Translating porn studies: lessons from the vernacular

Why compile a special issue of Porn Studies on South Asia? What, indeed, can be gained from looking at pornographic cultures and conventions through a regional lens? Does invoking South Asia in this way evoke the spectre of area studies, replete with its double origins in colonial expansion and post-war bipolar power structures? We think not. Our intention is not to map geopolitical stereotypes onto pornographic cultures; instead, as we turn our attention to South Asia, we take a cue from Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel’s introduction to a special issue of GLQ published in 2016. Writing about the intersection of queer studies and area studies, Arondekar and Patel assert that such scholarly glances at area studies’ Other is ‘no longer a simple effect of ventures […] into terrain whose purchase was in objects routed through ethnographic avidity or fervor or the bona fides of local habitations’ (2016, 153). To be sure, no reader will find in the following pages an ‘A–Z’ compendium of each and every particularity of pornographic cultures and practices in every nation in the South Asian region. The term ‘nation’ is crucial here – area studies as an approach is rooted in processes of imperial expansion, processes that were replicated in the organization of nation-states in the twentieth century. Indeed, any use of the term ‘South Asia’ invokes this fraught history and the attendant national constituents – Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and so on – that resulted from it.

Readers will of course encounter these national taxonomies and particularities in this issue – particularities that inform area studies as well. But our use of ‘South Asia’ does not resonate with the same configurations of space and time as those that inform area-studies-based approaches. It would serve readers well here to pay heed to Anne Murphy’s (2017, 91) pronouncement that ‘such divisions must be construed in heuristic terms, not as instantiating enduring boundaries or categories of meaning’. While recognizing the loaded criticisms of area studies, Murphy still finds in the term South Asia some ‘utility as a way of conceptualizing space and culture’ (2017, 91). Similarly, writing about incidents of official and unofficial censorship of media in South Asia, Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella note that the frame of South Asia allows them to:

explore the commonalities that result from their shared history of colonial subjugation, to account for their different locations in distinct national polities, and finally to examine the more recent connections and contestations brought about by regional liberalization in the 1990s and beyond. (2009, 2–3)

Consider, for instance, the following scenarios. In Pakistan, the sale of video pornography is an offence under Section 292 of the Pakistan Penal Code. In 2011, a hacker claiming to be from Pakistan defaced the official website of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and Pakistan Telecommunication Authority with demands for a blanket ban on all websites containing explicit material (Popalzai 2011). This led to a ban on pornographic websites in Pakistan by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority in 2011, which instead improved the sales of porn CDs and DVDs (Hasan 2012).

In October 2018, the Indian government’s telecom department issued a notification to internet service providers to ban 827 websites for hosting pornographic content including Pornhub, Tube8 and YouPorn (Singh 2018). This was not the first time that the Indian government tried to ban and regulate pornography. For instance, the Information Technology (Guidelines for Cyber Café) Rules 2011 required cyber-café owners to equip computers with filtering software to avoid access to pornography (Ministry of Communications and Information Technology 2011, 5). They were also required to keep a log of all websites accessed by the customers for at least a year (2011, 3–4). Furthermore, café owners were also asked not to build cubicles with a height of more than four and half feet. Computers had to be placed with screens facing outwards so as to reduce privacy and minors were not allowed inside cubicles if not accompanied by their guardians and parents (2011, 4). In the absence of legitimate ID, the internet user could be photographed through a webcam (2011, 3). In 2013, lawyer Kamlesh Vaswani petitioned the Indian Supreme Court for a ban on pornography, following a 2012 Delhi rape case. Vaswani declared porn to be ‘worse than Hitler, worse than Aids, cancer or any epidemic. It is more catastrophic than nuclear holocaust, and must be stopped’ (Biswas 2015). This culminated in the government instituting the Cyber Regulation Advisory Committee chaired by the then Telecom and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. Steps were taken by the committee to authorize the Internet and Mobile Association of India to compile a list of sites that host pornography (Jayadevan and Alawadhi 2014). In retaliation, Pornhub announced that they were launching a new site with an altered URL ‘in response to Pornhub getting censored and blocked in India’ (India Today Tech 2018). In 2015, the government attempted a ban after the supreme court verdict that blamed pornographic content for having promoted instances of sexual assault – the ban was recalled after public outcry.

