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ABSTRACT
S. S. Vasan (b. 1904?–26 August 1969) was an advertising canvasser turned writer, a mail-order entrepreneur, a publisher, and a film producer. His many (and overlapping) professions made him an important propeller of consumerism in late colonial South India. One such site of consumption was his investment in promoting products and literature related to body culture and sexology. This article argues that Vasan’s new advertising techniques such as the use of unprecedented full-page advertisements and elaborate illustrations, and strategic marketing practices re-imagined the place of ‘obscene’ literature within the domestic sphere. The article tracks how, by using his business acumen and journalistic networks within the early twentieth-century print culture in Madras, Vasan played many parts in creating and later monopolizing the market for self-care products and sexology within an expanding erotic consumer culture.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 From here onwards I will use the term ‘sexual’ for various forms of literature that include the obscene and pornographic and those concerned with health, wellness, and aesthetic self-fashioning.
2 Kokkōkam is a sixteenth-century Tamil sexual text written by a poet king, Ativira Rama Pandian. Also known by the name Ativīrarāmapāṇṭiya Kokkōkam, it is a rendition of the Sanskrit text Ratirahasyam, a sexual text written by Pandit Kokkoka some time between the eighth and thirteenth centuries. For the English translation from Sanskrit, see Kokkoka and Upadhyaya (Citation1965). For its English translation and comparison with the Ratirahasya and the Kāmasūtrā, see Ray et al. (Citation1949).
3 ‘Editorial Article 1 – No Title’, The Times of India, 28 January Citation1891, https://proxy.library.upenn.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxy.library.upenn.edu/historical-newspapers/editorial-article-1-no-title/docview/234298540/se-2?accountid=14707; and ‘From the Times Archives: January 28, Citation1891. Literature of the Year’, The Times of India, 14 April Citation1992, https://proxy.library.upenn.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxy.library.upenn.edu/historical-newspapers/times-archives/docview/741829522/se-2?accountid=14707.
4 Later in the article I will show how ‘obscene’ as a category often included works on sex, sexology, sexual science, marriage manuals, and prescriptive literature. It is also important to evaluate the term along with words like pornography, especially with regard to print culture. For a historical understanding of the term ‘pornography’, see Hunt (Citation1996), Moulton (Citation2000), Toulalan (Citation2007), and Heath (Citation2010).
5 On the business history of colonial India, see Gadgil (Citation1959), Yang (Citation1998), Kudaisya (Citation2011), and Roy (Citation2014). On large capitalist manufacturers, see Jumani and Tripathi (Citation2013) and Roy (Citation2018). For small-scale manufacturers, see Roy (Citation1999), Haynes (Citation2012), and Haynes (Citation2020).
6 The period between the late decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century saw an increase in migration from rural to urban spaces. In Madras there were long-distance migrants, moving for higher education, business opportunities, and government service, and short-distance migrants who moved to the city either temporarily when they were affected by unfavourable agricultural conditions or permanently to work in the service or small scale industrial sectors. For details, see Lewandowski (Citation1975), Irschick (Citation1986), and Roy (Citation2014).
7 The nature of the archive only gives us a few details about these businessmen. The only way we get a sense of the caste groups they belonged to is through the biographies of small-time businessmen and other people within their networks who made it big later in their lives.
8 There is a dearth of information regarding these businessmen. Vasan stands as a case study for this project.
9 By November 1928, one of the advertisements claims that the book has already sold 17,000 copies.
10 First edition, August 1927; second edition, October 1927; third edition, December 1927; fourth edition, July 1928; fifth edition, December 1929; and sixth edition, January 1941 (published by R. G. Pathy and Co.). Existing sources indicate that the book was in publication until 1951. Along with the Tamil edition it was also published in other South Indian languages like Kannada and Telugu.
11 ‘Teṉṉintiya Paṭaṅkaḷukku Vaṭa Intiya Vācalai Tiṟantuviṭṭa Es. Es. Vācaṉ’, Vikaṭaṉ, 5 October 2015, https://www.vikatan.com/government-and-politics/politics/53264.
12 Popular magazines of the time often carried advertisements for such pocket-size books. In a conversation with K. P. Thyagarajan, the current proprietor of Shanmugananda Book Depot and the grandson of K. A. Madurai Mudaliar who published many pocket-size versions of the Kokkokam in the 1920s–1930s, he pointed out the huge sales the book depot encountered throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He particularly emphasized how these pocket-size books were often given as wedding gifts to newly married couples. For more on ‘cheap books’, see Ghosh (Citation1998) and Gupta (Citation2000).
13 Ali, in his monograph Courtly Culture and Political Life In Early Medieval India, informs us that this knowledge about perfecting the body and the material culture associated with it was a part of the everyday practices of both the elite and the common masses in urban spaces. Also see Gode (Citation1960, 3–112).
14 While retrieving evidence about consumer practices such as the purchase of these products has been impossible, sources such as postal traffic reports highlight the exponential increase in value-payable or cash on delivery parcels that were at the heart of the mail-order trade. Geoffrey Clarke, an Indian Civil servant with the British India, in his book The Post Office of India and Its Story (Citation1921) gives us a glimpse of the growth of the value-payable or cash on delivery systems. For more on the repackaging of traditional medicines, see Sivaramakrishnan (Citation2006, 101–112).
15 It is important to note that even today, within Indian society the majority of people find it inappropriate to discuss women’s intimate clothes like bras or matters related to menstruation. The centrality of the body, especially the ‘exposed’ feminine form, both physically and metaphorically is considered obscene.
16 Existing archives and libraries indicate the presence of a wide range of Tamil sexual texts named Kokkokam. Although Kokkokam as a text is attributed to the twelfth-century Pandiyan author-King of Madura, Ativira Rama Pandiayan, the term Kokkokam gradually becomes an umbrella term for sexual texts. Sarah Hodges (Citation2008, 131) lists many such publication in her work.
