Savita Bhabhi discusses birth control on Indian TV

The site may be blocked, but Savita Bhabhi remains a cultural icon in India. She recently appeared on the Jay Hind TV variety show (played by an actress) to deliver some comedic advice about birth control.

Shohini Ghosh, communications professor at the National Islamic University in New Delhi, looks at the Savita Bhabhi censorship affair. The article has some cool info on Savita Bhabhi's roots in Indian classical and popular culture. But it gets way too bogged down in academic jargon -- "pleasures mobilised", "dissident spectator", "a phantasmatic arena", blah blah blah.

With her long, dark hair and voluptuous body, Savita Bhabi invokes the sensual female protagonists of popular calendar art and the children’s comic books series Amar Chitra Katha, with stories from history and mythology. Predominantly Hindu in its theme and iconography, these comic books feature stories of goddesses, queens, princesses and wives whose sexualised bodies are restrained by their monogamous, dutiful and moral dispositions. Savita Bhabi has inherited the body and discarded the temperament.

That Savita is referred to as ‘bhabi’ is no less ironic. Idealised as a maternal figure to the devar (the husband’s younger brother), the bhabi has also been the object (and subject) of erotic desire. Literature and films in India are replete with references to the desired and desiring sister-in-law. This theme finds powerful expression in Satyajit Ray’s widely acclaimed film Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964). While researching for the film in Santiniketan (the film being adapted from a story by Rabindranath Tagore), Ray found references to Tagore’s own relationship to his sister-in-law. Sooraj R Barjatya’s 1991 Bombay blockbuster Hum Aapke Hain Koun?! also places the figure of the bhabi within this tension.