Transcript
Toggle Index/Transcript View Switch.
Index
Search this Transcript
X
00:00:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Okay, so Ruth, first question is the easiest. Can you say your name and where and when you were born?

RUTH VANITA:

My name is Ruth Vanita and I was born in Rangoon in December, 1955.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. When you think about the home that you grew up in as a young child, can you paint a picture of some of your earliest memories for us?

00:00:30

RUTH VANITA:

It was a very small two room flat in a back alley in West Delhi in Patel Nagar. Well, I have memories then. Across the road was my grandfather's very big house with a garden and we used to go there three or four times a week. I have memories of that garden and playing in that garden. In this little flat, I used to stand on the stairway and look at the sky. That was the only sort of -- All around, we had neighbors.

00:01:00

RUTH VANITA:

It was a very tightly packed neighborhood. The kids, we used to all play in the back alley.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That sounds lovely. Were there other children in your family, your age? Did you have siblings or cousins that you were playing with?

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah, I had a cousin of, maybe four years younger than me and I had a sister seven years younger. Then we had neighborhood children, and we had other cousins, more distant cousins as well. We belonged to this very small, tightly knit religious group,

00:01:30

RUTH VANITA:

which was a dissenting Puritan, Protestant group. It was small, but we met all the members of the group a lot and all the kids played together.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yeah, very nice. Can you describe your household for us? Was it conservative? Was it religious?

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah, it was very religious. We had services, religious services - meetings we called them - in my grandfather's house four times a week. Apart from that, we also had family prayer and reading of the Bible every single evening at home.

00:02:00

RUTH VANITA:

Then apart from that, I also, all of us, individually read a chapter from the Bible every day. I grew up with the Bible and I knew it very well, the King James version, which is beautiful in the literary sense. My father had a clerical job, and my mother always tried to make money on the side by doing a whole variety of things; from running a kindergarten in the house, in which I also taught as a 15-year-old,

00:02:30

RUTH VANITA:

to sewing little silk purses and selling them, to having conversation classes for ladies, and piano lessons and English tuitions, and all kinds of things she did.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Wow. I love to hear that you were teaching even at 15. That's amazing. What kinds of things would you tell the kids in the group?

RUTH VANITA:

Well, it was a kindergarten, so the kids were like from three to seven. We would put up

00:03:00

RUTH VANITA:

little plays for their parents and train them in nursery rhymes, singing - my mother would play on the piano and they would sing and dance. We taught them, reading, writing, the usual stuff, and we'd take them to the neighborhood park to play.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's so sweet. I understand that your mother encouraged you to develop a love of poetry from a very young age, is that right?

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah. She came from a family that - socially, it was a downward trajectory for her

00:03:30

RUTH VANITA:

because she came from a very wealthy family and then moved into this tiny flat. It was very difficult for her. I think she kept up her spirits by singing and reciting poetry, as she went about the house, doing her housework. She also told me stories, lots of stories of her life, but also stories of all the novels she was reading, all the Victorian novels and other novels. I think she watered them down for me, but she told the stories and she recited all this poetry. I learned a lot of it just by osmosis. I still know those poems by heart, and I first heard them from her,

00:04:00

RUTH VANITA:

so we were very close. She also took me out of school in eighth grade and homeschooled me till I finished high school and then went to college. That was because the doctor had said my eyes were really weak and I needed to be removed from school. He thought I should just be removed and they should just get me married, but she actually homeschooled me.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

How lucky that you had a mum who was so proactive and did not listen to that doctor at all.

00:04:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

She took the initiative to teach you what you needed to know. When you were a young child, what were some of the attitudes and beliefs that you were aware of from your family?

RUTH VANITA:

Well, it was, in one sense, a very strict religious group. There were a whole lot of things we weren't allowed to do. We couldn't have a radio or television or go to movies. I went to a cinema first when I was 21 years old.

00:05:00

RUTH VANITA:

Women were not allowed to cut their hair. We couldn't wear trousers. We couldn't wear any jewelry or any makeup. On Sundays, we weren't supposed to play games. Fortunately, they let us read fiction the rest of the week. There are groups which didn't allow that as well. But actually, I didn't feel terribly constrained by most of it. Sometimes, I did, but mostly I didn't. Children just take for granted the world in which they grow up.

00:05:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Absolutely. Did you have a sense of your parents' expectations of you in those days?

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah. They always expected that I would do really well at studies, like in school, and I did. I always met it, it was fine. That was the only expectation I felt. I was, sort of, what was a very good girl as a child. Later, I think I disappointed them as an adult, but as a child, I met, I think, all the expectations.

00:06:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I can relate to that on both counts. I'm wondering if you could talk about your closest allies within your family. You mentioned a single uncle, Uncle Charlie. Can you tell us about him and the bond that you ...

RUTH VANITA:

I've written a poem about him recently, which is going to come out -- My book of poems is coming out this year from a publisher in India called Copper Coin. There's a poem about him. He was a very unusual man. We had a lot of single aunts and uncles in our family,

00:06:30

RUTH VANITA:

so I grew up with role models, both married people and single people. It wasn't as if, like some kids, everybody's married. It wasn't like that. Uncle Charlie, he had never been married. He was a real gossip, and very friendly, sociable and outgoing. Very jolly. He loved children. He also told me a lot of stories. I first heard the story, all the Greek narratives from the Odyssey, and Theseus. He would take us for walks,

00:07:00

RUTH VANITA:

my sister in the pram and me walking along. He would tell me all these stories. He lived in my grandfather's house on the top floor, for some time, for a few years. It was only a few years, I now realize, in my childhood, but it has left a tremendous impression because after that, he went away to south India and then we didn't see him that much until he died. But yeah, he was a mathematics teacher all his life, but he loved literature. And, yeah, he had never been married. He had lots of female friends,

00:07:30

RUTH VANITA:

even in my neighborhood. He made friends with all the ladies around, but there was never a woman attached to him. There were no stories of his ever being attached to a woman. He did have a lot of male students over the years, some of whom stayed in his house, or he stayed in their houses as a tutor. He helped a lot of young people with money. He was very generous with money and so on. I think he was my, sort of, male role model.

00:08:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Wonderful. Is there anyone else that comes to mind who was a powerful influence on you in those early years?

RUTH VANITA:

I guess my mother. Positive influence is my mother. I mean, no influence is entirely positive or negative, it's all mixed, but my mother, uncle Charlie, and some of my teachers at school who were just kind. Not that they were great teachers, I didn't have that experience. They were just like kind teachers.

00:08:30

RUTH VANITA:

The kids would tease me for wearing glasses, and the teacher said, "Look, I also wear glasses," and that sort of thing. I was a very shy child, and I hardly spoke in school. I usually had one good friend, but I was not a group sort of mixer.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Do you remember, at any point when you were growing up, who was your closest ally?

RUTH VANITA:

I don't know, I would have to say my mother, I guess.

00:09:00

RUTH VANITA:

I was a bit of a loner. I guess my closest allies were also books. I mean, I grew up just reading, just reading voraciously. The other kind of thing to say, if you don't have a book, you read the jam jar label. It was literally like that. I would read anything that I saw and I would sometimes climb up and take my mother's books and read them, which I shouldn't have. Like, I read the Kama Sutra first, it was her copy of it. I didn't understand it at all, but I did read it. I also read her psychology books. She was an M.A in philosophy at that time, and later an M.A in English.

