Towards an incomplete repertoire of South Asian pornographies: challenges, potentials, and futures

When the first half of this two-part special issue on ‘South Asian Pornographies’ came out in Porn Studies in 2020, we, the issue editors, felt that there was more to be said. We were still yearning for more representation from parts of South Asia other than India and in a sense that was our primary motivation for pitching a second issue. Two years and nine articles later, that itch has still not been scratched. In the process, however, we have come to the conclusion that a ‘full’ representation of South Asia is never going to be possible – not only for logistical reasons, but because of the very nature of the field. Speaking about pornography in the South Asian context brings up more absences than voices, and where we did find representation from spaces outside India, there were also withdrawals. These were often because of where our authors (or their subjects) were located. Thus, legal and censorial factors have impacted the shape of this special issue in more ways than one. The conflicts and tensions between censorship and obscenity, between permissibility and speech (even research) have only intensified in the two years between the first issue and the second. So, while this issue does feature a bevy of fantastic articles which we discuss here, we also want to use this space to talk about such issues – not as mere absences, but to hold up a methodological mirror for future work.

The case of Pakistan as it pertains to this issue is illustrative. For a time, we did have an article based on the experiences of obscenity laws and para-pornographic cultures in Pakistan. The author wanted to track the making of a film on mujra dancers – a form of sexually suggestive and expressive dance found in India and Pakistan, with the latter having become the hub of this form in the last few years. However, the paper did not take off because the author and the filmmakers were concerned about the security of their subjects. That film turned out to be Showgirls of Pakistan – a 2020 documentary by Saad Khan and Joey Chriqui that we have since watched with great interest. Thus, while Pakistan continues to remain an absence across the two issues of South Asian Pornographies, this film provides us with an opportunity to explore what is specific about the Pakistani context, as well as its greater resonances for studies of South Asian pornographic cultures.

While not strictly pornographic, mujra as it exists today – in between the stage and the web – is often framed as such. Mujra emerged as a court dance during the Mughal period and was performed by courtesans called tawaifs (Syeda 2015). But, as is often the case in the South Asian context, British colonial intervention criminalized the dancers, who were then forced to the margins of society to survive. This is the historical context that the film directs our attention to, and especially the problem of labelling erotic performance with the category of pornography using a Western lens. Showgirls of Pakistan shows the negotiations that performers make while they partake in such erotically charged dance movements, and the filmmakers follow three performers – Afreen Khan, Uzma, and Reema Jaan – as they go about their daily lives. The narrative is creatively interspersed with sequences from Pakistani films, and the documentary also relies on existing footage of the dancers including interviews they have given on television shows. Performing for an all-male audience, the dancers are constantly monitored by different government departments who send their officials undercover to check whether there are any violations. The instructions for the lessee and owners of the performance space include ensuring provisions for full censor rehearsal, compliance to the script, and the prevention of any additional dance moves or music other than what has been permitted. This often means that recordings of the performances are kept for safekeeping and any minute violation can lead to bans and cancellations that prevent the dancers from performing in big theatres for a while. This level of scrutiny is captured in an exchange Afreen has with her dressmaker, who advises her that a body suit with a plunging neckline might land her in trouble and promises to make a dress that can give her the look she wants without any objection from the censor. Further, the film showcases how the women support each other as they fight the moral police and patriarchal structures and navigate an unsafe workspace in which a number of dancers have been shot at, sometimes with fatal consequences.

The practices underlying mujra in Pakistan are thus calibrated to accommodate risks and to performing in immersive, often erotically charged performances under restrictions that foreclose physical contact between dancers, insist on mandatory full-body suits, and forbid see-through dresses. We see the dancers daringly expose the hypocrisies and moral compunctions that frame mujra dancers as sex workers. For instance, to a reporter who refers to mujra performance as vulgar, one of the performers says ‘If the upper-class women dance on television, it is performance, when we do, it is mujra’. When a cleric claims that moral values are destroyed because of mujra, she asks him whether he has ever seen her dance. In the backdrop of their performances are the arbitrary arrests of dancers like Anjuman Shehzadi for ‘vulgar dancing’. The documentary centre-stages the voices of the performers amidst the pushback they face from hosts of programmes such as the Hum Log telecast on Samaa TV and Azadi News. Mujra, as it appears in its contemporary form, stands between performative tradition and a global, modern culture – an in-between-ness that is a site of tension between desire and the law. The film is also testament to changing patterns of media consumption in Pakistani society. Hira Nabi has noted that, alongside totas [pornographic bits], the early 1990s saw the outpouring of Pashto films in the CD-R market which were not specifically pornographic but included ‘very, very sexually explicit, or very suggestive dances’ (2017, 276). And, as Farida Batool Syeda has observed, ‘The 90’s in Pakistan saw the widespread use of hands-on and user-friendly digital technology, which helped evolve the mujra dance genre into a low-cost and speedy informal industry’ (2015, 17–18). Syeda (2015, 127 and 137) also notes the extensive use of mobile phones for the digital life of mujra and its circulation. We see some of this reflected in Showgirls of Pakistan, albeit in more ‘updated’ forms.