In Bangladesh, carrying, selling and distributing pornography is prohibited under the Pornography Control Act of 2012, unless it is meant for educational or artistic purposes (Jillani 2012). In Nepal, the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology issued a notice in September 2018 banning digital pornography. The immediate reason for the ban was, as in the Indian instance from 2013, protests against the increase in sexual assault against women. Harsh fines of up to $4200 and prison sentences were imposed on perpetrators and internet service providers who refuse to comply (French 2018). The list of banned websites numbers 24,000, including sex-positive websites, queer platforms and educational websites (Kayastha 2018). Media rights groups were at the forefront in demanding that the distinction between obscene and pornographic are blurred and any ban on these websites were curtailing people’s options to choose and explore their sexuality.

It is clear from such instances that the battle over the pornographic landscape remains deeply fraught across several, if not all, South Asian countries. Perhaps the rise of internet-based pornography has accentuated these tensions, but they are definitely not new. As Charu Gupta points out, the genesis of such laws and regulations can be traced back to nineteenth-century colonial India, when obscenity laws first began to appear, with Sections 292, 293 and 294 of the Indian Penal Code being ‘explicitly designed for the prevention of any form of obscenity […] any visual or written material that was “lascivious or appealed to the prurient interest”’ (2001, 30–31). She further points out that British India was also a signatory of the agreement for the suppression of obscene publications in 1910, as well as part of a 1923 conference in Geneva that culminated in the Obscene Publications Act, 1925 (2001, 31). The shadows of such colonial-era regulatory effects linger on in the penal codes of contemporary India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which were all part of the Empire’s dominion. In contemporary South Asia, new problems and tensions in digital pornography fuse with earlier, deeply entrenched, colonial-era attitudes. Not everything related to pornography in South Asia needs to be seen through the lens of censorship and its subversion, but it is a major force to reckon with. The cartography of South Asian pornographies would remain incomplete without cognizance of the productive aspects of power – the fact that power ‘traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse’ (Foucault 1980, 119). In charting the territory, we must scale the layered vertices of time and the expanses of space. Thus, echoing the work of Murphy, Kaur and Mazzarella, the regional category of South Asia that is at work in this issue invokes multiple temporal and spatial registers – of now separate geopolitical entities and nations that are tied together by longer histories of colonialism and fractured modernities.

In this special issue – ‘South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene’ – we work with the idea that what we now call ‘South Asia’ is a region that has been produced by such encounters with the colonial ‘Other’ and the tectonic aftereffects of such encounters. In conceptualizing South Asia this way, we draw on what Kelly Pemberton and Michael Nijhawan, writing in the field of religion and ritual, call the ‘shared idioms’ and ‘vital elements of identity formation’ in South Asia – an ‘ongoing process and the historical product of creative human interventions’ (2009, 8). It is in such historically situated interventions that the articles in this issue locate the work of the pornographic and the obscene. It is important to note here that Pemberton and Nijhawan’s use of ‘idioms’ denotes a plurality – there is no singular idea of South Asia or South Asian-ness, even as we note commonalities. To push it even further, we must be wary of imposing a predetermined, monolithic idea of sexual culture even in any one of the individual South Asian countries. Rather, much like its languages, religions, cuisines and people, the sexual cultures and erotic artefacts of South Asia are multifarious and diverse. As Purnima Mankekar points out in the context of India, ‘There is no singular “Indian” discourse on erotics. At the close of the twentieth century, discourses of the erotic proliferating in the Indian public sphere drew upon […] preexisting genealogies or existed in uneasy tension with them’ (2012, 175 and 177). Like Mankekar we are keen to note continuities and breaks, mutations as well as radically new enunciations. Such a scholarly exercise must plot its steps on both temporal and spatial axes.

