When Arpita Das founded Yoda Press in 2004, she had a clear intent to publish writing by and about LGBTQIA+ people. With urban studies scholar Gautam Bhan helming it as the series editor, it was called the Sexualities list. “It wasn’t about whether it was cool or financially lucrative at all,” she says, “but the fact that I had access to a marvellous burgeoning author pool.”
Das’s early list included Gautam Bhan and Arvind Narrain’s edited volume Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, and Maya Sharma’s Loving Women: Being Lesbian in Unprivileged India, books that have acquired the status of queer classics. These titles appeared long before mainstream publishers began to view queer writing as a viable category.
Today, the landscape is dramatically different. “First, the millennials, and then Gen Z, both have changed the discourse around gender and sexuality radically,” says Das. “Sometimes, we talk about it at the office, that we now have the audience we always dreamed of.”
She attributes this transformation to legal developments as well as cultural trends. “Article 377 being read down by the Supreme Court in 2018 was very important for queer voices to feel free with the power of the law behind them.” Social media helped spread the word about queer books and authors, making Das and her colleagues feel more connected to a community of readers.
Building a readership is slow, meaningful work that indie publishers specialize in. Urvashi Butalia, director of Zubaan, is a case in point. With her deep roots in the feminist movement, an appetite for risk-taking, she has published pathbreaking books such as A Revathi and Nandini Murali’s A Life in Trans Activism, and No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy by Chayanika Shah, Raj Merchant, Shals Mahajan and Smriti Nevatia.
She is excited about publishing Sunil Mohan’s memoir Your Stick Will Not Break My Strength, which captures the difficulties he has faced as a trans man. “What sets this book apart is Sunil’s exploration of what is meant by masculinity. The question he poses is: when you make that transition from being a woman to a man, why must the idea of man mean a kind of macho masculinity, which is violent, aggressive and so on?” she says. “Can there not be a masculinity that is ‘soft’, that is different from the models that are normalised by society? That’s what he asks.”
Zubaan includes queer authors in many of their anthologies without identifying them as queer because some contributors may not be publicly out, and respecting their privacy is important especially because exposure might pose a risk to their physical safety and mental health.
Building on the work of Butalia and Das, Chirag Thakkar, now Senior Associate Publisher at Bloomsbury India, represents an editorial outlook where discussions of queerness are inseparable from questions of power, politics, and representation. “I don’t see queerness solely through the lens of LGBTQIA+ inclusion, as much of corporate Pride Month activity tends to,” he says. “For me, queerness is also about resisting normativity in all its forms.”
During his stint with Penguin Random House, he published non-binary lawyer Rohin Bhatt’s Urban Elites vs Union of India, tracing “the oral history of the marriage equality petition dismissed by the Supreme Court,” and Abhishek Anicca’s The Grammar of My Body, “a radical account of his life as a chronically ill, disabled queer man navigating desire, autonomy, and visibility.”
At Bloomsbury India, he continues to publish writers whose work “is attuned to questions of caste, class, incarceration, dissent, freedoms, and systemic exclusion.” As he puts it, “That’s why amplifying marginalised, persecuted, incarcerated and underrepresented voices, including Dalit writers, is just as integral to my publishing practice as uplifting queer voices.”
If commissioning is one side of the ecosystem, marketing is the other. Prateek Agarwal, Manager, Marketing, Digital and Partnerships at Penguin Random House India, has worked on books such as Kazim Ali’s edited volume On the Brink of Belief: Queer Writing from South Asia, Saurabh Kirpal’s Who is Equal: The Equality Code of the Constitution, and Saikat Majumdar’s Remains of the Body. He describes Penguin’s approach as “multi-pronged and community-first.”
Since marketing determines visibility, his approach includes targeted outreach to “queer collectives, digital forums, bookstores, and literature festivals”, partnerships with institutions, as well as “retail activations and memorable promotional materials”. His strategy involves building a lasting presence for queer authors rather than a superficial buzz that would fizzle out quickly.
Noting the constraints of limited shelf space, he points out that publicists work on crafting a narrative that strikes a chord not only with queer readers and allies but a broader readership interested in “universal themes such as love, identity, justice, resistance”. He also notes the value of building a support system to ensure that queer authors feel safe during promotional campaigns. “We are intentional about setting clear boundaries,” he says. Authors are offered media training, and “have agency over which events or media engagements they participate in.”
Community-driven initiatives are broadening the scope of queer publishing in India. Rafiul Alom Rahman, founder of The Queer Muslim Project (TQMP), recalls how their zine, Tributaries, led to a partnership with Penguin for On the Brink of Belief. “Bringing narratives from the margins to the mainstream is a priority, so signing up with a commercial publisher is a pretty big deal.”
Edited by Kazim Ali, it is an anthology featuring contributors from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Nepal, who were guided by writers such as Christopher Merrill, Darius Stewart and Maggie Millner. It includes poetry, flash fiction, essays, fragments and conversations.
