The fantasy never dies

It would be naïve to dismiss Savita Bhabhi as a pornographic comic strip that will disappear forever with the government pressing the delete button. If one Savita Bhabhi is uprooted, another dozen will grow — there’ll be a Savita girl, Savita boy, nurse, airhostess. This is simply because savitabhabhi.com is not just a graphical manifestation of sexual fantasies, but an integral part of what can be called ‘Sex and Indian Society.’

Before we delve into the Savita Bhabhi phenomenon, let us dwell on the ban. Early June, the Union Ministry of Information and Technology pulled the plug on the website with the help of its Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT). It cited the recently amended IT Act, under which the government can ban websites that do not subscribe to norms of public decency and morality.

Banning something on the worldwide web is like trying to build a dam on an ocean; a foolishness equivalent to… well, say, dry days? The Internet is not a book or a film. It is fluid, like air, like knowledge. It has numerous servers, cracks, openings, bylanes by which the final destination can be reached. The government of India must realise that for every website it firewalls there rises another detailing how to break that firewall.

Now, who exactly is Savita Bhabhi and what does she do in her cyber-home? For the uninitiated, she is India’s first toon porn star! In the words of her creators, Savita “is a regular Indian woman who can’t get enough sex” and “due to social issues (she is married), she was not willing to expose her true identity.” Note the phrase: “due to social issues”. This  implies that the protagonist operates well within the Indian social system, even respects it. She is fearful of being “uncovered” by her husband and wears sindoor and her mangalsutra. In essence, Savita Bhabhi is an urban, good-looking, married, well-heeled and apparently faithful woman-next-door. Collective fantasy takes over from there, leads her to the bedroom.

Scroll the page, and the woman-next-door is thrown back into the realm of civil society, serving tea to her husband like any other loving, caring wife.

Savitabhabhi.com was launched in March 2008. Her creators are unknown, (some say they’re based somewhere in Europe) and the site’s administrator goes by the username Deshmukh. The site has 30,000 registered users and about 60 million unique visitors a month, most of them Indians. It appears in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil and Malayalam. So widespread is her popularity that a consumer goods major fashioned a similar character to sell its products in villages. In an interview to globalpost.com, its administrator claimed that searches for Savita Bhabhi in Google results in 312,000 pages.

The website may just be over a year old, but Savita Bhabhi has always been there. She is the embodiment of impure thoughts, wet dreams, sexual fantasies, infidelity; she is the icon of an anti-culture called ‘immorality.’ And all these make her as old as humankind itself. Her ‘users’ gain the freedom to take the woman-next-door to bed, the power to turn into (cyber) reality hidden fantasies involving those who are beyond one’s reach, the ability to get what is not for one to have. The website only gives graphical life and expression to those age-old unattainables, and thereby very attractive. Young boys getting sexually attracted to older women, the salesman and the lonely housewife, the servant and the malkin, the man and the wife next door — are all famously infamous. When SB gets a massage from her young servant, or makes out with the bra-salesman, she is giving life to that collective deep, dark fantasy that spares no one.

The ban on the website has resulted in a shrill Internet campaign, with urban, educated Indians from all over the world telling the government: ‘Papa, don’t preach.’ Taking advantage of the situation, the site’s creators have now built savesavita.com, a platform for Savita-lovers and ban-haters in general to register their protest. Messages are pouring in thick and fast, some asking if savitabhabhi.com has posed any threat to national security, to the sovereignty or territorial integrity of India. A post answers: “Our relationships with foreign states couldn’t be friendlier since SB went online!” And in clear defiance to the government’s diktat, savesavita.com lists some websites that can be used to circumvent the ban.

It is the individual’s decision whether or not he/she wants to visit a pornographic website. For that matter, any website. But killing that option altogether means taking a decision on the individual’s behalf… something that is more blasphemous than the site itself. The government should understand this and leave it to the good sense of the people to make that choice.