Ansuya Mansukhani
Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts
Symbiosis International (Deemed University)

Abstract

The nation is not merely a geographical, territorial, or physical entity. A nation is not just its people. National sentiment and identity too, is not only articulated by its citizens, but is also performed through material forms and symbols. It is also an entity that is articulated through cultural forms, imagined, and constructed through texts. Often, the study of cinema’s role in the production of the nation’s imagination has prioritised a text-centred approach. This paper intends to contribute to these debates through another prism: cinematic censorship. Cinematic censorship has played a significant role in the cultural politics of the territory of India, both as a colonial entity and later as a post-colonial nation. Cinematic censorship has, therefore, allowed for a rich field of scholarship to emerge around the production, exhibition, and distribution of cinema during colonial and post-colonial times. Censorship has primarily been understood through the logic of a governing state entity that certifies a film for approval. Such an understanding fails to account for the existence of other entities that exercise control over cinema. Alternatively, this paper stresses the need to account for the public as an important entity that influences the production, distribution, and exhibition of cinematic texts. It, therefore, produces the idea of the public in contrast to the state as a central driving force in the imagination of the nation in cultural terms. Locating public censorship in relation to the rise of the Hindu right-wing in India, this study looks at the role played by public censurers in furthering the ideological and political project of Hindu nationalism. It approaches the phenomenon by locating it as a structural response to processes of colonisation and the subsequent contradictions between modern and traditional forms of authority in the nation. This paper then intends to expand how the disciplines of Political Science and Film Studies look at the questions of cinema, censorship, and the nation by accounting for the role of public interventions in terms of their cultural, ideological, and political significance.

Keywords:  Cinema, Censorship, Nation, Public

Producing an Object of Study: Censorship, Cinema, and the Nation

The history of cinema in India is one of an entity informed by the intrusion and presence of censorship practices by both the state and the public. As Madhav Prasad informs us, Indian cinema, (specifically referring to its most dominant strand, Hindi cinema) has been a textual signifier of the meanings of nationhood (Prasad, 1998). Even prior to independencecinema provided an important space for the construction of the nation’s identity, while also offering the space for the negotiation of these meanings. It is unsurprising, then, how enquiries in culture and cinema have drawn on these cinematic traditions to understand their engagements with the larger national project. I posit that this history can be approached through a different prism, that of cinematic censorship. Again, drawing from Prasad, cinema in India may be read as an utterance of the underlying structural conflicts between modern and traditional modes of production and organisations of society. Taking this further then, I argue that if cinema can be understood as being governed by the contradictions of the nation-state, as can cinematic censorship. The complex relationship between expression and tolerance, as simultaneously endorsed and disputed as a part of ‘democratic’ processes, demands a closer investigation into the ideological and censorial practices that govern cinema. Generally, censorship has been understood as representing a society’s views on moralities and its limits on tolerances. However, I contend that such a reading of censorship is simplistic and calls for a more discursive understanding of what the norms of permissibility reflect. On this ground, I argue that cinematic censorship is not only informed by a pre-existing and popularised imagination of the nation-state, but also reproduces it.

Here, I shift from a simplistic understanding of film censorship, where the primary authority of approving a film lies with the state and, towards a more nuanced one that accounts for the role of the public as a governing entity. Here, I draw from the works of Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1999), Nandana Bose (2009), and Lawrence Liang (2015/2022), who have provided important insights that can help us understand this moment. Nandana Bose further notes that the late 1990s to the early 2000s are years that are significant to our understanding of cinematic censorship because of the manner in which cinema becomes one of the loci of the moral panic of the nation – especially around sexuality, religion, and war. This moral panic was especially articulated through repeated state and public interventions by right-wing forces in light of a changing nation space and the anxieties surrounding the liberalisation of the nation (Bose, 2009).

The 1990s were important years in terms of state intervention in cinema and were witness to various controversies that the Central Board of Film Certification had gotten involved in. However, since there has already been extensive work done on these controversies during this decade by Bose (2009), my work will not be diving into the specificities of these debates. Instead, this paper intends to focus on  (a) a theoretical understanding of public censorship and (b) the relation between public censorship in the 1990s to that in contemporary India. I intend to provide fresh insights into the relation between cinema, censorship, and the nation by locating authority in non-state bodies, i.e., the public, rather than a state body. Public censorship in India, as this paper shows, is a specific historical response to the contradictions between the modern state and the pre-modern feudal structures. It essentially represents a form of “extra-legal” (Kaur and Mazzarella, 2009) censorship, implying that it lies outside of the legal system. Yet, if we were to extend this idea further, then we may also read public censorship as the articulation of a desire to claim control over the public sphere. Even further, we may read this as an attempt to define what is culturally acceptable and tolerable. Public censorship does not have the same legitimacy as film certification does, yet today, we continue to see it grow. Public discontent towards cinema is not a recent phenomenon. I argue that contemporary instances of public censorship today can be traced back to similar instances in the 1990s. We may identify how this legacy is continued in two ways: (a) the violent spectacle of dominant identity and majoritarianism politics that it invokes and (b) the ideological grounds of religious nationalism that it stands on. I posit that the growth of this phenomenon is a symptom of fractures in the processes of nation-building, and also plays an active role in the re-imagination of the nation based on religious and cultural lines rather than secular and territorial lines. 

