Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction available in Paperback
Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction
- ISBN-10:
- 0253220939
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253220936
- Pub. Date:
- 06/29/2009
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0253220939
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253220936
- Pub. Date:
- 06/29/2009
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253220936 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/29/2009 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Censorship in South Asia
Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction
By Raminder Kaur, William Mazzarella
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2009 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35335-1
CHAPTER 1
Between Sedition and Seduction Thinking Censorship in South Asia
William Mazzarella and Raminder Kaur
Censorship has been getting a lot of publicity in South Asia recently. The mid-1990s alone saw a veritable carnival of controversies over the line between the acceptable and the unacceptable in public culture. By way of example, one might point to the uproar in 1994 over the alleged obscenity of Madhuri Dixit's song-and-dance sequence "Choli ke peeche kya hai?" (What lies behind the blouse?) in Subhash Ghai's film Khalnayak (The Villain); to Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen (1994), which ran afoul of caste sentiment, the film censor board, and its real-life protagonist, outlaw-turned-parliamentarian Phoolan Devi; to Mani Ratnam's feature Bombay, whose dramatization of the Bombay riots of 1992–93 managed to offend Hindu groups, Muslim groups, and secular intellectuals alike; to the extraordinary intensity of protest (including one self-immolation) and policing that surrounded the Miss World 1996 pageant in Bangalore; to the Bombay ban on Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), which, in the wake of the national ban on The Satanic Verses (1989), desecrated Indian political idols old and new by featuring a dog named Jawaharlal Nehru and an unflattering, thinly veiled portrait of Maharashtrian strongman Bal Thackeray; to Mira Nair's feature adaptation of the Kamasutra, whose Hindi version was in 1997 subjected to more stringent cuts than its English-language equivalent; to the public burning of a scholarly article, printed by the Illustrated Weekly of India in 1994, that dared to call into question elements of the mythical narratives surrounding both the seventeenth-century Maratha ruler Shivaji and the nineteenth-century proto-nationalist heroine the Rani of Jhansi, and to the cinema smashing, legal challenges, and extra-legal harassment that greeted Deepa Mehta's Fire in 1998, not to mention the direct physical violence that ended the first attempt at filming its successor, Water, in Banaras in 2000, before it had even properly begun.
And that is just India. In November 2007, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency and suspended the country's 1973 constitution for a third time. Independent news stations were forced off the air, hundreds of protesting journalists and lawyers were arrested, and the Supreme Court was stacked with clients of the regime. But this relatively dramatic move — in some ways reminiscent of the much more extended Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in India in 1975–77 — was not Musharraf 's first experiment with censorship. Sporadic official interference with the media, as well as "disappearances," had marked his rule since its beginnings in a "bloodless" coup in 1999. As in other parts of the world, the Internet presents wholly new challenges to official regulation in Pakistan. "Cyber-cops" working for the Pakistan Internet Exchange assiduously filter pornography, blasphemy, and "anti-Islamic" content from online networks. More generally, as Asad Ahmed's contribution to this volume shows, Islamic orthodoxy is regularly asserted in the form of blasphemy accusations. Popular culture is by no means immune: Islamist parties have been involved in incidents such as the 2003 provincial banning of music by the pop band Junoon. And in the wake of the murder of three journalists in October of that year, the press has censored itself more stringently.
Bangladesh emerged onto the international map of censorship when Taslima Nasreen's novel Lajja was banned in 1993. Like that of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, the banning of Lajja only heightened the adulation with which it was greeted in the "liberal" West. Nasreen's more recent books, Ka and Dwikhandita, personal memoirs that identify the author's sexual partners in both Bangladesh and West Bengal, have provoked lawsuits and bans in both crossborder regions. In Nepal, two major incidents since 1990 stand out (prior to that year, under the Panchayat regime, press censorship was strictly enforced). First, there was the deafening silence consequent upon the Narayanhiti massacre of 2001, when the editor in chief, general manager, and publisher of Kantipur were arrested for publishing an editorial by Baburam Bhattarai, the second in command of the Maoists, alleging that the king's brother Gyanendra was implicated in the deaths (see Genevieve Lakier, this volume). Second, there was the more dispersed regime of press censorship imposed along with the state of emergency from November 2001 until August 2002. While not as brutal as other emergencies in the region, it involved comparable restrictions on the press: all pro-Maoist publications were raided and shut down the day before the emergency was declared. As for Sri Lanka, censorship in that country has generally been a function of the ongoing battle between the state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. While some aspects of President Chandrika Kumaratunga's media censorship have now been revoked, it is still illegal to report on any proposed operations or military activity by the security forces, or on the acquisition of arms, ammunition, or other equipment by the armed forces or the police.
The incidents we have listed here are only some of the best known, most publicized controversies of recent years. By no means a comprehensive list, they nevertheless give some indication of the terrain with which we are concerned in this book. Our intention in bringing them together under the rubric "South Asia" is to explore the commonalities that result from their shared history of colonial subjugation, to account for their different locations in distinct national polities, and finally to examine the more recent connections and contestations brought about by regional liberalization in the 1990s and beyond. Even though the primary emphasis of this volume is on Indian materials, our underlying ambition is comparative.
