The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinem

DARSHANA SREEDHAR MINI
The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinema and the

Precarious Stardom of Shakeela
ABSTRACT This paper looks at the genre of soft pornography in the Malayalam-speaking
south Indian state of Kerala and the precarious stardom of its female stars through a close
look at the career of Shakeela, an actress who became the emblematic soft-porn star of the
1990s. It interrogates how Shakeela’s outsider status and her heavyset body type fore-
grounded her as the locus of Malayali society’s conflicted relationship with sex and desire
while also creating a set of parallel film practices that challenged the hierarchies of the main-
stream film industry. By 2001 more than 70 percent of the total films produced in
Malayalam were soft porn, and a good number of them featured Shakeela. The mainstay of
soft-porn productions was the strategic positioning of the female lead as a cultural outsider—
a transient figure who is both a threat and a source of exoticized desire. Shakeela’s emergence
as a “liberated” woman who flaunts her sexuality despite social norms was so strong that it
destabilized Kerala’s hero-centric mainstream industry for a time, leading to what was popu-
larly called Shakeela tharangam, the “wave of Shakeela.” KEYWORDS film labor, India,
precarity, Shakeela, soft pornography
“When people are hungry, they need to be fed. There is no point in giving
them anything else. My films were just like that.”
—SHAKEELA, 1
In the mid-s, the Indian filmscape saw the emergence of a wave of soft-
porn films. Originating in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala in southern
India, they offered a forceful alternative to Kerala’s mainstream film culture,
allowing personnel from the lower rungs of the production hierarchy to step
out of their usual crew positions and engage in independent production practices.2
This rearrangement of hierarchical relations within the film industry applied
not only to technical crew, but also to actors, distributors, and exhibitors
who used soft-porn films to remap profit sharing and informal labor practices.3
The soft-porn ecology allowed for the emergence of a new category of stars and
starlets, mostly women, who had a lasting impact on the shape of the industry.
Feminist Media Histories, Vol. , Number , pps. –. electronic ISSN -. ©  by the Regents
of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy
or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page,
http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/./fmh.....
49
Nevertheless, the “stardom” of these actors was not the same as that of big-
budget mainstream stars. Instead of appearing on advertising billboards and
television ads, these actresses became the new pinup girls who fed the fanta-
sies of men in places as varied as B-circuit cinema halls and public toilets as
well as film magazine centerfolds. Their on-screen personas became manifes-
tations of forbidden sexual fantasies, counterpoised to the idea of a morally
pure, culturally virtuous Malayali woman. Their personal lives and private
interactions were perceived as continuations of their filmic roles. In fact, a
proliferating genre of pulp fiction focused entirely on their sex lives.4
This, coupled with the moral edicts and compunctions around soft-porn
film production, pitched these actresses as precarious performers whose labor
and image were divorced from their bodies. Their stardom was figured as a pre-
carious form caught between hypervisibility and invisibility. If the moral impe-
tus of Malayali society was to invisibilize sites of illicit desire, soft porn allowed
these actresses to become hypervisible sexual images through its modes of circu-
lation and exchange. There was a conflicted relationship between the actresses’
imagistic on-screen power as purveyors of an emerging sexual economy and
their complicated, vulnerable position as members of the Malayali public.
Foremost among these new and emerging actresses was Shakeela, whose im-
pact on the industry was so strong that soft-porn films soon came to be known
by the moniker “Shakeela films.”5 In this essay I track Shakeela’s rise as the bea-
con of Malayali soft porn across the nation and how her formidable bodily pres-
ence exposed the sexual contradictions of Malayali society. I argue that while
soft porn’s language of sexual excess allowed figures such as Shakeela to speak
to diverse constituencies of desire, it fixed their offscreen lives into the image of
the sex siren, catching them between the need to question the status quo and
their role as the prime movers of an alternative economy that allowed informal
relationships to flourish. While the radical choices they made were lauded for
veering away from established norms, the gendered expectations that accompa-
nied the film practices did not facilitate their entry as media creators. While
most of them disappeared from the industry after a short stint and were heard
of no more, for many others, entering soft porn was tantamount to blocking
their chances of ever entering the mainstream film industry. Thus, even as the
genre of soft porn proved ephemeral, fizzling out in the early s, its effects
on the careers and lives of certain actresses were longer lasting.
If according to Michael Curtin, precarity refers to a “set of concerns about
relations of production and the quality of social life,” figures such as Shakeela
force us to rethink precarity beyond conditions of economic instability.6
50 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SPRING 2019

While financial insecurity remains part and parcel of soft porn’s underground,
quasi-legal networks of production, the precarious stardom of Shakeela and
other starlets of the Malayalam soft-porn circuit brings us into the arena of gen-
der roles. This kind of precarity comes closer to Richard Dyer’s description of
the star commodity as something produced “out of their own bodies and psy-
chologies.” If soft-porn actresses such as Shakeela were “part of the way films
[were] sold,” the precarity of their stardom was as much a function of the fric-
tion between norms of sexuality and the licentiousness of the films.7 We cannot
explain this kind of precarious stardom in purely economic terms.
If, following Judith Butler, we can think of precarity in terms of a “fun-
damental dependency on anonymous others,” soft-porn actresses such as
Shakeela were caught between the image of sexual autonomy and the reali-
ties of social dependency.8 This precarious stardom was produced at the
confluence of infrastructural routes, censorial regimes, and norms of social
acceptance and permissiveness. I suggest that reading Shakeela’s career arc as
a form of precarious stardom offers us insights into the historical formations
of gender and sexuality within the film industry and Malayali society at
large. By bringing the fields of star studies and precarity studies into conver-
sation, this paper’s investigation of Shakeela’s peculiar type of stardom offers
a preliminary methodology for an ethical reading of marginalized cinematic
figures. Although the figure of Shakeela is localized in the specific context of
one of India’s many regional-language film industries, the lessons of this in-
vestigation are further-reaching and foreground the need for discussions on
precarious female labor in the context of disparaged genres such as soft porn.
In Kerala, soft-porn films were not the first to use sexually charged imagery;
sex and sexuality were narrative elements in films of the s and s as well.
Low-budget “glamour films” made by K. S. Gopalakrishnan, Crossbelt Mani, P.
Chandrakumar, and others in the s were frank about using erotic scenes.9
However, in the s soft porn emerged as a generic category in industrial and
journalistic parlance.10 Soft-porn films were underlined by informal modes of
production and distribution as well as by the use of ingenious marketing strate-
gies that foregrounded the adult content and the viewers it catered to. This was
most prominent in the incorporation of “A” (for “adult”) signage in posters and
publicity materials, and in accompanying texts that promised viewers a fair deal
for the ticket price.
In many instances, the lure of the “forbidden” scenes attracted audiences,
and filmmakers strategically mentioned in film posters the details of censor-
recommended cuts. While a “cut” might imply an excision or process of
Mini | The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinema 51

discarding, in this milieu the “cut piece” worked not by negation but addi-
tion, as I will go on to explain. Recycling the censored “cuts” thus added a
productive layer to conversations on how to bypass the strict eyes of the cen-
sor board. Their combination of low budgets, use of glamour, tailor-made
shooting schedules, and hurriedly written dialogue has led to the dismissal
of these films in dominant accounts of Malayalam cinema history as thatti-
koottu padangal (trashy productions).11 “Sexplosive,” “sexcitement” and
“saucy” were some of the phrases used to describe them in newspaper enter-
tainment columns, which often doubled up as publicity.12 Additionally, they
were often publicized as “gents’ films,” as they were aimed exclusively at
adult male audiences, marking the theaters they played in as all-male spaces
where women hardly ventured.13
Despite their overwhelmingly male target audience, these films were para-
doxically also called “heroine-centered” thanks to their strong female leads.14
Given the female-oriented plotlines, filmmakers began to employ a slew of new
actresses who were willing to act in sexually charged roles. There were already
columns called puthumukham (new face) in film magazines like Nana that fea-
tured aspiring actresses looking for a break in the industry. Some of these ac-
tresses expressed their willingness to take up roles involving intimacy or
exposure.15 While the starlets who attained prominence through these columns
sometimes managed to land roles, they often disappeared from the film scene
after a short time. In stark contrast, the soft-porn industry’s biggest face—
Shakeela—bypassed this circuit of film magazines and entered the industry
through a personal contact who worked as a makeup man in films.
Shakeela’s repeated appearance in soft-porn films made her the core engine
of their success and a popular sex symbol among Malayali men. It was Shakeela
who emblematized the growing popularity of soft porn, its mass appeal among
both homegrown and diasporic audiences, and its subsequent disappearance
from the cinemascape. The emergence of Shakeela in these films as a sexually
liberated woman who gives her desires a free outlet without subscribing to
moral edicts destabilized Kerala’s hero-centric, mainstream film industry for a
while, leading to what was popularly called Shakeela tharangam—the “wave of
Shakeela.”16 The emphasis on “women-centered” narratives in soft-porn films
led to acrimonious debates among feminists and women’s groups who were
quick to cite obscenity clauses to enforce proper implementation of censorship
regulations.17 Even while protests and theater blockades were organized to
prevent the screenings of these films, their popularity shot up. And when ob-
scenity cases were filed against Shakeela, none of the men’s or women’s groups

advocating gender equality supported her, making it her personal battle to fight
alone. This points to her gendered precarity, especially given her image as a soft-
porn star and the subsequent marginalization she faced as social and cultural
forces tried to constrain her.
Shakeela’s emergence and decline maps closely onto the life cycle of the
genre—it is almost as if Shakeela defined soft porn, the topography of her
body mirroring its imaginary topos. The ways in which the camera lingered
on her buxom, heavyset figure—an anomaly in the Malayalam film industry
at that moment—with a concentrated focus on her face, breasts, and thighs,
equated the realm of desire with her anatomy (fig. ).
FIGURE 1.Shakeela in Kinnarathumbikal (Lovelorn Dragonflies, dir.

R. J. Prasad), , in a massage scene, one of the prominent selling
points of soft-porn films.

In a sense, Shakeela is a conceptual anchor around which the textual aspects
of soft porn, as well as issues of production and distribution, can be studied in
depth. Against this backdrop I will map the specific constructs of cultural purity
and gender equations in Malayali society; battles over these were often fought
out over women’s bodies, and Shakeela was the battleground par excellence.
This mapping, both of Shakeela’s on-screen body and the life of a genre, neces-
sitates a hybrid methodology that includes a mix of industry studies, textual
analysis, and an ethnographic study I conducted intermittently between 
and . I draw on detailed interviews with technicians, artists, and produc-
tion units who participated in the films; distributors and exhibitors who were
responsible for their circulation; and the theaters that screened them. Using
these conceptual and methodological maneuvers, I argue that in spite of the pe-
jorative value associated with soft porn, actresses such as Shakeela mobilized its
sexual potentials in a complex manner, often using these films as a way of giving
voice to repressed female sexuality in a dominantly patriarchal society. While
this doesn’t necessarily make the films feminist, it demands a particular feminist
orientation toward the study of pornography itself.
THE SOFT-PORN ECOLOGY AND FEMINIST PORN STUDIES
“Feminist porn studies” as a distinct approach problematizes questions of repre-

sentation. The introductory issue of the journal Porn Studies described this ap-
proach as emerging with a stated interest in work that “engages with
pornography as texts, productions or performances; as occurring in various
kinds of ‘spaces’ with various significances; subject to various kinds of legal and
other regulatory frameworks and with different importances for its participants
and for observers of those participants.”18 Thus at the core of this debate is a
struggle over another kind of representation—not merely representations on-
screen, but representation in academic work itself on the industry, its practi-
tioners, their labor, and their agency. Mireille Miller-Young explains this as a
political position: scholars working on pornography have long been termed “ac-
ademic pornographers” in line with the anti-porn perspective.19 Miller-Young’s
own work on African American women working in the porn industry recog-
nizes that they did so for a variety of reasons, including economic sustenance as
well as taking control of their own sexual images. To envelop all kinds of por-
nographic production and labor under the metaphor of “exploitation” is to dis-
miss the agency of women who live and work in the industry, casting them as
mute subjects who are either exploitatively represented on-screen or must be re-
deemed through representation in certain kinds of feminist work. Feminist

porn scholars have been calling for a remapping of the terrain of feminist stud-
ies by including the study of labor, agency, pleasure, and desire.
Dealing with a form like Malayalam soft porn requires a similar feminist en-
gagement with labor, desire, and pleasure. At the same time, Malayalam soft
porn’s underground circuits of production and distribution and its dependence
on trust-based interpersonal networks necessitates moving out of the exploita-
tion narrative and studying collaborative practices as productive relationships.
The editors of The Feminist Porn Book () speak about the category of
“feminist porn makers” who create pornographic images through safe, col-
laborative networks.20 The overarching principle underlying the production
of Malayalam soft porn may not have a clearly defined feminist politics or
engagement with gender parity.21 But a feminist study of its production
practices allows a methodological move that can braid together the ground reali-
ties involved in informal modes of procuring and sustaining labor such as trust-
based and ethical collaborative approaches. Thrikkunnapuzha Vijaykumar, a
prominent soft-porn filmmaker, recounts that questions of ethics and consent
were followed on the shooting set: “Situated at the marginal zone where our
commitments have been questioned ad infinitum, it was important for us to
maintain some semblance of transparency, however limited it might look to an
outsider.” Specifically, even though the filmmakers had access to intimate shots
of the actresses that could have fetched them a good price on the market, there
seemed to have been a collective consensus about the risk involved in circulating
or trading sexually explicit celluloid fragments, or “bits.” “It was never a free-for-
all arrangement, where women did not have any space for negotiation as men
traded in their images. The very fact that we have had actresses who were vocal
about their comfort levels in terms of setting limits of exposure, is an indication
that we acknowledge film labor.”22
Vijaykumar and others worked with a pool of regular actresses, and nobody
wanted to be perceived as a “rat” and breach the trust, as it would have meant
shutting down their business altogether. Shakeela also recounts that when she
entered into contracts for films, she was very clear that she herself would not
perform any topless shots; these would be shot separately using a body double,
known as the “dupe” in the Indian film industries.23 In other words, her
films were made with a clear demarcation of boundaries and consent, as
opposed to the casting-couch narratives that usually surround the imagina-
tion of soft porn.24
Marking its distinction from hardcore pornography has always been central
to the soft-porn industry. The soft-porn filmmakers and production personnel

I interviewed for my project were keen to describe how they appropriated the
term “soft porn” as an oppositional phrase to distinguish it from hardcore por-
nography, and the ethical dilemmas that accompany the making of low-budget
productions. Some of them even opposed the designation of their work as por-
nography, constantly reiterating the need to account for the hierarchies and
conventions accompanying mainstream filmmaking practices.25 They strategi-
cally used the “soft” in “soft porn” to define the genre against the injunctions
laid out both by the anti-porn brigade and the censor board certification clauses
that were becoming increasingly stringent to contain the spread of sexually ex-
plicit content.
Soft-porn films were produced under severe financial constraints, with budg-
ets often not exceeding US $,.26 They emerged at the same moment in the
s when the mainstream film industry was facing a severe financial crisis.
The box office failure of many big, mainstream productions starring A-list lead-
ing men forced exhibitors to forge alternative business arrangements with dis-
tributors in order to stay afloat. This, along with tight shooting schedules,
marked these films with amateurish features such as lack of continuity and a re-
liance on stock footage.
Avoiding any direct exposure of genitalia, soft-porn films worked through
the power of suggestion via visual and aural tropes. They often included ex-
tended shots of cleavage and thighs, massage and bath scenes, and dubbed-over
moaning to signify sexual pleasure and climax. This application of the “money
shot” in soft porn is distinct from Linda Williams’s discussion of “money shots”
in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (). There,
Williams argues that there is a hypervisibility associated with the climactic mo-
ment of male ejaculation: to denote sexual orgasm, hardcore pornography nec-
essarily has to get close to genital coitus.27 The money shot in soft-porn films,
on the other hand, reinstates female sexual pleasure, reminding us that magni-
fied genitals and a visual manifestation of male ejaculation are not necessarily
the hallmarks of sexual orgasm. Softness in soft porn is defined through the de-
flection of female sexual pleasure to body parts such as the thighs or cleavage, as
opposed to the phallocentric climax of the money shot. This could also be read
as a way of signposting the sequences that could not make it to the final cut due
to censorship regulations. Thus, the “softness” of soft-porn films was also a way
of managing audience expectations, drawing from their familiarity with the
ground realities of production.
In his work on soft-core films, David Andrews argues that softcore emerged
as a self-conscious genre steeped in negation. He defines it as “any feature length

narrative whose diegesis is punctuated by periodic moments . . . of simulated,
non-explicit sexual spectacle . . . [and] leans on standardized forms of porno-
graphic spectacles such as striptease numbers, tub or shower sequences,
modeling scenes, voyeur numbers, girl-girl segments, threesomes, orgies and
the like.”28 “Spectacle” here serves a visual and affective purpose, with the
female breast emerging as a crucial visual signifier. In Malayalam soft porn
one encounters most of these features but with certain differences. For in-
stance, the female breast is often (but not always) reduced to the image of
cleavage that denotes (often unattainable) sexual desire. Dealing with soft
porn in the Indian context, then, leads to certain unique problems shared
by both the researcher and the filmmaker. Given India’s strong censorship
regulations and criminalization of pornography, soft-porn filmmakers had
to find unique workarounds to sexualize their films.29 The existence of soft
porn points to the loopholes and implausible regulations that govern censorship
mechanisms in India. These films unsettled the binaries of mainstream and un-
derground, legal and illegal, and challenged the official apparatus that was meant
to contain the obscene (fig. ).
FIGURE 2. Central Board of Film Certification censor report of the soft-porn film
Nakhachitrangal (Images Etched with Nails, dir. A. T. Joy), . Note the deletion
of the “embarrassing scenes” circled in red.

All films in India must be certified by the Central Board of Film Certification
(CBFC) before they screen in public venues.30 But soft-porn filmmakers often
managed to splice in “extra reels” in the form of thundu or cut pieces, which might
have been originally edited out of the censor print or lifted from completely
different source material, then added to the screening by the projectionist for
a titillating effect. “Bits” varied in their composition and content, sometimes
including excerpts from foreign films and sometimes featuring Indian ac-
tresses. In the case of Indian bits, some included recognizable actors, but by
and large most featured relatively new actors. If the recognizability or relat-
ability quotient was an added advantage for including Indian actresses, there
was also a fetishization of white skin that motivated many producers to em-
ploy “English” bits.
The intimacy suggested through these cuts included bedroom scenes, shower
or massage sequences, or those that referred to contemporary political and sex
scandals. The idea of “leak” or “exposure” narratives often accompanied the
discussions following the insertion of cut pieces of prominent actresses.
When asked how they had procured the “explicit” clips of the actresses, many
distributors I interviewed sidestepped the question with a template response:
“It was already available as XXX videos in the Gulf. They are not shot in
Kerala.”31 This implied an imagination of “elsewhere” that I came across in con-
versations with many mainstream film personnel during my initial inquiries as
to where exactly soft-porn films were produced. Many of my respondents ac-
knowledged the creative inputs given by the projectionists in inserting the bits.
The process of the projectionists’ interventions at the material level of the film
reel was equivalent to “editing over” the material and thereby scripting a new
narrative that was otherwise left out at the censor’s cut. This is similar to what
Lotte Hoek argues in the context of obscenity in Bangladeshi cinema in her the-
orization of the “cut piece.”32 Bits, as they are referred to in the Indian context,
work on the charm of the fragment that can disrupt the active viewing of the
film through its sudden explosion into a scene—a distraction that even the au-
dience looked forward to, something close to a state of willing suspension of
disbelief.
Even though hardcore films were sold surreptitiously under the counters at
VHS parlors (rental outlets) or imported via diasporic channels in Singapore or
the Gulf, the use of localized tropes that viewers were already familiar with
made soft porn immensely popular among Kerala’s film-viewing public.33
Casts and crews were quick to realize the financial gains made possible by this
arrangement of roping in newcomers. Using newcomers was a deliberate

strategy that allowed filmmakers to produce content that would not be under-
taken by established mainstream actors. In fact, most of the crew who worked
in these films preferred to remain anonymous, and this “negotiated anonymity”
was a central feature of the films.34
This also posed certain methodological problems for my research. When I
first ventured into the field to trace the production history of soft-porn films,
I strangely found the references to my object of study everywhere and nowhere
at the same time. In spite of the availability of many of these films in DVD for-
mat and uploads in many media sharing sites, YouTube channels, and even sites
exclusively meant for Malayalam soft porn, the details of the productions, includ-
ing the technicians, and even shooting locations were hard to come by. The
names in the opening credits were mostly fictitious coinages. The production
and distribution companies existed only until the business transactions were
completed. As soon as the outside state rights, satellite rights, and DVD rights
for the films were sold, these companies would be dissolved. This anonymity that
underlined soft porn’s production practices was a far cry from mainstream cin-
ema’s preoccupation with the singular director—a preoccupation that film stud-
ies has replicated in its focus on authorship. In fact, any visibility or claim to
authorship in case of soft porn could compromise the behind-the-scene deals ne-
gotiated by the industry as well the credentials of the personnel involved. And in
a context where the crew sought anonymity, the female star took the place of the
hypervisible author.
The risqué nature of soft porn necessitated a careful distancing on the part of
production crew who wanted to maintain their status as part of a more “respect-
able” industry. Since the production crew and distributors used fictitious names
to bypass their credit lines, the only identifiable faces were those of the actors and
actresses, along with the production manager.35 Among these, the actresses
would become the most public faces, to the extent that the films themselves
would be called “heroine-oriented films,” with the roles of the male actors re-
duced to a minimum. Female characters were given ample screen space to assert
their agency; publicity posters specifically mentioned their names. Another trope
linking soft porn to softcore was the inclusion of certain seemingly radical
choices, like the heroine’s preference for masturbation over heterosexual coitus.36
The storyline would feature the heroine’s preference to masturbate immediately
following her sexual deterrence of the partner by physically pushing him to the
corner of the screen space. The absence of either a graphically depicted or im-
plied penis mobilizes the mise-en-scène to capture the pleasure of the woman
with or without heterosexual intercourse. Narratively, the woman becomes the

seducer, not the seduced, the pleasure seeker rather than the object of sexual grat-
ification. While mainstream films of the time showcased the manliness of the
hero and did away with the agential role of women completely, “Shakeela films”
overshadowed the male presence with her towering stature. The male roles were
scripted as an adjunct to Shakeela’s bodily topography. Most actors who shared
the screen with her were sidelined to miniscule prototypes, almost extras, and
eventually stepped out of film industry with little or no impact.
This tendency to foreground female roles has been cited as an intrinsic feature
of softcore. In her work on erotic thrillers, Linda Ruth Williams locates sexual
intrigue in the storylines of film noir to explore how they drive on-screen soft-
core sex. In an interview, one of the executives from Axis Films International
said, “You need to keep the women in front of the camera. The guys are inciden-
tal, the guys are appendages.”37 Similar narratives dotted journalistic accounts
investigating the Malayalam soft-porn industry from the vantage point of actors
who were “barely visible” on the margins. For instance, one article in India
Today asserted:
They drool over inviting cleavages and pant with bawdy desire, succumb to
heady seduction and live the lascivious dreams of a million men. They are
envied, these lusty keepers of the steamy world of sex, but their haloes are not
in place. The sheen of stardom is dissipated and the trappings of fame
missing. They are revered, but also loathed, often disowned, by their own
families. They are heroes, but only in name.38
One can read in the dominant tone of the article an incessant compulsion to re-
masculinize the space of cinema, which was under threat by the upsurge in the
popularity of soft-porn actresses. Narrating the individual stories of male soft-
porn actors who were either disowned by their families or forced to relocate to
faraway places to escape ignominy, the author’s empathetic voice finds “hero-
ine-oriented” films the main culprit for the actors’ “measly salaries.” To show
how they have been overshadowed narratively within the diegetic space of the
film and ostracized from the prospect of entering the mainstream, the India
Today author even includes an extract from a mother’s letter to “her unlikely
hero of a son.” Concluding with a vignette shared by an actor, he writes:
Even after  movies, the assistant director tells them how to grin sheepishly
when the heroine reveals her cleavage. Will they ever get to perform?
Unlikely as long as the bottom line requites the heroines to be visibly bare
and the heroes, well barely visible.39

The reference to the opportunity to “perform” cuts across the gendered expect-
ations normally associated with soft porn. The actor’s inability to “perform” is
perceived not just in terms of screen space or a full-fledged character role. It is
more about the lack or deprivation that accrues because of the women’s relative
advantage in terms of laying out their preference in shooting certain scenes or
negotiating what they are comfortable with. In fact, an identifiable feature of
soft-porn films was the narrative prominence of the madakarani, an autono-
mous, socially mobile, morally flexible female figure who is unabashed about her
sexuality. One could describe the madakarani as a localized variant of the
vamp—an inhabitant of a moral ecology that demands a constant refashioning
of the self. Using her sexual attractiveness, the madakarani forges temporary al-
liances with patriarchy, but these negotiations are functional and do not bind
her against her will, leaving room for withdrawal if they turn against her inter-
ests. However, the madakarani is different from the vamp in that while the
vamp stands in stark contrast to the virtuous woman, she is at best a morally
liminal figure.
While her alliances are often temporary, calculated, and strategic, this is
aimed at stabilizing her position in a conservative, exploitative system that fur-
thers the longevity of caste, class, and heterosexual structures. Considering the
unequal wage gaps and unsafe working environments that made gender equity
impossible in Malayalam cinema, the resistant force emblematized by the fic-
tional madakarani offered a powerful alternative to a deeply patriarchal system.
For us, it is an entry point for a renewed look at the complex terrain of gender
relations that enveloped the depiction of this figure in Malayalam soft porn.
Moreover, as a cultural figure, the madakarani encompasses a much wider en-
semble of imaginative strands associated with women and sexuality, drawn from
fields as diverse as the vernacular erotic literature featuring sexually graphic illus-
trations (kambikathakal), vernacular pulp fiction (painkili), write-ups where
anonymous women share their bedroom secrets (rathikathakal), and the illus-
trations accompanying these stories. Each mobilizes the figure of madakarani,
who flaunts her sexuality and is unconstrained by norms of propriety as a ge-
neric necessity.
As transient figures, the madakarani as well as the actresses who played them
were seen simultaneously as a threat and a source of exoticized desire. Most came
from states such as Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and
Punjab—in short, from outside the state of Kerala. The fact that the lead roles in
these films were played by actresses originating from other linguistic and regional