17 One such example that overlaps with Vasan’s Ilvāḻkkaiyiṉ Irakaciyaṅkaḷ is Vasan’s mentor Nagavedu Munusamy Mudaliar’s Iṉpavāḻkkaiyiṉ Irakaciyaṅkaḷ [The Mysteries/Secrets of Pleasure Life]. These texts emerged at the same time with similar advertising strategies but differed in their approach. The former was more invested in the Western school of sexual sciences, whereas the latter was based on the Tamil/Sanskrit tradition of the Koka Shastra. Given the context of contentious authorship and unauthorized prints, Vasan and Mudaliar’s friendship is a particularly interesting aspect of the Tamil popular print market.
18 Vasan eventually came to be known as a media mogul as he ventured into film production and, later, broadcasting.
19 To maximize profits and market monopoly, Vasan operated his mail-order businesses by creating many addresses such as: Ananda Vikatan Office, 244 Mint St., Madras; Vasan Book Depot, Mint St., Madras; Genuine Watch Company, Mint Buildings, Madras; Sri Dhanam and Co. Post Box 119, Madras; and the Krishna Agency, 119, G.P.O., Madras. Even East-West Agency, P. B. 295, Madras.
20 Unless otherwise stated, all translations from Tamil to English are mine.
21 He was described as ‘agraharathu athisaya manithar’ [an unusual Agraharam (Brahmin) man] by E. V. Ramasamy Periyar.
22 In the late nineteenth century the first obscenity laws were initiated in India. Any form of obscenity falling under Sections 292, 293, and 294 of the Indian Penal Code was punishable. For more, see Gupta (Citation2000, 90–91).
23 A genre within the tūtu or messenger poems tradition composed between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this was recontextualized and packaged to speak to the evolving erotic consumers of the times.
24 In the early decades of the twentieth century, European sexual science was translated in India, China, and Japan by intellectuals and reformers. For intellectuals, sexual science was not only a body of knowledge contextualized around the body and sex but a site for the ‘larger societal project of modernity’. The ‘scientific’ study of sexuality came to be positioned within the nation-building project as a way to fight societal evils like child marriage, the oppression of women, population explosion, and eugenics. Reformist and nationalist literature located sexual science as a scientific and modern repository to educate men and women about sex and its implications for posterity and the nation. Intellectuals often presented a desexualized understanding of the body; in particular, it was the reproductive role of female bodies that was emphasized. Recent scholarship on sexual science in the vernacular has drawn attention to regional works focused on the question of the self as that of the nation. Also, see Gupta (Citation2001, 31) and Hodges (Citation2008, 132).
25 English learning books were an important part of this trade, particularly with respect to birth control products (Botre and Haynes Citation2017, 1025).
26 Pre-modern sexual texts were designed to cater to an array of issues related to the body. Recipes related to body beautification and remedies for ailments were often part of the texts. See Ali (Citation2004).
27 Introduced in 1878, these postal methods were generally used by retailers in India. In the early decades of the twentieth century the reduction in rates resulted in an increase in parcel traffic. See Clarke (Citation1921, 112–115).
28 Even today the word ‘obscene’ is as vague as it was in the past. A recent news report regarding the Raj Kundra Pornography case highlighted how the meanings of the terms ‘obscenity’, ‘pornography’, and ‘erotica’ are often blurred. For details, see: https://www.firstpost.com/tag/raj-kundra.
29 Also known as the Rati Rahasyam, Kokkokam, and Ananga Ranga. For the Hindi public sphere in North India, see Kokkoka and Comfort (Citation1964, 55–56) and Gupta (Citation2001, 53–54).
30 Advertisements in the Times of India.
31 Some of the journals and newspapers that regularly carried contraceptive advertisements in the 1920s and 1930s included the general monthly journal Indian Review that by the 1930s had printed 2000–3000 copies. Another journal, My Magazine printed 35,000 and 45,000 copies monthly and Ananda Vikatan was one of the largest circulating magazines by the end of the 1930s, printing around 30,000 copies weekly. See Fort St George Gazette Supplement, 30 March 1937, 152; Fort St George Gazette Supplement, 15 September 1936, 72; Fort St George Gazette Supplement, 1 March 1934, 187; Fort St George Gazette Supplement, 14 December 1937; and Fort St George Gazette Supplement, 10 December 1935, 132. Also, see Venkatachalapathy (Citation1997, 65) and Hodges (Citation2008, 110).
32 The Self-Respect Movement, through its local meetings, availability of capital, publications, and localized leadership, reached every nook and corner of the Tamil-speaking south. For more, see Irschick (Citation1986, 91), Pandian (Citation1996, Citation2007, 213), and Hodges (Citation2008, 81).
33 For studies on gender politics and the Self-Respect movement, see Lakshmi (Citation1990), Anandhi (Citation1991), Geetha (Citation1991, Citation1998), Pandian, Anandhi, and Venkatachalapathy (Citation1991), and Srilata (Citation2003).
34 Apart from the Tamil weekly Kudi Arasu, he also published many English and Tamil journals and newspapers between 1929 and 1931.
35 Ki. Vīramaṇi. ‘Periyar Tanta Vitivilakku!’, Es. Es. Vācaṉ Nūṟṟāṇdu Malar, Vikatan Publications, 2004; and Periyar, ‘Romba Periya Manuṣaṉ’, Vikaṭaṉ, 5 October 2015, Accessed 14 July 2019, https://www.vikatan.com/best-ofvikatan/vikatan-vintage/a-tribute-article-to-ss-vasan-on-his-death-anniversary.