Much of the film’s footage is drawn from social media videos and recordings taken by the documentary’s subjects, showing how digital media offer performers the potential to connect their offline performances with the micro-celebrity status afforded by social media platforms. In fact, the film starts with footage of Afreen as she interacts with her fans online, reading their comments live while updating them on her life as a dancer. The camera is focused on her feet, as she interacts with the audience in the soundtrack, asking them what they would like to see her upload on social media. The soundtrack of Afreen speaking with fans in a dark space without revealing her face allows the transgressive pleasures associated with engaging in stranger intimacy, as in camming, although without the visual as the main frame of reference. We then move to the all-male patrons of mujra as they watch Afreen gyrate her hips and the camera focuses on her breasts. The relative freedom that Afreen enjoys is possible only because she is in Lahore, unlike the other two performers we encounter in the documentary. However, in all of the vignettes, the digital modern world is at odds with conservative morality. What we encounter is a neoliberal assemblage of competing forces, some erotic and aspirational (Afreen, for instance, wants to make a music video like Rihanna’s), others repressive and censorial. It is in the thick of this tangle that discussions of porn also enter the film.

When rumours emerge of porn clips of her circulating in public, Afreen says ‘Why would anyone want to make porn in Pakistan where wearing sleeveless dress can take your life?’ Showcasing one of the clips, she jokes with her friends that the only similarity between herself and the performer in the clip is that they are both blond, and that even if it was of her, she does not find it a big deal. In the ensuing exchange, Afreen’s choreographer finds ways to prove that the clip is not of her – it shows a performer with breast implants before Afreen had these. The vignette aligns with Syeda’s observations about mujra’s multiple sites of production, distribution, and consumption, as well as innovative (and sometimes exploitative) practices such as compensating for the lack of Pakistani men in the videos ‘by juxtaposing the images of white heterosexual porn stars, acquired from the net or VCDs in the market, with exposed Pakistani women dancers’ (2015, 19) – also reminiscent of practices in Bangladesh and India (Hoek 2014; Mini 2016).

It is intriguing how discussions of porn attach themselves to the film outside the narrative text. Selected by VICE for its non-fiction collection, Show Girls of Pakistan was referred to as ‘Pak porn’ during the 17th Annual Hot Docs Forum by BBC’s Nick Fraser – the film’s director, Saad Khan, responding that this was equivalent to slut-shaming the film’s performers (Mallett 2016). What is interesting to us for our special issue is not just the film’s own discussion of pornography and obscenity, but also the ways in which ‘porn’ becomes a catch-all term that supports many different claims – those of moral conservatives, Western critics, and the filmmakers themselves. What we encounter in the form of mujra and in Showgirls of Pakistan, then, is a microcosm of what we have been calling South Asian pornographies. Mujra today is simultaneously specific to the legal and censorial conditions in Pakistan, as well as symptomatic of the nature of pornography, obscenity, and sexual cultures in contemporary South Asia. As a novel disciplinary formation, South Asian porn studies must contend with the multiple entanglements of obscenity, desire, sexuality, morality, and the law – a point we raised in our introduction to the first special issue and continue to extend in this one.

In this second part, we extend our interest in the way that the regional dynamics of ‘South Asia’ inflect pornographic cultures outside Euro-American contexts. By virtue of commonalities forged through colonial subjugation and similar patterns of economic liberalization in South Asia in the 1990s, the pornographic in South Asia is mediated via material cultures, infrastructures, and digital exchanges. Colonial regulatory structures seep into the post-colonial idealization of reproductive sexuality, positing this as the norm. On the other hand, the private sphere is cultivated as the dedicated realm for conjugal intimacy and is forever perched on the precipice between obscenity and transgression. While the articles published in the first issue located the pornographic imaginations cutting across film journalism, sex manuals, hijra¹ porn, Bangladeshi cut-pieces, aunty-porn, and Ragamala paintings produced in Avadh, this issue expands the scope of South Asian pornographies by addressing a range of sexual cultures that underpin discourses about sexuality, eroticism, and explicit media in the region.

