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English medium education had rendered my Hindi reading comprehension so slow that browsing a book in my own language seemed like an academic chore. They did well for the sheer audacity of the written word. Slang and abuse make up for absence of vocabulary and Mastram’s books, I’ve heard, were written imagining how a north Indian truck driver would describe his sexual fantasies. Digging deeper, the Hindi word for semen that a friend had come up with in college was ‘brasphootan’ he had apparently deduced this from a book on fish farming. The most popular Hindi word for sex is sex (even ‘yaun’ is too Doordarshan). The word ‘sex’ itself appears in various forms as puns on ‘kaama’: ‘kaameria’ (love-disease), ‘kaamnaon ki baarish’ (rush of love) or ‘kaamohit’ (lust). In the film, Mastram’s writings contain the usual Indian sexual themes- ‘Jijaji’ (brother- in-law), ‘bania’ (shop-owner) and the best friend’s wife ( ‘bhabi’) offering love on the sly. It’s no surprise that writer Mastram’s novellas-a series of cheaply priced pornographic paperbacks-sold like hot samosas at railway bookstalls.Īkhilesh Jaiswal’s film Mastram is a fictional biopic of the eponymous author. Forget pictures, even language was devoid of sexual expression. Such was the famine of images of the female form in Delhi back then. It was a sex-education documentary with a doctor attending to a series of married couples with conjugal issues, besides informing the audience of the side-effects of wearing tight underwear.Īnd yet, every time a pictorial diagram of the female anatomy or a shot of a woman breastfeeding would show up, we would hear the men- in-blankets let out loud guffaws from the front rows. A few minutes into the screening, however, we realised Gupt Shastra was a complete KLPD. Its poster outside, of a voluptuous female upper torso-as usual smeared with black ink-bore tremendous promise. We had bunked school-in our early teens-to catch a ‘morning show’ (a euphemism for soft porn). The sight of men wrapping blankets over their heads like monkey caps wasn’t uncommon in the early 90s except it seemed the few men around us at the box-office counter of Connaught Place’s Rivoli cinema were also trying to hide their faces. A film on an old smut paperback series that nobody wants to watch except nostalgics like me