Darshana Sreedhar Mini
Rated A - Darshana S. Mini

Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India

In the 1990s, India’s mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy, soft-porn films that emerged in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In this study, the author examines local and transnational influences such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema that influenced Malayalam soft-porn cinema. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, the author also examines how actresses and production personnel negotiated their social lives marked by their involvement with a taboo form. Mapping the soft porn industry’s utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, the author maps the genre’s circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as “South Asian” pornography. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries.

 

A More In-Depth Look at Rated A

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Interviews, Media Mentions and Popular Press Reviews

Book Talks and Reviews

 

 

Praise for the book

  • Darshana Sreedhar Mini delivers a deeply impressive, groundbreaking historical analysis of the Malayalam-language softcore pornography that emerged in Kerala, India during the transformative decades of the 1990s and 2000s. Exploring industrial processes and regulatory challenges, tracing production intricacies, foregrounding the lived experiences of performers, and highlighting exhibition dynamics and audience responses, this comprehensive study sheds light on a rich but previously unexamined subject, and in doing so it immediately joins the ranks of essential porn studies texts.

         Peter Alilunas, author, Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of   Adult Video (University of California Press, 2016)

  • Don’t be tempted to think you know porn if you see it. Mini’s analysis invites us to see soft-core porn as a social construction that reflected the borders of sexual agency and gendered respectability in Indian society for more than 50 years. Through a mosaic of methods, Mini strips down layers of mediated meanings, precarious labor, urban politics, and transnational consumption flows. Mini’s work is exemplary of how soft-core was a part of people’s lived experiences. Her own confessions about the research process unfolds as its own subplot to the story of frustrated desires, circuitous pathways, and patient perseverance.

         Vicki Mayer, author of Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Duke University Press, 2011).

  • A model for future film scholars. The decade-long research that went into making this book is evident in its rich historical details, insightful conversations, and multi-sited field work. Perhaps even more impressive is the author’s ability to pull together such vast and diverse material in a riveting story, so absorbing and beautifully written that I often felt like I was reading a novel. This exemplary work will produce lively discussions about film historiography, diaspora, stardom, authorship, and sexuality.”

         Monika Mehta, author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2011.)

  • A formidably researched counter-history of Indian cinema through the regional mode of the sex film, and a brilliantly synthetic work of adult film history, Darshana Sreedhar Mini’s Rated A dazzles with insight, relaying how Malayalam soft-porn produced complexly mobile and contested media publics. Mini explores films that centre female sexual autonomy and rely on the bounteous allure and non-normative sexuality of its stars, the madakarani (sex sirens): the dispersal of “screen pleasures” they offered radiated far beyond the film text towards public mediaspheres across national and transnational circuits. A deeply feminist account of an era’s cultural productions, its stars and makers, and the networks and economies of their oft invisible labor, Rated A is committed to examining the ways precarity, class, and caste politics inflects the unruly circulations of sexually coded media forms. Rated A is a fascinating, vital, and essential work of film and cultural history.

         Elena Gorfinkel, author of  Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

  • In Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India Darshana Mini takes readers on a truly fascinating exploration of Malayalam soft-porn cinema that emerged in the 1980s and captivated millions of viewers across India and the Middle East. Extensive archival and ethnographic research reveals the local and global influences that shaped the genre, the social and gendered dynamics of the industry, and the complex politics of sexuality and censorship in contemporary India. By challenging the dominant narratives of pornography as a Western phenomenon, this book provides a new model for studying soft-core film genres in diverse cultural contexts.

          Clarisa Smith, One for the Girls! The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women’s Porn (2007), Co-editor Porn Studies Journal.

  • Rated A is a fascinating cultural history of Malayalam soft porn cinema, and moreover of its afterlives – how it is remediated across a range of sites, reverberating in the cultural imagination. In the unfolding of that history Darshana Mini shows how soft porn and the debates and desires that it provokes are entangled with the building of gender, sexuality, politics, and social life. A major new contribution to the study of pornographies.

