Skip to content Skip to footer

Call 22

New Call: Touch

Touch is connection and separation, tenderness and intrusion, memory and longing. Touch is both a privilege and a necessity. It is woven into the fabric of our lives, shaping our senses of belonging and vulnerability. From the loving and healing touch of a mother to formal handshakes, it is a pivotal part of our personal and professional lives. 

Touch can convey emotions without words—comfort, hesitation, desire, or fear—each carrying its own silent weight. An insistent nudge from a pet demanding love; the sacred touch in religious rituals; a tap that commands our screens and connects us to the digital world; or an embrace that consoles without words. While touch forges unbreakable bonds, it also leaves behind fleeting traces that linger in our memory. It enjoys the power to express kindness, warmth, reassurance, love, as well as violence, harm, and pain with equal intensity. Absence of touch can be just as powerful as its presence. Untouchability, rooted in social hierarchies  reveals how the right to touch—and be touched—is often dictated by power, caste, class, and history. Touch transcends the physical, seeping into the emotional, social and psychological landscapes of our lives. 

The 22nd edition of Hākārā invites creative, academic, narrative, and reflective contributions that delve into the myriad dimensions of touch and how it continues to shape our societies and personal lives. 

Accepting Submissions for:

Fiction, dramatic narratives, biographical or autobiographical writings, memoirs, travelogues, visual narratives, visual arts, photography, film and video, performances, and creative forms of material engagement.

Submission Deadline: March 7, 2025

Publication: April 2025.

Submission Guidelines: You can read the detailed submission guidelines here.

Please use this link to send us your work.

We are not accepting email submissions.

Editor 

Ashutosh Potdar

Associate Editor 

Purvi Rajpuria

Editorial Support 

Pallavi Singh and Srujan Inamdar

Submission Guidelines

  1. In response to the primary focus of the upcoming edition of हाकारा । hākārā, we welcome contributions that take on new and innovative forms and new ideas not previously analyzed or that extend beyond an older conversation in the field of creative expression and/or enquiry.
  2. हाकारा | hākārā is a peer-reviewed journal. Being an online journal, we accept only electronic submissions.
  3. The written work has to be submitted as a Microsoft Word document (as .doc and Not PDF or any other format), and be double-spaced text in 12 pt Times New Roman font as an attachment. For the text in Marathi, please follow Unicode format. If the contributor wants to maintain a certain style in presenting work, please inform Hakara Editors while submitting the work.
  4. The image size has to be 150 dpi or more in resolution for visual work submission. Additionally, If you wish to submit your work to the ‘Panorama’ section, images must be at least 1000×600 pixels. Please share details of artworks including title, medium, size and year. In case, the images included do not belong to the contributor, the contributor should provide a source of the images.
  5. Please don’t send video files to be included in the submitted narrative. We can provide links to the video work uploaded on Vimeo, YouTube or other platforms that can be openly accessed.
  6. We require a title page with the contributor’s contact information, a short abstract and a contributor’s bio as part of the submission process.
  7. Submissions must not be previously published nor should they be submitted for publication elsewhere while being reviewed by हाकारा । hākārā’Editorial Board or outside reviewers.
  8. For the submission of research articles/essays(2500-3000 words), please follow the Modern Language Association (MLA) style. The contributors are requested to verify facts, names of people, places, and dates, and double-check all direct quotations and entries, and images in the Works Cited list.
  9. We request the contributor to obtain permission for illustrations, and images from the concerned to be used in submission. Also, translators submitting their work should seek necessary permission from the original writer/publisher if the work will be accepted by हाकारा । hākārā for the publication.
  10. Contributors would hear from the हाकारा । hākārā team a month after the submission regarding the decision on consideration of the work.
  11. For accepted contributions, हाकारा । hākārā Editors would be happy to work with contributors, if required, in finalising the work before its publication.
  12. Copyright remains with the contributor. However, if work on हाकारा । hākārā has been published elsewhere again in print or electronic format, we request the acknowledgement stating that the work was first published in हाकारा । hākārā, an online bilingual journal of creative expression published in English and Marathi. Visit www.hakara.in.
  13. At this stage, हाकारा । hākārā cannot pay contributors. But, we are seeking financial support that may help us pay our contributors in future.
  14. For any queries and submissions, please e-mail us: info@hakara.in
  15. हाकारा । hākārā: ISSN 2581-9976: Included in the University Grants Commission (UGC) CARE-LIST.
  16. We don’t charge any fees to get the literature/art published in हाकारा । hākārā.