00:09:30

RUTH VANITA:

I took her books on child psychology when I was like seven, eight, nine, I was reading what the child psychologist was saying that a 7, 8, 9 -year-old should be. It was pretty, pretty funny that was, she didn't know anything that I was reading all this stuff. We couldn't afford a lot of books, we were pretty low-income. We just had, basically, my father. I couldn't buy a lot of books. I could get them out of libraries, and the few books I had, I sort of reread and reread and reread until they sort of fell to pieces.

00:10:00

RUTH VANITA:

In my teens, I read George Eliot and Wuthering Heights, and some books like that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

All the classics. Thank you. I totally relate to that, of characters in those novels filling your imagination, and becoming almost your imaginary friends of sorts.

RUTH VANITA:

Right, right. Exactly. My mother's brother, my uncle, he was a professor of English.

00:10:30

RUTH VANITA:

He also was a sort of a role model because I think my mother's family was one of educationists, and that's what I automatically gravitated towards. He was a Shakespeare scholar. He still is there. He's my only relative to whom I'm close in Delhi and I meet him and I'm in contact with him.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Looking back on those early years before you left home and were independent, do you remember there being any LGBTQ people, either around you in your neighborhood or on the screen, in the media, that you were aware of?

00:11:00

RUTH VANITA:

Not until I went to college. These words were never used anyway. Now I realize that I read Harold Robbins and I didn't understand what was going on, but there was what now would be called a lesbian relationship in I think the Valley of the Dolls. But there was lots that I read that I didn't grasp. When I went to college, though,

00:11:30

RUTH VANITA:

I saw for the first time women who would now be called lesbians, they weren't calling themselves that, but I could see that there was something different. The first one I saw was this -- in my batch, but she was in science. Before every college function, I went to a women's college, Miranda House, and she would be on stage testing the lights. She'd just be saying, lights, lights in this deep voice. She never wore anything but jeans, jeans and a shabby pullover, a shirt or something.

00:12:00

RUTH VANITA:

She looked really uninterested in dressing up, no jewelry, nothing of the sort. She had this deep voice. I think that was the first person I saw. Then later in college, teachers as well -- I mean, we had a real range of really unusual women in Miranda House teaching - that generation of teachers. Some were married, many were single, a whole range of different types of single women, some of whom were having relationships with men quite openly actually, and some were having relationships with each other,

00:12:30

RUTH VANITA:

again, I think fairly openly, again without ever talking about it or naming it, but everyone knew. They weren't hiding it either. That was interesting. I didn't put any labels to it at that point, but I think it must have had some effect on me.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Absolutely. It's just a general sense of acceptance. It's very refreshing. Can you talk about the moment that you left the family home as an adult? What hopes did you have for yourself?

00:13:00

RUTH VANITA:

It's hard to say, I was sort of focused on career and on work, and I was also falling in love. I fell in love with a classmate in college and I didn't have, again, names to give it, so I wrote poetry to her and so on. But if I had been asked, I was still thinking that I would marry a man. I didn't see this as going in that direction, as now, say, kids might see it as going.

00:13:30

RUTH VANITA:

I wanted to teach and get a job, and I did. I was 20 when I started to teach. I got a job at Miranda House itself. Then I had a boyfriend for a while. My parents were very upset about him because he was a Hindu and we were totally incompatible anyway. It broke up in six months or so, but it caused a lot of conflict in his family and in my family as well. I would fall in love with women, but as I said,

00:14:00

RUTH VANITA:

I didn't have categories to put it in. Then at the age of 21 or 22, this other woman and I, Madhu Kishwar and I, we started a women's group which was meeting in my dorm room, what's called a dorm room in America, a hostel room, in Miranda House. From that, we developed this magazine, Manushi, and then that just swallowed up the next 13 years of my life. I was still teaching, but it swallowed up all the rest of my time.

00:14:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yeah. There's a really wonderful passage where you write about that time in your memoir from the women's movement piece. I was wondering if I could read a little bit from that and just ask you to reflect on that time.

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah, sure.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Here we go. "And yet, somehow, we managed to do all this and still chat, laugh, flirt, stay up all night writing,

00:15:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

go to late night Hindi movies and drive around the city, three on a motorbike, singing film songs. For several years, I taught five days a week and spent every other waking hour working at Manushi, barely sleeping and living largely on dal and rotis from the local tandoor and whatever other concoction we cooked up with no knowledge of cooking." I get so much from this passage because it's so sensory, you get the flavors, the sense, the sounds. I'm wondering what memories it conjures up for you.

00:15:30

RUTH VANITA:

Oh, there was this whole range of very interesting women, and men as well, who passed through the office as volunteers, as supporters, as translators, as writers, and coming for help for legal aid, for other kind of help. It was a very rich period. I learned a lot. I travelled all over Delhi and all over India in places that I would never have otherwise gone, and people - I met people that I wouldn't have. I learned a lot of skills as well,

00:16:00

RUTH VANITA:

everything from proofreading to page layout -- it was on letterpress we were printing -- to giving advice, legal advice. I learned the law, all sorts of stuff. But at the same time, it became, over time, pretty stifling. The women's moment at the time was completely unwilling to talk about sexuality, at all. Later, I learned that most of the leaders, including one very famous celebrity who recently died, were all basically lesbians, she definitely was.

00:16:30

RUTH VANITA:

They were having relationships with each other right and left, but they never talked about it either publicly or even in the movement - just to each other, to their friends. I didn't really know. I was just guessing. For 10 years, I was basically just feeling pretty lonely within the movement and unable to talk about certain things. We mostly talked about the issues pertaining to women who were either facing violence or to poor women. It was all about suffering, and not about joy,

00:17:00

RUTH VANITA:

hardly about joy. Even later, when it was much easier to come out, this woman I was mentioning, she just died recently, she could have come out easily. She was very wealthy, but she was married to a man, she had two children, and she just didn't. It would've made a huge difference if there had been more discussion within the movement. I think that's one way the Indian women's movement was different from the one in the west,

00:17:30

RUTH VANITA:

and that changed in the 90s, but by the 90s I had left. So, yeah.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

How would you describe the mission of Manushi?

RUTH VANITA:

Well, it was supposed to be to bring women's issues onto the agenda of political parties and of the media, and it succeeded in doing that. What happened was that the media, the newspapers and magazines started taking women's issues more seriously. I think Manushi had a role to play in that. It wasn't the

00:18:00

RUTH VANITA:

only one that did that, but it definitely played a role. The political parties too started taking women's issues more seriously. We wrote mostly about a range of women's issues. It wasn't just bringing out the magazine; around it was a whole organization where we were engaged in protests and rallies and changing the laws and doing all of this stuff. It was very complex and very, extremely busy and a lot of real hard work, by which I mean, a lot of manual hard work. We were carrying all these

00:18:30

RUTH VANITA:

piles of magazines to the post office manually and writing all the addresses manually and so on. It just took up a lot of time.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What fuels you in those days? Where did that endless energy come from?

RUTH VANITA:

I guess it's just the energy of youth. I sort of sidelined my academic career for this. Everybody in my batch, in the M.A - I stood first in the M.A, they used to have those sorts of rankings. Then those who were second and third immediately went off to America and joined the US academy

00:19:00

RUTH VANITA:

and started their careers, and they were doing feminism and postcolonial theory and all of that, but I was doing this work. By the time I actually moved to America, I had no contacts in the US academy, and my PhD was from India, and that really made a difference to my career; it set it back. On the other hand, I think I learned a lot that I would never have learned in an academic career.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Absolutely. You articulate, in something that I read, that you really discovered

00:19:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

all the corners of Delhi through your work on the magazine and the women that you met there? Could you say it was accurate that you were sort of breaking out of the protective bubble that was surrounding you during those days?

