Abstract
Entertainment has become a prominent mass media activity in South Asia and censorship, with origins in British colonial times, attracts nowadays much publicity. Placing contemporary evidence in a historical and regional context and investigating to what extent contemporary practices of censorship echo or reconfigure those of the colonial period, this edited volume proficiently pictures the striking continuities of colonial censorship and present troubles in the social dynamics of South Asia.
Focused on India, Chapter 1 provides examples of some of the best known incidents of media censorship in South Asia. State-sponsored official censorship coexists with self-censorship, inextricable as unofficial or primary restriction on one level, and the productive aspect of censorship according to a Foucauldian schema on another. Far from only silencing, censorship may also be a generative technology of truth, articulating a language of the hidden and the sacred in which everything is public without being shown. Censorship, involving many repressive facets, can also be productive and per-formative, routinising transgression by enunciating a new language for taboos. Hence, it is proposed to resituate the concept of censorship as ‘cultural regulation’, though in Chapter 6 Kaur cautions that while ‘cultural regulation’ offers a broader purview, statist aspects of censorship should not be overlooked.
The complex game of incitement and containment by the colonisers, dealing with the ‘outer’ domain of instrumental politics and the ‘inner’ domain of cultural identity and sentiment, was the ground from which the legal apparatus of censorship developed. While the Indianness of the inner domain eventually became a resource in the struggle for independence, independent India was supposed to overcome or be free from this historical split between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ domains. However, the Nehruvian formula of secularism imposed a rather stringent filter on what kind of practices would be allowed space in public culture. This led to often heavy-handed blackouts that Doordarshan imposed on news items on the doings and sayings of political critics, but also brought an increase in the ‘televisual interpenetration of devotional viewing, political propaganda, and consumer goods advertising’ (p. 17). The totalising approach to information control of Mrs Gandhi’s 1975–77 Emergency further extended these experiments through introducing pre-censorship and banning of news materials. Commercial satellite television in the early 1990s and the liberalisation and globalisation of consumer markets intensified the competition in visual publicity, making control experiments more complex. In a juxtaposition of censorship and publicity, cultural regulation cannot help but articulate the terms and foundations of its own legitimacy. This particular phenomenon has made regulation repressive as well as performative.
Chapter 2 by Christopher Pinney investigates the impact of colonial censorship of images on India’s contemporary political constitution and nicely depicts the influence of ‘double-coded’ images. Due to colonial titration of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ into separate domains (politics being strictly surveilled, while religion was autonomous), double-coding of images could portray critiques in the guise of religion rather than politics. The explanation of ‘document’ in the Press Act of 1910 which included ‘any painting, drawing, or photograph or other visible representation’ reflects evidently hostile reactions of the colonisers. Increasing surveillance of print culture in the late colonial Indian state led to further articulation of political aspirations through religious idioms, generating ‘cyclical iatrogenics’, the legacy of which ‘still informs key aspects of the religio-political landscape of modern India’ (p. 58). Regrettably, though, this essay does not throw any light on contemporary censorship practices in modern India.
Chapter 3 mainly focuses on the colonial administration’s dilemma in regulating cinema against a rising tide of moralising condemnation. Especially in the 1920s, with Hollywood films enormously encroaching upon the Indian field of entertainment, colonial administrators became suspicious about ‘eroticized egalitarianism’ (p. 63), which might undermine Britain’s civilising mission. This anxiety arose partly out of jealousy, with the British Empire unable to harness the kind of ‘communicative magic’ that became so popular by this time. Concern about the breach of ‘distance’ as a precondition of the charismatic authority of the whites became an issue. Those films removed the wall of the private spaces of European life, earlier too rarely intelligible to the ‘simple native’ (p. 69) and thus risked forming a low opinion of Europeans among natives. Concurrently, propagandistic colonial use of cinema appeared best to educate the simple folk to favour the shaky Raj. Here again, the complex colonial game of incitement and containment gave birth to cultural regulation. This essay goes well with Chapter 4 in establishing a causal link between colonial and postcolonial contexts of film censorship in India and confirming that censorship practices in modern India date back to the colonial period. Though the constitution of the Censor Boards changed several times after independence, the guiding principles for censorship as instituted under the Cinematograph Act of 1918 remained constant. While some filmmakers clearly endorsed the idea of state censorship, many were ambivalent. Two distinct but related features for such ambivalence are identified. First, just like the British Raj, the Bombay film industry seeks respectability and acceptance within Indian middle-class and elite social spheres. Second, the postcolonial ideology of developmentalism had not yet abandoned its obsession of catching up with the West. This again reflects the complex game of incitement and containment.
