movie: Mastram

yesterday watched a recently released movie Mastram written and directed by Akhilesh Jaiswal.Sometimes back, there was Miss Lovely, a film on c-grade movies by Ashim Ahluwalia. While Mastram is a fictionalised bio-pic on the mystical magical unknown author of Hindi porn booklets with which we (and various generations) grew up Miss Lovely weaves complex web of business, sleazy sex-horror films that form the deep underbelly that has sustained mumbai film industry. Mastram is unknown as the author figure has not been identified with or claimed by any individual so far (see the link below). In the film the authorial figure is given a face and a location. The face is of an individual named Rajaram (essayed brilliantly on the screen by Rahul Bagga) who aspired to go to JNU to pursue M.Phil but was lured by his mama to get married to 'the most beautiful girl of Himachal' and who aspired to be recognised as a man of letters, who adored personalities like Tagore and Premchand as their portraits completed the mise en scene of his study. The location is of a small nondescript town in Himachal in the proximity of Manali as we often come across Manali in written fonts on the walls whenever mastram travels in search of a publisher). He wanted to move to Delhi but remained in his muffasil town seduced by the charm of his wife and his padosan bhabhi. The narrative is non aggressive yet gripping and also attempts to map shifting contours of this genre called mastram with the change in the language, sexual vocabulary and metonymic figures (i.e. Sabita bhabhi). At this level, the bio-pic goes beyond and tries to capture the spirit rather than stays true to the world created in the pages of mastram. I here assume that Sabita bhabhi and mastram are two different constituencies of hindi porn world. I may be wrong entirely. Precisely at this stage, the question pertaining to the figure of an individual author crops up. We are often condemned to think about mastram through an individual writer yet, we can not separate it from the genre. This was a series without a given printer line. The writer directed says that it started as a journey to search this author. This may be a genuine impulse of a reader. Many of us wanted to meet and know about the author Mastram and his world from which characters emerged. We transposed these characters from our own environment to enter into the world of desire and pleasure. In this way we were also writing an obituary declaring the death of the author mastram in Barthes sense of the term. But, many of us also created our own porn stories and shared them with friends in high schools and college hostels. I remember those having 'experiences' were always respected in such gatherings and those who did not often took shelter in their creativity and imagination to impress upon our friends. The golden rule though was to make imagination look like real experience yet hotter and larger than a lived experience. A story that can be located and identified but that had to transcend the confinements and trappings of social world, that had to transcend here and now...opening a world imbued with bodies which can be made naked for the imagination. Do we need to remind that this was essentially a male field of imagination? Sabita bhabhi, i tend to believe offers an alternate terrain though. https://in.news.yahoo.com/why-i-went-in-search-of-the-erotica-writer-mastram-075627987.html?fb_action_ids=10152346840795266&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_ref=facebook_cb

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Sadan Jha
Associate Professor,
Centre for Social Studies.
Vir Narmad South Gujarat University Campus. Udhna-Magdalla Road.
Surat.395007 Gujarat. India.
blog: mamuliram.blogspot.com
http://www.css.ac.in/sadan_jha.html