"Why Dhows continue to Sail into the Future: Nidhi Mahajan on her Book, Moorings" in SCROLL (21 September 2025)

 Dhows, we might imagine, are wooden sea vessels of yore, legendary in their circumnavigation of the waters of the subcontinent and beyond. Yet, as Nidhi Mahajan offers in her new book, Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean, these sailboats are very much part of the contemporary world, its economy and even its politics.

Mahajan follows the travels of sailors and their boats to understand how the mobility of people, goods, and even their crafts, contribute to the makings and limitations of sovereignty in commerce and finance. Within this, climate change, labor relations, patronage, risk management, faith, and family all play their part. While Mahajan’s book may be about oceanic travel and trade, it also reckons with the politics of the lands seafarers have ties to and are sometimes unmoored from. These include South Asia, the Emirates, East Africa, and Iran among others.

An Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz, this is Nidhi Mahajan’s first book. It is available to read, open access, at the University of California Press website. In this interview with R. Benedito Ferrão, Mahajan discusses her over decade-long research that led to Moorings and why sea-based dhow trade continues to be an important indication of the times we live in.

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RBF: What led you to the study of dhows and trade in the Indian Ocean world?

NM: When I first began my doctoral dissertation research in 2007, I wanted to examine contemporary connections between South Asia and East Africa. This interest was fostered through early travel with family to Kenya, and courses I took as an undergraduate that gave me  historical context to why I, as someone who was born and raised in Bombay, felt immediately at home in Kenya. Given the long histories of mobility between these two littorals, or coastal areas, as a PhD student in Anthropology, I was interested in examining the shape of these connections in the contemporary moment, and how Indian Ocean trade continued in the margins of states through small-scale traders.

While I was aware of the long history of the illegalization of dhows on the Swahili coast, at the time, I had no sense of the structure or scale of the trade in the present. But I did know that I wanted to travel and live in Kenya for research. I was interested in seeing Indian Ocean connections not from South Asia, which has often been treated as a center for these histories, but from East Africa, especially port cities such as Mombasa and Lamu that have been viewed as more peripheral to structuring the Indian Ocean system of trade and commerce.

At the time, I knew that vahans (a type of mechanized sailing vessel or dhow from Kachchh) still visited East Africa but did not know how to enter this world. When I arrived in Mombasa in 2011 to do long-term fieldwork, a dhow from Mandvi had just docked at Mombasa’s Old Port. My host in Mombasa, Mohamed Mchulla, an archeologist, insisted that I should interview the sailors. With a research permit from the Kenya Port Authority, I got access to the port and met the sailors, who were just as surprised to see me, as I was them.

The sailors welcomed me onboard as they were curious about a young woman from India working in Mombasa. The captain, a Bhadala from Mandvi, whom I call Yusuf in the book, and the rest of the crew saw me as a naïve, young girl and took me under their wing. Despite differences of class, caste, and gender, we became fast friends as they invited me to spend afternoons eating lunch with them on board. Besides, we were all new arrivals in Mombasa and together tried to navigate the city. Their hospitality, our shared homesickness, and unfamiliarity with Mombasa created a bond that transformed over time, into friendship and patronage.

In fact, hospitality was a key practice through which these sailors dealt with strangers, whether government officials, merchants or anthropologists. Patronage too, was a familiar form in which labor in the trade is structured. This initial encounter onboard a dhow from Mandvi altered the course of my research. Yusuf became a key interlocutor for me, and as my research focus changed to the contemporary vahan trade, he insisted that to understand it, I would have to be as mobile and itinerant as the vahan itself, becoming moored and unmoored in different port cities.

Yusuf suggested that I interview dhow owners such as his seth, the owner of the vessel, in Bombay; visit seafaring families and Sufi shrines in Mandvi and Jam Salaya; understand how policies in ports such as Mundra and Tuna functioned in India; and compare these to the dhow ports of Sharjah and Dubai in the UAE and to their connections to Somalia. My early interests and encounter with the dhow in Mombasa thus forged a whole new voyage across the Indian Ocean. 

 

RBF: In your book, you remark that “[t]he Indian Ocean arena—long a space of connection across difference—is a particularly poignant place from which to think of encoun­ters.” You note that “India and East Africa have had a long history of cross-cultural contact, dating back to at least the ninth century,” with dhows and their crews playing a key role in forging these connections. As you point out, “Indian seafarers have long had a presence in East Africa, predating European contact. Hindu and Muslim Indian merchants and seafarers were crucial intermediaries for European and non-European imperial powers in East Africa, including the Portuguese, the Omanis, and the British.”

Despite this, “scholars have largely focused on Indian merchants in East Africa and not seafarers,” an oversight your book seeks to correct. What does this shift, emerging from an oceanic point of view, allow us to understand differently about the contact and relations between different cultures and regions?

NM: While scholars have focused on merchants who traveled and lived in different parts of the Indian Ocean, especially Gujarati merchants in East Africa, the seafarers who brought them there have largely been studied historically. For instance, historian Abdul Sheriff has argued that dhow sailors were crucial to forging cosmopolitanism across the Indian Ocean as they carried goods, ideas and people across the Indian Ocean. Dependent on the monsoon winds, these sailors lived for months on end in different port cities, and would often even have a wife in each port. While this was also true of some Indian merchants, power dynamics at play were rather different.

While merchants would come to settle in different parts of the Indian Ocean, sailors were always more itinerant, and they had a different kind of relationship to local populations whether in East Africa or elsewhere. Unlike merchants in East Africa, such as the figure of the shopkeeper or dukawalla who came to be viewed as exploitative or an intermediary for British commercial interests, the sailor (especially if he did not own the dhow) was always working-class. In the ports where these itinerant sailors would live and work, they mingled with a diverse cast of characters—whether Hadhrami merchants, other Swahili sailors, Somali shipping agents, or government officials. Indeed, as Jatin Dua has argued, hospitality even shaped relations between dhow sailors and pirates!

As working class, itinerant sailors, hospitality was central to making connections on strange shores. Many of these sailors came from the Bhadala community from Mandvi in Kachchh, and had long connections to the Bhadala diaspora in Mombasa. These Bhadalas in Mombasa are still associated with seafaring, even if many of them no longer go out to sea. Unlike many other Indian communities in Kenya, Bhadalas in Mombasa are often viewed as being more closely intertwined with Swahili and Bajuni populations of the coast as they once intermarried. Even today, Bhadalas are seen as part of a precolonial history of Indian Ocean connections in Kenya, as they came as sailors long before Indian laborers and merchants settled in East Africa during British rule. Indeed, a view from the dhow, and from these Bhadala communities offers a different entry point for the history of connections between India and East Africa.

In the book, I take a “view from the dhow” by focusing on these seafarers. In his work on mobilities elided by the imperial frame, Engseng Ho argues that although Bernard Cohn once described the imperial point of view as the “view from the boat,” “there were other boats as well.” The vahan is one of these boats that hold mobile lifeworlds that existed prior to colonialism and that persist today—albeit in transformed ways—its sailors responding to a series of ruptures through repetition and by continuing to traverse the Indian Ocean. This view from the dhow thus offers a non-liner history of Indian Ocean connections, and is always flexible, contingent and partial; the relationality between land and sea becoming visible through an interplay of what I call “moorings” and voyages.

Moorings here refer to regulatory mechanisms, forms of sovereignty, places, and material and social practices around which the dhow trade pivots. These moorings enable voyages, known in Kachchhi as ghos. These voyages are the unit through which time, space, and capital are lived, moved through and produced for these sailors. This interplay between sailors’ voyages and moorings enables one to see fixity and mobility, land and sea, time and space together, charting a relationality between different port cities and littorals. 

