PLEASURE, PRINCIPAL

Filmmaker Paromita Vohra’s Agents of Ishq is a digital space that offers Indians a rare safe space to speak openly about love, sex, and desire. A conversation on her new anthology, its 10-year journey, and personal stories as a shared garden of self-discovery.

- ADITHI REENA AJITH

“STORIES give you a warm embrace in which you can be poetic,” says filmmaker, writer and cultural critic Paromita Vohra. She has been creating a safe space through Agents of Ishq, an online archive formed in 2015 that has become a trusted platform for Indians to share stories about love, intimacy, sex, desire and friendship.

Over the last decade, it has grown into one of India’s most significant digital spaces for conversations around sexuality and relationships — a place where Indians felt comfortable enough to share their most private experiences. Through videos, essays, illustrations and personal narratives, the platform offered an alternative to both moral policing and imported Western frameworks.

A decade of intimacy

Now, as Agents of Ishq completes over ten years, Vohra has brought together a selection of these voices in her new book, Love, Sex and India: The Agents of Ishq Anthology (Westland). The book gathers personal essays and narratives on desire, heartbreak, friendship, shame, pleasure, consent and self-discovery, mapping how intimacy has been lived and negotiated in a rapidly changing India.

“These ten years have been very particular in the history of intimacy,” Vohra says. “We’ve seen dating apps, the Me Too movement, greater queer visibility, but also tremendous violence and pushback on rights. And yet, people keep trying to live fully, even in oppositional realities.”