“In Praise of Bad Women.”

review by Thomas Waugh

Darshana Sreedhar Mini, Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (University of California Press, 2024)

Call me a heavy-breather, but I spent the 2024-25 winter holiday reading a wonderfully hot scholarly book on my favorite topic, porn. Writing now in the freezing cold of January 2025 brings together several of my hottest pleasures in addition to porn—B movies, and the South Indian state of Kerala. This wildly cinephilic state of 35 million people famously has the highest literacy rate in India, and a still thriving century-old regional film industry in the local language Malayalam, which still produces over 200 wildly popular feature films per year, propelled by a lively star system. (Canada, with approximately the same population, has been producing only three-quarters that number of features annually and would be a starless box-office basket case were it not for all those star-driven French-language hits from Quebec.) Incidentally, Kerala also has the hottest men on the subcontinent, who delicately leap over the monsoon puddles holding up the corner of their flimsy waist wraps called mundus on their way to watching hit A movies in the bursting movie palaces and sexy B movies in storefront rerun houses.

When you're short of visual documentation from an unevenly preserved historical film corpus, get an artist pal (S. Radhakrishnan) to produce an evocative sketch based on the oral histories you've done--in this case of a "soft-porn shooting floor." Page 7.	Newspaper clipping in Malayalam language showing two rival soft-porn stars coming together for the first time in the 1999 film Kalluvathukkal Kathreena. Page 17.

And of course my other hottest pleasure is Jump Cut. Our readers around the world must be told about Rated A. Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India, Darshana Mini’s brilliant new book about the heritage of Kerala’s B-movie erotic films.  In Rated A you will learn everything about this genre that thrived throughout the 80s, 90s and 2000s. This includes its voluptuously hot leading ladies (with names like Shakeela and Silk Smitha), who took off their neriyathu cloths rather than mundus—on the screens of those palaces and rerun houses, for their overwhelmingly male audiences.

Jump Cut readers interested in so-called “world cinema” are accustomed to exploring genres, auteurs and movements from around the planet, such as national art cinemas, festival hits, and traditions of dissident documentary--more accessible and canonizable than B-movie local potboilers. Mini confirms that we need to broaden our scope. Her title Rated A references the official “Adult” rating that her corpus of such movies would routinely receive from India’s ludicrously bureaucratic, censorious yet ultimately ineffectual Central Board of Film Certification—whose nefarious impact on the world’s largest national cinema has already been the topic of several books. Indeed censorship debacles and dynamics provide a fascinating backdrop for Mini’s history.

Did you know that the impetus of India’s post-Indira “liberalization” in the 1980s and 1990s unleashed the importation of a flood of cheap Western sexploitation films onto the Indian market? I recall noticing these films on marquees from Delhi to Chennai throughout those years, but I didn’t screen a single one. Now I regret never having experienced such masterpieces as Carry on Emmanuelle (UK, 1978) in an Indian theatre. Beginning in the 1980s, this import phenomenon triggered the local generic energy that is the topic of Rated A—focused on poetic titles (in English translation) like Her Nights, Sex Life of Heroine, That Moment and Reshmi’s Youth. Malayalam soft-porn B-movies gradually dissipated in the current century, not without leaving a vibrant internet legacy evocatively covered in Mini’s final chapters. As for the gender composition of its audience, the public theatrical audience was of course overwhelming male, as I’ve already mentioned. But Mini makes a fascinating case for the existence of its female publics throughout the industry’s para-manifestations from VHS/DVD formats to its publicity apparatus and media coverage to its eventual digital and online recyclings.

Mini’s impeccably interdisciplinary set of methodologies includes on-location ethnography, oral histories and interviewing, textual, genre and star analysis, and media industry archival research, carried out over more than a decade—even in the Gulf States, where resides a huge cinephile Kerala diaspora. Having been trained in textual analysis in the 1970s, I especially enjoyed her one exceptional excursus into detailed study of a single film, the Hindi-titled but Chennai-produced “sex education” blockbuster Main aur Tum (You and me, Harihar, 1987). This rich mishmash of recycled imports on STI’s and childbirth etc. etc., is framed through indigenous materials on “wedding nights”, orgasm, and contraception, etc., etc., all organized around the role of a glib sexologist played by Bollywood “heavy” star Om Shivpuri. (In researching this review, I was fortunate to snag a 7-minute excerpt on YouTube; Mini was able to see the whole thing on 16mm, thanks to the film’s friendly producer.) I would have appreciated more textual analysis throughout the book, but I empathize fully with Mini’s challenge in the face of an evanescent and volatile corpus.

