Media Ecologies of Transnationalism and Liberalization: NRIs, Piracy, and “Blue Films” in 1980s’ India

Anxieties about the power of media forms to influence social behavior have always been at the center of media regulation efforts. This can be seen in contemporary India, for instance, in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s latest advisory directed at “Online Curated Content Platforms”—what most of us now know as OTT (over-the-top) streaming platforms. The advisory outlines the need to align streaming platforms with the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021, as the Ministry had been receiving complaints about obscenity and vulgarity in the content curated by these platforms. The demand for regulation of content though, is not new. It has parallels in the anxieties about piracy, media import, video technology, cable television, and foreign media that came with liberalization in the 1990s. In fact, each technological transition—the coming of video, cable television, and streaming platforms, for example, destabilized the harmony and balance of state-managed media regulation. 

As an immediate precursor to liberalization, when India formally opened up its economy, there emerged a consumer economy routed through the diaspora, which could be seen even in the 1980s. This included, among other things, the increasing popularity of VCRs and VHS tapes, first through import, although soon enough, locally made video cassettes were available to tide the influx of smuggled goods that made their way from Southeast Asia and the Gulf. The impacts of these changes were not merely economic or technological; one related phenomenon in the 1980s and the 1990s was the emergence of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) as a key pillar in the government’s media policy. 

Though they seem to point in slightly different directions, the advances in video technology and the increasing prominence of the NRI constituency had unintended side effects for film production and distribution cultures and the economy of erotic videos and soft porn films in India. Anxieties about video piracy and a scheme intended to draw in NRI funds counterintuitively led to an influx of foreign exploitation films from Europe and the US, which would eventually play a key role in creating the Malayalam “soft porn” genre as we know it today. 

Video Technology and Home Viewing
In the 1990s, manufacturing firms such as Videocon, BPL, and Kalyani Sharp started to manufacture VCRs and videocassette players (VCPs) for domestic consumption after licenses were issued by the central government for the manufacture of over 900,000 VCR/VCPs. The boost of the home-bred VCR manufacturers also supported popular interest in VHS tapes. Among other things, this led to an explosion in home viewing of direct-to-video erotic thrillers in the 1990s, alongside Pay TV, which was popular among Indians in the Gulf. “Blue films,” as pornographic films are colloquially called in India, were commodities that entered India via the Gulf, both as pirated VHS tapes, as well as material left behind by sailors in the merchant ships, which were then resold in domestic black markets. The privacy offered by home viewing allowed audiences the possibilities of watching erotic content from the confines of their bedroom. The imported blue films were rehashed and made available as thundu—extraneous segments that were spliced into the reel of soft-porn films during exhibition. The spread of video and its massive proliferation in India in the 1990s found accounts in media reports alongside anxieties around a shadow economy of smuggling and piracy.As R. Srinivasan writes in The Times of India in 1991, video tapes were confiscated from Bombay’s Santacruz Electronics Export Processing Zone, smuggled from countries such as Hong Kong using carriers. He writes that alongside the usual tactics of using carbonized paper to hoodwink X-ray scans and making use of contact persons at the customs, carriers detracted the officers by strategically paying duty for VCR and stereo, while keeping the contraband items on a separate bag with them, relying on the fact that the customs personnel wouldn’t suspect a person who has paid a substantial amount of duty as the carrier of hidden items.

In the years before liberalization, in 1986, film industry groups attributed the decline in the number of feature films to the video invasion’s dent in the box-office, which led to a domino effect where the drop-in cinema viewership meant a corresponding drop in the profitability of investing in film production. There was a constant sense of anxiety around video piracy as a scourge that impacted the distribution of the films. The loss was also amplified in terms of the money the government was losing in entertainment tax as a result of the number of VCRs that were illegally imported into the country. In a 1986 statement, the Film Federation of India noted how video piracy affected the export of Indian film reels as well as official VCR prints to the Gulf countries. The state governments, in the meantime, came up with regulatory mechanisms to put a check on the uncontrolled rate at which video parlors were mushrooming. The unlicensed nature of the video libraries, under-the-table transactions such as renting of sex videos, bootleg copies of newly released films, and illegally made copies of 35mm films were all projected as the immediate cause of worry. In March 1984, the Cinematograph Act of 1952 was amended to include the provision that all videocassettes should carry a fresh censor certificate. Since the state governments collected the entertainment tax, it was considered their responsibility to ensure that regulatory mechanisms were devised to contain video piracy. 

