female desire

“Darlings”: Two Women, One Story
A poster of the movie Darlings. Alia Bhatt is blowing a kiss to a miniature Vijay Varma who is depicted hanging on the top of a syringe.
Darlings, with the narratives of Badru (Alia Bhatt) and her mother, Shamshu (Shefali Shah), illustrates the story of ordinary women in India who are struggling to change their discourse, deconstruct their reality, and imagine miracles.
By Anuja Das
September 19, 2022
“Darlings”: Two Women, One Story
Editorial – Celebrating Sexuality
A colourful background with “100 % sexuality” written in blue with pink shadow around the text.

100 issues, 8 years! Thank you, dear readers and contributors! As we planned for this issue to put on our…

By TARSHI
March 15, 2022
Editorial – Celebrating Sexuality
Refusing the weight in waiting
Multicoloured psychedelic circles of varying sizes with tiny bubbles inside

As a girl, I was made to believe that pleasure was something that existed outside my body, something that I had to seek out, something that was necessarily a product of a partnered experience. I don’t think I was even allowed to want pleasure, especially in its sexual forms.

By Aathira Gopi
March 15, 2022
Refusing the weight in waiting
Book Review: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
Book cover for Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal. The cover depicts two women dressed in traditional salwar kameez standing on either side of a series of magenta buildings, enveloped by a silhouetted dome shape of a gurudwara with a deep bluish-purple backdrop. The margins are a dense criss-cross pattern in golden. Two short review extracts are aligned to the top left and top right corners

The story is so well told and is written with such a light, deft hand that it is almost easy to miss what makes it so quietly radical. To review it within the scope of exploring the coming together of literature and sexuality we must begin with its central cast of characters – the widows.

By Sheena D'Lima
January 3, 2022
Book Review: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
Issue in Focus – Desire and Sexuality
Picture of a woman's mouth, with her lips and tongue painted in rainbow colours

Any desire, not necessarily or narrowly sexual, but perhaps related to sexuality, such as independence, equality, gender role-bending, controlling your own finances, eating the food you’d like to eat as opposed to the food your spouse desires, wearing the clothes you’d like to wear, birth control, choosing to have or not to have children … any of these desires would have only that importance that the individual concerned is able to apportion to it.

By Shikha Aleya
August 1, 2018
Issue in Focus – Desire and Sexuality