Sexological and sex-educational discourses – both past and present – emerge as strong concerns for some of the authors in this issue. Sexology, as it was practised in South Asia in the early half of the twentieth century, took the shape of an elite bourgeoise project to cleanse the sexual by circumscribing it within a disciplinary paradigm.² In the pages of the inaugural issue of the Bombay-based International Journal of Sexology (1947–1955), the editor A. P. Pillay explored debates around the way female frigidity and ‘ideal’ orgasmic feminine subjects came to be discussed. Through the global network of knowledge sharing that Pillay forged through the International Journal of Sexology, channels of contact and communication were opened between sexologists and contributors from around the world, as well as the English-language readers from Berlin, Switzerland, Sydney, and Tel-Aviv (Ahluwalia 2018). As Sanjam Ahluwalia has pointed out, the journal’s reference to Western sexologists like Havelock Ellis, Margaret Sanger, and Margus Hirschfeld was compounded by a significant absence of contributions from Pillay’s contemporaries in India like R. D. Karve, G. S. Ghurye, and Sitaram Phadke. Magnus Hirschfeld’s visit to Bombay drew significant interest from the middle class and was widely reported (Fuechtner 2013). Yet global connections and the intermixing of ideas from Hindu scriptural texts, Ayurveda, bazaar [street] literature, social reform, and santati sastra [science of progeny] literature made sexology an eclectic space.³ This was often counterposed to the cheap literature that was available in the bazaar and meant for the masses. Through a normative, reproduction-oriented framing, and the use of medico-scientific language to steer the attention of the reader to the pedagogical handling of information, sexology provided a strong anchor by which to incorporate scientific discourse on sexuality into the otherwise popular consumption of erotic media (Gupta 2002; Ahluwalia 2018). This worked to reinsert middle-class respectability, stressing a scientific approach to sexuality as a knowledge system, although in an oblique way presenting the same pleasures and anxieties in the guise of science. Sexological tracts were a crucial part of the landscape of global and local connections that democratized sex in popular discourses. These developments are tracked in two of the articles in our special issue: Arnav Bhattacharya’s ‘Purging the Pornographic, Discipling the Sexual, and Edifying the Public: Pornography, Sex Education, and Class in Colonial Bengal (1930–1950s)’ and Anannya Bohidar’s ‘Creating Sexual Consumerism in Late Colonial South India: A Study of S. S. Vasan’s Contribution to Vernacular Sexual Consumer Culture’. Scholars such as Charu Gupta (2002) have argued that the categorization of sexological tracts and erotic media with sex advice literature often became blurry as it morphed through various layers of translations and cultural mediations. Bohidar’s and Bhattacharya’s articles expand on this.

Bhattacharya tracks the relationship between pornography and sexology by analyzing the works of the Bengali sexologists Abdul Hasanat and Nripendra Kumar Basu. As he points out, sexology gave way to a range of positionalities on sexual science among local sexologists that often varied significantly in the way they approached conjugal sexuality, class, and respectability. Among those sexologists who advocated birth control and sex education in Western India, R. D. Karve highlighted the supremacy of western sexological tracts and a rational approach steeped in European sexology (Botre and Haynes 2018). Karve’s contributions included books such as Adhunik Kamashatra [Modern Kamasastra] and editing the journal Samaj Swastya [Social Health], one of the first magazines in India to feature a sex advice column (Botre and Haynes 2017). As a critic of marriage, which he found to be constraining for both men and women, Karve supported the legalization of prostitution, while Samaj Swastya featured female nudes on the front cover and male nudes on the back to emphasize the relevance of nudity in promoting physical health (Heath 2010). Karve’s ideas were radical for the time, and different from other sexologists like Abul Hasanat, A. P. Pillay, and Nripendra Kumar Basu. Bhattacharya shows how Basu’s lack of a moral stance on pornography was influenced by his view that the popularity of erotic literature stemmed from the cheap accessibility of these printed materials. In fact, one imperative that united these varied sentiments among sexologists was the realization of the difficulties in maintaining a ban on erotic material.

