When actor Ranveer Singh’s nude pictures from a photoshoot for an international magazine appeared online last week, they were widely shared with exclamations and eyerolls. The actor is not the first male celebrity in India to appear before the camera in the buff: Almost as soon as the photos of Singh’s unclad body began to be shared, images from similar photoshoots in the past — of Jackie Shroff, Milind Soman, Anil Kapoor, Aditya Panscholi — were dug up. And then the predictable happened.
Offence was taken at the sight of Singh’s bare body, and two individuals — a lawyer and a person running an NGO — complaints with Mumbai police. Based on the latter’s statement, the cops registered an FIR against the actor. This, too, has happened earlier: Shilpa Shetty found herself in court because at a 2007 event Richard Gere kissed her and the complainant felt that “she did not protest”. A case was registered against Soman in 2020 for sharing a photo of himself running in the nude on a beach in Goa. Twenty-five years before that, obscenity charges were slapped on Soman and fellow model Madhu Sapre for posing for an advertisement wearing only sneakers — it took 14 years for the duo to be acquitted.
But the special and growing problem, today, is this: Someone somewhere is always offended by something others might find perfectly innocuous and it seems that nearly every instance of hurt sentiment is given a political hearing, and with the weaponisation of a loosely worded law, becomes a legal case. Do the might of the state and the majesty of the law need to come down heavily on every such “outrage”, or is it possible that a little more wisdom and discernment is showed? With the ambit of “offences” only growing bigger and wider — including a whole range of “misdeeds”, from nudity to scenes from decades-old films — it is up to the state and its instruments to ensure that one individual’s right to be offended does not impinge on others’ freedoms.