RBF: It is rather easy to think of dhows as being boats from the past, even if they may ply the seas presently. However, your book highlights how these “country crafts” are closely linked to modernity and nation-building. Simultaneously, they have also been assumed to be linked with illicit trading and the shadow economy by government agencies. Why do we see such a schism in how these vessels are regarded?

NM: As you rightly point out, there is a paradox or a schism in how dhows and vahans have been viewed by state agencies and wider public discourse. On the one hand, dhows are the most enduring symbol of Indian Ocean connectivity. Across Indian Ocean port cities, the dhow has become a symbol of cosmopolitan pasts celebrated in museums, heritage projects, cultural festivals, and nationalist imaginaries of a world before European colonialism. These romantic images of dhows occasionally shatter as news reports and government agencies assume that these dhows today smuggle goods across Indian Ocean port cities.

For example, in India, dhows have been associated, by government agencies, with gold smuggling (especially before the liberalization of the economy in 1991) or then have become a locus for anxieties around securing India’s coastlines, especially after the 26/11 attacks in Bombay in 2008. Yet, dhows were not always regarded with such suspicion by the Indian government.

In the early years of independence, the “country craft trade” was bolstered by the government as an indigenous form of shipping that could contribute meaningfully to the Indian economy by connecting minor ports, bringing in foreign exchange, and acting as feeders for larger ports. Indeed, up until liberalization in 1991, the government even had a cargo reservation policy for dhows, whereby dates imported into India could only be transported by country crafts. With liberalization, these protections were taken away. Simultaneously, given India’s desire to securitize its coastlines, country crafts were also seen as easy vehicles for the unauthorized movements of goods and people.

With increasing Islamophobia in India, given that many of these dhows are manned and owned by Muslim Bhadala and Wagher communities from Gujarat, these country crafts have been viewed with suspicion by government agencies, who celebrate these vessels as part of India’s rich maritime history on the one hand, and regard them as security threats on the other. Unlike other forms of transport—such as planes, trains, buses and so on which are also used to move contraband, country crafts are especially illegible to state authorities.

Rather than taking a presentist view of these security issues, this book argues that current suspicions of dhows across the Indian Ocean have emerged from a deep-rooted anxiety over the long history of trade and connection across the Indian Ocean. The anxiety about the movement of dhows reveals entanglements between long-standing mobile trade networks across the Indian Ocean and state authorities—not only imperial and colonial but also national. At the heart of ten­sions currently unfolding between states and mobile dhow networks, therefore, lie questions about territoriality and sovereignty.

In the precolonial period, dhow networks functioned as an “itinerant territoriality” across political entities that operated on the basis of a shared, overlapping, and lay­ered sovereignty. Since the colonial period, mobile dhows and their dynamic trade networks have contended with the boundaries of the sovereign state, defined and delimited by colonial and then national and international law and policy. These shifts in understandings of territory and sovereignty have led to the creation of regulations that seek to tightly monitor and control mobile people, goods, and vessels.

Yet it is precisely these regulations and difference created by national borders and jurisdictional struggles at sea that have offered the dhow trade opportunities for profit. As a result of state and international policy, the dhow trade has become an intermediary in the underbelly of global capitalism, becoming vilified by states in some moments, and conscripted by them in times of need.

Dhows, once viewed as peddlers across the Indian Ocean, continue to move creatively, flexibly, and quickly between port cities, becoming what some sailors have called the “Uber of shipping.” Indeed, these dhows are “tramp shippers” that do not follow a strict, pre-ordained itinerary, but move according to the needs of their clients and are always “just-in-time” in today’s global supply chains. 

RBF: “War and conflict offer risks and opportunities for dhows,” you state pointedly in the book. This is something you bore witness to firsthand in the course of your research. As you chronicle, on more than one occasion, you found yourself having to intervene on behalf of crewmembers (whom you got to know as research informants) when they unwittingly ran afoul of the law. Such situations, as revealed in the book, were made even more complex—in one instance—because these were Indian laborers with Emirati business connections who found themselves stranded in Iran!

In effect, the lived experiences of those involved in transnational dhow-based trading (which, ironically, are circuits that pre-date the establishment of nation-states in the Indian Ocean world,) seem to be at odds with ideas of sovereignty in this realm. What does one tell us about the other?

NM: War, conflict, and instability offer both risks and rewards for these dhow sailors and traders. Indeed, dhows operate in spaces where other forms of shipping may not be available such as in minor ports in Yemen, Somalia, and Iran. The UAE is a pivotal mooring for this trade as goods are supplied from UAE ports to places where container shipping is too expensive or risky due to high insurance costs or sanctions regimes.

For instance, dhows have acted as transhippers for goods to and from Iran, Somalia, and the UAE, even with changing sanctions regimes against trade with Iran. Disruptions in supply chains and containerized shipping also offer opportunities for these vahans—for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, even as containerized shipping was interrupted, Dubai saw a boom in the trade through dhows as they filled the gaps in shipping across Indian Ocean ports.

Yusuf, the sailor you refer to in your question, was incarcerated in Iran during the COVID-19 lockdown in Iran as he and the rest of his crew was found transshipping essential goods— foodstuffs, medicines and cigarettes—to Iran whilst in Omani territorial waters. Yusuf negotiated his release from prison in Iran by creating a contest between different patrons who could fund his bail, in effect, arbitraging between patrons. Indeed, sailors traversing across the sea often found themselves negotiating with different legal regimes.

However, dhows moved across the Indian Ocean long before the rise of nation-states and current ideas of nation-state sovereignty. In the pre-colonial period, dhows moved across the Indian Ocean without having to cohere to a singular notion of the law, instead subject to the law of whichever port city they were docked in, these laws not extending out to sea. During the colonial period, dhows would often move between shifting legal landscapes, finding spaces that were friendly for trade through policies such as low customs dues.

For example, princely states in India, such as Nawanagar, Kathiawar, and Kutch become pivotal centers for these trades as the rules for commerce were different than they were in territories directly governed by the British. Even today, dhows seek out spaces in the gaps between different sovereign nation-states. Built into notions of national sovereignty is an idea of dominion over territory, and a singular law. However, while nation-states seek to control mobility as a performance of sovereignty, this sovereignty is always incomplete and aspirational.

Yet, jurisdictional struggles at sea and the differences in rules and regulations created by national borders offer vahans new opportunities as they engage in what I call “geopolitical arbitrage.” This geopolitical arbitrage is a practice by which sailors and dhow owners capture value through price differentials created by geopolitical conditions across the Indian Ocean as they transship goods across spaces impacted by war or sanctions. So while on the one hand, enactments of national sovereignty through border regimes, jurisdictional control or policing produce risks for dhows, it is these same borders and differences in jurisdiction and legal regimes that produce the conditions for capturing value in this trade.

War and geopolitical conditions similarly enable the continuation of this trade. The lived experience of these sailors today as they navigate multiple sovereignties in the region enables one to examine the ways in which sovereignty functions, not only on land, but also at sea, profit created through arbitraging between geopolitical contests showing us that sovereignty and the creation of capital are deeply intertwined. 

Image courtesy Nidhi Mahajan

 RBF: In apprehending the place of the divine in the lives and labor of the seafarers you studied, you regard it as “a sovereignty rooted in pasts when Sufi saints were also arbitrators of kingly power.” Nevertheless, you also see the sacred as being of “continued relevance … [because] divine sovereignty and mobility in some moments can challenge state sovereignty and at others [move] in tandem with it.”

Inasmuch as these investments in religiosity may be testament to how mariners deal with the fickleness of the seas or the inconstancy of trade regimes, is it also how they contend with being minorities, rendered so especially because of the very faith they turn to (and are of)?