RUTH VANITA:

Well, in the family, I was very sheltered. Go to college and back and that sort of thing. And when I went, started working for Manushi, yes, to some extent I broke out of that. Then in another way, no, I was still just encompassed in work.

00:20:00

RUTH VANITA:

I was just working, I wasn't having other experiences. In Delhi, I continued reading and I started reading everything I could by anyone who was gay, whether Indian - there was very little Indian that was available, but basically whatever was in English. Things like The Well of Loneliness and E.M. Forster. I would just go to this bookshop, Galgotias, and other bookshops, and just pounce on whatever I saw. So, it was chance, whatever I found. I remember on the inside of my cupboard door,

00:20:30

RUTH VANITA:

it wasn't called a closet in India, inside of my cupboard door in my hostel, I put up a paper and written the names of all the famous people who were gay from Sappho and Plato to -. As I kept discovering, I would write more and more, there were hardly any Indian names because I didn't know any Indian names.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

For people listening, who might want to explore past issues of Manushi, is there an archive available to the public?

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah, I think most major libraries have all the back issues and there's also a Manushi website that has --

00:21:00

RUTH VANITA:

Manushi has changed completely now. I left it in '91 and after that it changed a lot, but the back issues are available online. I think you can order them. I also have a bunch of back issues which I intend to scan and give to some library, give them to a library and so on. So, yeah, they are available. You might have to do a little searching.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's wonderful. You mentioned that you found queer community in Delhi through a letter that was published in Trikone?

00:21:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Is that the name for the south Asian magazine? Do you remember what that letter said that you responded to?

RUTH VANITA:

Well, it was just a little note where this young man Ashish Jain had just said that he wants to form a group in Delhi, and he gave some -- I forget - just a mailing address. And I wrote a letter to him. And then when I went and met him, he was at a hotel, and he was busy packing to leave for America. He was leaving.

00:22:00

RUTH VANITA:

He had said he wanted to found this group and he was leaving, but he put me in touch with another guy who had just moved from Bombay to Delhi, it was called Bombay in those times. He and that guy and I met in a local cafe in the Nirulas actually, under the Defence Colony flyover, which was right near Manushi office, and we went for a walk. He was living very close to Manushi. We were in Lajpat Nagar, he was across the bridge in Jangpura. At his house, I met another guy, Sanju Mahale,

00:22:30

RUTH VANITA:

in whose flat then I met a whole lot of people, straight, gay, but mostly gay men, but also some lesbians, bi, etcetera. That's where I started. Then we would visit, I would keep visiting them, I would just walk across for dinner, whatever. This was in 1987, so I developed this other life, which was totally separate from Manushi, with these friends.

00:23:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That must have been a really powerful moment discovering that there were others like you that also had same sex attraction. I'm wondering how that moment changed your perspective or changed the direction of your life?

RUTH VANITA:

Well, I made some of my closest friends there. One who's still my closest friend who's in Gurgaon, whenever I go, I spend like almost every day with her. It was just having friends and not being as lonely.

00:23:30

RUTH VANITA:

Before that, I had seen other people who I knew were gay. For one thing, there were lots of people from the west who were constantly coming in to volunteer at Manushi. They were looking for lesbians and we were supposed to not talk about it because we were afraid, in the women's movement, of being labeled. I was not supposed to talk about it, so I couldn't. But I heard a lot of fantastic stories from Indian women too, who came for help, like one woman who came and told me that her mother-in-law had come on to her. I was just so taken aback by this. This was pretty early,

00:24:00

RUTH VANITA:

it was in 1980 or '81. Then there was another guy who was Madhu's acquaintance, and we watered the plants for him when he was out of town. He was a concert pianist, and he was gay. Then we had another gay guy who came and helped us set up a street play, he was in theater. Later, he got married to a woman, but he came and he's a fairly famous fellow. He led us through the street play and helped us with that. I wrote the script of the street play, and then we acted it in many parts of Delhi. So, I had seen people, I just hadn't talked to them about this. It's not like I didn't know anyone. I hadn't just talked to them about this.

00:24:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Was that the first time that you found yourself coming out publicly?

RUTH VANITA:

No. I had told my mother. When I was 25 or something. In 1985, Madhu and I went to Nairobi for the women's conference and went to London and did some work there. There, I just went out on my own and I went to the bookshop, Gay's the Word,

00:25:00

RUTH VANITA:

and there was a discussion there. Then I went with a group to Heaven, which is the disco there. When I came from England, I told my mother. I guess coming out is a whole process. I told her, then later I wrote an essay on Celia and Rosalind in As You Like It, and it was published in the English Department Delhi University's journal. And there, I was pretty open, not about myself but about the play.

00:25:30

RUTH VANITA:

Then I had these friends, but yeah, that was another kind of coming out.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Wonderful. It sounds like a really rich and vibrant time in your life. I know that you're currently now a professor at University of Montana. How long have you been teaching there?

00:26:00

RUTH VANITA:

Since '97. I came in '97. Yeah.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Talk about those in between years between the magazine and coming to Montana.

RUTH VANITA:

When I left Manushi, I immediately finished my PhD. I'd never had time to finish it when I was in Manushi, but I finished it. In '92, I finished it. It was on Virginia Woolf, and it was basically on the same sex relationships in her entire oeuvre. Then I got a fellowship to Cornell, but in the in-between years,

00:26:30

RUTH VANITA:

I had this extremely intense relationship. Then I went to Cornell, wrote the first book, which was supposed to be on Virginia Woolf, but expanded into studying same-sex relationships throughout the 19th century, and not by gay authors, but by everyone, like Jane Austen and Keats, and also some gay authors like Peter and Wilde and Forster and Woolf, and it was called Sappho and the Virgin Mary in the Columbia University edition. This is the Indian edition.

00:27:00

RUTH VANITA:

I really enjoyed being in that Cornell library because I discovered so much there. Then I came back to Delhi University and joined the English department, which is the graduate school. Then that relationship broke up. She went off to the west and because she couldn't be out in India - she felt she couldn't be. That was very devastating. We are still friends, she said that she sort of fled in a panic.

00:27:30

RUTH VANITA:

I think I also sort of fled in a panic. I then just applied for jobs in the US, and this is the one I got. I didn't know anything about Montana and I just came.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And so fortuitous that it's now been your home for so long, you've made it your home and it's such a big part of your life. Looking back over your time at the university of Montana, can you describe some of the changes that you've witnessed?

00:28:00

RUTH VANITA:

Well, one has more than one home, I think. I definitely think of India as home. We have an apartment there in Gurgaon, which is a satellite city of Delhi, or now is an independent city. We have a whole set-up there. We go at least once a year. Usually, I go twice a year. Corona made that impossible in this last year. But I've just returned from there. Yeah, I have a home there. I would say I'm sort of a divided self. Definitely, that's home as well. This is home because I have my wife and son here, but otherwise

00:28:30

RUTH VANITA:

I don't feel attached to Montana as a place in itself. But I wanted to say, speaking of coming out before, there were some funny incidents, amusing incidents too, because the year before I migrated, I was staying I had this, there is a whole complication I won't to go to, but I was staying in a colleague's house, a very big house, and they were on sabbatical in Hawaii. I was staying in that house. A student of mine, an MA student of mine,

00:29:00

RUTH VANITA:

she was sharing the house, and then there was another student, who also was sharing, supposed to share it. This other student told me that people were warning her, "Don't stay with her, she's a lesbian." So, obviously, these rumors were going around after the book came out, particularly, and this person I was with, we were seen together all the time. They told her that, and I said, "Well, it's a saving grace that at least there are two of you. Like, you're not alone with me in the house." There are two of you. She said, "No, it's not a saving grace." And she sounded really cross.

