South Asian Popular Culture

ISSN: 1474-6689 (Print) 1474-6697 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsap20

Pornography of place: Location, leaks and

obscenity in the Indian MMS porn video

Anirban K. Baishya

To cite this article: Anirban K. Baishya (2017): Pornography of place: Location,

leaks and obscenity in the Indian MMS porn video, South Asian Popular Culture, DOI:
10.1080/14746689.2017.1351089

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2017.1351089

Published online: 18 Jul 2017.

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South Asian Popular Culture, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2017.1351089

Pornography of place: Location, leaks and obscenity in the

Indian MMS porn video
Anirban K.Baishya
The Bryan Singer Division of Cinema and Media Studies, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern
California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This paper examines the phenomenon of MMS pornography in India. Pornography; affect;
MMS or Multimedia Messaging Service refers to a communication cellphones; MMS; leak
technology that allows the sharing of multimedia files over cellphone
networks. In India however, the term MMS has become attached to
pornographic clips that are shared over mobile phone networks or
the Internet. Through an examination of two limit cases, The Mysore-
Mallige Scandal (2001) and the Delhi Metro MMS Scandal (2014) this
paper argues that the negotiation of space and place is integral to the
production, circulation and ultimately the affective impact of such
videos. In particular, I seek to extend the definition of the MMS clip
by examining the play between place and affect. In doing so, I argue
that MMS pornography is a symptom of a larger spatial problem of
the digital age the problem of the leak.

Introduction
In 2004, the Indian public was faced with a new kind of scandal in which two students of the
prominent Delhi Public School (DPS), R.K Puram had recorded their sexual escapade using
a cellphone. The viral circulation of the DPS video clip led to a major moral and legal tussle
in the Indian public sphere.1 In effect, the DPS case forced the Indian public to recognize the
reorganization of the private and the public entailed by the use of networked communication
technologies. The DPS case was also the first time that the term MMS scandal came into
vogue, immediately (and indelibly) connecting the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)
an aspect of cellphone technology to a certain variety of pornographic videos.2 Popularly
known as MMS porn, these videos are best described as amateur insofar as they lack the
technical finesse (for lack of a better word) or production values of industrially produced
pornography. This is the kind of pornography that is shot on personal digital recorders
such as the handy-cam or more commonly, the cell-phone camera, and circulates over the
Internet or on mobile phone networks. Further these videos are often fragmentary, and
circulate virally as short clips that can be easily transferred or shared.

CONTACT Anirban K. Baishya baishya@usc.edu

2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 A. K. BAISHYA

The impact of MMS as an indicator of a shared cultural anxiety in India can be seen in
the plethora of references in contemporary Indian cinema including Bollywood blockbust-
ers such as Anurag Kashyaps Dev D (2009) and Dibakar Bannerjees Love, Sex Aur Dhoka
(2010).3 But beyond this visible presence in mainstream popular culture, MMS has a strong
presence in Indias digital underbelly. In fact, MMS porn has become a genre in itself with
terms such as MMS and scandals having attained an erotic charge and the mobile phone
emerging as a sort of a libidinal symbol (Figure 1).4 Pornographic websites such as FSI Blog,
Debonair Blog and Mobikama (now Desi Porn Movies) are dedicated to the MMS format,
and MMS often shows up as a popular category or tag in pornographic websites, along
with the other popular Ms of Indian porn Masala and Mallu.5
Yet despite this, studies of MMS pornography remain scant. Namita Malhotras mono-
graph Porn: Law, Video, Technology (2011) and Nishant Shahs dissertation The Technosocial
Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace (2012) are two of the main works that deal with
MMS pornography, although not completely dedicated to it. Malhotras work situates the
study within the questions of obscenity and the law, but undertakes a thorough investigation
of online pornography as an affective object and as a phenomenological experience. On
the other hand Shahs dissertation examines the emergence of a new form of subjectivity
under the prevalence of cyberculture and he dedicates a significant portion of his work
to the DPS scandal and the ways in which the unruliness of technology itself seemed to
trouble the law in this case.
What I want to draw attention to in this paper is not the DPS scandal itself, but two
other cases that extend the definition of MMS pornography. The first of these, the Mysore-
Mallige scandal occurred in 2001 (prior to the DPS case), whereas the other one, the Delhi
Metro Scandal of 2014 is more recent. Both of them destabilize the definition of the MMS
clip as they are not produced with the use of cellphones, but became attached to the term
MMS Scandal during subsequent circulation. Focusing on these two limit cases, my paper
deals with the dissonant sense of place that characterizes MMS pornography. In particular,
I examine how place, or rather the feeling of emplacement, is produced as an affective
response to the circulation of the video artefact.

