“If you can try to gain cheap popularity by using abusive language, as somebody giving threats, he also wants to be popular. The language used in the threat is better than your petitioner’s language.”
-Supreme Court vs Ranveer Allahbadia
This striking remark from a recent Supreme Court hearing against YouTuber Ranveer Allahbadia lays bare the judiciary’s discomfort with online expression that challenges normative ideas of decency. The court ultimately deemed Allahbadia’s language “vulgar,” “immoral,” and “anti-Indian” – a conclusion echoing India’s long-standing anxiety around obscenity and sexuality. According to the Supreme Court, the language used in death threats is better than the “perverse” language used by Allahbadia. This makes one ponder whether obscenity is just an arbitrary category or one that mirrors the deep-seated patriarchal anxiety around sexuality.
Rather than debating whether his language was right or wrong, I want to examine why it provoked national moral outrage – and how obscenity continues to govern our ideas of sexuality.
The politics of obscene language has been an age-old debate. One that played a prominent role in shaping ideas about sexuality. The origins of obscenity are indeed rooted in colonial Victorian notions of sexual purity, but these have seeped into the formation of postcolonial national sexuality. During the colonial period, a number of texts addressing sexual health and pleasure – especially written by women or about women’s sexual agency and prowess1 – were indefinitely banned or restricted from public access. In the late nineteenth century, ‘obscene’ became a way for dividing communities based on caste and religious lines and asserting a sectarian Hindu identity. The Hindi literati movement in the northern India called for the sanitisation of shudh Hindi bhasha by attacking popular erotic texts in Khadi Boli or Urdu as obscene, uncivilised, against Indian culture, and corruptible. Protests against such texts represented the postcolonial anxiety against women’s autonomy and pleasure, intercommunity relations, and homosexuality (Gupta, 2002).
With liberalisation and globalisation in India, these anxieties were reframed within a postcolonial nationalist imagination that oscillated between aspirations of global modernity and the desire to preserve an authentic Indian identity. Post-liberalisation, the obscene has carried the ghost of Indian morality. Whether it was the banning of Fire, Bandit Queen, Kamasutra, the Mangalore pub attack, the porn ban, or women’s representation in media, obscenity has offended Indian morality and family values. It is frequently used to defend women’s ‘decency’ in many cases. The charge of obscenity is deeply gendered. Ironically, while sexually explicit jokes are policed in the name of morality, violent portrayals of masculinity – as in films like Kabir Singh and Animal – are celebrated as “realistic” or even “educational.”
Given this socio-cultural backdrop, how the law treats obscene language demonstrates paternalistic anxiety to protect Indian culture and family. What this does is create a moral panic, sending the message that sex is dangerous. Time and again, sexually explicit material is banned, while misogynistic, homophobic, racist, or casteist language is left unregulated.
We are standing at a crossroads of global sexuality and transnational media exchanges. When Solicitor General Tushar Mehta claimed that the joke might be funny in the West, but it is not suitable for India’s “standards of morality and decency,” there was a dangerous pushback. We fall into the conundrum of consent, morality, and actual harm. Whose consent was crossed? Who was hurt? Did the live audience present at the time feel the language was obscene? According to the National Commission for Women (NCW), the show contained derogatory and racist comments. Mumbai police claimed the show was obscene. The Assam Police said that the remarks caused harm to public decency.
Fritzi M. Titzmann (2011), in her article “Is Sexuality anti-Indian?” quite rightly claims how obscenity is used as a political tool to often silence the voices that dare to deter majoritarian notions of Hindu patriarchal structures and gender norms in Indian society. The discourse around obscenity in India is not merely about public decency – it is about defining who belongs to the nation and who does not. Sexuality that deviates from heterosexual, patriarchal, or upper-caste norms is frequently labelled as “anti-Indian”. The humour may have been coded in the idiom of global, masculinist comedy – pornified, brash, and performative – but rather than interrogating the misogyny embedded in it, the state responded with moral censorship.
The language of Allahbadia’s remark is not just ‘obscene’. It reflects what can be called a pornified, hypermasculine imagination of incestuous sex – one that borrows from Western media’s crude, male-centric humour but is also shaped by local cultures of toxic masculinity and virality. This style of comedy positions sex as conquest. The joke was saturated with the language of locker-room masculinity: performative, competitive, lewd, and built around male pleasure. And yet, this is not unique to the West – it finds eager audiences in Indian media too, particularly among male influencers who trade in edginess and shock value.
