Exploring this Spot for Rare and Artistic Zines through Bandra's Zine Culture

From queer illustrators mapping heartbreak to Dalit poets reclaiming public space, Bandra’s zine culture offers more than quirky design. It’s a quiet but growing resistance against commercial publishing, social erasure and silence. In these handmade booklets, the margins are no longer sidelined; however, they speak first, loud and proud.

How Zines Travelled Across Borders to Find a Home in Bandra

Zines, short for magazines, are small, self-published works that prioritise voice over polish. Built on a DIY ethos, they often mix handwritten text, collage, and illustrations to tell stories that don’t typically reach mainstream platforms. What began in the 1930s as sci-fi fanzines in the US gradually evolved into a radical tool used by punk collectives, queer communities, and various political movements worldwide. In India, zines have gained ground over the past decade, with spaces like Bombay Underground playing a key role in shaping the culture. These artistic zines became a means of resistance and reflection on a wide range of topics, from public buses and biryani to heartbreak and caste.

In the heart of Chapel Road, Bandra, a small but spirited space called Fluxus Chapel is keeping that energy alive. Set up by Himanshu S, one of the earliest zinemakers in the country, this spot functions as a reading room, distro, and micro-gallery all at once. With over 150 zines by creators across India, Fluxus invites people to read, borrow, or buy work that ranges from personal journals to protest art. It also hosts regular zine-making workshops that break down the form for curious newcomers. In a neighbourhood better known for cafés and street art, Fluxus Chapel offers something different, as a rather raw, tactile, and deeply human storytelling that refuses to be sidelined.

How to Create Your Zine as a First-Time Artist

Making a zine is about personal expression. Begin with a theme, such as heartbreak or street photography, and sketch out your ideas. Start small with simple formats, such as an A5 booklet or a single-fold zine made from one sheet of paper. You can handwrite, draw, collage, or even mix in digital tools like Word or InDesign. What matters most is the voice behind it, not the design perfection. Many artists even use cut-outs, Xerox textures, or risograph prints to give their zines a raw, tactile feel.

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Once your pages are ready, photocopy them, fold and staple the booklet together, and you’ve got your first zine. Share it at zine swaps, lend it through libraries, or sell it at indie fairs and online platforms. You don’t need a publisher; just the urge to make and show it to your friends also works. The beauty of zine-making lies in the freedom it offers: there are no rules, only your story.

How Zine Culture Generates Creative Livelihoods and Preserves Counter-Cultural Memory

In Bandra’s alternative art circuits, zine-making operates as both a mode of self-authorship and a decentralised creative economy. By fighting institutional gatekeeping —whether it be galleries, publishers, or curated platforms —emerging artists can retain full agency over their content, aesthetics, and circulation. Independent spaces like Fluxus Chapel serve as hybrid spaces of distribution and community exchange, offering not just visibility but also economic independence through zine sales, participatory workshops, and collaborative programming. This low-barrier, high-agency model empowers practitioners to monetise their work on their terms, fostering a micro-economy rooted in artistic autonomy and mutual support.

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At the same time, the cultural function of zines extends far beyond commerce. These objects serve as living archives of dissent, identity, and hyperlocal knowledge, echoing the ethos of India’s little magazine movement while drawing from the global DIY lineage, much like the experiences of revolutionaries fighting for independence against the British Raj. Zines foreground the vernacular, the marginal, and the subjective, offering a platform for narratives often excluded from hegemonic media. In their raw visual language and fragmented storytelling, they resist sanitisation and institutionalisation, becoming critical tools of cultural preservation and resistance. Within this framework, zine culture is a politically charged, archival practice that continues to redefine who gets to speak, document, and be remembered.

Structural Barriers and the Indian Lag in Zine Culture

Despite its radical potential, zine culture is burdened by some systemic limitations both globally and more acutely within the Indian context. Internationally, zines operate on the margins of the mainstream literary and artistic economy, lacking institutional validation and sustainable funding models. The result is a creative ecosystem where most zinemakers balance their practice with full-time work, facing burnout and limited reach. Without formal networks of support or distribution, zines often remain hyperlocal, under-circulated, and vulnerable to erasure.

In India, these constraints are accompanied by deeper infrastructural and cultural gaps that continue to stifle the growth of self-publishing as a legitimate art form.

Firstly, there is a critical absence of public infrastructure for alternative publishing. Unlike global cities that house dedicated zine libraries or state-funded independent presses, Indian institutions such as libraries, art schools, and museums largely exclude zines from their collections and programming.

Secondly, the cost and accessibility of print production technologies are almost negligible. Affordable printing options are scarce, especially for creators outside metropolitan centres. Access to tools like risograph printers commonly used in zine-making internationally is non-existent, pushing artists to compromise on quality or scale and limiting themselves to spaces like Instagram to just show their art as a creator, not as a full-time artist who makes a living off of their art. 

Thirdly, zines continue to lack ‘discursive legitimacy’ within the Indian cultural landscape. They are often used synonymously with the ‘informal or amateur’, and are rarely included in art festivals, literary forums, or academic research. This persistent marginality prevents zines from making meaningful contributions to broader conversations about contemporary culture and politics. They get called something “less serious” when seen in spaces of protests. 

Fourthly, linguistic and geographic centralisation limit inclusivity. The majority of visible zines are produced in English and anchored in urban experience, sidelining regional languages and rural perspectives that could diversify and decentralise the medium. 

Building a Future Where Zines Thrive

Zine culture in India is a living, breathing archive of voices that often go unheard. To ensure its longevity, we must move beyond romanticising its DIY ethos and begin actively investing in its ecosystem. This includes creating public zine libraries, integrating zine-making into academic and artistic curricula, and offering material and financial support to creators, especially those working in regional languages and non-urban contexts. By bridging grassroots creativity with structural support, we can ensure that zines continue to be a space for self-authorship, dissent, and collective memory in a rapidly homogenising cultural landscape.