The range of articles in this issue attest to these long – and wide – genealogies of any imagined South Asian-ness. Like questions of identity that can only be answered in the plural (identities rather than identity), the articles in this issue demonstrate how a range of pornographies constitutes the force field of sexualized media in South Asia. In fact, the term ‘South Asia’ in this issue points towards a larger, shared ethos more than strict geopolitical boundaries. What would a South Asian ‘ethos’ of the pornographic look like? If porn studies – itself a relatively nascent field – has now begun to coalesce around certain shared ideas or directions of research, what might a focus on the region offer us as researchers of erotic cultures and practices?

South Asia as a geopolitical location has a unique relationship to pornography, given the multiplicity of cultural and legal-censorial regimes that define the obscene and the permissible. Going back to the question of a pornographic ethos, we contend that these legal, censorial and cultural regimes can alert us to the elastic nature of the pornographic spectrum. Erotic material from the South Asian region can demonstrate how pornography is often defined in oblique terms, finding reflection in various modes of popular (and sometimes underground) culture, bypassing legal and censorial constraints. Or, in other words, social censure and state censorship begin to outline the limits of the obscene and the permissible. While this is not unique to only South Asia, it highlights the fact that understanding the pornographic in this regional context is impossible without accounting for censorship and obscenity. Obscenity is key here. ‘Asheelta’ (Hindi), as it is called in many Indian languages (including phonetic equivalents such as ‘oshlilota’ [Bengali], ‘ashleelatha’ [Malayalam] and ‘osleelota’ [Assamese]), is a broad term that, as Lotte Hoek points out, ‘indicates social distinction and sexual mores within a single term, combining the English terms vulgarity and obscenity’ (2014, 3; original emphases). In his article in this issue, ‘Reading Anandalok: Obscenity, Cinema and Other “Prohibitive” Pleasures in 1970s–1990s Bengali Print Culture’, Spandan Bhattacharya makes a similar point about the term ‘apasanskriti’ – roughly translated as ‘crass/bad/decaying culture’. Bhattacharya focuses on print culture in the Indian state of West Bengal from the 1970s to the 1990s. Curiously, however, the material he examines in his article would not be considered pornographic at first look – the magazine Anandalok is owned by a major mainstream press and carries articles and images related to mainstream Bengali cinema. However, as Bhattacharya astutely demonstrates, the magazine’s tabooed status as ‘apasanskriti’ drew on a longer history of print culture including the publication of erotic stories, gossip, mysteries and scandals. While not directly censored or banned, the kind of material that Bhattacharya examines reveals a kind of a pornographic unconscious, which in turn is directly related to what Kaur and Mazzarella term ‘cultural regulation’ – ‘the performative, the productive, and the affective aspects of public culture’ (2009, 9). Censorship understood thus is a ‘relentless proliferation of discourses on normative modes of desiring, of acting, of being in the world’ (2009, 5). The work of censorship (and subversion of censorship) might be a general feature of media forms across cultures, but in the particularity of South Asia they reveal the edges of the elastic pornographic spectrum. Edges allow us to observe and test the limits of any phenomenon – if centres are where phenomena cohere and norms become apparent, edges are where we can observe them dissolving into other forms, activating resonant energies with their magnetic charge. Obscenity/asheelta with its conceptual elasticity performs this dynamic work in the South Asian context. Such edge-work is not a symptom of the weakness of the phenomenon, but rather an invitation to extend scholarly vision to its outer limits. ‘South Asian Pornographies’ with a focus on erotic forms across the spectrum, including ones that may not immediately register as pornographic to the unsituated eye, is such an invitation. This is as much a disciplinary issue as it is the general understanding of erotic cultures. In fact, we would go on to say that the ‘Utility of South Asia’ (to echo the title of Anne Murphy’s article) is to extend the disciplinary boundaries of porn studies.