spaces was carefully strategized to emphasize that local, ethnically Malayalam tal-
ent was not part of this sexualized labor. Reshma, Maria, Sindhu, Sajini, Roshni,
and other starlets went on to climb the ladder and land lead-actress roles. But the
most durable figure was Shakeela, who came to emblematize this entire genre. As
the madakarani par excellence, Shakeela is a unique figure who embodied both
monetary profit and perceived threat to morality in an industry strongly biased
in its treatment of sexual difference.
MAKING SHAKEELA: SAVIOR, SEDUCTRESS, “AUNTY”
Shakeela was born Chand Shakeela Begum to a Muslim family of mixed Tamil-
Telegu descent in the town of Kodambakkam in Tamil Nadu, a place first fa-
mous as a site for the production of all south Indian films, and since the s
as a hub for low-budget productions.40 If for the Malayali male imagination, soft
porn was an ambivalent space where the sexual imagination was defined in con-
junction with what was otherwise considered taboo, Shakeela’s on-screen per-
sona was a totem that stood for all that was culturally ostracized but privately
desired. In her autobiography, Shakeela describes how her films catered to an
audience who found expression for their fantasies in certain parts of her body.41
The public imagination of Shakeela as a series of desired body parts that could
be zoomed in on and magnified was enabled by her status as an outsider. The
Malayalam mainstream industry would never have allowed an “indigenous” ac-
tress, so to speak, to be foregrounded as a sex siren.42 In fact, the history of
Malayalam cinema has been peppered with a slew of “outsider” actresses who
emblematized exotic, desirable, and yet objectified bodies, for instance
Vijayashree in the s and Silk Smitha in the s and early s. The
porn-star aura that Shakeela embodied in the late s and s was a par-
ticular variant of the sex-siren figure enabled by the industrial configurations of
the time.
Shakeela’s debut was in a supporting role at the age of seventeen in Play Girls
(), a “sex education film” where she costarred with Silk Smitha. Shakeela’s
entry into the film industry was quite accidental. R. D. Sekhar, a makeup man
and Shakeela’s neighbor, offered her a role in the film, which he was producing.
But while it was Smitha’s diva image and alluring dance moves that helped her
traverse film industries of multiple languages, the media celebrated Shakeela’s
success with the term sexpuyal, the “sex tempest,” who with her sheer screen
presence was capable of outpacing even mainstream films in terms of box office.
The film that cemented Shakeela’s position as the sex bomb of Malayalam

FIGURE 3.Newspaper advertisement for Kinnarathumbikal (Lovelorn Dragonflies, dir.
R. J. Prasad), , prominently displaying the “A” certification. The success and
popularity of the film is denoted by the word “housefull,” and the number “” refers
to the second week after the release of the film. Courtesy Sarat Chandran.
cinema was Kinnarathumbikal (Lovelorn Dragonflies, , fig. ), a debut ven-
ture by the hitherto unknown associate director R. J. Prasad, made with a mea-
ger budget of approximately US $,.43 Kinnarathumbikal went on to gross
US $,, capitalizing on what one reviewer described as Shakeela’s
“dreamy eyes, puffed-up flesh squeezed within a low cut blouse and her deep,
deep cleavage.”44
Set on a tea plantation, the film explores conflicts caused by the blossoming
of complex desires amid the exploitative labor arrangements underlying the ev-
eryday lives of plantation laborers. Shakeela plays Dakshayini, a tea plucker who
has a live-in relationship with the plantation supervisor, Sivan, but also has sex-
ual escapades with the teenager Gopu. Gopu also has sexual relations with his
elder cousin Revathy, who is the daughter of a tea plucker, while Sivan also de-
sires Revathy’s hand in marriage. A similar story line involving intergenerational
desire was explored earlier in Rathinirvedham (Sexual Ecstasy, ) starring
Jayabharti, and Layanam (Union, ), starring Silk Smitha. But in these films,
narrative closure demanded that punitive justice be held against the female

protagonist for her transgressive desire and resulted in the deaths of the female
characters. In contrast, Kinnarathumbikal empowers Dakshayini, who feels be-
trayed by Sivan’s desire for Revathy. Rejecting Sivan’s advances, she incites
Gopu to murder Sivan, thereby helping the cousins elope. A double assertion
of agency is at work here. First, there is a strong refusal of patriarchal coitus by
a woman who is treated as a disposable object. Second, despite the fact that mar-
ital relationships within the same family are permitted in certain south Indian
communities, this works only when the woman is younger than the man; thus,
there is also a rejection of marital mores activated by Shakeela’s character.
One of the oft-quoted dialogues spoken by the character of Shakeela—“Is
there anyone among us who hasn’t committed sin?”—stands out to viewers of
the film and to those who may have merely heard about it. The statement is di-
rected at a hetero-patriarchal structure that berates women who are alleged to
have multiple sexual partners as warranting social sanctions while allowing men
to engage in extramarital relationships. As a strong statement against the double
standards and hypocrisy that enwrap middle-class moral values, this surfaces as
memes and quotes shared on fan sites and Twitter.45 There are even fan-created
trailers for the film, with fictitious details of the production addressing Shakeela
as “universal star.”46 The film banner for this production was inventively
phrased as “Kanyaka Films” (Virgin Films), a turn of phrase that was later taken
over in the  K. R. Manoj–directed Kanyaka Talkies.
Similarly, “The Lost Entertainment,” a YouTube channel that creatively ed-
its trailers for older films, curated a trailer for Kinnarathumbikal compiling
highlights to evoke the original experience of watching it on-screen.47 The idea
of loss implied in the phrase “The Lost Entertainment” speculates on how
trailer culture may have worked if the digital platforms were available for older
films. In the specific context of Kinnarathumbikal, this curation reimagines the
publicity materials and contexts of reception to conjoin different generations of
viewers (fig. ).
Though soft-porn films were perceived to address mostly male viewers, one
cannot totally ignore female viewership. For a while, these films were telecast on
cable channels such as Surya TV in the late-night segment “Midnight Masala.”
The reference to masala (spice) is a subtle allusion to the spicy scenes that could
not be broadcast during prime time. Kinnarathumbikal was also telecast in
 on Asianet, a Malayalam-language satellite television channel. The appear-
ance of a “soft-porn” film on prime time created a huge controversy, unleashing
debates about televisuality and asleelatha (obscenity) in domestic interiors.48
A recent Facebook post by Deepa Nisanth, a literary figure, emphasizes

FIGURE 4.Screen grabs from a fan-created teaser for Kinnarathumbikal (Lovelorn
Dragonflies, dir. R. J. Prasad),  (left), and trailer at “The Lost Entertainment”
(right). The woman-on-top position is a distinctive marker of soft-porn films.
the surreptitious pleasures the film provided. Nisanth recalls watching

Kinnarathumbikal secretly when it was telecast on Surya TV, knowing all
too well that her mother wouldn’t approve.49 Her curiosity as a teenager was
stirred by conversations in her college and teasing repartee directed at heavy-
set girls whom boys called “Shakeela.” In her deeply personal note, Nisanth
writes about how much Shakeela’s autobiography became crucial to under-
standing the “real” Shakeela and the trials and tribulations that made her a
force to reckon with. Nisanth’s post was widely shared and commented
upon by many Facebook users, who also added their reminiscences of watch-
ing the film.
In a way, it was Shakeela’s heavyset body that allowed her to fit into the ar-
chetype of the amorous “aunty.” This was a recurring trope in both visual and
written forms of pornography throughout the country and a stereotype that al-
lowed for imaginative access to the middle-aged woman next door as the key to
many a male fantasy. Shakeela confirms this in her autobiography: “My large
breasts and heavy body was what excited the audience. . . . If I didn’t have this
body, I may not have been able to make my career.”50 These films often paired
Shakeela with young actors, and her growing popularity had a lot to do with
how they stamped her with the image of a sexually deprived middle-aged
woman on the lookout for teenagers to satisfy her desires. The cougar-like figure
is denoted by the frequent use of the word chechi not only in Kinnarathumbikal,
but also in other films and erotic pulp fiction. In Malayalam, chechi literally
means “elder sister,” but colloquially also connotes an elder woman with whom
one intends to engage in sex.51 Coupled with this imagination of a sexually
deprived but desiring middle-aged woman, Shakeela’s body became a locus of
an excess that spilled out of the diegetic space of the narratives, allowing the

spinning of many offscreen fantasies, which circulated in sensational “yellow”
magazines like Fire and Crime.52
This template of intergenerational erotica would become popular in erotic
cartoons after the decline of soft-porn films, especially in popular erotic comic
series such as Savitha Bhabhi and Velamma, which regularly featured the sexual
adventures of eponymous characters who tend to look for pleasures outside
marriage (fig. ).53
This location outside the space of domesticated desires also enabled the inau-
guration of Shakeela’s fame as a “porn heroine,” a tag that was a near impossi-
bility in a cultural context where stardom was associated solely with male
actors and female roles were scripted to foreground normative codes of conduct
in a patriarchal society. Here, Shakeela not only became the archetypal mada-
karani figure, unsettling societal expectations of what roles an actress should
take up, but also inaugurated a mobilization of female pleasures in the sexual act,
positing the woman as initiator of lovemaking. Her gaze directed at pleasure-
seeking male viewers subverted earlier tropes of heterosexual intimacy where
the male partner and his sexual drives structure the scene’s composition. If
success, popularity, and the ability to influence production decisions constitute
the criteria for stardom, Shakeela was way ahead of many mainstream actresses
A panel from a Velamma comic depicting the eponymous title character about
FIGURE 5.
to have a tryst with her brother-in-law. Velamma, no.  (November ): .

