Nandana Bose is a postgraduate student at the Institute of Film and Television Studies, University of Nottingham. Below she describes her journey of discovery, from the Censor Board of India to a glittering award ceremony in Philadelphia…
Approved for distribution: Indian films are heavily censored for sexual content
It was with utter disbelief that I read the e-mail from The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) notifying me that my essay Censor Board of India Correspondence (1992-2002): A Discursive Rhetoric of Moral Panic, ‘Public’ Protest and Political Pressure had won the prestigious Student Writing Award of the 2008 Scholarly Writing competition. First place carried with it, apart from a plaque and honorarium, the incredible opportunity to be published in SCMS’s Cinema Journal, which is the leading scholarly journal in the field. It was the kind of recognition every young academic dreams of!
SCMS is “a professional organisation of college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and others devoted to the study of the moving image”, and one of its express goals is to encourage and reward excellence in scholarship and writing. A cursory glance at the past winners of this coveted award reveals the interesting fact that most of the awardees have been from leading US universities, making this achievement all the more special. Particularly gratifying is that it recognises the essay’s contribution to the study of Indian cinema, a burgeoning field that requires greater attention and recognition not just from Indian and South Asian scholars but from academics worldwide.
The Censor Board files
The essay, a chapter from my thesis on The Cultural Politics of the Hindu Right in Hindi Cinema (1992-2002), is a result of my fieldwork in Bombay in the monsoons of 2006. I spent more than a week at the Censor Board of India office situated in the posh Malabar Hill area, with breathtaking views of the Queen’s Necklace and the Arabian Sea. After receiving special permission from the regional officer Mr Vinayak Azad, arranged by his extremely helpful secretary Mrs Vijaya Chawak, I started scrutinising literally thousands of letters received over a decade by the office – in varying stages of decay, hastened by the humidity and heat of the Bombay climate and the steel cupboards where they were stored. These letters, which I spent hours looking at from 10 in the morning till closing time (which would often vary frustratingly depending on holidays or the whims of the officials) had been arranged in at least 15 files – the parchment-like archival material bound together by a thread which made it rather inconvenient for photocopying purposes.
I hadn’t expected to find such a fascinating primary research source in the contents of these complaint files, and was alarmed to hear that they would be burnt like the previous decade’s correspondence had been. Clearly, the Censor Board hadn’t recognised their intrinsic archival value, and their worth was awaiting discovery by an inquisitive and tenacious young researcher!
The essay
The essay constructs a chronological narrative based on a decade of letters involving the Censor Board of India, the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (I&B), the police, right-wing parties, various secular and religious, political and cultural organisations, cinephiles and other citizens; it traces a continuum of state and right-wing interventions in the process of censoring Hindi cinema.
The essay is structured chronologically in three broad time divisions that reflect changes in the predominating censorship issues: Moral Panics, 1992-1994; Communal Insecurities, 1995-1997; Policing Cinema, 1998-2002. From the volume of letters in the Censor Board files, preoccupation with sex and violence dominated the first period from 1992 to 1994; religious sensibilities and the alleged (mis)representations of minority ethnic and religious communities by public authorities (such as the police and politicians) became burning issues from 1995 to 1997; from 1998 to 2002, the police became proxy film censors and the alleged/imagined denigration of Hindu sentiments were the protesters’ running theme. It should be noted that these were overlapping, recurrent anxieties that persisted in the Indian public sphere throughout the decade – in particular, protesters complained of the damaging effects of sex and violence on women, children and young people.
The research argument
The essay is an attempt at mapping the field of power relations that existed between the Censor Board, the state machinery, citizens and various interest groups. It sets out to locate the various competing yet often hierarchical, shifting and diffused sites of political pressure and influence in the public sphere.
The essay argues that there were gradual shifts in power relations away from the due process of law over the period 1992-2002. In 1998-99 there was a change in government, with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) winning the 1999 general elections. I suggest that there were escalating interventions throughout the 1990s that accelerated from 1998 to 2002 during the tenure of the right-wing government. Correspondents were often writing in reaction to state decisions regarding the media and the film industry, political events, new censorship policies and appointments to the Censor Board, newspaper reports and controversial film releases.
What emerges from these letters is a sense of social and moral conservatism, intolerance of diversity and pluralism, a movement towards authoritarianism. The range, breadth and diversity of opinions, interpretations, dialogue, debate and criticism you might expect from an open civil society – the largest democracy in the world in terms of population – is conspicuous by its near absence from these Censor Board files.
The ceremony
I received the award in March 2008 at the SCMS annual award ceremony, held this year in Philadelphia in front of a large gathering of leading scholars in the field of cinema and media studies from across the world, and members of staff from the University of Nottingham’s Institute of Film & Television Studies – including my supervisor Professor Roberta Pearson. I was particularly happy since a close friend from my MA days in Calcutta, when we first began studying film seriously, was there to see me receive the award. It is a moment I will cherish throughout my life.
