Fiction set in the time of Indian freedom struggle draws attention to the lives of ordinary people against the background of great socio-political upheavals. That this period’s history can be juxtaposed with personal stories about being queer is the achievement of translator and scholar Ruth Vanita’s second novel A Slight Angle.
The novel fleshes out journeys of six characters—Sharad, Abhik, Sheela, Lata, Robin, and Kanta—as they attempt to carve their own understanding of what freedom means to them in the Delhi and Bombay of 1920s. Most of them seek love and companionship but find it impossible to be had among family, friends, and neighbours because the society has rigid notions of who can and should be loved. They try to escape to another location or withdraw into a painful loneliness, unable to express themselves as people capable of loving and being loved. Sharad designs jewellery; Abhik chooses the solitude of writing fiction; Sheela keeps moving from a running a neighborhood school to Gandhi’s ashram; Lata is a lonely actress; Robin wants a career in music; and Kanta gets to marry whom she wants to but it is not the happily-ever-after she expected. What these characters have in common, whether gay or straight, is that love is not for them: the people they love are out of bounds, as people of the same sex or as people belonging to another faith. It is a novel about the impossibility of truly loving someone.
Organized as diary entries and letters the characters write for themselves and to each other, the novel is rich for the way it evokes the mood of intimacy. Abhik writes about the person he loves and has been trying to run away from:
I look at the shaded sketch of you, now framed on my desk. Half-opened eyes turn in my direction, unseeing. With a pang, I see your eyes, closed like the ferns of the touch-me-not, like a letter sealed and sent, widen with shock as I pulled away from you. Will I ever hold your face again and draw it towards mine?
Pleasure seems to be the binding thread not just holding together the stories of the different characters but also anchoring these personal stories with the larger manifestations of modernity in India. Here is a moment about the experience of watching movies:
I began to understand the pleasures of going to the pictures. It wasn’t just the picture; it was the whole experience which those who went to plays already knew but those from families like ours did not. As we stepped into the theatre’s portals, the magnificent sweep of the Capitol or the path between the two great elephant statues that flanked the entrance to the Imperial, the worries, plans, satisfactions of days, weeks, years ebbed away. Another life more lasting, more ephemeral, began its tugging, drew one into its orbit, revolving around axes removed from our preoccupations.
While one was soaking in the produce of the “magic lantern”, the silent films, and then the talkies, love must have acquired a unique kind of visual vocabulary as actors on screen sizzled in their longing.
In addition to the movies, what makes the novel a study in Indian modernity are the references to Sappho, Socrates, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde to trace a lineage of desire the way most characters connect with. When Sharad wants to describe a bunch of gay men, he says, “They are … like Socrates, Shakespeare, Mr Oscar Wilde.”
Such details about the time make one ponder about the what it must have been like to live in those times when Gandhi spoke of desire in terms of something that one needs to really guard oneself against:
[Gandhiji] says that boys and girls should not be friends. He also says that exclusive friendship without secrets, even between two boys or two girls, is not good if it is motivated by an “undefinable attraction.” He considers such friendship undesirable and antagonistic to communion with God. One should be the friend of all, he says, like Christ. Even Christ, though, I think, had an especially beloved disciple.
Because Ruth Vanita brings together such disparate views of being and belonging, A Slight Angle becomes a novel about the present and about the truth of love rather than just a historical novel. Its strength lies in making intimacy a matter of exploration in timelessness, rather than using history as a backdrop for a postcolonial question. The title, and the epigraph, are from EM Forster’s words: “… standing … at a slight angle to the universe”, extending the work of Damon Galgut and possibly others who have wondered about how private the history of intimacy has been.