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N i n e C U LT U R A L D I F F E R E N C E S  M i n o r s i n t h e G l o b a l C u l t u r e In 1998, the Indian fundamentalist group Shiv Sena organized violent protests against the film Fire, the tale of a love affair between two women trapped in oppressive marriages. The film’s lesbian theme, ridicule of religious dogma, and portrayal of males as simultaneously tyrannical and ridiculous all contributed to the controversy. By December, Shiv Sena had succeeded in shutting down the film in Bombay, New Delhi, and other major cities, and the government’s Censor Board had agreed to reconsider its earlier certificate of approval. “Is it fair to show such things which are not part of Indian culture?” a Shiv Sena leader was quoted as asking. “It can corrupt tender minds.”1 In India, “corruption of tender minds” was apparently useful rhetoric to advance Shiv Sena’s religious and political ends. But if this particular variation on the harm-to-minors theme was based on fundamentalist Hinduism, India also has a British-style obscenity law, a remnant of colonialism, that turns on the sexual anxieties underlying Regina v. Hicklin.2 In 1911, the law was applied to prosecute the publisher of a poetic retelling of a story from the Uriya Haribans, about the erotic dalliances of the gods Radha and Krishna. The prosecutor argued that the work was obscene, that it might “produce impure thoughts,” especially among schoolboys, and—foreshadowing England’s Lady Chatterley trial forty-nine years later—that the offense was aggravated by the cheapness of the publication’s price. In keeping with Indian cultural tradition, however, the obscenity law ex- empted ancient temple sculptures, paintings, engravings, or other religious images.3 Although the exemption did not cover the written word, its logic provided justification for an eventual acquittal of the Haribans publisher, on the ground that the poem was “an allegorical representation” of the union of “the supreme with the human soul,” and was therefore not likely to deprave and corrupt schoolchildren.4 The defendants in a 1952 Indian case were not so fortunate. The court found that their publication of sexually graphic scenes from the walls of ancient Hindu temples, with accompanying text, was deliberately salacious, likely to “arouse sexual passion” among the impressionable and to “contaminate and tend to upset the balance of an ordinary adolescent mind.” The judges added: “morbid thoughts about sexual passions are intentionally aroused in the minds of those into whose hands this magazine may and are intended to fall and who are open to such immoral influences.”5 A 1971 film censorship case brought Indian jurisprudence a step closer to the beliefs that would animate Shiv Sena 27 years later. The Central Board of Film Censors had demanded cuts of nonexplicit prostitution scenes in a documentary film that contrasted luxury and poverty in four Indian cities; the filmmaker sued to challenge the entire regime of prior review and classification. The Indian Supreme Court rejected the challenge, explaining that motion pictures have the capacity to “stir up emotions more deeply than any other product of art,” particularly among children and adolescents because “their immaturity makes them more willingly suspend their disbelief.” The government’s demand for cuts in exchange for a U rating was reasonable given that “censorship is prevalent all the world over in some form or other.” Much like the MPAA’s (Motion Picture Association of America ’s) Production Code, abandoned in the United States only a few years before , the Indian board’s guidelines banned material that showed sympathy with “crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin,” or that would “lower the moral standards of those who see it.”6 In contrast to the cultural imperatives of postcolonial India or Victorian Britain, Japan has not traditionally associated sex with shame, evil, embarrassment , or sin. Critic Ian Buruma traces sexual themes in Japanese art to a long social tradition: pornographic drawings from at least the 10th century, produced by some of the country’s most celebrated artists, were associated with satire and rebellion.7 Another expert relates the Japanese taste for “fantasy of all kinds” to “the old Confucian puritanism.” Manga, the ubiquitous contemporary “porno-comics” that mix complex adventure stories with nudity and sex, are “a prevalent addiction because they are an outlet for people whose social codes are...

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