This paper is divided into three sections. I begin by looking at the 1990s, which allows us to lead up to the politics of public censorship in contemporary India. These are the moments that see the rise, as well as the progression and perhaps now the arrival of a growing national culture based on exclusionary grounds. I unpack these moments as they reveal their forms of maintaining control over the cinematic public sphere and their relation with the state and legality. I look at Deepa Mehta’s 1996 film, Fire, and the arguments and controversies surrounding it as a case study, one that feeds into our discussions about censorship and an unconventional usage of the freedom of speech. In the following section, we will look at how this sentiment is possibly indicative of a re-imagination of the nation on majoritarian-religious, non-secular, and non-democratic lines. Further, we will try and understand the root of these tendencies and their sudden break of emergence with the liberalisation of the nation-state. I argue that the politics and performativity that we see of public censorship today have been informed by several seminal, violent, and destructive moments from our past. To approach this paper, I draw from both primary and publicly available secondary literature, including the laws themselves, amendments made by the state, films, as well as news reportage and commentaries on film censorship in India. 

A Public Gone Rogue

The 1990s in India witnessed a rising tide of anger and many voices from the Hindu nationalist sections of the public claiming space and legitimacy in the public sphere (Varshney, 1993). The 1990s, thus, become an important moment in which we locate these debates because of the significant ideological, political, and economic shifts that the nation witnessed. These were the years when the nation had witnessed many moments of political instability with the death of two Prime Ministers and the failure of the modernising state machinery. Just as importantly, these were also the years that witnessed the ‘LPG reforms’, or the liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation of the Indian economy. The decade witnessed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, which was followed by communal riots all over the nation, as well as the Anti-Mandal agitations. With such events, the 1990s remain not just an important time that indicates shifts in ideology and politics but also remains in national memory as a decade of visceral public spectacles of violence and dominance. This is central to our understanding of public censorship. Cinema has always been a medium that attracts attention for various reasons, specifically because of its ‘public-ness’ or the collective experience it calls for. It attracts judgment, discussion, debates, and opinions. It is not uncommon to see various public groups across the political spectrum calling for bans or seeing pushbacks against films. I intend to draw attention to those instances of public censorship that have evoked censorial performance in the name of protecting the ‘national’. The national that I am referring to here is not the progressive or inclusionary idea of the national but, the exclusionary imagination of India that seems to be drawing from the ideals of Hindutva.

By drawing on instances from the 1990s and contemporary times that have evoked questions about the freedom of speech and expression within the context of cinema in India, I intend to argue that the idea of freedom of speech has not been universally applicable to all citizens. The questions we must ask, then, are these: how are the norms surrounding the freedom of speech constructed? How do larger narratives, structures and discourses produce certain voices and ideas as more important or permissible to be discussed in the public than others? The controversy surrounding Mehta’s Fire and its subsequent public censorship by right-wing forces allow us to understand that freedom of speech is neither universally applicable nor neutral and unbiased. It often contradicts itself. As we see with this controversy and other previous examples, who has the freedom of speech, or rather the freedom to speak without legal consequences, can be deeply influenced by pre-existing biases in the state machinery and the influence of dominant narratives. This is the premise under which I understand the current threats to the freedom of speech in cinematic networks. This leads us into the following section where we look at these instances more closely to understand what kind of sentiments are at play here.  

