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Gay Icons of India
Fighting a relentless culture of discrimination and homophobia, India’s LGBTQ+ community is finally on the road to inclusion and acceptance. While there are still miles to go, the Supreme Court’s landmark reading down of Section 377 in September 2018 came as a battle hard-won for those who identify as gay.
In the wake of this watershed judgement, Gay Icons of India celebrates twenty-two extraordinary personalities from the queer community who have resisted injustices through their art and greatly aided LGBTQ+ social movements. From dancers and poets to writers and artists, Hoshang Merchant and Akshaya K. Rath pay homage to these inspirational figures who stand steadfastly for equal love and the right to be different.
161 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 11, 2019
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September 21, 2022I am one of the people profiled in this book. I wrote a detailed letter to the publishers, pointing out the numerous lies and slanderous claims (without evidence and often in contradiction to the facts) about me in this book. It also contains lies and slander about some other profiled persons.
After receiving more than one letter from people profiled in the book, detailing inaccuracies, the publishers withdrew the book. Unfortunately, even though withdrawn by the publishers, it still continues to be available from some sellers and to be listed on sites like this one.
I am not rating it because I would rate it zero. I have now written to Goodreads to withdraw the book.
Here is my July 2019 letter to the publishers:
Dear Pan Macmillan,
I have just acquired a copy of your new book, Gay Icons of India by Hoshang Merchant and Akshaya K. Rath. As of today, it is the lead book on the website: http://www.panmacmillan.co.in/
I am one of the people written about in this book but the authors of the book did not interview me, ask me for information or even tell me about the book and my inclusion in it. Their account of my life and work is riddled with serious and defamatory claims, many of them entirely invented. Most of these errors could have been corrected by a simple Google search or by looking at my Wikipedia entry. Virtually everything that is said about me is factually incorrect. This is quite apart from the authors’ negative opinions about my work and gratuitous sarcasms about me.
I am a Macmillan author, and ironically Merchant and Rath misrepresent my writings in the three books (Same-Sex Love in India 2000; Love’s Rite 2005; Gender, Sex and the City 2012) I have published with Palgrave-Macmillan, as well as much else.
Here is a list of the incorrect statements pertaining to me:
1. “She did a PhD on the Virgin and the Whore” (p. 85). My PhD dissertation was entitled, “A Study of Virginia Woolf’s Critique of Love and Marriage.”
2. “After living unmarried in Delhi for long with her widowed supportive mother Ruth moved to Montana” (p.85). I moved to Montana in 1997. Both my parents were alive at the time and living together in their own home. Before I moved to Montana, I was living in Miranda House teachers’ quarters. The authors make it sound as if I abandoned my mother to move to the USA. In fact, both my parents lived with me and my partner in Montana in the 2000s, and after my mother was widowed in 2006, she lived with us till she passed away in 2012.
3. “…Ruth moved to Montana (USA) to be with another gay female academic with whom she shares a home” (p. 85). I did not move to Montana to be with the person who is now my spouse. I met her only after I moved to Montana to take up an academic position.
4. “She covers Sanskrit sources learned from her grandfather in her book Same-Sex Love in India” (85). My grandfathers did not know Sanskrit and none of the Sanskrit or other materials that I explored in the book were learned from either of them.
5. “Her Sanskrit roots and Western education enabled Ruth to document ancient Indian laws as they touched lesbian lives mostly in North India” (86). First, I don’t know what “Sanskrit roots” means. I learnt Sanskrit as an adult but I learnt Hindi in school and college, and Hindi is permeated by Sanskrit. My roots are no more or less in Sanskrit than those of most Indians. Second, my education is not “Western.” I was entirely educated in India, from kindergarten to the PhD. If Indian education in English is to be considered “Western” then every figure in this book has had a “Western education.” Third and most important, I examined ancient Indian legal, medical and other texts as they pertained to both male and female same-sex relations. I did not use the word “lesbian” for women in ancient India, and I wrote as much if not more about men as about women. Fourth, Sanskrit texts, such as the Mahabharata, are pertinent to western, eastern and also south India through most of history, not just to north India.
