“Only sex and Shahrukh Khan sell in India” is what actress Neha Dhupia had famously said 15 years ago and repeated 10 years later. Khan has since struggled to retain his Shah-like regality, but sex shows no sign of abdicating its pink velvet throne. Not the bashful bird-and-bees type you knew from old Bollywood narratives. Rather less covert or allegorical, quite a bit more denotative than connotative, and—pardon the phrase—very in-your-face. Multiplexes have been shut for months, and frankly, smut is grabbing more eyeballs than any tinsel supernova. Indeed, the word ‘smut’ still carries a tinge of the guilt-laced old world. ‘Porn’, on the other hand, is shedding a lot of its value-loaded infamy as it emerges, unquestionably, as the mother of all bestsellers. Or, as many among those who take India all the way to the Olympic podium in viewership rankings and au fait with the vocabulary may choose to rephrase that…MILF.
Something is indeed cooking on the Indian tawa. What are the ingredients that have gone into it, lightly sautéed or deep-fried? First of all, of course, the digital boom. The medium is the message. Take the proliferation of old-style websites, new streaming platforms and apps, with even Instagram and Twitter mediating a million quickies with this new thing called OTT. Two, the content itself is strikingly unabashed. Playing on a screen near you—size does not matter!—are scenes of frank, open sex. Straight, non-straight, you name it. The fruits of this booming industry are a phalanx of indigenous porn stars, badass enough to be making whoopee with their co-actors in front of the camera without a second thought.
Where do they come from? As any number of videos of plainly consensual, absolutely unforced sex or even solo live strip shows will tell you, the old Indian inhibition about public espousals of sexuality is fast dying. There’s a hint of liberation in the air—bound up in a complex where the old repressive sexual regime is alive and kicking too. As is exploitation. Born of that curious pairing, you get the new porn constellations. There has never been any dearth of young men and women from the hinterland who come with a dream to make a career in Bollywood but end up nowhere. Hordes of wannabes return home dejected, many others get somewhere. That place is the screen near you. The wages are paltry, and the idea of consent is often strained in their passage through this grey world. It’s actually a tipoff from one such girl that helped Mumbai police blow the lid off a porn racket running right under Bollywood’s nose. That’s where you heard about the arrests of Raj Kundra—a celebrity businessman in his own right, with a reported net worth of over Rs 2,000 crore—and TV actress Gehana Vashisth.
Volitional or not? That’s a tricky one. Hyderabad-based actress Sri Reddy, who had called out many bigwigs of the Telugu film industry during the #MeToo movement three years ago, says the pandemic has left many girls in the entertainment industry to fend for themselves without any job. “They have no option but to do porn or erotic films for survival,” she tells Outlook. “They do not want to do any other job, they think it will harm their prospects as an actress. It may not be an easy choice, but it at least helps them stay afloat.” Reddy says she was recently approached by a photographer-coordinator for an exclusive nude photoshoot in Goa. “I was offered big money and told it was meant only for the private viewing of one individual. I suspected foul play and rejected it. I wondered, why would anyone pay me so much money just for a private photoshoot? It could have found its way to a porn site.” Reddy admits she was in a position to turn that offer down, but there are thousands of girls in Mumbai who could have fallen for it. “They’re all vulnerable, mentally and financially weak in these Covid-hit times,” she says. “I don’t think only one individual like Raj Kundra could be held responsible for exploiting such girls. Without mafia support, such a racket cannot flourish anywhere.”
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Desi porn is nothing new—a shady, fly-by-night scene has always been there. But that old indigenous porn looked shoddy and amateurish, and invariably featured masked actors. There were sometimes whispers of high-end porn too those days. For instance, in the early 1980s when Kamal Haasan and Sridevi were a fetching pair in Tamil cinema, a rumour circulated that the two had ‘done’ a blue film’, available for viewing only to the rich and famous. When Kamal was asked about this during an interview, he replied in his typically impish way: “Yes, I too have heard about it. And I would definitely like to watch it.” From that coyly suggestive zone, the trail came to pass through sceneries of increasing greyness—secretly recorded videotapes of unsuspecting couples at seedy hotels, surreptitiously outed MMS clips, all the way to the black hole of hinterland rape videos circulated on Whatsapp.