The incidents with Fire were premonitory of a much longer line of reactionary public sentiments toward cinema in contemporary India, where religious and national identities (now almost synonymous) become the grounds upon which the public maintains its authority to act. The synonymity of these two identities (as well as their performances in culture and politics) only furthers the imagination of an exclusionary, and perhaps even regressive conceptualisation of the nation. The events surrounding the recent inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya in January 2022, are perhaps an apt set of examples to discuss before we move to a closer reading of the film. The building of the Ram Temple over the desecrated mosque was the culmination of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the Rath Yatra undertaken by L.K. Advani (senior leader of the BJP) in 1991. One of the ways by which those who opposed this move by the central government to build the temple chose to resist was by screening Anand Patwardhan’s Ram ke Naam (1992). However, during the weeks surrounding the inauguration of the temple, there emerged a series of events that are representative of the freedom of speech paradox. Many who wished to screen the film were forbidden from doing so, whilst those who wished to prohibit these screenings were able to do so. These pressures were often enacted by the state, as well as members from right-wing groups. For example, the student’s association in the Film and Television Institute of India (FTIISA), Pune, was attacked by right-wing groups. The students of the institute had been holding up a banner stating ‘Remember Babri’, and had organised a screening of Ram ke Naam as well as a photo exhibition of the demolition. Earlier in the same week, other right-wing groups were spotted outside the gates of the campus, shouting the slogan ‘Jai Shree Ram’ and threatening students that they would return with a bigger mob if the film was screened (Rajpurohit, 2024). In another case, at the private institute Ashoka University (Sonipat, Haryana), students were asked to remove posters of the screening of the documentary by the university administration. On the other hand, religious celebrations surrounding the inauguration of the temple were allowed to be held in other open, free-for-use spaces of the university (Kuntamalla, 2024). Similar prohibitions were imposed by different forces in Hyderabad and the K.R Narayanan National Institute of Visual Sciences and Arts in Kerala. The screening organised by a club, ‘Hyderabad Cinephiles’, was stopped by the Telangana police, and members were allegedly arrested (ABP News Bureau, 2024). In Kerala, students were once again threatened with violence by a group of people associated with the RSS (Sydeek, 2024). These acts of ‘extra-legal’ forms of censorship are especially important to read in the contemporary context because they indicate a changing state-public nexus and, therefore, a changing imagination of the nation that allows for these acts to increase in number.

From this point onwards, I turn to one of the significant instances of public censorship in India, that is, the pushback against Fire in 1996. The events surrounding the film are significant not only because of the political and social spectacle of the film itself, but also because of the debates and scholarship surrounding censorship and the freedom of speech that it incited. Here, I draw from the works of Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1999), Nandana Bose (2009), and Lawrence Liang (2015/2022), who have provided novel insights that help us understand this moment. As Bose notes, the incidents surrounding the Fire controversy were surrounded by three other cases of film censorship – Khalnayak (Villain) (1993), Bombay (1995), and War and Peace (2002). What we see today follows the same logic, where the public becomes one of the entities that expresses the moral panic surrounding cinema. However, drawing from its past and as we can see from the examples in 2024, these moral panics are clearly tied to how certain sections of the public imagine the nation.

Fire faced extreme criticism from the Shiv Sena (a political party active in the state of Maharashtra) for its representation of a lesbian relationship between two women named Radha and Sita. Another important aspect of this case that we must pay attention to is the presence of a certain figure, i.e., Bal Thackeray, and his role in the inciting acts of vandalism by Shiv Sainiks (activists from the party) against the exhibition of the film. Upon release, Hindu right-wing groups, such as the Bajrang Dal, disrupted exhibition spaces and, in some cases, literally set fire to the theatres (Jain and Raval, 1998). Thackeray, assuming the role of the guardian of a Hindu tradition, as well as sections of the Indian public from the right, were, of course, vehemently against the film. In one statement, Thackeray opposed the film by stating: “Why is the entire film shown against the backdrop of a Hindu family? Why have the names Radha and Sita been given to lesbian partners in the film? Why are their names Radha and Sita and not Saira and Shabana?” “Lesbianism is not Indian.” (Thackeray, as cited in Rajadhyaksha, 1999).  If we look at the keywords of offence here (Hindu, Radha, Sita, and lesbian), we can see how Thackeray’s statements again reproduce the Hindu identity not only as sacred but as the most important identity. Further, look at how Thackeray equates Hinduism with Indian (Lesbianism is not Indian), thereby equating the nation with religion. His remarks not only define national identity in terms of religion, but also in terms of sexuality. Thackeray’s remarks equate the heterosexual self as Hindu and the Muslim other as homosexual. By doing so, these remarks not only locate Islam as the other to the Hindu/Indian self, but also reinforces the idea that female body sexuality is a ground for the contestations of national identity. 

