The Hindu Right and the Politics of Censorship: Three Case Studies of Policing Hindi Cinema, 1992–2002

In the 1990s Hindi cinema was firmly entrenched in the contentious sphere of the political. India's Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC, also sometimes referred to as the Censor Board), historically considered a primary regulatory mechanism of Hindi cinema and the custodian of public morality by both the citizenry and the state, found itself at the center of a maelstrom of moral panics, escalating Hindu right-wing protest politics, primarily under the aegis of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the extremist right-wing party the Shiv Sena, and repeated state interventions.¹ I argue that the 1990s was marked by a gradual alignment of the right-wing nationalist agenda with the historically existing regulatory concerns of the state over the deleterious "effects" of cinema on vulnerable audiences, resulting in an unprecedented "censor-wave" (Bose xxxix). Exemplifying this temporal alignment, each of the three case studies discussed here—Khalnayak (The Villain, 1993), Bombay (1995), and War and Peace (2002)—represents the censorship of a "sensitive" issue for the Indian state—sex, religion, and national security—in a prevailing climate of reactionary right-wing politics, anxieties over cultural invasion by globalizing forces, and unstable coalition governments. It is my contention that censorship as a selective process was an intrinsic principle of Hindu nationalist discourse predicated on a series of exclusions in terms of religion, gender, class, and caste that led to the narrow remapping of the national imaginary, resulting in the "miniaturization" of the nation (Sen 46).

The first case study, of Khalnayak, reveals how female sexuality was considered a threat to traditional Indian culture and Indian womanhood by the patriarchal alliance of the state, Hindu nationalist discourse, and the viewing public, resulting in moral panics and the demand for stringent obscenity regulations. The protracted censorship controversy surrounding Bombay, the second case study, foregrounds the state's anxieties about the cinematic medium engendering Hindu-Muslim communal tensions, prompting preemptive measures, the extraconstitutional power of Bal Thackeray, the leader of the Shiv Sena, and the direct involvement of the police as censor and arbiter. The third case study, of the documentary War and Peace, exemplifies the overlapping power relations between the Hindu Right and the BJP-led state. It represents the nadir of partisan political interventions under the pretext of safeguarding law and order and the attempted stifling of pluralistic voices in a shrinking public sphere.

Through these three vignettes of landmark censorship controversies, "which reveal how deeply political the whole exercise has become in post-colonial India" (Pendakur, Indian Popular Cinema 79), I attempt to map the field of power relations that existed among the CBFC and the state, the Hindu Right, the viewing public, and various interest groups at a historical conjuncture and to locate various competing yet hierarchical, shifting, and diffused sites of political pressure and influence in the public sphere. As Lee Grieveson suggests, such "a struggle over culture and cultural space is, indeed, virtually a defining feature of democratic societies, which almost inevitably involve a complex negotiation between public authority and the dissemination of facts, ideas, and representations in public" (Policing Cinema 13). In order to contextualize the persistent regulatory concerns of the state apparatus over "obscene, indecent and/or immoral" cinematic material a brief overview of the media effects–based logic prompting direct state interventions, regulation, and the state-instituted codes of censorship is required.

"Why Is Film Censorship Necessary?" (CBFC, "Annual Report" 1)

According to Monika Mehta, "censorship has been a key point of contact between the post-colonial Indian state, the Bombay film industry, and the Indian citizenry" (170). It is interesting to note from a historical survey of cinema and censorship the astonishing fact that at no stage has there been any concerted action for the abolition of censorship per se, despite the film industry's prolonged resentment of the CBFC's discriminatory policies and practices. A cursory look at the history of Indian cinema reveals a continuous and unequal battle between the censors and the Hindi film industry. In fact, "fear of the censor has caused producers to exercise...