whose memory faded the moment they stepped out of the industry. Films such
as Miss Shakeela () cashed in on her presence, and even her makeup man
came to be known in film circles as Shakeela Ravi (Ravi being his actual name).
In my conversations with exhibitors and distributors of soft-porn films,
many still remember the sway these films had on audiences, how they helped
them wade through the crisis of dwindling audiences. For instance, the main-
stream film distributor Sreekumar stated:
The name Shakeela evoked suspicion from purists who thought her films
were nothing but an excuse for showing sex. But it saved many of us when
mainstream Malayalam films of the time flopped in the box office, leaving us
neck-deep in debt. It was the soft-porn boom that helped us to recover the
loss.54
Contrary to the popular belief that soft-porn production was highly
disorganized and scattered, many of my respondents spoke at length about
the streamlined planning required for low-budget productions. While the
reels of the “clean” prints were mostly processed in Gemini or Prasad labs
in Chennai, there were exclusive sites where the explicit bits were proc-
essed, for instance Vasant Color Lab or RK Labs in Bangalore. Agents in
Bangalore mediated between the distributors and the lab for a certain per-
centage of cut pieces from both parties. Some field representatives who
used to accompany the boxes carrying film prints still recall giving assis-
tance to projectionists to synchronize the bits with the “gap,” a term that
in film circles means sequences that could plausibly precede or follow the
cut piece.
One other factor crucial for the success of soft-porn films were the B- and
C-center theaters that catered to semi-urban and less affluent audiences. Ticket
prices here were comparatively lower due to lower tax rates. This allowed exhib-
itors to negotiate different models of profit sharing with the distributors—yet
another instance of flourishing informal transactions that never existed on paper.
If the theaters in the B and C centers usually had to wait for new releases until
the films finished their first run at the A centers, soft-porn films were released to
all centers in one go. In one way this catered to the aspirations of audiences in the
outskirts to be on par with the audiences who usually got to see films first, a
much-looked-for opportunity for many film buffs. The runaway success of
soft-porn films also unsettled established distribution patterns that marked new
releases only for the A centers and denoted B and C centers as zones solely for
added revenues (fig. ).

FIGURE 6.Poster for Kaumaraprayam (Teenage, dir. Deva), , outside a B-circuit
theater. The tagline says, “Get into the ecstasy of teenage passions.”
It was the B- and C-center theaters that increased the marketability of

Shakeela as a star. The prefix “Shakeela” was added to specify films tagged
as soft porn in general, such that theaters that screened Shakeela films were
collectively titled the “Shakeela camp.”55 One field representative who had
been sent to the “Shakeela camp” remembers how theater owners would
confront him to confirm whether the film print had the real or the fake
Shakeela—“real” and “fake” being operative terms used to identify films in
which she had acted throughout and those where she featured for a few mi-
nutes as a token presence.
BETWEEN AN ETHICS AND A MEMORY OF SOFT PORN
By , with the decline of soft porn, Shakeela herself became a reference
to her previous glory, making only cameo appearances in comic roles. She
even had cameos with mainstream actors such as Mohan Lal (Chotta
Mumbai [Small Mumbai, ]), Vikram (Dhool [Dust ]), and
Vijay (Sukran []) capitalizing on her past glory. But as opposed to her-
oine-centric roles in soft-porn films, these roles could easily be forgotten if

not for the fact that she managed to share screen space with mainstream
actors from a system that had always disparaged her films. With her mar-
ginalization post-, Shakeela’s career also began to mirror that of many
other starlets who had come from outside and enjoyed a short stint in the
industry (fig. ).
To some extent, many in the industry still feel that Shakeela’s image as the
veritable signifier of soft-porn films hijacked a share of success that rightfully
belonged to other actresses who starred in the films but are completely omitted
in accounts of the era. One of the actors who starred opposite Shakeela recounts
how when films were distributed as Shakeela films, even if they were recycled
from shots of her earlier work, they still easily broke even or reaped profits.
This process of recycling included both duplication as well as editing together
small segments that featured Shakeela, even though the result might be a hodge-
podge of exploitation films in Hindi and English. Shakeela’s image was like a
connective tissue that cohesively bound disparate fragments that would other-
wise have seemed like a random mix of sexploitation shots. Familiarity with her
image as an icon of soft porn became part and parcel of this fragment economy,
and doubled up as a mode of foregrounding the artifice behind the image and
the visual dynamics that invited audiences to break down the visual and aural
FIGURE 7.A  New Indian Express newspaper headline announces the decline of
soft-porn films, with the image of Shakeela (spelled “Shakila” here) standing in for the
“dark” state of the industry. Courtesy A. T. Joy.

sequences into smaller units. Here the precariousness of Shakeela’s stardom as
well as the limits of performative labor coalesced. Speaking about Shakeela’s star
value in the industry, one of my interviewees added:
Shakeela’s remuneration was on a day-to-day basis, which was beneficial for
her in some ways, but proved fatal to her career. There were many producers
who were willing to pay her more than Rs. Lakh [US $,] for a day. But
what she did not know was that these shots became parts of three or four
films in the pipeline. There were even agents who helped mediate the sale of
“unused” shots to prospective buyers.56
This informal economy came as a boost to soft porn, where transactions
were based mostly on trust and mutual benefit. But like most unorganized
ventures, the stakes of each party in the success or failure of the film were
not clearly demarcated. This proved useful in the informal labor practices
that it facilitated, but some parties gained or lost revenue because of market
contingencies. There were times when cast and crew were ready to work
without payment for days on end, with the guarantee of being paid once the
producer got the money from the financier. This distinction from main-
stream cinema was reiterated in many of my interviews with people associ-
ated with these films in varying capacities. “Now, you cannot imagine
anyone ready to work under such constraints. . . . The unionization is so
strong that the moment they feel that the producer is lax with payment, the
unit stops functioning immediately,” said one of the production managers
who earlier worked in soft porn.57 The money pooled into these films came
from a variety of sources, including remittances from Gulf-returned
Malayalis who thought of soft porn as a shortcut to easy money.58
But as a flip side, this association with easy money, low budgets, and low
production quality began to be equated with a narrative of moral decay. The
imagination of soft-porn films was peppered with anecdotes regarding the
exploitation of junior artists and the existence of the casting couch. The di-
rectors and producers were alleged to have resorted to shady dealings, like
the use of “open shots” (sexually explicit shots) to sell their films.59 It may
be true that some of the films had erotic sequences that were shot and edited
extraneously and entered different circuits, tagged in many porn websites
under “hot-boob show” or “Mallu Aunty clips.”60 The larger discursive con-
text within which these films were situated and the one-sided reviews they
gathered made them notorious as sex films. Voicing his severe criticism of
the way mainstream Indian cinema has portrayed soft porn as nothing short

of prostitution, one of the producers who made a string of soft-porn films
under a fictitious identity told me:
It was not like the mainstream cinema where the actresses after being cast are
told to agree to “compromise” to retain their roles. Whoever comes to
soft porn enters with the full knowledge of what is involved. . . . In spite of
the sex and desire, there was a certain ethic that governed our interpersonal
relations. It was not that everything was out there free for all.61
Shakeela, in the meantime, started taking up comic roles in mainstream
Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada language films.62 However, she continued her
popularity as a soft-porn actress by anchoring sex-education programs in
Tamil television such as Antharangam (Personal Intimacy, ), telecast on
TV, and Samayal Manthiram (Cooking Tricks, ), telecast on Captain
TV. Following a phone-in talk-show format, both elevated Shakeela to the
role of an information expert who mediated sex-related queries directly to
the sexologist. Interestingly, while the sexologist himself was featured as a
peddler of sexual myths and masculine performance from a strictly hetero-
sexual perspective, Shakeela’s presence as the initial point of contact for the
caller allowed for a collective discussion of the roles she enacted on-screen
and their relevance to sex ed.63 Shakeela’s presence as a visual icon of soft
porn was evoked time and again, as most of the callers were elated to share
a word with her or show off their knowledge of her films. Thus, Shakeela’s
career in soft porn also enabled her to stand in as a facilitator for informa-
tion regarding the callers’ sexual lives. Another sex-education program,
Thitthikkum Iravukal (Sweet Nights, ), made Shakeela’s on-screen sig-
nificance prominent in its narrative strategy. It devoted a substantial section
of the program to sequences from Shakeela’s films between responses from
the sexologist to caller queries. Thus in a strange way Shakeela, her era of
glory and her precarious labor, were recuperated for instrumental use in the
sex-education programs.
Shakeela’s influence in the industry was phenomenal, but she actively left
soft porn after it fizzled around , and the cameo roles she has played since
hardly offer her the stardom that she formerly enjoyed. But then in  there
was wide-scale publicity around her return to Malayalam films; this time as di-
rector of Neelakurinhi Poothu (Neelakurinhi Is in Bloom). As part of the film’s
promotion, both Shakeela and the producer, Jaffar Kanjirapalli, appeared in
many television and radio interviews. In these Shakeela emphasized that her di-
rectorial debut would give her a new beginning, and that this was in no way

