Amiya Bhanushali has found my ticklish spots. Her fingers flutter down the side of my body after lightly touching my hair and gently rest on my neck. I giggle as they approach my waist, rousing me from a gentle stupor that the past 30 minutes of ambient electronica music, views of the monstera on her balcony fluttering in the light afternoon breeze, and her hands have lulled me into. Now, she giggles with me and stays in those sensitive zones—her left- hand fingers roving from my axilla to thigh, as my body shakes and squirms involuntarily. I whisper “stop” through quiet tortured laughter. She doesn’t. “Stop” is not our safe word.
Instead, with a sudden movement, she tightens the rope with which she has cuffed my legs and pulls it toward a second rope snaking across my arms, chest and torso, ostensibly to tie both ends (and me) into a knot. At age 38, I’m not as bendy as I used to be, so she gives up when she senses resistance. With an unused coil of rope, she gently thwacks me up and down the lateral and posterior as she begins to slowly (so slowly) loosen the knots. When she’s done, I sit up with a groan. She grins, wraps her legs around my torso and envelopes me in a warm, tight embrace—bringing our shibari session to a close.
We are no longer dom and sub.
A flame-red framed artwork on her wall reads: “Be as romantic as you want. Be as romantic as you want to be.”
Whatever one thinks of BDSM—the leather whips and the handcuffs—you never think of it as a stress-reducing activity. Yet, shibari feels like an antidote to modern-day anxiety.
It was while browsing Pinterest for crochet and embroidery inspo, during the knotty days of the COVID-19 pandemic, that 27-year-old Bhanushali chanced upon an image of a human body tied up with rope. Bhanushali (her/their), then working at the affordable art platform Art & Found and also a practicing hand-poke tattoo artist, had found solace in craft—making things with her hands had, after all, always been how she felt she communicated best. The post wasn’t her first encounter with bondage—that was a traumatic experience in her early teens when she wasn’t quite ready—but it was a turning point. Now, “the rope felt like a bigger version of crocheting on the body”, she says. “I wanted to make bodies look beautiful with rope.”
That’s how Silly Hands Shibari started: an artist’s pursuit of beauty. In the last three years, Bhanushali has been studying and practising the Japanese bondage technique that, in its currently popular form, marries aesthetics with kink—where the rules of play are the same as any other BDSM activity but with a slight twist. There are many types of bondage, she tells me, and as many tools: from gags, blindfolds and handcuffs to plastic or gauze (for mummification) and latex beds that have a single hole for breathing (and sensory deprivation). She prefers the rope. “Shibari has a wonderful artistic quality to it.”
In 2022, Bhanushali dove deeper into the wild world of bondage, learning from online spaces (such as YouTube channel called Shibari Study), and IRL ones: attending The Intimacy Curator events, interacting with Mumbai and Bengaluru’s kink community, hanging out at kink-focused film festivals.
“I realised a lot about myself during that journey,” she says, “like how I see myself as an adult, how I see myself as a dom, and what is the kind of dom/sub relationship that I’m keen to explore.”
Last year, inspired by her own journey and sensing a niche she could fill in the kink landscape, Bhanushali launched Silly Hands Shibari—probably the only professional studio of its kind in the country dedicated to teaching the practice, methods and meaning of shibari. Besides her home city, Mumbai, she has held workshops in Gurgaon, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, where she’s taught the ethics, terminology and practice of rope tying, and where participants have practised playing riggers on consenting bunnies—of both the human and soft-toy species.
Bhanushali also regularly provides private sessions of varying levels of intensity at her home studio to those who sign up via a Google Form—from a beginner-level one like ours, with light rope-play, to more intense ones that can also involve bodily suspension. “Usually, the sessions are free flowing. I don’t have a set of steps I follow; I let the rope lead me. But it always starts with me letting them know what to expect, and for them to keep the communication open with me about what feels good and what doesn’t,” says Bhanushali. “The point of it is to get into your body, feel things and let them come to the surface—the sort of things we don’t allow ourselves to feel on a daily basis.”
Do people often turn up expecting…release, I ask. “Not really. I make that quite clear,” she says. “My practice is not sexual, although what I do would come in the universe of sex work, because it is related to and very close to physical body contact.” Indeed, I realise, our session has been charged not with any kind of arousal, but a surprisingly deep level of intimacy and connection. As I lay there minutes earlier, my body a rag doll in Bhanushali’s hands, I felt accepted. Counterintuitively, in that surrender, in that loss of control, I felt relaxed, calm, even content.
So, what’s in it for her? “I love knowing that my hands can create the feelings they create in my clients,” says Bhanushali. Her interest also lies in creating a “third space” to explore the somatic, therapeutic and artistic possibilities of this ancient art form—to rescue it as much from its shame-shrouded image as from its violent, misogynistic, exploitative roots, all of which were true of shibari (or kinbaku) as it evolved. In Japan, it started as a wartime punishment in the Middle Ages before it was drafted into the pleasure quarters of the Edo period, the pornographic magazines and films of the 20th century, and the swinger clubs of modern-day Japan.
I, a cis-het woman with fairly vanilla tastes in the bedroom, learnt of this fascinating history of shibari through a link to an article by internationally known shibari practitioner and author Midori, shared on the Silly Hands WhatsApp community. It’s the sort of space where conversation flows freely—about discomfort and trust, limits and boundaries. On days that Bhanushali opens up the forum, its 250-odd (and growing) members discuss alt spaces and gear, but more importantly, dynamics and negotiation, what makes a good rigger, green and red flags of rope bottoms, and safe practices. “Apart from letting go of the whole sexualisation of shibari, the fetishisation of bodies and rope,” Bhanushali says, “for me, there is also the exploration of the idea that there doesn’t have to be a sexual relationship with anybody to be able to experience something that is sexual. Those two are very different things.”
Through her practice, the Shibari practitioner is also teaching us about the delicate play of submission and domination. “I see my work as unserious, more as an expression of who I am as a person,” she says. “Silly Hands also ties shibari with the idea of playing as children but also play as kink—it all ties in together.” Kink, it appears, has captured the imagination of young people everywhere (a recent study claims almost 55 per cent of Gen Z globally reported embracing kink). India’s own sexual revolution has given way to a thriving pleasure industry, and even a cursory Google search for “shibari in India” will now throw up a Singapore-origin kink service and websites of underground indie brands who cater to this specific market. Bhanushali is keen to do her bit to keep the education flowing and cautions. “This is not something you pick up randomly. You have to be super aware, you have to understand consent and boundaries and all of that thoroughly.”
So, who is shibari for really? “Literally everyone,” says Bhanushali. “I don’t think there’s any exclusion. Allies are always welcome to grow the space, but I do want it to be a safe space for LGBTQ folx, thin bodies, fat bodies, disabled bodies, neurodivergent people. I am many of these things, and if I don’t extend that, I’m not doing enough.”
