CBFC's logic: Look two women having great sex. Let's turn lesbian
India must be the only country where economic progress is inversely proportional to liberalism. Depressingly, this is reflected in our laws, drawn from the antiquated British penal code - from the Victorian era - and applied with few amendments today.
Homosexuality - in fact, all forms of "unnatural" sex, which going by the definition of Section 377, would include most sexual activities in which heterosexual partners indulge - has been re-criminalised.
And, it appears, so have films that depict homosexuality. They are "promoting" unnatural sex, and will "ignite unnatural passions" among their viewers. Because, clearly, sexual orientation is a state of mind, and tends to be influenced by a two-hour movie. "Hey, those women seemed to be having great sex. Maybe I'll become a lesbian," you might think, as you munch on your popcorn.
The ban on Unfreedom shows us that India has only become more regressive in the two decades since Fire released. That film did show in theatres, sparking off protests from the usual suspects. This film will not even be given a chance.
According to media reports, one of the excuses that the Central Board of Film Certification has produced is that the film also has an Islamic terrorism angle, and that this may rouse tensions.
If this is indeed true, it typifies India's reaction to any controversy contained in a creative work - ban first; speculate later. This year has been a dark one for "freedom of speech" in India - the documentary India's Daughter was banned, and television networks were prevented from showing it; 28 words came close to being banned from use in films; and it promises to get worse.
These are the latest in a series of guidelines and diktats that have been slowly twisting the arms of film directors. Every time someone lights a cigarette or pours a drink, a health warning flashes across the screen. Most swear words are beeped out or muted, often robbing us of context. All scenes of semi or complete nudity are cut, always robbing us of context. I mean, if you watched The Last King of Scotland in an Indian theatre, the climax would have made no sense.
The films Blue Jasmine and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo didn't release in India because the directors refused to put in the cuts that the film certification board deemed necessary.
Isn't the point of having "certification" self-explanatory? The purpose of the board is to certify that the film is "suitable" for a certain age group of viewers, taking into account the depiction of sex, narcotics, and violence, right? How does the board get to decide that a film should not be shown at all? Technically, the most the board ought to be able to do would be to plaster a warning: "Adultery is a crime"; "Premarital sex is amoral"; "Lesbianism is dangerous to health"; and so on.
When I look at films from the '50s and '60s, whose content would have had to take into consideration not just a draconian Censor Board, but a conservative audience, I am quite fascinated by the manner in which the directors managed to subvert moral codes. The raunchy item numbers were cloaked as dream sequences, and thus outside the realm of the film's representation of real life. The heroine remained chaste, the hero innocent and honourable, while the "other woman" would dream of him wooing her against waterfalls.
In yesteryear Tamil cinema, most of the titillation would be conveyed through suggestive lyrics, with double entendres. MGR was quite the connoisseur of these, singing of "luscious mangoes" and "two full moons" as the heroine gyrated against him in figure-hugging costumes, with the backdrop conveying the literal meaning of the lyrics - they would be rolling under a mango tree, or flirting under a paper cut-out of the moon. The only woman who would so much as hold hands before marriage was the vamp; she was free to do everything that went against the morals of society, because she was conveniently the "bad girl"; so, after her raunchy dream sequence, she could even attempt a seduction, and be told off by the hero, who was repelled by her open sexuality.
Raj Kapoor usually depended on the elements of nature to show his heroines in as close to the buff as he could get. Here is a sudden burst of rain, just when the heroine is walking home in a translucent sari; here is a gust of wind, blowing her sari away, and she's too busy running after the hero's plane to sort out her wardrobe malfunction; or, here's a fake moustache that totally convinces the hero that she's a man and so it's perfectly understandable that he tore at her shirt, leaving us with copious under-boob show for the long chase sequence. It would be terrible if our filmmakers had to resort to such tactics, which were degrading to not just women, but all of humanity. For some reason, India has clung on to the idea that cinema must advocate, rather than reflect.
Even worse, it is deemed all right for films to advocate the most disgusting "solutions" - for the longest time, women were marrying their rapists to protect their modesties, and reforming these rapist-husbands, so that they became decent, honest men; for the longest time, men were sexually harassing women till they decided to fall in love with them; independent, wilful women were being "brought under control", a trope that was funny in England in Shakespeare's time, and is considered just in India, today.
If the censors want to screen films for what they "support" or "promote", perhaps they should look at these storylines instead of picking on sex and intoxicants.