00:29:30

RUTH VANITA:

So, I said, "Well, yeah, it is." And she said, "No, I've got a girlfriend in America." That was really funny. And then another occasion where two students in Miranda House, one of them was from Sri Lanka and another was from Delhi. They came to talk to me and they said they were graduating, and they were just wanting to talk about their future plans, but it became clear to me, as they were talking, that what they really wanted was to come out, but they didn't know how to say that, so they were saying, "Should we go to St. Stephen's for the M.A? We're not sure how it would be with men there

00:30:00

RUTH VANITA:

or should we stay in Miranda? What should we do?" Then finally, I decided, "I have to tell them because they are not going to." Then I just mentioned it. I just talked about it, then they were happy, and then they talked about it too. They said they had talked to other female teachers in Miranda House who had not got it at all, and who had just said, "Oh, it'll be great, go. You'll see men and you'll meet men in St. Stephen's." Yeah, they're these funny things.

00:30:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

They were so lucky to have you be so open with them and transparent. That's wonderful.

RUTH VANITA:

I also co-directed The Taming of the Shrew at Miranda House , and we did it at Miranda House and Hindu College. We cross-dressed the sexes. We had the women taking the men's roles and the men taking the women's roles. It was really interesting because when we had the cast, which was a mixed girls and boys cast, we had them all talk about things, just get together and imagine the future -- what could happen after the play and things like that, just as an exercise.

00:31:00

RUTH VANITA:

For some reason, they all -- Definitely not all gay. There was one couple of girls who seemed like a couple, I don't know, but they somehow talked it through and reached a point where all the men go off to a world of their own and all the women to a world of their own. It was very comical, really.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm wondering now,

00:31:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

in your tenure at University of Montana, how has your curriculum changed? Because I imagine over time you are reshaping what you're teaching.

RUTH VANITA:

Now I'm in the English department, but for most of the time here, I was in a program called -- It was a humanities program. It was like a world humanities program. It wasn't just English literature, which was nice because it allowed me to teach some English literature, but also to devise courses in other areas. I devised a course on the Gita, which was very popular.

00:32:00

RUTH VANITA:

I learned a lot. I devised a course on Goddesses, Goddesses in three cultures and, of course, on fathers and daughters in Western literary traditions. Just a whole range of things. I tried teaching courses purely on same-sex love too, like traditions of - Same-Sex Unions: International Histories. It was one course I devised, but I discovered that when you teach a course specifically titled like that, you only get a certain self-selected group of students and the rest just are going on without any information,

00:32:30

RUTH VANITA:

so then I decided that it's better to integrate teaching same-sex sexuality into just general courses. I do that in every course I teach. If I'm teaching poetry or fiction or whatever, I just integrate it into that - Introduction to Western humanities. It doesn't need a lot of work, it's already there. It's all there. It's just a matter of making it visible.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Oh, that's so interesting. I haven't thought of that, but it makes a lot of sense that way,

00:33:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

everyone comes away having learned a little something. Your students over your time teaching there, how has the demographics of your classroom changed at all?

RUTH VANITA:

It depends what you mean by demographics. The students are mostly white, mostly from Montana and surrounding states. I think I've had a couple of Chinese students and one Indian-origin student, that's it, and then a few Native Americans whom you can't always tell

00:33:30

RUTH VANITA:

because they're mixed. You can't always tell that they're Native American, but there are some. There have been a lot of LGBT students. Again, one can't always tell, and one often guesses wrong as well. But there are a lot and they're very active. There's an active Lambda and everything. That way it's nice. It's nice in Missoula too. There's a big lesbian community beyond the university. They're all very outdoorsy and I'm not, but it's nice to have them there. It's nice to be able to be open about parenting and your spouse and be able to introduce her

00:34:00

RUTH VANITA:

as your wife and that sort of thing. That's nice, but I don't have the sort of close friendships that I had in India. That may be because it's a small town. We started an Indian Association here. My wife actually started it and it meets. I had one colleague who was a gay guy from India, but he left after a while, but otherwise there aren't any.

00:34:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm wondering if your students inspire you or frustrate you or a little bit of both. Can you shed some light on that?

RUTH VANITA:

I have the occasional brilliant student, I suppose everybody does. I remember in one honors class I was teaching - she looked like a Victorian lady or dressed up with her hair tied up and in a long dress and all that. She was just extremely bright. I just thought this girl is a lesbian, and does she know it? It turned out she did know it. She was like - what I call child marriage - she was with somebody from the age of like 18, 19

00:35:00

RUTH VANITA:

or something, and she's still with her. She now has a job, she's teaching at the university, she went on to Stanford from here. That was a good relationship. She did an honors project with me, which she said influenced her PhD work, and so on like that. You have the occasional brilliant student. Most of them are -- Well, they're working. Most of them have two jobs. Many of them are first generation college-goers. Also, I think the way we teach them leaves a lot to be desired. I mean, the way the curriculum is designed is problematic. We don't give them a sense of chronology.

00:35:30

RUTH VANITA:

We give them a sort of a buffet. They're doing one course on Japanese literature in English -- It's mostly 20th and 21st century literature they're doing, then suddenly you're trying to teach them something in the 19th century. It doesn't make any sense to them. They have no sense of chronology. We haven't given them that sense because we've, so called, broken up the canon. We also teach, I think, very heavily on content. We teach 'what is the poem saying?' Not 'why is it such a powerful poem?' We pay very little attention to aesthetics,

00:36:00

RUTH VANITA:

to sound, to language, and much more attention to issues and themes and things like that. We're teaching literature as if it's sociology and that's not the most satisfying way to me, and also, even to many of the students, I think.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You are obviously such a wealth of knowledge about historical gender and sexuality writing. I'm wondering

00:36:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

if you ever learn from your students anything about sort of contemporary attitudes about gender and sexuality?

RUTH VANITA:

Oh, yeah, I get a lot of information from them, for sure, about the whole thing with pronouns and the whole thing with changing their names and all kinds of stuff like that that I would never have imagined. I learned all that sort of stuff. I didn't mention that in the '90s, before I came here, I started working on Same-Sex Love in India with my co-author of this book, and that was kind of a pioneering book.

00:37:00

RUTH VANITA:

It was a great learning experience because I read so much Indian literature in order to write those parts of the book, to put together and to introduce those parts of the book, and from that grew a lot of my later research and writing and so on. I learned Urdu after that, in order to be able to read some types of literature and write a book on it. That was a real experience and it crossed over - we were still working on it when I came here and he came here as well for a month to work on it with me. That was a great thing.

00:37:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm wondering if we can touch on cinema a little bit. How have you seen on-screen representations of queer Indian relationships evolve over your lifetime?

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah, well, I used to always wonder why gay men was so fond of Hindi cinema, because it all seemed very heterosexual to me. It always ends up with the boy getting the girl or usually ends up with that. Then I realized over time

00:38:00

RUTH VANITA:

that it's because it focuses on love and it focuses on love being the most important thing. This is something I've written about as well, which is that Hindi cinema is mostly about the songs, especially old cinema up to the '80s. It's the songs that we remember. We may not know where the song comes from, but some of the greatest musicians and poets, et cetera, created these songs. The songs are all about being defiant and standing by your love and for your love.

