Queer love and freedom in 1920s India

Ruth Vanita’s historical examines scans queer desire, cinema, and modernisation through interconnected lives in 1920s Bombay and Delhi.

Poster of Alam Ara (1931), often regarded as India’s first talkie. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

It is the 1920s: India is on edge as concepts of technology, politics, freedom, love, and the arts undergo rapid transformation. At the core of this churn is the freedom struggle, which forms the backdrop to Ruth Vanita’s latest novel, A Slight Angle. Vanita not only writes about the larger issues changing India but also contrasts them with individual experiences of being queer in such turbulent times.

There is something so intimate about this book, narrated through diary entries and letters, that I found myself transported to the 1920s and yearning for a time I have not experienced.

A Slight Angle

By Ruth Vanita

Penguin Viking

Pages: 282

Price: Rs.599

The novel shuttles between Bombay and Delhi, looking at the loves and lives of Sharad, Abhik, Sheela, Lata, Robin, and Kanta. Sharad designs jewellery and finds solace in it; Abhik spends time writing; Sheela shuttles between the local school and the ashram of Gandhi; Lata seeks company as an actress; Robin dreams about music; Kanta gets married to a person who does not live up to her expectations. They all suffer, irrespective of sexual orientation, as the love they seek eludes them due to constraints imposed by family, societal beliefs, and faith.

Personal quests

Running parallel to India’s search for independence are these smaller but not less important quests for personal freedoms and choices. Vanita writes about the spaces we navigate in our heads and hearts, spaces that sometimes align but mostly clash with the world at large. A Slight Angle is about what we choose to take and what is given to us; what we claim as ours when choices are few; and what happens when one’s existence hangs in the balance along with that of the nation.

The characters’ pursuit of pleasure links them with wider currents of modernity within India. They fall under the spell of cinema as silent films give way to talkies, depicting love in a way they have never encountered before. Vanita fills up the narrative with references to figures like Sappho, Socrates, and Oscar Wilde, placing the experiences of the characters on a wider historical plane.

A Slight Angle is more than just historical fiction. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

For me, personally, this book is a paean to queer desire. When we lament about the lack of understanding for queer people now, we forget to consider the times when people did not have even the constrained freedom we enjoy today. Faced with overwhelming restrictions in all spheres of existence, they led quiet lives, rebelling silently, if at all.

A Slight Angle is more than just historical fiction. It is a story about the timelessness of intimacy, expressed through different perspectives. The title and epigraph come from E.M. Forster’s famous line describing fellow queer writer, the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy: “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” It introduces Forster’s idea of the necessity of looking at life at a slight angle to see more clearly, without the obstructions introduced by prejudice.

Vivek Tejuja has worked with books at Flipkart, at Verve magazine, and now writes regularly on books and the experience of reading, notably on his blog, The Hungry Reader.