Figure 1.The cellphone and the MMS scandal are foregrounded in this splash page for Debonair Blog,
one of the most popular amateur pornography sites in India.
Note: Screenshot.
 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE 3

The (mis)placing of MMS porn: Two limit cases

The fact that MMS videos are informally shot (either on low grade equipment, or in secret)
and distributed (via the Internet or over mobile phones) means that even while they are
explicit in content, they are often fragmentary and marked by what Steyerl calls the aesthetics
of the poor image pixelation, low resolution and generation loss.6 These videos often do
not easily offer us a sense of place by which I mean an identifiable and relatable lived space.
I draw my definition of place from Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) who conceives of place as the loca-
tional [] qualities of space (6). For Tuan, place is intricately connected to experience and
identity and is hence less abstract than the notion of space. In the MMS porn-video there is
a space where the action happens, but this could be anywhere and often does not translate
visually into a sense of place. The idea of place therefore, has a paradoxical relationship to
the circulation of such videos. Though they immediately dont offer us a sense of being in
any particular place, they often circulate with place markers (Delhi and Mysore for exam-
ple). Which is to say that while at first look these videos could have been shot anywhere,
there is a clear geographical imagination that becomes attached to them as they circulate.
I began by arguing that the Mysore-Mallige Scandal and the Delhi Metro Scandal are
limit cases that extend the definition of MMS pornography. In the case of the Mysore-
Mallige video, the difference from the bulk of MMS porn videos lies in the fact that it was
shot on a handy-cam and generally has a much clearer visual quality than most of the clips
available on the Internet. Similarly, in case of the Delhi Metro scandal, we are essentially
talking about leaked CCTV images and not cellphone footage. However, in both cases the
subsequent circulation of the clips after leakage has occurred with the suffix MMS.7 In both
cases the use of term MMS appears, at first glance, to be erroneous. But if we move away
from the strict technological boundaries of the term, then it becomes possible to read MMS
as a powerful mode for understanding Indian amateur pornography. The inference to be
gleaned from these two limit cases is that it is not the actual technology of production that
is key in the MMS porn-video. Rather, the MMS video broadly understood, has more to do
with the values it accumulates as it circulates. In other words, in their subsequent circulation
either in original form or as shorter clips, videos such as the Mysore-Mallige footage and
the Delhi Metro CCTV footage become associated with the MMS form, notwithstanding
the original technology or format employed during shooting. MMS then, is displaced as
a strictly technological aspect of cellphone usage, and becomes a repository of voyeuristic
sexual pleasure and cultural anxiety.
At the same time, there is another displacement that takes place and that has to do with
the formal nature of the pornographic image. In her work on hard core pornography, Linda
Williams (1989) notes that pleasure is located in the image through the use of close-ups
of the genitalia. Williams points out that hard core pornographys principle of maximum
visibility (1989, 48) make the close-up and the money-shot (the shot of an ejaculating penis)
central to the visualization of pleasure in hard core pornography. However MMS pornog-
raphys lo-fi aesthetics deny us the same kind of visual pleasure as hard core pornography.
Pixelation, camera shake and low-light often taken over the frame and shots of genitalia,
even when visible, do not evoke the same affective response as in hard core pornography.
Therefore, the pornography of the poor image demands its own aesthetics. The place of
pleasure in the MMS porn video gets decentred from genital imagery and a certain visual
texture becomes associated with pleasure itself.
4 A. K. BAISHYA

Scholars such as Sara Diamond and Mark Andrejevic have identified this re-centring of
visual pleasure entailed by new visual technologies such as video and CCTV. For instance
Diamond (1996) notes the association of early video technology with erotic pleasure and
the new possibilities that video allowed in terms of documenting intimate moments such as
masturbation, fucking and babys first breath through a blur of pixels (190). On the other
hand, Andrejevic (2004) draws connections between the format of reality TV and certain
kinds of online pornography, which ostensibly allow subscribers access to hidden cameras
placed in changing rooms, bathrooms, and bedrooms (75). Like early video technology
and reality TV, MMS pornographys allure lies both in the immediacy of recording and the
placement of desire within a degraded visual texture. In case of MMS pornography, this
visual texture is related in turn, to the play of place and space the space of the private versus
the place of the public, the space of the media-screen versus the place of viewing, and place
as both nomenclature and phenomenological experience. Through an examination of the
Mysore-Mallige scandal and the Delhi Metro scandal I argue that the MMS porn-video is
marked by a dual spatiality there is both a sense of dissonant nomenclature that imbues
the non-space of the viral porno video with a sense of taking place somewhere, and a
simultaneous leak of the on-screen and private spaces into the space of the public sphere.

