Section 294 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) punishes obscene acts or words in a public place. To be considered a crime, the obscenity must cause ‘annoyance to others’. A person convicted under this law can face up to three months imprisonment. Obscene books are similarly criminalised under Section 292. The law on obscenity has evolved with the advent of the Internet and social media. Under Section 67 of the Information Technology Act, anyone who publishes or transmits obscene material in electronic form can be punished. The Oxford dictionary defines obscene as ‘offensive or disgusting by accepted standards of morality and decency. But for lawyers, the meaning of ‘obscene’ is not as easy to settle on. For a book or object to be obscene, Section 292 of the IPC says it must be lascivious or prurient or have the effect of depraving or corrupting someone. The terms ‘lascivious’, ‘prurient’, ‘deprave’ and ‘corrupt’ have not been clearly defined, leaving room for interpretation by courts. In 1965, the landmark Ranjit Udeshi judgement of the Supreme Court adopted the Victorian- era Hicklin test. The test assessed obscenity by the standard of someone who was open to immoral influences and was likely to be corrupted or depraved by the material in question. When approached from this angle, a wide range of material could be ‘obscene’. Over the years, the judiciary has narrowed the scope of obscenity. In the Aveek Sarkar case of 2014, the Supreme Court did away with the British Hicklin test and adopted the American Roth test, instead. As per this test, obscenity was to be evaluated like an average person would, apply contemporary community standards. The contemporary community standards test takes into account the changing values in society. What was obscene a century or even a decade ago need not be obscene now. The right to freedom of speech and expression is not absolute. Article 19 of the Constitution of India, which guarantees the right also provides for reasonable restrictions on various grounds, including that of decency and morality. This means that free speech has to be balanced against the contemporary community standards of morality when it comes to penalising obscene acts or content. Indian courts have often settled the debate between morality and freedom in favour of artistic freedom, such as in the M.F. Hussain judgement of 2008 and the Perumal Murugan judgement of 2016. In the latter, the Supreme Court held that ‘art is often provocative and is not meant for everyone’ material cannot be labelled as obscene simply because it is unpalatable to one section of society.