A Companion to the History of the Book (91 page)

Obscenity
is a notably protean concept that continues to evade definition. The problem is that “such words as ‘indecent,’ ‘lewd,’ and ‘obscene’ can be defined only in terms of one another, producing a closed system that thwarts even the most assiduous inquiry into what any part of it might mean” (Kendrick 1987: 160). But while it may be difficult to establish a coherent or universal definition of the term, it is at least possible to ascertain a set of criteria under which texts, images, and objects have historically been rendered obscene in Western culture. One of the most basic criteria is that the obscene, as used in the “Greek sense” by Peter Michelson, is the “bringing onstage what is customarily kept offstage” (1993: xi) or, in the words of Linda Nead, is the representation of “matter that is beyond representation,” or “which is beyond the accepted codes of public visibility” (Nead 1992: 90). While such a conception clearly encompasses representations of or references to sex or sexuality, it also serves to encompass other representations that have commonly been viewed as unrepresentable, such as images of or references to the excremental functions or to certain degrees or forms of violence. All pornography is thus clearly obscene (since “[p]ornography is the representation of sexuality so as to make its obscenity conspicuous, to the point of evoking its transgression of conventional taboos”; Michelson 1993: xii), but not all obscenity is pornographic. This is evident based upon our second criteria under which works have commonly been deemed obscene in the West, namely the espousal of “unconventional moral attitudes” (St. John-Stevas 1956: 2) such as free love or homosexuality. In the case of this conceptualization of the obscene, it is subject matter rather than language or imagery that is the source of contention.

The third and final criterion is mode of representation. Under this criterion, language could become the basis for rendering a work obscene, as in the case of advertisements or texts relating to medical matters (generally sexuality) that employed “colloquial” rather than “scientific” language (Sarch 1987). But by the late nineteenth century, form was often the most important consideration in classifying a work obscene in Western aesthetics, particularly in the case of art and literary works. Thus, Aubrey Beardsley’s sketches and James Joyce’s
Ulysses
were able to evade being labeled “obscenity” (although only after a series of trials and tribulations) by virtue of the highly stylized nature of their works (Michelson 1993; Pease 2000).

The ability to judge whether the form, language, or content of a particular work rendered it obscene was dependent on what in Western aesthetics was deemed to be the antithesis of the obscene, namely art. As Linda Nead reveals, form and framing are central to Western conceptions of both art, “defined in terms of the containing of form within limits,” and of the obscene, “defined in terms of excess, as form beyond limit, beyond the frame and representation” (Nead 1992: 20). The importance of form can be traced back to Plato, for whom objects were merely the reflection of absolute forms which lie beyond the realm of the senses. The dichotomies that Plato established – between form and matter, mind and body, ideal and real – became the basis of the Enlightenment reformation of aesthetics, most notably embodied in Immanuel Kant’s
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment
(1790). Kant sought to distinguish between contemplative pleasure (which was predicated upon reflection on an object) and sensory pleasures (which were not and hence were less refined). Crucial to the experience of contemplative pleasure was that the observer should remain a disinterested rather than a desiring subject during the act of contemplating an object; the object itself, in order to be labeled art, should exist for no other purpose than to be contemplated. But art was also, according to Kant, defined by form. As Nead argues, for Kant “what is bad, what is outside of or goes beyond aesthetic taste and judgement, is matter – that which is motivated, which seduces, embarrasses, or leads the viewer astray, away from the proper consideration of intrinsic form” (Nead 1992: 24–5). By the nineteenth century, such arguments had come to be used to distinguish between art and obscenity, with the latter being denied the status of art because it invited
interested
rather than disinterested contemplation. The obscene was thus what served to promote action or arousal, to create embodied viewers or readers, rather than disembodied contemplating ones.