         Feona Attwood, author of Sex Media (2017) and Co-editor of Porn Studies Journal.

  • Rated A delivers a richly-layered account of the precarious and often invisible world of Malayalam soft-porn cinema. Employing creative and tenacious research strategies, Mini adroitly delineates the textual logics and quotidian practices of a popular film industry that perseveres as Bollywood’s forsaken other. 

          Michael Curtin, author of Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor (University  of California Press, 2016).

Awards

  • The Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities, American Institute of Indian Studies, 2024

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Introduction: Soft-Porn 101

Figure 1.1: (Left) A publicity image for Avalude Ravukal on the back cover of Film magazine. no. 94, 1978, and (right) screengrab from the Films Division documentary Censor (2002) showcasing the censor certificate for Avalude Ravukal, noting its “adult” nature.

Figure 1.2: Copy of a director’s response to a CBFC censor report of the soft-porn film Nakhachitrangal (Dir. A.T. Joy, 2002). Note the deletion of the “embarrassing scenes” circled in red. Image Courtesy. A.T Joy

 

Figure 1.3: A confessional account titled “My Sleepless Nights” that appeared in Fire, as a part of the series “The Sex Stories of Zeenat: The Story of Sex Worker Zeenat,” January 2009: 32.

 

Figure 1.4: Logo of Thaniniram Film Entertainment Magazine. The text reads “Thaniniram Film Entertainment Magazine, editor Kalanilayam Krishnan Nair.” Source: Vol.5, No. 11 Aug-Sep 1957.

 

 

Figure 1.5: Advertisement for “Urakkara Photokal” (Bedroom Photos) that includes naked photos and photos of intercourse by Music Book Stall, Kottayam. Source: Thaniniram Film Entertainment Magazine, Vol.5, No. 11 Aug-Sep 1957, 63.

 

Figure 1.6: A Times of India advertisement for Her Nights in the Bombay edition. Note the text: “Language is no barrier. See it” and the “Tells ALL Shows ALL” in the inset to refer to its pan-Indian appeal. Source: From personal collection, 1978.

Chapter 1: Madakarani: The Screen Pleasures of the Sex Siren in Malayalam Cinema

Figure 1.: A centerspread featuring Rajkumari that appeared in Nana, June 13, 1980: 15. This is an atypical example in that the centerspread did actually carry the name of the actress.

 

Chapter 2: Waiting for Kodambakkam: Economies of Waiting and Labor in Tinsel Town

Figure 1: A wig and makeup maker’s shop in Vadapalani, Kodambakkam, featuring the actors Shivaji Ganeshan and M.G. Ramachandran on the signboard

Figure 2: An advertisement for Swamy’s Lodge in the Onam 1957 issue of the Thaniniram Film Magazine.

 

Figure 3: The Murugan Kovil at S. Perumal Kovil Street

 

Figure 4: An advertisement for an acting school in Vadapalani, on the classified Advertisement website Quikr.

 

Figure 5 Poster for Ayiram Chirakulla Moham (left) with “Vinayan” credited as the director. On the right, the IMDb page for the same film with “Ashokan” credited as the director.

Figure 6: Photograph of K.S. Gopalakrishnan on the shoot of Charavalayam (Spy-circle) (1988), from one of his personal photo albums.

 

Chapter 3: Embodied Vulnerabilities: Precarity and Body Work

Fig. 1: The poster of Naya Gupt Gyan at the entrance of Bhawani Theatre in Kolkata.

Chapter 4: The Alternative Transnational: Migration, Media, and Soft-Porn

Fig 1: Entrance of Bhavani Cinema, Kolkata. Photo taken by the author, 2018.

Chapter 5: (Dis)Appearances: Digital Remediations of Soft-Porn in the Contemporary

Figure 1: Newspaper clipping of Babylona (Dir. Jayadevan, 2002). Image Courtesy: Sarat Chandran