The NRI Scheme
Alongside changes in India’s media ecology, broader socio-economic developmentsalso had a part to play. Enter the NRI. The Indian diaspora in the 1990s was initially identified as a pool of untapped resources that could stabilize the economy when India faced a shortage of foreign exchange. In the film sector, the devaluation of the Rupee in 1991 had unforeseen impacts—the import of raw 35mm stocks plummeted, film stock prices shot up, and some National Film Development Corporation-funded filmmakers were then asked to shoot in the cheaper 16mm, instead of 35 mm. Illicit funds, hoarding, and speculation were already key concerns by the late-1970s. Interestingly, amidst calls for identifying hoarders, there were news reports that portrayed the Indian cinema industry as one of the prime sites that bypassed the regulations by using “black money” for transactions that ranged from remuneration for stars to advance payments for exhibitors. Furthermore, by the 1980s, despite an increase in exports, interest payments and imports rose faster, leading to an external payment crisis and balance of payments. This forced the government to find ways of rebuilding foreign exchange, leading them to turn to the NRI constituency. The introduction of NRI bonds—foreign exchange deposits raised from NRIs at attractive rates for a period of 3-5 years with some lock-in and an implicit Reserve Bank of India guarantee—made NRIs a concrete base of India’s financial backbone. Against this history of larger economic forces and film-institutional histories, one can locate the emergence of the “NRI scheme.” 

In 1984, fueled by the potential for NRI remittances, the Indian government came up with a film import scheme titled “NRI scheme” that allowed emigrant Indians to import foreign films to India by paying a canalization fee. The National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) was authorized to manage the scheme, with the administrative officer of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) appointed as the canalization agent. The profits accrued through the scheme had to be invested in India. But the import of “NRI films” was discussed widely in the media for all the wrong reasons. NRI-imported films were seen as oversaturating the market and thereby depriving Indian feature films a fair run in the exhibition circuit. Contrary to the figure of the NRI envisaged in the film import scheme as someone who wants to support the country’s development by bringing in foreign exchange, the NRI scheme was not driven solely by NRIs. There were instances when many interested parties based in India used their connections abroad to import foreign films without being bogged down by aesthetic or formal concerns. 

At times, these deals were mediated by agents based in the Southeast Asian countries, such as Singapore and Malaysia, who would connect the NRI with the procurer based in India, who would then share the responsibility of finding the distributor for the films concerned. Bombay-based Tara Singh & Sons, one of the clearance agents for NRIs, helped execute paperwork once the consignment reached the Indian airport. As opposed to the demarcation of foreign films based on the country from which they were being imported, the imported materials were publicized as hybrid packages that included a good mix of Swedish, Danish, and English films. 

An unintended side-effect of this import scheme, however, was that it led to the influx of foreign sex films and exploitation films. While the influx of “blue films” through VHS routes was already prevalent, their import through the exploitation of a government-initiated scheme ruffled quite a few feathers. As complaints started to come in about the quality of imports, the Indian government constituted a film import committee to clear the films before they were sent to the CBFC for certification. It was during this stage that officials at CBFC realized the discrepancy between the written scripts and their visual execution. In effect, by denying certificates to the films that were screened by the film imports committee, CBFC questioned the rationale behind the selection of these films. 

Soft Porn and Sex Education
From 1985-87, 558 films were submitted for clearance, of which 296 were ultimately imported under this scheme. Many discarded prints left at the government warehouse were later sold to scrap dealers and became part of the foreign package films that hit the film exhibition circuits in the early 1990s. Not only did they circulate as film prints, but they were also converted into VHS tapes, finding their way into video parlors where they could be rented, as well as parlors that specifically screened porn for small audiences on VHS. Thus, though the NRI film scheme was meant to boost the economy, it paradoxically played a part in heightening an already fraught film/media circuit where anxieties about piracy and porn went hand-in-hand. 

But it also had unsanctioned productive effects. This genre and its history are the subject of my book Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (University of California Press, Zubaan Books, 2024). The NRI scheme and the sexploitation films that entered India via the scrap dealers played a crucial role in providing templates for Indian filmmakers to incorporate sex education as a label to market these films, and successfully make use of the “S” certification used for specialized audiences to get past the censor’s scrutiny. The NRI film packages were a precursor for the Malayalam soft-porn films that borrowed heavily on the aesthetics, thematics, and industrial models that emerged from the NRI scheme era. The fringe economy of low-budget filmmaking turned transnational with the NRI films, borrowing from their sexploitation narratives to keep the “foreign” import image in place while they inculcated localized versions of pulp fiction and erotica that the viewers were already familiar with to market their wares. It is perhaps safe to say that Malayalam soft-porn as we know it would not exist today without the NRI scheme.