Book Discussion | The Incorrigible Heart: ‘Homo and Juliet’ by Shruti Chakravarty

Join us for an exciting book discussion on Dr. Shruti Chakravarty’s book Homo and Juliet where she will speak about the stories in the book and the making of it. In conversation with theatre-maker Nisha Abdulla and author Arundhati Ghosh, the trio will share their experiences and writings on intimacies illuminating polyamory, heartbreaks, queer meaning-making, politics and ethics of intimacies, and so much more. Moderated by Siddharth Chakravarty, a cis-het man who reflects on how intimacies are regulated by men, the discussion will also open up possibilities of doing love and desire differently.

This will be followed by an interactive Q&A with the audience.

Here are the details:

Date: 18th September 2026, Friday

Time: 07:00 PM (seating begins at 6:45 PM)

Venue: Champaca Bookstore, Indiranagar

RSVP here to register.

About the book:

Homo and Juliet, published by Yoda Press, has eight love stories of lesbian couples and non-binary persons, where you will read about unrequited love, a sense of lost time, unfolding gender journeys, mental health care, chosen families, femme invisibility, finding community, asexual partnerships, trans-lesbian love, butch-femme dynamics, desi family acceptance, runaway couples, celebration of queer anniversaries, surviving heartbreaks, and activism. Through these queer experiences and journeys, we can reimagine kinships and find freedom and joy in intimacies for all people.

Meet the author: 

Dr. Shruti Chakravarty is a queer-feminist activist and therapist with over two decades of work in gender, sexuality, and mental health. She is Chief Advisor at the Mariwala Health Initiative and faculty for the Queer Affirmative Counselling Practice course, and holds a PhD from TISS on queer intimacies. Known on Instagram as @pawlyamorous, Shruti describes herself as a classic, old-fashioned butch lesbian who believes loving a woman is the most glorious gift she could have got. Homo and Juliet (Yoda Press) is her first solo book – eight true stories of queer love and intimacy.

Meet the speakers:

Arundhati is a writer, cultural practitioner, social activist and traveller with three decades of experience including as the Executive Director of India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) (2013- 2023). Her awards include Chevening Clore Leadership, Gurukul Scholarship at London School of Economics and Salzburg Global Fellowship. She contributed to advisory panels of the Seagull Foundation, Blind with Camera, Sangama and Toto Funds the Arts, and continues for Museum of Art and Photography, Shomokaleen Protibidhan, Solidarity Foundation, and Maraa. Her poetry in Bangla Oshomoye phire esho nodi hoye was published in January 2023 by Lastrada Prakashan. Her book All Our Loves: Journeys with Polyamory in India was published in 2025 by Aleph Book Company and won the Non Fiction Book of the Year Award at the Rainbow Literature Festival 2025 and the Kala Shreshtha Award for Debut Author English at the Kala Literature Awards 2026. She has also co-edited a collection of essays in Bangla of daughters writing about their mothers titled Meyeder Mayera (Mothers of Daughters) published by Sonta Prokashona in 2026. She writes a monthly column on relationships titled Ties and Knots for the Deccan Herald. She consults and trains for the cultural and not-for-profit sector.

Nisha Abdulla is Bangalore based theatremaker practicing as playwright, performer, director, dramaturg, and educator. Her anti-oppressive arts practice places care, curiosity, and community at the core of the creation process. She is deeply invested in exploring the interplay of identity-belonging-power-gaze in the contemporary socio-political context. She has been the recipient of Voices from the South Grant by Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 100Artist Grant by Sud kulture, and Artist-in-Residence at Schauburg Theatre for Youth Munich + Vila Waldberta in 2019. She is also the Artistic Director of Qabila, where her work centers new writing and the dissenting imagination, and Co-Founder of OffStream, an artist collective that makes and enables creative projects around anti-caste advocacy. 

About the moderator:

Siddharth Chakravarty’s adult life and work is intimately shaped by the oceans: in embodied work as a seafarer and an activist, and contemporarily in work in maritime industries. In these journeys, he has encountered how power and control are mobilised through social norms: from masculinised hierarchies and racialised class relations on merchant ships to caste-based labour divisions and gendered structuring of work in fisheries. Siddharth sees the regulation of desire- through explicit violence and implicit norms- as central to keeping the wheels of capital, extraction and war turning. In his current work he thinks about ways to organise the dismantling of systems of oppression by creating the conditions that spark desire – to love, to choose, to dance, to dress, to fish, to rest, to disobey.

RSVP to reserve your spot.