The Censor Boards biggest challenge : Moral hypocrisy

Now that we have a sensible censor board at last, the biggest challenge for the board will still remain how to handle the moral hypocrisy in India.
A long time ago the editor of a new magazine in the 90s which promoted beauty and modelling, began to show a lot of skin on their magazine covers while the remaining magazines in the country were showing women in their salwar kameez or sari. The disconcerted editor came to meet me and told me that he was getting several complaints especially from readers in the South. After he had told me his tale of woe, I only asked him one question. I said but what has happened to sales? He had been so worried about the complaints that he had forgotten to find out what had happened to his sales that month. He quickly called up his sales manager, and discovered that sales had gone through the roof especially in the South which had brought in the maximum number of complaints. That to me was a great example of double standards in Indian society, and how moral hypocrisy rules the day.

Two Filmfare covers 50 years apart shows how Indian society is evolving
India has been changing rapidly over the years and I don’t think censor boards have kept in touch with how it iss changing. One of the ways to portray social change is through editorial. Two Filmfare magazines I dug out, one from 1965 and the other from 2015 is a good example of how our society has changed. But that is still not reflected often in our attitudes where we pretend to be holier than thou.

We think its alright to defecate in public but we think kissing is public goes against our culture. Strange! We think portraying rape in Indian films is fine and we have infamously portrayed the most disgusting rape scenes in any cinema anywhere in the world, but we find the thought of natural consensual sex in cinema repulsive. Or we like to burn shops and establishments because couples are celebrating Valentine’s Day and we call it an infusion of dangerous Western culture. For god’s sake what is more common in real life rape or natural consensual sex? So what kind of people are we?
While the Shyam Benegal Committee appointed by the Government gathers dust we must be careful not to think of our Censor Board as either the moral or the social police, which it has unfortunately been over the last 7 decades.
Bollywood is India’s largest driver of mainstream popular culture
Bollywood is just a mirror, perhaps a bit curved and not as plain as we want. But its still a mirror, and merely a representation of our society — it’s aspirations, it’s hypocracy and it’s imagination. Bollywood for long has been one of the cultural hot buttons that has offered a way for life to imitate the portrayal of archetypes in Indian cinema. Why would I find a page on Google called 16 famous rape scenes or the best rape scene in Hollywood to be from Damini featuring Rishi Kapoor and Meenakshi Seshadri? In the film Rishi’s Kapoor’s brother attacks the maid in the house with his friends during a noisy celebration of Holi, which is a commemoration of the divine love of Radha for Krishna. The festivities officially usher in spring, with Holi celebrated as a festival of love. To plant a rape scene during Holi is therefore a bit of anti-thesis.
The scene which is pure horror but must have been lapped up by the film’s audiences of the time, having been brought up on a steady diet of rape in Indian cinema. But they have been denied normal healthy consensual sex as is common in world cinema reflecting the duplicity and moral hypocrisy of the people. In fact, the public has been enjoying this for decades.
In another blockbuster film, there’s a chilling scene in a blockbuster where the Thakur (Amrish Puri) enters his haveli proudly declaring his son has now become a man. He has just committed rape. Is rape then the first rite of passage into manhood for Bollywood?
It is also interesting that when you search for ‘rape scenes in Bollywood’ you will find that in someway rape is associated with sex rather than crime and also associated with porn. Subsequent censor boards are no doubt responsible for creating these views in society.

India — 50 years behind in Film Censorship
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If one looks at the United States which after all is the best example of a democracy (since India has usurped the title of the largest democracy although it says nothing about the quality of democracy) almost 2/3 of the 20th Century was spent in film censorship by Government bureaucrats. If America was liberated from government censorship in the 60s we are still a good 50 years behind them in how we approach our films on censorship. That doesn’t say much for us, considering we trumpet the fact that we are the largest film industry in the world.
America faced the same problems as we did. Strong religious groups and other concerned authorities that were determined to see censorship of movies. In 1915 the Supreme Court declared state sponsorship of motion pictures as constitutional.
Self Regulation is the Best Option
The MPPDA ( The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) pursued policies of self–regulation with a Production Code with regard to film content, arbitration, intra–industry relations, and negotiations with government entities. They agreed to voluntarily regulate film content by establishing a branch to oversee and control the moral values of the stories they filmed.

Its only in 1966 that the Motion Pictures Association of America proposed another revision of the Production Code entirely in favor of some sort of voluntary classification system for movies which recommended that movies, “ …. keep in closer harmony with the mores, the culture, the moral sense and the expectation of our society.”
This classification system assigns a rating (currently: G, PG, PG–13, R, or NC–17)

To date this remains the most fair and democratic system of classifying movies for audiences across the world. Unfortunately India has a lot of catching up to do. 50 years is a long time to make up for one of India’s most popular industries.
We can only hope that the new censor board is mindful of how Indian society should progress rather than how it should regress, which is something the previous Censor Board was trying hard to do. And how India can make up for the time lost in doing society the justice it deserves.
As Julian Assange recently tweeted when the diversity issue at Google hit the press, “Censorship is for losers”. While that may not be entirely true, the new Censor board has a huge responsibility to determine how the future of Indian cinema and more importantly the attitudes of Indian society should unfold.
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