“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, Agents of Ishq 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.”
According to Vohra, Agents of Ishq stood out because it refused to be prescriptive. “We never told people how to live. We wanted to create a garden of different journeys,” she explains. “Stories about love and sex are often used to justify political ideas. We didn’t want that. We wanted full human renditions.”
Soon, readers began sending in their own experiences — unprompted, unfiltered and deeply personal. “Every time one person shared honestly, others felt encouraged to do the same. The stories enabled each other,” she says.
The decision to condense and curate this vast archive into a book was shaped by both reflection and urgency. “The internet today is an endless scroll. Attention is scattered,” Vohra says. “Reading a book in privacy is a different experience. It allows deeper engagement and creates a space to connect emotionally.”
The anthology is organised into six thematic sections and features over 45 stories from across the platform’s history. Rather than being arranged around labels like “violence” or “consent,” the sections focus on emotional journeys — realisations, unlearning, confusion, courage and healing.
“The stories give space for reflection on one’s own life,” Vohra says. “That journey can be funny, painful, quiet or celebratory.”
Differential sex education
One section of the book, ‘Undoing the World’, explores gender and sexuality. In ‘Diary of an Indian Sex Educator’ (2017) by Srinidhi Raghavan, the author describes how sex education was sharply divided by gender: girls were cautioned about menstruation and pregnancy, while boys were excluded from these classes. Conversations around sex were limited, euphemistic and often discouraged.
For Vohra, this separation reveals a deeper problem. “Sex is something people do together. But we teach it as if it’s disconnected. We never talk about mutual desire,” she says.
She recalls an early conversation with another sex educator. “I asked, what do you talk to girls about? Menstruation. What do you talk to boys about? Masturbation,” she says. “So I asked, ‘You don’t tell boys about menstruation, and you don’t tell girls about masturbation?’ She was embarrassed.”
While boys are taught that desire is natural, girls are taught to fear its consequences, Vohra explains. “Women are taught to wait to be desired, not to ask themselves what they want.” This, she argues, shapes everything from dating to consent. “If I’m always thinking, ‘Does he want me?’, I’m not thinking, ‘Do I want him?’ That eats into your confidence and ease,” she says.
This flows into another section of the book, ‘Encounters Women Can’t Forget’, which began as a collaboration with the online feminist platform The Ladies Finger. It invited women to share sexual experiences they could not forget — stories that were funny, angry and sometimes painful. Together, they revealed how sexual encounters often become spaces of learning and unlearning — about politics, pleasure, power and violence.
Vohra resists framing these experiences only in terms of individual behaviour. “Too much heterosexual sex is inherently non-consensual,” she says. “There is so much non-consensuality within so-called consensual sex.”
She locates this in social conditioning. “Women are not taught to trust what they want. Men are not taught to listen,” she explains. “Romance becomes about men desiring and women being desired. That eventually becomes unhappy — even violent.”
On friendship
Beyond romantic and sexual relationships, Love, Sex and India also centres female friendships. In ‘My Mother’s Lost Friendships’ (2021) by Runi, the writer recalls how her mother was forced to give up a close friend because of family pressure. In ‘Of Simps, Sluts and My Time in a Boys’ Club’ by Nayana Vaccharajani, the author reflects on trying to fit into a boys’ group after being excluded by girls, adopting the familiar “not like other girls” persona.
“These are stories about learning not to please, not to shrink,” Vohra says. “About reclaiming softness and connection.”
For her, friendship is as politically significant as romance. “If you lose the poetic part of life — friendship, tenderness, imagination — life freezes,” she says. At its heart, Love, Sex and India offers companionship. “In a world of constant scrutiny — political, digital, social — it’s hard to be yourself,” Vohra says. “These stories give you permission to try.” And perhaps, in reading others learn how to do that, readers may begin to feel a little less alone.
This article is written by Adithi Reena Ajith