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 in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and 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. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, Mini also explores the soft-porn industry’s utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, as well as how actresses and production personnel who are marked by their involvement with a taboo form negotiate their social lives. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, this study 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.

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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 multisited fieldwork. Perhaps even more impressive is Darshana Sreedhar Mini’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, 2011

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

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DARSHANA SREEDHAR MINI is Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and co-editor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene.