Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India [Updated Edition 2005]

Description

Why should the state’s refusal to recognize a union as marriage mean that the union is not a marriage? In Love’s Rite, Ruth Vanita asks this challenging question to emphasize that mutual consent and family and community recognition validate a marriage–and this support frequently extends to same-sex marriages as well.

When people claim the right to marry, their sex or sexuality is not intrinsic to that right, although social prejudice makes it appear so. Moreover, it cannot be denied that a multitude of events and depictions in vastly different cultures, times, and places all point to the possibility of same-sex love and commitment being recognized and accepted.

Marriage is a universal rite of passage that can, in the right circumstances, become ‘the perfect ceremony of love’s rite’. Vanita examines the twin phenomena of same-sex weddings and same-sex joint suicides (mostly female) reported from many parts of India. She argues that these couples invoke long-standing but fluid Indian legal, religious, and literary-cinematic traditions to declare their love to the world when they marry or die together. Using her intimate knowledge of ancient Indian textual history, the author demonstrates that same-sex love and relationships are deeply rooted in Indian culture–and compares the cultural and legal implications of same-sex marriage in India with those in the West.

The international debate on same-sex marriage is relevant to all democratic societies today. Ruth Vanita brings a fresh perspective to this debate, suggesting that same-sex marriage dwells at heart, not on the margins, of culture.

Raised and educated in India, Ruth Vanita divides her time between Gurgaon and Missoula. Her first novel, Memory of Light, appeared from Penguin in 2020. Her next book of poems, A Hidden Player, will appear from Copper Coin in 2022. She taught at Delhi University for 20 years; for 13 years, she was active in the women’s movement and worked as co-editor of India’s first nationwide feminist magazine, Manushi, of which she was a founder. She is the author of many books on same-sex sexuality in Indian and British literature; her next book, The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna and Species, will appear from Oxford University Press in 2022.