BOOK REVIEW

But, is the misfi t specifi c to the nature of Yours Censoriously the actual restrictions? Or, is the problem more foundational, and is the stand that Censorship in Cinema needs to be taken – the stand that the great Hindi and Marathi theatre director Satyadev Dubey took when he faced Ashish Rajadhyaksha censor attack for the Marathi play Gidhade (1970) – logically against any hy does ’s fi lm censor Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass speech restriction whatsoever? board (henceforth, the censor Publicity, William Mazzarella (Orient Blackswan), 2013; It is a curious fact of history that, Wboard/the board) exist? No pp 296, Rs 795. even amid wide anti-censor feelings, other modern institution of the state is Dubey’s stand remains largely unique. presumably beset by such extraordinary with other countries, defamation, main- Most conventional oppositions to the lack of clarity as to its very purpose. Legally, tenance of public order, and the one that board tend to stop short of opposing the the Central Board of Film Certifi cation has generated the greatest controversy: idea of censorship itself. The general exists because the Cinematograph Act, “decency and morality”. belief, it appears, is that while the com- 1952 (Section 5(2)) translated into the Many opponents of the board take the bination of politics and moral conserva- cinema Article 19(2) of the Indian Consti- debate back to the parent doctrine. They tism that defi nes censorship today may tution, the provision on “reasonable restri- contend that the Constitution’s “reason- be deeply problematic – for, in theory ctions” to the doctrine of free speech. Such able restrictions” clause and its physical it makes all fi lms potentially liable, if reasonable restrictions, says Article 19(2), manifestation in the censor board are read in a suffi ciently rabid way – it does include specifi c political limitations con- both, on the very face of it, incompatible not necessarily negate the in-principle cerning India’s integrity and its relations with the very concept of free speech. need for restriction, even though the

38 October 18, 2014 vol xlIX no 42 EPW Economic & Political Weekly BOOK REVIEW terms of such restriction are by no means an “other”, defi ned by class, religion Although “I” confi gure myself as the agreed upon. and politics. addressee of the several new forms of And thereby hangs a fascinating tale There is an “ideological loop” here public communication that arose since the that William Mazzarella’s Censorium: that says censorship exists today be- 1870s, “I” can “anonymise” myself amid Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass cause earlier conditions of censorious the numerous unknown others who also Publicity vividly recounts. Everyone agrees repression prevented our audiences from partake of the same forms. Such anony- that the censor board is a mess. All the becoming mature publics, so that we misation generates a tension between fi lm-makers who have ever engaged with need new kinds of censorious repression bounded social orders where meanings the horror of the state-sanctioned moral to protect “these illiterate unfortunates and interpretations could be controlled brigade performing hatchet jobs that ap- from their own worst instincts” (p 15). The and a new and unbounded domain pear more like Lewis Carroll’s Queen of censor board therefore exists, Mazzarella that Mazzarella calls the “open edge of Hearts and her blind fury, routinely tes- contends, at a time that is permanently mass publicity”. tify to the fact that the actual practice in transition: between a once-upon-a-time Both late colonial India and, in star- bears no obvious or overt connection to of tradition and a future state of socio- tlingly similar ways, the India of the the theory. moral order when today’s board would 1990s, faced a problem that was inher- Who are these people anyway? What give way to a more socially ubiquitous ent to mass-mediated societies: of a vola- qualifi es them? We get an avalanche of practice, whatever that might be. tile capacity for “excitement”, impossible questions, all grist to Mazzarella’s mill, Arguing that such a loop is in its very and unrealisable fantasies that symbolic from an astonishing cross section of nature incapable of addressing either orders cannot contain. States addressing people on all sides of that particular the institution or the theory, Mazzarella such tension did something bizarre. They fence. Should a censor board make begins the entire argument from a funda- assembled an “institution” to contain and political or aesthetic judgments at all of mentally different standpoint. He uses administer what appears to be on the any sort whatever? Indeed, should it be the institution’s actual practice – which face of it an “impossibility”. The anxiety, chopping at all when it is in