What's so offensive about nudity?

Jism ki uriyaniyat se nahin behtar koi libaas hai

Ye woh jaama hai jis ka na ulta na seedha hai

-Raghupati Sahay 'Firaq' Gorakhpuri

(The best apparel for the body is nudity as there's no right or reverse to it!)

The recent nude photoshoot of actor Ranveer Singh has ruffled the prudish Indians' fragile morality and sensibilities. Even 'educated' Indians are feeling squeamish about it. What's so offensive about male/female nudity?

Nearly fifty years ago, the bohemian Protima Bedi streaked and ran on the beach in Bombay. Madhu Sapre and Milind Soman posed minus clothes for a shoe ad in the mid 90s. It seems, we still have moral qualms and scruples regarding male/female nudity. It's ingrained in our genes and has become our collective chromosomic character.

If the unabashedly nude marble statue of David by Michelangelo wins the appreciation of the connoisseurs across the globe, why a chiselled male or female nude body of flesh and blood shouldn't be admired wholeheartedly? I'd been regularly contributing to now-defunct Indian English magazine Debonair, which was thought to be a 'girlie' magazine because of its contents and photos of models who had an aversion to clothes.

I also contribute to magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler among others of the same ilk causing people, nay prudes, to raise their eyebrows. I've never felt like hiding them because I've never viewed them as erotic or pornographic magazines.

Vulgarity is always in our thoughts and seldom in the contents. The way we look at an object, decides its moral as well as visual importance. Renaissance art of Europe is characterised by magnificent nudes on the canvas by the old masters like Rubens, Titian, and Raphael, among others. Do these paintings, sans a semblance of clothes, ever stoke our carnal desires? Do the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho temples pander to our basic instincts?

Vulgarity, like beauty, lies in the eyes of the beholder. For a lascivious person, even a fully-clothed woman is an object of lust and for a sane and sensible individual, even a nude figure (of a beautiful woman) holds no pervert fascination. We've been conditioned by society to condemn things as prurient or pure. Once we form an opinion, we dare not change it. Most of the people in India have just heard that Hefner's much maligned Playboy is a pornographic magazine. So it must be a taboo! But, they're not aware that the magazine also carries articles and interviews that have nothing to do with sex. Its gorgeous centre-spreads and playmates just add to its mojo, class and aura. Read its perceptive essays on contemporary cinema or seminal analyses on modern and western classical music or the interviews of famous and infamous people.

I once got to read an analysis of Satyajit Ray and Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's movies in an old issue of Playboy. I dare say, it was the best ever analysis of the two masters' cinematic craftsmanship. American non-white novelist James Baldwin's 1966 interview in Playboy's special issue is still regarded as one of the best literary interviews ever to have been carried by any publication anywhere in the world.

To cut the matter short, nothing is good or bad. Thinking makes it so. There's nothing so bad that there's not some good in it. We must get rid of the baggage of prejudices and flawed perceptions to appreciate or depreciate an object. This is maturity and this comes only with a mind that's open to accepting all things stoically and the way they're. Indian society still needs to grow up. Centuries of Victorian morality and Islamic Grundyism clouded our erstwhile liberal thinking. Indian society of yore used to be very lenient, if not outright libertine. Ergo, our thinking is too juvenile when it comes to sex and nudity.

(The writer is an advanced research scholar of Semitic languages, civilisations and cultures)