TQMP’s Queer Writers’ Room, run with the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, focuses on mentoring emerging writers from across South Asia. Rahman is proud of the 21 young writers who “felt safe and seen” because “their creative voices were valued.”
Maniza Khalid, Programs and Innovations Officer at TQMP admits that breaking into publishing is hard, especially for young writers without networks. The programme helps them “have a strong narrative voice” and “elevate their voices where they can be heard by a lot of people.”
Author Sudipto Pal, whose Bengali queer novel Bhalo Na Basar Golpo was translated into English as Unlove Story by Arunava Sinha, believes that the quality and volume of queer publishing depend on the willingness of publishers to take a chance on new writers.
He says, “Queer stories need to be truthful and authentic because we have a mature audience that appreciates raw emotions and rejects watered-down narratives.” His book was published by Seagull Books. According to him, Seagull’s Pride list, with translations from various cultures, helps readers “normalize” queer stories by placing them in diverse contexts rather than only “Westernized or urban Indian set-ups” that can feel niche. He values publishers who “put their money behind books they believe in…even if they are doubtful of instant commercial success.”
Karthika VK, Publisher at Westland Books reinforced the importance of making a financial commitment when she, along with Parmesh Shahani of Godrej DEI Lab, launched an imprint called Queer Directions: “The idea is not to separate our queer books from the rest of our list. When you have a queer imprint, you focus, prioritize and budget for it as a business. There’ll be poetry, fiction, graphic novels, and all kinds of books.” Their first book is called Desi Queers: LGBTQ+ South Asians and Cultural Belonging in Britain by Churnjeet Mahn, Rohit K Dasgupta and DJ Ritu. It studies the cultural impact of grassroots organizing and protest movements.
Even before launching this imprint, Westland was actively reshaping what queer fiction can be. Unmana, author of the murder mystery Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd, who was published by Westland, urges queer writers not to censor themselves: “What glorious, diverse, brilliant, macabre, joyful, chilling stories would emerge if we wrote what we truly want to write, if we wrote what’s missing in the published literature rather than what’s already accepted!”
Her protagonist is a book-obsessed queer woman investigating the murder of a bookshop owner. For her, a queer-affirmative landscape would include “more, better representation of queer characters in straight books,” rather than turning queerness itself into a genre. But representation is only one part. She asks, “How do we enable [writing] for marginalised writers without the kind of privilege I have?” The answer might lie in fellowships, grants, and mentoring.
Similarly, Yashraj Goswami, author of Cockatoo, a work of queer fiction published by Pan Macmillan India, reflects on challenges faced by debut writers. “The breakthrough is extremely difficult, no matter the genre,” he says. Publishers told him that he lacked social media visibility; some feared that queer fiction would “limit its readership.” But the complexity of his characters worked to his advantage: “I feel the book could not neatly be called queer or non-queer.” He advises queer authors to keep writing despite anxieties or the “volatile” environment that can lead to self-censorship. “Powerful stories will find their due place,” he says.
For him, a queer-affirmative publishing space is one “where a story is valued or rejected for its merit. He does not “want to be treated with kid gloves” just because his story has queer characters nor does he want to be rejected if his story “doesn’t fit the heteronormative mould”.
Literary agents, too, determine which queer stories reach publishers. Ambar Sahil Chatterjee of A Suitable Agency represents sex therapist Neha Bhat (author of the queer-friendly guide, Unashamed), Saumyaa Vohra (whose One Night Only features a bisexual protagonist), and Prathyush Parasuraman (author of On Beauty: The Cinema of Sanjay Leela Bhansali).
He observes that “English-language publishers in India are trying to make their publishing lists more diverse and commercially sustainable” but their focus tends to be on gay male narratives with “less visibility for lesbian, trans and nonbinary experiences” or “queer experiences from smaller cities and towns”. As a gay man, he sees advocacy as part of his role.
Finally, Ravi Singh, Publisher and Co-founder of Speaking Tiger, offers a long view of the market. “Many more queer-themed books…have been published in the last decade than at any other time in Indian publishing,” he says. According to him, this shift stems from queer people “being open about their sexuality and demanding both visibility and respect.”
Having published Santa Khurai’s The Yellow Sparrow, Hansda Sowvendra Shekar’s My Father’s Garden, and R Raj Rao’s Mahmud and Ayaz, Singh cautions against homogeneity. Some contemporary queer writing, according to him, shows “predictability, a kind of domestication of queer experience, almost a heterosexualization of it.” He likes to publish writers who are radical.
Singh’s concern is valid. Within the LGBTQIA+ community itself, there are conflicts between those who are keen to earn respect and approval, perhaps even a stamp of normalcy from the mainstream, and those who want to smash all such ideas of conformity. In a truly democratic public sphere, and publishing landscape by extension, there needs to be space for all voices.
Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, educator, poet, fiction writer, literary critic and peacebuilder. His work has appeared in various anthologies, including Borderlines: Volume 1 (2015), Clear Hold Build (2019), Fearless Love (2019), and Bent Book (2020).