The author's photo of a costume shop situated in Chennai's film production neighborhood. Page 78.	In her chapter on "digital remediations," the author's 2014 photo of a soft-porn cinema in Bombay's red light, catering to migrant laborers and sex workers by recycling soft-porn classics. Page 144.

In recompense, one aspect of Mini’s book that I found very appealing is its first-person framework. The “I-word” is present on almost every page, and Mini’s subjective experience with the soft-porn cultural phenom is at the centre of the book. Moreover her political take as a survivor of both Indian and American feminist politics is explicit:

“I align myself with sex- and porn-positive feminists who affirm the need to create inclusive approaches to studying pornographic practices and representations by accounting for production and labor involved in making pornography….(25)…foregrounding the agency of performers and industry professionals… (171)”

She keeps in the foreground her sympathy with filmmakers “working in a seemingly ‘low’ cultural form […] as a subversive political form to resist intolerant attitudes to difference.” 6
Rated A will have been a breakthrough in India in a context where Me-Too sexphobia is not to be taken lightly and where the Hindu right wing has been in bed with the so-called feminist anti-porn contingent for generations. Mini’s breakthrough is all the more since her oft-acknowledged lesbian point of view is as essential as it is brave and ensures her book’s critical edge (India’s Supreme Court decriminalized same-sex sex/identities in 2018, at the height of the author’s research). I have appropriated this edge in stealing the title of her conclusion, “In Praise of Bad Women,” as the title of this review of a book by a very bad woman indeed! (Part of me was hoping Mini’s queer point of view would allow glimpses of undeniable male same-sex undercurrents in the soft-porn corpus—onscreen and offscreen--but unfortunately that seems to be postponed for the next book!)
           
Among the many savory threads that bring out the specificity of Indian B-movie soft-porn culture is the role of the projectionist. The person in the booth turns out to be a creative and resourceful key player. It’s their job to have handy reels of “thundu,” usually naughty unapproved reels or clips, for on-the-spot splicing into officially “censored” movies, with the authorities winkingly looking the other way. One of Mini’s most suggestive photos is within a booth showing a cache of spools labelled “misc. Indian ladies” beside an editing machine with an unidentified actress in an “uncensored” bath scene on an editing machine screen. A rich encapsulation of the technical and human dynamics of the soft-porn industry!

Rated A cements Mini’s place as the leading authority on South Asian erotic media. 2024 was her bumper year since it also saw the publication of the Routledge anthology South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene, co-edited with her Madison colleague Anirban K. Baishy--nineteen finger-on-the-pulse essays previously published in Porn Studies. This volume inevitably makes up for the relative silence on male same-sex dynamics in Rated A. Both books are very pricey indeed, but welcome to US academic publishing in the 21st century! At least Rated A is very affordable in India thanks to the co-publication deal with Delhi’s “Zubaan”, so any underpaid industry professionals who read academic English can buy it for the price of a decent light sidewalk lunch for two, and in a couple of instances even check out their photo or artistic rendering!

Speaking of which, another brilliant and innovative feature of the book is its illustrations. Mini’s loving care is evident in the evocative collage cover and the almost forty other original and expressive images! I was expecting a lot of frame grabs, but in fact there are almost none, due to the ephemeral nature of the “constantly mutating, manipulable” corpus, alas, most films having been lost in their original form. Instead the book is full of the author’s own photos of her research adventures and discoveries, the evocative production, exhibition and publicity clutter and spaces of various kinds that she uncovered, and more recent internet grabs of pitches and people. Most original and evocative are three graphic “impressions” of configurations on set and on screen by Chennai art director S. Radhkrishnan, complemented by a handful of other artistic and graphic illustrations. The visual thread thus confirms Mini’s unique and very personal engagement with her chosen world.

