Marwah, 45, who is a professor of English literature and Creative Writing at Zakir Hussain College talked about her book at the World Book Fair in Pragati Maidan, “It was the subject that chose me, and I knew I had to do it,” she explained.

Based on a sex scandal that shook her hometown Ajmer, in 1992, it was the nude blotted photograph of a young girl published on May 16, 1992, in a local Hindi daily Dainik Navjyoti that prompted Marwah to write Dirty Picture. The scandal involved influential men, from a minority community, who coerced several schoolgirls into illicit sex. They had taken photographs and made video films of the act. “Several extraneous issues clouded the real story,” said Marwah, a determined activist-writer.

Marwah’s audacious fiction is partially based on facts and draws from these sleazy incidents. Set in the liberalisation era in Ajmer and Mumbai, the protagonist, Bharti, is inevitably drawn towards her nemesis. “She is trapped in her small town identity and her attempt to break out makes her a target,” stated Marwah, whose last novel Idol Love, 1999, was a dense political satire. Eventually Bharti’s body becomes the battleground on which the sexual politics of power is laid bare.

Though she didn’t meet the victims of the scandal, Marwah, who began her research in 1996, met the journalist Santosh Gupta who broke the story. “The most difficult conversation was with my mother, who at that time was the vice principal of Savitri Girls,” said Marwah. She finished the novel in 2005. The cover of the book, an oil on canvas by Pakistani artist Iqbal Hussain, typifies the protagonist’s complicated flux of power relations that surround her. However, it is the title that is most evocative. “It is attractive and very clearly sums up what the novel is about,” said Marwah.