Audacity of Pleasure: Sexualities, Literature and Cinema in India

It is a good time to take stock of paths and markers in the cultural battleground of sexualities in India. To note the impossibility of quantifying wins and losses because this war against moral panics cannot be measured by legislative gains. The politics of sexuality in the arts as well as the everyday in India lies, rather, in a fecund grey area that bristles with the sheer audacity of imagined and real pleasures. In some crucial sense, it must always remain audacious.

Brinda Bose is Associate Professor, Centre of English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.