Obscenity is not, therefore, inherently intrinsic to an object: an object becomes obscene, in part, by virtue of the response of the viewing subject. How an individual responds to a given object, as Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has argued, is dependent on the cultural capital of the viewer, which is largely contingent on class. Emerging out of the rise of industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth century, aesthetic judgment or taste became a means through which gentlemen could conceptualize themselves as apart from or outside the realm of material experience and hence capable of disinterested, socially generous behavior. “High” culture, predicated on a rational, disinterested pleasure, was seen as distinct from “low” culture, predicated on the pleasures of the appetite; elevating high over low culture thereby served to assert an individual’s cultural distinction. As Alison Pease reveals, the problem with the obscene (particularly in its most iniquitous form, the pornographic) was not only that it was associated with the working classes and hence “threatened the class hierarchies upon which aesthetic theories of the eighteenth century rested by exposing common experience in bodily sensation,” but that “the selfish individualism that pornography celebrated was viewed as pestilential to civility” (Pease 2000: xii). Since in an increasingly egalitarian society the acquisition of civil liberty was equated with self-control, the loss of self-control threatened, quite literally, the body politic (Bataille 1986). For conservative social theorists such as Edmund Burke, fashioning the social order through a typology of aesthetic responses was thus proof against revolutionary upheavals. While by the late nineteenth century, social theorists such as Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde were attempting to inculcate a rapidly expanding reading public with a “high” cultural aesthetic, as Linda Dowling (1996) has demonstrated, they also feared that this would debase elite culture in the process. The danger was that objects, images, and words would all take on new meanings through their contamination by the masses, who had yet to cultivate disinterest.

But why was there such fierce debate over obscenity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to what particular uses has obscenity been put? In the West, the censorship of obscenity evolved in the context of social and cultural transformations such as the industrial and French revolutions, secularization, urbanization, class formation, nationalism, women’s emancipation, and the professionalization of medicine. While brought under the purview of state control through criminal law, until the latter half of the nineteenth century the regulation of obscenity tended to remain largely in the hands of moral reform organizations (Bristow 1977: 40–1; Alan Hunt 1999: 57). Although the “dissipation” of the upper classes was always a concern of such organizations, their main goal remained the moralization of the poor (Goldstein 1992: 129; Roberts 1992: 146; Alan Hunt 1999: 62). However, a new spate of purity movements emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that were distinguished from their predecessors in a number of important ways: they were mass movements (in which large sections of both the middle and “respectable” working classes were mobilized); women played an important role in them; and, while they made attempts to reform the morality of the working classes, their chief target was the middle and upper classes (Foucault 1990: 123; Beisel 1993; Lynn Hunt 1993: 12–13; Alan Hunt 1999: 98). The aim of middle-class reformers was, in short, to ensure that “those who were to govern should themselves be morally regulated so as to secure cultural hegemony” and to “cement the two great modern classes into a ‘new’ national community under the leadership of the middle class . . .” (Alan Hunt 1999: 189, 120).

Such concerns did not only exist in the West, however. By the late nineteenth century, India, subject to the “civilizing mission” of British colonial rule for over a century, was in the process of fashioning a nationalist modernity that, while derivative, represented a distinct and decidedly anti-colonial political rationality, including its conceptions of, and attitudes toward, the obscene. While English-educated Indians were certainly well versed in Western aesthetics, they were also, along with their more traditionally trained counterparts, grounded in Indian aesthetic traditions. Since in Hinduism
kama
(the satisfaction of desire) was perceived to be one of the four elements of human activity, obscenity was viewed in a slightly different light from its general perception in the West. Although the concept of obscenity
(aslilata)
existed, for example, in Sanskrit poetry, the presence of “obscene” images in a poem was regarded not as a moral wrong but as a literary fault. What determined whether such “faults” should be considered obscene or not was whether the author’s intention was to sexually excite his or her readers (Masson-Moussaieff 1971; Dwivedi 1981). Although the doctrine of original sin (which permeated Muslim as well as Christian literature) had effected some changes in Indian aesthetics by the onset of colonial rule, obscenity was still largely deemed an intellectual rather than a practical “problem” (Khosla 1976).

