Love’s rite : same-sex marriage in India and the West

R. Vanita

This is the first book to examine same-sex weddings and same-sex couple suicides in India over the last two decades, discussing these phenomena in the context of the international debate on gay marriage, and in the context of past and present Indian and Euro-American cultural representations of same-sex union. Ruth Vanita explores a wide variety of same-sex unions, from fourteenth-century narratives about co-wives who miraculously produce a child together to nineteenth-century depictions of ritualized unions between women, and marriages today between gay men and lesbians, arranged over the internet. Examining the changing legal, literary, religious, and social traditions within which same-sex unions are embedded, Love’s Rite brings a fresh perspective to the gay marriage debate, suggesting that same-sex marriage dwells not at the margins of society but at the heart of culture.