The incidents of the Fire controversy, and the debates surrounding public and state morality that it incited can offer us useful insights on understanding the relation between extra-legal and legal forms of censorship in India. Using our understanding of “extra-legal” forms of censorship as indicative of a desire to control moralities and demand space in the public sphere, the incidents surrounding the film can help us develop a fresh framework to understand public censorship. This is an episteme that can help us unpack many of the events that we see today as well. Simultaneously, these events can help us understand some very important arguments about the possibility of understanding the freedom of expression in a non-universal or ideological manner. According to Rajadhyaksha, what becomes interesting about the figure of Thackeray (here) is that he simultaneously makes use of freedom of speech as a citizen, but due to his position in politics, also acts a representative of the state, thereby blurring the boundaries between a public and state censurer (Rajadhyaksha, 1999). Thackeray, like most actors of public censorship, represents a kind of sentiment that claims authority over the nation-space whilst vehemently opposing the current mechanics of law for not representing their exclusionary interests. In other words, Thackeray and the Shiv Sainiks, or Bajrang Dal activists, among many others who undertake acts of public censorship in the name of preserving culture/public decency/morality, represent a kind of traditional authority that does not align easily with the apparent constitutional morality of the state.

The synonymity of the national with the religious is only possible when one begins to argue that the basis of a nation is religion – not language and not territory. This is the sentiment that we are witnessing the fulfilment of today, especially with the rise of the incumbent ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and its alliance with Hindu fundamentalism in India (Datta, 1999). Public censorship, in all its bravado and evocation of sentiment, becomes a means by which authority is maintained over the subject, while modern identities that reject or even question such modes of existence are rejected. Yet, the existence of these two forms is contradictory, but that does not mean that they do not co-exist and feed off each other for legitimacy. This is precisely where the crisis of the Indian state lies, in its simultaneous desire to resolve this contradiction between modern nation-states while hoping to hold on to some indigenous national identity that differentiates from that of the colonisers. Such acts of public censorship are signs of a rise of public morality and authority that attempts to override the cinema and the filmmaker’s freedom of expression. This leads me to the following section that further explores the question of the freedom of speech in relation to these contradictions.

Who has the freedom to express?

Let us note that the expression of one’s sentiment unless it has the potential to harm another citizen, is a granted, fundamental right in a democracy. However, that does not seem to be the case in the examples cited above. The debates surrounding the freedom of speech and its limits are often constructed around ‘what’ is being said and how it may harm or offend a citizen or the state itself. However, the limitation of this framework is that it does not allow us to understand how these notions of harm and offence are constructed. Are they based on a universal understanding of what harm is, or rather, can they be understood as being arbitrarily constructed in the favour of those in power? I argue that the right to freedom of expression can become non-neutral and shift with changes in national narratives. I draw on debates surrounding the freedom of speech to understand the state’s response to public censorship within the context of a possible re-imagination of India. 

A crucial contribution to our understanding of the freedom of speech comes from the liberal tradition of political philosophy, especially elucidated through John Stuart Mill’s harm principle. To extrapolate Mill’s words, “the only reason for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will is to prevent harm to others.” (Mill, 2003). Invoking Mill’s harm principle, one may argue that citizens have the right to the freedom of speech in a democracy so long as the act of expression does not encroach upon the liberties of another individual or community. For Mill, state intervention is only justified (and necessary) when one individual’s liberty may interfere, intrude, or coerce another individual’s sovereignty. This intervention is what we understand as being manifested in state censorship. In Mill’s framework, censorship is based on the premise that an individual’s liberty of self-determination is not absolute. Therefore, the only time when the state can rightfully exert power over its subjects is to prevent harm to another. Now, using the harm principle, if we were to think about whether the state was rightfully exercising its responsibility, I would argue that it has often not done so in its ambivalence and underwhelming response to public censorship. Here, I draw on Laura Beth Nielson, who builds on Mill’s framework to argue that the harm principle does not always work as neutrally as one would assume it does. Nielson primarily works on law and hierarchy within American politics, but one can use her broad analytical framework within the Indian context as well. Nielson argues that what is considered harmful is often conditional because our legal and political systems can be more tolerant of certain kinds of public speeches than others (Nielson, 2006). In an ideal democracy, the state’s responsibility would be to protect all of its citizens, not a few. Further, as the utilitarian harm principle informs us, the ideal state would have to choose then between the maximum harm to many, or the minimal amount of harm to a few. However, the inability of the state to do so (such as in the case of the controversies cited earlier) is indicative of its ambivalence to violence in the artistic sphere. 