00:38:30

RUTH VANITA:

Most of the songs, which I noticed - at least 50%, if not more, are ungendered. For instance, a song like "Pyar kiya to darna kya," I've talked about this in this book I wrote on cinema, Dancing with the Nation. If you detach the song from the film and from the singer - and it does get detached, a lot of singers sing the songs, everybody sings the songs, female, male, transgender, et cetera, sing the songs, and the song is not gendered. It could be anybody singing to and about anybody,

00:39:00

RUTH VANITA:

for instance, a transgender activist in India actually sang this song at an LGBT rally, "Pyar kiya to darna kya." It was a very moving experience because she sang it as herself, on stage. Yet we all know the background of the song, and she sang the whole thing. It's become a kind of gay anthem -- "Pyar kiya to darna kya" has become. Also, one of the unique features in Indian cinema - I don't like to call it Bollywood

00:39:30

RUTH VANITA:

because that suggests it's an imitation, and I think it's not. An example of how it's not is - this is a big difference - the way male-male friendship has been portrayed in Indian cinema, in Bombay cinema, it's never been portrayed like that in any other cinema. The closeness of the two men -- The girlfriends are just there as an afterthought, pretty much. The real energy is between the men, whether it's in a film like Sholay or a film like Dosti (1969) which is perfectly obvious,

00:40:00

RUTH VANITA:

but there's even a whole set of websites called Shashitabh, which are about the Shashi-Amitabh coupling. There is this couple where, again, repeated from Shashi and Amitabh together, or Dharmendra and Amitabh or Dharmendra and Shashi, and there are all these pairings, star pairings, and there are these wonderful songs which, again, are totally love songs. When I show them to my American students, they absolutely think it's a love song. They're looking into each other's eyes, they're feeding each other, and so on.

00:40:30

RUTH VANITA:

Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan is of course another great pairing -- Anand, Namak Halal er Namak Harametcetera. That's very invigorating. Then I'm glad I lived long enough to see the wonderful film, which is this recent film. The name always eludes me because it's such a strange name, but you know the one, I mean, right? Shubh Mangal Zyaada Savdhaan, which, again, has wonderful songs and somebody really did a lot of research because they also have allusions to the earlier films,

00:41:00

RUTH VANITA:

the allusions to Dosti, allusions to Dostana, allusions to Sholay with the motorbike and all of that, so it's such a moving film and I felt that was the film I'd been waiting to see all my life.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I remember discovering Deepa Mehta's film Fire for the first time as a teenager, it was such a profound moment. Is there a significant moment

00:41:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

that you had earlier in life discovering that queer sexuality existed in Indian cinema?

RUTH VANITA:

Oh, Indian cinema? I guess, no, I keep discovering these films where I would -- Dosti(1969) is a film, which is all about the two young men's close relationship. At the end of the film -

00:42:00

RUTH VANITA:

they have no girlfriends in that case - at the end of the film, they are separated, they are reunited, they sing some of the most famous songs ever about love, and at the end of the film, this elderly female neighbor, she blesses them and says, "Tumhari jodi bani rahe" which is a typical blessing given to a married couple, 'may you as a couple survive.' Those were the sorts of things, I guess, of cinema. Yeah.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

It sort of broke out of subtext in that moment that became the main text of the film.

00:42:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's interesting. I think now would be a really good time to take a little break. How are you feeling?

RUTH VANITA:

Sure. I'm fine. Thanks.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Okay. Let's take 10 minutes and grab a drink of water and stretch. I'll just put myself on mute and I'll meet you back here in 10.

RUTH VANITA:

Okay. Great.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Okay. Where were we? Oh, yes. Can you tell us about your wedding, where it took place and who was present?

00:43:00

RUTH VANITA:

Well, before it became legal, we had a religious wedding. It was part-Hindu part-Jewish, and it was in New York. So, Mona's entire family was present and four of my very close friends from India came specially for the wedding, and then some American friends too, old friends from America - one of them who had been a volunteer at Manushi in 1980, she also came. She's now in California, she's American.

00:43:30

RUTH VANITA:

That was the wedding. And then we had a reception in Delhi, at the India International Center. That was probably the first such, sort of, public reception in Delhi. That upset my family a good deal. They were fine with the relationship, but they were upset, this was sort of coming out for them to their friends and relatives.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

How has your family's relationship with your wife evolved over time?

00:44:00

RUTH VANITA:

Well, after that, my parents came and basically stayed with us and I looked after them both here and then when they were in India, I was like the main caregiver. When my father died in 2006, my mother came and lived with us full time from 2006 to 2012 when she passed away. So, yeah, it became like any relationship. It had its ups and downs and so on, but yeah, that's how it was.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Do you have a son? Tell us about your son?

00:44:30

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah. We have a son.

RUTH VANITA:

He's 15 now. Yeah. So, his name is Arjun.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Are there ways in which he reminds you of yourself?

RUTH VANITA:

He's very different from me, which is nice. He's very different from me. He's not interested in reading or academics at all. He's interested in flying and he knows everything that there is to be known about planes and he's taking flying lessons.

00:45:00

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah, well, he reminds me of me in the sense that he has close friendships, he has two close friends.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I understand you divide your time between India and the US. Is it hard for your son and you to adjust at first, when you go back and forth?

RUTH VANITA:

Not for me. For me, it's like in an instant when I go there. When I come back here,

00:45:30

RUTH VANITA:

yes, there's a little bit of feeling like, what am I doing here? But for him, yes, it's a bit difficult, especially when we go in the summer, it's so hot. He's not used to heat. He'd have to stay at home in the air conditioning, so he can't be out as much. He doesn't have friends of his age there because we had him so late. We were such old parents. My friends, most of them don't have children. Those who have children, the children are now much older than he is, so he doesn't have a real cohort there.

00:46:00

RUTH VANITA:

So, yes, there's some difficulties, but he adjusts very fast. I've been teaching him Hindi since he was two years old - he can read, he can write, he can speak. When he's there, in certain ways he fits in immediately. In other ways, he misses Montana. There are things he does here, like skiing, for example, which he can't do there. So, there are things he misses.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm wondering when you go to India nowadays do you see like gay couples out in public?

00:46:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Are people able to be open about their sexuality in a way that wasn't possible when you were growing up?

RUTH VANITA:

Yes and no. Yes and no. I don't see a whole lot on the streets or things like that, but there are few, of course, celebrity and activist couples who are known, but then at a more ordinary, everyday level, I'm in touch with a lot of people in the movement and outside the movement. I can give you an example without naming any names, this young woman who - she invited me to give a talk,

00:47:00

RUTH VANITA:

and then she came out to me and she and her partner and all that. Though she is very educated, has a job, everything, the family is very liberal and educated, the parents are working, still they are so unaccepting and it's very difficult. It's a real struggle for her. At that level, every family is different. But on the other hand, the great thing about it is the dating apps and the internet. I think if that had been there when I was in India, I might not have migrated at all because -

00:47:30

RUTH VANITA:

I came to know about this more through her, but also, I know it in general. They just go on to all these dating apps, there's more than one, and they meet each other. Then if you don't really get together, you still have friends so it's also a way of making friends, and actually, you meet people completely outside your circle. When I was young, that was one of the things that how do you know if anyone is gay or isn't, you're guessing, at least for women, I think men are different, but for women you're sort of guessing. Sometimes you're guessing right. Sometimes you're guessing wrong. I used to sort of guess,

00:48:00

RUTH VANITA:

by the way the person looks you in the eye. I think that was one of the ways of guessing. But you didn't know. Now on the dating apps, it's open and they can do that and they meet. You meet people completely outside of your circle. Otherwise, you just meet the people in your circle. If you're an academic, you meet those people or an activist, you meet those people. But here, you meet somebody who's doing whatever, just completely professionals. The other interesting thing is there's so many of these young people in all professions now

00:48:30

RUTH VANITA:

who are LGBT and who see themselves as that. They are not activists, they're not in the movement or anything, but they are, and so that's really nice.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

One of the upsides of the modern age.

