From The Cinematograph Act of 1918 to the present Central Bureau of Film Certification: The only visible mouthpiece of a moralistic society.
In 1895, for the first time a film was publicly screened. A nitrate fire at the Bazar de la Charité, Paris in 1897 killed 126, one caused due to the violently flammable nitrate films. Fast forward to 1909, after several similar cases of fires caused due to the films, world’s first Cinematograph legislation was passed in Britain. It was hoped that the legislation would ensure safety by curbing the issue of cinema licensing (without any expectations). Licenses were made mandatory for public screenings. Eventually, the authorities began to control not only the conditions in which the films would be screened but also the content of the screenings. The first full-length Indian feature, D.G. Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra, released in 1913. The Cinematograph Act was born in 1918 and with it film censorship in India. The 1918 Act gave the district magistrate or the commissioner of police the power to issue licences to exhibitors, and the government to appoint inspectors to examine and certify films as “suitable for public exhibition”. It wasn’t until 1920 that multiple Censor Boards were set up and rules were put into place to judge the appropriateness of films, both local and foreign, for release. “No generally and rigidly applicable rules of censorship can be laid down.” were the positive words that the general principles of the Bombay Board of Film Censors began with and then proceeded to lay out 43 objectionable subjects. Most of these objectionable subjects comprised of politically incorrect depictions from the perspective of the British authorities. The Indian cinematograph committee (ICC) of 1927-28, chaired by a former Madras high court judge, T. Rangachariar, was the first comprehensive inquiry into movie viewing, censoring and exhibiting habits in the country, and an acknowledgment by the British of cinema’s increasing popularity in India. It made several pragmatic suggestions regarding censorship and the Indian cinema but in vain like most of the painstakingly written reports that have followed since. Despite the earlier mentioned long list of objectionable subjects, Indian cinema wasn’t exactly prurient in the 1920s and 1930s. Hamarun Hindustan (1930) had an intimate scene with Sulochana and Jal Merchant. Film-maker J.B.H. Wadia recalled, years after the fact, Lalita Pawar kissing her co-star “without inhibition” in a film, and Jal Merchant and Zubeida “kissing each other quite often” in 1932’s Zarina (depending on which account you read, Zarina had a total of 34, 48 or 82 kisses). Actors kiss in the Franz Osten-directed Shiraz (1928) and A Throw Of Dice (1929). And there’s the famous kiss in Karma (1933), which has gone down in legend as being 4 minutes long, though it lasts only a minute and involves a snake and a tearful Devika Rani trying to bring a comatose Himanshu Rai to life. (July 14 2018, Livemint) Suresh Chabria writes in Light Of Asia: Indian Silent Cinema, 1912-1934, “Even mentioning British excesses, the Indian National Congress, self-governance, or even revolution in other countries was enough to earn your film a cut or a ban.” “It’s a strange phenomenon which we find in this country to see the Government-sponsored Indian News Parade claiming to give all the news to the Indian people while the Censors black-out the Nation’s beloved leaders who make the most news,” cine-journal Filmindia complained in 1945, noting that even framed photographs of national leaders were cut from films. Through the Film Inquiry Committee report submitted to the government in 1951, we get a picture of what censorship was like in the years leading up to, and just after, independence. Things were, to put it mildly, chaotic. The five censor boards examined films separately, and each had their own set of rules and local pressures. Often, a title passed by one would be rejected by another. In addition, the government—of India, or of a particular state—might deny a certificate to a film passed by the censors, a fate which could befall a noir or a war film as easily as it could a propaganda newsreel. In the same decade, it was made evident that film censorship in free India would depend not only on official sanction but on societal approval. It was then that the kiss disappeared from Indian cinema—a curtailment so long and stifling that it hasn’t fully returned yet. In film critic and historian B.D. Garga’s words, “Kissing disappeared from the Indian screen not because of a fiat of the censor but because of pressures brought on by social and religious groups.” Over the next few years, a Central Board of Film Censors (CBFC, renamed as Central Board of Film Certification in 1983) was set up, regional boards were abolished, and U and A