6. “Her [Vanita’s] focus is ‘love’ and by extension ‘sexuality’ since Indian classical texts remain less explicit when an erotic bond is presented” (p. 87). On the contrary, I demonstrated and emphasized that Sanskrit texts, such as the Kamasutra, the Charaka Samhita, the Sushruta Samhita, and the Anangaranga, are remarkably explicit about sex and the body. Sex between two characters, including a man and a woman, is rarely described in detail in narratives, but legal, medical and erotic treatises are explicit in discussing the details of sexual relations, including same-sex relations.
7. The authors seriously distort my work by confusing their ideas, borrowed from Thadani, with mine. Thus, the first paragraph on page 87 purports to describe my work but makes it sound as if my work continues Thadani’s (which it does not because I explicitly disagree with Thadani’s central arguments). The second paragraph on p. 87 begins, “The skeptical are directed to the Nepalese temple Lalit Ghat on the Ganga or to Kathmandu’s yoni temple…” (p. 87). The absence of a subject in this sentence makes it seem as if it is I who “direct” readers to these temples, which I nowhere do. After inserting an out-of-context quotation from my work, the authors again refer to artefacts I have never referred to, but make it seem as if it is I who refer to these: “Women yoginis carved in wood as in Nepal …are shown gratifying each other with wood-dildos…” (p. 88). The rest of this paragraph and the first two sentences of the next paragraph (second paragraph on p. 88) put forward ideas that I have nowhere espoused, and that the authors have probably taken from Thadani but that are here made to sound as if they are my ideas, or ideas I agree with and build on. The second paragraph on p.88 then concludes, “What is Ruth’s importance to India? That she documented a vanished role of women in India, vanished because priests systematically wiped it out” (p. 88). I absolutely disagree with Thadani’s idea that patriarchal priests erased a utopian yogini lesbian matriliny. The texts I examine that sympathetically describe female-female relations, such as versions of the 14th-century Krittivasa Ramayan, were composed by men.
8. “Within the parameters of their book Ruth kept to the women’s Sanskrit texts and Saleem to the men’s Perso-Urdu medieval and pre-modern texts” (p. 88). This is absolutely untrue. The majority of Sanskrit texts I discuss and analyse in the book are about men. The authors’ own bias leads them to imagine that a woman would write only about women.
9. “Saleem, however, slyly strayed into women’s territory. He later and separately documented men’s role in the production of women’s moral literature in the mid and late nineteenth century Lucknow” (p. 88). The authors get this exactly backwards. In Same-Sex Love in India, Saleem and I together wrote about both Urdu rekhti poetry, which is precisely not “moral literature” but playful, often homoerotic, poetry about women, written in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Lucknow (and which we classified as modern). Later, it was I who “separately documented” and translated much more of this poetry in several essays as well as in my 2012 book Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry 1780-1870.
10. The authors refer to Mohini and Ayyappa, saying, “I [presumably Merchant] thought Sabrimala to be an ecstatic all-male affirmation of the confluence of Shiva and Vishnu (Mohini) through Ayyappa-worship” (91) and insultingly add, “All this is outside Saleem and Ruth’s little gay earth” (91), as if we never mentioned these narratives and Merchant “thought” them up on his own. In fact, I wrote at length about Mohini and Ayyappa and the confluence of Shiva and Vishnu, in Same-Sex Love in India.
11. “Ruth’s perspective is that of an upper middle-class woman in India and of course her education is elite” (91). I was raised in a struggling, single-income household that was financially very far from upper-middle-class. My father was a clerical worker, and we lived in a tiny two-room flat in a South Patel Nagar back alley. From class eight through the MA my education was financed by merit scholarships. With a couple of exceptions, every “icon” the authors include has a wealthier family background than I did. From the age of 20, I have always worked as a college/university teacher, and teaching is hardly the highest-earning profession. My education is no more or less “elite” than that of every other figure in the book but in my case the authors emphasize this much more and draw negative conclusions from it (see p.4 below).
12. “On queer marriage, Ruth holds that there were women marrying women in ancient India, since marriage is between souls and not bodies” (p.92). This is absolutely incorrect. Nowhere have I stated that women married women in ancient India. The authors’ crude misunderstanding of my nuanced argument results in this travesty.
