View: Let’s fail the Hicklin Test! | Economic Times

As a keen follower of women’s beach volleyball, I was watching Brazil take on Canada in the Olympics, when the doorbell rang. ‘Good morning, sir, good time?’ said the young man who looked like a young Anna Hazare. I mumbled something, and let him in while Eduarda ‘Duda’ Santos Lisboa passed a signal behind her bikinied back to her teammate on my TV screen.‘Sir, we’re conducting Hicklin tests in the area. It will take only 15 minutes,’ the Hazaresque said. I told him I had taken my two Covid shots and had also come up negative in my RT-PCR a week back. ‘No, sir, not a Covid test, but a Hicklin test.’He went on to tell me there would be no poking down my nostrils or throat. Not even questions. He would just quietly observe me for 15 minutes while I went about own business. That sounded odd. But fearing that non-compliance would mean health ministry officials breaking down my door, I returned to watching beach volleyball. Exactly 15 minutes later, the chap straightened his back, thanked me and left. I was intrigued. What was this Hicklin test?It turns out to be a ‘psycho-legal test’ named after a 1868 case in England. A chap was caught reselling copies of a pamphlet, ‘The Confessional Unmasked: Shewing the Depravity of the Romish Priesthood, the Iniquity of the Confessional, and the Questions Put to Females in Confession’ — a sort of 19th century Letters to Penthouse. The pamphlet was deemed obscene and was ordered to be destroyed. The accused appealed, and the case came to the court of a Benjamin Hicklin.Hicklin revoked the order, saying that the intention was not to ‘corrupt morals’ but to expose unpleasant truths inside the Catholic Church. But his order was challenged, and the highest court charged the accused under the Obscene Publications Act, allowing any publication to be banned if it has the ‘tendency… to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences’. The intention of the work could go self-fornicate. That’s when the paisa dropped! The man had come to test what I may find ‘lascivious’. Thankfully for me — and unfortunately for Raj Kundra and Co. — the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986, and Section 67 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 that finds ‘any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest, or if its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons’ don’t punish the consumer of obscenity, but only its producers. Poor Shilpa Shetty has even gone to theological lengths to prove that her husband’s adult films were ‘erotica,’ not ‘porn’ — when she should be really saying, ‘Yes, it’s smut. So?’Indian law is still ruled by the 1964 Supreme Court ruling in the ‘Ranjit D Udeshi vs State of Maharashtra’ case, which had it that unless the obscenity has a ‘preponderating social purpose or profit,’ it would appeal to ‘the carnal side of human nature and no longer come under the constitutional protection of free speech and expression’. (‘Obscenity with a social purpose’ is my new life goal.)And whenever Public India, even in 2021, hears the words ‘appeals to the carnal side of human nature’, it conjures up thought-bubbles of rape, real-life Shakti Kapoors, ‘ma-behen,’ ‘izaat’ — the whole jingbang that 19th century western Orientalists would fantasise about us: a people incapable of real pleasure, but only capable of engaging in ‘filth’.Watching pornography, like having a good meal, is a sensory pleasure that we can jolly well partake of without having to explain ourselves. Dragging up Kama Sutra and Khajuraho as ‘defence’, or hairsplitting over how Prabuddha Dasgupta’s nude photos are art, 50 Shades of Grey is erotica, and anybunny.tv is smut just adds to the confusion of what grown-up Indians can and can’t watch for their legit, sexual pleasure.And if all of us can watch porn legally, without blubbering like schoolboys or MPs caught watching a vintage Sunny Leone 14-minuter on their phones, then producing porn must be made legal. Enough of ‘We actually didn’t mean it that way’, and ‘It’s art, not obscenity’. Make smut, consume smut, responsibly. Am I worried about flunking my Hicklin test? Not at all. If anyone flunks it, it’ll be the channel broadcasting a fine, gruelling game of women’s beach volleyball. And how lascivious would the authorities be even if they think that.Views expressed are author's own