This play between porn/not porn is also where we locate the other focus of this issue – that of the vernacular. Asheelta is one such vernacular that does the work of the ‘shared idiom’ of cultural life in South Asia, à la Pemberton and Nijhawan. But the vernacular for us is not just a lexical issue, but one of everyday lived reality and practice. Language contextualizes the world of ideas in the material conditions of the world that it emerges in. In that sense, language itself is practice, and the term ‘vernacular’ describes this aspect of language in praxis. The vernacular is the grey untranslatable area that appears when we move from one cultural context to another. For Barbara Cassin (2014), the untranslatable is not that which cannot be translated, but that which is continuously translated. Hoek (2014) points towards this when she treats the Bengali ‘oshleel’ as an additive word-form that in the English points towards both the obscene and the vulgar. But this lack of fixity in meaning also creates a problem, which according to Cassin is ‘a sign of the way in which, from one language to another, neither the words nor the conceptual networks can simply be superimposed’ (2014, xvii). Seen through this frame, the vernacular is the surplus in the abstract idea of language that becomes language through practical usage. As Cassin points out, language is ‘not a fact of nature, an object, but an effect caught up in history and culture, and that ceaselessly invents itself’ (2014, xix). In that sense, all language is vernacular, and being seen as formal or normative language instead of vernacular is only an historical effect of power.

We pay attention to language here primarily because in the South Asian context the category of ‘vernacular languages’ reverberates with the timbre of the colonial encounter. One only needs to turn to the school system in South Asia where students are educated either in ‘English’ or ‘vernacular’ mediums (meaning education in any of the indigenous Indian languages). This immediately raises the ghost of the colonial past which, as Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan points out, posits ‘English as a literary and cultural system’ against which ‘vernacular, bhasha and language literatures’ are in a perennial contest (2018, 314). While we do not intend to plot pornographic cultures on the same scale as linguistic ones, the ramifications of this contention are deeper. If language is a kind of practice, can other forms of practice be subjected to the same tests and codes as language? Can we say that pornographic and erotic cultures in South Asia are also untranslatable vernaculars that require us to constantly recontextualize the meanings of pornography in its historical and cultural particularities?

In this, we come very close to Miriam Hansen’s postulation that the vernacular describes the ‘dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability’ (1999, 60). As Charu Gupta points out in her article in this issue, the vernacular offers ‘a corporeal presence and nearness of lived experience’ that is key to the study of sex and sexuality. Her article ‘Cast(e)ing and Translating Sex in the Vernacular: The Writings of Santram BA in Hindi’ explores the work of Santram BA, a caste reformer who also wrote widely on the topics of sex and birth control. Gupta emphasizes that Santram’s writings on sex cannot be separated from his anti-caste writings and they must be read as ‘metaphors for the churning going on in caste and gender relations in late colonial India’. For Gupta, then, vernacular language print media offered a vibrant space for conversations on sexual health and eroticism – themes that were often clubbed along with pornography by colonial-era obscenity laws. While Gupta’s observation is made in the specific context of Hindi sex-manuals, she draws attention to the cruciality of lived experience, which, when read alongside Hansen’s insistence on aspects such as idioms, dialects and translatability, outline the conceptual spine of this issue.