The fact of the matter is that public censorship does not work in the same manner as legal censorship, something that has already been established. Liang complicates this by introducing three categories of these extra-legal forms – meta-censorship, para-censorship, and auto-censorship. Meta-censorship refers to those interventions by extra-legal authorities (often those with some kind of political stature) who have played an active role in censoring films, but are not a part of the system of film certification. This kind of censorship works through the logic of denying a film exhibition on certain grounds and exists over and above the legal forms of censorship. For example, in 1995, Thackeray only allowed the exhibition of Mani Ratnam’s Bombay after he had his own private screening in his house (Liang, 2005). Para-censorship is driven more by the logic of producing a spectacle of sentiments surrounding the censurer’s disagreement with the film. It is essentially the boycott of a film, or an attempt to reduce the number of people who watch the film. Like meta-censorship, it also exists outside the legal system, but unlike it, it acts as a parasite that attempts to directly attack the production, distribution, and exhibition of a film. It makes use of the logic of virality, i.e., by extending power and authority over the film by drawing attention to itself. The right to reject a film through the spectacle of public uproar is the sovereignty of the audience gone rogue. This is because, historically, extra-constitutional means of public censorship in India have consciously disregarded the authority of law and crossed the boundaries of the right of the freedom of speech. Lawrence Liang argues that one of the primary differences between traditional forms of film censorship and forms of public censorship is the fact that the latter specifically use tactics of emotions to achieve their motives. This can simultaneously have disastrous effects in terms of public discourse (because it can often mobilise violence) but can also indicate threats to what ideally should be a democratic sphere of discussion. 

Deepa Mehta’s Water (2005), which faced a pre-production form of censorship is another example of how the power to control cinema gets located in the public censurer. The film’s production began in Uttar Pradesh in 2000, but faced extreme forms of public intervention on the grounds that the film was insulting Hindu religious sentiments. Demonstrations were held across the city of Varanasi, and the films’ production sets were vandalized (Alahakoon and Phillips, 2010). This ultimately led to the filmmaker having to postpone the making of the film. A more recent example of para-censorship could be understood through the example of the Padmavaat (2018) controversy. Auto-censorship, for  

Liang, is essentially the consequence of the other two forms and is realised through their repetitive practices. The result of auto-censorship is essentially the need for filmmakers to have to self-censor their own work to avoid interjections from both the state and public authorities. Out of the three forms, I read auto-censorship as the most dangerous because it is indicative of a changing environment, where artists and citizens alike are required to be careful of what they create and what they consume, and in what modes they choose to do so to avoid clashes. The danger of public censorship is (a) that it transgresses an already sanctioned line of the law when it creates uproar against a film that has already been certified and (b) that it not only places restrictions on the freedom of the filmmaker’s expression, but also on the rights of the public. Ashish Rajadhyaksha argues that such censorial instances place further restrictions not only on the freedom of speech, but also on the public’s right to receive this freedom of expression (Rajadhyaksha, 1999). Rajadhyaksha makes an intervention that interprets the Article in the specific case of cinema, arguing that in the case of film, censorship not only hampers the freedom of the filmmaker, but also negates the film’s relation with the audience. Drawing from this re-interpretation of this article in relation to cinema, I further argue that acts of public censorship (in the case of certified films) in their desire to decide what is fit for public consumption undermine the authority of the law. The danger of public censorship, unlike film certification or state interventions, is that it is far more uncontrollable. The greater the cases of extra-legal forms of censoring, the greater should be our concerns. This leads us to a very crucial point in our arguments – the changing public and its role in the re-imagination of India. 

Changing Publics, Changing State

In this section, I turn to studying the contemporary moment through a historical and theoretical reading of the political, cultural and ideological turns of the Indian nation-state during the rise of public censorship in the 1990s. To understand this shift, we will have to locate the ideological shifts in Indian politics in terms of the crisis faced by the modern state in the years leading up to the liberalisation of the economy. Further, we will critically understand how these changes are related to the rise of vigilante publics (Banaji, 2018), not just in the realm of cinema but beyond it as well. The idea of the vigilante public, as put forth by Shakuntala Banaji, is the rise of a kind of “ethno-cultural violence” that often stands in defence of the far-right Hindutva ideology. The actions of participatory violence enacted by the vigilante public are rooted in feelings of superiority and claim over nationhood. The acts of public censorship we see today, are often indicative of the same sentiment (take the incidents at FTII cited above, for instance). Then, the intention of this trajectory is to map instances of public censorship in contemporary India to both an ideological terrain, and also other historical processes and events. This finally leads me to my primary argument, that contemporary film censorship in India can be read as an indication of a re-imagination of the nation along non-secular and non-democratic lines.

