Bollywood-porn

This according to the New York Times' blog India Ink:

There is some evidence that Indians are more actively seeking pornography on the Internet than citizens of many other countries:
New Delhi, population 16 million, was the city with the highest-worldwide percentage of searches for “porn” in 2012. Dallas was the second highest.Google searches for the word “porn,” as a proportion of total Google searches, have increased five times between 2004 and 2013 in India, according to Google Trends. Over that period, India ranked fourth worldwide, after Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, and Pakistan.
One of every five mobile users in India wants adult content on his 3G-enabled phone, one 2011 study by IMRB concludes, and pornography Web sites rank among the most popular in India. Sunny Leone, an Indian-origin Canadian porn star, became a popular in India after appearing on the “Bigg Boss” house here in 2011.

While the "good" news (for those Indians who measure their superiority/inferiority as a culture vis a vis their neighbors) is that Pakistan still ranks higher than India in the porn-search statistics, the bad news is that this search isn't passive. The deep and rising interest in pornography could be behind what many have dubbed the "rape epidemic" in India.

I'm not surprised by the spike in pornography downloading in India. Indian males have been fond of pornography for a long time, it's only now that technology can track and evince these proclivities and formalize them as cultural practices. 

But what confounds me is how a proposed "banning" of pornography in India would solve the problem of rape. Rape isn't just a sexual or an impious act, it's an act of extreme violence that could happen when women are typecast as an overly submissive species, not just in pornography but in mass culture. 

Pornography is ubiquitous in popular Indian culture. Bollywood, the most hegemonic of all Indian popular cultural forms, is pornographic at its core, as it objectifies women like no other movie industry in the world does. Bollywood-Porn, like other kinds of pornography, divests the female of her individuality, by making her an object mostly that males can variously ogle at, lust after, wolf-whistle into oblivion, imagine as passive receptacles of their seeds, etc. 

The woman in a typical Bollywood fare is an object that exists only to titillate the male organ. 

Sociologist Ashis Nandy had observed years ago that we Indians should not underestimate the power of popular culture, by which he meant Bollywood, to shape our notions of socialization and sexualization. Indians have continued to ignore the effect Bollywood has on the Indian mind and now that sexual crime against women and girls have become a grave social problem, they turn to single out pornography as the sole villain.  

Listen to the song, and if you don't understand Hindi, just study the body language of both the girl and the boy; the scene is deceptively framed within the traditional Indian festival of holi, when Indian males get a chance to freely touch the bodies of females with whom they allegedly "play" holi. But its a pornographic scene; observe the manner in which the relationship between the boy and girl is shown to transform in a few seconds, from being asexual and/or friendly to one of lust and extreme desire. The boy lunges forward and begins to chase the female with such ferocity that it doesn't look like the celebration of spring anymore.


A generation of Indian males are raised to watch this as popular entertainment and you get the picture of what it does to their mind regarding women.

And don't be fooled: "Balam pichkari" has been corrupted from Krishna's time into symbolizing the self-spraying male organ. The male organ has been represented by several objects over time in Bollywood--as a syringe, as a "danda" or a stick, and here as a "pichkari" that wants to wet the object.