connected to the sex films she was earlier part of.64 Kanjirapalli, who is also vice
president of FEFKA (Film Employees Federation of Kerala), was also an erst-
while producer of soft-porn films.65 However, the project ran into trouble when
Shakeela expressed discomfort with Kanjirapalli’s insistence that she enact the
lead role as well as direct. Partially this was an effect of the print and visual me-
dia’s speculations about the film’s plotline, even before shooting started. For in-
stance, a Times of India report quoted the producer as stating: “It’s a
sentimental movie co-directed by Shakeela on a woman who raised a daughter
all alone fighting the odds. The movie will be a complete entertainer with spicy
scenes of Shakeela underwater and in the attire of a fish seller. The shots will be
taken in such a way that the censor board can never deny us certificate.”66
Neelakurinhi Poothu was shelved halfway into the preproduction phase.
Shakeela finally had her directorial debut two years later, in , with the
Telugu film Romantic Target. The film centers on a female vigilante who mur-
ders sexual predators who pose a threat to women’s safety and dignity. Stressing
the need for awareness of crimes against women, the film exposes the rampant
exploitation of women by the powerful—a narrative thread popular in many
soft-porn films as well. Despite Shakeela’s cameo role as a police officer, it failed
to win over audiences. As a response to an interviewer’s question about its
genre, Shakeela described it as dealing with a “lady-oriented subject.”67
The popular memory of soft porn in the recent past has not always been sen-
sitive to the concerns of the film personnel and actors. The Bollywood film The
Dirty Picture (), publicized widely as the biopic of Silk Smitha, is a case in
point. The Dirty Picture is a prime example of how the mainstream film indus-
try has capitalized on the lives of starlets by projecting them as helpless victims
caught in the claws of an exploitative mafia (fig. ).68 The soft-porn industry ap-
pears in the film in two crucial moments: first in the character of “Shakeela,”
Silk’s young and zesty rival who displaces her as the next sex bomb, and second
in the depiction of the soft-porn industry as an exploitative arrangement where
actresses are drugged and intimate moments captured without their consent.
This was more in tune with anti-porn accounts, which posited soft porn within
a template of moral decay and represented those involved as shrewd and calcu-
lating. But there is some anachronism in the narrative of The Dirty Picture. The
reference to the Shakeela character might be a reference to the real Shakeela—
the portrayal of a competitive relationship between the two through a song se-
quence posits a causal relationship between Silk Smitha’s decline and Shakeela’s
emergence. Smitha did attain the status of a madakarani during her time, but
never emblematized the genre of soft porn as Shakeela did. By situating

FIGURE 8.DVD cover of The Dirty Picture (dir. Milan Luthria), , showing lead
actress Vidya Balan as Silk Smitha.
Silk’s character in a narrative of moral and professional decline and associat-

ing this decline with a particular industrial form, The Dirty Picture not only
vilifies the soft-porn industry but also collapses two temporal moments. This
slippage allows for the perception of all madakarani figures as soft-porn ac-
tresses, no matter that Malayalam soft porn, strictly speaking, emerged as a
genre during Shakeela’s reign; Smitha had died by the time Shakeela became
a major presence.69
This anachronism is integral to the process of othering inherent in popular
accounts of Malayalam film history. This anachronistic othering, I suggest, was
also crucial to how the outsider madakarani figure became an index of taboo
desire within a libidinal economy. At once voluptuous, profane, exotic, and
threatening, the figure of the madakarani is denied contemporaneity in main-
stream Malayali society. Madakarani figures such as Shakeela always point to-
ward an elsewhere that is both geographic and temporal, for they belong to
the time of the libidinal dream that clashes with the real time of Malayali soci-
ety. For Shakeela, her decline made her many temporalities collapse. The image
of Shakeela the porn star still circulates on the internet while the “real” Shakeela
is consigned to the shadows of the silver screen.
A handful of legal obscenity cases were registered against Shakeela in dif-
ferent parts of south India. Of these, the case filed at the Tirunelveli district
sessions court in  involved a police raid in a theater, in which police
confiscated what they described as “uncensored pornographic content” and

arrested Shakeela and actor Dinesh on obscenity charges. The case dragged
on for nine years and was finally dismissed for lack of substantial evidence.
In one of her court appearances, Shakeela, a Muslim by birth, arrived clad in
a burqa, earning the ire of an Islamic women’s group that went on record to
say: “She doesn’t wear any clothes in films, how dare she choose symbols of
Islam?”70 But Shakeela defended her stance by asserting her right to practice the
religion in her own way, idealized neither as a radical sex liberationist nor as a
pious Muslim woman. Another controversy was over the Malayalam film
Kadambari (Wine, ), when the activist group Ayyankali Pada (Fighters of
Ayyankali) took up a “cleansing” campaign against the soft-porn wave in
Kerala.71 A group of activists attacked a theater with locally made bombs and
burned a reel of the film in front of the audience.72
Shakeela, then, is not just denied a claim to mainstream Malayali society
or her religious identity, but becomes a symbolic marker that can only exist
within the memory of soft porn. Shakeela’s autobiographical account and
the upcoming biopic produced in multiple languages by Indrajit Lankesh is
part of a recuperative effort to reinstate her voice and performance as impor-
tant interventions in rethinking sexual politics. At the same time, the direc-
tor claims that the film would be “rags-to-riches-to-rags story,” mapping
“the hardships and rough phase when she was not getting films and was try-
ing for character roles.”73 The film is still in production as I write, but the
first-look poster gives a complicated picture of Shakeela that both embraces
and distances her from the peculiar kind of stardom she was associated with.
The tagline of the film, “Not a Porn Star,” shows the actress Richa Chadda,
who is playing Shakeela in the film, standing in front of a wall scribbled with
abuses directed at her (fig. ). While the upper half of her body is covered in
gold jewelry, the text on the wall includes negative comments on her skin
color, weight, and religion. But she looks fearlessly straight at the camera.
The inclusion of the Malayalam word veshya, meaning “prostitute,” and a
Tamil word that loosely translates as “fuck” in midst of the Hindi words signi-
fies the localization of Shakeela as a south Indian figure despite the fact that her
films had a pan-Indian appeal, thanks to the dubbing industry that flourished
alongside soft-porn films. There is also an image of a penis that has been scrib-
bled over, but enough traces remain to see what it is. The wall scribblings are
uncannily similar to walls in the public restrooms and railway comfort stations
filled with random names, abuses, doodles, and phone numbers. While the pho-
tograph was shared by Richa Chadda on her Twitter feed with the caption
“Bold Is Gold,” the filmmakers drew inspiration for the image from Silk

FIGURE 9.Poster for Silk Smitha’s Miss Pamela (dir. Kottayam Chellappan),  (left),
and first-look poster of the upcoming film Shakeela (dir. Indrajit Lankesh), starring
Richa Chadda (right).
Smitha’s film Miss Pamela () and used this image to pay homage to Smitha.
It was Smitha’s “untimely tragic demise which led to the rise of Shakeela’s pop-
ularity, and had it not been for Silk to pave the way with her unapologetic
choices, Shakeela wouldn’t have been so popular.”74
The promotion of the film details the face time Chadda had with
Shakeela, a well-strategized move to possibly avoid the controversies of
The Dirty Picture (Smitha’s family filed a defamation suit, forcing the pro-
duction team to desist tagging the film as Smitha’s biopic). Whether or not
the filmmakers used “Not a Porn Star” as rhetoric to move beyond the ex-
pected trajectory of sensationalism, the making of the film would have been
unimaginable if not for Shakeela’s aura as a soft-porn star. The porn-star sta-
tus (and its corollary precarious stardom) had been Shakeela’s unique selling
point when her career was thriving. But to negate her distinct identity to
“mainstream” the film misses the point. Needless to say, the demands and
limitations placed by the genres of biopic and autobiography might have
their role in framing the project in a particular light. However, the authen-
ticity that the filmmakers are attempting to preserve by humanizing the sub-
ject should not do injustice to the particular time period and production
practices that facilitated Shakeela’s success and stardom. This kind of