To further understand this shift, we must look at certain discursive shifts in the public sphere. The public sphere, as we now know it in the liberal model, is understood as those common spaces where rational citizens adopt the tools of reason in order to deliberate on issues of common interest. The public sphere has undergone many critiques from Marxist, Feminist, and even liberal perspectives; the most well-known is perhaps that of Nancy Fraser (1985). Fraser’s criticism of the Habermasian public sphere is not only that Habermas romanticises it, but also that he fails to account for the existence of other non-liberal, non-bourgeois public spheres. Further, the criticism highlights how Habermas fails to account that the very existence of a public sphere has often been designed through processes of exclusion, where the marginalised have been denied access to the spaces that the sphere accounts for. As Diviya Dwedi informs us, most of these critiques highlight that the normative aspects of the liberal public sphere do not consider the real conditions, where the public sphere is based on a set of exclusions – in the case of India, these exclusions are primarily based on caste, gender, class, and religion (Dwedi, 2015). For Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, these exclusions are central to deciding who has access to the public sphere, and therefore, the sphere is not one of rational deliberation, but rather, one that is characterised by “struggles for discursive hegemony”. (Negt and Kluge, 1993 as cited in Dwedi, et.al, 2015). On the basis of already existing hegemonies and the clear divisions in Indian society, I further argue that the kind of public censorship we see today is both a product of, as well as a producer of, the discursive hegemony of Hindu nationalism today. This is precisely a result of the assumption and invented synonymity of the basis of the Indian nation as religion. In defining the nation as such, it is imperative for the forces and wings of Hindu nationalism to enact the existence of a public sphere that is based on the same exclusions, thereby producing the majoritarian conceptualisation of India. This is not only the case with cinematic censorship, but also the result of a series of movements highlighted earlier, such as the demolition of the mosque, the anti-Mandal agitations, and the rise of Banaji’s vigilante public (Banaji, 2018).

To understand the politics of film censorship in contemporary India, we will have to locate ourselves in the debates surrounding the development of a re-imagination of India on majoritarian lines, a phenomenon that has gained its strength post the 1990s. I will begin by looking at how we understand the politics of the current moment, after which we locate the development of a national culture in relation to the changing nature of the Indian state. Once again, let us remember that the public is the site where the national is performed. The construction of an exclusionary nationalism is only possible through the inclusion and assertion of the Hindu patriarchal imagination of India. What is concerning about contemporary India is the rising sense of a need for auto-censorship from artists and citizens. What is further concerning, however, is the emergence of the public-state nexus, where both become the guardians of this national culture. The rising cases of public censorship, such as the storming of the NFAI theatre by right-wing groups at the screening of the film I Am Not The River Jhelum (2022) (Free Press Kashmir, 2024), although on a much smaller scale, are reminiscent of the censorial incidents of the 1990s. In turn, these events, I argue, are reminiscent of the increasing number of violent spectacles, such as that of Babri in 1992. They are reminiscent of the kind of violence that asserts the idea of India as a nation belonging to the Hindus first, and other minorities second. 

The current politics of cinema are undoubtedly a part of a larger project of nation-building. This logic of the role of arts in the process of nation-building is simultaneously the same as the immediate post-colonial moment, and yet, different. It is similar because both the liberal-left form of nationalism we saw in the early two decades (Ahmad, 1993) as well as the latent cultural nationalism we see now have had to grapple with contradicting forces in a fight for identity. The post-colonial moment had to produce an idea of India as a nation, despite its differences in languages, geographies, and identities. It also had to use the logic of a strong, centralised state to produce a citizen that was ‘ready for democracy’. Yet the current moment differs because it represents a far more exclusionary form of national identity based on the imagination of a memory of a pre-colonial past and the greatness of tradition. Such an imagination can only justify itself by mystifying the past as something that needs to be returned to. Both these forms are coercive and exclusionary in their own ways, but the latter is a much more dangerous idea because, unlike the former, it completely negates the need for a secular state and its separation from religion. Nehru too, saw great potential in cinema as a tool capable of educating the masses, a desire that was later manifested in the setting up of the Films Division. The documentary film soon became a tool in the hands of the state in the larger post-colonial project of building a civic consciousness around cinema, but one that was manifested in its usage as state propaganda. These documentaries followed the logic of attempting to capture the reality of the new nation-building project along with its ideals of big development, technology, education, and what it meant to be a ‘good citizen of the state’ (Jain, 2013). In many ways, we inherited the colonial model of film censorship, but unlike the colonial form, censorship in the post-colony turned into the logic of nation-building and the larger ideology of the Nehruvian centralised state. It is important for us to note that the impulse of Hindu nationalism has always been a political commitment to Hinduism and its integrity to the territorial and ideological imagination of India (Varshney, 1993). The present form of the nation we see, could possibly be understood as one that does not see this difference as clearly – and that becomes a threat to all other identities in the nation. 

