For bold, boundary-pushing books, look no further

As the Booker Prize ceremony has drawn to a close, having celebrated the world’s finest literature, it’s worth remembering how much remarkable art never reaches these stages. 

Countless masterpieces remain confined to small rooms, unseen by the world. But once in a while, a piece finds that spotlight. Consider Tomb of Sand, Geetanjali Shree’s 2022 International Booker Prize-winning novel, translated by Daisy Rockwell, which was first published by Tilted Axis Press, a house that releases only about nine artfully picked books a year.

Adding fresh energy to the publishing landscape, independent publishers take the audacious risk of bringing these works into the light. They step away from formulaic bestsellers—stories built around love triangles, enemies-to-lovers tropes, or familiar historical backdrops—to champion books that challenge, surprise, and endure.

But in an age when every mainstream publisher has an equally robust push on sales and marketing, how does a small indie publisher fare? “I guess the hard part is not being able to get our books into the big chain bookstores,” says Rakesh Khanna of Blaft. “We sustain ourselves by working with great indie bookstores, selling online, crowdfunding, and tabling at fairs.”

Equally admirable is how they stay afloat in the world of Amazon pricing, given their small-scale enterprise and the globally diminishing set of readers. And for that, most of them rely on their dedicated community. “Our entire team keeps Zubaan running. We are so small and so inadequately resourced that we cannot afford any longer to hire more than minimum staff on a regular basis. We work with freelancers—wonderful people who become part of our community—who tell us what they think of our books. Without them, we would not be able to manage,” says Urvashi Butalia of Zubaan. “From our readers we often receive feedback about the kind of work we should be publishing, and the fact that over the years we have moved more and more in the direction of publishing voices from the margins comes from our readers.

Below are five indie publishers in India who are giving a platform to exciting counter-cultural work while satiating choice-starved readers with their bold, boundary-pushing titles that the mainstream may find a bit too risky.

Yaarbal Books

For powerful photobooks 

For filmmaker and publisher Sanjay Kak, Yaarbal Books began almost out of exasperation. When he tried to publish an elaborate photobook on Kashmir, no mainstream house would take it on. “The fact that it addressed the conflict in Kashmir fairly directly would have been a stumbling block for them,” he says. The smaller presses he admired couldn’t shoulder the cost of a large-format, image-heavy book. Kak decided to do it himself. That first act of independence became the foundation of Yaarbal Books in 2017.

The word ‘yaarbal’ means ‘a place to gather by the water’, a meeting point where people exchange stories and step out of isolation. Kak has tried to keep that spirit alive in his publishing practice. “It’s also ‘yaaron ka bal’—the strength of friends,” he says. Every book is made collectively: photographers, designers, editors, and printers working in close concert. “Making a book is an ensemble activity, not unlike a documentary film,” he explains.

Yaarbal’s catalogue is small but resonant. There are only two books thus far: Witness, a photobook by nine Kashmiri photographers, which was released in 2017, and Cups of Nun Chai, which came out in 2020, artist Alana Hunt’s meditative response to everyday grief as an effect of colonial violence. In the works is Em/No/Nahin by the late Tarun Bhartiya, a layered scrutiny of memory and political dissonance.

Kak resists calling Yaarbal an “independent publishing house”. “We do far too few books to justify that label,” he says. “They’re expensive to produce, often sustained by grants or small fundraisers.” Nevertheless, each title has sold steadily, been reprinted, and found space on shelves of bookshops.

“We need more bookstores committed to independent imprints,” he says, “not the epidemic of lit fests.” Yaarbal’s logo—a bold Y fused with a slingshot—captures its ethos perfectly: resourceful, resolute, and rebellious, wielding beauty as a form of resistance. Few emblems better capture the feisty tenderness at the heart of Yaarbal’s work.

Zubaan Books

For voices from the margins 

Zubaan was a “second birth” in publishing for Urvashi Butalia, a continuation of the work she and Ritu Menon began with Kali in the 1980s. The original venture, she recalls, was audacious: “I remember the mix of excitement, anticipation, fear in the pit of my stomach about what we were trying to do…and yes, as each small cog fell into place, the sheer happiness that we were giving shape to a dream.”

Kali was founded at a time when there was nothing like it in India—a feminist press trying to carve space for women’s voices in an overwhelmingly patriarchal literary landscape.

By the time Zubaan emerged two decades later, in 2003, the environment had softened, if only slightly. “Some of the hardest barriers came not from men but from women themselves —a lack of confidence in their own writing, reluctance to believe their voices mattered,” Butalia says. Yet the press persisted, publishing seminal works such as Recasting Women, Writing Caste, Writing Gender, and The History of Doing, many of which remain in print today.

Today, Zubaan operates with a small, tightly knit team in Delhi, complemented by freelancers and designers, alongside a devoted community of writers and readers. “Our readers often tell us what we should be publishing, and their loyalty, their advice, their anger, their willingness to help—it gives us a reason to be,” Butalia says.

