Ranveer Allahbadia’s recent remark on Samay Raina’s show India Got Latent has caused a massive stir across India. To one of the contestants on the show, Ranveer had asked, “Would you rather watch your parents have sex, or you will join them once and finish it off?”
The backlash was so intense that it led to multiple FIRs being filed, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) stepping in, and even statements being issued by two chief ministers. The issue also made its way into parliament’s budget session. But what was it about Allahabdia’s comment that provoked such a strong reaction from all sides of the political spectrum, uniting the government and the opposition?
The main criticism of Allahbadia’s remark centres around three key phrases: obscenity, vulgarity and sexually explicit content. These words also constitute Assam chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma’s tweet announcing the FIR against Allahbadia, Raina and others involved. However, the controversy goes beyond just the specific comment – it highlights deeper issues about public morality in India.
Incest, as a topic, is deeply troubling for public morality in India, but a crucial question arises: why are remarks about incest seen as such a major moral violation, while jokes that mock women, LGBTQIA+ people, and other minorities are often overlooked or even normalised? To answer this, we need to look beyond the public figures involved, Allahbadia and Raina, and understand how gender norms and patriarchal values influence the way society reacts to such issues.
The trajectories of the personalities
Raina gained fame for his “dark humour”, which has been widely criticised. His brand of humour has strayed far from the original intent of dark humour, which was meant to help marginalised communities cope with trauma. Instead, it has become a tool for ridiculing these very communities. Raina argues that humour should be free and that everyone should be able to joke about anything, even if it offends someone. In this view, humour doesn’t need to consider the power dynamics within society – jokes about women, transgender persons, Muslims and survivors of sexual assault are, in his view, just jokes.
Allahbadia – aka Beer Biceps – is a podcaster who has gained widespread popularity in recent years. He often invites controversial guests, including right-wing politicians, spiritual leaders with questionable reputations and people who promote pseudo-scientific views. Despite being considered pro-government, Allahbadia’s recent comment has turned some of his political allies against him. This raises the question: what was so controversial about his remark that even those aligned with him felt the need to distance themselves?
Public morality and hetero-patriarchy
To understand why Allahbadia’s comment created such a storm, we need to examine the role of public morality in Indian society. Public morality is a set of values and standards that dictate what is considered acceptable behaviour in society. In India, these values are heavily influenced by hetero-patriarchy, a system where male dominance and heterosexual/heternormative relationships, particularly imagined through a monogamous family structure, are seen as the foundations of society.
In this hetero-patriarchal system, the sanctity of the heterosexual monogamous patriarchal family becomes paramount. This idea of this family has been idealised as the backbone of Indian society. Any act of destabilisation, or even a mild transgression, can thus invoke strong responses. The institution of the family and the discourse around it have been reinforced by both social norms and legal frameworks. However, this view has not remained static and has evolved over time, especially after India’s independence.
Also read: Poor Joke or Convenient Target? Understanding the Case Against Ranveer Allahbadia
Historical imaginations of family and public morality
To understand how public morality has evolved, it’s necessary to look back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the Indian nationalist movement, the “women’s question” became a central topic. Nationalists were concerned with the portrayal of Indian women as helpless and oppressed, a view promoted by the British. Indian reformers, often upper-caste men, constructed the image of the “new woman” who had to be educated enough to become an ardhangini (half-companion) in marriage with the task of raising ‘good’, ‘moral’ children.
The “new woman” was designated the guardian of the “domestic sphere” – a sphere of life, according to the Indian nationalists, where Indians had an upper hand over the colonisers. The British, they argued, had attained superiority in the “material sphere” of science, technology and governance, but they could never conquer the “domestic sphere” of familial life and spiritual life, dotted with moral values and civilisational ethos, respectively.
