Panaji: Maharashtra, which has an especially strong tradition of reform movements and an active theatre community, is also the state with pre-censorship laws for theatre. “As per the laws, the State can control the writers’ script before it is even performed. This does not happen anywhere else in India,” said filmmaker and actor Amol Palekar at the Dakshinayan Rashtriya Parishad here on Sunday.
A discussion on censorship at the three-day national conference was chaired by Amol Palekar and Sandhya Gokhale and moderated by Atamjit Singh.
Mr. Palekar and Ms. Gokhale, his lawyer wife, spoke of their continued fight against censorship in theatre in Maharashtra. Mr. Palekar discussed numerous instances in which artists and writers fought against censorships in court, and won, and expressed regret at the fact that these battles need to be fought continuously.
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“Why do these fights against censorship keep persisting? We need to get to the root of this cause and solve it,” he said.
Mr. Atamjit Singh was of the opinion that censorship is a way of reinforcing the interests of the powerful in society, by preventing theatre from influencing people with different ideologies and counter-discourses.
Ms. Gokhale recalled that in the last two years, approximately 36 writers have been asked to change their scripts, from individual words and scenes to even entire pages. She also stated that there was no criteria for choosing the members of the censorship board. It is usually handed to the police department and ruling party members are appointed without any criteria.
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Mr. Palekar and filmmaker Anand Patwardhan stated that if there are no such censorship laws in other states, if TV channels, playwrights and right-wing propagators can speak without having a pre-censorship board examine their scripts, why are playwrights and documentary writers in Maharashtra subjected to this procedure?