Humans have been making pictures of sexual acts for almost as long as they have been having sex. At some point, a female or a male Homo sapiens untangled her/himself after a long session with their current squeeze and thought, “Ah, that was really nice! I think I’ll mark this moment on this cave wall here, right next to where Shmrog has made these drawings of yesterday’s mammoth hunt.” Since the booting up of human time, something in the Homo sapiens mind has wanted to record all bodily activity: hunting, eating, sleeping, dancing and sure enough, getting jiggy. So we have cave paintings, early carvings, miniatures, pata-chitra, Khajuraho and Konarak. In the modern age, in the western hemisphere, we have etchings and lithographs, water-colours and line-drawings. Somewhere in the very hot and fetid lap of the 19th century, photography is invented and its most popular use is quickly found: to photograph attractive bodies, half-clothed or completely naked, alone, posing coquettishly (mostly women, but men too). Or, in some frozen coitus while the photographer flashed his flare and told both, or all three, or five, to hold tight. Towards the end of the 19th century, some people begin to make the still images riffle across our eyes; soon after the invention of cinema we get some enterprising fellow alighting upon the idea that the people in the naughty books no longer needed to hold still and pretend, they could actually be doing the in-out activity in real time, as it were.
Parallel to the movie camera, the telephone is being developed as well. All over Europe and the United States, people are calling each other to make dates to gather to make sexual movies. It probably never occurs to anyone that the two large awkward instruments, the telephone and the moving picture camera, could one day be squeezed into the same tiny closet and forced to procreate. These are pre-XXX days, with people doing amateur things in parts of New York, LA, Paris and Berlin. The Second World War changes things and the industry goes seriously professional in the West; from films in various gauges over the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s things move in the ’80s to a) video-shooting and b) VCR-watching. This is when Indian Man and Indian Economic Muscle unfurl themselves. By the time the mobile telephone grows a camera and a system to pass on moving images via MMS, the Indian male is ready to take over, to come into his own, so to speak.
In terms of middle-class, urban-centric, Indian masculinity, we have this ‘six-pack’ outer layer that we now present to the world: our male filmi heroes, our ‘strong’ cricketers, occasionally our boxers and archers (and even golfers and snooker players, gods help us). Collectively we have our huge and overbearing army which only has to work in parts—it is that big; but deep inside us we know who we are, we Indian men, we know from where we get our uniqueness and we don’t mind who knows it.
Our greatness as men comes, clearly, from our consummate mastery in handling the video-function on our mobiles while we are doing other, less important, things.
I go on to a desi website called www.______.com to check it out and, somehow, I’m not amazed. The material is clearly uploaded by ‘normal-types’, Indian or subcontinental, mobile and digital still-cam wielding janata. You couldn’t make this stuff up and that is exactly the point: in this post-porn fantasy world, everyone, especially every South Asian man, is a stud-star, every woman a randy-raani.
Looking at this supermarket of South Asian handicrafting, my first thought is: okay, sure these damn gizmos which no longer require the participation of a photo or film laboratory staff to bring images to sight are an invitation to private intra-couple exhibitionism that cuts across class and taste boundaries. True all over the world; you do, you shoot the doing, you look at yourselves doing together and this, maybe, leads to further adoings; but were the women on display aware that these pictures and videos would be up on the Net? Next, what is it in men, but specifically desi men, that they need to be ‘seen’, as it were, only or mostly through the woman who is pleasuring them?
The answer to the first question is yes, most of the women seem to be participating not only freely but also with some awareness of where these popping pixels could end up.
As to the second question, it’s clear that ‘maa’ has been replaced by the mobile phone. If an American, European or Chinese was to ask: Merey paas bunglaa hai, gaadi hai, milquat hai, izzat hai, terey paas kyaa hai? The reply would be: merey paas ek good sa cellfone hai, merey paas temple priest sucking...and ***ing MMS hai; merey paas Indian girlfriends getting *** MMS hai, merey paas yeh sab kuchh hai.
Looking at this cornucopia one should be left with no doubt: in the distant future, when they unearth and look at the images of our days and everything has been compacted by time, these unfit, large and small brown bodies, these sub-continental throbbings will stand out in some way as the real thing. As the real action which the larger, fitter, more graceful Caucasian and African bodies were trying to mimic in their silly anatomical pantomimes. Then, as in the past and now, the Indian man with a potent recording instrument in his hand, will rule.