13. “In her own life, she describes her own queer marriage as between ‘two grooms’” (p.92). This is an absolute lie and also extremely insulting. I have never described my marriage as between two grooms. Also, my marriage is not a “queer marriage.” It is a marriage like any other. My argument has always been (see Love’s Rite) that marriage is marriage. When two people marry legally, as we have done, the marriage is not “straight” or “queer” – it is a marriage.
14. A primary problem in the book is its failure to cite sources, resulting in the author taking materials from others’ work without acknowledgment. Thus, the second paragraph on p. xxiv lists, without acknowledgment (but introducing some errors), a series of narratives that Kidwai and I were the first to analyse as examples of same-sex romantic friendship and/or love in Same-Sex Love in India.
15. In the chapter on Vikram Seth, the authors repeatedly refer to me as “defending” him, which is absurd as he needs no defence. They quote these lines of his out of context “In the strict ranks/ of Gay and Straight/What is my status? Stray or Great?” and then state, “In the name of ‘solidarity’ Ruth is charitable” (p.96). Putting the word ‘solidarity’ in quote marks suggests that I used this word, which I did not. I merely pointed out that the earlier lines in this same poem, “Some men like Jack and some like Jill/I’m glad I like them both…” (which the authors omit) clearly show that Seth came out as bisexual in 1980, when he published this poem (not “recited” it, as the authors state he did).
Apart from these egregious inaccuracies and inventions about me, the authors also employ an especially malicious tone with regard to me, beginning with the chapter title, “From Lajpat Nagar to La La Land.” The reference to Lajpat Nagar, nowhere explained in the chapter, alludes to the fact that Manushi (India’s first nationwide feminist magazine, which I co-founded and worked on from 1978 to1991), had its office in Lajpat Nagar for most of that time. “La La Land” is a rude way of referring to America as a place where people are out of touch with reality.
This xenophobic tone pervades the authors’ account of my life and work, culminating in the last line, “Of course, she does not live in India” (p. 92). In today’s world, with which the authors seem to be out of touch, many people live in more than one country. I lived in India until the age of 40, and now my partner, son and I live in our flat in India during every summer and winter vacation. I am in India for an average of three months a year, and longer when on sabbatical. Several other figures in the book, including Suniti Namjoshi and Giti Thadani (the authors extol and celebrate the latter), live in this way, and Agha Shahid Ali, whom the authors also extol, lived in the US for almost all his adult life. The authors do not acknowledge this in the case of Thadani, and do not employ the same castigating tone in the case of the other two.
The authors dismiss my perspective as “elite,” stating, “India’s elite feminists have middle class opinions. I once heard Madhu Kishwar say on TV that she does not want female prostitution to be legalized because she did not want prostitutes living and working in her respectable neighborhood. … Ruth’s and Kishwar’s feminism could not work for working class women in India” (91). This paragraph is replete with illogical prejudices.
First, the authors themselves are some variety of middle-class, as are all the figures in their book. India’s feminists are no more or less “elite” than the authors themselves. The authors use the meaningless label “elite” to put down and dismiss feminists they do not like (excluding, for example, Thadani, from this category although she comes from an incomparably wealthier family than either Kishwar or myself).
Second, Manushi magazine, during the 13 years I worked on it, was heavily focused on the lives and struggles of poor, rural and tribal women. To say that feminism (mine or anyone else’s) “could not work for working class women” makes no sense. Writing about working class women (or men) rarely “works for” them in the sense of improving their lives. But it brings them into focus for middle class, educated opinion-makers and law-makers. Manushi definitely achieved this.
Third, I left Manushi and ceased to work with Kishwar in 1991. Kishwar made her statements about prostitution almost two decades later, in 2009. Anyone who has read my work would know that my views on sex work and most other issues are very different from Kishwar’s. By conflating her and my “feminism” (by the way, she has explicitly and repeatedly disowned the term “feminism”) the authors display their ignorance of my 28 years of scholarship after I left Manushi.
