By The Jilted Indian Podcast

It’s time for our annual Jilted Indian book club episode! We are joined by resident book expert, fellow shitty Indian, and protest sister, Ishita Patel Kent, to discuss Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows. Come for a discussion of Desi themes throughout the narrative, and stay for the vegetable metaphors!

Update 1/8/2020:

Note: We neglected to include a Trigger Warning in the episode itself. There is some talk about child marriage and all that entails in this episode around 31:40 until 32:45. We apologize for the oversight.

Listen to Season 3, Bonus Episode 4 Here:

Show Notes Here:

On this week’s show we invited friend of the pod, Ishita Patel Kent to be our 4th chair. Ishita works as marketing director for the Dallas based independent bookstore Interabang Books. Interabang was affected by the recent tornadoes in Dallas, their original storefront and space severely damaged. Check out their online store and events calendar here. Thanks for being our 4th Chair Ishita!

We invited Ishita because she is one the most well-read people we know and wanted to hear her take on this year’s Jilted Indian Book Club pick Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal. Last year it was speculative fiction, this year erotica. They have something in common though, they are written by Brown women.

In this episode we talk about how the “Own Voices” fiction are being pushed into sub-genres or to younger audiences and not marketed as mainstream literature. We have seen that science-fiction, fantasy, and other niche genres often include diverse authors and characters.

Miranda mentioned that Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows was the March 2018 Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection. You can find that article where Mindy Kaling talks to Witherspoon about creating her own opportunities in Glamour’s September 2017 issue.

Learn the basics of Sikhism from the BBC, and here is how India “used” to treat widows via the New York Times piece on India’s Widows.

The books mentioned this episode include:

• Balli Kaur Jaswal’s The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters
• Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah and the End of Time, and The Star Touched Queen
• Mahesh Rao’s Polite Society
• Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last
• Rati Mehrotra’s Markswoman
• Nisha Sharma’s My So Called Bollywood Life
• Shanthi Sekaran’s Lucky Boy
• Sayantani Dasgupta’s Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond series
• North Texas’s own Hafsah Faizal’s We Hunt the Flame
• Shannon Chakraborty’s City of Brass
• Aisha Saeed’s Amal Unbound
• Swati Teerdhala’s The Tiger at Midnight

Until next year, Happy Reading!