Editorial: Issue 19/ September 2025

We present here another quarterly issue with an enchanting range of original and translated writings. The fiction here deals with queer love, betrayal, and revenge; the inadequacies of masculine communication; the labyrinthine quest of a booklover’s desire; sexual violence and personal liberation from societal trauma; ambitions and their routine curtailment for domestic stability. In all these stories, the writers handle the subject matter with exceptional sensitivity and linguistic creativity that astonishes the reader with the unsaid, as much as the said.  The poets in this issue speak of hypernationalism and fascism and personal interpretations of various social lives. A Hindi poet questions if the householder women, who adorn themselves evening after evening, realize they’re treated “almost” as prostitutes; points to the crevices of language which bear the marginalized silences; and satirically cheers upon the violence and all-pervasive hatred we have elected in “an idol of power with a broad chest.” Two of the poets use devices of eco-poetics to speak of themselves and the ecological destruction simultaneously in evocative phrases. “We’ll think about climate in the next decade.” Another poet destabilizes the linguistic heritage of their cultural native and asks what there is in their mother’s tongue. Our attention is drawn also to the crass masculine impulse and uncivility which has no regard either for art or for politics, and is embodied as normalized drunk misbehaviour. Another Hindi poet poignantly  reflects on his experiences of migration, belonging, and  ties that remain located in places we cannot fully fathom. The essayists in this issue raise the concern of  living in a “Reelocene Epoch” where our attention, art, education, politics is governed by the mere imitative performance of the trending, which flattens every phenomenon into an empty spectacle, depriving our beings of fundamental dignity; and the precarity of historical understanding in terms of popular narrative and the unattended details of biographical truths, which demand a nuanced orientation, often beyond ideologies and commemorative attachment, to dwell in their paradoxical illuminations. 

*

gulmohur stands in solidarity with the jailed activists and intellectuals of the Bhima Koregaon case; the victims of communal hatred and of state violence; the victims of caste and gender violence; the victims of fundamentalist oppression anywhere in the world; and with all those who dissent in the spirit of democracy to safeguard our ever-diminishing freedoms. We stand for the liberation of Palestine.

* 

We would like to express our profound thankfulness to our readers and well-wishers everywhere. We are immensely grateful to all our friends (on and off social media) who have helped us reach out. We also thank our contributors for trusting us with their submissions.  

*

Here is Issue 19 of the quarterly. We welcome critical feedback from our readers. Happy reading!

Editors

gulmohur

September 2025