Whats in a name? The effective nomenclature of affective places

If the poor aesthetics of the MMS porn video do not give us a sense of the place where
the action takes place, what is the function of the place-name? After all, could not a sex-
video prefixed with a place name, be anywhere, given that the investment in the video is
not the production of a sense of belonging, but the reproduction of a sexual act, whether
real or imagined? Especially since such videos are often self-made or shot secretly, there is
hardly any deliberate camera movement or framing that invites the audience to believe or
identify with the local configurations of the action. One can safely assume that given the
do-it-yourself and amateur nature of these videos, the production of the video is not simul-
taneous with the production of place. Yet something seems to magically transmute once the
video enters circulation and becomes retroactively attached to a place-name; the anywhere
of the video becomes endowed with a placeness after the fact. The Mysore-Mallige video
is a case in point. The hour long video that can still be found on circulating on the Internet
features a young couple in a hotel room. Shot almost entirely in night-vision mode, the
video documents snippets of the couples intimate moments with the man doing most of
the shooting. The entire video is not composed of sexual intercourse and we also see some
mundane moments of walking, talking and undressing. However, it is for its sex-scenes that
the Mysore-Mallige video became infamous and several shorter sequences cut from the
longer video can also be found online. When the video surfaced in 2001, there was much
speculation about who the couple was and where they hailed from. While the language
spoken by the couple does give us a clue to their ethnicity, this alone does not necessarily
stand in as evidence of belonging to a particular place. The sense of place, it may be said is
something that can only be created visually; as in the mise-en-scene in a fiction film, the
physical environment and the material objects that populate it are the evidentiary artefacts
that add to the reality effect of the scene.8
The Mysore-Mallige video was curiously devoid of any of these evidentiary artefacts in
terms of place. Of course, there is the space of the hotel room with its objects the bed, the
 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE 5

mirror, the bucket, but not a clearly articulated sense of geographical location. This personal
and spatial anonymity in the video was complemented by the video cameras night-vision
mode, in which the video was primarily shot. The night-vision mode, it may be argued
accentuated the sense of mystery around the scandal and this has also endowed the video
with a cult status in its own right.9 Here, the sensational and the mysterious fuse with the
aesthetics of the poor image in the sense that Steyerl writes about it. In her seminal essay In
Defense of the Poor Image (2009) she writes: It [the poor image] transforms quality into
accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction
(n.pag.). Likewise the Mysore Mallige video too has been transformed into clips. Several
versions of the video exist, cut down from its original sixty plus minutes to shorter lengths
ranging from a few minutes to a few seconds.
Incidentally, the most easily available full version of the video as of today is a colorized
edit of the original, that one user has ripped, removing the night vision.10 The intertitle that
follows this video features the purported names of the man and the woman it calls them the
stars of mysore mallige and also implores them to turn off the night-vision in subsequent
videos (Figure 2). While this specific edit could be dismissed easily as the work of a geeky
fanboy, it points towards the fact that digital artefacts such as MMS porn videos cease to
belong to any original author once they begin to circulate.11 The fans edit becomes a crucial
node in the reception and circulation of the video. Therefore, the culture of investigation that
has become attached to the scandal is an important facet of the life of the Mysore-Mallige
video as a digital artefact. It is as if by removing the night-vision mode, the colorized edit
is attempting to penetrate the pixelated veneer of the Mysore-Mallige video and unravel
some truth that is hidden behind the poor image. Public speculation about the couples
identity therefore, has also gone hand in glove with speculations of place.

Figure 2.Intertitles at the end of the colour-corrected version of the Mysore-Mallige video referencing
the couple as stars.
Note: Screenshot.
6 A. K. BAISHYA

