Piyush Roy
So the big debate this week has been about how the government of the land that gave the world its first manual on sex, the Kama Sutra, could ban its citizens from accessing adult sexual content online. In technical terms, what happened was that the department of Electronics and Information Technology asked the Department of Telecom to notify internet service providers to block access to 857 URLs of websites it considered pornographic under the provision of Section 79(3) (b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Their crime – hosting ‘immoral’ content contrary to the guidelines of Article 19(2) of the Constitution of India, under which the state can curb a fundamental right in order to maintain public order, decency or morality.
The government has justified its action as a response to a Supreme Court directive seeking strict laws in response to a PIL filed by advocates Vijay Panjwani and Kamlesh Vaswani seeking curbs on internet pornography featuring children. The Supreme Court observation had also come with a rider that it would not like to be seen interfering with adults wanting to watch porn in the privacy of their rooms. Vociferous filmmakers like Ram Gopal Varma have likened the order with the ISIS and Taliban’s restrictive bans on personal freedoms. While Twitter anger has questioned if we are going the Gulf and Saudi (Arabia) way, blog satire has lamented the Modi government of denying the ‘aam aadmi his acchi raatein’, while the promises on ‘acche din’ still wait to be delivered.
My contention is that, what an adult does in his private space without hurting anyone or upsetting the harmony in society should not be a state’s concern. Establishing a morally upright society for keeps, cannot be a knee jerk state agenda. For any lasting impact on the psychological make of an enlightened human being to be, the grooming has to be more foundational, like in one’s upbringing at home, from his/her socio-cultural context under the nurture of spiritual and/or healthy, universal traditions. Though in the context of erotica, one may argue that the Indian tradition has always been relatively more open and imaginative than other civilisations both in the West and the East. It could not have been otherwise, when ‘kama’ or sex happens to be one of the four (the others being dharma, artha and moksha) acknowledged purusharthas(goals) of life.
An open celebration of erotica also meant a natural respect for women, and greater gender sensitivity. You just have to look at the body language of men and women in our erotic temple architecture to understand that underlined equality as a way of life. The most desired woman in many ancient Indian societies was often elevated to the status of a nagarbadhu or bride of the city, a la the fictitious Vasantasena or the legendary Amrapali (also one of Buddha’s first, famous female disciples), who while notionally belonging to the entire city, enjoyed that autonomy of choice as to whoshe would choose to allow to enter her private chambers. Amrapali was a famous courtesan from ancient Vaishali, the capital city of one of the Indian sub-continent’s oldest democratic confederations led by the Licchavis in modern day Bihar. What an irony that today’s Indian democracy wants to dictate who or what’s going to enter that private space of its citizens!
It’s not that the majority consumers of porn are not aware of what’s good and what’s bad, or the difference between the celebratory and the surreptitious. Porn often is just another companion initiation ritual, like erotic literature once was, or erotic public art and sculpture before that, to a young person’s body processes of sexual awakening; it’s never the end! Bad, exploitative porn degrades the female gender, and erroneously alludes to ‘pleasure seeking’ being a male prerogative only.
Why popular Hollywood porn star turned Bollywood actress Sunny Leone is still treated as a pariah by the industry’s A-list filmmakers, with its biggest superstars declining to act opposite her in spite of her huge box-office draw? And why Devika Rani, the first leading actress to do kissing scenes in Indian cinema in the Silent Era, long before ‘the act’ became a taboo in the Golden Era is remembered as the ‘first lady’ of Indian cinema. Porn howsoever popular will forever remain a fringe interest, a time pass, a guilty pleasure –unless of course official diktats like the latest one bring it to centre stage.
Sooner than later, a maturing individual will outgrow that fascination for more lasting and fulfilling experiencesin the real. Until then, the ‘adult film’, like the world’s oldest profession, does enjoy that contestableusage of indirectly maintaining social sanity as a harmless outlet to the unholy urges of many an untamed lunacy from acts of actual sexual violence.