The press approaches marginal voices—Dalit, queer, regional—with careful collaboration, ensuring that stories retain their integrity. Landmark titles like Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?, co-written by young Kashmiri women to reclaim silenced histories, exemplify Zubaan’s commitment to ethical storytelling, even in the face of local bans.

Over decades, Zubaan has nurtured feminist publishing in India, creating networks, mentorships, and a sense of radical solidarity. As Butalia reflects, “Feminist publishing cannot be static; it evolves as feminism itself evolves.” In every book, the press creates spaces of care.

Yoda Press

For politically aware texts

In 2004, Arpita Das was a young commissioning editor at Oxford University Press, India, navigating a world of formulaic textbooks and uninspired historical lists. Frustrated by what she saw as a betrayal of Oxford’s once-revolutionary history list, she vented her frustrations during a holiday in Ranikhet with her partner. In the swirl of rum and masala coke, her partner asked her why she wouldn’t simply start her own publishing house. 

“The next morning, I sat down with my journal and drew a mind map: popular culture, city writings, sexualities, and new perspectives on history,” Das recalls. On that page, she scribbled possible names for her adventure, finally circling Yoda Press—a homage to the Jedi master whose combination of wisdom and innocence had captivated her as a child.

Her personal angst enabled her to challenge India’s publishing norms from a tiny office in Delhi, despite the hardships. Yoda Press faced financial instability, the departure of its co-founder, and the struggle to reach readers. And it wasn’t until 2009, when social media amplified their reach, that their work reached a wider readership.

From Amar Chitra Katha’s coveted propaganda that unconsciously seeps into every reader explored in Nandini Chandra’s The Classic Popular to the graphic novel inspired by the Shaheen Bagh protests (Ita Mehrotra’s Shaheen Bagh), Yoda Press has consistently published works that challenge conventional narratives. Ishita Gupta, who joined in 2016, describes the Shaheen Bagh graphic novel as emblematic of the press’s ethos: “It was created by women, about women-led movements, and it made an impact. Three schools across India received the book, and it even provoked protests in Ludhiana. The other two schools reordered the book the following year, which probably proves that it was such an impactful book.”

Yoda’s audience spans generations, from college students discovering politically aware texts for the first time to readers who have followed Yoda Press for 20 years. Each new batch of young readers finds resonance in the press’s commitment to nuanced, socially conscious narratives, while long-time supporters remain loyal to its subversive spirit. 

Blaft Publications

For original and exciting pulp fiction

Rakesh Khanna, the editor-in-chief of Blaft, recalls that when it started in 2008, Indian English fiction shelves were dominated by “sad housewife novels with mangos and sari borders on the cover”, leaving little space for the strange, the speculative, or the subversive. Blaft set out to change that, championing Tamil pulp, surreal noir, and translated oddities that gleefully collapse the boundaries between literary and popular culture. 

“There’s a lot of elitism in Indian publishing in English,” Khanna says. “It still seems important to switch up the kinds of voices on the shelves.”

Working from Chennai, Blaft has built a visual and political identity that is playful and radical. Khanna jokes he likes “images of hot women brandishing weapons or taming monsters”, an aesthetic that captures the press’s edge. 

Its upcoming titles reflect the same eclectic ethos: The Seekers by Dalit writer Gautamiputra Kamble, translated by Sirus J Libeiro, explores artistic struggle with rare optimism, while Bandigoat, an anthology of “strange and horrible tales”, revels in literary horror and folklore. For Khanna, the real reward comes at zine fests and indie fairs: “People come to our table and are surprised such books exist. It reminds you why the work matters.”

Promenade Books

For obscure world literature in English

Promenade Books is a tiny chaotic little bookshop in Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village. The size of a matchbox, its black shelves visible through its glass doors, the store is deviously enticing. One will mostly see books that they don’t see in more commercial bookshops—Japanese literature, unconventional European titles, and Latin American classics. 

Founded in March 2024 by Abhay Panwar and initially run with Sarthak Sharma, who helped shape the store’s early character, the store grew out of a desire to give rare and overlooked books a home. Promenade defines itself first as a publishing house, then as a bookstore. It publishes world literature in English translation, introducing readers to some of the most exciting and fascinating writers from the past. 

The term ‘promenade’, referring to a place for walking, evokes the leisurely act of moving through ideas and history. “We all are walking in the past in a way, aren’t we?” Panwar muses. The store’s imprint, Promenade Classics, revels in the audacity to declare something a classic simply because it deserves to be read and remembered. 

Among their most brilliant publications are LM Montgomery’s The Story Girl, which is a warm, whimsical book filled with childlike wonder; Henri Barbusse’s Inferno, possibly the store’s greatest hit, which is like a seeing eye into how ugly our souls can be; The Red Laugh, by Leonid Andreyev, a ferociously hideous book that speaks about the grotesqueness of war; and Stendhal’s Love, where he says, “O impose silence on my heart, which thinks it has much to say. I constantly fear having written nothing but a sigh, when I believe I have set down a truth.”