Welcome to White Shadow Press

My name is Yashasvi Bhandari. I’m the author of Antaram and the founder of White Shadow Press. Thank you for visiting my website–if you’re visiting after having read my book, thank you a thousand times. Words can’t express what that means to me.

For now, and for the foreseeable future, this is a one-man operation. And I’ll admit that this one man has no idea what he’s doing. He never has.  

When I began writing my novel, I knew nothing about writing a novel. I knew even less than nothing about the publishing process. For most of my writing journey, from the second I realized I wanted to be a writer, through the years of self-doubt and self-pity, all the way to the completed manuscript, self-publishing as a concept was repulsive to me, a sign of failure. And the idea of starting a publishing company—that had never even occurred to me.

In short, I had no plan. 

If I were asked what genre I was writing in, I’d shrug. I’ll figure that out later, I thought. Or better yet, I’ll let my agent figure that out. I’m going to write what I want to. I’m going to converse alone with the gods and dictate to people what the gods tell me. It will be magical, spiritual, meaningful. It will be art, real art. I wanted to write, to create, to be an artist with no trade, just passion and purpose. I had no interest in business. I didn’t even want to write for a living; I just wanted to be a writer. Because writing for a living requires what I regard (for right or for wrong) as “lesser” considerations, like making sure to put out content just to so that there’s content available to purchase, keeping track of trends and then quickly jumping on them before they too pass like everything else passes, assiduously adhering to tropes to play to a ready-made audience so as to collect their money, and eschewing all things with soul, because in business, and maybe too in life, all things with soul are risky.

But damn the risks and damn the logic. The objective of White Shadow Press will be to publish books that are drenched in blood. The bloodier the better, I say. But it’s not blood I seek. I’m in search of soul, a thing that’s impossible to define, impossible to identify with sight or the rational mind. One just feels it when one encounters it. One simply knows. Soul needs to be fished out of a body; of necessity, that body must bleed as it’s cut into, and bleed profusely. It’s a painful process, a long process, one that can’t be rushed for material gain or for vanity or for any other purpose besides the desire for soul itself–soul: that weird, deformed, deranged, beautiful, lofty, ugly, sublime thing. Soul is the only goal. And I don’t care how long it takes to get there. 

Dumb, you say? Idealistic? Childish? Naive?

I agree. This whole thing may be, in the end, just a colossal waste of time, effort, and money. The overwhelming odds are that this venture will peter out in time and then linger in my memory until that too fades away. I know that but I don’t care. Money means nothing to me, and I have no material desires—or at least none that are very strong. A home-cooked meal and a bottle (or two, or three) of cheap red wine is enough to make me happy.

I don’t know what will happen from here. But who does? No one, because no one knows anything.

So onwards I’ll go, winging it all the way to the finish.

If I could make a few friends along the way who feel the way I do, who hunger the way I do–for a sense of meaning, for soul–that’d be enough for me.

I hope you’ll be one of them.