I have written about non-English speaking, poor women after I left Manushi as well. My scholarship is far from being focused entirely on Sanskrit sources, as the chapter on me makes it out to be. My work draws heavily on Hindi and Urdu sources. For example, my 2005 book Love’s Rite remains the only book-length study of joint suicides and religious weddings of young, mostly female, couples reported in the Indian press from 1980 onwards. Almost all these women were poor, working class or lower-middle-class, and non-English speaking.
The book is full of many other errors, untruths, and distortions of fact. It is also extremely biased. For example, it states, “four of the icons here are female in the book. The gay male, here, is not shortchanging the female gay as men do women in the straight world” (p.xviii). There are a total of 22 “icons” in the book, and only four of them are female; if this is not short-changing women, what is it?
The book divides “icons” into three sections: “Forerunners,” “Contemporaries,” and “A Future Past,” and places Thadani in the first category but unaccountably places Rowkavi and Namjoshi in the second and third categories respectively. Namjoshi’s numerous works with explicit lesbian content appeared from 1981 onwards, and the gay magazine, Bombay Dost, founded by Rowkavi, first appeared in 1990 (he came out in Savvy magazine in 1986). Vikram Seth (the chapter on whom the authors insultingly title “Johnny Come Lately”) first published poems with explicitly gay content in 1980. Thadani’s first work, Sakhiyani, appeared much after all this, in 1996. In what sense is her work a “forerunner” of theirs?
With a similar disregard for timing, the authors repeatedly refer to Yaraana (1999), edited by Merchant, as a precursor to Same-Sex Love in India (2000), ignoring the fact that when Yaraana came out, Same-Sex Love in India was in press and therefore practically contemporaneous with it. On p.85, they disingenuously state, “it [Same-Sex Love in India] became a textbook of gay history as it covered all the three periods of India’s history whereas Yaraana concentrated only on modern Indian gay literature.” This is seriously misleading because Yaraana is an anthology of writings by modern men alone, most of them gay men, while Same-Sex Love in India includes both women and men in the modern period, many of them not gay but writers on gay subjects.
I have done the authors the courtesy of referring to them in the plural; however, they repeatedly speak as “I,” frequently including personal details and opinions in the book along with this “I,” thus making it clear that the real author is Merchant. However irresponsible an author may be, it is the responsibility of the publisher to fact-check before publishing.
I consider this book’s references to me defamatory and libellous. Kindly withdraw the book from circulation, and re-issue it, if at all, only when all the errors have been corrected. Yesterday I sent you by courier a hard copy of this letter, attaching copies of the relevant pages from the book, with extracts marked for your convenience.
I would appreciate a response, indicating what action you intend to take.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Dr. Ruth Vanita
Professor, University of Montana
(former Reader, Delhi University)
After receiving more than one letter from people profiled in the book, detailing inaccuracies, the publishers withdrew the book. Unfortunately, even though withdrawn by the publishers, it still continues to be available from some sellers and to be listed on sites like this one.
I am not rating it because I would rate it zero. I have now written to Goodreads to withdraw the book.
Here is my July 2019 letter to the publishers:
Dear Pan Macmillan,
I have just acquired a copy of your new book, Gay Icons of India by Hoshang Merchant and Akshaya K. Rath. As of today, it is the lead book on the website: http://www.panmacmillan.co.in/
I am one of the people written about in this book but the authors of the book did not interview me, ask me for information or even tell me about the book and my inclusion in it. Their account of my life and work is riddled with serious and defamatory claims, many of them entirely invented. Most of these errors could have been corrected by a simple Google search or by looking at my Wikipedia entry. Virtually everything that is said about me is factually incorrect. This is quite apart from the authors’ negative opinions about my work and gratuitous sarcasms about me.
I am a Macmillan author, and ironically Merchant and Rath misrepresent my writings in the three books (Same-Sex Love in India 2000; Love’s Rite 2005; Gender, Sex and the City 2012) I have published with Palgrave-Macmillan, as well as much else.
Here is a list of the incorrect statements pertaining to me:
1. “She did a PhD on the Virgin and the Whore” (p. 85). My PhD dissertation was entitled, “A Study of Virginia Woolf’s Critique of Love and Marriage.”
