By Srinath Sridharan
There are some books one is advised not to be seen reading, let alone reviewing. A book on love and sex, for instance, particularly if one inhabits corporate and institutional worlds, where public seriousness is often confused with private silence, and where certain subjects are deemed better left untouched, like live wires.
And yet, that is precisely why Paromita Vohra’s anthology deserves attention. Because we are a country that has always spoken about intimacy in code. Many of us who grew up in the 1970s saw a time when cinema conveyed intimacy through two flowers brushing against each other. And yet, the same streets carried blunt state messaging: hum do, hamare do—population, reproduction, policy. India has never been entirely silent about sex. It has simply never been comfortable speaking about it as life.
Now, in an era of endless platforms and devices, we communicate constantly, but still struggle to speak openly about desire, pleasure, loneliness, friendship, shame, consent. This book matters because it insists that these are not fringe conversations. They are human ones. Love, Sex and India: The Agents of Ishq Anthology is not a sex guide, nor an academic treatise. It is, as its editor describes, a collection of personal stories, intimate, confessional, and quietly radical drawn from a decade of Agents of Ishq, the digital platform Vohra founded in 2015. What makes the anthology distinctive is that it refuses the easy binaries that dominate public discourse: shame versus liberation, repression versus progress. Instead, it assembles what one might call a heterogeneous republic of love, where heartbreak, hesitation, lust and longing coexist with the social realities of caste, class, gender and power.
In the foreword, Vohra offers one of the book’s most piercing insights: sexuality education today risks becoming its own kind of evangelism, flattening the “swirling galaxy of desire” into jargon, red flags, and mandated terminology. Social media encourages confession, she notes, but often in identical language, policing experience rather than freeing it.
Vohra’s achievement through Agents of Ishq has been to create a trusted public space where private lives can be narrated without either moral panic or imported templates. Over ten years, the platform has grown into one of India’s most significant digital archives of intimacy, through essays, videos, illustrations and personal narratives. Neither research nor reportage, it became a living diary of a section of Indians speaking desire aloud.
Now, as Agents of Ishq completes a decade, this anthology gathers those voices into print: over 45 stories, organised into six thematic sections, mapping how intimacy has been lived and negotiated in a rapidly changing India. These ten years, as Vohra has observed recently, have been particular: dating apps, MeToo, queer visibility, alongside backlash and violence. And yet, people continue trying to live fully, even in oppositional realities. That tension between possibility and constraint runs through every page.
Even the table of contents reads like a cultural map of modern India’s intimate vocabulary. The opening section, ‘At First it Seemed…’, begins with titles that unsettle expectations: ‘Ayye! The Rebellion I Staged to Save My ‘Dirty’ Sidney Sheldons’, ‘The Women Who Bathed Together’, ‘I Took a Nude Selfie. It Changed My Life’, ‘Savita Bhabhi and I: A True Love Story’. They are deeply societal existential points—where sexuality intersects with secrecy, adolescence, popular culture, shame, discovery. Just that most of us pretend that it does not exist in our clean midst.
The anthology does not pretend intimacy is always lyrical. Sometimes it is awkward, funny, embarrassing, furious. That is precisely its honesty. Another section, ‘The Romance of Friendship’, reminds us that intimacy’s terrain is not limited to sexual encounter alone. Friendship, loss, tenderness, the radical act of being seen—these too are part of the emotional economy of desire.
One of the most striking thematic sections is titled ‘Undoing the World’. Here, sexuality becomes inseparable from the structures that govern it. In ‘Diary of an Indian Sex Educator’ (2017), Srinidhi Raghavan describes how sex education itself is divided by gender: girls are warned about menstruation and pregnancy, while boys are excluded entirely. Conversations remain euphemistic, limited, discouraged. It is an indictment not merely of pedagogy, but of how we have institutionalised silence.
Elsewhere, essay titles such as ‘Why Men Don’t Talk About Masturbators—and Other Questions You Never Thought to Ask’ signal the book’s ability to puncture discomfort with wit, without losing seriousness. Humour here is a way of speaking when language itself feels prohibited. The section ‘Sex Actually’ includes the powerful cluster ‘Encounters Women Can’t Forget’, born from a collaboration with The Ladies Finger. Women recount experiences that are funny, angry, painful, unforgettable. Together, they reveal how sexual encounters become spaces of learning and unlearning—about pleasure, politics, violence, agency. These stories remind us that intimacy is never merely private. It might also be shaped by power structures.
The later section, ‘Yearning, Searching, Finding’, might be the anthology’s emotional crescendo. Titles such as ‘We Met on Grindr…’, ‘This Is Who I Am: How I Found Myself in Kink’, show the breadth of experience: queer longing, self-definition, the search for language itself. Vohra notes that early submissions carried a shimmer of discovery—frank, unfettered, exuberant. In more recent years, she observes, people sometimes hide behind theory and jargon, mediated by social media’s self-consciousness. The anthology captures both eras: the rawness of first speech, and the complexity of speaking now.
What makes this book especially resonant is that it reflects not one India, but many Indias—diverse individuals negotiating the same fragile terrain. We live, after all, in the age of consent, of rights-language, of greater visibility. And yet intimacy remains buried under social sands: expectation, honour, performance, silence, the moulds we inherit without questioning. The stories remind us how slowly societies learn acceptance—not because love is rare, but because the ability to let others love differently comes so unevenly to us.
One may not always understand, or even fully comprehend, how such varied experiences of intimacy unfold. Some narratives may unsettle, others may invite discomfort, even disapproval. Yet that unease does not render another person’s lived truth illegitimate. Difference is not the same as wrongness. As a reader and reviewer, I do not approach these stories as questions of moral correctness. This book demands a certain generosity: the willingness to hear voices that polite society often ostracises simply for narrating their lives. Perhaps the deeper lesson is this: stories remain the most radical thing we can offer each other—refusing categorisation, insisting on human complexity. But for those who can listen, it offers something rare: intimacy as a mirror of India itself—contradictory, heterogeneous, unclassifiable.
Srinath Sridharan is an author, corporate adviser & independent director on corporate boards
Love, Sex and India: The Agents of Ishq Anthology
Paromita Vohra
Context
Pp 256, Rs 399