CENSORIUM

CINEMA AND THE OPEN EDGE OF MASS PUBLICITYBy WILLIAM MAZZARELLA

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5374-4

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………viiINTRODUCTION The Censor’s Fist……………………………………………………………………1CHAPTER 1 Performative Dispensations: The Elementary Forms of Mass Publicity…………………………..29CHAPTER 2 Who the Hell Do the Censors Think They Are?: Grounds of the Censor’s Judgment…………………76CHAPTER 3 We Are the Law!: Censorship Takes to the Streets…………………………………………..115CHAPTER 4 Quotidian Eruptions: Aesthetic Distinction and the Extimate Squirm…………………………..156CHAPTER 5 Obscene Tendencies: Censorship and the Public Punctum………………………………………190Notes………………………………………………………………………………………….223Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………257Index………………………………………………………………………………………….275

Chapter One

PERFORMATIVE DISPENSATIONS

THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF MASS PUBLICITY

This chapter presents a history of the censors’ present. I explain the emergence of film censorship as a response less to particular image-objects and more to a structural challenge that is inherent to mass-mediated societies: the open edge of mass publicity. Part historical fiction, part genealogy, this chapter ends where the introduction began, with the so-called cultural emergency at the end of the twentieth century. I argue that we can understand neither the cultural emergency nor its earlier iterations without understanding the peculiar way in which the cinema intensified and consolidated regulatory anxieties that took shape vis-à-vis print and theater during the second half of the nineteenth century. From the beginning, these anxieties touched on the volatile relationship between performative force and representational meaning, a relationship that, I suggest, preoccupies censors because it lies at the heart of any claim to authoritative cultural order or, in the terminology of my own argument, any claim to a performative dispensation. My argument thus implies that while at one level these anxieties were specific to the context of colonial India, at another they are both continuous with the Indian present and relevant to the problem of legitimating sovereign authority in mass-mediated societies everywhere.

At the beginning of this history lies a myth.

OUTLINE FOR A SHORT FILM IN FOUR SCENES

SCENE 1 The First Play, Ancient India, Mythical Time

We join the action as the sage Bharata and his sons, enchantingly assisted by a group of celestial dancers created for the occasion by the god Brahma, are putting on the first play. Or to be precise, they are staging the first play that aspires to the status of “dramatic art,” with all the aesthetic—and in this case also moral—ambition that this implies. There have been earlier, rustic performances in a vulgar mode of lowbrow comedy; indeed, the general vulgarity and dissipation of the age is what has prompted the god Indra to ask Brahma to create a theatrical diversion that might reach beyond the educated classes (who have access to the laws of the Vedas, even if they could do more to follow them) and bring the increasingly insolent subaltern classes to heel by instructing them even as it entertains them.

And thrillingly crowd-pleasing the new theater certainly is: full of fights, explosions, roaring voices, singing, dancing—in short, all the spectacular action that ordinary folk enjoy. But Bharata’s theater also takes its ideological duties seriously. Having given Bharata his dramaturgical instructions in the form of a new treatise on stagecraft, a “fifth Veda” called the Natyashastra, Brahma points out that a most convenient occasion for the first play would be Indra’s Banner Day—the day commemorating the time that Indra, together with a host of other deities, defeated the forces of the demons, thus safeguarding the social and cosmic order. Having rehearsed his one hundred sons and his dancing girls, Bharata duly resolves that his first play will be a dramatization of this noble triumph of good over evil.

The show comes off exceedingly well, and the gods who have been watching are delighted. They shower Bharata and his players with gifts: Indra gives them his banner staff, Brahma gives them a crooked stick, Varuna a gourd, Shiva blessings, Vayu a fan, Vishnu a throne, and so on. But other onlookers are not so happy. The demons whose defeat has been so conclusively depicted are furious at their humiliating (mis)representation and round up some goons with whom they rush the stage, screaming that they will not tolerate this kind of thing and casting a spell on the performers that paralyzes their ability to talk, move, and even remember. Indra, who had been taking great pleasure in Bharata’s dramatic celebration of his military prowess, is livid at the intrusion of this rowdy mob; he seizes his banner staff and bashes most of them to smithereens with it. Still, the surviving rowdies refuse to be cowed and proceed, in their uncouth way, to heckle and harass the blushing heavenly dancing girls.

