• The FIR filed against Ranveer Singh for hurting the feelings of women by uploading “obscene” pictures on social media.
• Legal experts were contacted by a news agency to provide insight on a variety of legal topics.
• Including whether the case will hold up in court and how obscenity is defined by law.

The FIR filed against Ranveer Singh for hurting the feelings of women by uploading “obscene” pictures on social media has made his nude photo shoot for a magazine cover a hot topic of conversation. Legal experts were contacted by a news agency to provide insight on a variety of legal topics. Including whether the case will hold up in court and how obscenity is defined by law.

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Understanding what is considered “obscene” is necessary to determine whether Ranveer Singh’s nude photoshoot is considered obscene under the law. Also whether sharing those images on Instagram constitutes an offence. “The definition of ‘obscene’ is not as easy to settle on, but it must be lascivious or prurient or have the effect of depriving or corrupting someone,” Supreme Court attorney Khushboo Jain explains. The phrases “lascivious,” “prurient,” “deprave,” and “corrupt” are no longer defined precisely, opening the door to further interpretation. The honourable courts have created standards over time to define what constitutes “obscene” behaviour.

Hitesh Jain, an attorney, recalls the Aveek Sarkar case, which arose from a picture of former tennis player Boris Becker appearing in nude with his then-fiancée a person of a different race, in an effort to combat bigotry.

“There’s a Supreme Court judgement in Aveek Sarkar’s case that it doesn’t come under the definition of obscenity,” he says, adding, “In today’s times, nobody can prevent people from filing an FIR, but at the end of the day we have to see whether the ingredient in the FIR makes an offence. I mean it is nowhere making any offence. This case will not hold in court. It can evoke some curiosity but it will not go beyond that. In Aveek Sarkar’s case, there was test that was applied where a person was found nude. And there have been umpteen cases like that. Even if you pose nude it will not amount to obscenity. Ranveer Singh is absolutely not guilty.”

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Khushboo Jain agrees nudity alone does not make a material obscene. “The contemporary community standards test takes into account the changing values in society. What was obscene a century or even a decade ago, need not be obscene now. Since community perceptions are not static, what is obscene must also remain a fluid concept. As observed in Udeshi’s case if a reference to sex by itself is considered obscene, no books can be sold except those which are purely religious. It would be safe to say that nudity alone is not enough to make material legally obscene, she says.

However, obscenity remains one of the most controversial and confounding areas of law. “Our honorable courts have struggled through the years to define it. It is like the task of trying to define what may be indefinable. The word obscenity is from one of those words whose meanings are vague or not clear in our Indian Law. The definition of word obscenity would change from time to time. What is obscene in the present day should not be treated as obscene in the future,” she concludes.