The “domestic sphere” required the invention of a sacrosanct familial tradition, which was continuous and unchanging for most parts. This rested on middle class, upper caste ideas of heterosexual monogamous patriarchal family, partly informed by a reimagination of the ‘great’ Indian past of epics and ancient law-books, and partly by Victorian notions of the family. Women were seen as guardians of family values, tasked with raising children and maintaining moral order. Gandhian ideas about women, which emphasised purity and marriage for reproduction, reinforced this model. In Gandhi’s view, a woman’s role was to maintain the sanctity of the ‘home’. This ideal woman was distinguished from the “common woman”, often seen as promiscuous or coarse, representing ‘lower’ caste and lower class women, such as street vendors and sex workers.
In post-independence India, this idea of the family continued to dominate. The newly independent state emphasised the sanctity of the hetero-patriarchal family as essential for social stability. Civil codes were framed to maintain this sanctity. The family, founded upon the marriage of a heterosexual male and a heterosexual female, conferred a “bouquet of rights” (to quote the Supreme Court in the recent ‘Marriage Equality’ case) to the people. As such, in elevating these ideals of family life, alternative and heterogenous forms of copulation and marriage, and heterogenous notions of masculinity and femininity found in various castes, tribes and communities in India, were relegated to the margins.
If the family was sacrosanct, and ideals were seen as static and normative, duties had to be defined for the constituting members of the family. Just like the woman’s role was defined as being the homemaker and the man’s role defined as the breadwinner, the parent-children relationship had to be one founded upon ‘respect’ for the elder. Discussions about sexuality that unsettles the ideal family life had to be repressed. Discussions on deviant sexualities and copulation – homosexuality, incest, ‘love marriages’ – needed to be policed because they challenged the upper caste morals of the ideal family and the consequent property and caste relations that emerged out of it.
However, changes in political economy primarily in the post-liberalisation period, and challenges from the LGBTQIA+ groups and women’s rights activists meant that the sanctity was far from being unchallenged. As the economy evolved and more middle-class women began working, the traditional values of family and gender were perceived to be threatened by the cultural nationalists. We find similar responses when governments mandated sex education in India. These changes were seen as a threat to the moral fabric of Indian society.
Why the outrage on incest but not on misogyny or homophobia?
In today’s India, the cultural nationalists, represented by the Hindutva Right, have become the self-righteous preservers of the familial imagination of the late 19th and early 20th century. This is also reflected in the recent attempts by the current regime to oppose the marriage equality case in the Supreme Court, where it dubbed same-sex marriages as an “urban elite issue”. Similarly, in the context of marital rape, the BJP has vehemently opposed the criminalisation of marital rape with the argument that it destabilises the sanctity of marriage. Sections of the Congress have also opposed both marriage equality (for instance, the former Congress state government in Rajasthan) and criminalisation of marital rape.
The criticism of Allahbadia has to be located in this wider context and history of public morality, derived from the sanctity of a heterosexual monogamous patriarchal family. In addition to other supposed motives such as setting an example to bring in stringent laws against free speech, a primary motive in policing and going after Allahbadia, Raina and others, for the BJP, is to project and affirm its image as the preserver of public morality.
In India Got Latent, Raina and other panellists have often made problematic and offensive remarks towards women and LGBTQIA+ individuals. In one episode, for instance, Raina had asked a participant who identified as bisexual if she “feels something” when women security guards check her at the airport. While questions are being raised today on the “sexually explicit content” on his show from various corners, it took an Allahbadia-style comment on incest to attract public outrage. This is because neither misogyny nor homophobia destabilises the imagination of public morality founded upon the sanctity of the family.
Misogyny and homophobia are not aberrations, but the norm. Rape jokes, wife jokes and jokes about gay and trans people have been a part and parcel of our everyday life. Even before the Raina version of “dark comedy”, they have arrived in the form of the “non-veg jokes” of our fathers and uncles. They affirm patriarchy and heteronormativity, as both these systems of power rely on the vilification and marginalisation of women and sexual minorities. Incest, or the mere act of making a stupid, unfunny statement involving incest, however, unsettles our imagination of the sacred – the institution of the family which we have been fed through our culture, state and the media. It disrupts the sanctity of our national, legal, cultural and social institutions.
Tridib Mukherjee is a PhD scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.
