This past year, censorship has made big and recurring news in India. The Censor Board for Film Certification (CBFC) under Pahlaj Nihalani’s chairmanship has proved to be simultaneously a bane for filmmakers and a god-given-muse for Twitter humorists. The CBFC has gone where few previous iterations of the board have gone before. Whether it’s a list of banned words —including ‘Bombay’ and ‘masturbation’ — or cutting short James Bond’s kisses on screen. There has been a heightening of the old desi variety of crowd-sourced censorship.
Our society seems to take offense easier and insist more volubly on our right to silence each other. And yet, while traditional channels of censorship have increased their scope and heightened their intensity, India is seeing a wide open space of cultural production online, which is somewhat free of the claustrophobic pressures of moral policing.
The Godrej Cultural Lab this Friday is hosting a talk titled ‘Censoring India’ by William Mazzarella from the University of Chicago.
Mazzarella, a professor at the American university, writes and teaches on the political anthropology of mass publicity.
Much of his work’s focus has had an Indian context. His connection began in the mid-90s through a PhD dissertation that would become the book Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Duke, 2003).
Since then, his interests have turned to Indian censorship vis-a-vis cinema. In 2013, he published Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Duke, 2013) — an analysis of film censorship in India, based on 10 years of research. In an exclusive chat with The Hindu , the professor talks about his journey so far and the interest that censorship holds.
How did you get interested in censorship?
In the wake of liberalisation, everyone was asking, what does it mean to have all these foreign brands coming in into India in the mid-90s? Is this cultural imperialism? How can we define Indian-ness in the background of all this? My sense was that advertising was one of the places where those debates were being carried out. After my book, I started thinking about censorship, mainly because, it seemed to me to be, in a way, the other side of advertising, which is about a big ‘Yes’.
Want this, look at this, desire this. It would appear that censorship is ostensibly, about a big ‘No’. Don’t look at this, don’t do that. In fact, my argument is that censorship itself has been a form of publicity. I actually think that censorship is more about making something visible.
What do you think censorship is?
It’s ultimately about exciting public attention around an act of authority. It’s almost like a ritual or ceremonial thing.
It’s a performance, supposed to have this kind of attention grabbing, exciting quality to it. Censorship adds to the charisma of power.
The reason why it becomes necessary to think about censorship in this way, is that censorship is not able to control the circulation of images.
Then the question becomes what’s the whole point of this censorial exercise if it is not in fact, able to control the public space in the first place? So then it has to be something else.
My argument is that it is actually about enhancing the charisma of power by focussing attention on a controversial object to say, we decide what is allowed, we as it were, control the social order.
We are the ones in command of this situation. Censorship in this sense has a theatrical aspect to it; like something that happens on a stage. Every time something is censored, its not a thing that is silenced, because, it is repeatedly mentioned.
Isn’t censorship about free speech?
Free speech is really important and I think it’s particularly important, at a time like this, when there is a lot of unpredictable repression going on. But, having said that, if you want to understand what censorship is doing, and how it works, you realise its not primarily about clamping down on free speech. It is about what kind of mileage can be gained, by the visible act of enacting authority.
The person who stands up and says I am offended by this, that too is a wager on what kind of attention can be gained in public through associating yourself with some kind of controversial image.
Have you followed the recent Indian intolerance debate?
It’s not just an Indian thing. The world right now is seeing a violent polarisation of politics. It’s a time of heightened violence, fear and hatred. One thing that has happened is that media savviness has become the currency of all players in this game, on every side.
Whether it’s ISIS or governments or private corporations, they are all playing the media game right now. It’s a very volatile time, a pretty scary time actually.
People's prejudices are coming out in ways that I've been surprised by. What is saddening is that the seeds of prejudice were there all along. It just required a climate in which it suddenly feels ok to utter those things.
I would hope that not articulating those things is not just a form of self censorship.
Time: December 18, 5 pm; Venue: Godrej India Culture Lab, Vikhroli
