When CPI leader Atul Anjaan said Sunny Leone’s condom advertisement would encourage rapes, his misreading came from a long tradition of richly coded condom ads. The early Nirodh ad spoke in the state language of family planning. Sex came at the end when a couple was shown slowly disappearing into a dark corner, which could not be publicly known. The Nirodh couple, solemnly holding hands to indicate responsibility and commitment, faded into sex under the disciplining gaze of the government.

Much later, the condom ad found a new language, the language of pleasure. The Kamasutra condom ad showed a half-naked couple frolicking in water, dissociating sex from the state and matrimonial responsibility. However, it was no sign of sexual revolution. The language of pleasure was safely couched in yet another language, the language of tradition. They could speak of sexual pleasure only by making an appeal to tradition for legitimacy — that’s why the name was Kamasutra. Who could object when it was all there in the old Hindu text? The later, more popular Nirodh ad that spoofed the Raj Kapoor song Pyaar hua, iqraar hua hai belonged to the cinematic convention of the double entendre, which we have grown comfortable with. Who could miss the overarching prophylactic connotation of the umbrella, which saved the couple in torrential rain? The ad spoke of sex in the social language of safety and protection.

Anjaan, and indeed most of us, are not used to sex being articulated in its own language, the language of pleasure. We are fine as long as we hear it in the language of the state, tradition, etc. But when it finds utterance in the unabashed language of pleasure, as in the Sunny Leone ad, we face a breach of meaning and try to translate it into some other language. Anjaan translated it into the language of social oppression, the rape.

Increasingly, sex is getting dissociated from languages in which we have got accustomed to finding it. What do you make of Radhe Maa in ‘sinful’ shorts dancing to Bollywood songs and Leone, dressed in a kurta and ceremonial yellow scarf, praying at the Siddhivinayak temple? From blasphemous pop star Madonna to New-Age meditation guru Osho Rajneesh, many have mixed religion and sex to shock their way to limelight. But that’s not what Leone and Radhe Maa do. Both, in their own ways, create a social crisis of meaning by unsettling our assumptions about sexuality and freeing it from languages of religion, psychology, science, justice, state and urban legend. They compel us to unlearn what we learn about sex from the pope, Freud, the Ram Sene goons, the police that raids couples in hotels, the feminist and the agony aunt.

Leone might be a savvy market queen who has tasted blood in the Hindi film industry and Radhe Maa might just be a sham to some, yet they force us out of our uncritical reception of tradition and modernity by provocatively mixing one language with the other.

Blurring boundaries

Once a broad line separated the good girls from the bad ones. In Hindi films, a conservative and self-effacing woman was played off against a permissive, independent woman who smoked and drank with abandon, made the first move and then aggressively chased the hero. The good woman, the heroine, was an adarsh Bharatiya naari (whatever that meant) and the bad woman, the vamp, was thoroughly westernised. Manoj Kumar movies (such as Upkar, 1967), where affluence and western culture were founts of evil while virtue lay in the desi and conservative lifestyle, turned this representation into a caricature.

The vamp went nearly out of fashion as feminist ideas spread, consumer culture dissociated guilt from gratification, and Indians tasted the fruits of western education. The heroine came to have a bit of the vamp too in her: now she voiced her desire, asserted her rights and showed an occasional mean streak. But it took Karenjit Kaur Vohra to actually subvert the good girl-bad girl binary with her complete, built-in bad girl — Sunny Leone.

A confident, self-made Indo-Canadian, Vohra is a devoted wife who flaunts her conjugal life, keeps away from affairs, bonds with her brother and visits gurudwaras and temples. But her double, Leone, is a taboo-breaking, bisexual porn star who challenges item girls of Bollywood by embodying the new sexual freedom, which affluence and activism have brought home. However, Vohra and Leone should not be seen only in juxtaposition; they are in constant interplay, each fashioning the other. Vohra is hot because her meaning is tampered by the codes of Leone; and Leone is acceptable because she carries the connotation of Vohra. What makes a porn star such a darling of Indian masses is the suggestion that Vohra the good girl carries the possibilities of Leone the bad girl. And when Leone acquires a hint of Vohra, she is no longer the traditional Bollywood sex symbol — that well-endowed, sultry woman, who symbolised a dark, secret, transgressive sexuality (often a South Indian for the sly racial suggestion of primordial passion). Her sexuality refracts through a globalised consumer culture and a Punjabiness that symbolises good health, abundance, fertility and affability. That’s why Leone’s porn is not the dark, secret affair that belonged to shifty people in seedy internet cafes or huddles in student dorms. It is out in the open — a gleaming, shopping-mall sexuality, which does not have the thrill of the contraband or the delights of thievery. Sex bombs such as Silk Smitha were the subtext of a socialist superego that had disciplined aesthetic expression in literature and cinema.

