Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India

In the 1990s India’s mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema―such as vernacular pulp fiction illustrated erotic tales and American exploitation cinema―and maps the genre’s circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as South Asian pornography. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research Mini also explores the soft-porn industry’s utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements as well as how actresses and production personnel who are marked by their involvement with a taboo form negotiate their social lives. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality import policy and censorship in contemporary India this study offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries.