As You Like It, Act IV

Bowing yet again to political pressure, the Censor Board has cemented its reputation as a pushover.

These are the objectives of film certification in India:

»The medium of film remains responsible to values and standards of the [sic] society.

»Artistic expression and creative freedom are not unduly curbed.

»Certification is responsive to social change.

»The medium of film provides clean and healthy entertainment.

»The film is of aesthetic value and cinematically of a good standard.

There is another objective, invisible, but alive in the everyday actions of the board’s decision makers: cover your ass.
No other point explains why the Censor Board should capitulate to thuggish political demands—the latest of those being a letter Raj Thackeray sent to Board chairperson Sharmila Tagore on 23 November—asking the Board to change the use of ‘Bombay’ in films to Mumbai, or else… Or else, the Board chairperson would be held personally responsible. Presumably by the Sena’s extralegal kangaroo court.

A Maharashtra Navnirman Sena spokesperson told the newspaper DNA, “It assured us it won’t happen in the future.” (Pankaja Thakur, the board’s CEO, tells Open no formal assurances had been made and that the board “has been accommodating people’s sentiments for a while”.)

Apart from raising the question of whether the board has to accommodate anyone’s sentiments at all, its actions reek of helplessness. Its true mandate, it seems, is to keep offence out of theatres. This runs counter to objective no. 2— that ‘artistic expression and creative freedom are not unduly curbed’. And its predicament is in no way improved by a chairperson who values cleansed cinema. That this review comes after an implied threat bolsters the percep-tion that the board is a push-over. A few examples: the recommendation that Dib-akar Banerjee change the words of a song from ‘tu nangi achchi lagti hai’ to ‘tu gandi achchi lagti hai’, that he remove a caste-related word from his most recent movie; that swear words be edited from The Social Network.

The point here is that people’s expectations of Indian cinema have undergone immeasurable changes. But since the board’s inception in 1952, it has grown meeker and less willing to rock the boat. By doing this, it has yet again emphasised that while it has the mandate to effect change, it is too busy pleasing all of India to do anything useful at all.

Censor BoardMNSRaj ThackeraySharmila Tagore