This speculation about the couples personal identities and the location of the action is
the subject of Bharat Murthys documentaries What Are You Looking At? (2007) and Jasmine
of Mysore (2007).12 Both of Murthys films examine the cult status of the Mysore-Mallige
video and track its reception among young adult men and women in India. In What are
You Looking At? some interviewees speculate at length about what actually happened. One
of the respondents for example, ruminates on the possibility of unrevealed footage from a
possible vacation somewhere. The speculation of where the sexual escapade took place is
also a major concern among viewers. In connection to this, some avid fans have pointed out
one particular shot in the video which gives us an evidence of place for a brief moment
in the Mysore-Mallige video, the man turns the camera towards the woman in an over the
shoulder shot and then zooms in to capture a shot of the area outside the window. Bharat
Murthy has speculated that this brief view outside is actually a shot of a fort in Mysore and
that the video was indeed shot in a Mysore hotel.13 In his second documentary Jasmine of
Mysore, Murthy and his team investigate the mystery of the location by visiting hotels in the
city. In one of the last sequences in this documentary, the camera zooms out of the window
trying to get a view of the hills and the fort outside. A dissolve takes us to the original shot
from the Mysore-Mallige video and another dissolve returns to the shot taken by Murthys
crew. Then the image fades to black as the film ends, suggesting that Murthy has found the
answer to the mystery about location.
There is no way for viewers to verify this other than to take Murthys theory at face value,
for even in its brief foray outwards, Mysore-Malliges camera remains truant and does not
allow anything other than speculation about place. But this, along with the linguistic markers,
that has given the video its broad sense of place. Here, the investigative subculture attaches
a sense of taking place (Rhodes, Gorfinkel xiii) to what could very well have happened
anywhere. Elsewhere Murthy has said that the Mysore-Mallige video had encouraged the
proliferation of MMS clips in places such as Delhi and Calcutta to the extent that every
place had its own scene.14 This idea of location-specific pornography becomes clearest in a
comment by one of the videos fans reported in an Indian daily, which goes: Mysore Mallige
was where it all started boys. Now dont you go forgetting your roots.15 It is almost as if a
certain sense of identity is at stake in a statement such as this.
In connection to narrative cinema, Rhodes and Gorfinkel write that this sense of identity
is constructed in and through place whether it is through attachment, rejection, inhab-
itation, adoption or movement (ix). Citing the work of the early film theorist Siegfreid
Kracauer, Rhodes and Gorfinkel assert that the identification of place makes the moving
image relate to a larger world than just the plot of the film. Rhodes and Gorfinkels work is
focused on narrative cinema and the larger collection of essays in their book concentrates
almost exclusively on the cinematic experience of place. But the focus in their work that
brief moment when the background suddenly becomes foreground (vii) is of conceptual
value as it allows us to extend the idea of an emplaced identity to other non-cinematic or
quasi-cinematic forms of spectatorship as well.
MMS videos such as the Mysore-Mallige video are definitely not the same as narrative
cinema. But there is a trace of a cinematic imagination at play during the duration of shoot-
ing or the time of circulation; note the use of the term stars in the fan-edit of the Mysore-
Mallige video for instance.16 If sex is the plot of the Mysore-Mallige video, the image is
open to a wider cultural and spatial dimension than just the act of having sex. The key to
understanding the affective impact of the Mysore-Mallige video then, is not the sex itself,
 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE 7

but the imagination of Mysore an identifiable, lived place for many viewers that made it
possible to think of pornography in the here and the now. Bharat Murthy for instance has
noted how viewers of the video across the country identify with the couple as being from
their place.17 He further notes a peculiar sense of identification and participation that he
felt while watching the video.18
The imagination of place is intricately attached to such as response. In all its here-ness,
the video clip becomes the catalyst for an affective response that goes beyond mere identi-
fication.19 In connection to affect and space, Gregory Siegworth and Melissa Gregg (2010)
note: affect marks a bodys belonging to a world of encounters (4). They further speak about
bloom spaces affective spaces of encounter that are generated as objects and bodies
come into contact with each other, opening up new arrays of relations and possibilities, or
what Kathleen Stewart poetically describes as a promissory note (340). Murthys response
recounted above is one such encounter, where the body comes into contact with the screen,
and via it, to other bodies, all held together by the imagination of lived place. If pornography
is meant to titillate, then it is the imagination of place itself that allows titillation. In many
MMS videos the sex-act remains unseen, or is too jerky, pixelated and poorly framed to
be explicit enough; but the prefixing of the place-name transforms the video clip into a
promissory note of erotic possibilities. This promise of erotic possibility goes hand in glove
with a dual spatiality in which ones inhabited space is always in friction with the space of
the screen or the mobile device.

Viewership and spatial duality

Two aspects of the MMS porn video make it peculiarly spatial virality and mobility. Being
viral means being contagious within a network, and being contagious in the digital speaks
to the great speed at which material can travel, and the immense breadth of its potential
reach. The network, according to theorists like Tony Sampson (2012) is also a space in which
affects are significantly passed on, via suggestions made by others (5). On the other hand,
by mobility I refer not to the accelerated speed of circulation, but to the actual mobility of
the devices on which videos can now be viewed laptop computers, tablets, smartphones,
etc. While virality endows MMS porn-videos with speed of circulation and accelerated
transmission of affect, mobility ensures that the screen, and with it, the viewer can un-fix
himself from one singular place of viewing.
This idea of an unfixed viewer, is not altogether new. For instance, drawing on the phe-
nomenological theory of Merleau-Ponty, the film theorist Jennifer Barker (2009) notes that
the cinematic viewer inhabits two places [] that of the film and his own (84). However,
in the traditional cinema theatre, the cinematic apparatus makes a demand upon the viewer
to suppress his awareness of lived place, the darkened atmosphere of the theatre augment-
ing his temporary suspension of disbelief in the narratively constructed space of the film.
Portable digital media on the other hand makes no such demand. The new media viewer
is both the audience and the projectionist rolled into one with the agency to pause, speed
up, slow down or physically terminate the experience of viewing.20
Therefore, the viewer of the MMS porn-video is as acutely aware of the texture of the
video that plays on the portable device, as he is, of the space of his viewing experience. In
this sense, the screen becomes not merely an interface between the place where the recorded
action occurs and the lived place of the viewer, but becomes a space in its own right.21
8 A. K. BAISHYA

