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 India’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 Vijay Anand, and actors but also saw independent India continue specialists who “know” the cinema? Arvind Trivedi and Anupam Kher – 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 Vijay Tendulkar to servant boy in Deepa Mehta’s Fire – tion that Mazzarella describes as the Anand Patwardhan, from Shyam Benegal would see India’s elite make “an unin- “state of permanent exception”. What is to Shabana Azmi – 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).