NM: The sailors I worked with were predominantly Muslims of the Bhadala and Wagher communities, from Mota Salaya in Mandvi and Jam Salaya in Gujarat. Both communities are classified as “Other Backward Classes” or OBC in India, and are often viewed with derision by, both, upper-caste Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat. Seafaring has been central to community identity for both, Bhadalas long associated with seafaring and fishing while Waghers have historically been associated with piracy in the region of Okhamandel. Religious practice too has been central for self-definition for both communities, whether as minorities in contradistinction to Hindus, or in caste hierarchies amongst Muslims as well.

Since at least the 1980s, conflicts between Hindu Kharvas, who once also worked on board vahans alongside Bhadalas and Waghers, have led to increasing segregation and tension between these communities. Anthropologist Edward Simpson has suggested that in Mandvi, these religious tensions were also a manifestation of class conflict as Bhadalas came to own vahans and Kharvas were increasingly pushed into the international labor market, especially in Oman, where they worked for Bhatia merchants and former dhow owners. Yet when I began fieldwork in Mandvi, the era of rising fortunes for Bhadala vahan owners had come to an end. Bhadala vahan labor­ers increasingly viewed labor migration to the Gulf as a horizon of possibility for youth.

While these tensions between Hindus and Muslims were palpable in Mandvi, they are less visible across the Gulf in the town of Jam Salaya, another center for the vahan trade. This is not because of the peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Hindus but because the town itself is segregated from the rest of the Kathiawar penin­sula of which it is a part. Jam Salaya has only a handful of Hindu families who con­tinue to live there, many having moved out of the vahan trade and migrated to other parts of Gujarat or to Bombay. The town’s fifty thousand inhabitants are predom­inantly Sunni Muslim Bhadalas and Waghers. While Mandvi has seen waves of Islamic reformism, Jam Salaya has kept both right-wing Hinduism and reformist Islam at bay. These class and caste tensions also converged with broader patterns of polarization of Hindus and Muslims in India. Even among other Muslim commu­nities in the region, Bhadalas and Waghers have been ostracized. In response, they craft their own religiosity based on Islamic piety in the shipyards as well as within collective bodies such as the jamaat.

For both these communities, religious identity and practice are central to self-definition. Bhadala and Wagher sailors view their lives and labor as shaped through Sufi Islamic religious practices on board the dhow and at home. Danger at sea—whether cyclones, or other adverse weather events—is managed not through secularized financial notions of risk management and insurance but through Sufi Islamic ideas of divine sovereignty and the “unity of life” according to which life and death are seen as open-ended.

In articulating a different vision of life and death, seafarers also link mobile dhows at sea to a constellation of Sufi shrines on land, especially those in their homeports in Kachchh. The Sufi shrine on land and its material life at sea become a portal through which one can examine ideas of divine sovereignty for these communities. The Sufi shrine on land becomes a spiritual, political, and economic mooring for those at sea, as well as for their kin who remain home. Divine sovereignty undergirds the laboring life of the seafarer, shaping class, caste, and religious identity on board the dhow, and back at home. These religious practices are grounded in Islamic pasts and enable these OBC Muslims to voyage out, seeking possibilities in the face of marginalization in India.

RBF: The marine world of trade that you research is largely a masculine field. Even so, you underscore how the women on land were “key finan­cial actors. They not only managed the household income but also maintained social relations with patrons, creating the networks that allowed men to move … [I]t was often women, and not men, who were most insightful about the economic structure of the [dhow] trade, some of them even having a critical sociological view of their own communities.”

How did spending time with the women “left behind” on land, as it were, expand your understanding of the sea trade run by the men and the community more generally?

NM: As I spent time with women in both Mandvi and Jam Salaya, it became clear to me that the labor of women at home and their imbrication in debt and patronage relations were central to enabling the mobility of khalasis, or sailors, on board vahans. The transregional mobility of men was forged by the women who stayed at home, this labor being largely invisible but, yet, deeply legible to men who went out to sea. Labor in the dhow trade, such as seasonal contracts for work, and systems of remuneration, operated on a system of patronage rooted in older forms of jajmani relations that structured agricultural labor in Gujarat where landless laborers became the clients of landowners, their patrons.

Within this patronage system, it was often women who found new patrons/dhow owners for their male kin to work with; it was women who went to dhow owners to ask for credit during the year; and it was often women who ensured that khalasis were paid the salaries owed to them at the end of the sailing season. Although women did not move with men, their labor of being in relation, which included their movement between homes, care-work, and maintenance of social networks, made the move­ment of men across the ocean possible.

Women also owned dhows and were given dhows by their families as their dowry, thus shaping the fortunes of the homes they married into. Women acted not only as care givers in the absence of male kin but also harnessed their networks, which extended from one household to another to shape family fortunes.

By examining women’s labor at home and men’s labor at sea together, I argue that mobility across the Indian Ocean is moored to the home, especially through relations of patronage between dhow owners and sailors, as well as between men and women as kin, and that these relations are central to community identity. The monsoon regulates these relationships of patronage and labor, as contracts for work were drawn up on a monsoonal calendar, suggesting that the dhow economy, as an intermediary in global shipping lines, requires cultural and environmental forms that elide binaries of nature/culture and change/stasis. Instead, the entanglement of nature, culture, and the contours of gendered labor are at the heart of global shipping and capital.

 

By spending time with women and examining these relations of production that are seemingly out of place in capitalist forms of exchange, I realized that patronage, gendered labor, and the labor of being in relation are central to Indian Ocean trade networks and capital today. These forms of labor are often presumed to belong to economic systems that char­acterized different eras—feudalism or nonwage markets—but I suggest that they are the very moorings for capitalist production. These forms of production do not simply disappear with the rise of a global capitalism but in fact moor capitalism to an Indian Ocean setting that extends from the home to the ship, becoming a mode through which global capital articulates with the local.

RBF: As we close, I want to ask you about the warning you raise about climate change: “[T]he
Indian Ocean, the fast­est warming ocean, has seen rising sea levels, an increasing frequency of tropical cyclones, and other adverse weather events.” As they find themselves so often moored and unmoored from multiple lands, what lessons do dhows have to offer in these climatically challenging times?  

NM: Sailors are intimately aware of the way in which climate change has impacted their lives. They would matter-of-factly describe how the monsoon now arrives in India later than it once did, how adverse weather events such as tropical cyclones and storms are more frequent, and that the sea itself is more tempestuous. Dhow sailors and families who live along the Gujarat coast now face increased danger at sea and in coastal regions. Indeed, sailors are in awe of nature—they notice small changes in the environment, and pay close attention to wind, waves, and shifts on land. This is not only due to climate change, but because understanding these subtle changes has long helped sailors navigate the Indian Ocean.

Historically, dhow sailors from Kachchh read the winds, sky, and sea, using methods such as sighting of birds, sea snakes, the color of water, and sand to navigate across the ocean, and predict the weather. Today however, conditions at sea are read, documented, and communicated through weather applications like Windy.com, video footage, voice notes, radio, and other forms of digital communication. Yet, like sailors of yore, contemporary dhow sailors continue to be in awe of nature, and layer older ways of reading the weather with new forms of communication. 

However, they understand that human agency is limited, and that even the most sophisticated technologies can fail. For instance, in 2018, Cyclone Mekunu, the most powerful cyclone to hit the Arabian peninsula in recorded history, severely impacted sailors who were in the region. While the cyclone had been predicted by weather monitoring systems, it changed course suddenly. The cyclone was an instance where scientific forecasting systems failed, and sailors who survived the cyclone were deeply grateful for having been saved, remaining in wonder of nature.