accuracy in a biopic privileges the “living subject” without implicating it
within the facade of false empowerment.
D ARSHANA S REEDHAR M INI is a PhD candidate in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the
University of Southern California. Her dissertation explores precarious media formations such as low-
budget films produced in the south Indian state of Kerala, mapping their transnational journeys. Her
work is supported by the Social Science Research Council. Her research interests include feminist me-
dia, gender studies, South Asian studies, and media ethnography. She has published in Bioscope: South
Asian Screen Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, Journal for Ritual Studies, and International Journal
for Digital Television. An earlier version of this article was Third Prize in the 2017 Society for Cinema
and Media Studies Graduate Student Writing Awards.
NOTES
I would like to thank Priya Jaikumar, Ellen Seiter, Anirban Baishya and Amit Rahul
Baishya who have read draft versions of this paper and enriched the final paper with
their generous comments.
. Johny and Shakeela, “I Was Part of Your Nights,” in Shakeela, Atmakatha
[Autobiography] (Calicut: Olive, ), . All translations are mine unless otherwise
noted.
. The dominant Malayalam-speaking population in the south Indian state of Kerala is
referred to as Malayali, which is used interchangeably with the term Keralite, used to
refer to the native population from Kerala. However, despite the consolidation of the
Malayalam language as the official language of Kerala, there are linguistic minorities
who speak Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Konkani.
. The demarcation of A, B, and C circuits in the exhibition of films in India reflects
different scales premised on the location of theaters and amenities provided for patrons,
including air conditioning, car parking, snack bars, and reservation provisions. B-circuit
theaters are usually single-screen houses that perform the bare function of film exhibition
and are far removed from other associated pleasures of the neoliberal economy. They
usually do not have the capital to pay the advance money to distributors to ensure a
screening upon release. The soft-porn films owe their popularity to the patrons of these
theaters. For more details see Darshana Sreedhar Mini, “Locating the ‘B’ in B-Circuit
Cinema,” in Film Studies: An Introduction, ed. Vebhuti Duggal, Bindu Menon, and
Spandan Bhattacharya (Delhi and Kolkata: Worldview, forthcoming).
. The genre popularly referred to as rathikathakal (coined from the words rathi,
meaning sex, and kathakal, meaning stories) are fictional narratives that appeared in many
popular magazines featuring the sex lives of unnamed women in the form of confessional
accounts. While women contributors to these columns were usually given fictitious
names, many soft-porn actresses such as Shakeela and Reshma subsequently appeared as
the purported respondents to these columns in sensational magazines such as Fire. Print
material such as sensational magazines and pulp fiction serves as an archive of visual and
narrative codes for soft-porn filmmakers.

. See Darshana Sreedhar Mini, “The Spectral Duration of Malayalam Soft-Porn:
Disappearance, Desire, and Haunting,” Bioscope , no.  (): .
. Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson, eds., Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local
Labor (Oakland: University of California Press, ), .
. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London and New York:
Routledge, ), , .
. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and
New York: Verso, ), xii.
. The word “glamour” was used by these filmmakers as a stand-in for sex and
eroticism. The films were related to soft porn only to the extent of the incorporation of
racy sequences. The autonomous female lead found in the later soft-porn films was
altogether missing from glamour films. Most of these were called orazchapadangal (one-
week films) by the filmmakers, as they normally had a very short shelf life, during
which they reaped maximum profit.
. While the use of the term “soft porn” in industrial parlance emerged only in the
s, its history traces back to journalistic accounts of the late s and s, when
film columnists used it to refer to sexually explicit Malayalam films distributed outside
the state of Kerala. The titles were usually in English—rip-offs of the American
exploitation films that were imported to India under the NRI [Non-Resident Indian]
scheme of  that was floated by the Indian government to increase foreign exchange.
. C. S. Venkiteswaran, ed., “Shakeela, Chila Thundu Chintakal” [Shakeela: A Few
Thought Pieces], in Udalinte Tharasancharangal [The Circulation of the Star Body]
(Kottayam: DC Books, ), –; G. P. Ramachandran, Malayalam Cinema:
Desam, Bhasha, Samskaram [Malayalam Cinema: Region, Language and Culture]
(Thiruvananthapuram: State Institute of Languages, Kerala, ).
. For examples see Times of India, November , , ; Times of India, March ,
, .
. There were exceptions, for instance the Crown Theatre in Calicut in north Kerala,
where the shows at  p.m. and  p.m. were slotted for soft porn, while the , , and  p.m.
slots screened Hollywood classics. Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, “Soft Porn and the Anxieties
of the Family,” in Women in Malayalam Cinema: Naturalizing Gender Hierarchies, ed.
Meena Pillai (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, ), –. However, no statistics are
available on female viewership of soft porn in theaters.
. Arun Ram, “Poorly Paid Male Leads of Southern Sleaze Dream of Making It Big in
Mainstream Cinema,” India Today, July , , https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/
society-the-arts/films/story/-poorly-paid-male-leads-of-southern-sleaze-dream-
of-making-it-big-in-mainstream-cinema----.
. In a column in Puthumukham, in a self-congratulatory tone, the writer projects the
role he is asked to perform as that of a production manager who is “on-duty” to procure
“raw talent.” “Call for Submissions for Puthumukham,” Nana , no.  (): .
. The Malayalam film industry wields a patriarchal and heavy-handed sense of
exclusivity in managing its production practices. The male stars and their availability
decide the production schedule and the selection of the actresses. Actresses are paid

much less than the actors, and this has continued unquestioned despite unionization in
the film industry.
. For instance, a  article in the Maharashtra Herald reported that the screening of
the “Malayalam soft porn” film Crazy Lady had to be cancelled in Delhi after
demonstrations outside central Odeon cinema hall by women activists from Janawadi
Mahila Samiti [People’s Women Group]. The demonstrators who gathered under the
banner of “Committee of the Portrayal of Women in India” under the support of Pramila
Dandavate, the Janata party parliament member, were quick to castigate dubbed films
as consistently flouting censorship regulations and demanded stringent actions against
theaters showing pornographic sequences. “Soft Porn Film Stopped,” Maharashtra Herald,
September , , n.p., National Film Archives of India library, Pune.
. Clarissa Smith and Feona Atwood, “Porn Studies: An Introduction,” Porn Studies
, nos. / (): .
. Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press ), vii.
. Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille
Miller-Young, eds., The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (New
York: Feminist Press, ), .
. David Andrews suggests that softcore industry embraces a “postfeminist”
depoliticized appropriation by advocating female agency, choice, and self-respect to
create a female-friendly space that can comingle traditional idioms of femininity with
nonnormative ones. While one could read this as an instantiation of the ways
feminism’s broadest appeal is mobilized to render the content unthreatening, some
elements do go against this otherwise neat categorization of soft porn as equivalent to
advancement of feminism. For instance, the “independent women as unhappy women”
trope in softcore films works in conjunction with “a mild misandry.” David Andrews,
Soft in the Middle: Contemporary Softcore Features in Its Context (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, ), .
. Vijaykumar in conversation with the author, July , .
. Shakeela in conversation with the author, July , . For an interesting take on
the idea of duping in soft-porn films see Surayya Banu, Dupe (Kottayam: DC Books,
).
. A series of incidents in  exposed the hierarchical and patriarchal mentality that
governed the main organization for actors, AMMA (Association of Malayalam Movie
Actors). The Women in Cinema Collective was constituted in  after one of the
actresses was attacked in a planned abduction masterminded by a prominent actor. The
main motivation for the formation of WCC was the irresponsible way in which
AMMA handled the issue of the actress’s attack by siding with the perpetrator. WCC
pitched its intervention as a policy and advocacy group that emphasizes safe working
environments and gender equity for actresses in Malayalam cinema, despite the fact that
they face many stumbling blocks, including loss of opportunities because of the
“informal ban” from some sections of the film fraternity who are offended at them for
speaking up. In July , a mainstream actress from the Malayalam film industry filed

