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About Us

Culture matters. And it has to matter in India, with its diverse languages, dialects, regions and communities; its rich range of voices from the mainstream and the peripheries.

This was the starting point for Guftugu, a quarterly e-journal of poetry, prose, conversations, images and videos which the public charitable trust Indian Writers Forum ran from October 2015 to October 2022.

The aim of the journal was to publish, with universal access online, the best works by Indian cultural practitioners in a place where they need not fear intimidation or irrational censorship, or be excluded by the profit demands of the marketplace. The guiding spirit of the journal is that culture must have many narratives from many different voices – from the established to the marginal, from the conventional to the deeply experimental.

To sum up our vision – a vision that has endured to direct our other ventures:

Whatever our language, genre or medium, we will freely use our imagination to produce what we see as meaningful for our times. We insist on our freedom to speak and debate without hindrance, both to each other and to our readers and audience. Together, but in different voices, we will interpret and reinterpret the past, our common legacy of contesting narratives; and debate on the present through our creative work.

Our team included founder-editorial consultants K. Satchidanandan and Githa Hariharan; and over a period of time, editors Souradeep Roy, Sneha Chowdhury, Daniya Rahman, Aman Kumar, Ishita Mehta and Aparna Mahiyaria; and production team Shweta Jain, Shoili Kanungo and Srujana K. We were guided by a distinguished panel of advisors, with the last of the panels including Adil Jussawalla, Anand, Aneesh Pradhan, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Jerry Pinto, M. Mukundan, N.S. Madhavan, Orijit Sen and Shubha Mudgal.

The site The Guftugu Collection, www.guftugu.in, is now maintained by the Society for Knowledge Commons, a not-for-profit organisation registered as a society under the Indian Societies Registration Act, 1860, and operating out of New Delhi, India. Email us at indianculturalforum2023@gmail.com for more information.

Past issues of Guftugu can be downloaded as PDFs. Downloads of issues are for private reading only.

All material in Guftugu is copyrighted. See Copyright.

© Guftugu 2023