2. “After living unmarried in Delhi for long with her widowed supportive mother Ruth moved to Montana” (p.85). I moved to Montana in 1997. Both my parents were alive at the time and living together in their own home. Before I moved to Montana, I was living in Miranda House teachers’ quarters. The authors make it sound as if I abandoned my mother to move to the USA. In fact, both my parents lived with me and my partner in Montana in the 2000s, and after my mother was widowed in 2006, she lived with us till she passed away in 2012.
3. “…Ruth moved to Montana (USA) to be with another gay female academic with whom she shares a home” (p. 85). I did not move to Montana to be with the person who is now my spouse. I met her only after I moved to Montana to take up an academic position.
4. “She covers Sanskrit sources learned from her grandfather in her book Same-Sex Love in India” (85). My grandfathers did not know Sanskrit and none of the Sanskrit or other materials that I explored in the book were learned from either of them.
5. “Her Sanskrit roots and Western education enabled Ruth to document ancient Indian laws as they touched lesbian lives mostly in North India” (86). First, I don’t know what “Sanskrit roots” means. I learnt Sanskrit as an adult but I learnt Hindi in school and college, and Hindi is permeated by Sanskrit. My roots are no more or less in Sanskrit than those of most Indians. Second, my education is not “Western.” I was entirely educated in India, from kindergarten to the PhD. If Indian education in English is to be considered “Western” then every figure in this book has had a “Western education.” Third and most important, I examined ancient Indian legal, medical and other texts as they pertained to both male and female same-sex relations. I did not use the word “lesbian” for women in ancient India, and I wrote as much if not more about men as about women. Fourth, Sanskrit texts, such as the Mahabharata, are pertinent to western, eastern and also south India through most of history, not just to north India.
6. “Her [Vanita’s] focus is ‘love’ and by extension ‘sexuality’ since Indian classical texts remain less explicit when an erotic bond is presented” (p. 87). On the contrary, I demonstrated and emphasized that Sanskrit texts, such as the Kamasutra, the Charaka Samhita, the Sushruta Samhita, and the Anangaranga, are remarkably explicit about sex and the body. Sex between two characters, including a man and a woman, is rarely described in detail in narratives, but legal, medical and erotic treatises are explicit in discussing the details of sexual relations, including same-sex relations.
7. The authors seriously distort my work by confusing their ideas, borrowed from Thadani, with mine. Thus, the first paragraph on page 87 purports to describe my work but makes it sound as if my work continues Thadani’s (which it does not because I explicitly disagree with Thadani’s central arguments). The second paragraph on p. 87 begins, “The skeptical are directed to the Nepalese temple Lalit Ghat on the Ganga or to Kathmandu’s yoni temple…” (p. 87). The absence of a subject in this sentence makes it seem as if it is I who “direct” readers to these temples, which I nowhere do. After inserting an out-of-context quotation from my work, the authors again refer to artefacts I have never referred to, but make it seem as if it is I who refer to these: “Women yoginis carved in wood as in Nepal …are shown gratifying each other with wood-dildos…” (p. 88). The rest of this paragraph and the first two sentences of the next paragraph (second paragraph on p. 88) put forward ideas that I have nowhere espoused, and that the authors have probably taken from Thadani but that are here made to sound as if they are my ideas, or ideas I agree with and build on. The second paragraph on p.88 then concludes, “What is Ruth’s importance to India? That she documented a vanished role of women in India, vanished because priests systematically wiped it out” (p. 88). I absolutely disagree with Thadani’s idea that patriarchal priests erased a utopian yogini lesbian matriliny. The texts I examine that sympathetically describe female-female relations, such as versions of the 14th-century Krittivasa Ramayan, were composed by men.
8. “Within the parameters of their book Ruth kept to the women’s Sanskrit texts and Saleem to the men’s Perso-Urdu medieval and pre-modern texts” (p. 88). This is absolutely untrue. The majority of Sanskrit texts I discuss and analyse in the book are about men. The authors’ own bias leads them to imagine that a woman would write only about women.
9. “Saleem, however, slyly strayed into women’s territory. He later and separately documented men’s role in the production of women’s moral literature in the mid and late nineteenth century Lucknow” (p. 88). The authors get this exactly backwards. In Same-Sex Love in India, Saleem and I together wrote about both Urdu rekhti poetry, which is precisely not “moral literature” but playful, often homoerotic, poetry about women, written in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Lucknow (and which we classified as modern). Later, it was I who “separately documented” and translated much more of this poetry in several essays as well as in my 2012 book Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry 1780-1870.
