vanita: Yes, there has been a sea-change from the seventies to now. This mirrors the earlier major change that I have written about, from the 1820s to the 1920s. From the time of the Mahabharata and the Kamasutra up to the 1820s people freely wrote about and discussed all kinds of love and desire quite openly. This changes after 1857 and the British takeover. Then it becomes silenced and unspeakable until, I would say the 70s, 80s, and it begins to change in the 90s. For example, when I was in the women’s movement it was not talked about at all and now that has changed in a major way. I wrote a poem, “Woman to Woman” in Manushi in the early 1980s, which was one of the earliest published on the subject. So, yes, things keep changing.
Kunal: So in relation to the statement that you just made, do you think that the sort of modernization that the british wanted to bring in the country, the manner in which they used to refer to India as primitive and barbaric but then things were made far more regressive socially especially for LGBTQ communities, the sort of societal acceptance that used to be there were sort of taken away, so do you think the level of “modernisation” that they wanted to bring made things worse, compared to like the “primitiveness” that we had?
Ruth Vanita: Well in my book Gender, Sex and the City (2012) I argue that the culture of north Indian cities like Delhi and Lucknow was modern; it was pre-colonial modernity. It had many changes after full-fledged colonial rule. I wouldn’t say all British people thought India was primitive and backward. Many of them admired and were attracted by Indian culture. Scholars like Sir William Jones greatly admired India’s highly developed literary traditions. But there were many who thought certain aspects of India were primitive and backward, like Hinduism with image worship.
The idea of modernity keeps changing. The British in the 19th century, the Victorians – many were Puritans. In England, and in much of Europe, for several centuries, homosexuals were executed, or tortured, put in the pillory so that was their view then. By the 1960s the British changed their views. In England in 1969 they got rid of the anti-sodomy law which they had instituted in all the colonized countries, not just in India. So ideas of modernity and society keep changing. India had one kind of pre colonial modernity. Then came the British of modernity that we accepted and internalised. We developed a hatred of earlier Indian literature that much more open about many things: not only about same-sex love but about sex and love in general, pleasure in general, having fun, and a kind of playful love that gets sidelined when you focus only on mysticism and remove the poetry that talks about everyday life. This book, Gender, Sex and the City is about the kind of 18th and early 19th century Urdu poetry that is not only about dying, pining and being separated but also about having fun, shopping, going out into the city. It is about friendships and love affairs and all kinds of relationships. When Indians were defeated in 1857, many felt that they must change themselves and become more masculine in the Western style. and that maybe their literature was making them effeminate. To fight against the colonizers, they had to become more like the colonizers. Many Indian social reformers became ashamed of their own religion, their own practices, and tried to become more like Victorian ladies and gentlemen. Later developed the silly idea that homosexuality is an import from the west because we, a lot of us who are educated in English are cut off from our own literature, we have never read the Kamasutra, we have heard of it, most of us know the story of the Mahabharata, but we haven’t really read the whole thing and so we don’t really know it, we only kind the abridged versions. Hence the idea that homosexuality is an import from the West whereas if you read your own literature and educate yourself you realise that modern homophobia was the import from the west, not same-sex relationships.
Kunal: Thank you so very much for doing this again. It was a delightful and insightful interview. We are honored to have hosted you.
Kunal is a Delhi based lawyer & policy analyst and has been working in the social sector since the last seven years. He is the Founder of ITISARAS and currently presides as the Chairman of the Governing Body of the organisation.
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