As the popular nationalist consensus started to unravel, India entered into a

period of political fragmentation and violence, shortages, economic stagna-

tion, currency devaluation, and failed monsoons. At the same time, film
censorship discourse shifted into a mode of what one might call ‘‘tempered
liberalism.’’ New positions on obscenity in the United States (Roth v. United
States) and the United Kingdom (the Obscene Publications Act) during the
late 1950s≤∂ inspired seminal statements in India—among them, Justice
Hidayatullah’s Supreme Court judgment on Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
in 1964 and Justice Khosla’s Film Enquiry Committee report in 1969. The
distinctively liberal aspect of these statements was that they tended to argue
that disturbing or provocative image-objects might be justifiable ‘‘in con-
text’’—which, in principle, generally meant within the overall aesthetic
framework of a film, book, or other work. In practice, however—and this is
where the ‘‘tempered’’ part comes in—the ‘‘context’’ often turned out to be
the apparently volatile state of Indian society and culture as a whole. Which
led to the familiar formula: in (formal) principle this object is probably not
problematic, but in (Indian) practice it probably is. Subtext: because we are
in a time between. Thus, in turn, the enunciator’s exception: it may be OK
for us cultured, cosmopolitan folk, but not for the pissing man.
I discuss the problem of obscenity in much greater depth in chapters 4
and 5. For now, I want to turn to a couple of examples that illustrate how
this tempered liberalism has played itself out at di√erent moments when
faced with actual cinematic image-objects. I begin with a film, Shyam
Benegal’s Nishant (1975), which had the historical misfortune of running
into the great exception itself: Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. And yet it was,
paradoxically, precisely during the Emergency that the censors felt the need
to deny that Indian society was in a state of exception.

EXCEPTION AND EMERGENCY: NISHANT

When they killed the youngest brother, it was sunset.

Fresh from the acclamation and controversy surrounding his plays Gha-
shiram Kotwal and Sakharam Binder (both 1972), Vijay Tendulkar was
feeling uninspired. A group of theater people, trying to enthuse him about
a possible collaboration, had o√ered him a series of scenarios, but nothing
quite caught his fancy. Until, some time after the meeting, Tendulkar felt
this one line still reverberating in his imagination. When they killed the
youngest brother, it was sunset.

88 Chapter 2
 The line came from an old newspaper clipping about the Telengana
peasant revolt of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In this particular incident,
the peasants of one village had risen up against the local landowners and
wiped out the whole family. Tendulkar had adapted the Maharashtrian
‘‘folk’’ theater style of tamasha for Ghashiram Kotwal, a scathing attack on
the then-rising Shiv Sena told in the form of episodes from the life of the
eighteenth-century Peshwa minister Nana Phadnavis, and thought that
this new germ of an idea might also benefit from a treatment that was more
‘‘ritualistic’’ than ‘‘naturalistic.’’≤∑ So he traveled to rural Andhra Pradesh to
explore local forms, but again nothing quite inspired him. Some friends to
whom he had mentioned the idea passed it on to Shyam Benegal, then
basking in the success of his first feature film, Ankur (1974), which had
been widely hailed as marking the consolidation of a new, ‘‘serious’’ Hindi
cinema. Benegal in turn contacted Tendulkar and asked him to turn the
story into a screenplay.
In the resulting film, Nishant, a lower-middle-class Brahmin school-
teacher and his wife arrive in a village. We realize soon enough that no local
authority, whether secular or spiritual, whether police or priest, is any
match for the iron fist with which the landowning family, a group of four
brothers, asserts its dominance in all matters. The two middle brothers are
violent drunks, only too happy to roar in the shadow of their truly leonine
oldest sibling. The youngest brother is the odd one out: timid, sensitive,
and the constant butt of his brothers’ jokes. Noticing that the youngest
brother seems to have taken a mute shine to the schoolteacher’s wife, the
two middle brothers abduct her from the house she shares with her hus-
band and imprison her in the manorial compound where she becomes fair
game for the brothers’ appetites.
An acute tension develops. Outside the compound we see the school-
teacher, rights-bearing citizen of a modern democratic state, utterly failing
to mobilize the formal forces of law and order to get his wife released.
Inside the compound, a volatile and unexpected intimacy develops be-
tween the youngest brother and the schoolteacher’s wife, an intimacy in
which brutal violence and sexual tenderness seem inextricably entwined.
During a chance encounter between the schoolteacher and his wife at the
village temple, she berates him for his ine√ectual lack of manliness and
returns to the place where she has now become a kind of manorial prop-
erty. The twin resonances of Sita’s abduction by Ravana in the Ramayana
and the relatively recent memory of the abduction and tortured repatria-