Even in taking care of the dhows themselves, sailors are deeply attuned to the ways in which vessels must be repaired regularly and with care based on seasons and climate. As they repair leaks, clean and waterproof the entire vessel at least once a year, they come to care for it through an intimate understanding of the effects the elements have had on the vessel. This method of repair is slow and requires consistent maintenance, usually all done slowly by hand and not by machine, thereby allowing sailors to take even greater notice of the effect of the elements and human agency on the vessel itself.

Through these intimate ways of knowing the environment and the vessels they use to cross the sea, sailors teach us that first and foremost, we need to have a deep respect and awe for nature. They know that human agency is limited and that  disregard for the environment has unimaginable effects. They also teach us to be more attentive in reading the subtle signs that the weather and environment give us. Through the careful and consistent care of dhows that are repaired slowly each year, they teach us that caring for the environment, human life, and infrastructure is a slow, intimate process, one in which human beings are not at the center, but subject to a power greater than themselves. 

From Scroll. 

"Photographic Memory: Rosa Maria Perez on Goa through Krishna Navelcar’s Camera" in SCROLL (3 June 2025)

 

On 15 May, Portugal’s Museu do Oriente opened the exhibition, Foto Arte Ganesh: Goa, Photography and Memory. Curated by Professor Rosa Maria Perez, senior researcher at Lisbon’s Centre for Research in Anthropology, with assistance by Douglas Santos da Silva, the exhibition focuses on the work of late photographer Krishna Navelcar whose studio once thrived on Rua José Falcão, a bylane of Goa’s capital city, Panjim. Although Navelcar’s Foto Estúdio Ganesh may now only be a distant memory, what the exhibition reveals is the legacy this Goan photographer created. Accordingly, the photography exhibit, which runs till 12 October, also enquires into issues of heritage preservation given the lack of official visual archives in Goa, erstwhile capital of Portuguese India (1510-1961). On 5-6 June, A symposium titled Through a Goan Lens: Multidisciplinary Approaches will also be held in conjunction with the exhibition.

Navelcar’s career bridged the periods of Portuguese and, then, Indian rule in Goa, spanning the 1950s to the 1980s. During this time, the photographer captured images in official contexts, including events attended by the last two governors of Portuguese India, Paulo Bénard Guedes and Manuel Vassallo e Silva; Navelcar also documented the 1963 visit of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to post-Portuguese Goa. The photographer’s images would appear in local Goan newspapers, but he also worked with radio stations during Goa’s Portuguese and Indian periods. For instance, his pictures show up in the Boletim da Emissora de Goa (a publication of the official radio station in Portuguese India) and he was also employed as a photographer for All India Radio from 1963 until the time of his retirement. Yet, Navelcar additionally trained his camera on local goings on of an everyday nature, such as weddings, religious rituals, and festivities. Because of this, the exhibition showcases a varied array of twentieth-century Goan history and life.

In this interview, Dr. Perez offers insights into Navelcar’s extensive oeuvre, themes of the exhibition, and what it means for his pictures to be on display in Lisbon more than a half-century after the end of Portuguese rule in Goa.

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R. Benedito Ferrão: As a researcher, your scholarship on South Asia has tended toward matters of religious identity, gender, and social relations. How did you first learn about Krishna Navelcar and what connections, if any, did you see between his photographs and your previous research? In turn, what led to the creation of this exhibition?

Rosa Maria Perez: I would like to clarify that my research interests primarily center on social structures and issues of discrimination and marginality, rather than on religious identity. While religious identity is an important aspect—particularly in research about the caste system in India—it is more of a subsidiary consideration in my work. On the other hand, I find that women’s studies offers a more appropriate framework for my research than gender studies.

My first encounter with Krishna Navelcar’s brother, the painter Vamona Navelcar, occurred in the mid-1990s, yet I was not introduced to Krishna until I was invited to assess the significance of a substantial collection of negatives—over 15,000—held by the Fundação Oriente. The extraordinary richness of this photographic archive culminated in the recently inaugurated exhibition following approximately eight years of work with the collection.

As an anthropologist, my interest in photography traces back to the earliest figures in the field, notably Margaret Mead, who incorporated it into their research. I have been captivated by the interplay between photography and anthropology for many years, particularly as contemporary anthropologists have begun to systematically investigate this relationship, moving away from an earlier focus on colonial photography.

Although I have not regarded myself as sufficiently specialized to write extensively on photography, I am now considering further research based on collections of Goan photographers currently preserved in Portugal. It is also worth noting that I have been teaching visual anthropology for many years—initially with Professor Lina Fruzzetti at Brown University, and more recently through a course I developed at the Indian Institute of Technology (Gandhinagar), titled Anthropology of Visual Systems, with a core approach to photography. I have also supervised theses on photography and film.

 

RBF: In your curatorial note to the exhibition, you remark that Navelcar’s photographs open up “a more complex narrative of Goan history.” You suggest that these images may challenge colonial conceptions of the region, which is notable given that Navelcar often functioned in an official capacity, commissioned as he was by state agencies to document various events in what was then the capital of Portuguese India. What can you tell readers about Navelcar’s official work and how do you foresee the exhibition offering new ways of thinking about the past as Navelcar chronicled it?

RMP: Krishna Navelcar’s official photography, commissioned by state agencies in the former capital of Portuguese India, transcends merely reflecting the colonial perspective or serving as a passive tool of the state. Instead, his extensive collection of photographs offers a comprehensive view of nearly forty years of Goan history, covering the end of Portuguese rule and the social and political changes that shaped modern Goa. Navelcar documented state events and public ceremonies, but he also captured everyday life, showcasing the diversity and resilience of the Goan people.

His photographs depict lively celebrations, everyday street scenes, and moments of transformation, often emphasizing the region’s rich religious and social diversity. In doing so, Navelcar’s images challenge the narrow views often present in colonial documentation, which tried to define Goan identity in limited ways. They prompt us to reflect on how official photography can both support and challenge mainstream historical narratives, and invite us to recognize Navelcar not just as an official chronicler but also as a witness to and participant in the formation of Goan memory.  In summary, while Navelcar's official role could have restricted him to reproducing colonial viewpoints, the depth and variety of his work adds complexity and richness to the narrative of Goan history.

 

RBF: Of your own process in selecting images for the exhibition, you muse upon how Navelcar’s pictures show an “intricate interplay between [himself as] photographer and [his] subject [that] underscores the significance of every detail … [These features] are all captured in time, transforming an ordinary photograph into a powerful testament of human connection and emotion.”

As visitors to the exhibition take in the display, what might they glean of Navelcar between him doing his official job as a commissioned photographer and his own expression of personal and artistic agency?

RMP: It would be a significant oversimplification to restrict a collection of over 15,000 negatives—especially since this collection does not represent the entirety of Navelcar’s work, with many additional negatives held by his daughter—to merely his role as a commissioned photographer. The exhibition showcases images selected from thousands of portraits, street scenes, and photographs capturing everyday life. These images clearly extend beyond the scope of his commissioned work, both before and after the end of colonial administration. This broader visual record highlights Navelcar’s engagement with Goan society in all its complexity, countering any attempt to diminish his legacy to that of mere official documentation.

With regard to your second question, every commissioned photograph of individuals represents a complex negotiation among the expectations of the commissioner, the creative vision of the photographer, and the agency of the subject. This is particularly evident in portraits or images of people, where the resulting photograph transcends a mere reproduction of the commissioner’s intent, emerging instead from a dynamic interplay between the photographer and the subject. While the photographer operates within the frameworks established by the client or agency, they also infuse their unique perspective, aesthetic choices, and ethical considerations into the process. Subjects may pose, resist, or collaborate, influencing their representation both consciously and unconsciously. Their expressions, body language, and willingness to engage play crucial roles in shaping the final image, highlighting the photograph as a product of interaction rather than a one-sided endeavor.

