Darshana Sreedhar Mini 
Although New Delhi is a cosmopolitan city with a mix of linguistic communities and migrants from all over the country who have moved there for work, the Malayalam soft-porn controversy put the Kerala-based community on tenterhooks.
The debate and protests over obscenity and censorship assigned the Malayali community with the moral responsibility of taking a strong stance to guard their regional cinema from becoming associated with sex films.
In the protests’ aftermath, a Delhi-based Malayali association organised a film discussion forum to showcase Kerala films in the right perspective and a seminar titled Sex and Violence in Indian Cinema” that was attended by art cinema proponents like Adoor Gopalakrishnan. The South Indian Chamber of Commerce alleged that these concerns about South Indian films emerged from Bombay cinema’s “step-motherly” treatment of regional cinemas, which did not get the visibility and loan provisions available for “purposeful films” funded by Film Finance Corporation (FFC).
It was not just Malayalam films that bore the brunt of allegations that they were pornographic; the South Indian film industry in general received such rebuke. Thus, the circulation of Malayalam soft-porn in other parts of India was always preceded by notoriety – a trend that started with the distribution of Avalude Ravukal (Her Nights) as a “sex” film because of the way it was marketed outside Kerala.
The term “Malayalam soft-porn” thus raises questions about what constitutes regional cinema in India’s multi-lingual context. Malayalam cinema’s association with unbridled sex unsettled regional filmmakers, who saw it as licensing both a dismissive attitude toward regional cinemas from South India and a forceful homogenisation of all the South Indian film industries as the “other” of mainstream Indian cinema – something encapsulated by the catch-all label “Madrasi films.”
Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India, Darshana Sreedhar Mini, UC Press, 2024. In India, the book is published by Zubaan.
Journalistic reportage of the time gestures to the sexualised imagination of South Indian cinema – Malayalam films, in particular – that peddled the notion that an infectious South was threatening the chaste character of the country. This devalued status partly explains why pseudonyms were so widely used in soft-porn production to guard the film crew’s identity.
This tension was palpable when I interviewed Ravi Kottarakara, Chair of the South Indian Chamber of Commerce, during the Indian Cinema Centenary Celebrations in Chennai in 2013. He perceived my work as “delegitimising” regional cinemas’ rich traditions by appending “Malayalam” to “soft-porn.”
For Kottarakara, the combination of “soft-porn” with the regional marker “Malayalam” contributed to the stereotyped depiction of “Madras films” as the harbinger of sex and violence. The perceived “devaluation” of the regional in these responses points to two versions of the region – some of my respondents were specifically speaking about Malayalam films when they uttered the phrase “regional cinema,” whereas others spoke of a larger category of “South Indian cinema” that had to constantly mark its difference from Bollywood.
The region, as it is invoked in these reactions, exposes a built-in boundedness that can elicit protectionist measures to safeguard regional interests. Regional cinemas have always tried to protect their distribution-exhibition interests from the influx of content from Hollywood and Hindi cinema. For instance, the South Indian state of Karnataka had an informal ban on dubbing films from other languages until the Competition Commission of India intervened and passed an order allowing dubbing in 2018.
The ban, instituted by private trade-related bodies associated with Kannada film and television in the 1980s, also draws from the pro-Kannada cultural movement. Intended to support local creativity, the ban against dubbing paved the way for an alternative culture of re-making films in Karnataka. The remaking protocols meant that films in other languages could not be dubbed into Kannada, but Kannada films could be dubbed into other languages to be distributed outside Karnataka and overseas.
This is significant because soft-porn filmmakers took advantage of this arrangement very early on by making original content in Kannada and then dubbing it into other languages. Aadipapam (The First Sin, 1988), a film that is often seen as a direct precursor to the soft-porn wave of the 1990s, was produced in Karnataka.
The director of the film, P. Chandrakumar, used a subsidy instituted by the Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce that was originally meant to promote Kannada filmmakers. Curiously, while Aadipapam went on to become hugely popular as a Malayalam soft-porn film, today, it essentially means a version that is dubbed from Kannada. Thus, even when linguistic and regional specificity are invoked, they can unsettle the logic of protectionism that undergird them.
The regional status of soft-porn surfaced in my fieldwork when a handful of my respondents based in the Middle East narrated their experiences of watching soft-porn on video tape – a format that allows for relative safety as it can be watched in the privacy of the home. In different cultural contexts in the 1980s, video was perceived as a “bad” cultural object that was seen as “creatively impoverished” because of its association with porn.
