South Asian Pornographies Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene

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.