Bharata is exasperated and asks Brahma to figure out a way that he can put on his plays in peace, without constant interruptions from the demons and their ruffians. Bharata gets his friend Vishvakarman, the celestial architect, to design and build a proper theater for Bharata’s company, a separate space under the protection of the gods, each of whom takes responsibility for overseeing some part of it. Indra installs himself as divine patron, officer of order, and exemplary spectator and seats himself on one side of the stage, right next to the action and quite visible to the rest of the audience. His banner staff, still warm from pulping the demons and their hired heavies, stands as a constant warning to those who might presume to breach the integrity of his divine patron-police powers.

Having ensured proper protection for the playhouse, Brahma then decides to give the assembled spectators—gods, demons, and ordinary folk all together—a little tutorial in appropriate spectatorship. He addresses everyone, but he is mainly speaking to the remaining and rather sulky demons, who have clearly not yet learned to back off, to not get so worked up, and to start treating hegemonic ideology as art. Smilingly, Brahma tells the spectators not to take what they see on the stage so literally, but rather to understand that it is fiction. He asks them to remember that the theater belongs to them all, that it serves all of their interests, and that it offers a reflective and refined engagement of all the senses with all the attitudes and arts in creation. Finally, he reminds Bharata and his actors that the Natyashastra requires that the sanctity of each performance be preceded by a sacrificial ritual of devotion to the stage, lest the talents and wisdom of the players be wasted and all involved be reincarnated as beasts.

SCENE 2 A Parsi Theater Performance of the Indar Sabha, 1860s

The scene begins with a shot of a crowd milling around outside the entrance of a Parsi theatrical production in a North Indian town. The walls of the theater are plastered with lurid handbills loudly broadcasting the spectacular attractions of the show. This is clearly a new kind of crowd. The spectators at Bharata’s play in scene 1, whatever their actual behavior, were expected to adopt a devotional relation to the stage. But the crowds gathering around the entrance to tonight’s production are members of a modern public. They have bought their tickets on the open market and come expecting value for money.

The camera follows the crowd as it winds its way inside. We see an interior arrangement in all essentials corresponding to our modern notion of a commercial theater. The spectators find their way to seats arranged in rows facing a curtain that will rise to reveal a breathtakingly lavish stage set, clearly separated from the audience by the invisible fourth wall of the proscenium arch, creating the impression of a self-contained dramatic world that presents itself to be seen by spectators who themselves remain anonymous members of a crowd rather than a devotional community.

And yet the play that they have come to see, a production of the extraordinarily popular Indar Sabha, was not written by a playwright hoping to sell tickets. We overhear a man in the audience explaining to his companion that it was commissioned in the early 1850s by the last of the Muslim rulers of the state of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, who before the British East India Company annexed his domain in 1856 was as famous for his voluptuous ways as for his lavish patronage of the performing arts. But Wajid’s dispensation has been gone for a good decade, and the artists, poets, and performers who once relied on his munificence have scattered far and wide in search of other sources of remuneration. Some of them have joined the new traveling Parsi theater to help put together commercial productions like the one we see before us now.

And yet what confronts us on the stage, like a visual quotation, is both oddly familiar and strangely changed. There is Indra with his banner staff, and there are the dancing girls, more enchanting than ever. During the ages that have passed since Bharata’s first show, Indra’s mode of presiding over his performative domain has become more markedly princely, exchanging some of his Vedic authority for a more temporal gravitas—as if he, now, is keeping alive the flame of courtly performative patronage at a time when it is rapidly dying in the real world. Evidently gratified by the sensuous pleasures of the dance and, as such, still operating as a kind of exemplary spectator, Indra is surrounded on stage by a large retinue comprising representatives of all stations of society, each of them occupying clearly defined positions of supplication or support vis-à-vis the central authority of Indra’s throne.

