For a country that prides itself on its loud, rambunctious cinema and regards it as its best export till date, it is surprising that the cry for a ban on a film we don’t like, or are distinctly uncomfortable with, is the norm. Not a year goes by without a call for a ban or censorship. William Mazzarella’s Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity , published three years ago, offers reasons for why we are the way we are. He argues how in a “mass-mediated society” censorship and regulation is often the norm, and both cultural and political legitimacy are unstable. Drawing on archival sources and extensive interviews with those whom we call “the censors”, the book offers both the legal and historical underpinnings of censorship in the country. India’s track record in banning books, films, plays, music is not enviable, yet all of this somehow also appears inevitable.
It is the observation Mazzarella makes about the years after India embarked on liberalisation that is of particular interest in forging an understanding of how groups claiming to be the sole interpreters of ‘public morals’ have emerged. Mazzarella writes: “Many explained the censorship struggles of this period as symptoms of a clash between two formations: the process of globalisation and economic liberalisation that brought a deluge of mass communication, and on the other side, the rise to mainstream power of an aggressively conservative form of Hindu nationalism… the intensification of censorship was one outcome.” The stage was thus set not only for state censorship, but several non-state actors, assertive caste groups, gender groups clamouring for censorship.
The book’s stage is cinema, but it helps us understand how dominant caste groups have been so effective in mobilising support for informal bans such as on writer Perumal Murugan’s Mathorubagan , till the courts’ defence of the writer’s right to write.
Mazzarella’s exploration of India’s engagement with censorship begins during British rule, and shows how restrictions on free speech got enshrined in the Constitution. The legal framework of censorship is still a work in progress. Mazzarella writes: “In our digital time, with its more customised and privatised forms of media consumption, the cinema hall may seem like an archaic space.”
To defend the indefensible, to be a little more tolerant and a little indulgent — for me those are the unstated takeaways from this important book.
anuradha.r@thehindu.co.in