10. The authors refer to Mohini and Ayyappa, saying, “I [presumably Merchant] thought Sabrimala to be an ecstatic all-male affirmation of the confluence of Shiva and Vishnu (Mohini) through Ayyappa-worship” (91) and insultingly add, “All this is outside Saleem and Ruth’s little gay earth” (91), as if we never mentioned these narratives and Merchant “thought” them up on his own. In fact, I wrote at length about Mohini and Ayyappa and the confluence of Shiva and Vishnu, in Same-Sex Love in India.
11. “Ruth’s perspective is that of an upper middle-class woman in India and of course her education is elite” (91). I was raised in a struggling, single-income household that was financially very far from upper-middle-class. My father was a clerical worker, and we lived in a tiny two-room flat in a South Patel Nagar back alley. From class eight through the MA my education was financed by merit scholarships. With a couple of exceptions, every “icon” the authors include has a wealthier family background than I did. From the age of 20, I have always worked as a college/university teacher, and teaching is hardly the highest-earning profession. My education is no more or less “elite” than that of every other figure in the book but in my case the authors emphasize this much more and draw negative conclusions from it (see p.4 below).
12. “On queer marriage, Ruth holds that there were women marrying women in ancient India, since marriage is between souls and not bodies” (p.92). This is absolutely incorrect. Nowhere have I stated that women married women in ancient India. The authors’ crude misunderstanding of my nuanced argument results in this travesty.
13. “In her own life, she describes her own queer marriage as between ‘two grooms’” (p.92). This is an absolute lie and also extremely insulting. I have never described my marriage as between two grooms. Also, my marriage is not a “queer marriage.” It is a marriage like any other. My argument has always been (see Love’s Rite) that marriage is marriage. When two people marry legally, as we have done, the marriage is not “straight” or “queer” – it is a marriage.
14. A primary problem in the book is its failure to cite sources, resulting in the author taking materials from others’ work without acknowledgment. Thus, the second paragraph on p. xxiv lists, without acknowledgment (but introducing some errors), a series of narratives that Kidwai and I were the first to analyse as examples of same-sex romantic friendship and/or love in Same-Sex Love in India.
15. In the chapter on Vikram Seth, the authors repeatedly refer to me as “defending” him, which is absurd as he needs no defence. They quote these lines of his out of context “In the strict ranks/ of Gay and Straight/What is my status? Stray or Great?” and then state, “In the name of ‘solidarity’ Ruth is charitable” (p.96). Putting the word ‘solidarity’ in quote marks suggests that I used this word, which I did not. I merely pointed out that the earlier lines in this same poem, “Some men like Jack and some like Jill/I’m glad I like them both…” (which the authors omit) clearly show that Seth came out as bisexual in 1980, when he published this poem (not “recited” it, as the authors state he did).
Apart from these egregious inaccuracies and inventions about me, the authors also employ an especially malicious tone with regard to me, beginning with the chapter title, “From Lajpat Nagar to La La Land.” The reference to Lajpat Nagar, nowhere explained in the chapter, alludes to the fact that Manushi (India’s first nationwide feminist magazine, which I co-founded and worked on from 1978 to1991), had its office in Lajpat Nagar for most of that time. “La La Land” is a rude way of referring to America as a place where people are out of touch with reality.
This xenophobic tone pervades the authors’ account of my life and work, culminating in the last line, “Of course, she does not live in India” (p. 92). In today’s world, with which the authors seem to be out of touch, many people live in more than one country. I lived in India until the age of 40, and now my partner, son and I live in our flat in India during every summer and winter vacation. I am in India for an average of three months a year, and longer when on sabbatical. Several other figures in the book, including Suniti Namjoshi and Giti Thadani (the authors extol and celebrate the latter), live in this way, and Agha Shahid Ali, whom the authors also extol, lived in the US for almost all his adult life. The authors do not acknowledge this in the case of Thadani, and do not employ the same castigating tone in the case of the other two.