Anannya Bohidar’s article explores the advertising techniques and marketing of sexual products spearheaded by the publisher and film producer S. S. Vasan in early twentieth-century Madras. Bohidar traces the advertising mechanisms used by Vasan to capitalize on the consumer market for conjugal erotic products. One of the interesting aspects that Bohidar explores is Vasan’s career trajectory as a mail-order entrepreneur who sold imported goods by advertising in local journals. By translating global sexual discourse for an emerging Tamil print public, Vasan brought together health and consumer products, placing them side by side with sexual texts. He also penned Ilvāḻkkaiyiṉ Irakaciyaṅkaḷ [The Mysteries of Wedded Life] (1927), a Tamil marriage manual, which was marketed as a superior literary product through its physical traits such as the outer binding and testimonies from prominent magazine editors vouching for its respectability. These features distinguished it from other kinds of erotic literature, including different versions of Kokkokam, a medieval sexual text. Like Bhattacharya, Bohidar demonstrates how erotica co-existed with sexological tracts, despite efforts to separate sexology’s ‘objective’ gaze from pornography’s sensationalism. This is an idea that runs through both issues of ‘South Asian Pornographies’. In the previous issue, for example, Spandan Bhattacharya (2020) explored how the infrastructures of cheap print technology caused the North Calcutta region of Battla to emerge as the hub for erotic literature in the early nineteenth century, including a range of material that drew from contemporary sex scandals in the form of novels and farces.

Bijleeraj Patra’s article ‘A Short History of the “Blue-Photo”: Bengali Sex Magazines and the Visual Empire of Printed Images (1940–1970)’ shifts the focus away from sexological tracts but sticks with print culture. Patra discusses sex magazines such as Nara-Nari (1938–1950s), edited by Sukanta Kumar Halder, and Natun Jiban (1944), using these to chart the vernacularization of desire mediated via print technology in the early twentieth century. ‘Blue-photos’ captured women in a nude or semi-nude fashion, in side-poses and long shots which diluted their immediate identification. Patra also traces the circulation of ‘blue-photos’ in the way male bodybuilders [‘Sharircharchakari’] doubled-up as semi-nude models for sex magazines, while the ‘blue-photo’ tradition can also be glimpsed in the practice of nude models working with art students – art education itself being part of the matrix of colonial modernity. Photographs of the female form used in art education also became part of photo-series in sex magazines. Unlike the exhibition of the face to individualize muscular male bodies, female nudes often had their faces occluded from public view. The facialization of the muscular male body and the facelessness of the ‘arty’ female nude can be mapped to the gendered politics of respectability in modern Bengal.

A focus on muscularity returns, albeit in more contemporary forms, in Michiel Baas’ article ‘Capitalizing on Desire: (Re)Producing and Consuming Class in Indian “Gay” Pornography’. Baas interrogates gay pornographic expression through an ethnographic exploration of the practices and experiences of fitness trainers and bodybuilders as they fashion their identities to capitalize on their erotic and sexual potential in order to cater to an all-male clientele. Expanding on his previous work (Baas 2020) that locates the space of the gymnasium and use of bodily capital by fitness trainers as a way of moving beyond limited social and cultural capital, Baas shows how fitness trainers occasionally move to porn, explicit photoshoots, and sex work to utilize muscular capital, working with and through their bodies. This, as Baas shows, is underlined through patterns of (homo)erotic layering found in photographs featuring muscular men, as well as consumption models that open up a range of options – an example being OnlyFans – to explore the possibilities of partaking in a continuum of bodily practices.

Overlaps between homoerotic (self-)representation and digital platforms are also the subject of Rohit Dasgupta’s discussion, ‘“Grindr is basically interactive porn”: Ethnographic Observations from Kolkata on Queer Intimacies and “Pic-exchange” on Grindr and PlanetRomeo’. Dasgupta uses digital ethnography to map social media use by young queer men in Kolkata, in order to interrogate porn consumption practices. Training his lens on the queer networks forged through the sharing of self-made explicit images, he locates affective encounters that allow for an interactive exchange of intimacy. By sharing explicit pictures and digital footprints in the form of animated images, users explore variations of phatic communication in order to engage in fleeting intimate encounters that border platformed intimacies and porno-cultures.

