Sex is a taboo word in our society, hushed in drawing rooms, not talked about in classrooms, present in our bedrooms yet looking for a vocabulary even there. Paromita Vohra is clear that Love, Sex and India: The Agents of Ishq Anthology (2026) edited by her is not a didactic or normative text. It is also not a manual or filled with statistics like reports of family surveys. What it is about are honest and vulnerable conversations on how India deals with its innermost desires and finds the vocabulary for it in personal accounts, stories, and essays.
What the anthology brings to fore is the reality that in our society, traditionally, children do not share much about their personal lives with their parents. A daughter who comes out to her mother as lesbian jostles with lines of inquiry she had not thought about. “I had mentally prepared myself for every type of feeling. I thought my mother could possibly have – angry-feeling, betrayed feeling, scared-feeling, log-kya-kahenge feeling – but this homophilic fellow-feeling was totally off-script” Sharwari notes in her account I Came Out to My Mom and Now I Think She’s Fomosexual. From that, to a daughter trying for a ‘gotcha!’ moment with her mom by talking about sex in front of their extended family, there isn’t a dull moment in the book.
The anthology is firm about challenging notions of what is ‘conventional’ and what gets swept under the rug for as Ismat Aapa reminds us in Lihaaf, a lot can happen under a cover. The selection that Paromita has curated is intentional in talking about marginalised narratives like that of asexuality and the discovery of its vocabulary by a young man is testimony to its isolation even within the larger queer umbrella. The book also takes the liberty to imagine a present beyond ‘coming out’. It talks about various emotions that queer people go through – those of shame, guilt, liberation, fear – but also makes available a space where one can talk about cruising, pleasuring oneself, polygamous relationships and the complexities of queer love, of simultaneously trying to be subversive and trying hard to find a semblance of familiarity which for most has meant a very normative heterosexual upbringing. The razor sharp focus remains on being a provocateur while simultaneously being a purveyor of desire in all shapes and sizes.
There is a story about a nervous sex educator who has to teach girls in a posh school about sexual assault and menstruation without uttering the word ‘sex’. Vaginismus, a common but little known condition, is dealt with with the sensitivity it deserves, in the clinic of a friendly gynaecologist, one who is always difficult to find for empathy and medical knowledge often don’t go hand in hand in India. Grooming figures as a theme where a sixteen-year-old is blown away by the attention of a twenty-six-year-old. She doesn’t know what awaits her and that love is a two way street. “Sex is what you do when you are in love”, a father tells his daughter, only for her to be sexually abused in a relationship and then gaslighted. The barrage of emotions of women who have felt suffocated, obliterated, diminished in a heterosexual relationship comes through clearly in this anthology. It doesn’t come as much of a shock because in the deeply patriarchal misogynist world that we occupy, this incessant and consistent violence against women is omnipresent. But the anthology covers much more – there’s pleasure, fun, naughtiness, titillation, and more.
Bodies that are not considered conventionally attractive or normal are often de-sexualised in the popular imagination. Fat is never hot but cute. Can a disabled person have sexual desire and can it find an expression? The anthology tackles these issues through reflexivity –a woman finds herself attractive through a naked mirror selfie she takes and a disabled man finds an outlet for his sexual desires through toys even as others around him frown at the mention of them. A transwoman takes to and exits prostitution for sustenance. These accounts talk of bodies which don’t often find space in conversations as those with desire; they are often a site of fetishisation but rarely of one of agency. Love, Sex and India does well to incorporate narratives that challenge these notions.
There are some accounts in the book that might seem judgmental of certain ways of being but because of other accounts that challenge such judgments and beliefs, the book provides the reader with tools to question received ways of thinking. It constantly pushes the boundary of what has always been around us but rarely spoken of. It also does us all the favour of normalising talking about having sex and not being ashamed about it. In its pages it has documented and created an archive of desire like no other. Love, Sex and India transforms the reader into ‘an agent of Ishq’ as we interpret and analyse these accounts.
Image credit: Anant