The general sense of fear of an encroaching state and the rise of a violent, masculinist, nationalist public censurer can be read as an indication of the development of an authoritarian regime and the growth of a fascist performance of national identity. Many of the incidents of public censorship (and even beyond the realm of cinema), cited in these arguments have been performed by members either a part of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh/RSS (National Self Help Organisation) or its associated Sangh Parivar. I argue that these events, many of which include threats to minority communities, attempts at violence, the assertion of national and religious identities, and disruptions of spaces, all gained their authority from the events in Ayodhya in 1992. In Aijaz Ahmad’s pertinent reading of the moment, he argues that the destruction of the mosque was nothing but a showcase of a fascist spectacle that was built on the Sangh Parivar’s groundwork organisation, the mob’s contempt for the law of the Constitution and the claims to the reclamation of a national cultural tradition (Ahmad, 1993). What we see today, both with film censorship and otherwise, is no different. We need not look further than to see members of parliament such as Navneet Kaur Rana stating: “agar iss desh main rahena hai toh Jai Shree Ram bolna padega” (If you want to stay in this nation, you will have to chant Lord Ram’s name) (Rana, 2024 in Maa Annapurna, 2024). This is no different from the chants heard on the streets, and of videos circulating online. What becomes a matter of concern, then, is the fact that these incidents of public censorship are not occurring in isolation, but in relation to other developments in the public sphere as well. 

Public and politicians alike, the list of such performances is endless. This spectacle, in its own ways, acts as a censoring of other identities, as an imposition of violence by the majority. Fascism, as argued by Ahmad, Jairus Banaji, and Shakuntala Banaji, is always a politics of spectacles (Ahmad, 1993). These spectacles are always organised displays of power by the majoritarian groups. This is precisely why Banaji argues that the iconography of religion occupies a major part in building these spectacles (Banaji, 2002). It makes complete sense, then, how censorship in contemporary India is not just the logic of a simple ban, or a pushback – it is the presence of a series of events by the state and the public where certain identities are prioritised over others. Again, we need not go any further than the inauguration of the Mandir and the events surrounding it to understand the emerging nexus of power, authority, and propagation of dominant discourses of nationalism. 

Jairus Banaji sees the core of this fascist sentiment as having two centres – the construction of a national myth and the presence of various cultures of authority. From the time when Banaji was writing this argument in 2002 to now, I would argue that the right-wing tendency in India has finally been realised in the form of the current government. On the basis of many of these examples, in the contemporary, one might argue that the lines between the public and the state support of the project of Hindutva are now coinciding. The rise of the vigilante public and the right wing in the government are at the centre of this movement. According to Shakuntala Banaji, all of these moments – lynching, threats to the lives of citizens, reactionary spectacles, and incitements of mob violence are (a) a rejection of the modern authority of the state and (b) an incredibly proud means of capturing and creating the public as Hindu (Banaji, 2018).  In other words, re-imagining the nation as belonging to a single culture and community. Banaji further argues that this is the desired public sphere in the re-imagination of India. I am not arguing that this is where we have arrived, but it would be naïve to deny the strong presence of these elements in society. The flooding of our streets with images of Hindu gods (with an intention of expressing supremacy, not merely expressing one’s identity), of changing textbooks, of increasing training camps – all of these explain the creation of the vigilante public, who in our case is the public para-censurer. 

Now that we have understood the relation between censorship and the emergence of a Hindutva national culture, let us consider the factors involved in its development and its implications for the history of cinematic censorship. The years leading up to the liberalisation of the Indian economy had been years fraught with the disillusionment of a state that had failed to live up to its promises. Further, India had seen the assassination of two prime ministers, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi and the presence of an unstable government. The state was characterised by a contradiction of simultaneously promising material developments but failing at enforcing them because of our state capacity, i.e., the ability of a state to function in such a manner that allows it to reach its desired goals (Kapur, 2000). The rise of the Hindu right, then, can be understood as the consequence of both ideological and material developments. The Hindu right-wing, or Hindutva, only rises at the time of threat of the external forces of globalisation, and the need for globalisation came precisely from the inability of the Indian state to sustain itself. Further, the rise of globalisation was supplemented with the collapse of a left-liberal kind of nationalism. The earlier national project needed to be supplemented with a different national agenda. This paved the way for the rise of Hindutva nationalism, which public censorial forces have often drawn inspiration from. Rajni Kothari argues that we can locate the emergence of Hindu nationalism as we know it today within these contradictions (Kothari, 2005): those of opposing global and local forces, of an ideological debate between the left and right wing about the kind of developmental trajectory necessary for the state and the simultaneous presence of an incapable state. These created the perfect conditions for the imagination of the need to revitalise the nation along alternative lines. This sets the stage for the rise of the vigilante public, the emergence of a certain nationalist culture and the rise of violence on the streets as a means of displacing the anger towards the failure of state and civil society processes. 

