‘A Slight Angle’: Rule-breaking, self-actualisation, and queer desire at a historic time in India

This June marks 55 years of Pride marches, first held in response to the Stonewall Riots of New York in 1969, soon turning into a commemoration of the gay rights struggle and a celebration of being. India saw its first Rainbow Pride Walk in 1999 in Kolkata, a determined effort by a handful of activists and allies, and a far cry from the vibrant, energised event that Pride walks and marches across the country are now.

Ruth Vanita’s new novel, A Slight Angle, is set in nascent urban India of the 1920s, many decades before the vocabulary of Pride entered our social, cultural, and literary spaces. And yet, its relevance to what we now understand as Pride is undeniable. It frames questions of identity, of the validity of desire and of self-expression, of the long-drawn, ongoing quest for acceptance in the community and within juridical structures, becoming a sort of roadmap of the time that has been and of what might take shape hence. In telling the stories of its young protagonists, Sharad, Sheela, and Abhik, it constructs a complex, nuanced picture of queer desire, quietly marking its place alongside the other desires of a nation only just beginning to define itself.

Queer desire during changing times

Ruth Vanita’s work on queer history in India has been a crucial resource for gender studies scholars for years now, and it is, therefore, no surprise that the politics of queer desire is at the heart of the novel. What comes as happy accompaniment is rich historical detailing, bringing alive pre-independence India with all its cross-currents of nationalism, a charged literary landscape, and a faint but resolute glimmer that was soon to turn into the glamour of the Bombay film industry. Set primarily in Delhi and Bombay, the story explores these cities almost languorously, strolling through Delhi’s college campuses, navigating the darkness of Qudsia Park, skirting the city’s overpopulated pockets, listening to the sound of the sea in Bombay, catching a performance at the ritzy Excelsior theatre.

It also travels through small-town India, making short stopovers at Banaras, Allahabad, and at Gandhi’s ashram in Gujrat. Deftly, Vanita paints a comprehensive picture of the 1920s, a decade preceded by the deadly Bombay Influenza, the flu pandemic that killed millions between 1918-20, changing the lives of those who survived. Politically, this was the time of the emergence of Gandhi and the consolidation of his mass appeal. Political awareness was everywhere, in community spaces and within homes. Khilafat had made its presence felt and Chauri Chaura had just resulted in Gandhi halting the Non-Cooperation Movement to work towards the goal of ahimsa.

At this moment of flux in Indian history, Sharad Kumar Mathur, soon to graduate from Hindu College of the newly constituted University of Delhi, finds himself drawn to his teacher, Abhik Roy, a few years older, and Sharad’s introduction to the world of literature, aesthetics, and theatre. Vanita brings a touching honesty and much empathy to the relationship between Abhik and Sharad, engaging with its emotional and ethical complexities. Connected to both Sharad and Abhik, is Sheela, a graduate of the famous Isabella Thoburn College of Lucknow, and radical in her own way, rejecting marriage and the conventions of gender forced on her by her middle-class family and the patriarchal order she lives in. Alongside are characters like Sharad’s sister Kanta and Sheela’s brother Robin, who fall in love in defiance of religious and caste divides. There is also the glamourous Miss Rita, the rising star of the film industry who forges a defiant path to success and social acceptance. It is this period of rule-breaking and self-actualisation, both for the nation and for its ordinary citizens, that A Slight Angle attempts to capture.

What makes the novel extraordinary, however, is not the meticulous scaffolding of history but the ease with which Vanita’s writing normalises queer desire. Sharad, born in a middle-class family, is aware of the secret lives of men like him, men who follow social diktats by day- –get married, have children, go to work – and seek out other men at night, for fleeting moments of pleasure. Sharad’s choices are made to feel anomalous to him, his interest in art, his refusal of masculine normative, all push him into inchoate isolation. His attraction to Abhik is yet another secret he is forced to keep. It is only after he travels to Banaras and runs into a group of young men who pull him into their own world, modelled somewhat on the lines of the Aesthetes of 19th-century England (Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde feature prominently in various conversations in the book), that he begins to find a community and sees the possibilities of a future that does not hinge on guilt or shame. This break with isolation, in defiance of the moral, social, and legal codes of the age, is the real triumph of the novel. Employing multiple perspectives, the text allows its characters to speak in their own voices, bringing down the massive wall of silence that those on the margins of hegemonic orders have been forced behind.

Other marginalisations

Vanita tackles head-on the very constructed “immorality” of queer desire in early 20th-century India. Suparna Bhaskaran writes, in Queering India (2002), of how concerns and prejudices around deviant sexual behaviour made their way from Britain to India, shaping public opinion and formulating notions of impurity and disgust. The criminalisation of homosexuality was a product of the “colonial homogenisation” of Indian law in 1860, and cultural resistance to same-sex desire and relationships was the obvious corollary to the same. One of the men Sharad befriends in Banaras is Bechan – a writer, staunch nationalist, and a follower of Gandhi. Dexterously weaving together strands of history and fiction, the author writes into her story a controversial name from the 1920s, the writer Pandey Bechan Sharma, familiar to his readers as Ugra. His short story, “Chocolate”, was published in the Calcutta magazine Matwala in 1924, initiating what Vanita has referred to as the “first public debate on homosexuality in modern India”.

In the novel, Bechan’s writing, while meant to expose the “dangers” of homosexuality, becomes the catalyst that brings together queer voices, validating their existence through the simple step of acknowledgement, and legitimising the language of queer desire by bringing it into the public domain. The text also asks unsettling questions of its reader – when male homosexuality is at least recognised, even as it is reviled, why does female homosexuality remain hidden, sometimes in plain sight? When women, in this novel, and in their real-world counterparts a century ago, set up home outside of marriage, why is same-sex desire silenced into a platonic and hence, palatable, sisterhood? The threat that queerness posed to the certainties of patriarchy, and to a large extent, to those of an aggressive nationalism, is obvious in the stories the novel chooses to tell.

The book opens with an epigraph excerpted from EM Forster’s description of the Greek poet, CP Cavafy, as a “gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” A queer writer, in praise of another queer writer, signalling the latter’s conscious distancing from the normative, layers the epigraph with meaning, signifying an ongoing dialogue between generations of writers, characters, and their readers, all of whom might stand at a slant to heteronormative narratives of family, marriage, and romance. While its lens shines brightest on queer lives, the novel also takes note of and challenges other marginalisations, like gender inequities within heteronormative relationships, and class and caste within social spaces. Like Bechan, there are other historical and literary figures that the book inducts into its cast. The reader is introduced to the poets Mahadevi Varma, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan and Sumitranandan Pant, all of whom coded their personal lives as well as their writing with various degrees of defiance.

A Slight Angle is firmly anchored in history and confident in its politics, but it needs to go on your TBR because it is also that rare beast – a moving love story that makes you root for its sundered lovers and refuses to settle into the banal. In today’s climate, more than ever, these are the stories we need to read.

A Slight Angle, Ruth Vanita, Penguin India.