A requiem for the censor board

It is from here that an erstwhile chairperson, Asha Parekh, once sallied forth, leading her flock in the war against vulgarity.‘‘You are my eyes and ears. If you might find anything obscene or offensive, you must report it, bring it to my notice,’’ she once instructed a gathering of CBFC panel members. It was a stirring evocation of the Gestapo, old-timers recall.

Unfortunately, even the conservative bureaucrats who surrounded her found such standards too difficult to emulate. It was her mission to protect the average Raju from the corrosive effects of swear words uttered on screen. (Benegal could do nothing but fume when he was told to drop an expletive in Zubeida). Ditto with boozing and smoking.

Parekh knew her rules very well, yessir. No way would a flick ‘‘glorify’’ the consumption of alcohol or ‘‘encourage’’ the use of tobacco, so long as she was around, which wasn’t actually all the time.

Regional officers had to work around her, to steady the boat and prevent the rules from getting the better of everyone. No one minded it, of course. The industry is used to the business of give-’n’-take (give into a few requests for cuts and take your concessions); panel members are largely the type who would get more worked up over their perquisites than a David Lynch film; and Parekh herself was probably making statements merely to be heard by her mentors in Delhi rather than out of any serious intent.

Naturally, when Vijay Anand took over, there was much trepidation about the course he would steer. To everyone’s surprise, his ideas were completely at odds with those of his predecessor. He started out by ticking off those, he thought, were far too straitlaced in their approach to censorship. He even mocked their policing techniques. During screenings in the CBFC auditorium, panel members would often switch on the lights on their table to jot down points about certain scenes. Anand took a dim view of this practice, which he thought interfered with the process of viewing.‘‘Why do you have to write down anything? If any scene is extremely offensive, you are bound to remember it. And you can discuss its merits after the screening,’’ he told a rather disbelieving audience.

Much of what Anand said might have been gone down better a decade ago when members were not always political appointees. Back then, it wasn’t unusual to have a person of Vijaya Mehta’s stature on the panel, or a discussion centred around a film that went on for an hour. But, in the last decade, with coalition politics taking root in the government, and the cronies of provincial dadas doing likewise in the administration, the CBFC has come to represent a murky world where aesthetics or film appreciation is the last thing on anyone’s mind. No wonder Anand didn’t last.