The recent death on September 27 of Playboy publisher-editor Hugh Hefner in his Los Angeles Playboy Mansion, surrounded by his trade mark bunnies, brings to mind the comparatively modest effort of the unlikely Mumbai businessman Sushil Somani and several editors, including your correspondent, to establish Debonair as India’s answer to Playboy.
The late Vinod Mehta, then an advertising agency copywriter, was appointed the first and became the most famous editor of this monthly (estb. 1973) which featured a nude centrefold in every issue. The legal status of Debonair remained a grey area for a long time and it was not unusual for editors to receive court summons from small towns across the country where citizens were outraged by the ‘obscenity’ of the nude centrefold of this men’s magazine.
Your correspondent was appointed editor of Debonair in 1988 after serving as the founder-editor of Business India and Businessworld. I felt Debonair which had a somewhat sleazy image, needed to graduate into a full-fledged metropolitan men’s lifestyle magazine. Hence I included a major literary section edited by the highly respected writer-poet Adil Jussawala to make the usual excuse — “I buy Debonair for its editorial content” — sound more plausible. However all this didn’t impress Sushil Somani, the publisher. And when I decided to feature a beautiful black model on the centrefold — black is beautiful, dummies! — Somani pulled the picture from the press at the last minute, forcing me to resign a year after I took the job.
Returning to Hefner, he was the embodiment of what he did and neither the publisher nor any of the editors of imitation magazines lived the unapologetically ostentatious hi-life he did. Had he started his Playboy business and entertainment empire in this country where the social liberalism of ancient India had been jettisoned in favour of Victorian prudery, he could never have built his multi-million dollar Playboy empire. I’m unaware if Debonair is still being published, but if it is, its publishers should be prepared for the heavy weight of hindutva mob rule encouraged by the current political dispensation.