Even within a brief or formal assignment, the photographer interprets the scene through decisions regarding framing, timing, and focus. These choices can subtly or overtly challenge, nuance, or reinforce the intended message. Although the commissioner outlines the broad purpose and context, it is the photographer who negotiates the particulars: the approach to the subject, what to include or exclude, and how to respond to the subject’s reactions. This negotiation is especially critical in ethnographic contexts, where sensitivity to the subject’s dignity and agency is of utmost importance.  Such negotiations underscore that even official or commissioned photographs are the result of dialogue, not a unilateral process.

RBF: An important fact is that Krishna Navelcar named his studio for his late brother Ganesh, who died
very young. Ganesh was also the name with which the artist Vamona Navelcar (1929-2021), another of the photographer’s brothers, would sign his canvases, also as an homage to his late sibling. Both Krishna and Vamona were in the employ of the colonial state, the former in Portuguese Goa and the latter in Portuguese Mozambique. Despite the geographic distance, the brothers shared a close bond. What might we make of the emotional and political entanglements in the lives of these artistic brothers?

RMP: No one is better positioned than you to address this question, given your extensive and profound scholarship on the work of Vamona Navelcar—partly in collaboration with Vishvesh Kandolkar. My own response would likely reflect much of what you have already written, the lectures you have delivered, and the exhibition you curated. Nevertheless, I will attempt to provide a reply.

Both brothers navigated careers within colonial state structures, yet their creative output consistently reflected a deep engagement with issues of identity and belonging. By honoring their brother through their professional identities, they engaged in a subtle form of resistance against erasure and marginalization, thereby asserting a familial and cultural memory within the frameworks of colonial modernity. Politically, their lives exemplify the paradoxes experienced by colonized individuals who contributed to official cultural production while simultaneously cultivating spaces for personal and collective meaning. The emotional bond between the brothers, maintained across continents and colonial boundaries, underscores how affective ties can both enhance and complicate artistic agency. Their shared tribute to Ganesh serves as a site where personal grief, cultural symbolism, and the politics of memory converge, challenging the oversimplified narratives often imposed by colonial and postcolonial histories.

RBF: At present, there is no official repository of visual culture and history in Goa. As your curational
essay explains, “The evident lack of visibility of photographers’ collections in Goa has resulted in a significant deficiency of systematic studies on photography in the region.” Apart from the intellectual challenges that arise due to this unarchived photographic history, what is lost culturally and artistically by not having a permanent collection of such photographs in Goa? In this regard, what intervention can an event like Foto Arte Ganesh offer and are there any plans to bring the exhibition “back” to Goa?

RMP: Without these visual records, the lived experiences, social transformations, and diverse identities that have shaped Goa could be forgotten or reduced to official or externally constructed narratives. The absence of a permanent photographic archive leaves Goa’s cultural identity vulnerable to erasure, oversimplification, and external definitions, rather than allowing it to be continually reimagined and affirmed by Goans themselves.

The exhibition aims at doing more than simply showcasing images; it revitalizes collective memory, confronts historical amnesia, and honors the people and diversity of Goa. By presenting these photographs in a curated public setting, Foto Arte Ganesh not only fills a gap in the historical record but also encourages new avenues of dialogue, research, and artistic expression, fostering a shared sense of heritage and belonging.

Looking ahead, as a curator I recognize the essential need to diplay exhibitions like Foto Arte Ganesh in Goa that would restore a significant visual history to its rightful place and act as a catalyst for further archival initiatives, public engagement, and the potential development of a permanent photographic collection. This endeavor would mark a meaningful step toward addressing the historical importance of Goan photographic heritage and promoting continued cultural and artistic renewal.

In conclusion, I want to emphasize that my role in this exhibition and its catalogue is not doctrinal and definitely not patronizing. The work I have done is the result of over thirty years of “observing” Goa, an endless source of inspiration, shaped by its artists, researchers, and creators. I view myself as a vessel through which this inspiration has flowed. Ultimately, this work rightfully belongs to Goa and to the Goan people.

From Scroll. 

 

"Soft-Porn Cinema and the Making of Indian Desire: Author Darshana Sreedhar Mini on Rated A" in SCROLL (9 February 2025)

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, labor 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 moralizing view taken of the industry, instead drawing attention to its place within Indian society and even 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 they acted in 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, USA. In this interview, Mini talks about her research process, which included being employed, briefly, in the film-making industry in South India. The conversation covers, among other topics, issues of caste, gender, and labor in cinema, the consumption of Malayalam soft-porn as a regionally marked product, and nostalgia for soft-porn as an erstwhile phenomenon.

*

 

RBF: In “Soft-Porn 101,” the introductory chapter of the book, you juxtapose two provocations that informed your research.

You begin by saying that your approach “[takes] stock of Malayalam soft-porn’s nuanced negotiation of issues of gender, film production and distribution, [and] labor practices, … [which] requires moving beyond narrow and simplistic accounts of moral decay.”

Yet, later in the same chapter, you also underscore how “Malayalam soft-porn itself does not have a defined feminist politics nor is it necessarily oriented toward gender parity. But a feminist study of its production practices allows us to braid together the ground realities involved in its informal modes of recruiting and sustaining labor such as trust-based and ethical collaborative approaches.”

Even as you critique the moralizing stance often taken towards such filmmaking, it appears as if the soft-porn industry operates under its own moral code. How do these internal ethics challenge Indian society’s perceptions of these enterprises?

Additionally, as you analyzed the ethics of labor relations in the soft-porn industry, what was revealed to you of, both, the complex portrayals of women characters in such films but also the agency of the artists themselves, even if the intent of such movie-making may have not been explicitly feminist?

DSM: The emergence of soft-porn in the 1980s drew the ire of pro-censorship groups who lobbied the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) on the need to restrict adult content. Obscenity became the primary lens used in popular discussions to address soft-porn as a symptom of the moral decay. The sexual panic was premised on a crisis narrative in which availability of adult content allegedly endangered safety and unleashed cultural chaos. The portrayal of women in these films as non-normative sexual figures who refused to be cowed down by middle-class respectability, meant that they (and the films) easily became targets for the purification campaigns to cleanse obscene media representations. Soft-porn exhibition drew protests from anti-obscenity forums and women’s groups, who demanded that protective measures be instituted to rescue soft-porn actresses from exploitative practices in filmmaking.

When I started research for this project in 2010, these were the limited frameworks within which soft-porn as a cultural object was discussed. The pilot study in Kodambakkam, revealed that soft-porn and mainstream cinema were not oppositional categories, but soft-porn took in the surplus labor of mainstream cinema—those who waited for a break after years of apprenticeship and wanting a break from being part of crowd scenes to one with dialogues. Moreover, the soft-porn industry financially supported mainstream exhibition in the late 1990s, when the Malayalam film industry faced financial crisis with films suffering losses at the box office.

Rated A uses the lenses of film labor and informal media flows to interrogate how these actresses, as well as other production personnel balanced their social lives that were marked by their involvement with a tabooed form. Despite the claims made about soft-porn film as a genre and form distinct from mainstream cinema, there were technicians and cast who moved from mainstream cinema to soft-porn to profit from the windfall. Additionally, the crew and production units used fictitious names in the credits, making these films hard to track down in terms of production histories.

