Inside The Feminist, Anti-Caste, & Queer Heart Of India’s Goth Movement

Before being trivialized through the 'goth baddie gf' that every vanilla femboy dreams of, the subculture was a language of defiance, melancholy, and meaning-making forged in the aftermath of punk. Emerging in 1980s Britain through bands like Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees, it took the skeletal energy of post-punk and infused it with mood: minor-key guitars, cavernous reverb, and a fascination with mortality and myth. But goth has never only been about music. It has always been an aesthetic philosophy — a way of approaching the world that treats darkness as a form of knowledge. At its best, goth is less about sorrow than about survival.

In India, the subculture’s slow flowering feels like an act of resistance. Our alternative scenes have long revolved around metal, punk, and electronic music, with little space for the measured intensity of goth. Yet over the past few years, a small but committed community of artists — musicians, designers, and curators — have begun to cultivate a distinct Indian goth lexicon. Their work emerges as a form of translation: finding the points where rage, tenderness, myth, and even marginalisation intersect.

Among them is Echo Eudora, a musician whose art transforms pain into purpose. There's also Gurpreet Singh, founder of the community page Goths India and a musician exploring gothic metal’s emotional weight; and Willow Scarlet, also known as Bhumi, a gender-fluid artist who helped inaugurate 'Mauthpit', India’s first goth night. Together, their voices form a map of how goth is being reimagined in India as a consciousness.

When asked about the emotional core of her music, Echo Eudora begins from silence. “When you sit still in darkness, in true silence, you learn how to respect it because it teaches you how to survive,” she says. Her relationship to darkness was not inherited from Western imagery but shaped by isolation and self-discovery. “As a child, I often found myself isolated or unwanted and while social conditioning teaches us to hate ourselves for the lack of validation, I began viewing things from a different perspective. I viewed me being by myself as a chance for me to explore the depths of my mind.”

That early solitude became a method. She recalls how she, “admired monsters and broken scars because they reminded me of myself,” and how people’s fear of their demons could be reimagined as self-acceptance. As a child, she would carry butterflies with broken wings home to try and bring them back to life, a small act that foreshadowed her later compulsion to heal through art. “When I didn’t have anyone looking out for me and I felt unsafe, the only thing I could do was make art,” she says. “It didn’t matter whether anyone else liked it or not, it was my way of expressing myself.”

In her songs like 'Dark Paradise' and 'Schizophrenic', Echo revisits trauma, mental illness, and societal judgment — but through sonic worlds that hold empathy and rebellion in equal measure. “Schizophrenic was a fun version of a horror I experienced as a sixteen-year-old girl put inside of a psych ward. My parents kept trying to figure out what was wrong with me for wanting to live life differently,” she tells us. And music became her form of resistance against a system that pathologised difference.

Even as she speaks about capitalism’s chokehold on creative freedom, she grounds goth in resistance: “People want numbers, footfall, and money — that’s how their world works. It is a reminder as to why being goth is so important. It is exactly to question this system.” She also criticises how venues often expect artists to serve as promoters: “The moment artists are expected to bring in customers, that’s when you take away the opportunity for underground artists to perform.”

Her articulation mirrors what scholars have long observed about goth: that it is a practice of attention — a refusal to look away from death, pain, or social failure. For Echo, those lessons are embodied through the figure of Kali, a goddess she calls both protector and mirror. “The more I worshipped Kali, the more I understood my anger and rebellion. It helped me use my rage for justice and transform myself into who I am today.” Her invocation of Kali, Ixchel, Isis, and Inanna folds goth’s global mythology back into South Asian spirituality, drawing unexpected parallels between ancient goddesses and modern subcultures. “To me, being goth isn’t just about darkness or horror, it’s about a divine sense of energy. It is about embodying the spirit of a powerful being that stands up for what’s right," she notes.

Her spiritual practice extends into the material world through her brand 'Echuora', a merch store she founded to support her career. “Performing at gigs or income through streams isn’t enough to cover the bills. As an independent artist, a merch store is the best shot I have at making a decent income,” she explains. The store sells artwork on wigs and tote bags, with designs she hopes to expand into a "goth cruise line" someday.

Outside music, she finds solace in marine life and the ocean. “I recently read a book about marine biology that inspired me to become a vegetarian,” she says. “I admire the mysterious caves and alien-like creatures in the deep dark trenches of the sea. Swimming next to them seems far more fascinating than a dinner conversation with a stranger.” For Echo, even environmental concern is an extension of her gothic ethics — a recognition of the world’s fragility and interconnectedness. “If politicians stopped fighting each other and started fighting climate change then the world would begin to heal.”