One frustration I felt as I finished the book was the absences of pointers from the author for the reader who wants to experience the original media objects under scrutiny. Such access is surely a fundamental premise of film and media studies. Of course we love your descriptions and analysis of films, stars, and publics, but we want to maximize our exposure to films, stars, and media. We understand that the archive is depleted, vandalized and recycled and that “these films often lack singular, unaltered texts and are mutable depending on the venues in which they are projected.” (159) And we realize along with book publishers that it’s dangerous to publish internet links that will be long since invalidated by the time your book appears in print. But the reader needs help. Youtube delivers lots of instances of the 2020 Shakeela biopic (without subtitles of course), but reliable access to decades-old soft porn materials is pretty hard to come by. Hey, let’s have a DVD compilation to accompany the book… with subtitles!

Basically this is a high quality volume. Mini and the University of California Press have a right to be very proud of their product, as does the book’s Delhi co-publisher, the indie-feminist Zubaan. However as both addictive author and user of scholarly film books, I hope my few gentle gripes will lead to a more perfect and serviceable film studies list in the future. Firstly, I hate the book’s endnotes, which are unuseable. I understand that publishers labor under the myth that readers find footnotes distracting to the point of harassment, but their real pressure is certainly the bottom line and all those expenses on layout and typesetting. Ultimately all the work gets downloaded on the author and the reader! Sobeit, we’re used to it. But making things worse, the now standard practice of including the original page and chapter numbers on an endnotes page’s “running head” has inexplicably been rejected by UCP. Accordingly, this book’s notes, however crucial, force the reader to flip back and forth eight times before connecting a reference in the text to its note and thereby to lose all sense of Mini’s argument. Get with it UCP!

Secondly, they’re clearly also saving a lot of money on copy-editing: the book unacceptably has more than its fair share of embarrassing errors. As a copy-edit sadist, I can’t decide whether my favorite is the misspelling of the India’s mass-selling condom brand “Nirodh”—the most popular in the world!—or the obscure movie they’re hilariously calling “Prostitute’s Dairy.” I admit my pleasure is a kind of coping mechanism, but for the following crime, no coping is possible: someone decided that international English-speaking readers need no help dealing with Indian languages (including English). A glossary should clearly have been provided to help North American and other Global North readers with local terminology. I’m not talking only about adjectives like “Ambedkarite”, nor the endless stream of Malayalam film industry concepts like “madakarani (sex siren)” that dot every page, nor the suggestive translations of Malayalam soft-porn titles which are offered only sporadically. Indian English also needs a support mechanism: for example in a book continuously discussing storefront exhibition practices, the word “footpath,” which translates into North American English as “sidewalk” provides one more task for the glossary in the second edition please!

As for Indian topography, the widespread phenomenon of Global South changes in names of cities and even countries is no novelty to UCP’s intended readers, who were launched on their trauma by “Myanmar”’s dictators in 1989. Mini apparently neglected to set up a consistent and clear policy for dealing over a historical span with this issue. The film industry hub cities of Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Trivandrum, Cochin, Calicut, Bangalore, Poona, etc., etc. all started one by one becoming something else thirty years ago (mostly thanks to the political agendas of rightwing governments). Mini should have provided front and centre a detailed note on her naming practice in the above non-existent glossary, to guide non-Indian readers through the confusing morasse (she does indeed offer a sensible but well-hidden endnote on the issue as applied to Madras/Chennai only, though more than one discussion inappropriately references both Madras and Chennai on the same page [e.g. 131] and doesn’t even acknowledge the issue). Otherwise Mini seems to reject updates on city names in her native state of Kerala, for example Thiruvananthapuram, the name of the capital since 1991… except when she doesn’t! The issue of course is accessibility for readers not intimately familiar with Indian history and culture in the period Mini covers.

In conclusion, my foregoing slight crankiness about production and editing challenges notwithstanding, my parting shot is unmitigated enthusiasm for a wonderful book on an urgent historical and political media corpus. Mini uses the hottest new media studies concepts for her study, uncompromisingly, without ever talking down, but delivers a thundu-rich study that will be accessible for students, cinephiles, pornophiles, and South Asia-philes alike. I’m all for a book about “corporeal solidarity” and I rate it A+!  Grab it in paper while it’s hot. In fact, go to India and buy it there for only seven US dollars!

 A Facebook screen shot of soft-star Shakeela, evoking the genre's internet legacy evocatively covered in Mini’s final chapters. Page 161.