From GlobalPost:
New Delhi: Fifteen years ago, when artist Orijit Sen produced India’s first graphic novel — a story about the Narmada valley dam protest movement — he was only able to print the book with the help of government funding, and distribution meant carrying copies of the book to stores and trying to explain why it didn’t belong in the children’s section.
“No publisher would consider publishing something like a comic book,” Sen said. “We were only able to publish it with the help of a small grant from the government, and the government didn’t know what we were using it for, obviously.”
The scene is different now.
Amid a boom in publishing and contemporary art, India’s comic book scene is undergoing a renaissance of its own. Once known only for the beloved Amar Chitra Katha series, which focused on Hindu mythology, today India’s comic book industry includes homegrown superhero sagas, modernized versions of classic myths and even postmodern tales of urban angst. More:
S. Mitra Kalita in the Wall Street Journal:
A 2008 image of an online cartoon of Savita Bhabhi.
What does Savita Bhabhi—the sari-clad Internet porn star—have to do with Google’s threat to leave China?
For Indian companies, potentially a lot.
Savita, of course, is the voluptuous cartoon character who looks like a cross between reality television star Rakhi Sawant and Veronica Lodge of the Archie Comic book series. There’s nothing subtle about Savita—although she certainly tries.
“I’m going to take a shower! You should also change out of those wet clothes,” she greeted a neighbor in a November episode, for example. As expected, the two end up together in the shower. The illustrations are explicit, the dialogue laughably simple: “Oh that feels so…” or “Oh I’m going to…”
In June, the Indian government banned her. Sachin Pilot, minister of state in the ministry of communications and technology, says the decision was driven by a complaint received from a women’s group in Maharashtra. He did not know which one. More:
Click here to read India’s tech minister’s take on Google, China
Previously at AW:
Shohini Ghosh in Himal Southasian:
Recently, the Indian Government blocked the much loved Savita Bhabi website created by the pseudonymous Deshmukh, Dexter and Mad. The Savita Bhabi (Savita sister-in-law) site carries a daily cartoon strip about the “Sexual Adventures of the Hot Indian Bhabi” who is described as a “regular Indian woman who just can’t get enough sex”. In June, the Government of India instructed internet service providers to block the site under Section 67 of the Information Technology Act which prohibits the publication and transmission of “any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest” or whose effect could “corrupt and deprave” and certain amended provisions that were included after the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. These provisions allow for the censoring of material deemed threatening to the “the sovereignty or integrity of India, defence and security of the state”.
In an age of proliferating hardcore cyberporn, why did the government target a cartoon strip as a ‘moral and national threat’? N.Vijayaditya, the Controller of Certifying Authorities – an agency entrusted under the IT Act to block websites – stated that they had acted on “several complaints” made against the site. The demise (not really, since you can access the site through proxy servers) of India’s best loved bhabi was mourned by thousands of online admirers. Headlines reported the “Assassination of Savita Bhabi” and the “Death of India’s First Porn Star”. A Bombay-based rock band dedicated a special song to Savita Bhabi, while blogs and networking sites launched ‘Save Savita Bhabi’ campaigns. On the other hand, Savita Bhabi’s detractors allege that the site denigrated Indian women, insulted ‘Indian family values’ and threatened ‘Indian culture’. Those familiar with censorship debates in India will know that over the last two decades these allegations have recurred with predictable regularity around sexual speech and more particularly around transgressive images of women’s bodies and sexualities. So what precisely is transgressive about Savita Bhabi? More:
The Indian government has quietly blocked a comic-strip hard-core pornography site, savitabhabhi.com. The Telecom Department has asked all Indian Internet Service Providers to block access to the year-old site about the “sexual adventures of a hot Indian bhabhi.”
The creators of the site, that gets 60 million visitors each month, about 70 per cent from India, has started a ‘Save Savita’ online campaign, a Twitter stream and a Facebook group.
“Savita bhabhi” (or sister-in-law Savita) is a buxom, newly-wed housewife who seems to seduce just about anyone who knocks at her door — from neighbourhood teenagers playing cricket in the street to door-to-door salesmen.
Previously in AW:
And click here to read the Global Post story.
The sixth annual India Today-AC Nielsen-ORG MARG sex survey interviewed 5,353 respondents across 11 cities in India to find out attitudes to sex outside a long-term relationship, homosexuality, sex with prostitutes and pornography. Here are the results:
It’s perhaps appropriate. In the age of universal meltdown, India seems to be a nation in heat. Take what just happened in Meerut.
A young woman, Priyanka Singh a former beauty queen, well-spoken, smart, goes on camera to plead her case after being accused of killing her parents. She and her friend, Anju Singh, hint at a murky saga of sexual exploitation by their relatives and talk of being driven to the edge of a breakdown.
Prise the lid off India’s gleaming globalised façade and a welter of images comes forth. There’s a woman in Mumbai chopping her boyfriend into pieces with her former lover.
There’s a teenager mysteriously murdered in her Noida home amidst murmurs of her parents’ swinging sexual lifestyle. If social norms are changing, with the touchstones of modern life under siege, then sexual mores are in a state of confusion.
What was considered a perversion earlier is a guiltless pleasure now. What was thought of a taboo is now believed to be an all access VIP pass.
Even the terminology, loaded with the prudishness of the past, is being reinvented. Is adultery the same as infidelity? Does kinky sex just mean prolonged foreplay? The India Today-AC Nielsen-ORG MARG sex survey 2008 of 5,353 men and women between 18 and 40, the sixth consecutive time we are studying the intimate life of urban Indians, seems to suggest all this and more.
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Now known for strict conservatism, India was the birthplace of erotica, famed for its sensual literature and carvings. Andrew Buncombe looks at a modern expression of an ancient urge. In The Independent, UK:
India’s cultural gifts to the world include the Kama Sutra and the sexually charged carvings that lure and intrigue tourists at Khajuraho. But the country’s reputation today is as a much more conservative, buttoned-up society where couples risk opprobrium even for something as chaste as daring to hold hands in public.
Little surprise then, perhaps, at the roaring success of 21st century India’s most recent contribution to the world of eroticism. The country’s first online pornographic comic book strip is luring tens of thousands of internet viewers, who are logging on for a daily dose of stimulation and humour courtesy of the buxom Savita Bhabhi.
More:
And here’s the latest: Andrew Buncombe has an update on the creators of the cartoon strip: “[They] are second generation Indians. (The American slang gave it away.) I now also suspect, because of the times that the emails were sent to me, that the authors do not even live in India.”
More here:
Previously on AW: The Bhabhi chronicles
India’s first home-grown, online graphic porn star is the unlikely Savita bhabhi. In Tehelka, Anastasia Guha checks her out.
COMICS HAVE A WAY of bypassing our critical and moral register and going right to the id. They have a way of getting into, and then staying in, the deepest recesses of the psyche. This is apparent from our frenzied interest in Savita Bhabi, India’s first animated Internet porn star. Created by the appropriately underground Deshmukh, Dexstar and Mad (whoever they may be, they are not telling – we did ask), Savita Bhabhi is growing to be a phenomenally popular pornographic comic strip. It has grown solely by word of mouth to 3911 registered users in little over a month since its inception. The lead character has been drawn with every Kserial bahu trapping firmly in place: the dull gleam of a mangalsutra, sindoor forming a bright contrast to long dark hair parted chastely down the middle.
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