Hugh Hefner had worked tirelessly in his office, handpicking each and every word and picture that went into that first issue of Playboy featuring the iconic Marilyn Monroe photographs published in 1953. In December 2013, the American magazine celebrated its 60^th anniversary. It was not until 2012 that Playboy Inc. first turned its attention to India and joined hands with PB Lifestyle Ltd, a Mumbai-based entertainment company, to launch the popular Playboy Club in Goa as the American company sought to revive its once-successful club business worldwide. The application for the club was rejected by Manohar Parrikar’s BJP government on technical grounds in the beach state. However, the main reason, which was moral, was made amply clear when another Goa BJP legislator, Michael Lobo, told India Real Time shortly after the rejection, “Playboy is nothing but a glorified dance bar or a glorified prostitution joint.”

Finally, last month (August 2014), Playboy was hosting a party at the plush Novotel hotel in Hyderabad to mark the opening of its first club in India. I was in the city and was to attend it. As luck would have it, I couldn’t make it and missed seeing the moral police in action. Members of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) and Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) had gathered outside Novotel, demanding the inauguration of the Playboy Club be called off. A lot of bytes and quotes flew from the activists’ spokespersons, pointing out how the shady club would be a bad cultural influence on people across Telugu land.

As I read the reports of the protests, I wondered how the protesters would have behaved had they been aware of India’s connection with Playboy over the years.

Let’s take a look at India’s Playboy connection.

One of the first Indian authors to allow Playboy to publish a story of his was the author of Swami and Friends and The Bachelor of Arts, RK Narayan, of whom his friend and mentor Graham Greene had once said, “Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian.”

Narayan’s short story God and the Cobbler appeared in the February 1976 issue of Playboy. Narayan’s name and picture in Playbill came as a genuine surprise. If anything, Narayan’s appearance in Playboy is proof of how popular the magazine was: and contrary to popular perception, as one that had to be read, not just seen.

The magazine described his story as “another fictional treat is God and the Cobbler, a philosophical fable by RK Narayan, who is generally considered India’s foremost English-language novelist. A new Narayan book, The Painter of Signs, will be published in May by Viking (Playbill, Playboy, February, 1976).” The illustration for the Narayan short story made reference to Hindu art and was done by Los Angeles artist Ignacio Gomez.

God and the Cobbler, of course, given Narayan’s poor sales in the west, was not the lead fiction story of the issue. The story, however, is a gem. It features a hippie; takes place in India; and has a hearty dose of Hindu philosophy and spirituality. The story is about a god-fearing cobbler, who sets up his shop under a flowering tree in front of a temple in a South Indian city, and a hippie who, sitting on the temple stairs is observing the cobbler from a distance. The story follows the interaction between the hippie and the cobbler and describes in detail the way in which one perceives the other taking cues from appearance, beard, dirty clothes, skin colour and mannerisms. Narayan brilliantly states one of the basic tenets of hippie-ism in the course of describing the foreigner – “No need to explain who the hippie was, the whole basis of hippieness being the shedding of identity and all geographical associations.” The story ends in a rather comic way with the cobbler saying, “Even a god steals when he has a chance.” (Playboy, February 1976: p. 149)

Right from the very first edition, literature has had a place in the magazine. Hefner knew well that the “cheesecake” could take the magazine only so far. Due to lack of funds, Hefner could not buy original stories for the first edition of Playboy. He was forced to reprint two popular stories in the inaugural issue. The first issue, apart from the iconic Marilyn Monroe pictures, purchased for $500, included a Sherlock adventure by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and an Ambrose Bierce short story, A Horseman in the Sky.

In 1986, academic and professor of English at Berkeley, Bharati Mukherjee’s short story appeared in the magazine. Mukherjee’s The Middleman was published in the April 1986 issue and is the title story for a collection that won her the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1988. In this story, Mukherjee uses her “immigrant experience and feelings of strangeness and exile… to power an entertaining adventure story”. (Playboy Stories, 1995: p. 511)

A decade later in April 1996, Playboy announced on its cover “A startling interview with Salman Rushdie,” arguably India’s most talked about writer since the publication of Midnight’s Children. In the interview, Rushdie spoke candidly of the fatwa issued against him by Iran’s supreme leader in 1989 for hurting Muslim sentiment in his book The Satanic Verses, his anger at his book being burned, the fear he felt after the fatwa, about British Airways and other airlines not letting him board their flights, and how and why he stopped writing for two years after the Iranian leader’s order.

Much before all this, tales from the ancient collection Panchatantra had been published in Playboy. Tales from the Panchatantra also appeared in the Ribald Classics section of the magazine. The Ribald Classics were such a big hit with readers that Hefner selected some of the most entertaining tales and collected them in two books: Playboy’s Ribald Classics and More Playboy’s Ribald Classics.

Two stories from the Panchatantra are told in English by JA Gato – The Woman and the Well and The Way of a Travelling Man – were published in the magazine and later on were included in a Playboy Press book More Playboy’s Ribald Classics (1969). In 2006, Gato went on to put together A Bedside Anthology of Ribald Classics, about twenty years after Playboy discontinued the section. This anthology has more contributions from a wider collection of Indian classics: The Greedy Doorkeeper and His Beautiful  Wife and A Very High Quality Wine from the Katha Sarit Sagar,  Persuasion from the Tantrakhyayika, and To Hear is to Obey from the Hitopadesha – all of which have appeared in Playboy.

With Playboy planning to open more clubs, lounges and cafes in India, more protests are inevitable. It only reaffirms my belief that Indians used to be much more tolerant and open-minded in the days when we eagerly waited for the new weekly episode of Malgudi Days and when its author was still writing.