Wimimedia
By Arpita Das, Columnist
For Pride Month, I set out to learn what it’s like to be working in the Indian publishing industry as a queer/non-binary/trans person in 2026. The publishing house I work in, Yoda Press, has nurtured the oldest LGBTQ+ list in the industry, and in the English-language publishing ecosystem, where I am located, others are now catching up and doing sterling work to widen and deepen the corpus.For example, a large independent publishing house, Westland, has recently inaugurated a series called Queer Directions. The feminist indie publishing house Zubaan has been publishing important titles by transwomen over the last decade. The Big Five too have made sure to nurture this segment of their list, and during Pride Month they have had many titles to show in their Instagram promos. Collaborations with the LGBTQ+ community have become quite popular, and the Indian author pool today also has many notable LGBTQ+ writers, and we constantly see important titles written by queer folks and about queer lives.
The importance of this work cannot be downplayed. The young founder of Lekha, The Northeast Writing Collective, Yana Azaad spelled it out for me: “To publish queer stories is to build a narrative for a freer future for everyone, and as publishers, we must remain committed to this freedom.”
For young queer folks in the industry, therefore, it should feel like a hopeful, even joyous landscape. However, when I set out to ask some of them about their experiences while working in publishing, I found things, as they often are, to be far more complex.
Office Culture
One of the deep-rooted problems of our industry, a fact I try to speak about whenever anyone is listening, is that while our author pool and lists have become enviably more diverse and layered over the last 20-plus years, our offices remain worryingly non-diverse in terms of class and caste, and also in terms of how many queer and trans folks are actually part of them.
Arpita Das
Of course, there are offices like our own and Zubaan, where we actively append the following line to our job calls: “Folks from marginalized communities and with gender-diverse identities will be preferred.” However, the industry at large continues to remain resistant to making their offices more diverse and inclusive in a proactive manner.
As a result, queer folks in the industry—particularly those who are young and in entry-level positions or internships—find themselves in an acute minority in the industry and many of them, therefore, choose to remain silent even when sometimes blatantly homophobic things are said in their proximity.
Overall, what emerged from my discussions was that it is particularly rough for AMAB (assigned male at birth) folks in the Indian publishing industry.
It was consistently pointed out to me by my interviewees that sales, marketing, and production departments, which have traditionally been male bastions, are difficult spaces for AMAB queer folks. A former student of mine who interned and then worked as an assistant in the sales department of a large academic publishing house came to me at one point to talk about the offensively toxic masculine cooler talk that he often overheard. What confounded him was that the cis-het men in the department, on realizing that he was not interested in being a participant in these discussions, would not leave him alone, but made it a point to up the ante on their offensive remarks when he was within earshot.
These were mostly repugnant comments about women, sometimes even about women who worked in the office, some of whom the young queer assistant considered his friends. Yet, he felt he was not in a position to share what was being said in this classic locker room scenario with his women friends in the office. My brilliant student (and an immensely adept publishing professional) had a nervous breakdown, and, after a year in therapy, left the industry.
Queer folks I spoke to in the generally safer and more inclusive editorial and publicity departments (these have typically been headed and inhabited more by women) also pointed out uncomfortable instances of interacting with men in the sales, marketing, and production departments. A young queer person mentioned how whenever he went to speak to his production head about printing specs for his titles, the older man slipped in a snide comment about the way in which my interviewee walked, and the bracelets he wore on his wrist.
When I asked if anyone takes these issues to the HR department in their offices, most of them demurred. In an industry where hardly any heads of departments or houses are openly queer, there appears to be a sense among young people that if they were to make their outrage an open affair, they (and only they) would suffer for it. Personnel in many HR departments, which have now become quite adept at corporate-speak on diversity and inclusion, have very little lived experience or clearly defined regulations to refer to when it comes to having queer colleagues.
I also want to exercise a note of caution for any reader who might believe that there is more support for AFAB (assigned female at birth) queer and trans folks in the industry, or that cis-women in the industry are all allies.
Recently, when the Indian government introduced an amendment bill in the parliament pertaining to the transgender community, the LGBTQ+ community across India erupted in protest against the bill. As the bill proceeded through the houses of parliament and received presidential assent to become law, protests took place over many weeks in almost all the big Indian cities. Many feminist organizations and others which consider themselves allies of the queer movement shared statements of support for the community and its demand to stop the bill in its tracks. At the time, a few of us initiated a similar statement from the Women in Indian Publishing group.
But despite the fact that the statement was drafted by one of the most respected feminist publishers in our midst, Urvashi Butalia, we had to work hard over a few days to canvass for the 73 votes we needed (a simple majority) to allow us to share the statement publicly. Even more concerning, we got only those 73 votes, meaning that 71 other women in the group (almost half its strength) were not interested in supporting the statement protesting the Trans Amendment Bill.
A young trans person who recently joined the industry as an intern also spoke of the differences in their experience of working with a trade publisher and an educational publisher: “I have become very ambivalent about people not using the non-binary pronoun for me. I have had to make my peace with it because I did not want to do the labor of explaining to them what the ‘they/them’ pronoun meant to me.” While interning with the trade publisher, their chosen name was respected. With the educational publisher, however, they felt no confidence in correcting their supervisor when she continued using their deadname and the masculine pronoun for them. They did correct her a couple of times, but to no avail.
They also spoke to me about their partner, who worked for more than a year with an educational publisher. His was an experience “starkly different” from theirs. He could never be “out as a queer person” there. He could not even express himself in the way he dressed. Over time, he also sensed a gendered rift in the office space, “like the men on one side and women on the other.” While he naturally felt safer with the women, here too he was often subjected to “personal and intrusive” questions that “one would not appreciate” in the workplace. For example: when he would get married?
I can only imagine the discomfort the young queer man in question felt, considering India does not yet legally allow same-sex marriage and thus marriage remains a heteronormative luxury.
‘Hope’
Perhaps the most visibly out queer person in the industry who also occupies an important position with a large publishing house, Chirag Thakkar, gave me some valuable insight into his journey. He began with the caveat that he has always maintained queerness as one of his identities, not the be all and end all of what he or his work represents.
At the same time, he shared two instances with me which made me feel hopeful. One, is that in two of his jobs he asked for medical insurance for himself and his queer partner, a given for an employee with a spouse of the opposite gender. And both times, he managed to get it.
Another instance he shared with me was about being mocked by a male colleague in his office when he was younger. Without naming the person, he reported what had happened to him to the relevant channels and found them immensely supportive. Chirag’s presence and voice in the industry acts as a deeply enabling and empowering factor for young queer folks. Naturally, his publishing reflects this as well.
Just as I was about to file this column, a young queer person who had interned with us at Yoda Press a couple of years ago and currently has a job in a publishing-adjacent office, called to speak to me. They said that their experience in the industry had been almost entirely positive: “At no point was being queer something I had to hide.” Perhaps change is indeed on its way, and as more millennial and Gen Z folks rise to senior positions in the industry, we might see our dream of a genuinely diverse and inclusive industry beginning to come true.