As onstage participants in a tightly organized performative order in which everyone has a place, the players are thus enacting, for the paying general public on the other side of the proscenium arch, a relation between performance, patronage, and participation that, in this emergent age of generalized commercial entertainment, already appears outmoded. The mythical resonance of Indra and his banner staff, divine patron of the theater, could, until only a few years before, unproblematically be imagined as continuous with present-day performative contexts. To be sure, at the sight of this delectably staged tableau, many audience members in the theater tonight feel a welling of devotional attunement. But their devotion is interleaved with the impression that the splendor of Indra’s performative order belongs to a historical time that is at once irrevocably past and yet now also available, in a vaguely nostalgic mode, as a commodity.

SCENE 3 A Cabaret Show at the British Cinema in the Military Station of Secunderabad, Hyderabad State, 1926

The scene opens as a scantily clad chorus line of British dancing girls, performing as the Cabaret Company, are shimmying their way across the stage of the former Laik-ud-Daula Theatre, now the British Cinema. The audience is largely composed of appreciative British soldiers from the Secunderabad Cantonment, along with a sprinkling of officers and their wives. Although the British think of the theater as a morale-boosting facility for their troops, the nizam, the Muslim ruler of Hyderabad (the largest and wealthiest of the Indian princely states), owns the building and likes to attend movies and shows there with his entourage.

Normally, the British resident in Hyderabad prefers to stay away, feeling that, as the top local representative of the British Government of India, there is something unseemly about going to entertainments over which the nizam appears to think he is presiding—and on a British military base at that. But on this occasion, the resident has decided to show up and is absolutely appalled at what he finds. At the best of times the nizam, although theoretically the colonizers’ ally, is an embarrassment to the British. He shows up noisy and unshaven, wearing a moth-eaten fez and an old flannel sherwani, and insists on seating himself and his retinue, for all the world like sponsoring deities, in special seats on either side of the stage. Not only does the nizam ignore the proper division between the space of the performers and the space of the audience, placing his disgrace in full view of the public, but he also refuses to observe the self-discipline appropriate to a spectator. On one recent occasion, the resident recalls with a small wince, the nizam shouted stridently across the stage during a performance, demanding that his nawab, seated on the opposite side, bring him a glass of lemonade. Ignoring the soldiers’ exasperated cries of “Shut up!” and “Sit down!,” the nizam has even been known to take strolls across the stage in the middle of the action.

All of this would just be another symptom of the outmoded, arrogant despotism that tinges every aspect of the nizam’s administration, a theater state of sorts preserved in a state of suspended (and occasionally picturesque) historical animation by the deal the British have struck with those princely states that agreed to cooperate. But on this night, watching the nizam and his stubbly sons sitting there leering at the white female flesh on display, close enough to reach out and touch the dancers, the resident feels an altogether more intimate humiliation prickling his scalp. The nizam has brought along his senior wife, seating her behind a muslin curtain so as to shield her modesty from the gaze of the British soldiers. But what devices will protect the prestige of the British in the eyes of the Indians, a prestige whose vulnerability is suddenly made horrifyingly palpable in the dancing girls’ every seductive step? The resident’s foot, which until that moment has been marking the beat of the band, freezes.

SCENE 4 An Imaginary Play Dramatizing Events Taking Place in Mumbai and Delhi between November 1998 and February 1999 in Connection with the Violent Attacks on Theaters Screening Deepa Mehta’s Feature Film Fire.

