NY Times Reports Sunny Leone 'Bollywood' Controversy

NEW DELHI, India—Poor Sunny Leone. The Vivid contract star retired from performing in 2012, with the exception of one lesbian scene in a movie she directed the following year, but as all too many former adult performers have discovered in their retirement, too often, the public doesn't forget—so let the slut shaming begin! "V shd be careful that western rejects like sunny leone are not allowed to epitomise indian culture or acquire the status of a Bollywood icon," tweeted Indian Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi on April 10, setting off a Twitter storm that blasted the politician as one tweet called Singhvi a "political sycophant," another asked if he had tweeted "with his pants on or off?" and Omar Abdullah, former Chief Minister for the Jammu and Kashmir provinces, wondered, "What the hell possessed him to tweet this???" Apparently, the impetus for Singhvi's outburst was the release of the film Ek Paheli Leela, a reincarnation tale in which Leone (known in India as Karenjit Kaur Vohra) essays a dual role, which New York Times reporter Kai Friese described as "both a simple Rajasthani village girl and, some three centuries later, a model with an international career." Fact is, Leone is very popular in India, perhaps in part because of her American porn career, though all of her films are banned in her native country. Friese reports that Delhi-based film studies professor Shohini Ghosh often screens the horror film Ragini MMS-2, in which Leone starred, playing herself as a porn star getting her first mainstream Bollywood role, which Ghosh sees as part of "an exciting emancipatory streak in Hindi cinema’s love affair with bad girls." The Times also reports that Leone was the top name on Google India's 2014 list of most-searched personalities, and speculates that that may be because of her former career in porn. Leone, however, hopes that audiences will eventually forget that she's been a "porn star" (which she describes in interviews as "those two words") and accept her as a mainstream actress. "If in recent months India has acquired a reputation both for official squeamishness and a toxic mix of sexual repression and sexual violence, it’s Sunny Leone’s Indian career that best captures the more enduring complexity of this nation’s sexual psyche: a combination of prurient prudishness and genuine tolerance," Friese concluded. To read the full New York Times article, click here. Pictured: Sunny Leone in Ragini MMS-2.