Under the Covers

Shivery, goose-pimply, knees-to-water, creaming-jeans kind of arousal? Or, how dare he, that dirty, horrible man, victimising that poor little girl? It’s a state of the nation question: the answer is a dead giveaway, and will tell me more about the person than about the film itself, which was due to be out a couple of weeks ago, but has predictably got stuck.

The question then becomes: can a film like that, one-fifth of which is supposed to be explicit sex scenes, be released in India, especially an India in which conservatism is climbing the popularity charts with alarming rapidity?

The EL James trilogy, which your faithful columnist plowed through as soon as it came out (yes, I confess, your ladyship, I read all three, one after the other, and have lived to tell the tale, while keeping at bay withering comments from those who said oh, how could you waste your time on those books, life’s too short) was what it was: jumped-up Mills & Boon novels on sexy steroids.

Soft-focus sex, of the sort in which body parts were coyly alluded to, rather than named, has always been part of the forbidden pleasures of a romance novel (Victorian or Gothic), particularly that which needs to be hidden away and read. The hard-core porn stuff, which I discovered quite by accident at an unseemly young age, simply because I was curious to see what an uncle kept hidden in his drawer, is something even “mature” women won’t be caught dead reading in public. It leads to too much derision, especially I suspect from people who always wanted to discover what it was all about, and could never gather the courage to admit it.

What Fifty Shades of Grey has done is to combine the oldest trope of the romance novel: the innocent, trembling young virgin, waiting to be woken by the experienced worldly-wise older man, and layered it with some hard-core BDSM. Whips, chains, leather, and, hush, a few other things I can’t mention here. How exciting. No longer something you need to keep hidden: this is a woman writing fiction for women — throw off that brown-paper cover, acknowledge you have needs, explore your desires. And come into your own.

The film, by all accounts, is a little funnier and smarter than the books. But the funny thing is that is being bashed both ways — for showing too much sex, and too little sex. Again, that tells me more about the person critiquing than about the film itself. Because, after all: how much is too much, and how little is too little?
For us, in today’s India, where even cuss words are on the verge of being excised from cinema, Fifty Shades of Grey stands in danger of being drowned in a Hundred Shades of Suffocating Saffron. The on-screen kiss has seen an unshackling only in the last few years, but it could well be the next target: I can already see the proponents of “Chumban hatao, Bharat bachao” crawling out of the woodwork, and waiting for their chance. If things go the way they are right now, I won’t be surprised if even the word “sex” is deemed inappropriate for public consumption.

The kind of action a film like Fifty Shades promises is quite clearly out of the purview of those who want to limit, even for adults, what people can watch. It reminds me of an incident that happened very early in my tenure at the CBFC. An official was horrified at the visual of a naked man, even with his frontage heavily pixelated. I asked her what was wrong, wasn’t the man in his own house, about to get intimate with his lady: she was appalled, and accused me of being “too liberal”. “How can we show him with his clothes off,” she asked, her voice rising. “This is not what we do in India.”

What we’ve done in India is to hide, not show. To shame, without being brave enough to name. To be brazen about vulgar dance numbers, and hypocritical about everything else. This is an India a heartbeat away from being dragged back into the dark ages. Unless someone shows good sense, and stops the loonies that are moving out of the fringes to the centre.

At this rate, I fear we will soon be back to nodding flowers-and-swans. Handcuffs? Fifty lashes for you.