New Delhi: The Kerala HC refused to identify a Malayalam magazine cover of a woman breastfeeding a child as 'obscene', stating sternly that 'what may be obscene to some may be artistic to other; one man's vulgarity is another man's lyric.'
Dismissing a writ petition filed by Felix MA, the bench of former chief justice Antony Dominic and Dama Seshadri Naidu, said in its order that the court does not see obscenity in the picture or find anything objectionable in the caption for men. "We looked at the picture with the same eyes we look at the paintings of artists like Raja Ravi Varma. As the beauty lies in the beholder's eye, so does, obscenity perhaps," the bench observed. "May we observe, Indian psyche has been so mature for ages that it could see the sensuous even in the sacred. The paintings in Ajanta and the temple architecture are cases in point," it said. The ruling goes on to quote several judgments and literary works to make its point and concludes, "Going by the contemporary community standards ...we may observe that given the picture's particular posture and its background setting (mother feeding the baby), as depicted in the magazine, it is not prurient or obscene; nor even suggestive of it."