In this episode of The Sanskaari Girls Podcast, Ria Chopra—writer and cultural commentator—joins Vandita Morarka to explore digital identity, feminism, and selfhood in the Gen Z age.
Together, they discuss how young people navigate fragmented online selves across platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp, and the particular pressures of code-switching within South Asian cultural contexts. The conversation reflects on writing about the internet from within it, the rise of digital feminism and influencer culture, and the tension between accessibility, authenticity, and rigour.
They also examine the “exhaustion economy” of constant visibility and productivity, before turning to questions of class, audience, and geography in South Asian digital spaces. The episode closes by imagining futures for Gen Z feminism—and what it might take to sustain meaningful, joyful engagement online.
Read more about her work here and buy Ria's book Never Logged Out: How the Internet Created India’s Gen Z NOW!.
🎙️ The Sanskaari Girls Podcast is a podcast by the Sanskaari Girls Book Club (SGBC), a South Asian feminist reading community fostering critical engagement with literature, amplifying marginal voices, and building reflective, politically conscious conversations.
Follow SGBC on Instagram, and sign up for the SGBC Membership!
—CHAPTERS
00:00 The Evolution of Digital Identity07:34 Curation of self across platforms10:04 Conformity in digital spaces11:59 The Robbers Cave Experiment15:05 The other side of online norms15:54 Social conditioning of women16:47 Role of age in curating online behaviour18:43 The Absence of safe spaces for learning21:07 Reflections on mistakes and personal growth23:03 The Interplay of online and offline selves27:13 A case for empathy29:01 Navigating professional and personal identities30:49 What made Ria who she is35:53 Rejecting capitalistic niche-ification38:16 Challenges of writing on the everchanging Internet44:01 The best medium to represent the internet....is the internet47:25 Feminism in the digital age56:48 The role of brands in feminist discourse01:02:05 The crisis of trust in institutions01:05:03 Finding joy in digital exhaustion01:10:34 Survival sans monetisation01:15:21 Empathy and sympathy in feminism01:18:20 Ria's reccs01:26:21 Outro
In this episode of The Sanskaari Girls Podcast, Professor Madhavi Menon—renowned scholar of English literature and gender studies—joins Kuhoo to explore the intricate politics and poetics of desire.
Drawing on Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaf, sufi poets, and everyday life, Professor Menon reflects on desire as something simultaneously seen and unacknowledged, thriving in places we rarely expect. She discusses the role of fantasy in shaping human yearning, and examines how law and morality influence whose desires are legitimised and whose are marginalised, especially in the context of India’s shifting legal landscape around sexuality.
This conversation asks us to reconsider what desire is, how we experience it, and what it reveals about the worlds we live in. Read more about her work here. Her books Infinite Variety and The Law of Desire can be purchased via Speaking Tiger Books, and Amazon.
🎙️ The Sanskaari Girls Podcast is a podcast by the Sanskaari Girls Book Club (SGBC), a South Asian feminist reading community fostering critical engagement with literature, amplifying marginal voices, and building reflective, politically conscious conversations.
Follow SGBC on Instagram, and sign up for the SGBC Membership!
In this episode of The Sanskaari Girls Podcast, the team from Zubaan—India’s pioneering feminist publishing house and NGO—joins Vandita Morarka (founder of SGBC) to explore what it means to be a feminist publisher in practice.
Melissa Fernandes, Aanchal Seema Khulbe, and Indira Tayeng discuss how feminist principles shape editorial decisions, archiving, and on-the-ground community engagement. Together, they reflect on how Zubaan’s unique model bridges publishing and activism, preserves feminist histories, and continues to reimagine what feminist knowledge production can look like in South Asia.
Follow Zubaan on Instagram (Books + Projects). Check out more of their work at Zubaan Projects, and shop their wonderful titles at here.
🎙️ The Sanskaari Girls Podcast is a podcast by the Sanskaari Girls Book Club (SGBC), a South Asian feminist reading community fostering critical engagement with literature, amplifying marginal voices, and building reflective, politically conscious conversations.
Follow SGBC on Instagram, and sign up for the SGBC Membership!
In this episode of the Sanskaari Girls Podcast, Vandita Morarka speaks with linguist, technologist, and translator Sowmya V. B. about the art and politics of translation. Through the lens of her work on The Hunger that Moved a Goddess, Sowmya reflects on what it means to carry meaning, rhythm, and emotion across languages.
Sowmya runs pustakam.net, a bi-lingual website with reviews of novels and films, short stories and interviews of famous Indian and global personalities; read her translated work here, here, here, and here, and follow her work with ‘Sowmya Writes….on Everything She Wants to’.
🎙️ The Sanskaari Girls Podcast is a podcast by the Sanskaari Girls Book Club (SGBC), a South Asian feminist reading community fostering critical engagement with literature, amplifying marginal voices, and building reflective, politically conscious conversations.
Follow SGBC on Instagram, and sign up for the SGBC Membership!
In this episode of the Sanskaari Girls podcast, Vandita Morarka engages in a profound conversation with poet, activist, writer Meena Kandasamy, exploring the concept of the feminist killjoy. They discuss the complexities of speaking out against oppression, the emotional balance between anger and joy, and the role of silence as a form of resistance. Kandasamy shares personal anecdotes and insights on navigating loneliness in truth-telling, the importance of friendship and solidarity in feminist struggles, and the cultural significance of madness and possession in women's narratives. The conversation also touches on the influence of fiction on real-world feminism and concludes with recommendations for further reading on difficult women in literature.
Read more about Meena's work, follow SGBC on Instagram, and sign up for our (free) membership.
In this episode of The Sanskaari Girls Podcast, writer, editor, and essayist Rega Jha joins Vandita Morarka (founder of SGBC) to discuss the essay as a feminist form. From personal storytelling to digital platforms, Rega reflects on how essays can be both intimate and political—bridging personal experience with collective feminist thought.
Subscribe to Here/Now Studies, Rega’s newsletter, follow SGBC on Instagram, and sign up for the SGBC Membership.