Between the titillating nature of the recorded imagery and the titillation of the viewing
subject, the screen becomes endowed with an erotics of its own. The poor aesthetics of
the MMS video then become a sign of the erogenous, and pixelation, jerky movement and
night-vision shooting become symptoms of the sexual. The invitation for dual presence
makes the screen itself a bloom space of sexual possibilities. Think, for instance, of the
current popularity of cam sites such as Chatroulette and Omegle, in which one is as likely
to come across people sitting at their office desks as chancing upon a broadcaster mastur-
bating to the camera.22
A very public example of this spatial duality in the Indian context can be seen in a recent
case in which two politicians from the Hindu right-wing party, BJP were caught on tape by a
news channel as they were watching pornographic clips on their portable devices while the
Legislative Assembly was in session in the state of Karnataka. This controversial incident has
been surrounded by a moral rhetoric, especially given BJPs own hardline stance in matters
of morality and obscenity. Moral debates aside, there are interesting spatial undertones to
the entire issue. This is best reflected in a tweet from Derek OBrien, a member of Trinamool
Congress, another political party. The tweet went: If an MP (or) MLA watches porn in his
bedroom, its his problem. If he watches it in (the) Parliament (or) Assembly its a big prob-
lem.23 Clearly, the problem was not merely that pornographic media was being consumed
by people in positions of power, but the fact that it was being consumed in the space of the
Assembly. The dual space inhabited by the politicians in this case was transgressive, as it
allowed the private to leak into the public. This leads me to another point the erotics of
the screen is constituted by the ever present possibility of leaking. This idea of the leak is also
key to understanding the other case I examine in this paper the Delhi Metro MMS case.

Of other (leaking) spaces

Leaked into the Internet last year, the CCTV footage of a couple getting intimate on Delhis
Mass Rapid Transport System is certainly curious as far as pornography goes. As with the
Mysore-Mallige video, several versions of varying lengths are to be found in circulation in
pornographic websites, often with the suffix, MMS (Figure 3). But while the Mysore-Mallige
video was deliberately shot as a record of a sexual escapade, the Delhi Metro MMS is an
example of found pornography. The image is extremely blurred all we can see are a man
and a woman on the screen getting intimate. There is some physical contact, some kissing
and fondling, while all other assumptions of sexual activity are to be inferred.
One of the original versions of the video can still be found on non-pornographic
video-sharing sites such as Dailymotion and Youtube. Here, the footage is accompanied by
a soundtrack featuring the voices of the DMRC (Delhi Metro Rail Corporation) employees
who allegedly captured and leaked the video. The conversation between the men, peppered
with jeers, laughter and commentary on the action, is also marked by what can be con-
sidered to be production decisions. Should we capture this horizontally or vertically? one
of them asks; get that pose [] we need to get his face clearly, another says.24 Yet, despite
these seeming substitutions for production decisions, the footage is not pornographic in the
sense that industrially produced, hardcore pornography is. There is no focus on genitalia, no
aestheticization, no investment in sexual climax or what Williams (1989) calls the money
shot (100). If these generic features alone define pornography, then the MMS video must
be non-porn in every conceivable way.
 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE 9

Figure 3.The Delhi Metro footage as seen in a popular pornographic website

Note: Screenshot.

If the surveillance footage is essentially not pornographic in terms of aesthetic or visual

coding, why does it circulate as porn? Bharath Murthy offers an interesting definition of the
pornographic image that might allow one to think outside of generic boundaries in such
a situation. He says: basically the definition of a pornographic image [is that] its an image
that is not supposed to be seen, but is seen. So it can be any image.25 This idea that any
image can become pornographic is reflected in what the Italian artist Messina (2006) calls
realcore to differentiate amateur pornography from hard core and soft core pornography.
According to Messina while soft core pornography involves simulated sex and in hard core
pornography sex is performed on screen by actors, the kind of amateur pornography found
on the Internet is concerned with pictures of real people with real desires, having real sex
in real places (2006 n.pag.).26 Other scholars such as Godmilow (2002) have also written
about the pornography of the real. In critiquing the idea that there is a neutral truth that
can be uncovered by cinema without authorial or ideological investment, Godmilow writes
about the pornography of the real the exploitation of real life situations to produce the
titillation of difference [] the secret sentiment best characterized by the phrase Thank God
thats not me, while also encouraging them [the audience] to peek at the devastated, the dis-
torted, the dispossessed and the daringly, dramatically different (4). This suggestion of the
real as the symptom of the pornographic allows us to read beyond the pornographic image
as genre and instead read into images, a pornographic mode. Something similar happens
in the case of the MMS porn-video, especially ones that have seemingly no sex in them.
If the real were to be considered a frame for reading MMS pornography, then space and
place are an intrinsic part of the equation of affects. In a case such as the Delhi Metro MMS
10 A. K. BAISHYA

