1st Edition
South Asian Pornographies Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene
South Asian Pornographies is the first consolidated volume that explores the relationships between pornography, obscenity, law and desire in South Asia. Focusing on case studies from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh while gesturing towards other countries in South Asia, the authors of this volume come from fields as varied as history, literature, media and communication, and the visual arts. The book proposes that as a geo-political location, South Asia has a unique relationship to pornography, given the multiplicity of cultural and legal-censorial regimes that define the obscene and the permissible. South Asian case studies can demonstrate how pornography in the region is often defined in oblique terms, finding reflection in various modes of popular (and sometimes underground) culture, bypassing legal and censorial constraints. Like questions of identity that can only be answered in the plural (identities rather than identity), this book demonstrates how a range of pornographies constitutes the force field of sexualized media in South Asia. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, History, Sociology, and Social and Cultural Anthropology. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Porn Studies.
Introduction—Towards an Incomplete Repertoire of South Asian Pornographies: Challenges, Potentials and Futures
Darshana Sreedhar Mini and Anirban K. Baishya
Part I–Before Pornography: Sexology and Popular Sexual Discourses
1. Cast(e)ing and translating sex in the vernacular: the writings of Santram BA in Hindi
Charu Gupta
2. Purging the pornographic, discipling the sexual and edifying the public: pornography sex education and class in early to mid-twentieth century colonial Bengal
Arnav Bhattacharya
Part II–Art, Print Culture and Literature at the Edges of the Pornographic
3. A short history of the ‘Blue-Photo’: Bengali sex magazines and the visual empire of printed images (1940–1970)
Bijleeraj Patra
4. Reading Anandalok: obscenity, cinema and other ‘prohibitive’ pleasures in 1970s–1990s Bengali print culture
Spandan Bhattacharya
5. Pornography and Indian miniature painting: the case of Avadh, India
Natalia Di Pietrantonio
6. ‘Raped, outraged, ravaged’: race, desire, and sex in the Indian empire
Anubhav Pradhan
7. Between aunties: queering South Asian aunty porn
Kareem Khubchandani
Part III–South Asian Porn and the Digital Turn
8. The X factors of sex: hijras, Victorian law, and digital porn in postcolonial India
Rahul K. Gairola
9. Pleasure, bodies and risk: women’s viewership of pornography in urban India
Ketaki Chowkhani
10. When celluloid pornography went digital: class and race in the Bangladeshi cut-piece online
Lotte Hoek
11. Transgressions in Toonland: Savita Bhabhi, Velamma and the Indian adult comic
Darshana Sreedhar Mini and Anirban K. Baishya
12. Capitalizing on desire: (re)producing and consuming class in Indian ‘gay’ pornography
Michiel Baas
13. ‘Grindr is basically interactive porn’: Ethnographic observations from Kolkata on queer intimacies and ‘pic exchange’ on Grindr and PlanetRomeo
Rohit K. Dasgupta
Part IV–Feminist and Minor Approaches to South Asian Pornographies
14. #PatriarchyKaPackup: mediating sexual discourse and the casteless feminist subject in Indian performance poetry
Pallavi Rao
15. ‘I am a porn star!” Sex and Sunny Leone unlimited in Bollywood
Tupur Chatterjee
16. ‘We give sex a good name’: an Interview with Paromita Vohra
Darshana Sreedhar Mini and Anirban K. Baishya
17. Confluences: of war porn and nationalism, at the limits of memory
Ricky Varghese
18. Porn, sexuality and expression in Sri Lanka: feminist debates and interventions
Subha Wijesiriwardena
Biography
Darshana Sreedhar Mini is Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (2024), which explores the media-ecology produced by Malayalam soft-porn films by mapping their transnational journeys. Her research interests broadly include South Asian Cinema, Feminist Media, Global Media Cultures and Migrant media. Her work has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Film History, Porn Studies, Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, South Asian Film and Media, Journal for Ritual Studies and International Journal for Digital Television.
Anirban K. Baishya is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Viral Selves: Selfies and Digital Cultures in India. His research interests include new media and digital cultures, social media and political culture, media aesthetics, surveillance studies, and global media. His work has been published in International Journal of Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, South Asian Popular Culture, Porn Studies, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and Media, Culture & Society.
