Understanding Obscenity: Resolving Jurisprudential Ambiguities In India
- IJLLR Journal
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Dr. Diksha Munjal-Shankar, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.
Mugdha Dwivedi, Ph.D. Candidate and Junior Research Fellow, Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.
ABSTRACT
Obscenity, in common usage, describes material or conduct that offends the senses or arouses sexual impulses with the object of stirring lust or corrupting thought. Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India guarantees every citizen the right to freedom of speech and expression, yet the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and a cluster of allied statutes curtail that guarantee wherever expression is branded "obscene." The trouble is that "obscene," for all its dictionary certainty, has never acquired a settled legal meaning. Courts have applied the word inconsistently across decades, and that inconsistency has both narrowed the practical reach of Article 19(1)(a) and produced erratic, sometimes indefensible, applications of the penal provisions built around the concept.
This paper interrogates the statutory and judicial architecture of obscenity law in India, tracing its ambiguities and setting them against comparable frameworks in the United Kingdom and the United States. It documents episodes in which adjudicators mistook artistic nudity for indecency or treated unflinching realism as vulgarity, and it argues that Indian obscenity law needs structural reform if it is to hold public morality and creative freedom in genuine balance. In a constitutional democracy that promises equal fundamental rights to every citizen, no one person's assertion of a right should be permitted to swallow another's.
The paper closes by arguing for interpretive clarity and doctrinal fairness, urging reform that protects both the public's interest in decency and the creator's and publisher's interest in expression.
Keywords: Indecency, freedom of expression, obscenity, vulgarity, fundamental rights, punishment, offensiveness, sexuality, statutory provisions, judiciary, prurient tendency, exceptions, constitutional remedies.
