Disputed cuts

The trouble with censorship battles is that every time they break out, personality clashes inevitably render debate on the real issues an...

The trouble with censorship battles is that every time they break out, personality clashes inevitably render debate on the real issues an impossibility. Take the three cuts demanded by the censors in Shekhar Kapur8217;s Elizabeth 8212; three scenes we all virtually know by heart without having seen the rest of the film.

After years of dancing around trees, Censor Board chief Asha Parekh has sought to lend a feminist touch to the controversy by saying the tirades against her power to decide what the rest of the country watches stem from a bias harboured by male directors. No way, she asserts, she is not going to silently allow another woman, even if it be a long dead queen of a faraway land, to be portrayed 8220;in a poor light8221;.

And when Kapur protests about the distortions the censor8217;s scissors will etch on his acclaimed extravaganza, his argument that if it was okay for the rest of the world, why not for his countrymen interestingly echoes a cinematic controversy over in the US. If oodles of sex on the bigscreen are okay for the French and for the Japanese, argue American critics, why cannot Stanley Kubrick8217;s psychosexual thriller Eyes Wide Shut be cleared by their censors?

Barring the chilling thought of empty theatre seats, nothing gives filmmakers more nightmares than runins with the censor board. Indeed, votaries of the freedom of artistic expression are crying hoarse about the absurdity of a censor board in an era of open skies and wired homes, with satellite channels and the World Wide Web offering increased dosages of pornography, political propaganda and bloodsoaked images of violence.

They have a point. What possible havoc could a single image of three heads impaled on stakes wreak on young minds with access to a PC and a modem and, by extension, the literature that inspires turn-of-the-century fads like the Trenchcoat Mafia?

Yet, if only the issue were that simple. One need only go back to the Shaktimaan controversy early this year, when strings of figures of the incidents of violence inchildren8217;s television programmes were quoted amidst calls of, well, censorship. If some argued that what was acceptable for western kids better be acceptable for ours, others made a pertinent representation that with the mass media having broken the illiteracy barrier across India, chunks of viewers could not rationally absorb the fare on offer.

And later in the year when Sarfarosh gave villainy a new twist, there were renewed calls for self-censorship and warnings about the insidious biases big-screen imagery could foster. Clearly it is about time the debate on censorship is enlarged from its current focus on isolated controversies and celebrity spats. As the three proposed cuts in Elizabeth and the 16 in Such A Long Journey and the numerous others in countless films are sought, the entire censoring establishment and the creative community need to predicate the debate on the target audience and the socio-cultural implications of a film as too the effect of censorship on the contours of the final product.