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah, no, definitely. I think the internet, even for me, is wonderful. Because being here, I can be in touch with so many people in India and in England -- I have friends in England too -- and other side of the country, and all over the world, which -- otherwise,

00:49:00

RUTH VANITA:

I'd be really isolated if I didn't have WhatsApp and email and Skype, and the phone, the cell phone, it would be really difficult. Corona sort of made me realize both the ups and downs - I couldn't travel, but on the other hand, I could be in touch with people. But if anything had happened to those forms - to the internet, that would've been terrible. I suppose that's not inconceivable, it could happen. On the other hand, the good thing about it was that during Corona,

00:49:30

RUTH VANITA:

I was asked to give, many people were asked to give talks on zoom at really remote places, like some little college in Odisha or in North Bengal or somewhere, which wouldn't have the money to bring people to speak. They could have all sorts of people giving them talks on all sorts of topics. The other wonderful thing is how many colleges are now open to not only open to it -- it's sort of a fashion in academia to have people talking about LGBT subjects. I went back to my own college, to Miranda House, like long ago,

00:50:00

RUTH VANITA:

about 15 years ago, and gave a talk there. Many questions from the students - it was really nice to see it being openly discussed. But Miranda House is at least an elite college in Delhi, but now it's like small colleges in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, and in Hindi as well. The publishers are all wanting to publish books on these topics. They publish practically anything. The quality is quite uneven, but because they're so anxious to publish on the topic, that's really nice,

00:50:30

RUTH VANITA:

which was not the case like 20 years ago. They were very dubious about publishing Same-Sex Love in India, because they were afraid they might get into trouble and things like that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's great. I'm also interested in hearing your thoughts on, in recent years, obviously we've seen marriage equality happen in the US, and we've seen section 377 be overturned in India. Can you reflect on that? How does that feel? Did you ever imagine that these victories would be possible?

00:51:00

RUTH VANITA:

377 we did imagine from early on in the 90s, it was being worked upon and I knew the people who were working on it. ABVA first, who don't get enough attention, but then Naaz and all of that. It took a long time, but yes, it was great that it finally happened - as a friend of mine said it's too late for us, but at least it happened. And marriage, in 2005 before marriage equality was such a big campaign, I had written this book Love's RIte, on same sex marriage in India.

00:51:30

RUTH VANITA:

This is a new edition that's just come out. I would really like to live to see marriage equality in India. That I didn't imagine would ever happen. My work on this subject started when, I remember in 1980, I was in my college ... You said who were the first, like, gay people I saw. Actually, the first gay people I saw in the media in 1980, in my college hostel room, I just opened this little tabloid called Blitz,

00:52:00

RUTH VANITA:

and there were a picture of these two women in Kerala, who had tried to commit joint suicide together and had written these love letters to each other that they had left behind. Those were the first gay people I saw. They weren't calling themselves that, but I saw their pictures in the paper. After that, I started collecting these newspaper reports, mostly in English, but also in Hindi and other languages, about these young women, all low-income, non-English speaking, poor women who ran away together and either got married by religious rites or committed joint suicide, or both, all over the country from 1980,

00:52:30

RUTH VANITA:

and it's still going on. There are hundreds and hundreds of cases, mostly women, but some men as well. I collected it, and I was just puzzling, like, why do they use this language of marriage or of death? I was really interested in it and that's what the book grew out of. But the main point there is that very often queer activists will say, oh, marriage is this bourgeois, heterosexual, imitative, heteronormative, whatever jargon they use, and that's what marriage is. It totally isn't. It comes from these lower class,

00:53:00

RUTH VANITA:

low income, low caste, tribal, Dalit, fisherwomen, factory women. These are the women who were running away together and getting married or committing joint suicide. I've put the whole list with the names as many as I have, which is by no means the complete list, in the new edition of Love's Rite. It totally comes from, not from the movement and from above, but from below. Now the cases that I'm caught are, of course, these celebrity weddings and which is great.

00:53:30

RUTH VANITA:

I don't mean to discount that at all, but I do want to say that the pioneers of marriage equality are these young couples, many of whom literally are martyrs of the movement. They were outside any movement. They didn't get that inspiration. They didn't even know about a movement. They didn't even know words like lesbian or gay or anything like that. They just knew that they wanted to be married and they fought for that.

00:54:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's really powerful to hear that. I think that it's true that the work that you've done with Manushi, and also with your teaching, you've created a culture of visibility and acceptance, it's impacted so many people. It's really profound to see the work that you're doing, and how you've helped so many people. Do you acknowledge that legacy that you've left?

00:54:30

RUTH VANITA:

Well, we brought out Same-Sex Love in India, we were told that and ever since, so many young people from all over the world write to me, young Indians from India, saying that, saying basically that. Just recently, I got an email that, "Your work helped me to come out," and stuff like that. Even Manushi I was not writing about these issues, very little. I did write some but not a lot, but it's all the later books. I remember once my co-author Saleem Kidwai, who was a Muslim, he's passed away - He was in a bar and some young Hindu guy came up and touched his feet and said,

00:55:00

RUTH VANITA:

you have put me back in contact with my own tradition. We didn't know that we had a tradition of literature and art that is homoerotic. We discovered that and put it out there. A lot of people say that they gave the book to their parents as a coming out gesture. They gave their parents to read. Now, some parents read it, some parents didn't, but at least the information is out there and now, of course, it's all over the internet. But for many years, it was through books.

00:55:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You've written so much, I'm wondering if there's a topic that you want to publish on next that you haven't done yet, that you're looking forward to tackling?

RUTH VANITA:

I'm now writing, not just on this issue but on other things. If this had not been an issue, I sometimes think if there had been equality from the start, then I would've written on very different things. My next book is called The Dharma of Justice. It's about the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and about debates between characters in those books,

00:56:00

RUTH VANITA:

in those epics about gender, about varna, which is called "caste" in English, and about species, animals. I'm really interested in animals and the suffering of animals - that's one thing. I've written one novel last year. I'm writing a second novel now set in the '20s and '30s. I'm finished that. I have a number of things I'm sort of interested in looking at.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

The novel that you're writing set in the '20s and the '30s, is that in India?

00:56:30

RUTH VANITA:

In India. Yeah.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Interesting. I can't wait for that one.

RUTH VANITA:

I had translated - there was a Hindi writer called Ugra. the first sort of controversy, the first public debate in modern India, about homosexuality was around his work. It's a book called Chocolate. It's a collection of eight stories that he wrote in 1924 to '27.

00:57:00

RUTH VANITA:

He brought it out as a book and he got a tremendous amount of flak for it. He was writing it in a sort of what he thought was a homophobic way, but he was told that he shouldn't write about it in any way at all. It should be a topic that should never be written about. I translated these stories into English. It told me about what was going on in the '20s and '30s - just in that hundred years, between 1820 and 1920, the whole topic had been silenced. In the 1820s - I wrote this book about Urdu poetry

00:57:30

RUTH VANITA:

and same-sex love was being sort of very openly written about by all these Urdu poets in very fun ways - between men, between women, between women and men, everything - in that hundred years, something happened with silenced it. That's the history I was interested in bringing out and I've written all these academic books, but I think fiction reaches people in a different way, a different set of people I should say.

