Editorial: Issue 20/ December 2025
We proudly and elatedly present the five-year-anniversary issue of our quarterly! It would be a cliché to say it feels like yesterday. The pandemic was a bleak time and to dream up a literary magazine was our way of acknowledging our discontent with the contemporary publishing landscape, while simultaneously drawing forth a creative community of passionate readers, writers, and artists. It is with much gratitude that we look back at the gradual growth, or rather deepening, of this space which, thanks to our brilliant contributors, has striven to remain open to a dynamism of critical thinking across genres and forms. Over the last five years, we have successfully worked with first-time writers, alongside experienced published ones, from the subcontinent (and elsewhere) and brought out dedicatedly curated issues of original and translated writings. Despite the limitations of digital algorithm, we have continuously platformed voices from beyond the mainstream circuits. We plan to make the most of this endeavour in the coming years through working with translators to publish relatively lesser-known works, mentor writers at different stages of their work, open up for discussion and engagement, and take up some other innovative projects. Our success is owed to this community, this caravan of literary enthusiasts, which has sustained us with their heartening support and trust. We promise ourselves to carry on with the love-labour of nurturing gulmohur into its prime possibilities.
This issue contains fiction dealing with the horrors of the partition and the absurdity of death in human-caused catastrophes. An old translation from Assamese records the abject inhumanity of scorching women’s bodies with ‘zindabad’ proclaiming nationhood. A translated story from Bangla recounts the horror of domestic life for women through a caricatured account of the husband’s breakdown. Another story quietly recollects the debilitating losses and griefs of womanhood. A delightful, sensuous piece on a kitchen equipment dwells on the themes of home and belonging in the modern diasporic world. A crime fiction brings to us the complexity of shame and desire in the context of queer love. Another tender story on human interaction with animals leaves us thinking about the way we perceive our everyday world and the subtle compassion that eludes us in our self-centred engrossment. The poetic themes in this issue range from feminist concerns of violence and degradation to the ecological notes of failure and inevitable doom, from the space left by nostalgic absence to the dissatisfying conjuring of urbane opulence. In these rhythmic lines, girlhood reminisces, motherhood opens its eyes wide, identities and their corresponding crises are dealt with exemplary skill. A Bengali poet warns the romantic ones of love’s expiry date, “Each kiss is a valedictory one!” Another poet reminds us the precarity of language: “the word is a cavern,/ ballooning blackness.” There is an ode to the genocide in Gaza, one of the many we have published over the past years, reminding us to remember the ruins of civilizational collapse. The essayists in this issue dive into the subject of the humanities as a discipline and its declining market-value, as it were, and its experienced consequences; and the radical history of Qawwali as an art-form, with its homoerotic and inter-religious roots, urging us to retrieve the bold potential of the tradition and to reconsider the flattening of its contemporary, albeit popular, interpretations.
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gulmohur stands in solidarity with the 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.
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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.
We had put out a call for funds earlier this month and have met half the target. We, as a little magazine, need your support to cover the basic costs of running this quarterly, maintaining the website and the domain, and other regular costs of production. If you believe in this collective literary enterprise and our vision, please share about us with people around you and help us spread the word.
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We welcome critical feedback from our readers. Happy reading! We wish you a very happy new year!
Editors
gulmohur
December 2025