‘A Slight Angle’: Rule-breaking, self-actualisation, and queer desire at a historic time in India
The novel also takes note of other marginalisations, like gender inequities within heteronormative relationships, and class and caste within social spaces.
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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.