Grounds of the Censor’s Judgment 89

tion of women abducted during Pakistan’s partition from India hang heavy
over these scenes.
At his wits’ end, the schoolteacher joins forces with his fellow Brahmin
and spiritual counterpart, the village priest, in a plan to incite the peasants
of the village to rise up in revolt against the oppressive rule of the land-
lords. Seizing the occasion of a festival day on which the landlords’ bless-
ings would normally be sought, the peasants storm the compound in blind
anger, indiscriminately killing anyone who falls in their path. The youngest
brother manages to escape from the building with the schoolteacher’s wife,
but the crowd eventually catches up with them amidst some nearby boul-
ders and finishes them o√. Having fallen behind the mob whose fury he
released, the schoolteacher is left to survey the devastation wrought by his
attempt to bring progressive revolutionary consciousness to the peasants.
As minister for information and broadcasting, Indira Gandhi had been
behind the push toward a new breed of state-sponsored ‘‘good’’ films in the
mid-1960s.≤∏ Good films needed good censorship, and in the wake of the
Khosla Committee’s recommendations, I. K. Gujral (Mrs. Gandhi’s succes-
sor as information and broadcasting minister and fellow future prime min-
ister) attempted, during the mid-1970s, to infuse some Khosla-approved
sophistication into the censorship process:≤π

The Censors must possess suitable educational qualifications and cul-

tural background. They should be persons commanding public respect;
they should have a broad outlook on life. They should know something
about the arts and the cultural values of this country. They should have
traveled widely and should be persons who can be expected to deal with
the problem of censorship without the handicaps of unreasonable inhi-
bitions or an obsession with petrified moral values or with the glamour
of so-called advanced groups. (Khosla et al. 1969:100)

Anil Dharker was one of a small group of ‘‘supercensors’’—formally,

advisors to the chair of the cfbc —that Gujral invited to bring their judg-
ment to bear on the ‘‘new wave films’’ which were ‘‘more sophisticated than
a normal Hindi film’’ (the other advisor from Bombay was the celebrated
Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder). Dharker remembers the regular film
censors of that time as ‘‘true blue government servants’’ who ‘‘would never
go out on a limb. It was always safer to chop.’’≤∫ And this was the mode of
censorship to which mainstream filmmakers had pragmatically adapted;
knowing that the censors were likely to demand a certain proportion of sex