Collectively, all of the authors work with the problem of how to speak about sex and sexuality in the South Asian context – and by speech, here, we refer to not only linguistic utterances, but also legal, moral and censorial ones. Consider that almost none of the articles in this issue deal with the porn industry, strictly defined. Now compare that to the industrial focus of a number of books in the area of porn studies. For instance, Linda Williams’ (2004) edited collection Porn Studies begins by claiming that it is markedly different from earlier studies of pornography that were predominantly embroiled in the pro-versus-anti-porn debates. In the introduction, Williams points out the status of still and moving image pornography as ‘fully recognizable fixtures of popular culture’ (2004, 1). The grounds for such an observation, for Williams, lies in the sheer overabundance of pornographic films as compared to the volume of films produced in Hollywood, which makes them ‘emphatically part of American culture’ (2004, 1–2). Similarly, in The Pornography Industry, Shira Tarrant outlines one of the goals of her book as the explanation of ‘industry basics – who works in porn; how much they earn; rapid technological changes that are shaping production distribution, and user access; along with often-elusive revenue data’ (2016, 1–2). Consider also the predominance of the United States (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, Europe) in such studies. To turn again to Williams’ (2004, 2) introduction to Porn Studies, part of the rationale for the book lies in the centrality of porn in American culture. Such rationalizations are repeated in the invocation of Justice Potter Stewart’s famous pronouncement about pornography – ‘I know it when I see it’ during the 1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio case (Tarrant 2016, 3; Gorfinkel 2017, 36 and 153) and the First Amendment (Strossen 1999, 13; Harchuck 2015, 9; Tarrant 2016, 3; Gorfinkel 2017, 72) – in many studies of pornography, almost as if these constitute the primal scene for the discipline of porn studies. While these rulings and laws are crucial, as is their investigation, we point towards them to emphasize that they too are rooted in historical and cultural specificities. This again is a question of scale – of the fraught negotiations between the universal and the particular – of codification and vernacularization. If issues such as the Potter ruling and the First Amendment are also spatially and temporally specific, then their predominance in porn studies must be translated, if not questioned. For researchers of pornographic cultures located elsewhere, they become important for their conceptual offerings (the interplay between legal codification, morality and ethics, the concept of freedom of speech, etc.), and not necessarily for the specificities of their social location. So, what would the primal scene (if at all we can think of one) of South Asian pornographies look like? What would be the historical ramifications of such a scene, and of what use would it be to researchers of pornography located outside that region? In the pages of this issue, readers will find conceptual wisdom along with the particularities of the region. In terms of the question of the porn industry that we raised earlier, we must stress that it is not as if there is no porn industry in South Asia. But one would be hard pressed to find translations of equal value for terms such as ‘porn industry’, ‘porn-star’ or ‘hardcore/softcore porn’.

Not that there is no previous work on pornography in South Asia – Bhrigupati Singh’s (2008) essay on the soft-porn morning show in Delhi; Namita Malhotra’s (2011) monograph on porn, law and technology in India; Lotte Hoek’s (2014) book on cut-pieces in Bangladesh; Ketaki Chowkhani’s (2016) essay on women’s porn use in urban India; Darshana Sreedhar Mini’s (2016, 2019) work on Malayalam soft-porn; Tupur Chatterjee’s (2017) essay on Sunny Leone; and Anirban Baishya’s (2017) essay on cellphone pornography in India; to name a few. But in each of these cases, readers will notice that the infrastructures and the circuits of the pornographic are not as easily translatable to the image of the ‘porn industry’ or its alternatives drummed up, for instance, by AVN, Naughty America, Deep Throat and Candida Royalle (and there are immense internal variations within these as well). At the same time, we would also like to caution against exoticizing South Asian pornographic cultures – these are places of contact, exchange, adaptation and influence. But these are, in the spirit of Hansen’s definition, arenas of the vernacular; and as Luzia Savary points out in the context of colonial-era reproduction manuals, such South Asian vernaculars must be ‘understood as a new creation, linked to the specific historical and linguistic context in which it was forged’ (2014, 383). Or to introduce a specifically porn-studies pun to the issue – one definitely does not know ‘it’ when one sees it. Translating porn studies for each historical and cultural location, then, must start from places of contact and exchange, mutations and borrowings. The authors of this issue may be working on very specific themes and areas, each specialized within their own disciplines – but collectively they translate the porn studies ‘code’, providing a methodological extension for the field.