British rule altered Indian conceptions of obscenity by introducing both Western conceptions of obscenity and new forms and types of “obscene” literature into India. By 1895, more than five million packages of books and newspapers a year were being imported into India from Britain, a figure which jumped to more than twelve million by the early twentieth century (National Archives of India 1895, 1911). At the same time, changes in the indigenous publishing industry (in terms of the amount and type of literature being published) and the rise of new socio-religious reform and nationalist movements all fed debates over obscenity and emergent discourses about degeneracy, racial purity, and moral reform. While similar to such discourses in the West, they were also in many ways distinct (see, for example, Chatter jee 1995; Robb 1995; Gupta 2001; Sarkar 2001). Indian educators and moral reformers, for example, tended to regard much of both Western and Indian literature and popular culture as morally corrupt. Religious leaders and social reformers, on the other hand, were inclined to deem the literature of their own community as “pure” in opposition to that of the “infidels” (of both foreign and indigenous origin). Nationalists maintained that not only were the British prudes when it came to censoring their own literature, but that they were responsible for introducing the idea of obscenity into India in the first place – and, in doing so, had forced Indians to view elements of their own culture in a derogatory light. But since the damage, once done, could not be undone, nationalists tended to criticize the colonial government for failing to sufficiently regulate Indian print culture which, many of them were convinced, needed to be purified before India could obtain
swaraj
(self-rule).

These variant discourses were united, however, by one major concern, namely the depiction of Indian women as exotic and sexualized beings. Although purifying the image of women was a standard trope of anti-obscenity crusaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such concerns assumed particular resonance in a colonial context such as India. Since colonial rule severely limited the ability of Indian nationalists to challenge threats to their power and authority in the public sphere, they placed a distinct emphasis on “restoring” their masculinity and redeeming the Indian “race” by transforming the domestic sphere – an agenda that Pradip Kumar Bose regards in Foucauldian terms as “a change from the government
of families
to government
through the family”
(Bose 1995: 125). A key method adopted by Indian (particularly Hindu) elites to achieve this was to reform the role of Indian women. While “orthodox” Hindus regarded women as the bearers of Hinduism (since they were believed to be ruled by Scripture and to be uncorrupted by Western education or the depredations suffered by Hindu men in the colonial public sphere; Sarkar 1998), and Hindu “reformers” believed that they were the repositories of a new, reformed Hinduism (from which practices such as child marriage and enforced widowhood would be abolished), both regarded women as the embodiment of the virtues of chastity, purity, and self-sacrifice (Katrak 1992). Not only were figures of Hindu mythology, such as Sita, Savitri, and Draupadi, held up as ideals of Hindu womanhood, but the discourse of the civilizing mission was turned on its head through pitting the “pure” Indian woman against her “impure” colonial counterpart. The European woman was regarded as impure because she exhibited not only her face (in beauty contests reported in “respectable” journals) but also her body (in European films and cinema posters). As one nationalist critic noted, “In India . . . even women of evil fame will not consent to display their bodies in this shameless manner” (National Archives of India 1923).

The path to self-rule was thus dependent on the de-exoticization and desexualization of the Indian woman, and the creation of a new moral code. During the course of the nationalist movement, Indian elites made numerous efforts to fashion such a code. In the nineteenth century, these included attempts to replace ritual correctness with a system of personal ethics, to develop physical culture, and to uplift the “depressed” classes (Raychaudhuri 1975; Rosselli 1980; Bayly 1999). Efforts to regenerate Indian morality became more complex in the twentieth century, and they also became more intimately entwined with concerns over biological regeneration, influenced in part by the eugenics movement (Hodges 2005). It is in the context of such movements that the drive to censor “the obscene” must be placed. Hence, while the explicit aim of an organization such as the Society for the Suppression of Public Obscenity, founded in 1873, was to enforce the law against obscene publications as it stood and to improve the law if it were deemed necessary, the larger goal was distinctly nationalist. Not only did the Society contain an impressive array of Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Brahmos (“all united in this great work by a common morality”) but they all sought to promote “the progress of the country” through “the promotion of pure, and the suppression of undoubtedly vicious, literature”
(Counterpoint
1978: 179) – to overcome, in short, the effects on Indian society of the project of colonial modernity. Yet appropriating or “translating” Western aesthetics was not, perhaps, the best way to achieve this. As the novelist, essayist, and linguistic reformer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay lamented, in “observing the aesthetically new Bengali literature of the modern time ascendant on the path of progress, I sometimes wonder – it may be beautiful, but perhaps it is alien, not ours. Why don’t I find the pure Bengali feelings in the pure Bengali style?” (quoted in Banerjee 1989: 175). The translation of Western aesthetics into the Indian cultural milieu undermined, as Chattopadhyay was well aware, the very “pure” Indian culture that nationalists and reformers were battling to construct.