were adopted as certification categories. “The Act of 1918 was repealed, but it was later replaced with a law not dissimilar in scope,” Arpan Banerjee notes in his essay Political Censorship And Indian Cinematographic Laws: A Functionalist-liberal Analysis. This was the Cinematograph Act of 1952, the cornerstone—and, in many ways, the millstone—of film censorship in India. The 1952 Cinematograph Act sets out the structure of censorship as it stands today: the chairperson at the top, then the board members, then the advisory panels (members of the initial examining committee and the revising committee, which do much of the actual examination of films, are drawn from these). Everyone, from the chairperson down to the advisory panel members, is a government appointee. And every government at the Centre has taken advantage of this, staffing the CBFC with party loyalists eager to make cuts and deny certificates to films critical of the establishment. The Emergency saw the most blatant use of this power, with Gulzar’s Aandhi (1975) and Amrit Nahata’s Kissa Kursi Ka (1977) banned, and Shyam Benegal’s Nishant (1975) stuck in a bureaucratic tangle, because they were perceived as critical of the Congress government. (July 14 2018, Livemint) What makes the Cinematograph Act such a problematic piece of legislation is the Section 5B of the Act, which states that any film that is against the “interests of [the sovereignty and integrity of India] the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or involves defamation or contempt of court or is likely to incite the commission of any offence” can be denied a certificate. Censors are tasked with ensuring that films provide “clean and healthy entertainment”; do not “deprave the morality of the audience”, endanger public order or “depict the modus operandi of criminals”, and so on. All these rules are not only vague but also convenient since no film can be released without a certificate from the CBFC, a government appointed body. In 1968, Abbas—already well-known as the screenwriter of Awara and Shree 420—made a 16-minute documentary, Char Shahar Ek Kahani, which had scenes showing prostitution in Mumbai. The CBFC’s examining committee handed the film an “A” certificate; after Abbas protested, the revising committee reached the same conclusion. After a fruitless appeal to the Central government, Abbas petitioned the Supreme Court, arguing that pre-censorship was antithetical to freedom of speech and expression. The court ruled against Abbas. “The censorship imposed on the making and exhibition of films is in the interests of society,” said the judgement, though it also asked Parliament and the government to do more to separate the objectionable from the socially valuable. Though Abbas’ suit was probably doomed from the start, it did have one useful fallout: the formation, in 1981, of the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT), a quasi-judicial body headed by a retired high court judge, which one could approach if unhappy with the decision of the CBFC’s examining and revising committees. (July 14 2018, Livemint) There have only been some minor developments in the years since—films must now carry no-smoking advisories, and (thankfully) it’s almost impossible to shoot a scene with a live animal. In addition to the ever-arbitrary demands of the board—a blurred brassiere here, a bleeped “virgin” there—censorship by mob has emerged as a disturbing issue. Starting with Bal Thackeray demanding his own cuts in Mani Ratnam’s Bombay in 1995, the Shiv Sena’s protests against Deepa Mehta’s Fire in 1998, religious organizations and fanatics demanding cuts in movies like Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and Padmaavat in the present times to delaying releases if the demands aren’t met, censorship by mob has been normalised. Though everyone in the industry is affected by it, they refuse to unite and speak against it. “Bollywood does not care,” director Dibakar Banerjee says, “because it knows it will somehow navigate through the bureaucratic red tape to survive. It’s a vestige of the licence raj.” In an interview to The Hindu in January 2002, Vijay Anand, director of Guide and Jewel Thief and the CBFC chief at the time, was asked whether the media was right to pick on the board’s decisions. “Why not?”, he replied “We are the visible mouthpiece of a moralistic society.” This is an uncomfortably honest self-assessment, but there’s some truth to the idea that the board isn’t entirely to blame. Film censorship in India can only be fixed if the rules governing it are overhauled and if there’s a change in attitude that has persisted since the days of the British: the tendency to treat the viewer as incapable. Movie-watchers should finally be allowed to decide for themselves whether a particular film will offend their sensibilities or not.