Sumita Bithi’s Rokomfiri Jounota: Sammati-Suraksha-Sanjog-Samman (Saptarshi Prakashan, Kolkata, Rs.500, 2026) arrives into Bengali publishing with an unusual mandate – to talk about kink, BDSM (bondage-discipline, domination-submission, sadism-masochism), fetish and fantasy in a language that, as the editor points out in her introductory note, has almost no vocabulary for any of it.
The book is structured as a sequence of 15 first-person oral narratives, interwoven with four longer conversational pieces with a filmmaker, a human rights lawyer, a mental health and feminist activist, and two sex worker rights advocates. What emerges from this structure is not a manual or a taxonomy of kink practices but something closer to an oral history, and its real subject turns out to be less about sex acts than about the social architecture that makes certain desires speakable and others unspeakable.
Consent as an organizing idea, not a footnote
The book’s subtitle Sammati-Suraksha-Sanjog-Samman (Consent-Safety-Connection-Respect) signals its central argument before even a single interview begins, and the text bears this out. Across nearly every narrative, the interviewees insist that what distinguishes their practices from the popular imagination of ‘perversion’ is not the intensity of the act but the presence of negotiated consent.
One interviewee, describing years of blood and pain play traced back to adolescent self-harm, is careful to explain how she eventually reframed the practice through ‘informed consent’, turning a private compulsion into a communicated, bounded exchange with a partner. Another narrator, discussing BDSM’s power dynamics, is emphatic that the popular conflation of BDSM with abuse gets the causality backwards. It is precisely the elaborate protocols of naming limits, safe words and ongoing check-ins that separate consensual power exchange in BDSM from abuse or abusive violence. This is the book’s most disciplined thematic thread – it repeatedly, almost didactically, returns to consent not as a legal checkbox but as an active, continuous practice of communication that has to be built, rehearsed and renegotiated.
Pathologization of desire and politics of diagnosis
A second major theme, most fully developed in the dialogue with mental health activist Ratnaboli Roy, is the book’s sustained critique of how psychiatry and psychology have historically treated non-normative sexuality as a disorder. The conversation traces a genealogy familiar to readers of queer history – the way homosexuality was once diagnosable and is no longer, and the way kink and BDSM practices still sit uneasily inside classificatory systems like the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Roy’s argument is not that mental health frameworks are irrelevant, but that they carry an inherent conservatism. Clinical institutions are, in her words, deeply patriarchal, and their notion of a ‘healthy’, legitimate intimacy quietly defaults to monogamous, heterosexual marriage, so that anything organized differently gets coded as risk or symptom rather than as a valid way of living.
Several interviewees echo this from the other side of the consulting room. They describe being made to feel that their desires were evidence of an underlying anxiety disorder or trauma, only to discover, often through years of self-education and community, that kink community and people with mental health conditions are not the same population, and that the correlation many people assume exists between the two populations is itself a product of stigma and social exclusion rather than of the kink practices themselves.
Coming of age without a vocabulary
Perhaps the most quietly devastating theme running through the individual narratives is the sheer isolation of growing up in India – specifically within Bengali, middle class, heteronormative households – with an emergent sexuality that had no name. Nearly every narrator recalls a childhood or adolescent memory retroactively understood as an early signal of their orientation. For example, a game of being ‘tied up’ at age six or seven, a fascination with a scene of restraint in an ordinary film, or an attraction to pain that was first misread as self-harm.
What is striking is how many of the narrators describe genuine crises of self-understanding in the absence of language. One narrator recalls a suicidal episode in adolescence driven not by desire itself but by the terror of being discovered and shamed, with no parent, teacher, or institution equipped to help. The book insists, gently but persistently, that this vocabulary vacuum is not incidental – it is a structural failure. Sexuality education in India, even in its most liberal iterations, rarely goes beyond a sanitized heterosexual ‘vanilla’ script, leaving anyone outside that script to construct an entire emotional and conceptual world alone, usually with the help of the early Internet.
Internet as community, archive and rescue
In relation to the issue of vocabulary, the book has a recurring sub-theme on the Internet, specifically the chat rooms, online forums, and later, dedicated kink and BDSM community sites of the late-1990s and 2000s. These were often the first sites where many narrators encountered people like themselves. One narrator describes the vertiginous experience of receiving an email from a stranger abroad who had spotted ‘India’ and ‘BDSM’ on a dating profile and wanted to build community. Another describes being mentored for years by an experienced practitioner met at a club in Berlin.
These accounts complicate a lazy assumption that surfaces elsewhere in the book and that the editor explicitly pushes back against in her preface – the idea that kink is a western import. Several interviewees argue, sometimes heatedly, that this framing is itself a form of cultural erasure. Desires and practices resembling kink and BDSM have had quiet, unacknowledged histories in Indian and Bengali cultural life (the book gestures, for instance, toward classical devotional poetry’s eroticized language of bondage and submission), even if the contemporary vocabulary – the acronyms and community structures – arrived through global, English-mediated networks. The Internet, in this telling, did not invent these desires; it gave people who already had them a place to find each other and a lexicon to describe what they already felt.
Law, marginalization and uneven cost of visibility
The dialogue with lawyer Kaushik Gupta introduces a more institutional register, examining where kink and BDSM practices sit, often ambiguously, relative to Indian criminal law, and how practitioners navigate the legal grey zone to protect themselves. This threads into the book’s broader, more political theme that visibility and marginalization are not evenly distributed. The concluding dialogues with sex worker rights advocates Meena Seshu and Aarti Pai widen the lens further, insisting that any conversation about sexual freedom that excludes sex workers’ own testimony is incomplete, and that class, caste, language access, and Internet literacy all determine who gets to safely explore and name their desires versus who is criminalized for the same underlying acts.
The editor is candid about this limitation in her own framing note – most of the practitioners she could reach were urban, English-literate, and economically comfortable enough to find these communities online, and she treats this not as a flaw to hide but as a gap the book itself cannot fully close.
Deliberately unresolved ethics
What ultimately holds Rokomfiri Jounota together thematically is its refusal to adjudicate. The preface states outright that the book is not a courtroom. No one is put on trial; no practice is ruled legitimate or illegitimate. Instead, the book treats each account as data about how ordinary desire gets lived out inside, and often against, a heteronormative social script. Its real accomplishment is less about cataloguing kink than about using kink as a lens to expose the fragility of the categories that societies use to police intimacy – ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, ‘healthy’ and ‘sick’, ‘Indian’ and ‘foreign’.
In choosing oral testimony over sexology or theory, and in placing lived experience in direct conversation with law, psychiatry, and sex-worker activism, the book makes a case that sexual diversity is best understood not through diagnosis but through listening.
About the main photo: A copy of the book Rokomfiri Jounota along with a booklet containing 14 photographs related to the book printed separately. Photo credit: Kaushik Gupta