90 Chapter 2
and violence to be cut out, they would simply shoot twice as much as they
needed. But censors habituated to operating in this crudely quantitative
mode—cut so-and-so many feet here, 40 percent there—were simply not
equipped for the new era, where, as Justice Hidayatullah had ruled in the
Supreme Court, provocative image-objects might be permissible ‘‘subject
either to their artistic merit or their social value over-weighing their of-
fending character’’ (K. A. Abbas v. Union of India [1970]).≤Ω
As it happened, Nishant ’s arrival at the cbfc coincided with the decla-
ration of Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency in the summer of 1975. How are we to
make sense of the apparent contradiction embodied in the figure of the
prime minister? As information and broadcasting minister in the early
1960s, she had been at the forefront of promoting the production of so-
cially engaged Indian films.≥≠ But in declaring the Emergency, she came to
preside over the most repressive and intolerant phase in the annals of
Indian censorship. Films were banned outright or simply destroyed, as in
the infamous case of Amrit Nahata’s Kissa Kursi Ka. The government’s
arbitrary flouting of court orders found its corollary in a more person-
alized regime of approval in which Mrs. Gandhi’s younger son and heir
apparent, Sanjay Gandhi, would take ‘‘donations’’ to his party in return for
permitting the release of new films in Delhi.≥∞
With the declaration of the Emergency, V. C. Shukla replaced I. K.
Gujral as minister of information and broadcasting. Here, again, were the
two faces of Mrs. Gandhi’s regime. Gujral represented the awakening of
government to Khosla-style aesthetic liberalism; Shukla, by contrast,
played the dictator’s philistine yes-man. As chairman of the Film Finance
Corporation, the government-backed body with a mandate to nurture
‘‘good’’ films, B. K. Karanjia dealt with Shukla directly and remembered
him, almost thirty years later, as being ‘‘as ignorant as he was arrogant.’’≥≤
Sociologist Shiv Visvanathan describes him as ‘‘a trifle sinister, a trifle silly
with a touch of the illiterate, another satrap still not successful in de-
parochializing himself ’’ (1998:59). Although Shukla replaced Gujral, Guj-
ral’s supercensors lingered on into the summer of 1976, that is to say, for
more than half of the Emergency. The censorship situation that Nishant
encountered, then, was an apparently peculiar blend of liberalism, cour-
tesy of the supercensors, and authoritarianism, courtesy of the new regime
at the ministry.
Although Nishant ’s plot was based on events that had taken place in the
late 1940s, that is, during the very earliest years of Indian independence, its

Grounds of the Censor’s Judgment 91

depiction of peasant uprising resonated directly, in the mid-1970s, with the
then-surging militant Maoism of the Naxalite movement. According to
Vijay Tendulkar, someone from the Ministry of Information and Broad-
casting informally warned Shyam Benegal that the film was likely to run
into trouble. Anil Dharker recalled that Benegal, uneasy about the film’s
prospects, invited him and his fellow Bombay supercensor, Hyder, to a
special screening ahead of the formal screening for the cbfc’s Examining
Committee. (Benegal did not remember Dharker being involved at this
stage.)
During his work with the Censor Board, Dharker had observed that,
when potentially controversial films were shown to an examining commit-
tee, the cbfc’s regional o≈cer would invariably preempt debate by insist-
ing on certain cuts as soon as the end credits were rolling. The committee
members, not wanting to lose their perks,≥≥ would fall into line. So when
the time came for Nishant to be examined, Dharker and Hyder showed up,
pretending not to have seen the film before. Dharker figured that he could
play the regional o≈cer at his own game:

He would make sure he got his say right in the beginning. So I used that
tactic. I positioned myself in front so that I could turn around and face
them all. The moment the end came, I said ‘‘wow! What a film! One of
the best films I’ve ever seen!’’ I really launched into, you know, ‘‘we
should pass it without a cut’’ and I gave a little speech [laughs]! So after
that the Regional O≈cer was stunned. He couldn’t contradict me be-
cause in the hierarchy I was higher than him.

Initially, Nishant did get its censor certificate in October 1975, although
Benegal was required to insert introductory disclaimers to play down any
implication of contemporary relevance: not only the usual ‘‘All characters
and names in this film are fictitious and bear no resemblance to any person
living or dead,’’ but also the more temporally specific, ‘‘In a feudal state . . .
the year 1945.’’ Even then, as we shall see, V. C. Shukla would revoke the
certificate before Mrs. Gandhi personally made sure it was reinstated.

The eyes of the world.

At one level, it would appear that the Bombay regional o≈cer of the cbfc,
frustrated by Dharker seizing the initiative at the screening, referred the
matter upward to the ministry in Delhi, where Shukla reasserted o≈cial
authority by ordering a ban. But as it turns out, both Shukla’s ban and Mrs.

