Recently, the National Commission for Women (NCW) issued summonses in two apparently unrelated but structurally related controversies. The first involved Nora Fatehi and Sanjay Dutt, called in over ‘Sarke Chunar Teri Sarke’, a song from the forthcoming film ‘KD: The Devil’ that had been pulled from streaming platforms and referred to the Delhi Police Cyber Cell within days of release. The second concerned rapper Badshah, summoned over ‘Tateeree’, a Haryanvi hip-hop track whose music video featured schoolgirls in uniform dancing atop a Haryana roadways bus. Badshah deleted the song and issued an apology. Neither gesture resolves the question the NCW implicitly raised: what does it tell us about a society when two mainstream productions, independently and in the same news cycle, converge on the same commercial calculation, that the sexualisation of women and girls is not merely marketable but apparently irresistible?
Summonses and platform bans manage symptoms. They cannot reach the thing they are responding to, which is not the individual bad actor but a social logic that is deep, stable, and commercially rational. The real question is: what produces the demand in the first place?
Herbert Marcuse described a mechanism he called repressive desublimation: the strategic release of just enough sexual energy to pacify a population while leaving intact the deeper conditions of unmet need that generated it. The item number, the viral rap provocation, each operates precisely this mechanism. Pierre Bourdieu added the empirical dimension: what people find pleasurable is shaped by the cumulative conditions of their upbringing and education. A population whose access to cultural life has been structurally constrained will approach entertainment expecting immediate gratification rather than the reflective engagement that requires, and in turn builds, cultural depth. Antonio Gramsci completed the picture: dominant formations sustain themselves through culture, by ensuring that particular tastes feel natural and politically inert. An audience kept engaged by titillation is an audience not asking more inconvenient questions.
The most compelling evidence is the gradient visible across the Indian film industries when mapped against the social development of the societies that produce them. The Bhojpuri industry operates in a context of severely constrained human development. Bihar ranks among the lowest of any major Indian state on the UNDP's subnational Human Development Index, at approximately 0.574. Much of its core audience consists of migrant labourers and marginalised men whose intimate lives are shaped by precisely the conditions of suppression that redirect desire into the nearest available outlet. In February 2026, weeks before the current controversies, Bihar Police launched a crackdown on vulgar Bhojpuri content in public spaces. Few commentators asked what social conditions had made that content commercially rational to produce.
At the other end of the spectrum stands Malayalam cinema. Payal Kapadia's ‘All We Imagine as Light’ won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2024, topped international critics' polls, and received Golden Globe nominations. This is not an isolated achievement. ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’ anatomised domestic patriarchy with formal economy. ‘Kumbalangi Nights’ reconstructed masculinity from within with an intelligence that few other Indian industries were simultaneously attempting. Kerala's Human Development Index, approximately 0.782, is the highest of any major Indian state, leading India on gender equity, literacy, and access to public services. Malayalam cinema did not produce great films because its filmmakers are more talented. It produced great films because its audience expected to be treated as thinking adults. The distance between ‘Tateeree’ and ‘All We Imagine as Light’ is not a distance of taste. It is a distance of development.
One objection deserves a direct answer. What about filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap, whose transgressive work serious critics celebrate? The distinction here is not between explicit and non-explicit content but between portraiture and provocation. The expletives in ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ are the precise dialect of feudal, caste-ridden Bihar, rendered so that the audience confronts what it might prefer to look away from. In ‘Tateeree’ and ‘Sarke Chunar’, no such relationship exists. The content does not illuminate a social reality; it decorates a fantasy. To conflate the two is to confuse a surgeon's instrument with a street brawler's on the grounds that both are sharp.
Which brings us to the third cultural event of this period, the one that generated the least outrage and is perhaps the most revealing. The Film Federation of India's jury chose not to submit ‘All We Imagine as Light’ as India's official Oscar entry, despite its Grand Prix at Cannes. The film, directed by a woman and centred on two women navigating longing and dislocation in Mumbai, was passed over. The two facts, a jury that could not recognise what it was looking at, and a mainstream industry that found ‘Sarke Chunar’ a rational commercial bet, are two expressions of the same social formation: one that does not yet have the broadly distributed cultural capacity to demand, reward, or even reliably identify its own best work.
The accountability failures are real. In ‘Tateeree’, Badshah's apology invoking his identity as a son of Haryana was the public relations equivalent of the mechanism the song deployed: enough contrition to release institutional pressure, not enough to address what it revealed about his assumptions regarding his audience. In ‘Sarke Chunar’, the performer most visible in the controversy was arguably among the least culpable, having recorded the Kannada version three years earlier and objected to the Hindi translation on becoming aware of it. Those with the least power received the most scrutiny. The CBFC, noting the song was on YouTube and therefore outside its jurisdiction, exemplifies a regulatory architecture that has exempted itself from the most widely consumed format of audiovisual content in the country.
The appropriate response is not censorship. The history of state censorship of popular culture is a history of suppressed symptoms and unchanged conditions: more hypocrisy, less art, no development. The Bihar Police crackdown on vulgar Bhojpuri songs is well-intentioned. It is also a precise metaphor for everything this moment is getting wrong: silence the expression, leave the conditions intact, declare the problem solved. The structural answer, the only one that addresses root causes, is what Kerala spent six decades building: a society in which foundational needs are broadly met, education is genuinely accessible, and the capacity to engage with serious culture is not the exclusive property of a small elite.
The culture a society makes is the most honest account it gives of itself, not its stated aspirations or its official mythology, but what it pays to watch on an idle evening, and what its gatekeepers quietly pass over in favour of something safer. The question India needs to ask is not what is wrong with the artists who made these songs. It is what kind of society produces both ‘Tateeree’ and ‘All We Imagine as Light’, and responds to the first with institutional theatre and to the second with institutional indifference.
(Harsh Pratap Singh is a lawyer and legal academic. He has taught at IIM Rohtak and writes on law, culture, and political economy.)
(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.)