I argue that a study of these films offers us an understanding of the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy and censorship, as well as deeper debates about obscenity and sexual freedom in contemporary India. Using multi-sited ethnography, my project will focus on these alternative routes of circulation and the anonymous, clandestine and shadowy circuits of dissent within the film industry’s ranks. These films then, emerged as a way of resisting the mainstream film industry’s exclusionary functioning that alienated the lower rung of the production units. Moreover, soft-porn filmmakers and their crew often used pseudonyms to negotiate factors such as censorship regulations and trade union membership clauses. This history of transnational connections foretells the illicit routes taken by soft-porn films smuggled into the Middle East by Kerala’s diaspora since the 1990s. Although soft-porn films shared connections with e arlier forms of sexually suggestive material such as vernacular pulp fiction and erotic illustrations, they were partly influenced by exploitation films imported from the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. This dissertation explores the rise of the South Indian state of Kerala as a hub of soft-porn cinema in India from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s.
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