This book shows that many characters in the Sanskrit epics - men and women of all varnas and mixed-varna - discuss and criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability. On the basis of philosophy, logic and devotion, these characters argue that such categories are ever-changing, mixed and ultimately unreal therefore humans should be judged on the basis of their actions, not birth. The book explores the dharmas of singleness, friendship, marriage, parenting, and ruling. Bhakta poets such as Kabir, Tulsidas, Rahim and Raidas drew on ideas and characters from the epics to present a vision of oneness. Justice is indivisible, all bodies are made of the same matter, all beings suffer, and all consciousnesses are akin. This book makes the radical argument that in the epics, kindness to animals, the dharma available to all, is inseparable from all other forms of dharma.

Queering India provides 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 provide a comprehensive look at a much neglected area. The topics are wide-ranging, considering film, literature, popular culture, historical and religious texts, law and other aspects of life in India. All the essays are original to the collection.

Indian cinema is the only body of world cinema that depicts courtesans as important characters. In early films courtesan characters transmitted Indian classical dance, music and aesthetics to large audiences. They represent the nation's past, tracing their heritage to the fourth-century Kamasutra and to nineteenth-century courtly cultures, but they are also the first group of modern women in Hindi films. They are working professionals living on their own or in matrilineal families. Like male protagonists, they travel widely and develop networks of friends and chosen kin. They have relations with men outside marriage and become single mothers. Courtesan films are heroine-oriented and almost every major female actor has played this role. Challenging received wisdom, Vanita demonstrates that a larger number of courtesans in Bombay cinema are Hindu and indeterminate than are Muslim, and that films depict their culture as hybrid Hindu-Muslim, not Islamicate. Courtesans speak in the ambiguous voice of the modern nation, inviting spectators to seize pleasure here and now but also to search for the meaning of life. Vanita's groundbreaking study of courtesans and courtesan imagery in 235 films brings fresh evidence to show that the courtesan figure shapes the modern Indian erotic, political and religious imagination.

Contents:
Introduction by Ruth Vanita. I. Colonial Transitions 1.The Politics of Penetration: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code 2. Sultan Mahmud's Make-Over: Colonial Homophobia and the Persian-Urdu Literary Tradition 3. Doganas and Zanakhis: The Invention and Subsequent Erasure of Urdu Poetry's "Lesbian" Voice 4. Alienation, Intimacy, and Gender: Problems for a History of Love in South Asia 5. Eunuchs, Lesbians, and Other Mystical Beasts: Queering and De-Queering the Kamasutra II. The Visions of Fiction 6. Loving Well: Homosexuality and Utopian Thought in Post/Colonial India 7. "Do I Remove My Skin?": Interrogating Identity in Suniti Namjoshi's Fables 8. "Queerness All Mine": Same-Sex Desire in Kamala Das's Fiction and Poetry 9. Homophobic Fiction/Homoerotic Advertising: The Pleasures and Perils of Twentieth-Century Indianness 10. What Mrs. Besahara Saw: Reflections on the Gay Goonda III. Performance Pleasures in Theatre, TV, and Cinema 11. A Different Desire, A Different Femininity: Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati, and Marathi Theatres, 1850-1940 12. Queer Bonds: Male Friendships in Contemporary Malayalam Cinema 13. "I Sleep Behind you": Male Homosociality and Homoeroticism in Indian Parallel Cinema 14. Queer Pleasures for Queer People: Film, Television, and Queer Sexuality in India 15. On Fire: Sexuality and its Incitements 16. After the Fire: Smoldering Questions about Representation

Long before the debate on marriage equality began, young, non-English speaking, low-income female couples all over India got married by religious rites or committed joint suicide, which they considered being 'married in death.' These women had no contact with any movement and had never heard words like 'lesbian' or 'gay.' While many families, in collusion with police, violently separated the couples, several families also supported their daughters. Love's Rite, first published in 2005, is the first and still the only book-length study of these unions, starting with one reported in 1980. The book argues that the couples asserted—and today still assert—their right to be together, using an age-old language of love understood by Indians. Vanita explores Indian religious, legal, and literary traditions that provide spaces for same-sex and other socially disapproved unions. While many recent high-profile Indian weddings have been reported as the 'first' of their kind, Love's Rite celebrates the unsung pioneers and martyrs of the struggle for marriage equality.

This volume makes available for the first time in English the work of a significant Indian nationalist author, Pandey Bechan Sharma, better known in India as "Ugra," meaning "extreme." His book "Chocolate," a 1927 collection of eight stories, was the first work of Hindi fiction to focus on male same-sex relations, and its publication sparked India's first public debates about homosexuality. Many prominent figures, including Gandhi, weighed in on the debates, which lasted into the 1950s. This edition, translated and with an introduction by Ruth Vanita, includes the full text of "Chocolate" along with an excerpt from Ugra's novel "Letters of Some Beautiful Ones" (also published in 1927). In her introduction, Vanita situates Ugra and his writings in relation to Indian nationalist struggles and Hindi literary movements and feuds, and she analyzes the controversies that surrounded "Chocolate." Those outraged by its titillating portrayal of homosexuality labeled the collection obscene. On the other side, although no one explicitly defended homosexuality in public, some justified Ugra's work by arguing that it was the artist's job to educate through provocation.

The stories depict male homoeroticism in quotidian situations: a man brings a lover to his disapproving friend's house; a good-looking young man becomes the object of desire at his school. The love never ends well, but the depictions are not always unsympathetic. Although Ugra claimed that the stories were aimed at suppressing homosexuality by exposing it, Vanita highlights the ambivalence of his characterizations. Cosmopolitan, educated, and hedonistic, the Hindu and Muslim men he portrayed quote Hindi and Urdu poetry to express their love, and they justify same-sex desire by drawing on literature, philosophy, and world history. Vanita's introduction includes anecdotal evidence that "Chocolate" was enthusiastically received by India's homosexual communities.

Indian cinema is the only body of world cinema that depicts courtesans as important characters. In early films courtesan characters transmitted Indian classical dance, music and aesthetics to large audiences. They represent the nation's past, tracing their heritage to the fourth-century Kamasutra and to nineteenth-century courtly cultures, but they are also the first group of modern women in Hindi films. They are working professionals living on their own or in matrilineal families. Like male protagonists, they travel widely and develop networks of friends and chosen kin. They have relations with men outside marriage and become single mothers. Courtesan films are heroine-oriented and almost every major female actor has played this role. Challenging received wisdom, Vanita demonstrates that a larger number of courtesans in Bombay cinema are Hindu and indeterminate than are Muslim, and that films depict their culture as hybrid Hindu-Muslim, not Islamicate. Courtesans speak in the ambiguous voice of the modern nation, inviting spectators to seize pleasure here and now but also to search for the meaning of life. Vanita's groundbreaking study of courtesans and courtesan imagery in 235 films brings fresh evidence to show that the courtesan figure shapes the modern Indian erotic, political and religious imagination.