In my research, I look at new profit-sharing mechanisms forged by exhibitors and distributors to avert risk by screening soft-porn films. This was after they were jolted by the failure of the mainstream films, and soft-porn films opened up space to come up with profit sharing models to overcome their losses. By studying the labor that went into the making of the soft-porn films and how it had varying ramifications for the cast and crew, I showcase how a political economy of labor studies can be used to unpack the varying scale of labor, both material and embodied that goes into the making of film forms.

For instance, soft-porn films gave narrative prominence to female actors, who became the poster girls of these films, so much so that there were difficulties in procuring male actors to pair with them. In fact, male actors were reluctant to be in films, where they must play second-fiddle to the female actors whose sexual agency to some extent demasculinized the roles scripted for male actors. At the same time, by acting in these films, the actresses were doubly marginalized and were perceived as public women on whose lives viewers could lay claim. In Rated A, I discuss an instance, when Reshma, an actress who was part of soft-porn films was subjected to a double scrutiny about her stint in the industry, when she was arrested by the police. The interrogation video shot at the police station was shared widely on platforms like YouTube. The outing and forced exposure of Reshma’s whereabouts is in line with the argument around why non-normative sexual bodies are perceived as threatening to patriarchy, calling for new ways to contain the excess. Apart from the transgressiveness etched on to the body of the actresses who enacted these roles of madakarani (sex-siren) in these films, their extra-diegetic lives were scrutinized, stripping them of their privacy and personal space. There was a publicness imbued in the way these actresses and their career choices were seen as perched on the precipice of sex work.

As opposed to the perception that there was a free-for-all culture in soft-porn films, in my research I came across narratives where there is an ethical relationality in the way decisions were taken, and wages discussed with the actors. Since no one was paid outright, there were trust-based informal arrangements that were managed for payment. The actresses also were forthcoming about their comfort levels in enacting certain intimate sequences and considered these films as part of their regular employment. Even as a part of this research, when I contacted production personnel who worked in these films, I found that the relationships with the actresses were based on care and collegiality. They shared the information of the actresses only after getting confirmation from them that they were okay to be interviewed. To be speaking about a stint of their career which was deemed a failure is not an easy process, and as one of my respondents put it, “They [the actors] will have to come to you, and you need to wait patiently if you want to hear their versions.”

 

RBF: Focusing on women actors, you describe the role of the madakarani (a term in Malayalam) as “a woman whose frank sexuality and readiness to use her body mark her as an unstable social figure.” How did these women become madakarani, you enquire as you investigate the “gendered value-economy of the film industry, where [these women’s] aspirational mobility to cross class lines and caste origins is mediated by sexuality.”

In particular, you draw our attention to actors most prolific between the 1970s to the 1990s, such as “Vijayasree, Rani Padmini, and Silk Smitha—who were perceived as sex sirens in their time,” and all of whom met untimely deaths as a result of murder or suicide. Perhaps of all of these actors, it is Silk Smitha (1960-1996) who is best known. This, not least, because her career trajectory is the basis of the Bollywood film The Dirty Picture (2011) where Vidya Balan famously plays Smitha.

As you note, The Dirty Picture cannot be considered to have done justice to Silk Smitha, for even “[t]he South Indian film fraternity alleged that Bollywood had co-opted the tragic life of a South Indian actress for commercial gain and reduced their film culture to stereotypes to suit the tastes and expectations of a national audience.”

The book illuminates how Smitha’s lower-caste origins are obscured by The Dirty Picture while securing the legacy of Balan, a Tamil Brahmin, as someone daring enough to assay such a role. This produces a tension which leads one to question the limits and possibilities of film as a medium and an industry. How do you see cinema operating as a pathway for actors like Smitha while also functioning to misrepresent them, especially as a posthumous chronicle?

DSM: In the first chapter, I address the role played by film journalism in brokering connections for new actresses, and the way it laid out certain parameters within which aspiration, hard work, and social mobility came to be discussed. Film journalists had a huge role to play in deciding who could get noticed, as well as in facilitating introductions to film producers or directors that newcomers sought. In fact, the informal regimes that operated (still operates) in the film industry, needed these intermediary figures who had access to women who had come to Kodambakkam in search of jobs and were looking out for opportunities. Most of the film journalists were men, some of whom would ultimately take up public relations work in the industry. If you look at these weekly columns from the 1970s and 80s, it is evident that there were patronizing and judgmental attitudes used to comment on actresses’ personal lives, and at times they slipped into locker-room conversations.

Silk Smitha was so guarded in her responses to the press, primarily because she felt that as a dancer stereotyped for eroticized roles, what film journalists ended up writing about her was colored with sexual suggestions and remarks. In her curt responses, she made her disapproval known. Many newcomers found in the journalists the insider-figures who can pass on success mantras. I think when we study the film industry, it is crucial to study how film journalism doubled up both as trade press, as well as news columns that resemble entertainment weeklies.

When The Dirty Picture came out, there were a lot of discussions on how the film made use of sensational stories to reduce Smitha’s life to a rags-to-riches story, without taking enough input from or doing research on the South Indian film landscape where Smitha worked. The Dirty Picture is a prime example of how the local image of the madakarani was mainstreamed by character stereotyping, as well as an entire form of cinematic practice that deviated from the seemingly “national” model of Bollywood. As I discuss in the book, the film follows a formulaic Bollywood blueprint that includes song-and-dance sequences, a rags-to-riches plot of a small-town girl pursuing her dreams, and a narrative of heterosexual romance.

The Dirty Picture brought great success to Vidya Balan whose decision to play Silk Smitha was seen as a radical step as other prominent actresses had refused to take the role. Here, press reportage operates in a very different way in case of an A-list, mainstream Bollywood star, as opposed to the likes of Silk Smitha and Shakeela, and even worse in the case of smaller starlets who were the subject of moral reprimand in popular discourse.

In my first chapter, I cite some instances where we can see the forensic gaze used in the way obituary columns were written of actresses who enacted the role of madakarani. Film magazines often bracketed the lives and careers of madakarani between the climaxes of screen pleasure and their sudden death by suicide or murder. In their reportage of madakarani’s deaths, film magazines rendered the actresses’ corpses and the audience’s posthumous memory of these actresses as objects of a forensic gaze. 

The discourse of obscenity emerges as a larger framing device in film reportage that fixes the madakarani in cyclical narratives of visibility and decline. In fact, the very factors that contribute to the making of the figure of the madakarani were also seen to be the cause of her decline; these magazines foreground sex and sexuality not just as sources of pleasure but also as forces that threatened the previous “good standing” of these women when they entered the field of erotic films. In publicizing starlets’ identities through centerfolds and introductory columns, film journalists applauded them for their enterprising judgment while simultaneously deriding them and pronouncing verdicts on their careers. In time, such reportage led to a perception of the madakarani as not only an unacceptable form of the hetero-feminine but a symbol of an entire region’s “degenerate” film culture. In Rated A, I explore how such filmic imaginations of sex and desire, constantly flowing within and out of Kerala, have led to a sexually mediated understanding of intimacy and public life.

 

RBF: To stay with Silk Smitha and The Dirty Picture a little longer, as signaled above, a further tension your book explores is the one between national and regional cinemas: “[The Dirty Picture‘s] reference to ‘South India’ as a hotbed of erotic films led to debates about how Bollywood film appropriated regional cinemas and sensationalized Smitha as a starry-eyed dancer whose rise and fall made her an emblem not only for erotic films but for the region from which she hailed.”

On the one hand, Bollywood clearly privileges Hindi, that being the mainstay of the industry. Yet, The Dirty Picture demonstrates how even regional stories are co-opted by mainstream Indian cinema. What are the problems of such a monolinguistic (and perhaps even monocultural) approach to representing a diverse nation? Parallelly, what pushback does one see to this phenomenon, especially in South Indian cinema?