Shifting the register from the digital to more ‘traditional’ media, Kareem Khubchandani’s ‘Between Aunties: Queering South Asian Aunty Porn’ explores a selection of South Asian diasporic novels, suggesting that in these desire is encoded as a continuum coexisting with aunty attributes such as cooking and gossip. Khubchandani’s article, in many ways, is in conversation with his project on Critical Aunty Studies, a collaboration that brings together scholars working in this area, and a special issue of Text & Performance Quarterly (2022) that draws on a colloquium organized in 2021.⁴ Exploring the genre of ‘aunty porn’, but also using the figure of the aunty as a ‘method’, in alignment with the broader Critical Aunty Studies project, Khubchandani locates how gossip and the surreptitious intimacies that emerge through erotic embodiment are woven into the mundane aspects of interactions between aunties. Tapping into literature, film, and visual art – what he calls a ‘promiscuous archive of aunty representation’ – Khubchandani forces us to rethink pornography in the South Asian context, not just as a form of representation, but as a form of lived intimacy between aunties that allows queer desires to manifest in otherwise stringent social structures. He provides us with a framework for disentangling the queer erotic realms that allow aunties to ‘invent pleasure, play and autonomy beyond the sexual scripts prescribed to them’.

If Khubchandani urges us to look beyond forms of representation to the lived, affective relationalities of pornographic and erotic intimacies, Pallavi Rao’s article pushes the envelope even further. ‘#PatriarchyKaPackup: Mediating Sexual Discourse and the Casteless Feminist Subject in Indian Performance Poetry’ addresses how performances touching upon the erotic require a balancing act whereby any traces of pornographic have to be suppressed, while simultaneously directing attention towards questions of desire and pleasure. Focusing on female slam poets utilizing urban performance spaces, Rao examines the erasure of identity categories including caste and class in their performance as they narrate instances of sexual violence and pleasure. Rao juxtaposes the castelessness embodying the universality of experiences in upper-caste female subjects’ performances with the politicization of identities of Dalitbahujan women.⁵ In doing so, she demonstrates how performance poetry’s ‘localized articulations of mediated erotics’ allow for a kind of sexual confession where sexual action is displaced offstage and reinserted through the soundscape, supplanting the visuality of the sexual act with an aural component.

The next piece in this special issue is an interview with filmmaker and sex-educator Paromita Vohra. ‘“We give sex a good name”: An Interview with Paromita Vohra’ is an extensive conversation between Vohra and the two guest editors. The interview covers a range of topics pertaining to Vohra’s experience as an artist, filmmaker, sex educator, and creator of the multimedia portal Agents of Ishq (AoI). Vohra walks us through her journey as a curator and the stakes involved in understanding sexual pleasure and desire through a feminist lens. The conversation takes the reader through the messy realities that stall, condition, and discipline bodies, making sexual violence the dominant paradigm in understanding the body in the South Asian context. Vohra’s work instead directs us towards the multisensory aspects of love and sexual pleasure, as seen in her installation ‘A Love Latika’, which she describes as ‘an electronic forest of erotic poems’. As an exploration of ‘public privacy’, the installation invited visitors to collectively partake in what they would otherwise consider deeply private moments of listening to erotic poems. The same sense of collectivity is also seen in AoI, both in user-submitted columns as well as in collaborative multimedia pieces. Of special note is a fascinating collaboration on the idea of consent in which AoI produced a series of videos with lavani artists (lavani is a Maharashtrian song and dance performed by women and using sexual innuendos). These videos work through different relationship scenarios to explore what counts as consent and the conditions which can signify violation. As Vohra states, the basic premise for AoI is to normalize conversations about sex, using popular culture as a reference point for initiating discussion about sex. This includes conversations on porn and porn-adjacent forms. The eclectic material that is presented by AoI in essays, images, and videos envisages an intersectional space which doubles up as a platform for sex education in India.

Sticking with the themes of sex education and feminist intervention, the final article in the special issue, Subha Wijersiriwardena’s ‘Porn, Sexuality and Expression in Sri Lanka: Feminist Debates and Interventions’, locates the fault lines within which sexuality and erotic media operate in Sri Lanka amidst state sanctions on pornography. Wijersiriwardena points out the residual legacies of colonial legal regulation that define the strictures within which obscenity laws are used in Sri Lanka, as they do in India and Pakistan. The Obscene Publications Ordinance No. 4 of 1927 restricts the possession, production, import, and export of obscene publications.⁶ In the absence of a clear-cut definition of what constitutes obscenity, this Act is used to prosecute same-sex relations as well as sex work, alongside free expression. Wijersiriwardena tracks the various feminist interventions pertaining to regulations on pornography pitched from the rights perspective, and how they bring in questions around pleasure and consent. As with the Indian scenario described by Vohra, the absence of a comprehensive sex education policy and strict regulations on obscenity in Sri Lanka make digital porn an important supplementary avenue for sexual exploration among the country’s youth. With platforms such as Jillhub aggregating local content, performers such as Kuweni Devi, Shani Akka, and Princess Alekhshi gather a massive following and the regional markers of Sri Lankan erotic media are used in the tags that accompany the content description. Analogous to the anonymization of the face in Patra’s discussion of erotic female nude art models in Bengal, Wijersiriwardena showcases strategies of ‘home-made’ porn where the face of the female performer is deliberately obscured using emojis. Wijersiriwardena points out that the amateur home-made format and the informal regime of production puts porn performers out of the realm of visibility. This means that even if there are violations of consent among porn performers, the chances of them coming out in the open are rare.