92 Chapter 2
Gandhi’s objection to it were not only expressions of a local attempt to
manage the terms of an authoritarian political order but also, in a funda-
mental way, mediated by the kind of anxiety that thrives at the open edge of
mass publicity.
Both V. C. Shukla and Mrs. Gandhi were, in their di√erent ways, re-
sponding to a sense of shame arising from a sudden shift in perspective:
seeing their own dispensation as if from outside. According to Benegal,
Shukla got cold feet abroad while attending a screening of Nishant as the
head of the Indian delegation at a film festival in Vancouver. Benegal was
determined to fight Shukla’s revocation of his censor certificate and assem-
bled a stellar group of Indian auteurs (including Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen,
and Hrishikesh Mukherjee) to petition Mrs. Gandhi on his behalf. As a
well-known enthusiast of ‘‘good’’ Indian cinema, Mrs. Gandhi was perhaps
predisposed to a favorable response. Benegal recalled, ‘‘She had asked to see
the film. She’d seen Ankur, she’d liked it, and she’d got her friends and so
on for a couple of shows. She was following my work. She was following
Satyajit Ray’s work earlier.’’≥∂ But the clincher here, too, seems to have been
the potential for international embarrassment. Banned at home thanks to
Shukla, Nishant was busily picking up prizes at prestigious international
festivals, including an audience award at Cannes in May 1976. Benegal
again: ‘‘She called V C Shukla—which I heard later—and said ‘do you want
to make us a laughingstock by doing this? How can you ban a film like this?
Because sooner or later it will come out, and it’ll be a slap in our face.’ She
said ‘you solve this problem.’ ’’
Seeing themselves, as it were, through the eyes of the world, both Shu-
kla’s and the prime minister’s responses expressed classic authoritarian
insecurities. Shukla’s discomfort was that of a potentate shamed on foreign
shores by cultural producers who were supposed to be tightly folded into
his patron/police power. Mrs. Gandhi’s anxiety stemmed from a desire to
insist to the world that her dictatorship was not just some crude power
grab but rather an intensified commitment to national progress that was
by no means incompatible with world-class aesthetics. In an obvious way,
the Emergency was an attempt to concentrate total patron/police powers
in the hands of the state and to achieve complete control over the field of
mass publicity. It is significant, then, that both V. C. Shukla and Mrs.
Gandhi—while coming to opposite conclusions regarding what should be
done about Nishant—felt intimations of the film’s potentiating power as it
circulated through an international public field that they could not control

Grounds of the Censor’s Judgment 93

and which, as such, functioned as an open edge vis-à-vis the performative
dispensation of their regime.≥∑
According to Benegal, Shukla objected to Nishant because he inter-
preted the film as a treasonous incitement to violent rebellion against the
state. But as Madhava Prasad (1998) has argued, Nishant is provocative
precisely because of its political ambiguity. While it conforms to the dic-
tates of ‘‘statist realism’’ by staging a confrontation between ‘‘feudal’’ and
‘‘modern’’ social forms, it refuses to reassure the viewer that a middle-class
leadership will successfully be able to harness the energy of popular frus-
tration to a state-led project of national development. Prasad notes that the
soundtrack of the scene in which the priest and the schoolteacher first try
to mobilize a crowd of peasants to rise up against the landlords gives us not
their words but rather an overwhelming density of bells and drums. He
interprets this absence of language as marking the impossibility of a dis-
course that, from within the generic space of statist realism, would man-
ifest the peasants as both the natural enemies of feudal oppression and as
‘‘an obedient army’’ (208).≥∏ And, of course, once the peasants do rise, their
rage and violence is indiscriminate, leveling everything and everyone in
their path.
Girish Karnad, who played the schoolteacher in Nishant, felt that the
film was not so much politically ambiguous as both idiomatically unrealis-
tic in its use of language≥π and politically implausible. The idea that two
Brahmins—the schoolteacher and the priest—should succeed in convinc-
ing the villagers to rise up against landlords of the Reddy caste when the
film seemed to suggest that the peasants themselves were Reddys (rather
than, say, [landholding] Kammas or [formerly untouchable] Dalits) was
simply unbelievable in a place where ‘‘it’s a question of caste loyalty before
law, logic, justice—anything.’’ Karnad attributed this political misreading
of the situation in rural Andhra Pradesh to the Maharashtrian Vijay Ten-
dulkar’s unfamiliarity with the local context.≥∫ At a fundamental level,
Karnad felt that Nishant was incoherent because it had failed to reconcile
the opposing aesthetic impulses of Tendulkar, whom he characterized as a
socially conservative writer, and Benegal, who ‘‘wanted a progressive film.’’
Certainly, even the optimistic connotations of the film’s titular ‘‘dawn’’
seem diametrically opposed to the tenor of the line that originally inspired
Tendulkar: When they killed the youngest brother, it was sunset. To the
extent that Nishant conveys a political ‘‘message,’’ there is, again, room for
both views. Either the mob’s indiscriminate violence can be interpreted as

