Literature

Finding Lit’s Political Potentials
an illustration showing the solar system

Fiction is often relegated to a secondary stow because fact-based forms of knowledge are becoming more and more valued. To be informed is to stay with the facts. Yet I think fiction allows us to stay just about as informed.

By Shweta Krishnan
March 2, 2020
Finding Lit’s Political Potentials
Finding Feminism
finding feminism: a woman handling a book

Standing behind the camera, with a microphone in one hand, I have felt this power imbalance first hand. The camera may humanise the person in front of it more than a text analysis would, but the modes of production remain in someone else’s hands.

By Surbhi Dewan
March 2, 2020
Finding Feminism
Editorial: Representation and Sexuality
A photograph of two yellow flowers blooming amid grass. Dark green leaves are emerging from behind the flowers' petals.

We are, all of us, trying to hold steady, and to hold space for each other and for ourselves. And so, instead of trying to put together a collection of ‘all new’ articles, this time we are republishing some ‘ever fresh’ ones on the theme of Sexuality and Representation.

By TARSHI
June 15, 2021
Editorial: Representation and Sexuality
Editorial: Literature and Sexuality

As we see through this issue of In Plainspeak, stories have in them the power of exposing brutal truths about society and therefore also bring with them the possibility of reform, change, and hope, and when not possible, temporarily escaping into other worlds.

By TARSHI
March 16, 2020
Editorial: Literature and Sexuality
Critiquing the (Hetero-)Canon of Love: Desire and Longing in Contemporary Indian ‘Gay Romance’ Fiction
Book cover for 'parrots of desire'

Undoubtedly, LGBTQ+ literature and writing in India has witnessed an ‘explosion’ in the past two decades, and the trends in contemporary publication promise consistent growth in the future too. However, issues of queer representation in existing literature, and especially contemporary literature, need to be continually invested in, for literature is a key marker of society’s outlook on and reception of such sensitive subjects as homosexuality and ‘queer’-ness

By Anil Pradhan
March 16, 2020
Critiquing the (Hetero-)Canon of Love: Desire and Longing in Contemporary Indian ‘Gay Romance’ Fiction
Brushstrokes:The Lurid Covers of 20th-Century Pulp Fiction
picture of a pulp fiction novel cover

Considering how sexuality was a running (and selling) theme in pulp fiction stories, and female sexuality was employed as a means to titillate and attract readers, the covers often reflected this.

By Curated Content
March 2, 2020
Brushstrokes:The Lurid Covers of 20th-Century Pulp Fiction
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
Book Review: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
book review: erotic stories for punjabi widows

Much like any good erotic encounter, Balli Kaur Jaswals’ 2017 novel, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, is a delightful romp that comes to a satisfying, sweet climax and an urge to fall back on the pillows.

By Sheena D'Lima
March 2, 2020
Book Review: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
Bodice-Rippers and Bad Education: Do Romance Novels Lead to Sexual Mistakes?
against an orange backdrop, a man leaning down to face a woman, they are in an intimate pose

While we’ve grown used to hearing porn blamed for society’s ills, it’s now the medium’s comparatively matronly cousin – romance novels – that have come under scrutiny.

By Curated Content
December 15, 2018
Bodice-Rippers and Bad Education: Do Romance Novels Lead to Sexual Mistakes?
Beyond Premchand and Manto: Hindi Theatre is Finding Inspiration in the Writings of Vijaydan Detha
Theres are two photos which are stills from the play,Dohri Zindagi. In thr first photograph, there are two women,one is impersonating a man and the other woman is drying out her laundry (bras), she has a sunflower in her hair. In the second photograph the same women are holding eachother and facing eachother. The third photograph is a still of Vijaydan Detha from his documentary.

Every contemporary debate, from homophobia and intolerance, finds an echo in the Rajasthani writer’s stories. Vijaydan Detha’s Dohri Zindagi starts…

By Curated Content
July 15, 2017
Beyond Premchand and Manto: Hindi Theatre is Finding Inspiration in the Writings of Vijaydan Detha
Art and Activism: Strange bedfellows?
A hand holds up the cover of a book which reads, 'I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.'
July 15, 2014
Art and Activism: Strange bedfellows?
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