‘Censorship problem is not unique to India’

The c-word is just another one of India's tales of paradoxes, the way William Ma-zzarella, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago known for authoring Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity sees it as he revisits the way the censorship story has been unfolding in the country the recent times.
With tongue firmly in cheek he helped the roomful of artists, film students and academics at the Godrej Culture Lab break the somber silence and let out peals of laughter as he speculated the half kiss in the trimmed Spectre that made it to Indian movie halls or the living historical figure Gurmeet Ram Rahim and his supernatural feats in MSG.
"Censorship itself is a kind of publicity that thrives on visibility. Instead of drawing a veil on things, the act itself is publicized and unspeakable things are spoken again and again by the censors themselves justifying why they've silenced it. Censorship seems to be flourishing despite the fact that it hasn't been able to silence or control a great deal of our public conscience space. So maybe we need to think differently about what the censors are up to," he says with a wry smile pointing at the travesty that the CBFC guidebook itself is. "It reads 'What everyone should know?' the coy question mark in the end being the key point!"
It's definitely been a busy year for the Indian censors given the current censor chief Pahlaj Nihalani in the spot for his highhandedness. "But for many years the complaint has been about the censor board operating as a patronage opportunity for the government in power at the time," an inevitable reality he pointed out.
And when he brought up the list of objectionable words that leaped out of CBFC's private circulation and went viral in the wired world, Anuvab Pal, stand-up comic and screenwriter moderating the talk couldn't help but wonder about the humour in the "gravitas" of the real time situation when "the committee must have sat together and nominated the words and signed in solemn silence."
There is a policing dimension to censorship. About silencing. But it's not a problem unique to India. "America has had a tradition of censors operating in shadowy ways." If in the colonial times, censorship was more about racial distinctions, censorship today is cloaked as education and unraveling of culture.
An ideal flawless censor system is a utopian idea for as long as social ethics and prevailing law and order limits will guide the censor board's laws. "Also it can be tough to reign in the censoring impulse is about intensities than principles and a performance of authority," he added.
And while the last few years have seen films with an abundance of adult themes, it will be a while before Indian cinema is truly free.
The no-go areas continue to evolve but when at the receiving end of all that policing, censorship gets real and beyond just laughs. "It's time to understand what censorship activates and not silences. And we need to think twice of our own fascinations and susceptibility to being seduced by the great bane of censorship," he signed off.