‘Only the erotic remains mysterious, unconquered. Everything else has become data.’

Erotic subjectivity typically expresses itself through play. Role play and fantasy are what imbue the ordinary with mystery, inducing the defamiliarisation that is integral to the erotic as well as to literature. If literature originated in day-dreaming and fantasy, it stands to reason that the earliest literature would be of the erotic kind. And so it is.

For instance, the first novels in English – by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding – had a good deal of prurient content. Today these men are considered, individually and collectively, the “father” of the English novel. Their novels are “classics” taught in respectable university departments. So I have always been puzzled by people who consider erotica to be lowbrow, something “serious” writers wouldn’t have time for.

The pseudo-snobs who say, let the EL Jameses of the world do erotic fiction – I want to slap them with this anthology. For this very reason, there are no “erotic specialists” in this collection. All are writers with a serious amount of literary work behind them. A couple had written erotic fiction before; most hadn’t – until I contacted them. And I wanted it that way.

Many of the writers I approached had a problem writing a made-to-order erotic story.

It’s one thing for a story to organically develop into an erotic narrative, and quite another to set out to write an avowedly erotic story. While the skill and imagination involved might be the same, the latter is infinitely more difficult. It’s like meeting a comedian at a party and asking him to be funny – it doesn’t quite work like that.

But the alternative to commissioning erotic stories is to take what’s already been written, either stories or novel excerpts. But this book wasn’t about collecting existing literature – it was about putting together fresh writing. And that’s what you will find here.

Typically, anthology editors are driven by a pre-ordained set of concerns, such as diversity of themes and voices, gender parity in representation of writers, and so on. But I have attempted nothing of the sort. I think The Pleasure Principle is fairly diverse without my having had to make an effort to make it so.

On the gender front, if anything, we have surpassed the benchmark by some margin – the book has six male writers and nine female. That we reached this ratio without a self-conscious balancing act is revealing. It suggests that the erotic is primarily, though not exclusively, the realm of the female. I’m not the only one to think so. In her classic essay, “The Uses of the Erotic,” Audre Lorde writes, “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognised feeling.”

Lorde, of course, is interested in the political expression of the erotic. My focus, as the editor of this anthology, has been the literary expression of the erotic. But whichever way one looks at it, there is no getting away from the fundamentally destabilising power of eroticism.

As Lorde says of our erotic selves, “We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within Western society.” Here the “we” refers to women. But one could say the same for men, and her judgment applies to semi-Westernised societies like India as well.

So if the erotic has been suppressed in our lives, what has taken its place?

The pornographic. From the internet to Bollywood to the kind of graphics that accompany news stories, the pornographic is one of the defining elements of popular culture today. It would be no exaggeration to say that for millions of people, pornography mediates their sexuality, and their relationship to their own bodies and the bodies of their lovers. For Lorde, “pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasises sensation without feeling”.

This distinction between the erotic and the pornographic has been a guiding principle in the curation of the stories for this book. My brief to the writers was simple: etch out the emotional landscape of sex in a fictional narrative. They liked it for the obvious reason that it offered a broad canvas for the imagination. It partly explains the rich diversity of approach, style, voice, theme, setting, and characters in these stories.

For instance, I did not plan to have a lesbian-themed story, nor did I plan for a homo-erotic one, or a transgender narrative – all of which my friends told me I must specifically commission in order to make the book suitably inclusive. While inclusiveness defined in political terms is important, it is not as if the erotic realm of heterosexuality has been exhausted.

Quite a few of the stories in The Pleasure Principle cover new ground even in “straight” territory.

The unexpected transmutations of online lust when it goes offline, the sex tapes of our ancient gods, the yearnings of an elderly widower, the forbidden desires of a middle-aged school teacher are some of the erotic sub-themes explored in the following narratives.

One question that pops up in the context of an erotic fiction anthology is that of political correctness. My answer to this question: No. In this, I take my inspiration from one of my favourite essayists, Siri Hustvedt. In “A Plea for Eros”, Hustvedt states an obvious truth that a political correctness gone rogue makes us deny: “Of course women are sexual objects; so are men.” And if this is so, it’s because “desire is always between a subject and an object”.

This doesn’t mean a free pass for sexual abuse or harassment. But in a context of intimacy between two people, “erotic pleasure… thrives on the paradox that only by keeping alive the strangeness of that other person can eroticism last”. Keeping alive this strangeness requires not only objectification, but also imagination, and here we come full circle back to literature – via fantasy – as the treasure house, refuge, and training ground for the imagination. So, as I have already said, and don’t mind saying again: leave your shoes of political correctness at the door before you enter the portals of literature, especially erotic literature.

Some of the authors in this volume would be familiar to you, some others not so familiar. That’s by design. I don’t see the point of an anthology that does not make an effort to discover and introduce fresh voices to a wider readership. So I’ve aimed for a reasonable mix of established and upcoming talents.

Being by nature allergic to rules or expectations of any kind, I have broken even the easiest and most obvious expectation to fulfil – of picking only Indian (or Indian-origin) writers for an Indian anthology being brought out by an Indian publisher for an Indian readership. I have included a white American writer from San Francisco for no reason or logic whatsoever other than the fact that I loved her story.

Before I conclude my ramblings, I feel obliged to answer one final query: the why question. Why an anthology of erotic stories? Why now? Aren’t there enough of them already?

I believe what India needs right now, more than anything else – more than foreign investment, more than good governance, and more than nine percent economic growth or a half-decent football team – is a new volume of erotic stories. And more and more of them. India needs an erotic revolution. Indians need to give up both TV channel spirituality and Redtube pornography – which sort of nicely complement each other – and get back in tune with the physicality of their bodies, with the geography of their feelings.

Lorde’s definition of the erotic is most relevant in this context. “The erotic,” she writes, “is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Pornography reigns supreme today because nobody – neither the powers that circumscribe our life choices, nor we as individuals – are ready to engage with the chaos of our feelings.

Those of you who work in offices would be familiar with the managerial injunction to “keep feelings out of it”, or to “decide rationally and not emotionally”. The erotic is all about putting emotions and feelings back where they belong – in our lives. And what better place to begin than the domain where feelings are being vacuumed out by pornography: the bedroom?

So yes, I might as well come out and say it: for me, this anthology of erotic fiction is not only a literary but also a political project. It is my claim that bringing out a collection of erotic stories today, especially in today’s India – I don’t need to explain what I mean here – is an act of moral responsibility.

Excerpted with permission from the Introduction to The Pleasure Principle: The Amaryllis Book of Erotic Stories, edited by G Sampath, Amaryllis.