a police complaint against a director for using a dupe for a scene that involved exposure
without her consent. WCC seized this issue as warranting a thorough investigation on
the noncontractual discretionary use of clauses by filmmakers. Anu James, “Why Did
Kerala Actress File Complaint against Jean Paul Lal,  Others of Honey Bee ? Lal
Reacts,” Ibtimes, July , , https://www.ibtimes.co.in/why-did-kerala-actress-file-
complaint-against-jean-paul-lal--others-honey-bee--lal-reacts-.
. A. T. Joy, a director, in conversation with the author, September , .
. The Indian currency equivalent for this is approximately Rs.  lakhs. Directors
A. T. Joy, Dubai Mani, and Thrikunapuzha Vijayakumar in conversation with the
author, September , August , and July  respectively.
. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible”
(Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .
. Andrews, Soft in the Middle, , .
. Sections  and  of Indian Penal Code  make selling pornographic
material to young persons an offense punishable by imprisonment for up to three years
and a fine of Rs. .
. For more details see http://cbfcindia.gov.in/.
. Gopalan, a distributor, in conversation with the author, July , .
. Lotte Hoek, Cut Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (New
York: Columbia University Press, ).
. The narratives of soft-porn films drew heavily from the vernacular pulp fiction
referred to as painkili, and this sense of transmedial familiarity allowed for building in
references between written/literary and cinematic expressions of sexuality.
. In his discussion on softcore Andrews writes about the strange “byzantine
nomenclature” that allows pseudonyms to circulate among softcore producers, players,
and even critics. Andrews, Soft in the Middle, xiv.
. Kuppuswamy, a manager, in conversation with the author, August , . The
production manager is the person who connects the production and postproduction
stages of the film and delivers the film print to the film lab. This person will be aware
of the real identities of the technicians involved, the cast as well as the distributors.
. Andrews, Soft in the Middle, .
. Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, ), , .
. Ram, “Poorly Paid Male Leads of Southern Sleaze.”
. Ram, “Poorly Paid Male Leads of Southern Sleaze.” The extract from the letter
reads, “Unable to take the insults from her friends, your sister has stopped attending
college. Your father has to take the flak from all relatives. . . . Please don’t come home.”
. Shakeela’s mother was from the Telugu-speaking community in Andhra Pradesh,
and her father was from the Tamil-speaking community of Madras. As opposed to Tamil
and Telugu films, it was Malayalam soft-porn films that gave her career a boost.
. Shakeela, Atmakatha, .
. Jayabharati, who started her filmic career in the late s, was one of the few
Malayalam actresses who was able to portray sensual roles in mainstream Malayalam

cinema without being castigated as a second-rate actress. For instance, Itha Ivide Vare [It Is
Here, ] and Rathinirvedham [Sexual Ecstasy, ] solidified her as someone whose
body gave the narrative an erotic charge.
. M. G. Radhakrishnan, “Crippled by Failed Productions and Losses, Malayalam
Film Industry Banks on Sleaze,” India Today, June , , https://www.indiatoday.
in/magazine/society-the-arts/films/story/-crippled-by-failed-productions-
and-losses-malayalam-film-industry-banks-on-sleaze----.
. R. Ayyappan, “Sleaze Time, Folks!,” Rediff, January , , http://www.rediff.
com/entertai//jan/mallu.htm.
. See for instance https://twitter.com/kiduquotes/status/?
lang=en.
. See for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIPHLPheP.
. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uixXufYuO.
. For a detailed account of the contested television telecast see Radhakrishnan, “Soft
Porn and the Anxieties of the Family.”
. Deepa Nisanth’s Facebook page, accessed August , , https://www.facebook.
com/deepa.nisanth/posts/.
. Shakeela, Atmakatha, .
. The word chechi also played out interestingly in Bigg Boss Kannada, one of the south
Indian variants of Big Boss, the Indian franchise of the Big Brother format. One of the male
contestants had refused to address Shakeela as chechi, with the press conjecturing that it
could be more on account of the double entendre behind the use of the word. “Rohit
Turns Shakeela Down,” Times of India, July . , http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
entertainment/kannada/movies/news/Shakeela-wants-to-take-Rohit-to-her-house/articles
how/.cms.
. Yellow magazines are cheap, sensational publications that mobilize speculative
accounts, gossip, and confessionals in the apparent drive to “expose” the truth.
. Bhabhi translates in Hindi as “sister-in-law.” Both Savita Bhabhi and Velamma point
towards a shared sexual fascination with married women and present a window to
understand sexual transgressions in an otherwise censorial and strictly regimented society.
For an account of the Savita Bhabhi phenomenon see Darshana Mini and Anirban
Baishya, “Transgressions in Toonland: Savita Bhabhi, Velamma and the Indian Adult
Comic” in a forthcoming issue of Porn Studies.
. Sreekumar in conversation with the author, February , .
. Sreekumar in conversation with the author, February , .
. Shaji, an actor, in conversation with author, September , . Shaji also
mentions that the “normal” industry practice was for the cast to sign a contract and an
advance would be paid to them before the shoot. The remainder would be paid post-
dubbing so as to ensure that the cast remained faithful to the dubbing schedule before
committing to other projects. In Shakeela’s case the day-to-day basis of payment was a
radical departure from an entrenched industrial standard.
. Kuttikrishanan, a production manager, in conversation with the author, October ,
.

. There is a substantial diasporic community from Kerala in the Middle East.
Remittances sent from the host country to Kerala were in many instances routed to
film production, including soft porn.
. “Open shot” is a term used in the film circles to refer to intimate scenes involving
the hero and heroine that are “real” shots, meaning performed by the actor and the actress
concerned, and not by dupes. It also involves sex scenes shot for the film with a limited
crew.
. The instance of Abhilasha breastfeeding a baby in P. Chandrakumar’s
Aadyapaapam () has the tag “hot boob show” on many pornographic websites.
“Mallu” is a colloquial usage to refer to Malayalis or those who hail from Kerala. “Mallu
Aunty clips” in this context would mean erotic clips featuring cougar figures who are
presumed to be from Kerala or have regional markers that point toward a Malayalam
soft-porn film.
. Thankachan, a producer, in conversation with the author, March , .
. These are regional film industries based in south India.
. “Moralistic Porn: Sex Shows on Tamil TV Channels Will Amaze You,” The Quint,
November , , https://www.thequint.com/love-and-sex////moralistic-porn-
sex-shows-on-tamil-tv-channels-will-amaze-you-shakeela-antharangan-tips.
. “Malayalam Soft Porn Actress Shakeela to Direct a Malayalam Movie
‘Neelakurinji Poothu,’” Asianetnews, January , , https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=HwBHhbFp.
. Crucially, like Shakeela, Kanjirapalli was not ashamed of his soft-porn phase despite
his decision to switch gears to catering for film units in the mid-s. In his discussions
with me in September , he was quite amenable to sharing details about his experiences
as a soft-porn filmmaker.
. P. V. Shyam, “Soft-Porn Star Shakeela Plans a Big Entry,” Times of India,
December , , http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/malayalam/movies/
news/Soft-porn-star-Shakeela-plans-a-big-reentry/articleshow/.cms.
. “Romantic Target Trailer Launch-Shakeela, Syed Afzal,” Silly Monks Tollywood,
February , , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEjygJgE.
. The film was released on December , Smitha’s birthday, which was a deliberate
ploy to frame it as a biopic. Amid claims of it as a biopic, the film lit the fires of
controversy on the “actual” story behind Smitha’s death when her brother Naga Vara
Prasad filed a writ petition in the high court alleging character assassination of his sister.
. This runs parallel to another anachronistic tendency, to view the glamour films
of the s as soft porn. This has been the frame with which Silk Smitha has been
viewed in popular accounts that repeatedly iterate the example of her film Layanam
[Union, ], which features her as a married woman who looks for love outside of
marriage, as evidence of her soft-porn status. But this was only one of many kinds
of roles Smitha enacted. Interestingly, the film was dubbed into Hindi as Reshma
Ki Jawani [Reshma’s Story] in  and circulated widely during the boom of soft
porn, and thus etched Smitha’s memory as that of the quintessential south Indian
soft-porn star.

. Jhilmil Motihar, “In the Dock,” India Today, October , , http://indiatoday.
intoday.in/story/In+the+dock//.html.
. Ayyankali pada is a left-wing radical group fighting for the rights of the poor. They
drew their name from Ayyankali, a leader of the oppressed classes in Kerala.
. Sreedhar Pillai, “Smut Glut,” The Hindu, August , , http://www.thehindu.
com/thehindu/mp////stories/.htm.
. “Shakeela Was Not a Porn Star: First Look of Biopic Starring Richa Chadha Out,”
India Today, November , , https://www.indiatoday.in/movies/regional-cinema/
story/shakeela-biopic-first-look-richa-chadha----.
. “Richa Chadha’s First Look in Shakeela Biopic Is Inspired by Late Southern Actress
Silk Smitha, Here’s Why,” TimesNowNews.com, November , , https://www.
timesnownews.com/entertainment/news/bollywood-news/article/richa-chadhas-first-look-
in-shakeela-biopic-is-inspired-by-late-southern-actress-silk-smitha-heres-why/.

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The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinem

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DARSHANA SREEDHAR MINI

The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinema and the

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FIGURE 1.Shakeela in Kinnarathumbikal (Lovelorn Dragonflies, dir.

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THE SOFT-PORN ECOLOGY AND FEMINIST PORN STUDIES

“Feminist porn studies” as a distinct approach problematizes questions of repre-

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MAKING SHAKEELA: SAVIOR, SEDUCTRESS, “AUNTY”

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the surreptitious pleasures the film provided. Nisanth recalls watching

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It was the B- and C-center theaters that increased the marketability of

BETWEEN AN ETHICS AND A MEMORY OF SOFT PORN

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Silk’s character in a narrative of moral and professional decline and associat-

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