Indian Erotica (Yes, It Exists!)

Tell us exactly why we should be reading it.

15 June, 2018
Indian Erotica (Yes, It Exists!)

ANANTH PADMANABHAN

Author, Play With Me

“In Play With Me, I wanted to talk about what pleasure does to one’s sense or expectation of love. It also talks about how we can be in love with more than one person. It’s perfectly normal to be unapologetic about what someone wants for his or her own body. The book is about Sid, Cara and Nat, and about the shifting dynamics in their relationship with each other. Cara is unabashedly sexual and very clear about what she wants. I always knew I wanted to have a character like that in my book. I was sure that my characters were going to be completely comfortable with their sexuality, especially the women. It’s the core of the book really. There is very little erotic fiction in India, especially by a man, and I was keen to give this a shot. I think it’s the first- person male narrative that makes my book so different from the others. And I was pleasantly surprised and pleased at how much traction my book gained.”

SANJANA CHOWHAN

Author, Swipe Right For Boss

“I started writing erotica two years ago, and it was incidental. My editor at Juggernaut believed that I had that tongue-in-cheek tone required to write erotica, after she read one of my snarky pieces on modern dating. And that gave birth to my first book, Swipe Right For Boss. The book is about a girl who is hooked on to this dating app, and she is set up by her colleagues with a man on Tinder— who happens to be her boss—and the story is all about how she starts sleeping with him. I’ve published several other erotic books ever since. My stories aren’t really romantic—they’re quite staccato and pretty straightforward, which is probably why people appreciate them. My characters are definitely all a little dark, but then so are we. They’re all unabashedly, gobsmackingly sexual like all of us! While writing erotica, I’ve realised that the Indian audience loves sex, that’s all. But obviously, I’ve had my fair share of trolls as well—I’ve been called things like ‘smut peddler’ on Twitter, and a very famous author thought it was completely okay to pry into my sex life just because I write on the subject.”

SREEMOYEE PIU KUNDU

Author, Sita’s Curse

Sita’s Curse, published in 2014, is a story of a 39-year- old Gujarati middle- class housewife called Meera Patel. And it’s all about her physical desires and all the men that make an impression on her. It’s different because Meera is completely cued into her physical longings and desires, and she doesn’t shy away from expressing them. Her journey is free from any feminist biases. In India, middle-class women are often painted as asexual, but Meera revolts against that. Her husband Mohan suffers from erectile disfunction, and the book also talks about how he resorts to violence to ‘satisfy her’, and touches upon the concept of sodomy and pornography. But then she’s introduced to a guruji, and she ends up falling in love with him. This is really relatable as it happens in a lot of Indian households. My story explores the uppressed, repressed, and unspoken, almost hidden desires of a middle-class housewife, who has lived a very simple life—definitely not your usual erotica protagonist. She’s the kind of woman who waits for the milkman to come every morning, or the one that stands on her balcony and combs her hair.”

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