specifi c fact he studies at a particularly critical time and the means to resolve it, not only a board of “Certifi cation”? And, if it has in its career, between 2001 and 2003, brought the colonial British administra- to, what qualifi es a censor to chop? when it was controversially chaired by tion together with India’s indigenous elite, Should those wielding the hatchet be fi lm-maker , and actors but also saw independent India continue specialists who “know” the cinema? Arvind Trivedi and – to the practice into its own administration. Should it not be, in the very theory of it, open a new historical inquiry around The problem itself, generated by what the man on the Clapham Omnibus? how the institution arose in the 20th Mazzarella calls (slightly infelicitously century in India, and why it was deemed through the book) as the “pissing man” – a ‘State of Permanent Exception’ in the fi rst place necessary. The board problem repeatedly reproduced through- Few people who vehemently oppose the plays on a familiar stage, and most of out Indian cinema’s history by responses board oppose the principle of censor- the key players in the saga – the censors to scenes like, to take an example that he ship itself. In the process, even progres- themselves, from Anand to Kher, and their discusses at length, the masturbating sive opinion tends to buy into a condi- key challengers from to servant boy in Deepa Mehta’s Fire – tion that Mazzarella describes as the Anand Patwardhan, from would see India’s elite make “an unin- “state of permanent exception”. What is to – are all present. On tended alignment with the censorious extraordinary about that state, common the way, what we get is the tale of an imperatives of the colonial state” (p 64), to both the philosophical debate and the astonishing institution, which throws an attitude he discovers in his various in- specifi c criticism of the board’s function- astonishing new light on the concept of the terviews being reproduced into the pre- ing, is the veiled threat at the back of it modern public sphere, and the condition sent. Such an alignment has meant that all. Nobody, least of all the censors, of the citizen who occupies that space. post-Independence Indian governments argues that the system is perfect. Indeed, The “state of permanent exception” ended up opting for an indigenized version it is hard to even imagine what a perfect arrived in India at an interesting time, in of the white man’s burden: a kind of perma- censorship mechanism in a society would the late colonial period when the British nently institutionalized discourse of histori- cal crisis according to which censorship be- look like. But, imagine, they say, even authorities and the Indian nationalist comes necessary because India is (always) in for a moment, what would happen were elites faced an unprecedented cultural and a time of transition (p 75). the board abolished, the fl oodgates of political massifi cation. The rise of mass sex, sleaze and vituperation that would publicity, contrary to general understand- The ‘Inherent’ and the ‘Contextual’ be let loose. The feeling that we need a ing, takes place in India before political In the late 19th century, the specifi c board, if just for the moment, however democratisation, and then causes major problem was around how to regulate problematically it may function, appears problems for such democratisation. The interpretation. The British realised soon to be widely shared, even in progressive key problem posed by the rise of mass enough that both traditional Indian texts, circles who all feel the need for the publics to modernity itself is that of a new including and especially mythologicals, institution to exist to protect them from mode of subjective formation: anonymity. often contained political content. An

Economic & Political Weekly EPW October 18, 2014 vol xlIX no 42 39 BOOK REVIEW important solution that was fabricated And then came the cinema. Until the e ffervescence and the symbolic order” at the time would have a long-term cinema came along, says Mazzarella, (p 105). The volatile tug of war between impact: namely, for the censors to make the “infi nity of mass publicity” and the these provides for Mazzarella the found- common cause with traditional patron- “corporal intensity of performance” had ing predicament of mass publicity that age structures. When the 1876 Dramatic remained relatively autonomous; now in characterises modernity itself. Censor- Performances Act defi ned a political the experience of the moviegoing spec- ship in its most basic form is to him a dimension, described as the capacity of tator, publicity literally translated into “persistent phenomenological experience the text to generate “disaffection from bodily impact. From its earliest days, the of a tension between the sensuous force the government”, as well as a moral