Humour which transgresses the socially constructed boundaries of the Indian family is common parlance in vernacular folk songs, oral tradition, and popular culture in India. Then and now, it has been scrutinised from different perspectives as well. Whether it is Kapil Sharma’s late-night show, Santa Banta jokes on the Internet, husband-wife jokes or dewar-bhabhi jokes, they have all been celebrated and condemned. Incest-related jokes and gaalis (profanities) are everyday vocabulary. Yet Allahbadia’s joke raised a national alarm. It divided the nation among those who supported him and those who did not. Amidst the furore, it reached the point where the Court had to intervene.
Allahabadia was the modern nation’s vision of the Indian youth. His journey starts from being a novice urban middle-class podcaster with just a camera recorder and YouTube channel to becoming a modern youth star with the National Creator Award 2024. He has asked difficult questions to Bollywood celebrities as well as senior Indian ministers while interviewing them. From being a self-made young boy creating motivational videos about his own physical and sexual health to embodying an ideal of Hinduised masculinity and spirituality rooted in traditions of yoga and meditation, somewhere he became an exemplary figure for the nationalist moral aspirations of post-internet millennial youth and Indian families. So, when the ideal child of the nation speaks about Indian parents with sexual undertones, it breaks the entire nation’s trust and opens up new anxieties to protect Indian youth from the “obscene” lurking out there.
To simply label such speech as “immoral” or “anti-Indian” and call for censorship misses the point. Moral regulation does not dismantle the misogyny embedded in such humour – it only suppresses it temporarily, often selectively, and disproportionately targets vulnerable or dissenting voices. Obscene language is considered as a marker of ‘bad taste’ – language that does not align with the language of respectability. The language of respectability is constructed on the language of caution, prevention, and fear. It translates through inflicting shame against those who do not conform to societal norms of sexuality. The invocation of obscenity often masks political and cultural anxieties, particularly fears around women’s autonomy, queer rights, and inter-religious relationships. Rather than protecting from harm, obscenity laws and discourses sustain inequalities, policing the boundaries of acceptable sexuality.
Obscenity doesn’t just live in courtrooms or moral codes – it’s got a new avatar, dressed in algorithmic filters and community guidelines. Not only the State but big data managers like Instagram and YouTube have moderation policies that have shadow-banned many sexuality educators and queer content creators who produce informed knowledge on sexual health and sexual expression. The self-censorship of sexuality educators to prevent being shadow-banned is another reflection of this sentiment that we are not ready to talk about sex or more accurately, pleasure for women and the queer community (Singh, 2023). While platforms like Instagram and X claims to uphold “community standards,” they routinely censor sexual health content – including posts about menstruation, contraception, or queer identities – under the guise of obscenity or nudity violations. At the same time, algorithmically moderated platforms allow the objectification of women in hypersexualised content that aligns with dominant beauty norms and commodified heterosexual desire. This convergence of digital moderation with state-backed morality shows that censorship today does not require a censor – it can be outsourced, automated, and still uphold the same patriarchal, caste-bound logics of exclusion.
What gets silenced today isn’t just what’s obscene – it’s what’s inconvenient. What doesn’t sell. What asks us to take sex seriously or differently. The ones left fighting for visibility are often those speaking from the margins. Debates on obscenity point towards something bigger about how language shapes sexuality. It shows how language itself is controlled and constructed according to the dominant moral dictates of sexual norms. The public reaction on social media against Ranveer came from the place where the lines of civic respectability and decency got crossed. At the same time, right-wing followers were disappointed about Allahbadia’s fake image of the good Hindu boy. The legal call for censorship then appealed to both sides. Allahbadia was publicly shamed and legally held accountable for making an obscene joke. However, this collective moral outrage for censorship is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it shows a “progressive” non-tolerance towards harmful speech. On the other hand, the selective targeting of sexual speech keeps caste- class- and gender-based hierarchies intact by excluding some speech as obscene and anti-Indian and others as respectable and Indian.
1. Erotic works of literary figures like Muddupalani (a courtesan in Tanjavur in the 18th Century) were charged with obscenity. Interestingly, its reprint in 1911 by Nagaratnamma (a Kandika poet) came under attack by Hindu upper-caste nationalists for degradation of Indian culture and “threat posed by devadasis (temple and court artists) to the purity of family life” (Tharu and Lalita, 1991, pp. 12-13).↩︎
References
Gupta, C. (2002). Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India. Permanent Black.
Singh, R. (2023, September 7). ‘Account Restricted’: Sex-ed content creators fight shadowbans on social media sites. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/life-style/sex-education-content-creators-shadowbanned-across-social-media-sites-8920943/
Tharu, S. J., & Lalita, K. (Eds.). (1991). Women writing in India: 600 B.C. to the present (Vols. 1–2). New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York.
Titzmann, Fritzi-Marie. (2021). Is Sexuality Anti-Indian? Reflections on Obscenity in Contemporary Indian Popular Discourse. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108991735.006
Cover image by Katja Anokhina on Unsplash