In the Indian context, video was also the harbinger of piracy; in the 1980s, video was reported to be the format with “the latest releases from Hindi and regional cinema, as well as a reasonable selection of pornography.” Video porn co-existed with celluloid pornography, and encouraged the production of direct-to-video films sold through video libraries.
Affordable and easy-to-use, magnetic tape allowed pornography to circulate widely and to be easily reproduced, which made it a lucrative investment that turned quick profits. U-Matic and Betamax tapes featuring adult content were sold in video libraries in India and Dubai, along with clandestinely sold copies of Screw that were passed around among patrons on the lookout for “foreign” magazines.
Many of my respondents recounted how they came across Malayalam soft-porn films among the pirated CDs that were sold by door-to-door salesmen in Dubai and Sharjah, and in Dubai’s Karama market, which was famous for counterfeit goods. In Bahrain, Malayalam soft-porn was available for rent in places like Gold Souq, a neighborhood in Manama, where phone card shops also sold video films.
Describing his encounter with Malayalam soft-porn in Bahrain, one of my respondents, Narayanan, recounted that erotic magazines such as Muttuchippi were available in stationery shops that sold Malayalam newspapers and magazines. Sometimes the magazines were published with a Gulf-Malayali audience specifically in mind.
The Sex Education Encyclopedia, published by Moral Books in 1978, included a separate announcement for Gulf Malayalis that listed the details of book marketers based in the UAE, Kuwait, Doha, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. Many adult magazines such as Honeymoon Guide also advertised soft-porn films and featured catchy quotes and images from the films to directly reach out to prospective viewers in the Gulf.
The adult magazine Cross Fire featured storylines exploring the double lives of Malayali women who were recruited to work as maids in Dubai but ended up performing sex work. Like the narrative tradition of first-person used in Rathikathakal, many of these stories feature women directly addressing the readers as they write about their experiences in the Gulf.
In the censorial atmosphere of the Middle East, it was common practice to label porn films as “mythological films” or “home videos” to minimise risk if caught by the Mutawa, the special police unit that enforces religious observations and public morality. Recounting an early encounter with soft-porn in Dubai, another respondent, Thampy, stated that when he was approached by a vendor who tried to sell him soft-porn films, he was too scared to even look at the CDs: “It was as if being in Dubai made it seem like soft-porn films were illegal […] I have watched these films in theaters in India, but never felt like they were illegal there.”
Soft-porn DVDs were bought and sold with a sense of trepidation, arranged alongside mainstream films with genre labels such as “melodrama” and “thriller” to hide erotic content from the authorities, while leaving it open for those who possessed the cultural and contextual knowledge to decode them.
In contrast to the “back room” section of American video stores that Dan Herbert describes as cordoning off adult video from the rest of the inventory, Gulf-Malayali video rentals hid adult films in plain sight.
Isaac, a former video library owner who sold soft-porn along with his regular ware of Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam films in Dubai, stated that soft-porn CDs sold in video parlours might look to an outsider like “any other Malayalam film,” except for the text in Malayalam promising juicy elements. Often, cover images would be sanitised, transforming, as Isaac described it, “even Shakeela to look like a schoolteacher or a middle-aged family woman.”
Some of my Pakistani informants also spoke of soft-porn films that were available in Karachi’s Rainbow Center in Saddar, one of the hubs of video piracy in Pakistan. For instance, Wahab, a cleaning worker said, “In the labourer camp that I worked in the industrial area of Mussafeh, I stayed with a group of Indians. I knew of these films from them, but never thought I would find them in a kiosk in Saddar. My immediate response when I found these films stacked with Bollywood was to tell my friend, this is from Kerala, not Bollywood.”
Responses like Wahab’s starkly contrast the uneasiness demonstrated by officials such as Kottarakara. For this other set of diasporic respondents, the experience of recognising “Malayalam soft-porn” was marked by nostalgia for the homeland. Such starkly different responses in conceiving how illicit media objects evoke different senses of relationality in transnational contexts resonate with Kathryn C. Hardy’s argument that the “region that is constantly on the move.”
The circulation of soft-porn in the Gulf illustrates how the consolidation of regional identities and diffusion of generic markers create alternative transnational imaginations that are speckled with regional traces.
Alternative transnationalism then, is mediated by two contrasting poles of formal and informal networks: first, the formal circuits that national film institutions envisaged as they promoted trade relations by inviting the Indian diaspora to trade in “foreign” made films in India; and second, the specific infrastructures of diasporic media that targeted the Malayali audience in the Gulf.
The above is an edited excerpt from Darshana Sreedhar Mini’s book, Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India.
Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (UC press, 2024) and co-editor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and Obscene (Routledge, 2024).