Hiding the scissors: On the Central Board of Film Certification

The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) wields significant cultural influence by deciding which films can be screened in Indian cinemas. Its decisions on what to excise from Indian films are followed nearly completely even by streaming services, despite not being required to show the censor’s version of a filmmaker’s artistic vision. The patterns that producers interpret from the CBFC’s decisions determine which stories are even made. There is a reason why few political films that espouse the cause of secularism (or the ills of communalism) are seen in cinemas today. There is also a reason why few would dare to make a film such as Satluj, considering what it went through at the censors’ hands, and the fate it was met with when an online release was briefly achieved. The censor board stands captured, blocking off films that are inconvenient to the ruling dispensation in ways that have never been seen before, and purging politics hostile to the dominant philosophy from films. All this to say, what the CBFC does matters, and the only check on its authority is the Cinematograph Act, 1952 and the rules framed thereunder, but its autonomy is only on paper.

The CBFC is required to watch and rule on films in a matter of weeks. For over a year, the film Monkey Man, featuring a dystopian vision of a society with supremacy baked in, has not even been watched. This amounts to a de facto ban, but the CBFC has chosen the route of avoiding that headline by simply not taking a call one way or the other. Even background references to the government’s inaction during the COVID-19 pandemic were removed from Homebound, India’s entry to the Oscars. The CBFC is also guilty of unlawful concealment. In plain defiance of Section 5A(2) of the Cinematograph Act, the board has stopped publishing certificates in the government Gazette. In addition, it has now placed the online details of its certificates with cuts — unindexed and difficult to obtain as they are — behind an “under maintenance” message. Archives have stopped receiving cut portions of films for researchers’ study. Pre-censorship as a concept is odious to free societies, and the CBFC’s role ought to be curtailed, if not abolished altogether. While it exists, however, the CBFC must be compelled by the film fraternity, and its founding statute, to follow the law. The censor’s scissors have plagued and stifled the voice of generations of storytellers, but the dynamic this has played out in has been visible and must be held accountable.