DSM: The national-regional binaries play out in terms of how cultural taste, connoisseurship and popularity is recast in collective imagination. The cultural hegemony of Bollywood as an industry, and as the ur-space from where theorization of Indian cinema emerges has left out many regional cinemas as the geographical “others” whose separate linguistic and audience base demand specific lenses for analysis. These often become empirical case studies to advance arguments about why regional cinemas are popular but are still ensconced within the provincial narrative of exceptions.

Very often, regional cinemas have been alleged to have allowed a free way for low-budget films to thrive. In journalistic and trade news on censorship in the 1970s and 1980s, there are demands for stringent action to be taken by regional censor boards when it comes to certifying regional films, especially when they were also dubbed into different languages. These attitudes persist (sometimes residually) even today. During the course of my research process, the area of research—i.e., Malayalam soft-porn, itself led to raised eyebrows from many cultural purists who felt that writing on soft-porn would lead to a dilution of Malayalam cinema’s art cinema lineage.

For me, research on soft-porn is also to acknowledge that the form had a lasting influence both in inspiring other art forms, including mainstream films that drew the thread from soft-porn like Pavada (dir. G. Marthandan, 2016), Rosapoo (dir. Vinu Joseph, 2018), Super Deluxe (dir. Thiagarajan, Kumararaja, Tamil, 2019), or art installations, like the one by Priyaranjan Lal that was exhibited at the 2014 Kochi Biennale, some of which borrows from the film Kanyaka Talkies (dir. K. R. Manoj, 2013).

I start the book with reference to The Dirty Picture because it encapsulates how the sex siren in Indian cinema also doubles as a discourse about a moral and professional decline in the film industry, especially with the influx of women from lower caste and class backgrounds who pushed the boundaries of middle-class social mores. Here, I analyze a cartoon by Unnamati Syama Sundar themed on The Dirty Picture, which was shared on Facebook and later formed part of Jenny Rowena’s article in Dalit Web on Smitha. Syama Sundar’s cartoons emerge from Ambedkarite politics and are critical of the left-savarna complicity in sidelining Dalit concerns.

Syama Sundar highlights the problematic formulation of (what we could think of as a postfeminist form of) women’s sexual liberation in The Dirty Picture, which dilutes the social context of Dalit experiences and flattens variations in women’s experiences and struggles. He exposes the flip side to the liberal humanist take on the film by pointing to the complicity of savarna interests in framing it as a narrative of individual liberation. Enacting eroticized dance sequences as a secondary artist further relegated Smitha’s embodied labor to the status of inessential component for artistic value. Even in the discussions around the making of The Dirty Picture, Silk Smitha was less of a subject than a fetish-object to be molded to the needs of the box-office economy. Likewise, the film offers no inkling of the experiential or lived accounts of lower-caste actors struggling in a system in which the caste-class nexus and contact networks create opportunities.

Colorism is prevalent in the film industry, and it has been something that came up in my discussions with junior artists. There has been a tradition of creating different tiers of junior artists, depending on their looks and skin color, and this has been a practice that operates in other regional film industries as well. This practice also operates with the presumption of a savarna coded woman’s features as the preferred “default” and that is used as a yard stick to define what deviates away from it. While creative freedom in deciding who would best suit the role has always been an argument raised in favor of making changes in the skin color of actors, I think an informed discussion among the artists is important as well. I would be curious to know if make-over culture and the modicum of freedom it allows, makes people overlook cooptation.

 

RBF: In the book, you share how you sought employment in the film-making industry you were researching. “The position of helper that I was offered had a very nebulous job description,” you divulge, going on to say that because you had to “work across many departments…,” it benefitted your research.

I read with awe and amusement about how you negotiated being a researcher and employee simultaneously, encountering – as you did – “contradictory descriptions of the ‘contacts’ for whom [you] should be on the lookout,” or meeting the demands of the job when “additional challenges [were thrown] at [you] to see if you were capable of handling a ‘man’s job’”!

How did this insider’s perspective change the course of your research, if at all, and, because of your employment, what was made apparent to you that you may not have learned otherwise? While still on the topic of methods and research, what made you interested in this subject in the first place?

DSM: The initial thinking around this project started in 2010, as an aftermath to a focus group I conducted with teenagers to understand how they consumed soft-porn films as sex education material. In India, incorporating sex education formally into school curricula has faced multiple obstacles, both from religious groups as well as teachers’ organizations. Teachers, especially, felt that they were pressured into teaching sex-related material using safe sex paradigms, while deterrence is usually preferred in the conservative moral ethos of India. That’s what piqued my curiosity initially. As I started digging further, I realized that even though soft-porn films were widely available in cinema-halls and as DVDs, the production details of these films were not readily available. Most filmmakers and technicians who were part of these films used fictitious names in the credits.

Moreover, journalistic reports spoke about these films as a den of vice, where free sex and exploitative practices were rampant, and that too warranted more investigation. I left for Chennai in 2011 to do a pilot study and to see if this was a feasible project to carry out, since getting a list of the “real names” seemed the hardest to get through. I had to wait for over two years to get my first real contact, and more time was spent in the field to track down people. After all, the filmmakers who were associated with these films weren’t always comfortable coming out and owning these films as their productions.

This project has also been about a process of patient waiting. I stayed in Kodambakkam and took up stints of work in the industry to be part of the production process. Unlike a purely archival project or qualitative study, where you can work with a specific archive or a dataset, here the anonymity of the production practices necessitated a different model of approaching research. In many cases, it also involved waiting for clues and the right timing when the respondents would feel comfortable reconnecting  and giving me details. This project is ten plus years in the making, and the extra time was also necessitated by the mixed methods I ended up using, including backup plans in case I hit roadblocks.

But it is precisely this kind of waiting that led me to my first contact. Becoming a familiar face in and around my research “localities” led to connections which led to the position of a helper. I think I could have written a book on soft-porn without these connections and experiences, but it would not be Rated-A. I think the insider’s perspectives were crucial to get a behind-the-scenes look at the film/labor ecologies, and to understand things that I couldn’t from archival work, or from analyzing media discourses alone. In many cases, I got interviews with film producers and directors only because someone or the other could introduce me to them—even more so in case of actresses who had left the industry or had moved into a different phase of their career, Shakeela included.

Some of the ephemera I collected as part of my research—lobby cards, posters etc. were a direct result of this generosity. Sometimes even though I didn’t actually collect some of the material, the very fact that I got to see and photograph them for analysis in my book (a continuity album, for example) was more than I could have hoped for if I didn’t have this access.

 

RBF: In addition to Silk Smitha, another figure you zero in on, as you have just said, is the iconic Shakeela who continues to be prominent in South India (and beyond), both for her filmic past and her more contemporary involvement in politics and sex education.

Of Shakeela’s trajectory as being emblematic of the soft-porn industry, you write that “her formidable bodily presence exposed the sexual contradictions of Malayali society. Soft-porn’s language of sexual excess allowed figures such as Shakeela to speak to diverse constituencies of desire, yet it also fixed their off-screen lives into the image of the sex siren … [F]or many [other women actors], working in soft-porn blocked them from ever entering the mainstream film industry. Thus, even as the genre of soft-porn proved ephemeral, fizzling out in the early 2000s, its effects on the careers and lives of certain actresses were longer lasting.”

Against the precarity of such employment, even as Shakeela may emerge as a legendary presence, and a feminist one at that in how she champions sex-positivity despite having intermittently faced social disapprobation, is hers necessarily an exceptional success story?

