Censoring India

Abstract

During the early twentieth century, the emerging medium of cinema in British India became a distinctly contested political issue, revealing the tensions and limitations of empire. The record on cinematographic censorship indicates a number of competing interests and changing views, while political transformations and messy realities on the ground defied the efficacy of censorship. Even as many Indian filmmakers sought to convey messages of nationalist aspirations, the perceived need to guard against the revolutionary thoughts of communism and ideas from America that seemed to promote democracy and promiscuity fuelled censorship as a major multivocal imperial policy. Beset by many obstacles, it sought to control the exhibition of both Indian and foreign cinematic productions.

The article seeks to understand the genealogy of censorship derived from prior British attempts to regulate literary and dramatic productions. In the 1920s, anxieties about the maintenance of law and order and protection of British rule during a period of increasing Indian nationalist unrest had to be integrated with various concerns about deteriorating economic conditions. As Indian cinema struggled to come into its own, the issue of control became a central concern for both coloniser and colonised, while both faced threats from the influx of foreign (especially Hollywood) films.

The article also explores why it was deemed so important to bring cinema under the colonial gaze. While there was no unified front on how to deal with this new medium, it was perceived as highly in-fluential, with great potential for harmful or beneficial propaganda impacts. Finally, considerations of the competing demands of moral concerns were juxtaposed to the growing economic needs of the Indian film industry.

Throughout, it transpires from archival research how defining policy issues became ever more critical and how the complexities of implementation were made more difficult by the ‘global’ nature of policy formation as opposed to the more ‘local’ nature of the performance of control.