The Bollywood code

Leone has not only killed the Bollywood sex symbol that signified a dark, secret sexuality, but has erased an entire metaphorical code. At its simplest, the Bollywood sexual code had two flowers in an embrace to signify an amorous event. But when the code got elaborate, even a die-hard Freudian would blush with embarrassment — the rains, the wet clothes, the deep, dark cave and a flickering fire lit by an enterprising hero. The entire mise-en-scene conspired to relay the meaning of what was going to soon happen. In a more academic version, with ample help from anthropology, the hero and heroine would stray into a forest and reach a village where drunk tribals danced wildly and sang their deep-throated songs. The gaunt tribal man and his plump woman were idealised sexual types. It took our filmmakers a rather long detour through pre-historic times to simply convey that the hero and heroine are going to make love. The Ramsay Brothers found inventive ways of inserting sex sideways into horror stories. Their ketchup-covered ghosts found humanity at its most vulnerable in the female of the species in a see-through negligee alone in her bed at night. It was a standard tactic to pull crowds, but it would certainly have found Freud nodding in approval.

Innuendos, double entendre and suggestive dance moves were other parts of the metaphorical code. Sexual meaning remained buried in these metaphors. It was only hinted at, however elaborately, creating a flash of understanding. The suggestive imagery was foregrounded and sex remained in the background. Leone has subverted this code by bringing it all to the foreground. She is not a metaphor where we understand one thing in terms of another. She has placed the foreground beside the background and brought the two incompatible worlds together — of the whore and the girl-next-door. Leone’s rhetoric aims to show the whore in the girl and the girl in the whore while also upsetting other binaries of traditional Punjabi/American rebel, heterosexual/bisexual, glamorous/domestic, moral/immoral and ethnic/global. She liberates sexuality from the left- and right-wing clichés by creating new meanings between the obvious stereotypes of a dutiful wife and a hungry whore.

Leone’s good girl-bad girl interplay also mirrors a confusion in our westernising society pertaining to the question of ‘What empowers women’? Is it open sexual expression or a challenge to the male gaze? She has mixed the two opposing languages of the Manoj Kumar movies and forces us to interpret each anew. She is popular not for only being a porn star but for putting more meaning in porn than just sex. She has taken sexuality beyond the Bollywood conventions and deployed it to expose our own social and cultural infirmities.

By coding sexuality with provocative ideas, Leone may well signal the end of media that thrives on nudity. Just like porn mags died after the internet, after Leone it might become increasingly superfluous for engine oil ads to feature erotic women or for magazines to carry sex surveys to boost circulation. She has also made the job harder for the many Poonam Pandeys who get quick and easy publicity by shedding their clothes.

Beyond religion

Cinema represents our social view of sex. That sex can be discussed only in whispers and metaphors is an idea that arose from religion, where most of our taboos are manufactured. Religions — except for a few traditions such as tantra — find sex impure, so they restrict it to the business of procreation. If Leone undermines the cinematic language of sexuality, Radhe Maa challenges its religious interpretations. While she has been accused of holding lewd kirtans and forcing people into sex, what we know from her online photographs and videos is that she loves to flaunt her body in revealing clothes like models and film stars. She revels in her glamourised self. Her devotees, most of whom seem to come from conservative backgrounds, don’t mind it at all.

For most of the modern babas and gurus, sexuality is a matter of regulation, control and sublimation. Sex is useful only for its procreative purpose. They prescribe sexual routines and regimens and tell women to produce more children in the service of religion. When religion posits sex as sin, there are only two ways to engage with it — compliance and defiance.

Radhe Maa neither complies with the religious code of sexuality like most other gurus, nor wilfully defies it like Osho Rajneesh. Her sexuality sits easy with the religiosity she projects. It does not involve the ISKCON-type eroticised but celibate devotion. She dances to popular Bollywood love songs and poses in revealing pink dresses. That she does it openly and not in a secret double life proves that she dares to mix the profane with the pious and invent a religiosity that does not follow the sexual codes of mainstream religion. She allows us to perceive sex as a normal human activity and consider religion as an inclusive practice that does not thrive on taboos. Like Radhe Maa’s representation, Leone’s life and career also stress the everydayness of sex as against its exoticisation in cinema. When Leone mixes sexuality with religion and domestic life, she doesn’t shock but makes it appear regular.

So, are Leone and Radhe Maa the new avatars of eros who liberate sex from its various politics and articulate its essential meaning? Do they strip sex of all its veils and present it in its primary voluptuousness? On the contrary, they are part of a growing trend of a de-eroticised sexuality rendered everyday and routine by the market. Radhe Maa staring down from billboards, brandishing her mini trishul, is an advertisement of instant grace. She is a pastiche of tradition and modernity, of religion and commerce. Sexuality seems to be her marketing gimmick. Leone’s sexual articulation is through a language of the market, which has eroticised consumption and de-eroticised sex — a pizza or a mobile phone is sexy while in its pornographic abundance, sex is instant and ready-made, devoid of its imagination and improvisation. Leone is able to normalise sex, which could earlier only be metaphorical, by commodifying it. In a hypersexual consumerist world, you can talk of sex just as you talk of consumer goods. The market has de-eroticised sex by making it instant, abundant and standardised just as it once de-revolutionised Che Guevera by putting him on T-shirts and coffee mugs.

In a manner of speaking, Radhe Maa and Sunny Leone usher us into a post-erotic age where sex loses its romance and imagination by becoming routine and commonplace.

Dharminder Kumar is a Delhi-based writer

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