The scene opens on a modernist-minimalist stage set in which the seats that, in previous scenes, might have been occupied by Indra, the nizam, or some other patron, have been replaced with three risers, one at each side of the stage and one in the middle near the back wall. On each riser is an overstuffed armchair and each armchair dwarfs an actor, facing stiffly forward. In place of the actors’ faces we see three large video screens, suspended from the rafters. The video screens each display a face in tight close-up, magnified so as to be entirely out of proportion with the bodies of the actors sitting in the armchairs. The faces belong to other actors representing, in turn, Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); Censor Board chief and erstwhile screen siren Asha Parekh; and Bal Thackeray, leader of the Shiv Sena.

The faces of “Vajpayee” and “Thackeray” look straight ahead from either side of the stage, blandly and blankly, like television panelists caught in downtime, waiting for the red transmission light to come on. “Parekh,” on the screen in the middle, is blindfolded. Beneath and in front of the video screens, the center of the stage is empty but illuminated by two spotlights. This area, which will be animated by the gestures of successive groups of actors enacting the public outrage of protest groups, represents the public space of the street. The spatial relation between the three actors elevated in the armchairs and the “public space” in front of them is arranged so as to suggest discontinuity: the giant faces preside over this (as yet empty) public space while appearing to gaze over and past it, into a nonspecific distance. The stage is flanked by large banners advertising corporate sponsors. No one is holding the banner staffs.

The voice of a narrator is heard: “In 1996–97, Indo-Canadian film director Deepa Mehta premieres her film Fire at film festivals all over the world, including India. The film focuses on the increasingly intimate relationship between Radha and Sita, two sisters-in-law in a middle-class New Delhi household, both neglected by their husbands. Their emergent solidarity gradually takes on erotic overtones. Championed in some quarters as ‘the first lesbian film from India,’ Fire is given an ‘A’ (adult) certificate by the Indian Censor Board and passed with no cuts in November 1998.”

The video image of “Bal Thackeray” blinks. The actor playing Asha Parekh goes into a continuous loop, which will last until the final moments of the performance: signing off on the censor certificate, again and again, impervious to the mounting agitation around her. The narrator continues: “No sooner is the film released in Indian cinemas than the Shiv Sena starts a violent campaign to get it banned, mainly on the grounds that its depiction of a ‘lesbian’ relationship is ‘against Indian culture.’ The fact that Radha is played by Shabana Azmi, a Muslim and an activist for progressive causes, is repeatedly emphasized.”

A group of actors playing activists from the Shiv Sena’s women’s wing rush into the center of the stage, shouting slogans and hurling stones. We hear sounds of shattering glass and crunching wood. Immediately, another group of actors, this time portraying young men from the militant Hindu vigilante organization the Bajrang Dal, bustles into the center of the stage from the other direction, joining the fray, shouting and brandishing sticks. A third group of actors, dressed in the garb of the progressive intelligentsia, marches past silently, bearing candles, placards, and a petition for the Supreme Court. The Shiv Sena women and the Bajrang Dal boys run off the stage, to be replaced in short order by a group of male Shiv Sena activists dressed only in underpants, grabbing their crotches and shouting anti-Muslim slogans.

As the noise dies down, the narrator continues: “Despite the censors’ approval, the protestors’ threats close down screenings of Fire in several Indian cities, even as audiences in other cities, titillated by the controversy, find tickets only on the black market. In a controversial move, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting sends the film back for re-censoring at the CBFC which, once more, passes it without any cuts.” The actor playing Parekh continues, over and over, to certify Fire. “Thackeray” thunders from his screen about how the BJP has gone soft on its promises to uphold Hindu values, gloating: “I added petrol to Fire!” “Vajpayee” objects in dignified tones to the hooliganism and lawlessness of his former coalition partners’ boot boys. The underwear protest crew yells: “We are the law!!” A jerkily juxtaposed sequence of clips featuring disclaimers by Fire director Deepa Mehta fills the screen suspended over “Parekh’s” body: “Fire is not a lesbian film … it’s about human desire…. If anything, the film is about choices. Hindu concepts like tolerance, nonjudgmentalism, compassion. The incredible loneliness of being that’s often the lot of women in India…. My film is about love…. Fire is a film about tolerance and choice.”

(Continues…)

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