Home rule

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The Great Bongmeister chronicles the sexual revolution on Indian cable TV with the fondness of a grandfather sharing his stash of classic Playboys:

Sushma Swaraj, Minister of Virtue

The cable revolution of the early 90s came as a blessing from heaven (or hell) for the raging hormones of my generation who were henceforth liberated from the oppressive censorship of state-owned television… ladies with Sachin Tendulkar shoulders and Ramesh Krishnan waistlines heaved and thrusted away. As a result, Silk Smitha, Nylon Nalini and the other goddesses of the wet sari pantheon became part of our nightly vocabulary… [Link]

Alas, the uprising was choked nightly by a minister inappositely named Swaraj:

In the north rose a fell presence, an evil Eye that never slept… minister Sushma Swaraj.. launched a war against flesh tones on the airwaves! Soon she was passing one dictat after another–Star Movies censored all their sugar and spice, Sun TV followed suit… [Link]

One frustrated victim of fowlstrangulum interruptus commented:

Uff, Sushma Swaraj… how we cursed her… [Link]

But the sexing up of daily media soon made blue channels and pr0n sites irrelevant:

People stopped going to websites for their porn–instead they started making them themselves armed with… camera phones and webcams. School kids in respectable institutions were shooting their own sex videos and marketing them through auction sites… Who would go to Desibaba [a porn site] to watch digitally morphed pictures when people like Tanushree Dutta were going topless in songs in reality…

Indians were being sexed up too fast and Desibaba was now a relic of a more innocent bygone era… I would like to believe that Desibaba is still alive–spread out over thousands of hard drives where pictures and stories from it have been downloaded over the years… there is a little bit of Desibaba in each of us–in the memories we carry. [Link]

Related posts: Delhi sex clip portends sexual revolution?, Baazee.com CEO arrested over sex clip

6 thoughts on “Home rule”

  1. “And in this thought you have a definition of Swaraj. It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands.” [Link]

    from “HIND SWARAJ OR INDIAN HOME RULE” BY M. K. GANDHI 1938. Ahmedabad, Gujarat: Navajivan Publishing House

  2. the original post by the bong makes interesting reading.

    There were a lot of channels that had porn on them. Sun TV and JJ TV were two such channels.

    JJ had very cheap quality porn without fail on at 1 am sat nite….for years.

    There was even a proper adult channel that was in the testing phase and would telecast a small half screen image for a while, till the govt. shut it down.

    Funny that the land that gave the world Kamasutra, considers sex such a taboo….

    Damn those British with their victorian ideals and stuck up mannerism.

  3. Damn those British with their victorian ideals and stuck up mannerism.

    Damn the British and before the British… – Shabana Azmi

  4. Funny that the land that gave the world Kamasutra, considers sex such a taboo…. Damn those British with their victorian ideals and stuck up mannerism.

    Apparently that old Victorian prudery influenced even Mahatma Gandhi:

    The British were certain that these temples were proof of ancient India’s decadence, the depths of degradation they had sunk into. This alleged weakening of the moral fibre, morality being defined as the denial of the sexual impulse at all waking moments, was the reason India fell an easy prey to invasions. This theory had many adherents and it is not totally out of fashion yet. Even that great Victorian puritan Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, found the temples deeply distressing and gave his blessing to a band of pious vandals who wanted to chip the walls of the temples clean from these ‘indecent and embarrassing’ affronts to their ignorant notions about Indian culture. It took the intervention of no less than Rabrindranth Tagore who wrote an appalled letter to Gandhi, explaining that this was a national treasure and could not be so cavalierly demolished because some people were uncomfortable that their ancestors were sexual beings.

    The Erotic temples of Khajuraho

  5. Hmmm….Not sure if you can just blame the Brits for all this. Indian society had become quite conservative about such matters — at least with regards to its depiction and discussion in public — for several centuries before that.

    But yes it is quite funny how much things have changed — almost gone into reverse, in a manner of speaking — when you compare it with the Khajuraho era. Although the exposure to Western films and media, along with B4U and all the booty-shaking that’s going on in an increasing number of Hindi films & music videos, seem to be quite quickly liberalising people’s attitudes to all this in many quarters. At least that’s how it seems, anyway — I don’t know how the “average” Indian back in India feels about these developments (beyond the well-off, foreign-orientated urban elite, I mean).