Close your eyes

Surat-based Hindu Yuva Vahini had raised a hue and cry over hoardings in the city that displayed advertisements featuring Sunny Leone in condom ad

The Information and Broadcasting Ministry issued a circular earlier this week banning telecast of condom advertisements between 6 am and 10 pm, citing the alleged “indecent” nature of these promotional campaigns and their corrupting influence, especially on children. The government invoked the Cable and Television Network Rules, 1994, which aims to protect children from being exposed to morally derogatory content, on the advice of the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI). The ASCI had earlier this month requested the ministry to take a call on this. This is not the first time in recent times that advertisement promoting condoms has been censured. In September, Surat-based Hindu Yuva Vahini had raised a hue and cry over hoardings in the city that displayed advertisements featuring Sunny Leone.

 
What exactly irks the authorities about sex, especially when children — or vulnerable groups — can be exposed to a plethora of other corrupting influences on TV and other media? Around the same time that this ban came into effect, almost all news channels were telecasting the ghastly video of the murder of a Bengali Muslim worker in Rajasthan. While some channels decided to censor it by blurring out the more horrific sections of the video — created by the murderer himself — anyone could easily access it on YouTube or other video-sharing websites. The arguments about the ameliorating influences of human love and its elevated position in the history of our culture — and the contrary effects of suppressing it — have been repeated ad infinitum, and is boring to even recall.

 
The purpose of censorship, especially when it evokes the monster of morality, is never ethics or a desire to protect any vulnerable group from corruption or outrage. The motives are usually political or economic, and often both. While obscenity cases have been a dime a dozen in India, perhaps the most famous is the one over Ismat Chughtai’s “Lihaaf” (“The Quilt”) — a short story which explored themes of a lesbian relationship. It was published in 1942, first in the magazine Adab-e Latif, and then in an anthology of her work published by Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi. Narrated from the perspective of a pubescent child, it explores the sensual in the quotidian. The narrator-protagonist goes to live in her aunt’s house in Agra and sleeps in the same room as her female guardian, only to be awakened at night by strange sounds emanating from the bed on which the aunt sleeps with a female companion. The quilt or the lihaaf, which cover the two women throws shadows on the wall, but there is no description of what the girl discovers when she lifts it. The readers are provided only a cryptic line at the end: “Allah! I dived for my bed.”

 

Chughtai’s contemporary and friend Saadat Hasan Manto — whose “Bu” (“Odour”) was also charged with obscenity in the same case — has praised the story as one of her best. She, however, was not so sure and often said she was quite taken aback by the praise and the abuse. There was enough of the latter. Soon after the outrage she was issued a summon by the Lahore High Court in December 1944 and the news was published in newspapers, her mail was inundated by abusive letters — the 1940s version of online trolling. In her autobiography, she writes: “Then the letters filled with profanities began arriving. Directed not only against me but also against my whole family, Shahid (her husband), and my two-month-old daughter.”

 
The trip to Lahore for the case, however, is described in Chughtai’s characteristic tongue-in-cheek style. It entailed long walks around the city, sampling hot dogs with pork sausages, and endless parties and social engagements. The case itself feels like a breeze, with Chughtai’s lawyer asking the witness for prosecution to point out exactly what in the story is obscene. When the witness was unable to do so, the judge dismissed the case. Chughtai reportedly recollected that she had not used the word “dildo” because she was unaware of the Urdu synonym. Scholars have argued that the case had little to do with the non-existent obscenity in her — or Manto’s — story. Right before Independence and with the movement of Pakistan gaining popularity, it was an attempt by certain sections of the Islamic right to discipline two subversive writers — and, in turn, in nation building of a particular type. The outrage that the case and the abusive letters symbolised is a close cousin of the sanskari flood that seems to be sweeping through India right now — and calling for bans like the current one.  

 
Whether or not condom companies or TV channels move court over the ban on these advertisements, which does entail an economic cost, is yet to be seen. There is, however, a social cost as well. These advertisements did play a role in spreading awareness about safe sex — an essential role in a country where both the population and spread of sexually transmitted diseases is exploding. According to the United Nations AIDS report, India had the third-highest number of people living with HIV at 2.1 million at the end of 2016. Only South Africa and Nigeria had a more. Between 2005 and 2013, the number of people suffering from AIDS had, in fact, declined — with an increased government push to awareness. After all the good work, we have suddenly decided to close our eyes. Every week, Eye Culture features writers with an entertaining critical take on art, music, dance, film and sport