that is defined by a total lack of sexual intercourse, or has a hint of an erotic encounter at
best, the pornographic is defined by leakage of the real. This not a leak merely of informa-
tion, but is an instance where the space of what Williams (2004) describes as the on/scene,
leaks into the lived world of the viewer. By the on/scene Williams refers to that which was
originally relegated to the realm of the obscene and was kept out of public view, but has
now appeared in the new public/private realms of Internet and home video (3). The on/
scene then is the dangerous supplement to visual culture; that which needs to be kept out
of view, but nevertheless appears stubbornly, becoming the pivot of moral, legal, sexual and
censorial debates. Physical intimacy and sexual relations are very much a part of the on/
scenity of the Indian public sphere where contestations about public intimacy are extremely
frequent.27 In the Delhi Metro MMS, the on/scene leaks into the off-screen and the private
leaks into the public as the thin LCD skin separating the image from the world dissolves,
fusing the double spatiality into one. It doesnt matter if there is fornication in the video or
not just the mere fact that the private place of the sex-act leaks into the public, and the
clandestine video leaks into public discourse is enough to render it pornographic.

Conclusion
There are of course, more things to be said about MMS videos: questions of ethics, law and
morality always come up in troubling ways while dealing with the anomalous objects of
digital culture (Parikka, Sampson 3). However, addressing those questions requires a move
towards alternate models of thought. Thinking about MMS pornography then, requires a
certain placing within the material culture of the network. By this I mean that questions
of law, ethics and morality must be placed within the dialectic of body and screen, and the
exchange between desire and the network.
New and emerging work in the field such as Wendy Chuns work on network cultures
and surveillance (2006), Jussi Parikka and Tony Sampsons work on the underbelly of the
Internet (2009) and Susanna Passonens work on affect and online pornography (2011)
offer us alternate ways of conceptualizing pornography beyond the nature and content
of the image alone. The image has of course not disappeared, but in the viral economy of
the Internet, it has begun to appear simultaneously and rapidly. Taking cognizance of a
network enabled form such as MMS pornography then, is to also take recognize that we
no longer enter the internet we carry it with us (Sheller, De Souza 4). This returns us to
the question of the leak. To leak is to have matter from one space spill into another, for one
world to blend into another. The leak is by nature, transgressive.
One could then postulate that the leak is the constitutive threat of the Internet economy
think of sting operations and Wikileaks for instance. Amateur porn videos such as the
Mysore-Mallige video and the Delhi Metro MMS must be read within this lurking possibility
of the leak. Thinking of place then becomes all the more necessary when dealing with a form
like MMS pornography, for it is in the question of place, in its apparent lack or its sudden
foregrounding that we begin to catch glimpses of the skeleton of the networked universe.

Notes
1.
For instance Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron (2013) state that the moral panic unleashed by
the widespread circulation of pornographic images produced with cell phones after the Delhi
 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE 11

