Savita Bhabhi and I: A true love story

How did I end up writing Savita Bhabhi stories?

It started in 2009, when Savita Bhabhi had just begun. I was a fresh computer science graduate, freelancing for a magazine. My friend and I were working on our design startup. And I had just started work on my first graphic novel, which was to be a serious Pakistan–India dhishkyaun shahkar.

The first few Savita Bhabhi episodes had come out and I, like everyone else, was reading them all. Some ideas are so strong that sometimes their treatment doesn’t really matter. I don’t mean to say that the concept of Savita Bhabhi was treated badly. The artwork of the first comic—The Bra Salesman—is really good. The ones that followed had good artwork too but it was the concept that sparked my engine, and I guess everyone else’s as well.

Then I got on the Savita Bhabhi forum. This was before you could stream porn online, or at least before I could. Forums were a great place to find good porn. By good porn, I mean, the porn that works for you at that moment in time. I find the stories in porn films to be exceptional. The stories of the good old, full-length porn movies border on the absurd. But between the absurdity and the bad acting, it somehow creates something that is actually not bad—something unusual. Recent porn films, which are shot in HD and want to be tasteful, no longer have that strange quality. It is difficult to explain. I think it’s because you get the feeling that the new films take themselves very seriously and the old ones didn’t.

Anyway, I thought the Savita Bhabhi forum would have gold. Instead, I saw their invitation asking for stories from readers. So, I shared my story idea, which was inspired by the graphic novel I was working on.

I was deep into research then: Tarbela Dam, Afghanistan, behaviour of frontier tribes, etc. So the story I wrote was this: Savita Bhabhi goes to Afghanistan to catch Osama Bin Laden on behalf of the USA. She lures him out of hiding and f***s him till he’s tired and ready to surrender.

Why did I feel like writing a story for Savita Bhabhi? Well, I like humour and I want to be a part of funny things. I saw Savita Bhabhi as something funny, something naughty that I could write. I can craft an absurd plot. It might not be good, but I can write one.

The next day, I got an email from a ‘Deshmukh’—the pseudonym for the owner of Savita Bhabhi. He liked the story and wanted me to flesh it out, although he suggested we change the location to Shimla and he’d rather have a dacoit instead of Osama. I was cool with it. He asked me to send him a rough plot and that he’d take care of the rest. I did my bit, he did his, and Savita in Shimla was out soon.

And then I went out, feeling wonderful, like an invisible Republic Day parade was on. Immediately afterwards, I bumped into my buddy Adhiraj Singh and the staff of what was then Random magazine (today, Comic Con India). How I showed off! Badi santushti mili. As someone who draws, I liked the illustrations. They were done. I have never been a perfect anatomy, third angle to the fifth perspective, aur pata nahi kya guy. I just draw, theek deekhey toh badhiya. So I was happy.

A few weeks later, I suggested another idea and Deshmukh responded. This time I was exploring my ‘krativity’—Savita won’t be at the house, she would be at her maayka. Her husband Ashok would be at home, alone. He would be visited by the cablewallah, doodhwallah etc., and none of them charge him. In their flashbacks would be their sequences with Savita Bhabhi. The story would end with Ashok congratulating Savita Bhabhi on her good management of the home.

Here too, Deshmukh edited the storyline and wrote the porn himself. I did write the porn, but he told me, ‘Lovemaking isn’t alternate oohs and aahs,’ (which is quite true). And I loved my absurd plots more than writing the erotic parts. I have always been in a hurry, and hurry is bad for lovemaking.

So I stuck to what I knew best—providing the storyline.

But I asked him to credit me, that is, to mention my name on the cover. He was unsure, since usually, everyone got pseudonymous credits like FunkY!@bb. I just didn’t understand why people wouldn’t want their name on something so cool. Or did they not think it was cool? Maybe they were not Indians? Or maybe they were and they knew their chacha read it? Pata nahi.

But yeah, I got my full credit, and I’ll always be proud of it. Nobody in my bloodline can top that. 

Deshmukh later asked me to write for a third time for a new comic series he was planning, and this time he (actually, I have never been sure if Deshmukh was he or she) was ready to pay me. They wanted me to sign a contract with some company based in Isle of Man, an island located between England and Ireland. I agreed and wrote the story, though by the time that was wrapped up, I was lost in other things in my life and could never get the money.

Then other things happened.

In 2011, I finished my first graphic novel, The Itch You Can’t Scratch, and on a whim, the publisher and I decided to mention the following on the blurb: ‘After writing for Savita Bhabhi …’ This small, impulsive act taught me about sensationalism, journalism, ethics, PR agents, everything.

Since my book received wide coverage and the first article about my book called me the creator of the character Savita Bhabhi, Deshmukh was pissed. I wrote to the reporter but she didn’t correct it.

During all this, my parents maintained a safe silence.

Maybe they knew, maybe they didn’t. My graphic novel was about my life and my family. It was honest about poverty. But my sisters were pissed about the honesty with which I had written about our family. The poverty of a Dalit family, the story of my father’s brothers who were consumed by it. As an upper-middle-class family now (thanks to my father and reservations), my sisters try to keep that under wraps.

They felt shame in me putting it out like that for the world to read.

My eldest sister told me about her issues with the book before she stopped talking to me altogether for some time. About Savita Bhabhi, well, they never spoke of it. My eldest sister once mentioned it once: ‘Aur tu ek to ajeeb ajeeb cheezein kar hi chukka hai, wo kya bhabhi waigarah …’  and then she laughed.

That doesn’t mean all my relatives were as easy-going. 

One of my mamajis gave me a golden lecture on doing ‘these bad things’ and how he never thought I was ‘that kind of boy’, I’d seemed so ‘normal’. I had made ‘these shameful things public’ and I had to succeed a lot in life to wash these sins off—pata nahi kya kya kaha.

Looking back, I still feel Savita Bhabhi was a powerful character. Obviously she’s hot as hell—what draws me to her is the whole desipana in an area where Indians send top traffic to adult websites, but still don’t create adult content. Also, her character appeals to the teenage boy in me who used to drool over beautiful older buxom women. I have nothing to say in about the character. There’s nothing to learn, man, it’s just the whole naughtiness of it. That’s it. Why do we have to dissect everything? Roti khaa ke so jao, yaar.

I do not want to talk about how the character liberates women, etc. In my head, they don’t need anyone or any character to liberate them. They are liberated, they liberate themselves. It’s an individual who does things. If a serendipitous thing like an encounter with a fictional character helps it, then great. Dissection is a useless debate, which wastes essential time; we can use that time to take action, useful small acts that begin change. Not bakar bakar wherever that is just lines of text. Lorem ipsum. Lo mujhse bhi likhwa liya duniya ne paragraph. Zeher kahan hai?

A lot of people also might pretend to like Savita Bhabhi because it’s cool to do so, like watching the movie Gunda is cool, a kind of cultural slumming it. But I believe the character was a big success because of its relatability. It invoked this dark fantasy for a hot bhabhi, yet kept it slightly funny, catching on to the tone of Mastram (the cheap erotic literature, which also inspired a film). Take the story of Savita giving tuitions—a simple act that occurs everywhere is made naughty, and a scenario that’s already in the mind of every teen who goes for tuitions. It’s just that someone wrote about it.

I would happily do it again.

Sumit Kumar is a cartoonist and founder of the comics and animation studio Bakarmax. Excerpted with permission from Love, Sex, and India: The Agents of Ishq Anthology, Westland Books (2026).