DSM: The soft-porn film industry’s promotion of relatively unknown female starlets also contributed to anxieties about female stars. The film magazines that showcased these starlets were keen to foreground their willingness to act in films that required “modern” and “bold” (i.e., sexual) roles and they thus began to associate this group of ambitious aspiring actresses with the madakarani and her sexual autonomy. So even though some of them—Shakeela, for example—can be labelled soft porn stars, this is not the same kind of stardom we see in mainstream, big-budget cinemas. Instead of appearing on advertising billboards and in television ads, these actresses fed fantasies through B-circuit cinema halls and film magazine centerfolds.

On the one hand, Shakeela fits this industry-type perfectly. Shakeela’s heavy-set body allowed her to fit into the archetype of the amorous “aunty,” a recurring figure in both visual and written forms of pornography throughout the country and a stereotype that gave imaginative access to the middle-aged woman next door. She started acting in these films almost like any other soft-porn actress, but the way that the image of soft-porn was so indelibly fixed on her is singularly exceptional. There is much industry-lore—some of which I discuss in my book—about how the mere mention of Shakeela’s name or even a cameo presence could impact a film’s circulation and reach. Many of my respondents called these “Shakeela films.”

So, Shakeela is exceptional in how she literally becomes the mascot for the entire form. I think this also makes her career longevity exceptional, even beyond soft-porn. Most soft-porn actresses disappeared from the industry after a short stint, or even when they are remembered—as for example, Reshma—it is through narratives of failure, loss, tragedy, etc. Shakeela on the other hand has managed her own agency in this regard.

An example of this, which I discuss in my book, is how she also been roped in as a sex education expert in a Malayalam promotional sketch (2023) for the Netflix show Sex Education. In the sketch, “Shakeela’s Driving School” stands in as a metaphor for sex education itself, her tips about driving being innuendos about sexual intercourse as she tells a couple that she is going to talk to them about an important chapter that may have been skipped by their teachers in school. Shakeela’s words of wisdom range from pointers on intercourse and foreplay, to ethical dictums about consent and slut-shaming, the importance of self-pleasure and protection, and, quite ironically, the importance of finding out each other’s likes and dislikes instead of copying what is shown in porn.

 

RBF: Moving from the films to their audiences, Rated A apprehends how “Malayalam soft-porn offers alternative ways of imagining the global.” This is especially so when considering the transnational circuit of the financing, distribution, and consumption of these films between Kerala and its diaspora in the Arabian Gulf.

“This traffic in contraband media objects and desires enables Kerala’s expatriate population in the Gulf to reconstruct a sense of a home when they are far away from it. If we understand these consumption practices as constituting a media public, then soft-porn’s media public can be also said to constitute a ‘transnational public,’” you muse.

In this investigation of the movement of soft-porn in the era of globalization, particularly as it helps create a sense of transnational identity, even as the conventional assumption may be that such influences are unidirectional (by which I mean simply arising in the homeland and then landing upon the diaspora), I imagine this was not always so?

DSM: You’re right in pointing out a certain kind of assumption of unidirectionality in global flows. But assumptions and ground realities can be very different. One of my central concerns in Rated A was in fact, the global aspect of soft-porn films, right from the way they took inspiration from American exploitation cinema, to their export as mediated packages of desire in the Middle Eastern Gulf. I was aware of the Gulf aspect even before I formally started my research…I mean almost every family in Kerala has someone/knows someone who works in the Gulf. So, the idea that soft-porn films would circulate there in some form was not much of a surprise. But I was surprised by the extent to which they were woven into imaginations of intimacy while away from home. I think of this as a kind of diasporic formation that is similar to food—taste and smell for example, are corporeal sensations that trigger memory, affect, and longing. Desires can function much the same way, especially when they are packaged in a media form as powerful as soft-porn.

I think this is a form of affective diasporic transnationalism that functions in a very different way from the picture-postcard version of nationalism as imagined in the Westward-bound NRI imaginations (Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenga and so on) especially because it primarily bypasses the national. It’s a connection or a bridge between a very particular region of the nation, and certain sections of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East. When Malayalam soft-porn enters the Middle East through underground pirate circuits, it often circulates amidst Bangladeshi low-budget films and Pakistani mujra as “South Asian” pornography. Some of my Pakistani informants also spoke of soft-porn films that were available in Karachi’s Rainbow Center in Saddar, one of the hubs of video piracy in Pakistan.

In my book, I discuss how camps that house blue-collar laborers, for example, used to screen these films, or how soft-porn films also shape interactions between diasporic men living away from their families and sex-workers. Or even, how these films used to be smuggled into the Middle East as VHS/CDs/DVDs using ingenious strategies. There’s an amount of risk associated with this too— in the censorial atmosphere of the Middle East, there was also a common practice of labelling porn films as mythological films or home videos so that it minimized risk even if caught by Mutawa (The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice), the special police unit that enforces religious observations and public morality in Saudi Arabia. One of my respondents, a former video library owner, who sold soft-porn along with his regular wares in Dubai, told me that soft-porn CDs sold in video parlors might look to an outsider like “any other Malayalam film,” except for the text in Malayalam promising “juicy elements.”

These are all subterranean aspects of diasporic transnationalism that bypass (or rather cannot be contained within) the legal, formal channels of transnational relationships and their corollaries which are usually about diasporic workers’ rights, remittances to the home, and so on. The Gulf has always been a major presence in Kerala, of course, as a kind of peek into transnational affluence—it’s the region of aspirations where foreign goods used to come back to Kerala. With the circulation of soft-porn we have a slightly different kind of transnational movement—not about aspirations but about desires, through which the “province” literally flows back to the global cosmopolis.

 

RBF: While Malayalam soft-porn no longer exists as a genre beyond the early-2000s, you point out that it “enjoys an afterlife … on the internet [including social media],” in its reimagining in other films, and even as artworks. “Memories of soft-porn return not just as … circulating fragments, … but also permeate imaginations of gender negotiations ... This recirculation is significant for understanding how gender, sexuality, and media impact media publics in South Asia,” you emphasize.

Why is soft-porn, especially in its afterlife, a medium that makes such interrogations possible? And, in keeping with this notion, how would you like your book to lend itself to such processes and the study of cinema (South Asian and otherwise) more generally?

 

DSM: First of all, I think it’s a powerful form. Yes, these may not have been the “best of” kind of films in the pantheon of cinema, but the images and imaginations they gave rise to had a deep impact on the collective psyche of the nation, whether it’s the vehement opposition to these films, the risk-laden lives of the actresses, or the kind of gender discussions they led to overall. Though many of the films and actresses who appeared in these films are indeed forgotten, there is still an idea of “soft-porn films” that circulates and is remembered. Most people in the Indian media context may be hard pressed to shore up the title of a single soft-porn film (at least outside of Kerala), but they may still have a set of associations they make with the term “soft-porn” even though it may be regressive ones like for example, the stereotypical association with “South India.” These imaginations I think flow across time as repertoires of sexual performances and representations that become “lived” in current-day media whether it’s camming, adult streaming platforms, or influencer culture.

 

I discuss these kinds of resurfacings in the last chapter of Rated A. For instance, I look at one social media influencer to discuss how content creators use soft-porn’s tropes mediated through technological interfaces. Then there are new forms of erotic short-video series in platforms like Nueflicks or co-optation of soft-porn repertoires by streaming platforms like Alt-Balaji through shows like Gandii Baat.

 

And those are not the only kinds of memories and remembrances. As I discuss in the last chapter where filmmakers and artists have also started looking at the form as something that needs to be acknowledged and come to terms with. You can’t just hide away a piece of cinematic history forever calling them “dirty pictures.”

 

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