Tamil Nadu had its first brush with modern porn in December 2001, when Dr L. Prakash, a leading orthopaedic surgeon, was arrested and charged with transmitting obscene photos and videos in electronic form. He was alleged to have lured women—some his patients—as well as men to his remote beach house for wild parties, and shot them in video and photographic form. These, converted into DVDs and CDs, were sent to his brother in Seattle labelled as ‘Surgical Procedures’. His brother then uploaded them on porn sites like realindianporn.com, tamilsex.com and amazingindians.com. On a complaint from one of the boys featured in the videos, the police raided the doctor’s clinic and his farmhouse in Minjur, recovered pornographic material and arrested him. Dr Prakash’s case was the first to be tried under the IT Act, when it came into existence in 2001. He was also charged under several other sections of the law, and was sentenced to 13 years in prison. Labelled by local media as ‘Sex Doctor’, Dr Prakash, an otherwise brilliant surgeon, wrote a dozen books, many of them thrillers, during his incarceration. After serving his prison term, he went back to his practice and even addressed medical seminars. His wife, a gynaecologist, had however divorced him after his arrest. Before him, porn in south India happened in the 1980s and ’90s through one-in-six-months B-grade movies directed by a Malayalam director called Sajan—many featuring Prathibha, who used to be a rage those days. The characters would speak mostly desi English, mainly so these could get passed by the censors as English movies. The explicit scenes featuring topless women would not be shown to the censors, and would be added later for being exhibited in small, seedy theatres.
That scenario, suffused in illicit and darker colours, has undergone a sea change lately. Thousands of sex videos, from self-styled erotica to hardcore porn, are strewn all over the internet. Of strikingly superior quality in terms of production values, featuring actors who have not only taken their masks off, but are daring enough to own their projects on social media—in short, awash in broad daylight. In a society soaked in prudishness, this is almost total glasnost.
Many had seen it…coming (sorry). In 2015, a Google Trends report found six Indian cities—Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Howrah, Unnao and Bangalore—among the top 10 places in the world that keyed in the word ‘porn’ on the search engine. A 2018 PornHub report suggested an Indian visitor to a porn site spends an average of 23 minutes 8 seconds, against the global average of 10 minutes 13 seconds. In fact, anything remotely connected to porn has always worked like a magnet here. A report by Let’sOTT, an aggregator that keeps tabs on over 50 OTT platforms, says Mastram, a web series based on an eponymous, fictional porn writer from the 1980s, got a staggering 1.10 crore views on a single day—July 3, 2020—on MX Player. A feature film based on Mastram back in 2014 had barely earned Rs 3.5 crore at the box office, but its 10-part web series became the most viewed Indian series during the pandemic! Doing the kind of business that would do a Salman Khan blockbuster proud. That same month, Ekta Kapoor’s Alt Balaji, known for steamy web shows such as Gandi Baat, also saw a 60 per cent spike in its viewership. In fact, PornHub data shows India logged a 95 per cent spike in traffic to adult sites during the first three weeks of last year’s lockdown. It has not looked back since.
The OTT boom, in a sense, is both cause and effect here. Says a content writer associated with the porn industry, “Prior to the Internet, porn used to be delivered illegally via informal theatres, video cassettes and CDs. It wasn’t easy. People had to slink into morning shows to watch sex scenes interpolated into dubbed regional movies.” Now, adult content is available in clips of 5-10 minutes to 30 minutes. Not all of them are directly on porn sites. Besides live sex shows done by actors on their personal apps, websites and social media platforms, most are published on the dozens of subscription-based apps available on Google Playstore and other web stores. Apps and websites such as Chikooflix, NueFlix, UFlix, Crabflix, Bamboo Flix, XPrime, Fliz Movies, Stream X, Hot Hot X VIP, HotHits, Hot Shots, Gold Flix, Lollipop, Big M Zoo, Bindas Times, Uncut Adda and Uncut Masala—many noticeably riffing on ‘flix’—are names that bear witness to a thriving ecosystem.
