Did 2021's Bust Arrest The Digital Provocative Content Boom?

When ALTBalaji’s Gandii Baat premiered in 2018, its tag line promised to deliver “urban stories for rural India”. By “urban” the Sachin Mohite-directed web series meant adult. With each of its six seasons so far structured as an anthology, individual episodes were connected by their setting — a “rural” milieu — and their softcore focus: the sexual escapades of various characters.

That the series has lasted six seasons (there’s no official word yet on a seventh) is a sign that it’s worked. And indeed it has, as a provocative offering aimed at audiences from smaller Indian towns, with a particular grasp of the vernacular. Gandii Baat could be considered pulpy — and a linguistic breakthrough, for the vocabulary around sex it helped expand. Its mix of western and desi ideas of sex, kink and pleasure was novel.

The success of Gandii Baat provided the fillip for a whole host of small-time media players to conclude that the OTT space wasn’t merely a playground for the urban elite to create and sell snobby/woke/literary stories; rather, just like cinema, it too could be a space for B and C-grade content. Thus were born the likes of Ullu, Kooku, Fliz, Hotshots and more.

India’s tryst with soft porn/adult content doesn’t really have a firm starting point but you could argue it originated in cinema during the Truly Terrible ‘80s. B and C-grade movies became a prolific subset of the Hindi film industry, and though there wasn’t always gratuitous nudity, there certainly were allusions to sex, and the requisite sleaze. Kanti Shah can probably be credited with creating the B-film of yore — with a blunt sexuality that came to define the genre. In later decades, films like Jism, the Malaika Arora era and experiments like Girlfriend were indicative of the Hindi film industry’s awkward approach to depicting sexuality.

The internet’s permeation led to a personalisation of the viewing experience. In 2008, Savita Bhabhi — a hard-core adult comic — had released online, to sensational response. Rules and regulations for the digital realm were still patchy; less than a decade-and-a-half later, a noticeable — if bumpy — space for erotic content has been established on OTT platforms.

There are obvious challenges to creating soft porn in India and selling it through somewhat systematic channels like streaming apps and platforms. These are challenges Vibhu Agarwal, Ullu’s founder — and perhaps the space’s most visible face, at least until the summer of 2021 — has spoken about. On the one hand, there’s the stigma and the scrutiny. On the other, it’s impossible to properly amplify a product that most consumers would pretend to be entirely unaware of. Then, there is the imprecise (and at times arbitrary) brush with the law that continues to confound and stymie creators in equal measure.

In July 2021, entrepreneur Raj Kundra — actress Shilpa Shetty’s husband — was arrested by the Mumbai Police on charges of allegedly producing and disseminating pornographic content via the HotShots platform. (The police had made prior arrests in the case as early as February 2021.) Before it was taken offline, HotShots had allegedly ventured into territory that was still untested in the digital space — full frontal nudity, graphic scenes etc. Indian laws say that consuming porn personally is not a crime, but its creation and distribution is. Then again, the continued presence of some of these apps/platforms raises the issue of how ‘porn’ is being defined or categorised.

Apps and sites that platform softcore/adult content have multiplied in the pandemic years. Ironically, it is also this same period that has seen the tables turned on the possibly promising future of a space that could use structural intervention sans prejudice. In the interval between the start of the pandemic and its perceived retreat, actual Indian porn channels have made their way to international platforms. There are apps like Mangoflix, Bindastimes and probably many others on the world wide web that continue to test the bounds of, and somehow evade, the arbitrary nature of regulation. Ullu and its ilk may still be standing in the aftermath of the HotShots storm, but it is remains frustratingly unclear where this road of erotic highs and criminal lows will lead.