00:58:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's very true. I'm a fan of fiction. It's my sort of way of escaping the world. I'm wondering if you could reflect on the people that you've met over the years who identify both as Indian and as LGBT? Is there anyone who comes to mind who embodies both identities that has been very precious to you in your life?

00:58:30

RUTH VANITA:

Well, Suniti Namjoshi was a great pioneer, I think. She was probably the first to write, I mean, Kamala Das, in a sense, but Suniti Namjoshi much more clearly, even though she was wary about coming out in India, as long as her mother was alive, but still. I know her, she's a friend. Her writing is wonderful. I teach her writing, especially a book like Conversations of Cow. I really love that. I think it's just a masterpiece, little masterpiece

00:59:00

RUTH VANITA:

which talks about all these -- In Conversations of Cow, about being lesbian, being a woman, being Indian, being immersed in Western literature as well as Indian literature, and being in the West where only parts of you are understood by different groups and just all the fun of that, the difficulties of that, but also, she deals with it in a very playful way. So, yeah, that's one person.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

When you think about your body of work, what are you most proud of?

00:59:30

RUTH VANITA:

I guess Same-Sex Love in India was the most pioneering book. Then the book on marriage, because it's still the only book on that whole, quite unique, phenomenon of these young couples getting married. The novel has been a whole different -- It was a different type of writing. It was nice for me to write this novel

[shows Memory of Light]. It was like imagining two women being together, or two men being together

01:00:00

RUTH VANITA:

in a different society where this kind of modern homophobia and modern prejudice didn't exist, so that was fun to write. What is also fun about it was that I didn't know if it was any good. Now, when I'm writing academic writing, I know when it's good and when it's not, I know how to fix it. This was just because it was a totally different type of writing - I've always written poetry, but not fiction- it was like, I didn't know if it was any good until I showed it to other people and got their feedback

01:00:30

RUTH VANITA:

and then showed it to publishers, then three publishers wanted it in India, three major publishers. I still very uncertain about fiction-writing.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

It must have been very nerve wracking trying something new for the first time and yeah, putting yourself out there.

RUTH VANITA:

Well, it's good. It sort of makes your brain work, a different part of your brain work, a different part of yourself, imagination, whatever work. Yeah.

01:01:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm wondering because you split your time between the two countries. Could I ask you to reflect on how both cultures have influenced who you are?

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah. That's a great question. I grew up with English literature. English is my mother tongue. That's what my parents spoke to each other. My father's from South India, my mother from the North, and that was the common language. I don't want to deny my absolute debt to English literature which has given me a lot of joy

01:01:30

RUTH VANITA:

and Western classical music and art. All of it comes out of Christianity in a sense. Although I was raised as a Christian, I'm now Hindu. From my late twenties, I gradually gravitated to Hinduism, but still, Christianity has shaped me, particularly through its art, its literature, and - even writers who thought they were not Christians like Percy Shelley, of course, they were coming out of a Christian background. So, there's that. And then as far as India's concerned, of course,

01:02:00

RUTH VANITA:

it's very different being a Christian in America and a Christian in India, because when you are Christian in India, you are in a whole entirely different world. I mean, I grew up with Hinduism, with Indian food -- which I can't do without, I cook my own food because I have to eat Indian food -- and with Hindi literature. I didn't grow up with cinema because we weren't allowed to go to movies, but later I came to know cinema.

01:02:30

RUTH VANITA:

But Indian music for sure, film music, classical music, and Hinduism, which has - Hindu devotion, Hindu practice, Hindu literature, which has increasingly become very important to me.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's wonderful. Thank you. I just got a note from the team that I think we have to shift your camera very slightly because in the corner of the screen,

01:03:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

we see the stack of books and it wasn't there before. We just have to turn the camera. I think we, we

JUAN RAYMUNDO RAMOS:

Don't have to turn the camera. We can just move it out of the frame.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Oh, move the book out of the frame?

JUAN RAYMUNDO RAMOS:

Yes, that way. There you go.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Better solution.

JUAN RAYMUNDO RAMOS:

Thank you.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Okay. This is wonderful. You've got such a gift of storytelling. It's really been such a pleasure.

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah. Nice talking to you.

01:03:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I have some big questions now. Of course, if anything doesn't feel like you have an immediate answer, we can skip it. I'll just throw them out and you tell me if it's something you want to talk about.

RUTH VANITA:

Sure.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

In thinking about the people who have stood in your way over the course of your life, if you could go back and speak your mind to them now, what would you say?

01:04:00

RUTH VANITA:

Stood in my way? I don't know. I think people stand in each other's way all the time. It's very hard to pin down, for instance here -- it's very hard to say whether people don't like you because you are, are gay or because you're a woman or because you're Indian or because they just don't like you, maybe they just don't like your personality. I've always found it very hard to separate those things. And do I want to say anything to them? No. I don't want to say anything to them.

01:04:30

RUTH VANITA:

I'd rather sort of never see them again, such people. What is there to say to people? People are on their own evolutionary paths. They're going to evolve, I'm evolving. We all make mistakes. I'm sure I've stood in other people's way or they think I stood in their way. One has to sort of let go, if one can, of those things, their misconceptions - people may have misunderstood what I was saying, maybe I misunderstood what they were saying, coming from different cultures,

01:05:00

RUTH VANITA:

there's cultural clash. They find my way of talking maybe here, sort of, different from what they're used to. American ways of talking are very different from Indian ways of talking. One can't help that, one can't fix all of that, and saying anything won't really fix it.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I respect that. Thank you. And here's another one - at what age did you feel the freedom that you could a hundred percent be yourself?

01:05:30

RUTH VANITA:

[Laughing] What does that even mean, being yourself? In Hindu thought, there's the self which is just the ego, and then there's the self, which is the divine, the universal self. When you be yourself, that self, then you're liberated. I, certainly, haven't reached there. In the American sense of that word, "being yourself" - the self is divided, you can never be your entire self anywhere, very few places, maybe with somebody very intimate you can be

01:06:00

RUTH VANITA:

what you think is your entire self even then it's not your entire self. But in your writing, maybe you can be, some kinds of writing. And even there, there are parts you have to censor and withhold, but then we are all so many selves. We have different dharmas in different places. Yourself as a teacher, yourself as a friend, yourself as a spouse, yourself as a parent. As a parent, you can't let your whole self out. The appropriate self, the appropriate dharma, is the one that you have to foreground.

01:06:30

RUTH VANITA:

Maybe the imagination - when you're reading, when you're writing, when you're out in nature, that's where you are your whole self and the whole self that is the self of the universe. I mean, you have moments of freedom where you can identify with that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I like that. Thank you. I understand that you were honored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Is that right?

01:07:00

RUTH VANITA:

Oh, I got a fellowship. Yes, yes.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Can you tell us about that?

RUTH VANITA:

The NEH fellowship, let' see, the NEH and ACLS - we were in Ann Arbor in Michigan for one and a half years, and I studied Sanskrit there with the great Madhav Deshpande. That was a wonderful experience. At that time, I was writing the marriage book, I was writing Love's Rite, the book about same sex marriage and Mona was doing a PhD there. That's why we were there. It was a nice experience being there.

01:07:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Are there any other moments that we haven't touched on that that we should be sure to include in this conversation for folks who are wanting to get to know you and your experience?

RUTH VANITA:

No. I think we've pretty much covered most aspects as much as they can be. I mean, you can always go on and on, but I think we've covered most things.

01:08:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

We usually do this thing at the end of these conversations where we have a quick- fire round of questions, where we ask the same questions to everybody. I'd love to bring us to that section of this conversation now.

RUTH VANITA:

Okay. We can try. I'm not very quick --

LUCY MUKERJEE:

No, you don't have to be quick, it's okay.

01:08:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

The first one is, if you could tell your 15-year-old self one thing, what would it be?

RUTH VANITA:

I suppose that same cliché - things will get better, maybe.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Why is it important to you to share your story?

01:09:00

RUTH VANITA:

Well, because I think a lot of history, even very recent history, like the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, people don't know it. When I was teaching, somebody said, "Oh, the '70s are before my time." I think it's useful to know the past. The present is constantly becoming the past. All my work is about discovering the past, and it's very enriching and wonderful to know what the past was. I wish I could talk to somebody who grew up in the '30s and '40s,

01:09:30

RUTH VANITA:

a gay person. I think knowing about the past is always useful. Everybody has their own past, but there's overlap and it's always fun to know about the past. That's why.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What is the value of a project like OUTWORDS, it's an archive for queer stories.

RUTH VANITA:

Yeah, there's one of the earlier such archives was Project BOLO, from Bombay,

01:10:00

RUTH VANITA:

where we had these interviews like many years ago. I think it's very useful because I listened to all those interviews, most of them were of more or less my age group, but I didn't know there's such a range of stories. There were men and women and transgender people, and they were all coming from such very different backgrounds, Hindu and Muslim and Parsi, and different parts of the country. It's really interesting to listen to all that

01:10:30

RUTH VANITA:

and see where it was similar and where it was very different. I guess that's the value of a project like this. That's what literature is too. You see the lives of so many people that - you would never have met these people if you had just lived your life, but that's what literature's about. It shows you the lives of the range of people.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Absolutely. Thinking about the people who are listening, of all ages,

01:11:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

what advice or wisdom would you like to share with them? The LGBTQ community from all over the world so they might be looking for guidance or inspiration.

RUTH VANITA:

[Laughing] I can't give any advice. All I can say is that in my work, I have tried, always, to focus on joy. There's always a choice - when you're looking at

01:11:30

RUTH VANITA:

something you can focus on the negative parts of it, on the marginalization of LGBT people, let's say, in literature, but in all my work I've looked and found LGBT -- LG I should say, I haven't worked on T really, but LGB lives and love, at the heart of the canon, heart of literature and culture in the West, as well as in India, and I think if you look, you'll find it. You'll find joy, and joy is worth dispersing, I think.

01:12:00

RUTH VANITA:

This is just my point of view, rather than focusing more on victimhood, on marginality, on suffering, which of course one has to acknowledge, but rather than focusing on that, focusing on joy is, I think, better for the reader and for yourself.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I love that. Thank you. When we came back from the break, remember we had the continuity correction,

01:12:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

so I think we have to re-ask you about your wife? Let me see. I'll go back and see, we just want to make sure we have that correctly so that we can introduce that section of the conversation. I'll say, let's see, can you tell us about your wife? What is her name and how long have you been together?

01:13:00

RUTH VANITA:

Her name is Mona Bachmann and she is a Jew from New York. Her parents migrated to the US, fleeing the Holocaust. She has a direct connection to that past. We met when I went for the job talk here at the university of Montana. She was teaching as an adjunct in the English department, and I applied for the job. I met her at the job talk. Yeah. And that's it.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I don't know if I asked you this one about your time together, but could you tell us one or two of your fondest memories together with Mona?

01:13:30

RUTH VANITA:

Well, traveling together has been great. Traveling alone is nice, but I wouldn't want to do a lot of traveling alone, but traveling together has been great. We've traveled in India, to all the great south Indian temples, and she just has this feeling for them. She feels as if she has a past connection to them, which is wonderful. We've traveled in England, Greece, Italy, et cetera, and within the US. She's a great organizer. She's an organizer of groups.

01:14:00

RUTH VANITA:

She's organized all kinds of groups in which she's very active. I'm not so good at that. She's organized a reading group in which she's a part, and a writing group, and a Jewish group. She organized the Indian association here. She's organized it here for us, which is very nice for me and for our son. She's a great organizer and she's also a great organizer of travel. When we travel, she plans and organizes, so I don't have to do that. That's a great luxury.

01:14:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Absolutely. That's wonderful. Thank you. I think we've come to the end of my questions. Great. I had a personal note here that if you would be so kind, I would love to know the backstory behind one of your poems that really struck me. There's a poem called "Mermaid," can you tell me about that one?

RUTH VANITA:

What's it called?

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Mermaid

RUTH VANITA:

Mermaid. It was such a long time ago. I'd have to look it up.

01:15:00

LUCY MUKERJEE:

If you want to, you could read it aloud and tell us about it.

RUTH VANITA:

Okay.

RUTH VANITA:

Oh Having caught me, neither fish nor flesh,/ You slip me back into the sea,/ But I, with the feel of your hands fresh/ On my wet skin, follow you under/ Water. Slowly, I learn to breathe in/ The alien air of your being, to walk/ On glass, to swallow my words and sing/ Unheard.

01:15:30

RUTH VANITA:

Your kindness is everything. /I am the slave of the lamp you light./ You wish me to stand on my feet. /I forget to swim,/ Choose, free as the wave that brought me /Ashore, to abandon home,/ To become foam. Okay, well, I'll talk about this because I don't like to dwell on pain, but through the 80s and the early 90s, I had a couple of really painful relationships that were either unrequited or semi-requited.

01:16:00

RUTH VANITA:

Some of these poems came out of that, and then I had the one wonderful relationship which broke up when she left India. Then Mona, and one or two others, but this one came out of that sort of situation. It was very funny because when this book, A Play of Light, was published, which was in 1994, it got very good reviews in the Indian press, but one of the reviews said that, well, she's a feminist and so on, and yet she writes to a man in this kind of way,

01:16:30

RUTH VANITA:

with this kind of self-abnegating, subjecting kind of way. It was very funny because she assumed that it was a man. The poems are all in the I/you mode, almost all so there is no indication that it's a man, but she just assumed that. That was funny. But I do think that love poetry, most great love poetry - not that my poetry's great at all - but most love poetry, I think, comes out of pain. There's some joyful love poetry, but very little.

01:17:00

RUTH VANITA:

Most of it comes out of struggle and pain and so on. But there's a sort of joy in reading. I was discussing this with my students just the other day, I was teaching Romantic poetry. I said, "A lot of it is about sadness and acknowledging sadness." Then I'd also said that poetry exists to give pleasure. That's what Wordsworth said. This student said, "Well, what happened to pleasure when you're talking about sadness?" I said, "Well, the thing is when it becomes art, then the sadness gives you pleasure." Which it might not in life. But when you read it, it gives you pleasure. That's the paradox of art.

01:17:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's very true. I hadn't thought of it like that, but you're right, it's ironic. If you would humor me with this last question, what does joy and happiness look like to you at this moment in your life?

RUTH VANITA:

Well, happiness, I think, is something which is more subtle. It's more a state of contentment or satisfaction, where you're just carrying on with your everyday life,

01:18:00

RUTH VANITA:

companionate kind of friendship, kind of love, and familial love, that's what basically it is and it becomes - that's one thing. Joy is a different thing. I think joy is when you hear Nikhil Banerjee or you hear Bach, a moment when you see the stars or the moon, or you read Keats or something. Joy is something different. It's fleeting and it's momentary and it comes and goes.

01:18:30

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Very true. Thank you. This has been wonderful. I appreciate your time so much.

RUTH VANITA:

Thank you. Thank you. You've been great.