However, simply rooting the violence that we see today within the understanding of a class conflict and the unfulfilled promises of modern development would be dangerous. This is because it does not take into account the rootedness of this violence in an idea of the nation that imagines it as belonging dominantly to a single culture that has consistently been under the threat of external oppressions. A final point, rightfully highlighted by Kothari – is that the very institutions of democratic processes (political parties, representative elections) are now all being used for the “anti-democratisation” (Kothari, 2005) of India to define who belongs, and who does not. This ‘anti-democratisation’ is essentially the indication of a changing nation space where opposing views, beliefs and ideas are subjected to incredibly low levels of tolerance, unlike in the idealised form of a democratic setting. A ‘democratic’ nation that loses out on its physical and metaphorical spaces to dissent, express opinions, criticise and ask questions about power, is one that becomes less democratic day by day. 

Conclusion

All forms of censorship, how they function and what roles they play must be historicised in order to understand how they develop. Cinema and film censorship, then, become just another location where we may see the engagement of forms that participate in the production of ideological narratives that desire to re-imagine the nation and maintain further control over public consciousness. The arguments made in this paper intend to convey that the power to control cinema lies not only with the state and its sanctioned legal authority, but also with the public. This is precisely why we must pay attention to rises in public censorship because they indicate shifts in our understanding of authority in society. Any study of public censorship, begins with asking the question: what is the authority that sanctions the presence of this entity? It is only when we ask that question that we can understand the shifts in culture and politics. I contend that public censorship, then, is indicative of a very serious shift in Indian politics, one that we must deal with carefully. The phenomenon of the public censorship of cinema, as we know, is specifically rooted in the history and politics of India. It emerges as a symptom of the conflict and the tensions between the traditional and modern elements of Indian society and is representative of the sentiments of anti-tolerance. The forms that we see today are grounded in a non-secular reading of the nation, where only certain citizens belonging to certain communities have access to the privileges of the nation-state. We may not be there yet, but we are witnessing the creation of a more intolerant public sphere, where artists and citizens alike must be more conscious of all that they produce – speech, art, literature, cinema, or alternative ways of being that do not seem to fit into this imagination of India.

Such projects, as the one I have attempted to delineate in the reading of this current moment, can only survive by projecting themselves as something that is needed by the people of the nation. In the process, what we are witnessing is the apparent regeneration of a traditional past and the destruction of the idea of India and of a secular discourse. This does not mean we must return to the practices of the nation that came before the rise of extremism. Such an India is still torn at the seams by class, caste, religious and gendered conflicts. The project of the postcolonial nation-state has always had to contend with the forces of the modernising process, and the desires of traditional authorities to establish an alternative form of the nation, where religion, caste and patriarchy become the central organising principles. The consequences of the inability to resolve this contradiction are now in front of us. I would like to conclude with a proposition. It is in the face of such extremism that it is necessary for us to reconsider the politics of our spaces, and to ensure that such spaces exist as sites of resistance against the dominant authoritarian politics. Of course, nations have the possibility to be coercive entities, but the existence of their power and dominance cannot be the only grounds on which we contend against them. Nations can be defined on inclusive grounds, and they do have the potential to be progressive projects. In such circumstances, we must question the usage of this power and its manifestations in forms such as censorship, and question how we choose to define the nation.  Today, the rise of public censorship is not only supplemented by the rise of various other films that seem to be supporting the dominant ideology of Hindutva, but also of other interventions in cinematic institutions. Is cinema, as well as other forms of media, made to be subservient to dominant discourses? What alternative paths can cinema adopt to resist? In such times, then, how does cinema respond, and how do the rest of us respond to such polarisation? The answer, I contend, can only lie in holding onto some progressive understanding of India, as well as holding state and other censorial forces accountable for their participation in the building of certain kinds of environments of intolerance. 

References

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Banaji, J. (2002). The political culture of fascism. South Asia Citizens Web. http://www.sacw.net/2002/BanajiSept02.html

Chandra, P. (Director) (2002). I am not the river Jhelum. Alpana Theatre.

Banaji, S. (2018). Vigilante publics: Orientalism, modernity and Hindutva fascism in India. Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture 25(4). https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2018.1463349

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Dwedi, D., et al. (2015). The public sphere from outside the west. Bloomsbury Academic.

Free Press Kashmir News Desk. (2024). Hindu right-wing members disrupt Kashmir-related film, storm into NFAI theatre. Free Press Kashmir.

Hindu right-wing members disrupt Kashmir-related film, storm into NFAI theatre