Such structural factors impact the way research on explicit media takes a different shape in Sri Lanka, and more broadly in South Asia, where the safety of respondents is often a cause of worry because of informal work patterns. This aligns with what we observed in the case of Showgirls of Pakistan earlier in this Introduction. Research on the pornographic in South Asia often requires modulating between representation, affect, desire, and law. As seen in Showgirls of Pakistan, and as demonstrated by many of the authors in this issue, this has as much to do with media infrastructures in a rapidly globalizing world as it does with ethics, morality, and free expression.

In both Pakistani mujra and the case of porn in India, a range of technological changes since the 1970s has led to a reimagination of explicit media and its modes of production and consumption, as well as a series of frictions between infrastructure, desire, and the law. With the importing of VHS tapes and VCR players to India and Pakistan in the 1990s, adult content could easily be transferred and duplicated. The importing of tapes also boosted transnational underground media production based in the Gulf and Hong Kong. As many scholars have noted, the period of economic liberalization in the 1990s and the opening up of the skies also gave way to anxieties about the importing of sexualized content (Mazzarella 2006; Shah 2007). In the contemporary moment, those anxieties have moved from the satellite channel and the VHS tape to other spaces – particularly the internet. In the Indian context, recent developments are indicative of new discourses about digitally mediated communication in which pornography stands in for an array of anxieties. Take, for instance, the case of Raj Kundra, a businessman arrested for making pornographic films in 2021. Kundra, who was widely publicized as the mastermind of an adult film racket, had formed a company named Arms Prime Media Limited in February 2019 and developed an app named ‘Hotshots’, which was later sold to a UK-based company, Kenrin. Indian law enforcement acted on complaints that young actresses were forced into porn films with the promise of roles in web series, and the content was then uploaded on subscription-based OTT platforms meant for adult films. Allegedly, the day-long shoots were carried out in rented bungalows in the outskirts of Bombay like Madh Island, with a limited crew who would ‘double up as directors, dialogue writers, location scouters and web app developers’ (Thaver 2021).

In some ways, concerns around these developments are similar to the imagining of a criminal underground of porn production in the celluloid era, encapsulated in films such as Miss Lovely (dir. Ashim Ahluwalia, 2012), The Dirty Picture (dir. Milan Luthria, 2011), and Kanyaka Talkies (dir. K. R. Manoj, 2013). Yet they also point towards new sites of anxiety, desire, and pleasure that have emerged with the ubiquitous uptake of the internet and cell phones and a porno assemblage. Here, the fear of leaked videos from CCTVs and cell phones exists alongside the potentialities of self-expression and sexual experimentation. Whether it is Pakistani mujra as reflected in Showgirls of Pakistan, new developments in adult OTT offerings in India, the remediation of Bangladeshi celluloid porn and cut-pieces on the web (something Lotte Hoek [2020] beautifully explores in our previous issue), or the many instances of amateur homemade porn in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, it is clear that South Asian pornography is a transitioning discursive field. Much of the old persists in the new, yet the new must also be studied for its novel offerings. The topics explored by the authors in this current issue present exactly this blend of continuities and disjunctures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Hijra is a difficult term to translate to English. Colonial regimes branded the Hijra community as eunuchs, but the term and identity is broader. Today, the term can generally be used to refer to someone who is part of alternative kinship systems formed by gender non conforming communities and asserts a feminine gender identity for usually (but not always) male-born persons.

2 For more on sexology in the Indian context, see Ishita Pande (2020).

3 For more on Santati-Śāstra, see Luzia Savary (2014).

4 See https://www.criticalauntystudies.com/

5 The composite term Dalit-Bahujan is often used in anti-caste movements to broadly refer to marginalized lower-caste groups categorized constitutionally as OBCs, Dalits or Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes (Rao 2021).

6 See http://www.mediareform.lk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/164-Obscene-Publications-Ordinance-No.04-of-1927.pdf