The authors dismiss my perspective as “elite,” stating, “India’s elite feminists have middle class opinions. I once heard Madhu Kishwar say on TV that she does not want female prostitution to be legalized because she did not want prostitutes living and working in her respectable neighborhood. … Ruth’s and Kishwar’s feminism could not work for working class women in India” (91). This paragraph is replete with illogical prejudices.
First, the authors themselves are some variety of middle-class, as are all the figures in their book. India’s feminists are no more or less “elite” than the authors themselves. The authors use the meaningless label “elite” to put down and dismiss feminists they do not like (excluding, for example, Thadani, from this category although she comes from an incomparably wealthier family than either Kishwar or myself).
Second, Manushi magazine, during the 13 years I worked on it, was heavily focused on the lives and struggles of poor, rural and tribal women. To say that feminism (mine or anyone else’s) “could not work for working class women” makes no sense. Writing about working class women (or men) rarely “works for” them in the sense of improving their lives. But it brings them into focus for middle class, educated opinion-makers and law-makers. Manushi definitely achieved this.
Third, I left Manushi and ceased to work with Kishwar in 1991. Kishwar made her statements about prostitution almost two decades later, in 2009. Anyone who has read my work would know that my views on sex work and most other issues are very different from Kishwar’s. By conflating her and my “feminism” (by the way, she has explicitly and repeatedly disowned the term “feminism”) the authors display their ignorance of my 28 years of scholarship after I left Manushi.
I have written about non-English speaking, poor women after I left Manushi as well. My scholarship is far from being focused entirely on Sanskrit sources, as the chapter on me makes it out to be. My work draws heavily on Hindi and Urdu sources. For example, my 2005 book Love’s Rite remains the only book-length study of joint suicides and religious weddings of young, mostly female, couples reported in the Indian press from 1980 onwards. Almost all these women were poor, working class or lower-middle-class, and non-English speaking.
The book is full of many other errors, untruths, and distortions of fact. It is also extremely biased. For example, it states, “four of the icons here are female in the book. The gay male, here, is not shortchanging the female gay as men do women in the straight world” (p.xviii). There are a total of 22 “icons” in the book, and only four of them are female; if this is not short-changing women, what is it?
The book divides “icons” into three sections: “Forerunners,” “Contemporaries,” and “A Future Past,” and places Thadani in the first category but unaccountably places Rowkavi and Namjoshi in the second and third categories respectively. Namjoshi’s numerous works with explicit lesbian content appeared from 1981 onwards, and the gay magazine, Bombay Dost, founded by Rowkavi, first appeared in 1990 (he came out in Savvy magazine in 1986). Vikram Seth (the chapter on whom the authors insultingly title “Johnny Come Lately”) first published poems with explicitly gay content in 1980. Thadani’s first work, Sakhiyani, appeared much after all this, in 1996. In what sense is her work a “forerunner” of theirs?
With a similar disregard for timing, the authors repeatedly refer to Yaraana (1999), edited by Merchant, as a precursor to Same-Sex Love in India (2000), ignoring the fact that when Yaraana came out, Same-Sex Love in India was in press and therefore practically contemporaneous with it. On p.85, they disingenuously state, “it [Same-Sex Love in India] became a textbook of gay history as it covered all the three periods of India’s history whereas Yaraana concentrated only on modern Indian gay literature.” This is seriously misleading because Yaraana is an anthology of writings by modern men alone, most of them gay men, while Same-Sex Love in India includes both women and men in the modern period, many of them not gay but writers on gay subjects.
I have done the authors the courtesy of referring to them in the plural; however, they repeatedly speak as “I,” frequently including personal details and opinions in the book along with this “I,” thus making it clear that the real author is Merchant. However irresponsible an author may be, it is the responsibility of the publisher to fact-check before publishing.
I consider this book’s references to me defamatory and libellous. Kindly withdraw the book from circulation, and re-issue it, if at all, only when all the errors have been corrected. Yesterday I sent you by courier a hard copy of this letter, attaching copies of the relevant pages from the book, with extracts marked for your convenience.
I would appreciate a response, indicating what action you intend to take.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Dr. Ruth Vanita
Professor, University of Montana
(former Reader, Delhi University)
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