Remember Mastram?

A film on an old smut paperback series that nobody wants to watch except nostalgics like me

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. We had bunked school—in our early teens—to catch a ‘morning show’ (a euphemism for soft porn). The film playing was Gupt Shastra. Its poster outside, of a voluptuous female upper torso—as usual smeared with black ink—bore tremendous promise. A few minutes into the screening, however, we realised Gupt Shastra was a complete KLPD. 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.

And 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. Such was the famine of images of the female form in Delhi back then. Forget pictures, even language was devoid of sexual expression. It’s no surprise that writer Mastram’s novellas—a series of cheaply priced pornographic paperbacks—sold like hot samosas at railway bookstalls.

Akhilesh Jaiswal’s film Mastram is a fictional biopic of the eponymous author. 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. His sentences are sexual metaphors. The word ‘sex’ itself appears in various forms as puns on ‘kaama’: ‘kaameria’ (love-disease), ‘kaamnaon ki baarish’ (rush of love) or ‘kaamohit’ (lust). They sound ancient.

The most popular Hindi word for sex is sex (even ‘yaun’ is too Doordarshan). 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. 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. They did well for the sheer audacity of the written word.

I never read Mastram. English medium education had rendered my Hindi reading comprehension so slow that browsing a book in my own language seemed like an academic chore. For instruction and delight, we read ‘Prescription’, the sex advice column in Femina. Most of us watched porn only on printed pages, inevitably starting with the depressing Debonair, a magazine that Atal Behari Vajpayee kept under his pillow, according to its former editor Vinod Mehta. I lost my only copy in the rains, having hidden it under the bushes near my house.

During our time at college, crumpled issues of Playboy or Hustler would get shared among rooms like a community grant. Mumbai’s finest cartoonist Hemant Morporia once told me how he knew nobody read Playboy for the articles: those pages were stuck anyway! Still, Playboy and Hustler did more to push the boundaries of free speech than most of American journalism put together. In Delhi, we would hear about editors of desi girlie-mags like Chastity and Fantasy being arrested by cops on charges of obscenity. This is probably why no one knew who the author Mastram really was, or if it was a shared pseudonym.

In Jaiswal’s film, the writer, who lives in a Himachal town, shields his identity out of shame. He holds high literary ambitions. I can imagine. While in my early twenties, when a proprietor—Mr Jain—offered me the chance to edit Debonair, the first thing I thought of was what my parents would tell their friends. Besides, of course, Jain wouldn’t pay more than my salary as a reporter, which I loved very much. I don’t know how many people read Mastram, but even in small towns, DVDs, satellite TV and the internet should have relieved the worst excesses of sexual repression by now.

Nobody wanted to watch Mastram. I was the only one at the theatre for the Sunday 11 pm show, picking a fight because they wouldn’t let me in. They had cancelled all other shows that day because no one had bought a ticket. After intense discussions with the manager, the box-office clerk finally let me book a ticket for the next morning.

Word on movies usually gets out early on social media. Perhaps people already knew the film wasn’t as exciting as its posters made it out to be. Or maybe nobody wants to revel in nostalgia of a time when men wrapped in blankets got off on female body diagrams and had Mastram to read for erotica. Maybe.

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