The north Indian regional pulp fiction industry was mostly centered around Meerut and Daryagunj in Delhi. In the 1960s and 1970s, these magazines and books were selling in the hundreds of thousands. Some popular writers were Pyareylal Awaaraa, Kushvaahaa Kant, Gulshan Nanda, Ved Prakash Sharma, Rajhans, Ibn-e-Safi, Akram Ellahabadi, Ranu and Surendra Mohan Pathak, some of whom had written over 1500 novels each. In the 1980s, many of these novels were easily selling 500,000 to 600,000 copies without any pre- or post-launch publicity (Pande, 2008).
A dash of crime romance laced with a heavy dose of pornography where women were stereotyped as passive and brutalised by ‘macho’ men was the main content. Ved Prakash Sharma’s Vardi Wala Gunda (1996; translated as The Criminal in Uniform) is a story based on Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and is laced with a liberal dose of black magic and tantric potions induced to make the women wild, though ultimately subjugated by brutal men. It sold a million copies.
These books are a long way away from the Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana, the Sougandhikaparinay, the Shritawanidhi or the Basholi, Kangra and Rajasthani style of miniature paintings with erotic illustrations. These earlier texts contained practical descriptions about the art of sex and did not depict the degradation or domination of women, violence or paedophilia.
The sex industry has confused and manipulated the minds of many who believe in sexual equality by normalising pornography (see Suraiya, 2004). Due to this there has been little resistance to the flooding of the Indian markets with explicit, sexually violent and degrading material.
This normalisation has even led to top government officials using pornography and the judiciary defending them. In 2008, the Bombay High Court Judge Justice Vijaya Kapse-Tahilramani, crushed the case against top customs officers arrested for watching porn flicks. He stated that merely watching an obscene film in the privacy of one’s home is not a punishable act under the Indian penal code.
In May 2010, following a tip-off from police in Germany, a serving lieutenant colonel of the Indian Army was arrested by the Crime Branch in Mumbai for uploading child pornography on Websites. The police are investigating whether the officer, Jagmohan Balbir Singh, 42, was also involved in producing these videos (Sharma and Singh, 2010).
Religious men too are not out of the purview as pornography makers and distributors. In January, 2011, a ‘godman’ from Mathura near Lucknow, called Vrindavan ‘Porn Swamy’ Rajendra, was arrested for making sex clips with children for his foreign disciples, who helped him market these through some Websites. Police confiscated a movie camera, DVDs, and hours of footage with children, his wife and some foreigners. Mathura police said he had been booked under Section 377 (unnatural sex) of the Indian Penal Code and 67B of the IT Act.[193]
A 2007 report suggests that the surge of foreign tourists in India is mainly due to the rampant child pornography industry in India. According to the data issued by the Ministry of Tourism, the number of tourists visiting India has gone up from 3.92 million in 2005 to 4.43 million in 2006. This is a sharp increase of 13%. Jeff Avina, director of operations at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna, speculates that the paedophilia industry might be one of the causes of the sharp increase in foreign tourism in India (Pratyush, 2007). In 2009, a Dutch national, 56-year-old William Heum, was arrested on child pornography charges in Chennai on a tip-off by Interpol.[194]
Feminist anti-pornography resistance does not match the might and money of the sex industry. Saheli Women’s Resource in Delhi has been running a continuous campaign against pornography since 2004 on the basis that it commodifies women’s sexuality and depicts women as sex objects (Saheli, 2004). In July 2009, at a conference ‘Daughters of Fire: India Courts of Women’, organised by Vimochana in Bangalore, feminist anti-porn activists drew links between pornography and violence, the oppression of women and girls, and negative impacts on the sexual behaviour of people in general (http://www.vimochana.in/blog/). As mentioned earlier, in 2009, cartoons featuring the Internet porn star, Savita Bhabhi, were banned as a result of a complaint by a women’s group in Maharashtra. And in 2011, the Vrindavan ‘Porn Swamy’ was arrested based on a widespread campaign by women’s groups against him.
These victories seem small at a time when news magazines are writing cover stories that glorify the sexual emancipation of Indian women. But they are significant for highlighting the fact that there are a whole lot of men in India who are not very emancipated and have a hard time accepting women’s sexual emancipation. They are having such a hard time that they must secretly film nude girls and women having sex, and then disperse the results to thousands of others in the global world of online pornography.
Bibliography
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Bollywood Hungama News Network (6 July, 2010) ‘UTV conducts online survey among teenagers as part of marketing plan for Udaan’, http://www.bollywoodhungama.com/news/2010/07/06/14329/index.html.
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