The very mention of the word porn among a circle of Malayalis can, even now, turn faces pale, make conversations uncomfortable, and bring forth harsh judgments or worse, awkward silences. Forget porn, sex is still a whispered word, and even a kiss does not get a free pass. Into this cover of prudeness, an academic has bravely set sail to shatter pretences and dig out stories about Malayalam cinema’s soft porn industry, which had thrived for decades.
Darshana Sreedhar Mini’s book Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India emerged from a project about sex education and took a decade of travel and research between Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Dubai to complete. An assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Darshana not only went meticulously through archives of publications and did dozens of interviews, but also had a stint working as a dubbing artiste and getting an insider’s perspective. The result is a well-accounted narrative, spanning the beginning, the growth and the decline of soft porn.
In her book, written and published before the Hema Committee report’s release last year, Darshana writes about the “compromises” asked of the women actors, the exchange of “favours using their bodies”. The Hema Committee, constituted in 2017 to study the issues of women in Malayalam cinema, reported how mainstream actors get asked the same kind of questions, the words ‘adjust’ and ‘compromise’ being regularly thrown at them as a euphemism for demanding sexual favours.
The report’s findings did not surprise Darshana, she says, having heard many similar accounts. “The report’s relevance is in the fact that it also doubles up as a source where survivors came forward to register their grievances. As in many other instances of sexual harassment, including #MeToo revelations, where legal filing and redressal of cases have been drawn out, for many women who testified it was a big leap. The report exposes systemic problems women face in a predominantly male-dominated work arrangement, where arbitrary hiring practices normalise informal arrangements where certain individuals/caucuses can openly flaunt their power to make and break careers of workers,” she says.
In her research, she found similar instances, but also related to the ways labour operates in the film industry. Moreover, she says, “Considering soft porn as disrespectful and actors who were part of this as of questionable morals, should not dissuade us from considering questions of labour in the industry.”
The anonymous world of soft porn making
The idea for the book sprang from a project in 2010 when Darshana spoke to several young men for her research on sex education and heard them mention soft porn and several of its aspects. She became curious about these films, which “despite their hypervisibility were made anonymously by producers using fictitious names and not spoken or written in dominant film historical accounts as valid creative productions.”
In Rated A, Darshana says, she examines “how soft porn cinema’s interaction with larger debates on sex-education, censorship and gender non-conformity influence the shape of media discourses in India’s public sphere.”
One of her biggest revelations was how labour is organised in soft porn cinema, which often consisted of a pool of people who waited for a break in mainstream films. These included make-up men, production assistants, cameramen and migrants from the Gulf who remained as silent partners. Mainstream technicians, when they became part of soft porn, would use fictitious names. In fact, using pseudonyms was such a common practice that when she encountered a real name (Purushan Alappuzha), it took her two years to realise it.
Darshana writes in Rated A: “The ecology of soft porn film production was so steeped in anonymity or pseudonymous practices that even real names were sometimes mistaken as fake ones. And in a context where the crew sought anonymity, the hypervisibility of the female star replaced the filmic author.”
The female star, of course, becomes the primary and most often the only focus of these films in the eyes of not just the audience but many who ventured to comment or critique soft porn. Darshana has dedicated chapters to the women, taking them out of the imageries they have been trapped in, and touching their ignored, misunderstood, or ridiculed lives. Silk Smitha, Shakeela and other known and unknown actors, who became known as “madakarani”s (seductresses) are written about in detail.
Women reduced to ‘madakaranis’ on and off-screen
“The concept of “madakarani” is one of the anchors around which I frame the interventions of the book. The term broadly refers to the narrative role performed by female characters in soft porn films, as well as their professional distinction as second-tier labourers distinct from A-list female actors in mainstream Indian cinema,” Darshana points out.
But at the same time, she observes that madakarani is also a social form—an archetype for a woman who is sexually assertive, and attractive, but is also deemed dangerous by society. "In a sense, the madakarani is also a site of hypocrisy—or rather a mirror of society’s hypocrisy as these kinds of women are secretly deemed desirable, but socially they are shunned and held up as examples of what women should not be. In the case of soft porn films, the madakarani figure is the centre of the narrative, but at the same time, because of how rumour and gossip work, the very actresses who performed these roles were also seen as madakaranis off-screen."
In her book, Darshana addresses Silk Smitha and Shakeela’s stardom and the way their sexuality and ‘outsider’-status were capitalised for the construction of the madakarani status in these films.
“Both the actors were crucial in helping us understand the labour that goes into the making of films. For instance, Smitha had protested the second-tier status she was relegated to because of being a dancer, as actors were given certain respectability that dancers, especially those who portrayed eroticised roles, were not given in the 1990s. Things have changed with item numbers, and with the mainstream actors doing item dances. But we are thinking of two actors, who were sexualised, and Smitha’s oppressed-caste status adds to the complexities of her madakarani status. With Shakeela, her Muslim identity came to be discussed, even challenged for the kinds of roles that came to be associated with her,” she notes.
Even in their deaths, the madakaranis were not spared. Film magazines wrote their obituaries casting aspersions on their characters and private lives. Darshana studies obits of three actors whose deaths were controversial – Vijayasree (suicide), Rani Padmini (murder), and Silk Smitha (suicide). They were all, she says, perceived as sex sirens in their time, although Vijayasree was a mainstream actor, and their deaths were as contentious as their on-screen lives, although they came much, much before soft porn was even on the horizon.
“The very factors that contribute to the making of the figure of the madakarani were also seen to be the cause of her decline,” Darshana says.
“In the case of the three actors I mention, the reportage was extremely regressive—not just sensational and relaying rumour as judgment, but also focusing on their moral characters as the cause of their deaths. The result is that in time, these actors can only be remembered for their sensational deaths. Think of Silk Smitha and The Dirty Picture (a Hindi biopic of the actor starring Vidya Balan) for example that fixes her as this tragic character with moral flaws,” she adds.
She looks at labour relations and uses soft porn as a case study to understand why we need to look at how informality operates in the film industry and to what effect. She attempts to look at the political economy of labour to tease out how respectability, aspiration and caste operate in the film industry.
“My work in Rated A is a modest effort to spotlight a cultural form which is more just than just sex, but made with the songs sung by prominent playback singers, and dubbed by mainstream dubbing artists,” she says.
Made for men
During her work for the book, Darshana had a stint as a dubbing artiste in Kodambakam (in Tamil Nadu) but this was short-lived because of union rules. However, it allowed her to interact with agents and studios and other industry hopefuls (actors, script-writers and so on) who came to Chennai.
She also took herself to the theatres that screened soft porn films, which would have been a very telling experience, considering these are fully occupied by men and are seen as a male space. “It was not an easy experience, since as a Malayali woman doing a project on soft porn, you all of a sudden become a site of curiosity, as well as anger (as I realised with some men’s rights groups disturbing one of the online events organised around the book),” Darshana recalls.
In her introduction to the book, Darshana scrutinises this point, of how soft porn in magazines or films always catered almost exclusively to men. “In my research, I spoke to many queer women and cis-women who felt that reading erotic fiction or watching soft porn not only expanded the scope of what they counted as tapping into the popular media that were available but was also an act of defiance, when these could not be procured with ease, unlike their male counterparts,” she says.
But even as men thronged these spaces, the industry declined and faded away by 2010. There were pushbacks from the mainstream industry, Darshana says, a push for rigid censorship that could curtail the spread of soft porn, and protests from anti-obscenity groups and feminist forums. She writes that actor Mammootty – a superstar in South India – is alleged to have spearheaded the campaign to put an end to soft port in Malayalam cinema.
“In Malayalam cinema, soft porn was perceived as placing the whole industry and its respectability in question. The same got expanded to the South-Indian industry as well. At a time when Mammooty’s Rakshasa Rajavu (directed by Vinayan who had in fact made his debut with a soft porn film called Ayiram Chirakulla Moham) was in the theatres, Shakeela’s film Rakshasa Rajjni (by K Murali, 2001) was released, which in many accounts was seen as how mainstream industry got involved advocating for the active curbing of these films. It was at that time, as many respondents put it, that Mammootty was believed to have brought the soft-porn films and their morality to the radar of the government,” Darshana says.
Silk Smitha's song in the Mammootty film 'Adharvam'
But even otherwise, the reception of soft porn has changed over the years. There were, Darshana notes, repetitive templates which couldn’t work forever. The films were popular but usually as things adult men watch, rather than true cinema.
Other avenues were opening up for sexualised media with the increasing popularity of the internet. Adult OTT series have also allowed for the emergence of a set of actors who work exclusively for specific adult platforms.
A decline was inevitable, Darshana says. “But it never really disappeared…the genre itself had a cult value and there’s an immense amount of nostalgia attached to it as well.”