Public School scandal, was so large in scale that Schools and colleges tried to ban mobile
phones, and authorities around the country responded to the menace in various ways (194,
195). They also point out the kind of informal economy that evolved especially around this
kind of pornography, as downloading services mushroomed to cater to the multitude of
people who did not have computers (217). In the legal sphere, the DPS case inaugurated a
high profile case against Avnish Bajaj, the CEO of Bazee.com (the Indian branch of Ebay).
Bajaj had no hand in directly selling the DPS clip online as a student of IIT Delhi initiated
the online auction. However, since this case had no previous precedent, the state decided to
pursue the case against the online vendor itself. Detailed analyses of the legal complications
around the case can be found in Namita Malhotras Porn: Law, Video, Technology (2011) and
Nishant Shahs The Technosocial Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace (2012).
2.
Multimedia Messaging Service or MMS refers to the technology whereby multimedia content
such as audio files, digital still photographs and moving images can be shared between
cellphones. The rather quick association of MMS and cellphones with pornography echoes
the association of the polaroid camera with the production of amateur pornography in the
1960s. Writing about the case of the polaroid camera, Susanna Paasonen (2016) points out
that the polaroid bypassed the need to engage another party in the production process by
removing the need to develop film (71, 72). Cellphone technology, it could be said takes this
a step further and makes both production and distribution easier.
3.
For a detailed discussion of surveillance and voyeurism in Bannerjees film, see Kuhu Tanvirs
Through the Digital Peephole: LSD and the grammar of transparency in South Asian Popular
Culture (2015).
4.
For instance, see Nisha Susans article on MMS porn, Porn at the End of the Rainbow where
she writes: The phone camera is this decades sex tweak and the making of the sex tape is
merely a new addition to the human repertoire [] In another era, the awestruck lover might
have been mucking about with a paintbrush instead (2011). The centrality of the cellphone
in this account is echoed in Robin Jeffrey and Assa Dorons 2013 work, The Great Indian
Phonebook where they trace the phenomenal rise of cell phone technology in India and
demonstrate that cell phone usage in India has shown a kind of unevenness and adaptability
that societies show when confronted by seemingly global technologies. For instance, they
point out how the figure of the mobile wali (mobile wielding woman) became eroticized and
objectified in popular music videos in the Bhojpuri language in the late 2000s. Though not
strictly pornographic, here the cell phone becomes attached to anxieties about domesticity,
femininity and cultural propriety. The cell phone, hence, is both an object of threat and fantasy
and this is resonated in the form of MMS pornography as well.
5.
While masala refers to the Hindi word for spice a thinly veiled reference to the nature of
these videos, Mallu is colloquial slang for Malayali, and refers to the spate of Malayalam-
language soft porn films that emerged in India in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For a more
detailed description of Malayalam soft-porn see Darshana S Minis The Spectral Duration
of Malayalam Soft Porn where she writes about the ways that Mallu Aunty films and Hot
South Indian films have become synonymous with the pornographic imagination in India.
6.
Namita Malhotra (2011) echoes Steyerls thoughts when she writes that the Indian amateur
porn videos resolution is often so low that it plays like a thumbnail of a video that if enlarged
to occupy a cinematic or even laptop screen, would disintegrate into fuzzy pixels, and tell
even less of the events that it records (87).
7.
For instance, a fragment of the Mysore-Mallige video can be found on sites such as YouTube
and Daily Motion with the title, Kajol on Bed while Sleeping MMS Scandal Video (see https://
www.dailymotion.com/video/x33n6yl) while another fragment can be found on Xvideos titled
Sex Dating Links with MMS as one of the tags.
8.
For Barthes (1986), the effect of reality is conveyed in a narrative by means of attention to
apparently insignificant details, which, by their very insignificance or banality become signs
of reality (148).
12 A. K. BAISHYA

9. The night-vision mode has become a staple of horror films globally being prominently used
in a number of box-office successes such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal
Activity (2009).
10.Nicknamed Bastaads Edit this version of the video can be found on the pornographic website,
Xvideos.com.
11.One could also make this argument about other, more mainstream cultural products that
involve fan participation and fan labour for instance anime music videos (in which fans
mix footage from their favourite anime shows to the tune of popular songs) or fanfiction (in
which fans draw from their favourite fictional characters and set them in new stories of their
own imagining).
12.While both documentaries are based on the same topic, they were made for different
broadcasters. What Are You Looking At? was made for Indias Public Service Broadcasting
Trust (PSBT) and The Jasmine of Mysore was made for its Japanese counterpart, NHK.
13.See Indian Porn at its Amateur Best in The New Indian Express<https://www.newindianexpress.
com/magazine/article272471.ece?service=print>.
14.See Freedom of Expression: interview with Bharath Murthy in Pad.ma.
15.See Ways of an Indian Pervert in The Times of India<https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
india/Ways-of-the-Indian-pervert/articleshow/692375.cms>.
16.Barbara Klinger (2006) notes that one of the ways in which cinema has thrived in private
spaces has been through the medium of the home movie amateur productions shot by
and featuring family members (4). According to Klinger, the cinematic experience is not
constituted by theatrical film exhibition alone, and the space of the private is as important in
the history of cinema as the film theatre itself. This argument can be extended to the realm
of pornographic imagery, where the ability to use mobile devices to record the everyday have
led to an increased intrusion of the cinematic into the private space of the home.
17.See Indian porn at its amateur best in The New Indian Express.
18.Murthy writes: More than position me as a voyeur, which a professional porn film does, it
placed me in an ambivalent position. I felt that I was being watched. I felt it was me engaging
in the act. It was a strange feeling (Ibid).
19.Paasonen for instance, proposes to call online pornographys affective power resonance
instead of identification. She describes resonance as the force and grab of porn its visceral
appeal and power to disturb (16). She goes on to explain that resonance does not refer to
specific kinds of causal effects of pornography but to connections and movement between
porn and its audiences that are always imprinted and marked by contexts and technologies
of production, distribution, and circulation. This movement has no predictable direction or
trajectory (17, my emphasis).
20.Film scholars such as Barbara Klinger note that this increased agency of the viewer started
with the introduction of VCR and then DVD. These technological advancements not only
brought the cinema closer to the home, but also allowed viewers to pause, rewind and fast-
forward essentially to choose what parts of a particular feature to watch (57).
21.This possibility of dual even multiple spatialities is addressed by Lev Manovich in The Poetics
of Augmented Space (2002; 2005) where he writes about new media spaces as augmented
spaces are which physical spaces overlaid with dynamically changing information (2). He
particularly identifies cellspace (mobile media) as a kind of augmented space that is filled
with data which can be retrieved by a user via a personal communication device (3, 4). A
striking recent example of cellspace as augmented space can be seen in the popularity of
Niantics game Pokmon Go, in which the world of the game maps on the physical world of
the player seen through the phone camera. While this kind of cellspace can be seen to be
the literal extreme of augmented space, the idea of spatial duality (or a fusion of one of more
spaces) lies at the root of all mobile, screen-based technologies.
22.In relation to webcams and camsites Wendy Chun (2006) writes that the structure of the
camsite does not necessarily spread voyeurism, but mimics it in order to create indexicality
and authenticity within a seemingly nonindexical medium (103). In other words the
 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE 13