94 Chapter 2
a conservative, cautionary tale about the need to keep a tight lid on popular
uprisings that will only lead to death and destruction. Or it can be inter-
preted as a radical critique of the middle-class statist presumption that the
revolution can be directed from above. But the relation between Tendulkar
and Benegal in the making of Nishant deserves to be considered more
carefully. Things become more interesting once we move our sights be-
yond the most overtly ‘‘political’’ dimensions of the film.

Cuts and Complicities

The problem of a ‘‘modern’’ overcoming of ‘‘feudal’’ social forms is, as
noted, a characteristic theme in what Madhava Prasad calls the statist
realist genre of filmmaking. On that level, Nishant conforms to generic
requirements while o√ering no easy solutions. But it also raises a subtler
and perhaps more subversive question about forms of agency and desire
that become possible within the space marked ‘‘feudal’’; forms of agency
and desire that are inextricable from degradation and violence.
I have in mind here the relationship between the imprisoned school-
teacher’s wife, played by Shabana Azmi, and the landlord’s hapless young-
est brother, played by Naseeruddin Shah. A sexually charged intimacy
develops between them, a relation in which genuine gentleness is blended
with physical brutality after she has scorned her husband’s ine√ectual
attempts to get her released from the landlord’s compound. The relation-
ship is not simply, as Prasad argues, a conventional instance of the middle-
class cinema’s fetishistic fascination with an ‘‘untamed’’ sexuality that is
supposed to be characteristic of the feudal order. Certainly, the more boor-
ish elder brothers’ behavior might be understood that way. But the young-
est brother’s mixture of awkwardness, e√eminacy, gentleness, and violence,
coupled with the schoolteacher’s wife’s forthright way of o√ering herself to
his approach, suggests a more complex erotics.
We see the youngest son alone one evening, drinking himself into a state
of volatility, whipping the ground with a length of rope in a rather stilted
imitation of the easy aggression of his older brothers. Thus fortified, he
enters the room in which the schoolteacher’s wife is being kept, brandish-
ing the rope as if to use it on her. Rather than cowering in a corner—and
certainly not manifesting the ‘‘mute submission’’ that Prasad (1998:206)
attributes to her—the schoolteacher’s wife rises and approaches the young-
est brother in an attitude that subtly blends an element of submission with
more than a hint of provocative, level-eyed desire. As if overcome by the

Grounds of the Censor’s Judgment 95

power of her presence, the youngest brother roughly pulls her to him, and
for a few seconds we see them embrace in a standing position, his face
expressing nothing so much as bewilderment. The image then abruptly
cuts to the following morning, as the camera pans down and to the side
from the brightly lit wall of the room to reveal their two bodies, side by
side, on a mattress on the floor. We do not see their faces; she is fully
clothed, he wears pajamas. Within seconds there is another sudden edit,
and we find ourselves in the outdoor crowd scene where the teacher’s and
priest’s ‘‘impossible’’ voices will be drowned by drums and bells.
The first few times I watched this sequence, I was sure that the abrupt
cuts were traces of the censors’ scissors. But Shyam Benegal insisted that,
whatever other obstructions o≈cialdom may have devised for Nishant (of
which more in a moment), neither the cbfc nor the Ministry of Informa-
tion and Broadcasting had pushed through any cuts. As it turned out, the
cuts were his own. Vijay Tendulkar remarked,

You know, there is something missing in the film. I don’t know whether
you have noticed? Violence of sorts is at the base of the film. It’s some-
thing basic to the film. Yet you don’t see a single drop of blood in the
film. You will be surprised to know how it happened. There was blood
in the film, and the film was ready when the Emergency came. And this
probably would have been the first film to go to the censors. And Shyam
Benegal became jittery. He felt that, well, this will be banned. That was
again the general mood at the time. So on his own he voluntarily drew
out all the blood from the film.

