The Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities was awarded to Darshana Mini for Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India
The Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences was awarded to Vibhuti Ramachandran for “Immoral Traffic”: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India.
Darshana Mini
In the 1990s and early 2000s, India’s mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy, soft-porn films that emerged in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. Darshana Sreedhar Mini’s Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India, to be published by the University of California Press in August 2024, presents a critical history of these films through a mix of archival and ethnographic research. In this first sustained study of pornographic cinema in India, Rated A examines formal and informal media infrastructures, labor practices and cinematic cultures associated with soft-porn cinema through a feminist lens. Mini maps the landscape of soft-porn from various perspectives: industrial, regulatory, cultural, production, exhibition, and reception. Examining the soft porn industry’s utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, the author also shows how actresses and lower-rung production personnel negotiated their social lives marked by their involvement with a tabooed form. Strikingly, the author also examines local and transnational influences such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation films that influenced Malayalam soft-porn cinema, while also tracing the genre’s circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as “South Asian” pornography. Rated A, thus, offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries. By taking an expanded view of the relationship between forms of gendered performance and film infrastructure, Rated A demonstrates that soft-core films and popular discourse about them, as well as their production and transnational distribution, alternatively reproduce and challenge dominant constructions of gender, sexuality, class, and caste. In doing so, Rated A examines how soft-porn cinema’s interaction with larger debates on sex-education, censorship and gender non-conformity influence the shape of media discourses in India’s public sphere.
The AIIS Book Prize Committee praised Professor Mini’s manuscript, saying it is the first book-length study of soft-porn in India and described it as an “original, timely, and fascinating account of Malayalam soft-porn cinema as an industry and genre. Based on extensive archival research and ethnographic methods, the work analyzes media publics and the making of sexuality, subjectivity, and society in contemporary Kerala (from the 1970s until the 2000s), including through an imaginative examination of female figures (both actors and characters) who defy the boundaries of and scripts for proper femininity. It contributes to studies of cinema and media studies by highlighting audience, exhibition, consumption, and circulation, not only narrative, genre, personalities (‘star’ actors and directors or auteurs), and the film form. The writing is clear, lively, polished, and theoretically sophisticated. The author makes compelling connections to a scholarly literature on public culture, feminist porn studies, global media industries and diasporic subjects (in the Gulf region), film production, stardom and labor in Indian cinema.”
Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an Assistant Professor of Film at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her PhD from the Cinema and Media Studies department at the University of Southern California. Darshana Mini’s teaching and research lie at the intersection of gender, sexuality, transnational media, migrant media and screen cultures of South Asia. Rated A is supported through funding by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) and National Endowment of Humanities (NEH). She is the co-editor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene (Routledge 2024). She is working on her second book that explores how migrant media practices shape discussions around citizenship, ethnicity, and consolidation of national identity through state building and governance in India.
Vibhuti Ramachandran
“Immoral Traffic”: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India, will be published by Cambridge University Press as part of its book series, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society. Ramachandran’s ethnographic research for this book was supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the development of her book manuscript was supported by the University of California’s Hellman Fellowship. The book is aimed at an interdisciplinary readership interested in anthropology, law and society, gender and sexuality studies, South Asian studies, global studies, and critical approaches to NGOs and humanitarianism. “Immoral Traffic” takes its readers to the complex intersections of U.S.-funded anti-trafficking campaigns and postcolonial Indian law. It foregrounds the significant role NGOs and legal actors play in suturing and implementing these interventions, examines their impact on sex workers, and centers how sex workers navigate them. The book is rooted in encounters Ramachandran observed between the NGOs and Indian legal actors implementing these interventions, and the women experiencing them. While some of these women (from India and Bangladesh) were trafficked, others did sex work along a complex spectrum of choices and survival strategies. The book is based on multi-sited ethnographic research across legal processes, state institutions, and NGOs in New Delhi and Mumbai. It demonstrates how Indian law and global anti-trafficking campaigns combine humanitarianism, paternalism, punitive care, bureaucratic practices, moralistic projects of reform, and anti-immigrant panics as they come together to govern prostitution. At the same time, it provides rich insights on how women removed from the sex trade navigate these overlapping interventions that are ostensibly aimed at helping them, but often deeply punitive and moralistic, and rarely in line with the outcomes they seek. The title, “Immoral Traffic,” comes from India’s anti-prostitution law, which donor-driven NGOs draw upon to implement a U.S.-funded anti-trafficking agenda. This law’s provisions and procedures to “manage” prostitution, and NGOs’ efforts to deploy and extend them, feature centrally throughout the book. “Immoral Traffic” follows the sequence of interventions this law prescribes and sex workers experience, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters.
The Prize Committee was impressed by this excellent ethnographic study of the sites and processes involved in the contemporary Indian state’s governance of prostitution, particularly as those related to its enforcement of anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking laws and its interactions with state and nonstate actors. This account of the complex roles played by these different actors ranging from state and legal entities to donor driven NGOs to the women targeted for rescue and reform is especially compelling. The committee also liked the choice to do a multi-sited investigation and to concentrate on Delhi and Mumbai.
Vibhuti Ramachandran is an Assistant Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Trained as an anthropologist, her research spans the fields of law and society, gender and sexuality, South Asian studies, critical NGO studies, global studies, and critical approaches to human rights and humanitarianism. These interests stem from her interdisciplinary academic background. She received her PhD in anthropology from New York University, Master’s degrees in sociology and the social sciences from the Universities of Delhi and Chicago, and undergraduate degree in journalism from Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi. Vibhuti Ramachandran’s research examines how law and humanitarianism converge to construct prostitution through the contrasting lenses of victimhood and immorality. This theme threads through her book manuscript, “Immoral Traffic,” which connects the anthropology of law, NGOs, and the Indian state. Ramachandran’s research has been published in the journals Humanity, Social Sciences, Law and Social Inquiry, and Contemporary South Asia. Ramachandran has also been developing a second area of research, on how law and humanitarianism converge to construct childhood as a category of vulnerability. Her interests in this area include concerns around orphanhood, child labor, child migration, and child trafficking. Reflecting her range of research interests, she teaches courses on human rights, gender and sexuality, critical trafficking studies, and global childhoods.
The 2023-24 AIIS Book Prize Committee included Sarah Lamb and Anand Yang, co-chairs, Sonal Khullar, Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, Preetha Mani, and Tulasi Srinivas