There’s enough diversity among them. If Ullu, Kooku, Fliz Movies and Gupchup produce soft porn, NueFliks, Hot Hits, Uncut Adda, 11 Up Movies, Bindass Times, Crabflix, Xprime and Horse Prime stream hardcore. Most of these platforms emerged over the past couple of years, especially since the pandemic forced people indoors. And they promote content openly on Twitter, Telegram etc with small clips, mobile numbers and bank account details. (Outlook called some of these numbers; the receivers feigned ignorance before removing the contents.) Uncut Adda, which describes itself as a video-on-demand platform, opened a restricted Twitter account in November 2020 and collected 32,000+ followers over nine months. Bindas Times joined Twitter in March 2020 and had by August 4 over 54,000 followers. The poster of Tinasutra—starring Tina Nandi—makes its Twitter cover image; the film has been described as “the most demanded film ever on Indian OTT”. Xprime joined Twitter in September 2020 and had by August 2021 nearly 30,000 followers. 11 Up Movies had its Twitter handle blocked in July 2021 following complaints. The Horse Prime app was launched in 2020. They are also interconnected—films made by Eight Shots appears on Bindas Times, NueFliks hosts films made by Uncut Adda, and so on. Clearly, the Raj Kundra-linked Hot Shots is just the tip of a giant, phallic iceberg.
Even this degree of surreptitiousness is missing overground. OTT platforms like Alt Balaji, Ullu and Hoichoi began the trend of erotic content in Hindi and other Indian languages five-six years ago. Later, shows such as Sacred Games, Mirzapur and Paatallok on Netflix and Amazon Prime pushed the envelope further as far as depiction of sex scenes was concerned. There are many who are dismayed by the turn of events. Actor Mukesh Khanna of Mahabharat fame says porn videos have reached even small children today. “Porn sites are named on the lines of Netflix…it should be stopped completely,” he says. Filmmaker Pahlaj Nihalani is bemused by the fact that movie content that wouldn’t have escaped his scissors during his (controversial) tenure as censor board chairman now don’t even need a certificate. Why should satellite TV and OTT have different levels of permissiveness, he asks. “This is a dual policy. If we can have unified taxation under GST, why can’t we have one nation-one rule for the entertainment industry as well?” To be sure, the government has attempted regulation. In 2018, the Centre banned 827 sites but, nimble of foot, many are still available under different domain names. “Indeed, it’s now difficult to say how many porn apps and websites exist in India,” says film trade analyst Atul Mohan. Adds cyber law expert Pawan Duggal, “We still follow laws from a time when the Internet was not that popular. This needs a drastic change.”
But those who speak in prohibitive tones, while not exactly in a minority, do not quite represent India any more than the millions logged by PornHub—with very many of them willing to make fairly open avowals of porn. Without even taking resort to the, well, figleaf of the porn/erotica distinction. Film critic Murtaza Ali Khan weighs in here: “Porn has zero aesthetic value, its sole purpose is the graphic depiction of sexually explicit scenes. Erotica, on the other hand, is any literary or artistic work that deals with erotically stimulating subject matter. However, at the end of the day, these lines can fade and what’s erotica for one can be porn for another and vice versa.” And those who think India should stop being hypocritical would say the seamy underbelly and exploitation hinted at by the Kundra affair will actually fade only with more openness.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Adults Only!")
(With inputs from Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, G.C. Shekhar, Prashant Srivastava and Neeraj Jha)