While Echo’s practice is steeped in personal transformation, Gurpreet Singh’s path began with sound. “The expression of sorrow. Some describe being goth as ‘celebrating darkness’; it simply means being open and honest about the depressing parts of life,” he insists. For him, goth was not imported through fashion but through music — symphonic and gothic metal bands like Evanescence, Nightwish, Sirenia, Within Temptation, and Theatre of Tragedy. “It brings me peace to listen to someone else who also suffered trauma and the end of innocence, and expressing my own mental struggles in my music,” he notes

He explains how his upbringing in homegrown musical traditions later merged with gothic influences. “I grew up with Hindi and Punjabi music, and found rock later in life, including Gothic Rock and Gothic Metal,” he says. “What drew me to it was the fearless expression of emotion and despair with the grit of an electric guitar and sophistication of pianos and strings.”

He is careful, though, to distinguish his practice from any attempt at “Indianizing” goth for its own sake. “I do not aim for an Indian expression of goth; what I create is entirely sourced from my personal influences. I work not to continue in anyone’s footsteps but to discover my own sound.” Yet his acknowledgment of the patriarchal world around him — and the way women dominate India’s visible goth spaces — reveals goth’s political undercurrent.

That ethic of care — of making space for the marginalized — runs through every conversation about goth in India. Gurpreet summarizes it simply: “To create a safe space for anyone who feels like an outcast and finds comfort in darkness.”

For Willow Scarlet, who performs under the same name and identifies as gender-fluid, goth’s meaning lies in both community and reclamation. “Ever since I joined the goth community, I’ve always wanted to create something that would include Indian and Desi elements in the goth aesthetics as well as goth music,” they say. In their view, goth’s visual vocabulary — silver jewelry, tribal motifs, mystical imagery — has long borrowed from South Asian cultures, even if the people behind those cultures were rarely visible in the global scene. “I just wanted to make it more ethnically pleasing to the South Asian goth audience, as well as to bring something to goth culture that a lot of brown people could resonate with,” they note.

They describe using henna-inspired liner designs and South Asian textiles to construct their own looks, while their music incorporates sitar and desi drum beats alongside high-reverb soundscapes reminiscent of 1980s gothic rock. “Indian goth artists take their creative freedom and they do not do the same copy pasting of the 80s and 90s goth bands. The elements remain the same — reverb, keys, minor scales — but the way we use it is quite different and very unique.”

Their commitment extends beyond aesthetics to infrastructure. On World Goth Day, Willow helped inaugurate 'Mauthpit', India’s first dedicated goth night — a DIY event for artists, queers, and outsiders across Delhi and North India. “It was always a dream to create something where Indian goth music would be appreciated,” they explain. “Mauthpit strives to make a safe space for Indian goths where they enjoy the music as well as be themselves and connect with the community.”

Willow clarifies that 'Alternative Inside', often associated with them, is not their own brand but a corset label run by a friend that they actively support. Their own venture, 'The Desi Gothic Store', once offered handmade corsets, accessories, and apparel. “Almost 80% of the things I would sell were my own unique designs,” explains Willow. The store is currently on hold while they complete their master’s degree, but they hope to revive it.

The artist highlights how running events like 'Mauthpit' has meant facing infrastructural gaps and indifference. “Dealing with venues can be hectic as sometimes they do not have most of the equipment that you need to set up a mysterious and ethereal mood for a goth night, but we try our best to DIY the stage with our own props.” For them, the priority remains connection: “At the end of the day it is just about the music and the community.”

If Echo turns goth inward into spirituality, and Gurpreet channels it into emotional honesty, Willow wields it as social critique. Their politics are unambiguous: “Everyone and anyone is welcomed in the goth scene in India, especially as long as they are respectful for other people, especially towards minorities — queer people, people from diverse religions. Ideally they should also share some left-leaning views in their politics.”

The emergence of Indian goth does not mean the creation of a single sound or look; it means a gathering of sensibilities — devotional, defiant, introspective — under one nocturnal roof. Each of these artists reframes goth as a living vocabulary. Echo Eudora’s vision of darkness as divine energy, Gurpreet Singh’s insistence on empathy through sorrow, and Willow Scarlet’s translation of goth into a desi, queer, and anti-caste language together form a portrait of a movement in formation. Their work reveals that India’s goth culture is about invention — one that understands, perhaps better than most, that to embrace darkness is not to seek despair, but to reclaim the power of being unseen.

Follow Echo Eudora here, Gurpreet Singh here, and Willow Scarlet here.

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