I then decided to investigate further and I had the opportunity to make a couple of documentaries about Mysore Mallige, which was one of its titles. More than position me as a voyeur, which a professional porn film does, it placed me in an ambivalent position. As a film student, I was surprised by the kind of feeling that the video generated in me as a viewer. This video was one of the earliest instances of the phenomenon of amateur porn that has now become a subject of a mainstream Bollywood film (
Of course, there are plenty of Indian pornographic films made in Kerala and elsewhere, where one can see raw, uncared for Indian bodies, but this was the first time I saw people like me, by which I mean middle-class college-educated lovers. It was the first time I had seen graphic sexual intercourse in video being engaged by ‘real’ Indian people, rather than actors paid for it. In 2002, one sultry day in Kolkata, in the hostel (a unisex one) of the Satyajit Ray Film and TV Institute, some of us watched with astonishment an amateur pornographic video.