Perhaps the best example of the concerns with South Asian pornography’s long durée in this issue can be seen in Natalia Di Pietrantonio’s ‘Pornography and Indian Miniature Painting: The Case of Avadh, India’. Her article locates how the practices of eighteenth-century European collectors shaped the taxonomy used to classify the indigenous Rāgamālā miniature paintings produced in Avadh. Taking the instance of Richard Johnson’s collection of Rāgamālā images, Di Pietrantonio argues how they were seen as obscene and pornographic at different points in time, contingent on the demands of archival processes and institutional locations. As Di Pietrantonio astutely points out, ‘Obscenity and pornography were legal categories imported to India from British imperial policies’. Anubhav Pradhan’s ‘“Raped, Outraged, Ravaged”: Race, Desire, and Sex in the Indian Empire’ undertakes a close reading of August Brancart’s nineteenth-century erotic novel, Venus in India or Love Adventures in Hindustan, that narrativizes the sexual exploits of a British army officer stationed in India. Pradhan calls the novel a ‘watershed in South Asian pornography’ for its awareness of racial and geopolitical realities of the time, including anxieties of miscegenation and the presence of British women in the midst of native men. In doing so he locates how interracial desire is manifested in the text and the curious ways through which India emerges as a site of deviance that can lead British men in the line of duty. Di Pietrantonio and Pradhan’s articles deal with completely different objects and techniques – the prior focusing on visual artefacts, the latter on the written word. But, taken together, both authors offer us useful insights into the erotic frisson produced by the colonial encounter. The Avadhi miniatures and the pornographic text that are the subjects of Di Pietrantonio and Pradhan’s articles, respectively, have their provenance in different circumstances at the hands of different creators. But they are also each other’s obverse – one rendered pornographic by the imposition of Victorian attitudes on already existing objects, the other generated by ‘the imaginative space of the colony’ – what Anjali Arondekar describes as ‘an imagined breeding ground for a spectrum of imagined sexual vices that in turn vivify the rhetoric of an evangelical civilizing mission’ (2009, 105).

The tussle between this imagined erotic space and civilizing mission, of course, did not disappear with the end of the colonial rule. Vestiges of the colonial era lingered on and continued to shape both legal and moral attitudes towards gender and sexuality in postcolonial nation-states. Rahul Gairola’s ‘The X Factors of Sex: Hijras, Victorian Law, and Digital Porn in Postcolonial India’ begins with this premise in his exploration of the interconnections between colonial-era laws and the current landscape of digital pornography as it relates to hijras. As subjects that did not fit the neat binaries of male/female, hijras challenged the ‘British biopolitical order’ and were subsequently pathologized by both ‘the British Raj and the postcolonial elite’. Such attitudes, Gairola notes, ‘inaugurated a historical precedent for pathologizing transgender’ people in contemporary India. Gairola builds upon this complex history of colonial pathologization codified as law and examines how it reverberates in the landscape of digital pornography. Although ‘Digital India’ might seem far removed from this history of colonialism and colonial-era laws, Gairola’s study of digital pornography offers us a much-needed diachronic view that can bridge our understanding of older and newer articulations of law, sex and pornography.

Unsurprisingly, the digital appears in two other contributions to this issue. Lotte Hoek’s ‘When Celluloid Pornography Went Digital: Class and Race in the Bangladeshi Cut-Piece Online’ examines what happens to celluloid pornography in Bangladesh when it transitions into online digital platforms. In what can be read as an extended epilogue to her book Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (Hoek 2014), Hoek zeroes in on the digital afterlife of Bangladeshi cut-pieces (sexually explicit ‘bits’ spliced into the film-reel during exhibition) that were produced illegally by Bangladeshi action filmmakers. An interesting question Hoek raises in her new article is how traces of locality are addressed and marked in spaces of digital consumption. For instance, in the case of VCDs it is quite common to find ‘Pakistani mujra or scenes from Pastho cinema, South Indian soft-porn clips, and music videos from across South Asia’ alongside Bangladeshi cut-pieces. Hoek notes that despite certain ‘national’ characteristics, there are formal affinities between such pornographic bits from various parts of South Asia, emerging from the conditions of cinema production and distribution in the region. In formulating cut-piece pornography this way, Hoek argues for a ‘pornographic region, which is associated with particularities of narrative, aesthetic and, significantly, particular types of bodies’ (original emphasis).