Though filmmakers are attuned to claims about Indian films as powerful media in moulding social structures, they admit inability to exercise ‘self-censorship’ properly. Hence, the state must intervene to ensure the making of ‘socially relevant’ films for proper implementation of modernisation agenda. State-censorship must exist, then, since neither the film industry nor the uneducated or poorly educated audiences are able to regulate themselves. In this reviewer’s opinion, however, law and morality were virtually synonymous in precolonial India and ‘self-controlled order’ served the purpose of legislation. Only after the introduction of state-centred positivist control mechanism by the colonial administration did the ‘simple native’ lose confidence in self-regulation. Hence, the media lost its freedom too. Many statements in this essay support the contention that state intervention was deliberate and premeditated.
The fifth chapter, on censorship in Indian advertising, suggests strongly that self-regulatory mechanisms still exist in modern India. The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) is a glaring example of such a voluntary organisation. Its Consumer Complaint Council (CCC) deals with complaints from consumers against false, misleading, indecent or illegal advertisements, or those leading to unsafe practices. The process of decision-making by the CCC is described as ‘maddeningly paradoxical’ (p. 124), lengthy and arbitrary in nature. This appears as a procedural defect of the Council, which could be minimised without substantially affecting the nature of its self-regulatory censorship practice.
Chapter 6 by Raminder Kaur focuses on the nuclear power of India. It discusses official secrecy as a major statist aspect of censorship under the colonial Official Secrets Act of 1923, the Atomic Energy Act of 1962 and the National Security Act of 1980. Since ‘national security’, in the absence of any written rules, ‘can mean almost anything’ (p. 142), censorship under the pretext of safeguarding national security is almost unquestioned in India. The Right to Information Act of 2005 allows citizens information on government actions, but this does not mean information on ‘anything’. Concerning nuclear issues, scientists are venerated as quasi-deities and the colonial sacralisation of science has been reproduced by an elitist alliance between Indian scientists and government after independence. Attempting to show democratic accountability, information about nuclear power is revealed to the public in a ‘measured way’ seeking to win over public opinion. Kaur argues that these modalities of concealment and revelation have led to a nuclear culture continuously moulded by peoples’ responses. In my view, this culture, too, echoes the complex colonial game of incitement and containment.
In Chapter 7, Asad Ali Ahmed tracks the colonial genealogy of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and subsequent additions after independence. Attempting to identify this law’s origins, Ahmed suggests that the peculiar Indian vulnerability to mental anguish, identified by Macaulay in response to insulting language, especially with regard to caste, religion or women, led to the criminalisation of ‘speech’ as an ‘act’. Concerning religion, one may doubt the inherent nature of this alleged vulnerability among South Asians. The precolonial context of largely peaceful religious coexistence suggests that too much importance attached to the ‘divide and rule’ principle by the colonisers led South Asians to such extreme vulnerability, reinforced by the division of India in 1947 on the basis of religion. While Macaulay’s laws were intended to demonstrate state neutrality to religions, postcolonial Pakistani additions intended to Islamise the state, so that postcolonial Pakistan is now struggling with intra-religious blasphemies.
Chapter 8 by Genevieve Lakier focuses on the press in Nepal as a growing power to represent the new face of the nation. Though the 1990 movement for the Restoration of Democracy eventually brought down the King’s government, the Press and Publication Act of 1992 did not allow the press to write freely about the royal family. Only after the massacre of Nepal’s royal family did anger and public disbelief emerge and the press realised that it could produce a national imaginary via circulation of texts. The essay suggests that the ‘new’ mass media of Nepal after this massacre as a key event paved the way for ‘the power of disbelief’ to ‘consolidate and construct national identity’ (p. 227).
The contributors to this volume investigate a wide range of cultural regulation, from cinema to painting, blasphemy to official secrecy and even advertising to nuclear culture. These essays enlighten readers and provide better understanding of the concept of censorship. Unfortunately, the volume does not include anything on Bangladesh, leaving out a wide field of regulation from Dhalliwood to Dish culture, and from electronic to print media. One hopes the next volume will include Bangladesh and also Sri Lanka to obtain a more complete picture of present-day censorship across South Asia.