The distant and unattainable woman in a skimpy outfit, born on the celluloid became a dream and an aspiration for the masses in the 1990s. However, it provoked the Hindu right and Muslim radicals to give birth to ‘disorder and chaos’. Just as in Bhagwad Gita, Arjuna tells Krishna, “In overwhelming chaos Krishna, women of the family are corrupted; and when women are corrupted, disorder is born in society.”
The uncontrolled woman, the woman with the dishevelled hair and rampant sexuality was splashed across the TV screens and she entered our drawing rooms with the liberalisation and globalisation of 90s. They became the most tangible symbol of ‘chaos’. From the early 1990s, the BJP and the Shiv Sena began a concerned attack on what they saw as the ‘deterioration of cinema culture’ which amounted to an ‘insult to the Hindu faith’ by ‘body exposure,’ as Shohini Ghosh commented in Seminar. The Hindu right was perhaps quicker to sense the subversive potential of popular cinema.
These regular incidents provoked public and media debate; it became evident that the incidents were just part of the larger known reality of religious and cultural make up of some political factions. As Brinda Bose points out in Sexuality, Censorship and Cinema, there emerged a consensus that most strident and shrill demands for censorship around sex and sexuality have been focussed on women – what they say, how they are shown or not shown, how ‘vulgar’ their representations are, and little attention has continuously been paid to censorship instigated and sustained by aged religious and cultural patriarchies.
‘Choli ke Peeche’
It all started in the domain of Indian popular culture in 1993, the film song ‘Choli ke peeche kya hai’ (What is behind the blouse?) in Khalnayak plunged the nation into a debate about morality. The lyrics of the song stood accused of transmitting improper sexual mores.
R. P Chugh, an advocate and a Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) supporter filed a legal petition alleging the song as obscene, defamatory to women and is likely to incite “the commission of offence.” He assumed that sexuality is obscene and such references “dishonoured” women – assumptions common to the cultural discourse in India that followed. His request to prohibit the song from state television proved futile in the wake of innumerable private channels ushered in with the advent of liberalisation. Satellite Television revealed the fragility of national boundaries and state authority.
In 1997 the women-sexuality-censorship-cinema debate hit the media again with Deepa Mehta’s landmark endeavour, Fire, the so called first Indian lesbian film. The protests, this time from Bal Thackeray’s camp, saw vandalised cinema halls and activists stripping outside the Bombay home of actor Dilip Kumar who, along with Deepa Mehta, filed a petition against the protests. The dark humour in sisters-in-law, Sita and Radha’s, loving alliance provoked political and religious rivalries. Bal Thackeray proclaimed that contrary to the story of the film, lesbianism did not exist in Hindu families and a radical Hindu leader declared that the attacks would cease if the two women were shown to be Moslem. Fire may have received 14 international awards but on the ‘harm’ Deepa Mehta caused by ushering in a ‘wretched culture’ was thoroughly deliberated upon by the reactionaries.
Sujata Moorti argued in Inflamed Passions that many of the concerns developed because Fire represented the genre of global films and was made by an NRI. Mehta’s western locus evoked the ire of the religious right. One of Fire’s major contributions to contemporary debates and discourses on sexuality and representation has been the ingression of queer subjectivity. It’s now an obvious threat to the national polity, changing the sexual landscape. The Indian lesbian community that for years had maintained a silent, almost secret existence in the country certainly welcomed this film.
The number of runaway lesbian ‘marriages’ after the controversy also became regular on the daily newscast. Women from all parts of the country, urban and non urban areas, in the face of opposition from family and society and largely without any support from anyone else have the right to be left alone and lead their lives, said a queer feminist writer and activist, Shalini Mahajan in ‘Questioning Norms And Bodies’.
Recently, the same year that two popular Hindi films – Salaam Namaste and Neal-n-Nikki – celebrated pre-marital sex and live-in relationships, Tamil film actress Khushboo found herself embroiled in a national controversy. The agitation launched by the Dalit Panthers of India against Khushboo openly claimed that the remarks went against Tamil culture and ethos. BJP and Pattali Makkal Katchi also took a dig at Khushboo demanding an apology. Khushboo was finally forced to apologise for offending many sections of the Indian society.
