Their constant circulation in high, folk, and popular culture testifies to their endless generosity as far as meaning-giving is concerned. Ruth Vanita calls them ‘philosophical poems’. How exactly does the garment of love endure when stretched across continents, hearts, time zones, squeezed through rings and telephone wires? Is it spandex love, or some other mysterious fabric? The idiom is modern, but love’s mysteries endure.The power of great art is that – to use a cliché – it is a gift that keeps on giving.Įpics, of whichever culture, are great art.

And yet, it is also about an unmistakably contemporary emotion, negotiating the formidable odds presented by the modern world. This is love poetry about the age-old themes of beginnings and ends, and miraculous in-betweens. And yet all that inflammable content is reined in by a fiercely controlled poetics, alert to the exigencies of craft. Love here is a matter of wonder, affirmation, loss, revelation, grief, celebration, and alarm. The poems probe situations of extremity: the farthest limits of love, the anguish of foretold endings, the fear of dissolution. The poems traverse that complex and treacherous topography of the inner world, where ‘protest’ meets ‘recognition’, and elation meets fear. This edition features four poems, all of which are previously unpublished. She is currently on a Fulbright scholarship in India, researching the poetics of gender in eighteenth-century Hindi and Urdu poetry. She has also published on Shakespeare in several journals, including, most recently, Shakespeare Survey. Her recent books include Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West and Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Culture and Sexuality. Vanita’s bibliography reveals her abiding preoccupation with issues of gender, sexual orientation and cultural history: she has authored Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination co-authored Same-Sex Love in India: Readings in Literature and History co-edited In Search of Answers: Indian Women’s Voices from Manushi and edited Queering India. She is deeply engaged in the fields of lesbian and gay studies, gender studies, and British and South Asian literary history. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies, and she has translated several works of fiction and poetry from Hindi and Urdu to English. She was founding co-editor of Manushi, an influential journal about women and society, from 1978 to 1990. She is Professor at the University of Montana, formerly Reader at Delhi University.

Her book of poems, Play of Light (Penguin India) was published in 1994. Ruth Vanita is a poet, editor, translator, academic and activist.

Love’s Rite by Ruth Vanita