one, cinema has been credited with peculiarly and the signifi cant meaning of mass- that which could “deprave and corrupt”, vital powers, and now in India, from mediated objects” (p 113). there were some rough-and-ready solu- those days into the present, the “vividness” tions like separating out traditional reli- of cinema, the – Mazzarella is quoting Tug of War gious spaces of performance, where the the 1969 G D Khosla Enquiry Committee The model he draws on, a three-cornered patron was expected to play censor, on Film Censorship – “realistic colours… tug of war, however, has the possibility from the space of the modern public unique among all art forms and media for of opening some very basic questions for domain. The division, he shows, continues its evocative potential” (p 61), made the why the cinema offers such extraordinary into the present, with art production cinema a volatile and dangerous entity investigative possibilities for political that circulates within more contained from which the people needed especially science in India. In one corner of the symbolic domains still largely freer than to be protected. contest is the “spectator” – a split creature, that which can go to “illiterate publics”, Mazzarella’s own work over the years at once the transcendent ideal of romantic and where, also, the traditional patron has focused on modern forms of publicity, union and ethical citizenship, a “continent has often been replaced by the modern and he would still be known in India spectator-citizen” well able to hold it in, “police” administration. mainly for his work on Indian advertis- as well as its mirror opposite, the hot- The legacies of this strategy of control ing (Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and headed intemperate spectator capable and containment are evident even in Globalization in Contemporary India, of violence. Importantly, the two are not the present-day implementation of Sec- 2003). In this book too, a major focus always apart. They can also inhere tions 292-294 of the Indian Penal Code remains the phenomenon of mass pub- within the same person. Mazzarella (IPC) that deal with obscenity. The divi- licity, the fear of which often defi nes speaks of a particular turn in the sion between “inherent” and “contextual” the censor board, and makes the board obscenity debate in which, as he quotes meaning – that, say, a particular kind into an expression of a “frozen ideologi- lawyer Indira Jaising, obscenity laws are of explicit representation is in and of cal form”, a permanent instrument of all about protecting people not from itself obscene, or that it depends on protection from the anthropoid incar- other people but from “themselves”. In where it appears and how it is used – nation of the “gap between collective another corner is the cinematic object is fi rst translated into controlled and uncontrolled domains of publicness, and then into modern and traditional. So, the IPC clearly exempts both traditional EPW 5-Year CD-ROM 2004-08 on a Single Disk forms (from Khajuraho to naked sadhus), and controlled conditions where the The digital versions of Economic and Political Weekly for 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 contextual interpretation can be enforced. are now available on a single disk. The CD-ROM contains the complete text of 261 issues The matter only enters the domain of published from 2004 to 2008 and comes equipped with a powerful search, tools to help organise research and utilities to make your browsing experience productive. The contents of the CD-ROM the state – the board and the police – are organised as in the print edition, with articles laid out in individual sections in each issue. when, it enters a “public place” to the “annoyance of others”, as Section 294 of With its easy-to-use features, the CD-ROM will be a convenient resource for social scientists, IPC researchers and executives in government and non-government organisations, social and political the defi nes it. activists, students, corporate and public sector executives and journalists. Soon enough, however, arose a more Price for 5 year CD-ROM (in INDIA) complicated problem that made such divisions impossible, where, as with Individuals - Rs 1500 Institutions - Rs 2500 examples like K P Khadilkar’s play Kichak Vadh (1907), it became impossi- To order the CD-ROM send a bank draft payable at in favour of Economic and Political Weekly. ble to keep the moral and the political separate. Performative intensity of a ritual Any queries please email: [email protected] kind began combining the salacious with Circulation Manager, the seditious, or what Mazzarella calls Economic and Political Weekly “content beyond content”, capable of 320-321, A to Z Industrial Estate, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400 013, India releasing dangerous political energies.

