It is the middle of the night in Peddi. Achiyamma, played by Janhvi Kapoor, drives an open jeep into a field, takes a log of wood, disrobes the pallu from her two-piece sari, and tying it around the wood, lights it on fire. The question of why she is doing this is left dangling, because the more pressing question of her body is yet to be revealed. Thus, before we get explanation, we get eros. 

The fire she lights allows a close-up of her navel, then of her breasts spilling out of her tight low-cut blouse, then her back—and, finally, her face. The body revealed, now logic can re-enter the film. She is setting fire to her own fields to get a sympathy vote in the upcoming election that her father is poised to lose. A sex kitten who can win elections for her father. Dutiful and bountiful, the very font of female empowerment in Telugu cinema. (Achiyamma walks with her hands behind her back throughout the film—one hand clasping the other bicep, making her puff her chest up as she struts forward, her sunglasses tucked into her blouse.) 

Sergei Eisenstein’s theorisation of the montage—where a single shot does not give meaning, but only when paired with another shot, through montage, does it secrete sense—is given a run for its money. Disaggregate the body into parts, and each shot holds its own meaning—pure grist for arousal. 

As was to be expected, many people were troubled with this framing. More than troubling, however, which the framing is, I found it detestably boring, as though Telugu directors have run out of all ideas to frame the female body. The staging stinks of aroused ennui, it does not even have the audacity to turn the erotic into parody before pornography.

Some directors throw fruit at the navel, some coconuts. Some caress it with sunflowers or water droplets. Others make it into a frying pan for a piping omelette. Others merely bask in its presence—that odd, long scene in Kushi (2001) when Pawan Kalyan keeps staring at Bhumika’s navel, the camera leering alongside. (The YouTube video “Bhumika Navel Show” on the official Shemaroo Telugu channel has over 2.5 million views.)

Peddi, however, is a post-social media film, and had to respond to the allegations that went viral of having sexualised Janhvi in the film. The director, Buchi Babu Sana, promised to axe the scenes as people blamed him for his gaze, the actress for her acquiescence, and the star actor Ram Charan for enabling it. Janhvi even started liking posts that critiqued the film’s gaze, pouring gasoline on the debate.

A video came up of Janhvi on Raj Shamani’s podcast, where she makes a distinction between sensualisation and sexualisation. She uses “consent” as the dividing factor, even though this might be a very reductive and clean way of framing it. There is a fragility in this distinction; because both sensualisation and sexualisation are dependent on objectification, the question is, perhaps, of manner and degree. 

Is the picturisation in songs such as “Sheila ki Jawani” or “Beedi Jalaile” or even “Oo Antava” sensualisation or sexualisation? The difference, I suppose, is translucence. Both, clearly, are geared towards a form of arousal. But one does it with a skein, either of cloth or of the shot not closing in on body parts fragmented from the body. They build a world around the body that is in the deep throes of being desired. It is infectious—it allows you to slip into it, perform it for yourself, imagine yourself into it, and revel in its sleaze.

Eroticisation as a site of pleasure

The eroticisation of the female body has been a constant presence in Indian cinema, as part of its patriarchal mandate and its mostly male audience. This is what John Berger succinctly summarised when he wrote, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Telugu cinema is a particularly troubling case which does not even take into account women watching themselves being looked at, with its near absence of female directors.

This eroticisation, though, has also been a site of pleasure, and not just for men. Those arguing against the complete removal of the woman’s body as a site of pleasure are arguing for the excising of pleasure itself from cinema. There is no respectable way of objectification. Besides, desire is not politically well-behaved; it is certainly not respectable, but it is essential to the way we dream our way through the world’s morass. Pleasure gets a bad rep because its merchants can be so deeply cloistered, because they cannot imagine other ways of consuming it. 

There comes a point where this pleasure is so narrowly constructed in the scene we spoke of, for instance, with the way the camera, literally, frames Janhvi as though she is disembodied, that it squeezes out any possibility of play, of imagination, of “more”. This, for me, becomes the point at which sensualisation becomes sexualisation. When Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or-winning Blue Is The Warmest Colour premiered at Cannes in 2013, its 20-minute lesbian sex scene drew a line on the sand—questions of the pornographic appeal of these scenes were overwritten by anxieties around prudishness. No easy answers were provided, because that would turn cinema into a resolved artform. 

Today, films are thought of narrowly, as efficient vehicles of storytelling. Excess flab must be cut out. The whole debate about the “utility” of sex scenes in films came from this narrowness, as though we consume films for their utility. This is why people who reduce a film to its themes and morals as though that is the film miss something essential about cinema: it is always more than what it says, simply because its audio-visual nature allows straying and eludes meaning. It is also why these narrow depictions of the female body are odious—because they do not allow for this more.

If we reduce films to certain tenets, we also reduce spectatorship to those very same tenets. We must celebrate abundance, even as we keep an eye out for how this abundance can be coloured and how it is conjured by structural snags of the world the movies emerge from. In our pursuit of an equitable society, we must not become one bereft of pleasure. In our pursuit of a pleasurable society, we must not become one bereft of equity. We must thrive in that fragility.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.

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