The Broken Rainbow

“These poems, though mostly short, cover vast ranges of territory, of memory and displacement. Skilfully told, their power compressed, the stories these poems relate strike home. This is a stirringly evocative, deeply felt book.”
Adil Jussawalla

“Vanita’s poems and translations in The Broken Rainbow are an astounding testament to how the most intimate vocabulary for describing the closest of our affections (her poems refer to her wife, her son, her friend, her mother, her uncle) and for inhabiting the most familiar of our geographies (her poems straddle Montana, Gurgaon, Binsar, Lucknow, Delhi), may emerge not only from some vaguely defined interior, some mysterious inner well of our expression alone, but in that charismatic encounter with the canvas of the historical, the inherited, the studied.”
Akhil Katyal, Hindustan Times

“Ruth’s poems are like splinters of the shattered rainbow, a spray of distracted colours, a melange of variegated inheritances . . . The poets, professors and other activists of queer culture constantly animate Ruth’s poetic landscape with their griefs and dreams.”
Akshaya Kumar, The Tribune

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Ruth Vanita taught at Delhi University for 20 years and later at the University of Montana. She was the co-founder of Manushi, India’s first nationwide feminist magazine and volunteered as co-editor for 13 years. She has published many books, including Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination; A Play of Light: Selected Poems; Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India (new edition 2020); Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India, 1780-1870; and Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema. She co-edited the path-breaking Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History in 2000. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies and magazines, most recently in The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, and she has translated several works of fiction and poetry from Hindi and Urdu, most recently Mahadevi Varma’s Mera Parivar as My Family (Penguin, 2021). Her first novel, Memory of Light, appeared from Penguin in 2020. Her most recent book is The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna and Species (Oxford University Press, 2022). Her second novel will appear in 2023. She divides her time between Missoula and Gurgaon.