Ruth Vanita is a professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Montana. She divides her time between India and the United States, with her partner and son.

Ruth Vanita is an Indian academic, activist and author. She specialises in lesbian and gay studies, gender studies, British and South Asian literary history. Ruth has written widely on the history and literary representation of same-sex relations in India, including her book Love’s Rite (Penguin, 2005), a study of female couple suicides and weddings since 1980. Her most recent book is Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India, 1780-1870. Two books edited by Ruth were finalists for the prestigious Lambda Literary Award – Same-sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000, co-edited with historian Saleem Kidwai) and Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (2002).

She has also translated several works of Hindi literature, including noted Hindi author Rajendra Yadav’s Sara Akash (new edition forthcoming: Penguin, 2014), The Co-Wife and Other Stories by Premchand, Mannu Bhandari’s Hindi novel, Mahabhoj, and Chocolate, Ugra’s Hindi stories on male-male desire. She has also published many poems and essays on Shakespeare. At present, she is working on a book on courtesans in Bombay cinema, and a study of Hindu ideas of change. 

Ruth Vanita was born in 1955 in Rangoon, Burma to a Christian family. Her father is of Tamilian origin while her mother is North Indian and she comes from a family of educators. She moved to New Delhi when she was two and grew up there.

When she was in 8th grade, the doctor advised her mother to discontinue her studies due to Ruth’s acute myopia and as she had already received sufficient education for a girl, according to him. Her mother was a teacher and home schooled her, until Ruth graduated high school and went on to attend Miranda House college in Delhi University.

She did her B.A and M.A and later became lecturer in English, Miranda House and Reader, Department of English, Delhi University between 1976-1997. 

Ruth says she was never confused about her sexuality, she only needed time to discover it. Experimenting with Marxism during her early college years and then being vocal in her writings about feminist ideologies, for Ruth, studying same-sex literature and theories were a natural next step.

After few years of study abroad, returning to India and teaching literature,
she became part of one of the earliest non-formal LGBT intellectual circle in Delhi. The excitement of the underground gay & lesbian movement during the 90s is still fresh in her mind and she feels that while the LGBT movement has made rapid strides in the last few years, there still needs a more positive legal and social framework for same-sex couples to
have a lasting happy relationship in India. Her defining book ‘Same-Sex Love in India’ with Saleem Kidwai is one of her many literary outings that form the spine of contemporary Indian same-sex literature. She is happily married to her same-sex partner and has a son.