Moral policing is sacrilege

A clip of Besharam Rang, a Hindi film song from the yet-to-be screened Hindi film Pathan, starring Deepika Padukone and Shah Rukh Khan, was released as a teaser recently. It is a typical Bollywood song, shot in India, Spain, UAE, Turkey, Russia, Siberia, Italy, France, and even Afghanistan – one wonders why locales on the Moon and Mars were left out! It comes alive with steaming, bosom-heaving, hip-swivelling, skimpily-clad heroines gyrating to raunchy music with pelvic thrusting, bare-chested, besotted, salivating heroes crooning mushy songs of love and desire.

Like all movies of the ‘masala mush’ genre, churned out from Mumbai over the years, the visuals are awash in a splash of vibrant colours, with extras flesh on flesh, vigorously shaking their limbs in rhythm with the hero and heroine on exotic sun-kissed beaches. It pulsates with heart-throbbing music to lewd and lusty lyrics. Bollywood knows that the masses in their millions, broken and bent from toil, erupt in orgiastic cries and whistles each time the hero and heroine dissolve into each other in caresses, and escape from their dreary existence. The smug middle class, weary of their drab life, loose themselves for a few hours in prurient, vicarious excitement. The nouveau rich and the wealthy and the art critics? Who cares! They don’t count. Stars are made and unmade by the masses.

Romantic mush, salacious visuals mixed with heady music that arouses passions, that bewitch and seduce the senses, have always been opiates of the masses, and Bollywood – and regional cinema, including the Bhojpuri movies starring the BJP MP Ravi Kishan -- has perfected the formula.

Enter the self-styled vigilante moral police, and lo! Look at their sanctimonious humbug that the cinematic clip of a few minutes of a rambunctious and sexy song by lusty young men and luscious young women will pollute our society and corrupt our sons and daughters! They are outraged that the girl in the bikini, dancing passionately entwined in the hero’s arms, is wearing orange and ostensibly shaming their political party.

They have laid proprietary claim and copyright to that colour. If green belongs to another party, and white and red to yet others, and all parties and religious outfits lay claims of ownership to various colours, what do we ordinary folk wear then? In any case, how have we become such insecure prigs? Has a mighty civilisation of intellectual and spiritual giants become a nation of midgets with dwarfed thinking?

The men who are quick to take offence, scandalised that our cinema sirens who sing and dance coquettishly are impious, ironically hail from the very land that saw supreme beauty in love and that took erotica to a subliminal level and reached the apogee of art and carved the magnificent stone temples dedicated to love in Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh a thousand years ago.

And Kamasutra by Vatsyayana, a Sanskrit treatise on the art of making love, written nearly 2,000 years ago, is considered generally to be the greatest and most enduring book on carnal love that has captivated the imagination of people from around the world. It is still published and sold widely. Two words leap to mind first if you mention India to a foreigner -- Kamasutra and Taj Mahal. One is an epic to the art of love and the other is a memorial to love.

Kama, or pleasure and love, is one of four objectives of life called purusharthas in Hindu philosophy -- Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha. And Kama has a proper place in the scheme of life. Like Khajuraho’s erotic sculptures, many of our ancient temples have erotic carvings that extol Kama, depicting it artistically, as at even the Sun Temple in Konark. It was an evolved and enlightened civilisation 1,500 years ago, when the world was in the ‘Dark Ages’ elsewhere.

From that oceanic expanse of our vision of creation and the universe and from those majestic peaks of art and philosophy, why are we diminishing and circumscribing ourselves in the dark corner of caves? How diffident and shaky are our men when a ravishing beauty dances bare-bodied in the sun, lashed by the waves of the sea? How they rant unconvincingly about their piousness? Always beware of the self-righteous prude. What a contrast between our present-day chest-thumping but timorous and diffident ‘Hindu’ and the magnificent heroes and heroines of our mythology!

Apsaras, Menakas and Urvashis held kings, sages and gods in thrall. The gods, in fear of the man who does tapasya, sent girls with ravishing charm to lure rishis to stray and succumb. A lovely poem by Rabindranath Tagore, abridged here, evocatively expresses the power of beauty and love over the mortals of the earth.

IN the depths of the forest, the ascetic practised penance. He desired Paradise.

But the girl who brought him fruits in her skirt, and water from the stream, flitted past him.

The days went on, and his penance grew harsher till the fruits remained untasted, the water untouched…

The Lord of Paradise heard that a man had dared to aspire to be as the gods; and feared him…

But he knew the ways of mortals, and he planned a temptation to decoy this creature of dust away from his adventure.

A breath from Paradise kissed the limbs of the girl and her youth ached with a sudden rapture of beauty…

The time came when the ascetic should leave the forest for a mountain cave, to complete the rigour of his penance.

The ascetic told the girl that it was time he left the forest.

‘But why rob me of my chance to serve you?’ she asked with tears in her eyes.

He thought for long, he gazed on her face in silence, then said, ‘Go, and may your wish be fulfilled.’

For years he sat alone till his penance was complete.

The Lord of the Immortals came down to tell him that he had won Paradise.

‘I no longer need it,’ said the ascetic.

The God asked him what greater reward he desired.

‘I want the girl who gathers twigs.’

This is the land of Krishna, god of love and seduction. A land steeped in his Ras Leela and his lore, the irreverent god who played pranks on girls and robbed their robes when they bathed in the river, and danced and enchanted them with his flute. Love unites and celebrates life. Love is all. To moral-police love in such a land is sacrilege.

(The writer is a soldier, farmer and entrepreneur)