Editorial: How we became this weird

The second-order effects of censorship go far beyond shutting down an inconvenient work of art or caricature. When frank expression is prohibited, it mutates into strange forms. It snickers at us from toilet walls, gets appropriated by merchants of sleaze, and makes a mockery of what is denoted as ‘the limit’ defined by laughter club uncles to mark the bounds of ‘decency’.

Three developments in recent days bring home how the joyless outlook of the fascist right is turning India into a weirdo nation.

In the first of these, the censors have refused a certificate to the film Santosh about the rape of a Dalit girl and the police investigation following it. The film, written and directed by British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri, was applauded at the Cannes Film Festival and received a Bafta nomination. Although the script of the film was submitted to the authorities before filming—and nothing objectionable was found— the Central Board of Film Certification recommended a long list of cuts to tone down the depiction of police brutality, misogyny and discrimination against Dalits, the three plain-sight embarrassments it likes to hide behind a fig leaf. The director has decided it’s impossible to accommodate the cuts and tell the story she intended to tell.

This example of regulation censorship is of a piece with the current hounding of the comedian Kunal Kamra, who is being chased by the Mumbai police for poking fun at Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, among others, in his latest show last Sunday. After allowing Shiv Sena (Shinde) vandals to ransack the studio in which the show was filmed, the cops are now trying to put a slander rap on the comedian, although they have no authority to do so.

This is just the sort of ostrich-like refusal to see the light and an incapacity for humour that perpetuates ugly and outdated sensibilities in society. Conventional Bollywood’s bizarre attitude to sexuality, especially female sexuality, springs from the crazy rules of censorship imposed on it after Independence. In the censor’s rule book, it’s not kosher for lovers to kiss but the villain can go to great lengths in a rape scene. Love between consenting adults is mediated by flowers and bees but affection for a sister can be expressed as a tight hug. Such rules, enforced in the disguise of accepted morality, turned Bollywood into the whacko institution it is with its peculiar grammar of rape, actors ‘specialising’ in sexual violence, and canny-by-half sub-plots crafted to exploit the female body.

Such twisted notions from censored media find expression in society at large too, as we saw last week in the pronouncement by a judge of the Allahabad High Court. Justice Ram Manohar Narayan Mishra ruled that “grabbing a minor girl’s breasts, breaking her pajama strings and dragging her under a culvert” represent only the “preparation” for rape but not quite the real thing. The sheer crudity of expression is not only remarkable for its disregard for the Latin felicity so loved by Indian judges but also for its typical Bollywood literality.

The purpose of all forms of censorship, including that wrought by ‘middle-class decency’, is not only to shut out creative dissent but to normalise twisted thinking. The prurient filmmaker, the politician, the policeman, the vandal, the judge and the troll all collaborate along this entire continuum to turn us into a mutant society.