These questions re-emerge in Darshana Mini and Anirban Baishya’s ‘Transgressions in Toonland: Savita Bhabhi, Velamma and the Indian Adult Comic’, albeit in relation to pornographic comics. Focusing on two adult comics, Mini and Baishya explore the dynamics of class, gender and taboo as they relate to the figure of the ‘bhabhi’ (sister-in-law) and ‘aunty’ – both short-hand notations for married women who form the centre of the comics’ sexual fantasy. While part of their argument is formal, related to the affordances of the digital comic book that circulates online, their article also focuses on the idea of the region in the Indian imagination and how it operates through matrices of language and visual cues. Together, Gairolia’s, Hoek’s and Mini and Baishya’s articles explore how such regionality operates within the space of the internet through various registers including linguistic indices manifested as tags, search terms and comments.

The last article in this issue, Ricky Varghese’s ‘Confluences: Of War Porn and Nationalism, at the Limits of Memory’, takes us to the edges of the pornographic in South Asia. Our earlier invocation of this issue as a kind of scholarly ‘edge-work’ is stretched to its limits in this article focusing on questions of violence and brutality. Varghese’s meditations, to use a sexual pun, push edge-work to the realm of edge-play. They build on Prabha Manuratne’s (2014) work on war porn that explores how wartime violence ‘becomes consumed, sexualized, and talked about, primarily by subscribers and users in the Global North/West’. In the process, Varghese interrogates the prevalence of videos of caste and religion-based violence in contemporary India. Comparing the aesthetic of such videos to Multimedia Messaging Service pornography in India, Varghese notes that there is a ‘voyeuristic quality to the aesthetics’ of both lynching and Multimedia Messaging Service porn videos. Thus, Varghese raises questions that extend into the arena of nationalism and right-wing violence, and how the enactment of such violence on screen raises deep-rooted memories of historical trauma and the politics of otherness in South Asia. Varghese’s immediate point may not be about pornography proper (sex-films, magazines and the like), but it allows us to draw an important link between the power of virtual mediation and the viral nature of online circulation. If the ‘pornographic unconscious’, as we noted in the case of Bhattacharya’s article, has to do with the limits of ‘cultural regulation’, Varghese’s article offers us a chance to understand how the pornographic unconscious operates in images of violence as well – despite contextual differences, objects such as those explored by Gairola, Hoek and Baishya and Mini, it would seem, have something in common with the kind of images Varghese writes about. Blood, semen, the digital apparatus and the space of the internet itself emerge as the objects (and perhaps objective) of the climax.

As some of the instances recounted earlier in this introduction demonstrate, conversations on sex, let alone pornography, remain constricted in the South Asian context. Not only are academic studies of pornography stuck between the ‘extremes of pro and anti standpoints’ (Attwood, Maina and Smith 2018, 1), but porn work – even academic work – in South Asia carries actual risks, both legal and otherwise. This problem made its presence felt during the initial run of the call for papers for this issue, when some prospective contributors pulled out after initial abstract submission due to such concerns. In this sense, this special issue also hopes to offer a space for conversations about pornographic forms in South Asia. Thus, the thrust of this issue can be said to be two-fold; first, a sustained attempt at looking at the origins, effects, affordances and formal properties of South Asian pornographic forms; and, second, to move away from what David Church in a previous issue of this journal calls ‘the broadly Eurocentric contours of current research on porn studies’ (2017, 261). We do not presume to have provided the ‘global canon’ (2017, 261) that Church hopes for (or even a regional one), but we do hope that this issue will provide a methodological breadcrumb trail, if not a new path for interrogating pornographic forms from different cultures. This hope is not the sign of a paradigm shift, but one of translation – the hope that the discipline itself, and not just its texts, is rendered relevant for those situated at its frontiers.

Acknowledgements

The guest editors would like to thank Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith at Porn Studies for facilitating the publication of this issue. A special note of thanks to Dr Monika Mehta for encouraging the guest editors to put this together. The idea for this issue germinated after a panel titled ‘Rethinking Pornographies: Obscenity and Moving Image in South Asia’ at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference at Montreal in 2015. Thanks is due to the Adult Film Histories Special Interest Group that graciously sponsored the panel at the conference. Finally, the guest editors are grateful to all of the authors and anonymous reviewers who have each gone through multiple drafts and contributed to the final shape of the issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.