40 October 18, 2014 vol xlIX no 42 EPW Economic & Political Weekly BOOK REVIEW itself. Eternally elusive, the cinema with the fl ows and counterfl ows of cen- which all censorship apparently aims: a appears to a nervous state machinery sorship discourse, only some of which condition where patron and police shall to be a rampant meaning-generator, a was articulated by the board. entirely merge into one single entity. This “visceral force of image-objects” capable This entire episode was especially external-intimate obstacle, humanised as of quasi-autonomous meaning-genera- curious because it happened at a time of a the “pissing man”, is actually an essenti- tion beyond the control of any available major inversion of the “state of permanent alised, anthropomorphic embodiment of interpretative community. And, there is exception” within which censor boards Mazzarella’s “open edge of mass publicity”. in between all this, the board. usually function, when the Emergency – What it does is to create a comfortably Once censorship is defi ned in this way, itself a moment of “exception” – created a routinised role for the censor board as however, it opens up other fl oodgates. normalised fi ction of everyday life, illus- permanently isolating image-objects and Just as there is the content beyond the trated by the only (temporary) require- giving them a “heightened value”, the content, there is also the state beyond ment of the then censor board, that better to keep them within the predictable the state. Several extra-constitutional Nishant introduce an intertitle saying that and familiar limits of what he calls claimants to the censor’s role begin it was set in pre-Independence times. “restricted obscenity”. On the other hand, making the same claim to authoritative a generalised obscenity cannot be sym- cultural order, responding to the same Tightrope bolised as such, but it can be put to other “performative dispensation” as the cen- Bombay, to take another example, was kinds of work. sor board itself did. The most substantial clearly where the state was out of its Of greatest relevance, perhaps, here, part of Mazzarella’s work constitutes the depth in addressing the problem of the is the possible connection between this detailed analysis of some famous fi lms fi lm’s capacity for uncontrolled meaning- entire model of censorship and the cinema. made in the 1970s to the 1990s – Shyam generation, something that the fi lm itself Invented before the cinema came along, Benegal’s Nishant (1975), Shekhar Ka- had apparently included as an organisa- the censor board’s ultimate model of pur’s Bandit Queen (1994), Mani Rat- tional principle. Walking a controversial apprehending the “open edge of mass nam’s Bombay (1995) and Deepa Mehta’s political tightrope that has left viewers publicity” and translating it into the Fire (1996) – where he moves within and undecided to this day as to just what the obscene obstacle of the “pissing man” outside the fi lm text to reveal the extent fi lm was trying to say, Bombay echoes – came to be par excellence the cinema. to which the fi lm itself, in its very form, in its address as well as the way that The movie theatre, capable of anonymity, along with the discourse around it, a sur- the censor board, the police, and Bal now enshrines what he calls the “obscene real dance involving those who made it, Thackeray negotiated among themselves superego loop”, namely, the “moralized those who supported it, those who op- the solution for how to show it – a con- attachment to the laws of the symbolic posed it, and those who censored it, siderably longer discursive and formal order” that is “inextricable from the seems to effectively perpetuate the same history fashioned around censorship. Is pleasures of transcending them” (p 216). three-cornered discursive contest from it based, for one, on fi ction or fact? The It is certainly the case that post-celluloid late-colonial India into the present. fi lm repeatedly claims both conditions. technology has diminished the censor Is it a realist work, as Bandit Queen was board signifi cantly. It is also true that Sleight of Hand claimed to be (which might have situated we see an exponential increase in the Nishant, to take a major example, faced some of its more unstable representations), volume of digital moving images in the censorship trouble during the Emergen- or it is a work of melodrama, as we see in public domain, only a minuscule part of cy, but cracked that problem through Bombay’s use of songs? Both these ques- which are actually censored. It is also both sleight of hand (one censor board tions are situated within a well-established evident that more and more fi lm-makers member stage-managing the post- discourse, but the third fact, the fi lm’s working in informal and community- screening discussion) and the direct in- representation of the Muslim, is what based exhibition contexts are simply tervention of Indira Gandhi herself. really opens the fi lm to historical inter- choosing not to bother to get a certifi - Paradoxically, however, the fi lm – which pretation – to the role that “representation cate. Mazzarella, however, suggests that in its public image passed through with of Islam” has played, since the 1920s, as such technology can only eventually no cuts at all – may have, long before it the “paradigmatic obstacle to achieving be judged for its position on censorship faced any censorship, actually internalised continent spectator-citizenship” (p 140). – or its own capacity to transcend that the problems it might have faced in the The obscenity debate forms both the obscene loop – when it fi nds its own way way it was put together, its use of sound, centerpiece of the book and, eventually, to channel what he calls the “affective and several other aesthetic decisions on the point that allows Mazzarella to pro- potentials of collective effervescence” the display of explicit violence. What we pose a possible resolution to the problem through the intimate and anonymous get, with such a reading of Nishant, a of “permanent exception” into which all forms of mass publicity. fi lm that has often been interpreted by positions, pro and anti, seem locked. The

fi lm studies scholars as representing a problem is what he calls an “extimate” Ashish Rajadhyaksha ([email protected]) statist position, effectively becomes like (at once external and intimate) obstacle is at the Centre for the Study of Culture and a thin narrative membrane vibrating to the ideal, unachievable condition to Society, Bangalore.

Economic & Political Weekly EPW October 18, 2014 vol xlIX no 42 41