transmission of affect in online pornography is not guaranteed by the image, but is promised
by the network in which the image is endlessly replicated.
23.MLA stands for Member of the Legislative Assembly and MP stands for Member of Parliament.
In Indias political system, the Parliament is the highest legislative body in the country. Each
state also has a legislative body of its own, called the State Legislative Assembly. See Karnataka
Porn Scandal in NDTV<https://www.ndtv.com/article/karnataka/karnataka-porn-scandal-
ruckus-in-assembly-three-ministers-may-be-asked-to-quit-as-mlas-174294>.
24.See DELHI METRO FOOTAGE LEAKED COUPLE in Youtube. A re-upload of this video
can be found in Dailymotion; see<https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2me9dd>. Original
conversation is in Hindi, translation mine.
25.See Freedom of Expression: Interview with Bharath Murthy in Pad.ma.
26.Messinas definition resonates with Namita Malhotras assertion that in the Indian context, the
amateur pornographic video is often a fragment of video, made with a cheap accessible form
of recording whether the mobile phone camera, the digital camera, surveillance camera,
webcam or a carefully placed hidden camera (86, 87).
27.A very recent manifestation of this can be seen in the recent Kiss of Love campaign in Kerala
and elsewhere, wherein young couples took to the streets and kissed publicly in a show of
protest against moral policing and the crackdown on public intimacy by Hindu right-wing
organizations such as the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha and the Shiv Sena.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Nitin Govil, Priya Jaikumar, Darshana Mini and Amit Baishya for their invaluable
comments and suggestions for this paper and Bharath Murthy for providing me with copies of his
films. Also a special note of thanks to the Adult Film Histories SIG, for sponsoring the panel on South
Asian Pornographies in the SCMS Conference at Montreal in 2015, where this paper was presented.

Notes on contributor
Anirban K Baishya is a PhD candidate and an Annenberg Fellow at the Cinema and Media Studies
Division, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. His research interests include
surveillance, pornography, and cellphone cultures and his PhD dissertation examines the selfies and
the rise of digital selfhood in contemporary India.

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Filmography
Dev D. Dir. Anurag Kashyap. Perf. Abhay Deol, Mahi Gill, Kalki Koechlin. UTV Motion Pictures,
2009. Film.
The Blair Witch Project. Dir. Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Snchez. Perf. Heather Donahue, Michael C.
Williams, Joshua Leonard. Artisan Entertainment, 1999. Film.
LSD: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha. Dir. Dibakar Bannerjee. Perf.Nushrat Bharucha, Anshuman Jha, Neha
Chauhan, Raj Kumar Yadav. Balaji Motion Pictures, 2010. Film.
Paranormal Activity. Dir. Oren Peli. Perf. Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs. Solana
Films, Paramount Pictures, 2007. Film.
The Jasmine of Mysore. Dir. Bharath Murthy. Perf. Aishi Sengupta, Bharath Murthy. NHK, 2007. Video.
What Are You Looking at? Dir. Bharath Murthy. Perf. Abhriam, Aishi Sengupta, Ashish Rajadhyaksha,
Pratibha Nandakumar. PSBT, 2007. Video.