Once upon a time, the hot male body wasn’t common. Don’t get us wrong. There have always been hot men. But the idea of the hot male body wasn’t one that mattered much in Indian media. Only women’s bodies seemed to be everywhere. When people thought, wrote poems and sang songs about or took photographs of a woman’s body, it was almost always in terms of sex appeal. But the idea of the male body as sexy, as something to look at, as a subject of desire was infrequent and is a relatively new development. So how did we reach this place of six-pack sexy symbol men? Yeh andar ki baat hai. Follow us on an expedition as we investigate a very special historical object that tells us something about how men’s bodies were and are seen– the Indian men’s underwear ad. The 1970s They say the brain is the largest sexual organ. Because without your sexual imagination where would you be? In the 1970s and 80s, imagination was key because chaddi ads were mostly on the radio. A brand called Young India ran radio ads for their baniyan and underwear. The ads would cover up any awkwardness with over the top comical uncle-type voiceovers. Sexy-vexy chhodh do. Nobody was associating male sex appeal with underwear – yet. As Santosh Desai, one of India’s sharpest observers of popular culture and CEO of Future Brands, says, “Underwear used to have nothing to do with sexuality for men in the 70s and 80s. Think about it - men of all ages used to walk around bare bodied in our homes and neighbourhoods. There was no eroticism attached to it. The eroticism was always attached to the female body. Not the male body so much. It was reflective of how men looked at themselves.”Obviously, this is not to say that no one was having sex back then. Desai says, “Men took sex seriously, sure, but not their own sexuality.” Even the actors in the 70s and early 80s didn’t set an aspirational value that had much to do with sex. Sanjeev Kumar and Rajesh Khanna were role models for men, but their masculinity did not lie particularly in their bodies. It lay in their manner and their conduct on screen and off. Most of the actors had soft, rounded figures. Of course, there were the overtly macho men like Dara Singh and Dharmendra but they were exceptions. The 1980sFirst, a note about the scene back then. Anurag Agnihotri, Executive Creative Director, Ogilvy & Mather says, “Brands like Amul and Rivolta had chaddi ads back then but they were generally about boxer briefs. Print ads didn’t have any models, just three superimposed pictures of white boxers. Some ads would be pasted on walls like film posters. But none of them spoke explicitly of male sexuality.” A now-legendary VIP Frenchie newspaper ad in the late 1980s changed everything.
CHADDI PEHEN KE DUDE KHILA HAI
A history of masculinity through chaddi ads
Written by Shruti Sunderraman
Graphics by Debasmita Das
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