As for the jumpy cuts in the highly charged scene between the school-
teacher’s wife and the landlord’s youngest brother, Tendulkar told me that
Benegal was persuaded to chop it by the visceral revulsion of a female
acquaintance for whom he had screened a rough edit of the film. In Ten-
dulkar’s version of the scene, as it was originally shot the landlord’s brother
had in fact started beating the schoolteacher’s wife, but his approach,
rather than resolving itself peacefully in an embrace, had spiraled into
frenziedly eroticized, and thus libidinally heightened, violence: ‘‘When he
is indulging in violence with her she says something. He is hotheaded and
starts beating her. He beats her severely and, in that, suddenly he becomes
erotic. And that is the point that he gets involved with that woman.’’
Benegal confirmed that he had cut several scenes, not because of any out-
side pressure or anticipated objections but because they seemed to him gra-

96 Chapter 2
tuitously literal in a film already highly charged with ‘‘implied violence.’’≥Ω
But in its diluted form, this particular scene manifests an abrupt disconti-
nuity between the eroticized violence that drives the characters’ approach to
each other and the apparently pacific resolution of the embrace, which
quickly transitions into a placid few seconds of apparently postcoital re-
cumbence. If the bells and drums both emphasize and disavow the ‘‘impos-
sibility’’ of a middle-class mobilization of the peasants, then equally this
sudden edit both foregrounds and represses the discontinuity between the
‘‘feudal’’ brutality of the violent approach and the ‘‘modern’’ placidity of
their companionship.
What lurks in this cut is the traumatic corollary to the schoolteacher’s
dutiful but vain attempts to get his wife released by going through the
proper modern channels. This is not just the implication that the systems
of the modern state are corrupt, which is, as we have seen, the standard
theme of thwarted progress. It is something much more unsettling, some-
thing implied in the provocative blend of meek surrender and defiant
desire that Shabana Azmi brings to her performance: namely, that (feudal)
domination and (modern) empowerment are not incompatible.
Tendulkar’s story about the woman who was repelled by the unedited
version of this scene rings true to me. But then so does Benegal’s claim that
he felt the violence was gratuitous. He may well subjectively have experi-
enced the jitters that Tendulkar attributed to him as an a√ront to good taste
rather than as a more tactical anticipation of what the censors would
permit.∂≠ But to allow these aspects of the situation to speak to the central
question of this chapter—the grounds of the censors’ judgment—I need to
turn to the final act in the story of Nishant and the censors: how the three-
way impasse between Shyam Benegal, V. C. Shukla, and Indira Gandhi was
finally resolved.

The Infamous Intertitles

Benegal remembers that Shukla, having been reprimanded by Mrs. Gandhi,
ordered him to submit Nishant for recertification, knowing that the cbfc
could then demand various cuts. Alternatively, according to Aruna Vasu-
dev’s 1978 account, the next installment of the drama took place after the
film’s producers, having been invited to screen the film at the Chicago Film
Festival in November 1976, applied to the Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting to release the foreign exchange they would need to have En-
glish subtitles added in Brussels.∂∞ According to Benegal, the film faced

Grounds of the Censor’s Judgment 97

further cuts at the hands of a humiliated Shukla, but a joint secretary at the
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting who was one of the victims of
Shukla’s purges used his very last day in o≈ce to o√er Benegal a compro-
mise. In Vasudev’s telling, the ministry agreed to release the foreign ex-
change in return for one more alteration. The original October 1975 certifi-
cate could stand if Benegal would only agree to insert a new set of much
more declarative intertitles at the beginning and end of the film.