Ironically, films cleared by the Censor Board continued to cause heartburn, violence and large scale resentment. In 2006, Sharmila Tagore, chairperson was reported to have said that while the board under her leadership was not averse to kissing scenes, she did not endorse the screening of pornographic content in films saying, “I don’t think society or Indian people are ready for it. There is a cultural difference between India and the rest of the world.” The same year, however, the Hrithik Roshan-Aishwarya Rai kiss in Dhoom 2 sparked of court action when a Bhopal based lawyer filed a case saying that the kissing scene lowered the dignity of women for its vulgarity. Off-screen Richard Gere-Shilpa Shetty kiss also received the censure of a certain high moral public brigade.
Feminists respond
Feminists have often argued that the definitions of ‘obscenity’, ‘indecency’ and ‘morality’ are questionable. Not recognising women’s sexuality and upholding their dignity by reducing them to asexual beings in the popular culture is critiqued a great deal by feminist activists and theorists.
The secular feminists are divided into those who have favoured “reasonable restrictions” in the form of censorship to protect against sexual exploitation through representation. Whereas those opposing censorship of sexualised representation believe that the ideas of ‘purity’ and ‘chastity’ oppress women into silent domination in domestic roles that feminists try to eradicate. What, then, is ‘obscene’ as against the ‘aesthetic’? Whose morality is being imposed as a diktat through the censorship of images?
The bold sexualities of women, constantly attempting to derail the existing prevalent practices and ideas of morality, even drew flak from the fraternity of women. This tussle became most evident when, the President of the Women’s Wing of the BJP, supporting Chugh’s petition, wrote: “Choli ke peeche kya hai is an obscene song and as a result of which new anti-social elements have got the excuse of singing this song on seeing girls. Many incidents of eve-teasing have occurred. The film song singers only just to earn money are shamelessly singing such type of songs which are against the public interest.”
Similarly, some women activists threatened to file cases against the National Award winning actress Suhasini for justifying the controversial remarks made by Khushboo over pre-marital sex. Yesteryear actress Manorama also thought that the remarks should not have been made.
The danger is defined; an encroaching decadent ‘West’ is becoming the source of much ‘chaos’. The Hindu and Muslim reactionaries have chosen to not insulate themselves from the danger or retire to a life of purity in the mountains. Instead they continue to fight with absolutism and with violence.
Muslim women face the wrath
The Indian tennis star Sania Mirza refused to be drawn into a controversy over what she wears on court after being accused by a leading cleric of wearing “indecent dress” and being a “corrupting influence on young women.” Haseeb-ul-hasan Siddiqui, a leading cleric of the Sunni Ulema Board, said: “The dress she wears on the tennis courts not only doesn’t cover large parts of her body but leaves nothing to the imagination.” This attack came after she became the first Indian woman to reach the fourth round of the US Open. The adverse effect of success in the form of controversies hit the then teenager. She said, “Wherever I go people look at me. That’s why these days I prefer to stay at home. I have to learn to live with all this.”
The filming of a sequence for Namaste London, which featured actress Katrina Kaif wearing a short dress, inside Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti’s dargah created uproar among khadims (servers) and the shrine administration. The film’s director Vipul Shah, keen to avoid any controversy, even said “If people want, we will have another shoot for the film with Katrina wearing a proper dress. We are even ready to drop the scene from the film.”
Law
Relationship between women and censorship is governed by the indecent representation of women (prohibition) act of 1986 that makes punishable the figure of a woman, her form or body or any part thereof in such a way as to have the effect of being derogatory or denigrating women or is likely to deprave, corrupt or injure public morality or morals.
The ‘need for censorship’ section in the report of the working group on National film policy (1980) says:-
“Particularly in the context of a hyper-conservative society like India, which has rigid social and religious norms of behaviour, where the political consciousness has still not matured and where harsh economic conditions inhibit individual growth, there are bound to be serious limitations of the freedom of expression.
In this situation, any system of formal censorship is bound to come under heavy pressure on the one hand from the traditional elements in society who want to preserve status quo and, therefore, demand rigid standards of censorship, and on the other hand from artists and intellectuals who challenge the status quo and therefore, want maximum liberalisation. The latter are ironically supported by market manipulators who demand complete freedom to depict anything which is likely to sell. We feel that if the overall objective of censorship is to safeguard generally accepted standards of morality and decency, in addition to the well recognised interests of the State, the standards of censorship applicable to freedom of expression cannot be very much ahead of the standards commonly accepted in the society. Censorship can become liberal only to the extent society itself becomes genuinely liberal”
