“Not in Our Good”: Nationalist and other Concerns in the Censorship Debates in Early Indian Cinema.

Authors

  • Binayak Bhattacharya

Keywords:

Censorship, Indian cinema, Late-colonial India, Bengal

Abstract

The present article traces the historical and cultural roots of the censorship practices in cinema in late-colonial India. The emergence of censorship in India, it suggests, carries a larger concern of the hierarchized nationalist public sphere which sought to establish its effective social control over the newly emerged medium of popular mobilization. Interestingly, the British film industry could enjoy only a limited entry into the film industry in India, and the colonial authority too showed their apparent reluctance towards carrying out necessary reforms in securing the prospects of the nascent sector. This specific feature eventually necessitated a coalition between the dominant social institutions and the colonial authority in carrying out the cultural policing of cinema. The development was further valorized by the emerging sector of literary intelligentsia whose rejection of all forms of films other than literary cinema instigated the middle class professional to enter into the production vis-à-vis the discursive domain of cinema in India. The article summarizes this historical process to locate the coordinates of the social control which, in the virtual absence of a regimented censored regime, produced the normative rules for cultural policing in order to overpower the constitutional exercise of censorship in India.

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Author Biography

Binayak Bhattacharya

Binayak Bhattacharya teaches at the Amity School of Communication, Amity University, Delhi, India. He has worked on the relational aspects of progressive left politics and Indian cinema for his PhD research. Issues that interest him are broadly various areas of film history, the political economy of cinema, Bengali cinema, cultural theory and popular politics and the aesthetics of protest. For the last few years, he has been writing for journals and books and has a few publications to his credit.

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Published

2021-10-29

How to Cite

Bhattacharya , B. (2021). “Not in Our Good”: Nationalist and other Concerns in the Censorship Debates in Early Indian Cinema. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 2(2), 217–235. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/58