D S.V. Srinivas and dramatic escape from prison, Sitaram defeats the villains and restores order. Finally, Sivarama Krishna and Vasundhara are reunited, Malleswari marries Chinna and Sitaram finds himself in a bedroom with Pappi and her younger sister Bappi. The Alluda Majaka controversy foregrounds the dilemmas of the left, including leftist women's groups, regarding issues related to popular culture in general and cinema in particu- H lar. Not only did the religious right—the BJP and the Bharatiya Janata Mahila Morcha (BJMM)— set the terms of the Alluda Majaka debate but it also ensured, with its superior resources, that its voice was most clearly heard in public.3 Moreover, there is a disturbing similarity between the left, right and 'apolitical' participants despite the difference in their location and stated concerns. Obscenity, or more specifically, objections to it happens to be among the most readily available means of initiating a public discussion on cinema and of accessing the official public sphere, particularly the mainstream print media. For instance, in the recent past there have been court cases and campaigns against individual 'obscene' films like Teneteega (Nandakumar, 1991), Bandit Queen (Shekhar Kapur, 1996) and of course, Alluda Majaka; general campaigns against obscenity, which involved pamphleteering, blackening of publicity posters, activists raiding cinema halls exhibiting obscene films, innumerable letters to editors of newspapers, film reviews and other writings on cinema targeting obscenity. Obscenity was the rallying point for the opponents of Alluda Majaka. Their diverse concerns found a meeting point in an anti-obscenity campaign. I wish to argue that individuals with otherwise differing institutional and political affiliations came together to form a public and that obscenity functioned as a 'gatekeeping concept' in their intervention in the debate on popular cinema. Arjun Appadurai who coined the phrase 'gatekeeping concepts' explains that ... a few simple theoretical handles became metonyms or surrogates for the civilization or society as a whole... [they are examples of concepts] that seem to limit anthropological theorizing about the place in question, and define the quintessential and dominant questions of interest in the region (Appadurai 1986:357). Obscenity is one such 'theoretical handle' which seems capable of setting the terms for a debate on cinema. As we shall see, the public thus formed (to cleanse cinema) not only sets out to exclude certain sections of the audience, but more importantly, is in fact defined in explicit opposition to them. I would like to examine what obscenity signifies for the public that opposes it and how these particular significations then work to produce an antagonism between 'women' and 'masses'. The construction of these two categories is such that women are seen as upper caste and middle-class while the masses are seen as lower caste/class rowdies. Interestingly, the film too depicts women and the masses as antagonistic collectives, though in a manner quite different from their production within the obscenity debate. Consequently, both the filmic narrative and its critics mutually reinforced the notion of a society threatened by the agency of women and the masses. The larger question the Alluda Majaka controversy raises is how films Numbers 32-33