Same-Sex Love In India, a Lambda literary award finalist, is one among the very few literary endeavours that fit in fluidly with both edifying and leisure reading.

India's academic repertoire (studied literature) would expressly benefit from the cross cultural and explorative research conducted by and through the book. On the other hand, readers addicted to dabbling in subaltern themes would find Same-Sex an enlightening treatise.

Strikingly bracing in its subject matter, Same-Sex is a noteworthy assemblage of innumerable peripheral and central texts concerning the dynamics of homoerotic behavioral and acceptance patterns in India.
Comprising selections from religious thesis, erotic writings, historical recordings, story cycles, to modern novels, stories, poems, plays and memoirs, this exhaustive study pans the entire gamut of homoerotic experience witnessed in the country over literary time.

The encyclopaedic volume brings together an incredible array of experience-catalogues on same-sex love from over two thousand years of Indian literature.
It tells one not so much about how men loved men or how women loved women, but how such deviation (if at all) was represented in literature. The volume is remarkable because it is both instructive and corrective.

Same-Sex is instructive in that it is a befitting tribute to a civilization that has prided itself for its encompassing and assimilative tradition of love. Love in its cosmic purview does embrace various manifestations, as devotion, (bhakti) friendship (maitreyi) and affection (vatsalya). The book is radically riveting in that it concerns itself with issues not just of same-sex sex but same-sex love. The book's primary preoccupation is with fond attachment between people, and not with passionate sexual attachment between them. Sexual alignment is only a secondary derivative of a primary love bond. That too only selectively.

So where the Kamasutra reveals established homosexual practice, the Bhakti tracts, (where a man-devotee pledges himself to his lover deity) speak of no established sexual blueprint, only a derived homoerotic pattern.

Same-Sex works also as an outrageous oxymoron, as a powerful corrective to the skewed thinking that same-sex love in India was openly critiqued and that society at large considered it a hostile aberration. This definitive anthology lays bare stark references to deviant sexual behaviour, undoing of sex, multilateral ramifications of sex change and unequivocal sexual attraction, even consummation between members of the same sex.
It liberally dwells upon tracts hitherto construed as innocuous asexual amours, and exposes them as predecessors and contemporaries of western Freudian psychoanalysis seen in widely hailed books as Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.

In both its avatars, Same-Sex Love in India remains an exhaustive research on gender and 'queer' studies. Read it as you will, as a record of perennial love representations, or as an unmasking of the anomaly of love in same-sex groups, the book gives one an edge over other cultural and historical periodicals. It is a landmark essay that engages in the homoerotic delineation of otherwise conformist subjects in Indian literature. Same-Sex Love in India is in itself a departure from the norm, a delineation in its own genre.