Source : India Media
Communist muffs on a war path against sex is akin to Shiv Sena hoodlums running amok on Valentine’s day. Both are same sides – ideologically and politically -- of the same coin. But that is a different topic.
What is my concern is a person like Paul Zachariah’s description of the current Mallu polity as ‘sex-starved’. But when was Kerala sex-sated, ever? Or, for that matter, India?
Music director Vinu Thomas says in an interview: “When people elsewhere think of Kerala, they invariably speak about adult films. I tell you the real reason behind this. Ours is a small state, with limited income. The film industry too is weak, but highly talented. Adult movies are a periodic development based on the available resources and financial viability. Call it easy money making, assured returns or like that.”
The first adult rated Mallu film was Kalayan Rathriyil, directed by IV Sasi. The second adult film, Avalude Ravukal, is also directed by him. That was in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, came Sathrathil Oru Ratri, directed by Sankaran Nair. This film became extremely popular at that time and was shown in all the ‘adult’ movie halls of every major town and city in India. I saw this film in the Light House theatre in Hyderabad in 1978. Light House was considered a ‘bad’ and ‘dirty’ theatre by my parents, like all parents in the country. Anyway, coming to the point, during what is called the golden period of Mallu cinema – late 1970s to early 1990s – there were hardly any ‘dirty’ movies out of Kerala. But the phenomenon returned in the form of ‘Shakeela films’ after the turn of the century. The highs and lows of the adult film history run parallel to the fate of the film industry there: ‘dirty’ films being dished out whenever the mainstream cinema started making flops.
Sex has no political bedfellow. Sex sells. That’s all.
The issue today is not whether moral policing is good or bad. The issue is that today, sex is out of the closet, not just in the slums and chawls where it has always been in the open, but in the moralistic, casteist, orthodox, middle class Indian homes where the ‘first night’ meant, till recently, sex without frills or foreplay, a ritual to be completed with the lights out.
My daughter, aged a half over 7, is going to be taught sex education in her school next year. She is in the UK, but there are many schools in India where sex education is part of the curriculum. Thanks to the internet, today’s children know more about sex at their age than those of previous generations.
The main issue is, as Shyam Benegal once said, humans have an interest in different kinds of prurient pleasures and as individuals, they have to find a way to deal with it.
I remember meeting the late Vijay Anand in 2001 or 2002 when he censor board chief. At that time he was considering a request from the Kerala regional board of certification for screening pornographic films in select theatres in an attempt to 'save' mainstream cinema in the state. Anand was very much in its favour, and told me he preferred certifying adult films as ‘x-rated’ and allowing their legal screening in separate theatres than to use scissors (Of course, he exited soon after and was replaced by a BJP footnote called Arvind Trivedi whose idea of permissive sex on film never went beyond fleeting kisses.)
Anand realized that in several parts of the country, some producers shoot two versions of a film, one with openly sexual scenes and another that is more regular and acceptable to the censor board. Commonly in small cinemas in satellite towns across the country, theatre owners interpolate 'sexually explicit' scenes into films certified for public viewing, he told me. He even had figures with him of police raids on internet cafes allowing customers to log on to adult web sites. He wanted this sex-with-lights-off attitudes to end by not making sex a moral issue.
Is the subject of sex, then, about permissiveness or liberalism? One thing is sure: it certainly is not about calling all Mallus sex-starved.