Soft-porn cinema and the making of Indian desire: Darshana Sreedhar Mini on her book ‘Rated A’

While largely about the production of adult films in Kerala between the 1990s and early 2000s, Darshana Sreedhar Mini’s new book, Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India, focuses on the women actors in the genre, labour relations, and issues of caste, gender and sexuality in India.

The first scholarly book-length study of its kind, Rated A (which is free to read on the University of California Press’ open access website, Luminos and available from Zubaan Books in India) challenges the moralising view taken of the industry. Instead, Mini draws attention to the industry’s place within Indian society and the South Asian diaspora. In so doing, Mini highlights the careers of such iconic actors like Shakeela and the late Silk Smitha while also examining how the films in which they acted are a chronicle of their times.

Yet, even as Malayalam soft-porn cinema may be a thing of the past, as Rated A documents, the genre has an afterlife, which is itself revealing of why nostalgia for such films persists on social media and elsewhere.

Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an assistant professor of Film in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US. In this interview with R Benedito Ferrão, Mini talks about her…

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