Dama Seshadri Naidu, J.

A citizen, seemingly sensitive and scrupulous, cries foul at, what he terms, the Society’s moral decadence. He draws our attention to the Ext.P1 cover page of a magazine depicting a mother feeding her baby, exposing her bosom. The caption reads which translates to “Don’t stare, we have to breastfeed”.

2. According to Felix M.A., the petitioner, it offends Sections 3(c) and 5(j), III of Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act and Rules, as well as S.45 of the Juvenile Justice Act. He has also roped in Sections 3 and 4 of Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986, and Article 39(e) and (f) of the Constitution of India.

3. “Shocking one’s morals” is an elusive concept, amorphous and protean. What may be obscene to some may be artistic to other; one man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric, so to say. Therefore, we can only be subjective about Ex.P1 magazine cover depiction.

4. We do not see, despite our best efforts, obscenity in the picture, nor do we 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.

5. Even the sections relied on by Felix fail to convince us that the respondent publishers have committed any offence, much less a cardinal one, affecting the Society’s moral fabric, and offending its sensibilities.

6. 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.

7. Throughout their long history, the arts of India—both visual and literary—have consistently celebrated the beauty of the human body, notes the much-acclaimed travel-writer, William Dalrymple. Indeed, the whole tradition of yoga, he continues, was aimed at perfecting and transforming the body, with a view, among the higher adepts, to making it transcendent, omniscient, even god-like. The body, in other words, is not some tainted appendage to be whipped into submission, but potentially the vehicle of divinity. In this tradition, the sensuous and the sacred are not opposed. They are one, and the sensuous is seen as an integral part of the sacred. The gods were always depicted as super-humanly beautiful, for if the image was not beautiful then the deities could not be persuaded to inhabit the statue. We could not express better than what Dalrymple has said in his lyrical prose. (Italics supplied)

8. Kama Sutra—the Aphorisms of Love—composed by Vatsyayana many millennia ago, is the first scientific treatise in the world on eroticism.

9. In a provocatively titled chapter—Obscenity Lies in the Crotch of the Beholder—of his book Republic of Rhetoric: Free Speech and the Constitution of India, ((Kindle Locations 2636-2638). Penguin Random House India Private Limited. Kindle Edition.) Abhinav Chandrachud wonders whether sexually arousing material be banned merely because somebody might get addicted to sex? After all, there is much in the modern world, he answers, which is addictive, yet legal: cigarettes, alcohol, even chocolates, present easy examples. He then cautions that “to censor pornography because it degrades women sends us down the path of a slippery slope.” (Id. (Kindle Locations 2678-2679)

10. The earliest case to book judicial bounds to nebulous concept of obscenity was Regina v. Hicklin decided by the House of Lords in 1868. Justice Cockburn, in that case, defined the test to be whether the tendency of the matter, charged as obscenity, is to declare incorrect those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this ought may fall. Indeed, obscenity is a weapon of cultural regulation. Either the U.K. or the U.S.A. or India, for that matter any common law Country, one other shape the entire jurisprudence of obscenity: Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H.Lawrence.

11. In India, Renjith D.U