In the beginning: This film is a fictionalized recreation of a story of the

past when the feudal system was prevalent in British India. It has no
bearing with [sic] the present day India where feudalism has been abol-
ished and no section of the people su√er from any oppression from another
section.
And at the end: The scenes depicted in this film relate to a period when
India was not independent. Citizens of India today enjoy equal rights and
status, and working together are moving ever forward.

In Vasudev’s version of the story, Benegal accepted the intertitles but the
ministry still managed to prevent Nishant from going to Chicago (Bene-
gal’s first film, Ankur, was shown instead). According to Benegal, the joint
secretary at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting knew full well
that the new intertitles would, through their performative excess, have
exactly the opposite e√ect to what the minister intended. ‘‘People will
laugh,’’ he told Benegal. ‘‘Let them know what this [the Emergency] is all
about.’’ By accepting the deal, Benegal got his certificate back and au-
diences rolled in the aisles. ‘‘And then, as soon as the Emergency was over
[in 1977], I got a letter from the Censor Board saying ‘you can remove those
things!’ ’’
I started this chapter by arguing that the censors justify their actions by
claiming that society is in a state of exception, an in-between time. When it
came to film censorship, the peculiarity of the Emergency was that as a re-
gime that made the state of exception absolutely explicit, it was nevertheless
also more committed than any other regime in Indian post-Independence
history to the constant assertion that the political situation was absolutely
‘‘normal.’’ Before and after the Emergency, censorship was premised on the
idea that image-objects have to be managed by a specially qualified cadre of
individuals because society at large is in too much of a state of instability to
handle it. But the joint secretary’s intertitles were a masterstroke because
they perfectly expressed the o≈cial ideology of the Emergency while perfor-

98 Chapter 2
matively underlining its absurdity. By the o≈cial logic of the Emergency,
whatever instability Nishant insinuated could not possibly be relevant to the
present, since the present was, by definition, modern and progressive com-
pared to a feudal and oppressive past. And yet if the present was so stable,
then why did the absolute distinction between the past and the present have
to be so strenuously and so repeatedly asserted?
Madhava Prasad assumes that Shyam Benegal added the original dis-
claimers spontaneously because ‘‘the pastness of feudalism is a necessary
protocol of realist representation’’ (1998:196). Benegal’s own version of
events would seem to require a somewhat di√erent interpretation. The
pastness of feudalism was certainly a necessary protocol of o≈cial Emer-
gency ideology. And it does seem to have guided Benegal’s decision to ex-
sanguinate Nishant so as to distance it from Vijay Tendulkar’s more visceral
but also more provocative vision, leaving just a trace of something emer-
gent in Azmi’s insinuating performance, around the edges of the cuts.
Benegal’s commitment to a certain conception of cinematic ‘‘taste’’ may
have led him to those edits anyway, Emergency or no. But the story of
Nishant does suggest that, ironically enough, censorship during the Emer-
gency relied on denying the ideology of exception—the claim that we are in
a liminal time where unspoken rules have failed—which has otherwise
been the consistent justification for the censors’ work. Film censorship has,
as I have shown, generally rested on a concern about the potentiated reality
of mass-mediated image-objects. The peculiarity of Emergency-period
censorship was perhaps after all not so much its intensification, still less its
arbitrariness. More fundamentally, its distinguishing abnormality was its
desperate attempt to banish the problem of potentiated reality altogether
by asserting a state of absolute normality.

FORCE AND MEANING IN THE MASS-MEDIATED IMAGE-OBJECT

Indian cinema censorship since the 1960s has, as I argued above, generally
referred films to the judgment of censors who are supposed to combine, in
varying proportion, aesthetic discrimination and cultural responsibility.
But these conventional grounds of the censors’ judgment are, in turn,
premised on a persistent anxiety about the instability of mass-mediated
image-objects. The anxiety revolves around a basic question: can the vis-
ceral force of image-objects be judged as a function of their contextual
meaning (within a film, vis-à-vis an interpretive community, and so on) or

Grounds of the Censor’s Judgment 99