1st Indian woman to pose for Playboy

DHAKA: The first Indian woman to pose naked for Playboy magazine says she is proud to have ‘pushed the envelope’ in a country where public nudity in any form remains largely taboo.

Minor Bollywood actress Sherlyn Chopra, 28, will feature in a nude spread in the November issue of the magazine, although her Indian fans will be hard pushed to get hold of a copy.

Playboy, along with a host of other foreign ‘adult’ magazines, is banned in India, which has strict obscenity laws proscribing any public act or published material deemed to be ‘lascivious or appealing to prurient interests’.

News that Chopra had become India’s first ‘Playmate’ caused quite a stir, fuelled by Chopra herself posting nude out-take pictures from the Playboy shoot on the microblogging site Twitter.

As well as some inevitably lascivious and prurient responses, many Indian Twitter users criticised her decision and accused her of a desperate publicity stunt to further her acting career.

She had written to Playboy herself expressing an interest in posing.

‘If you consider being the 1st Indian woman to pose for Playboy an ‘achievement’, you should consider raising your standards,’ tweeted @Sunu_K.
 
In an e-mail interview with AFP, Chopra dismissed her critics and said she considered herself a pioneer for sexual freedom in India, reports daily Hurriyet.

‘I had no apprehensions and have no regrets: just feelings of pure liberation and sheer excitement,’ she said of the Playboy shoot in Los Angeles.

BDST: 1437 HRS, AUG 5, 2012

Edited by Robab Rosan, Cultural Affairs Editor