Description
Queering India is the first book to provide an understanding of same-sex love and eroticism in Indian culture and society. The essays focus on pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial gay and lesbian life in India to comprehensively examine a much-neglected topic. The topics are wide-ranging, considering film, literature, popular culture, historical and religious texts, law and other aspects of life in India.
Specifically, the essays cover such issues as Deepa Mehta’s recent and controversial film, Fire, which focused on lesbian relationships in India; the Indian penal code, which outlaws homosexual acts; a case of same-sex love and murder in colonial India; homophobic fiction and homoerotic advertising in current day India; and lesbian subtext in Hindu scripture. All of the essays are original to the collection.
Queering India promises to change how we understand India and gay and lesbian life and sexuality worldwide.
ISBN 978-0415929509
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.
