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Cinema and Censorship – The Politics Of Control
In India "Censorship, legal and extra-legal, is a serious inroad on the freedom of expression. Censorship is highly subjective and essentially mindless. The main motivation for censorship is intolerance. Conventional wisdom and official ideology cannot be allowed to be questioned and criticised and must be suppressed. The portrayal of historical events that depict a government or certain persons or groups in an unfavourable light cannot be tolerated and should, therefore, be suppressed by recourse to censorship."
Someswar Bhowmik’s Cinema and Censorship – The Politics of Control in India is a pathbreaking work on a subject that is rarely written in a way that could provide a framework and a hard disk of information on the history, politics and sociology of censorship not leaving out the religious bias that has stepped into film censorship over the past decade. Bhowmik’s basic question is why censorship that functioned mainly as an instrument of political and informative control during the British rule should sustain for more than six decades after Independence in the world’s largest democracy, which produces the largest number of films in the world. Bhowmick is Research Scientist with the Educational Multimedia Research Centre, St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. The research was undertaken after the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) completed 50 years of "its checkered existence, having been established in 1951 as the Central Board of Film Censorship" in 2001, and the 50th anniversary of the Indian Cinematographic Act, 1952, that happened the following year. The preface sets the tone of the book. It brings in a comparison between censorship and other coercive institutions such as the military, police, intelligence, paramilitary organisations and the criminal and penal procedure codes framed in Independent India. The author traces the history of film censorship in India. He covers all areas of Indian cinema from feature films in Indian languages, documentary films, docu-features to international films that have faced the axe of censorship. He juxtaposes his arguments against the total lack of censorship on television, underscoring the inherent irony in the ideology of censorship within the audio-visual media. His exploration and analyses of the historical and political processes that films have faced from the censors. He reveals the ironical contradictions within the machinery that keeps moving back and forth in keeping with the vested interests of the government that rules at the Centre and controls the functioning, membership and administration of the Censor Board. The word "control" linked to cinema censorship implies denying the Indian citizen his fundamental right to freedom of expression. How does this contradiction sustain? In the concluding chapter, A Medium in Chains, Bhowmik quotes veteran Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski (1999) who wrote: "In a dictatorship, censorship is used; in a democracy, manipulation." This applies in every sense to film censorship in India. The book questions the validity of the very existence of the CBFC. The author stresses how at times, the discretionary powers of CBFC have been completely violated by Supreme Court’s interference. He spells out how, in case of Raj Kapoor’s Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978), the Supreme Court conceded the "ultimate censorious power" of the people over the CBFC without mentioning "the parameters and procedure for the expression of this people’s power." He adds that the CBFC is also under the indirect control of bodies like the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT) and Review Committee that have the power to over-rule the refusal of a certificate by the CBFC to a given film. The FCAT overruled the CBFC’s refusal of a certificate to the Marathi film, Maficha Sakshidar (1986). The film dealt with the sensational killings of the Joshi-Abhyankar families in Pune. The book glosses over the June 17, 1981 revisions. Under this, the board exhorted filmmakers to eschew the use of visuals or words depicting women in ignoble servility as a praiseworthy quality in women. It added that if mere cuts will not remove what is undesirable in the film, it should be refused a certificate. The book skirts the debates over much-publicised films like Pati Parmeswar and Aurat ka Intequam. In terms of the time-frame, the author is comprehensive and contemporary. The book presents an impartial and objective explanation of how this manipulation of the filmmaker’s right to freedom of expression is denied at every step by whichever party holds the reins of power at the Centre, at the state level, at the membership and board of the CBFC. Cinema and Censorship`85is a critical, incisive, research-based analysis of the political factors that continue to dog the concept of film censorship in India by the CBFC.
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Soli Sorabjee in the Indian
Express (January 30, 2007) following the non-screening of Parzania
in Gujarat. The film was rejected by multiplex owners in Gujarat for
fear of a Hindu backlash.