Sumita M. ShethMore on the Khushboo Gag Order
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We had reported the terrible time actress Khushboo was having due to her views on sexuality. Below is an interesting article from Outlook India further exploring the issues behind it all - Sumita Sheth
"It has simply ceased to be a discussion about the views expressed by an actress on safe premarital sex. The Khushboo-Suhasini controversy is also no more an issue of 'freedom of expression'. After quite a few national icons and politicians—like Prakash Karat, Brinda Karat, Narain Karthikeyan, Aamir Khan, Sania Mirza and P. Chidambaram—expressed support to Khushboo, the episode has lent itself to new dimensions: the northern view of the Dravidian south, the English-speaking class versus the Tamil public sphere, Tamil culture vis-a-vis foreign cultures, and the future of Chennai's image as a preferred destination of global capital (in the wake of vigilant moral policing).
The defenders of 'freedom of expression' within Tamil Nadu were quite slow to react.
The upper middle class and the intelligentsia hardly backed the beleaguered actress. The core conservative elements in society—cutting across caste, community and class—seemingly lent support to the street protesters. It was only after CPI(M) politburo members Prakash and Brinda Karat came out in defence of the actress that the state's Left leaders vocalised their stand. Even then, it had riders. "Those who disagree with Khushboo should resort to healthy and democratic means of protest though her views on pre-marital sex are not acceptable to the party," CPI(M) state secretary N. Varadarajan said.
Writer-publisher and social activist Ravikumar notes that society and religion in India have always supported both repression and sexual excess simultaneously. "In the West, a Victorian mindset and prudishness were encouraged by the church, till capitalistic values and the free market took over and encouraged free sex and sexual freedom.
In merely talking of freedom of expression in the ongoing controversy, we reinforce the classic Indian binary of freedom versus repression. To understand the issues, we need to transcend this binary," he adds.
The fear of the upper middle classes seems limited to whether the pubs, discotheques and other centres of consumerist pleasure where they hang out would face the wrath of the moral police, or if they would be allowed to dress as they please. It's another matter that the developments in Chennai over the last few months have not given any reason for panic on this front. But for the Park Hotel incident, where it was the media that played moral police, the ire of the protesters this time has been directed only at Khushboo and Suhasini. "This class and the nation's opinion-makers are anxious only over whether the developments in the economic realm—the IT sector, call centres or the new MNCs setting shop in Chennai—would be affected by the moral strictures in the cultural sphere," says Ravikumar. Cultural consumption of the kind demanded by this class is enabled by a certain economic freedom, he argues, adding "sex surveys and aids awareness are part of this process".
According to A.R.Venkatachalapathy of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, the general apathy of the upper class has much to do with their ambivalence regarding morals in a fast-growing global cultural world. "They are unable to give up the pleasures of consumerism, at the same time they are unwilling to pay the moral price. The threat to morals and the assertion of female sexuality—which seems to be exemplified in the periodic opinion polls couched in a pseudo-scientific methodolgy—panders to their voyeurism as well as plays on their fears. Attacks such as those on Khushboo assuage these fears."
Read the rest of it here.