The very fact that these and other similar controversies were taken up and circulated by the cosmopolitan media establishment in South Asia (and often beyond) is itself an important social fact. Superficially, part of what made them compelling as public dramas was the way that they seemed to stage the contradictions of South Asian public culture in an age of globalization, a period that combined effervescent consumerism with surging religious nationalism. From the mid-1980s, and especially after 1991, the deregulation of consumer goods markets joined hands with an explosion in new commercial media. In the 1980s, India saw the spread of color television (already established in the rest of South Asia) and the coming of video and cable; in the 1990s, South Asians began being influenced by transnational satellite broadcasting and the Internet.
In this context, the relationship between the public interest and the interests of publicity inevitably became more complicated. Marketers, politicians, cultural producers, and social movements all sought to establish a presence and a profile, to realize the value-creating possibilities of these new affect-intensive fields of public identification, as well as to proclaim their dangers (Brosius and Butcher 1999; Kaur 2003; Mankekar 1999; Mazzarella 2003; Rajagopal 2001). Structurally, the lure of what one might call "profitable provocation" meant that the boundaries of public civility and decorum were constantly being challenged. Key areas included the public representation of sex, the supposed irrationality of religious appeals in an ostensibly secular democracy, and the line between legal and illegal forms of political action — this last paradigmatically represented by the popular rise of hypermasculinized, often violent political organizations like Bombay's Shiv Sena (Eckert 2003; D. Gupta 1982; T. Hansen 2001; Katzenstein 1979).
With so much publicity, many of these controversies actually became less rather than more intelligible. The media reportage quickly imposed a kind of discursive hardening, a sort of dramaturgical standardization. It was the prescripted urban drama of cultural globalization, the overdetermined clash between the cosmopolitans and the localists, between modernity and tradition, iconically fungible and ready-made for nightly summary on CNN. At the same time, it would certainly be a mistake to suggest that we might reach the "truth" of these events by stripping away the "distortions" and "biases" imposed upon them by the media. These were struggles that, in a very fundamental way, lived and breathed in the media, found their distinctive forms and their conditions of possibility in the space provided by a particular configuration of media and publics.
On the one hand, then, the essays in this book represent a collective attempt to step back from the clamor, the relentless repetition of assertions and counter-assertions. On the other hand, we recognize, and indeed theorize, the inseparability of medium and message. In part, this means placing the contemporary moment in historical and regional context. To what extent do the contemporary discourses, practices, and conditions of censorship echo or reconfigure those of the colonial period? The essays by William Mazzarella on the 1920s and Tejaswini Ganti on the 1990s, for instance, suggest striking continuities in the social dynamics of film censorship. Meanwhile, Asad Ahmed describes the present-day adaptation in Pakistan of colonial legal precedents regarding the management of blasphemy. Historical and comparative contextualizations also require us, in turn, to rethink the very category of censorship. To what extent is it an adequate or relevant descriptor for the kinds of public cultural controversies that we invoked above? In what ways might we retheorize censorship to gain a fuller understanding of the cultural politics of publicity in South Asia?
From Censorship to Cultural Regulation
As with many social phenomena, the harder one looks at censorship, the stranger it becomes. At the most elementary level, it quickly becomes clear that the common understanding of censorship as the repressive action of states and state-sanctioned institutions will not get us very far. One might even say that there seems to be something of a correlation between the regulation of cultural production and the proliferation of provocative forms.
Repression first: by considering censorship only as a matter of silencing and of denial, we risk missing what several scholars have identified as its productive aspects. On one level, we are referring here to the relatively obvious point that any kind of utterance or discourse, indeed the very possibility of language, depends upon a kind of constitutive foreclosure (Bourdieu 1991; Butler 1997, 1998). This foreclosure is, as Judith Butler argues, "a kind of unofficial censorship or primary restriction in speech that constitutes the possibility of agency in speech" (Butler 1997, 41). In this sense, censorship does not act upon a sovereign subject from "outside"; rather, it is one of the very preconditions of subjectivity itself.
In practice, the relation between explicit and implicit forms of censorship is often ambiguous. Genevieve Lakier's contribution to this volume demonstrates this through an analysis of the self-censorship at work in the (lack of) representations of the massacre of Nepal's royal family in the indigenous media. And Tejaswini Ganti shows how, in the world of Mumbai film production, self-censorship is inextricable from personal dispositions toward controversial themes. An open question — both empirically and theoretically — is the extent to which the positive meanings allowed or encouraged by a certain linguistic or semiotic configuration are "haunted" by the possibilities that they must disavow, but which remain crucial to their intelligibility. By attending to the particular politics of disavowal that structure particular events or sites we may well understand something important about the dialectic of fascination and loathing that seems to characterize so much in the realm of censorship.
On another level, some have theorized censorship as productive according to a Foucauldian schema. Classically, we imagine the censor, as Dominic Boyer (2003) reminds us, as the very embodiment of the anti-intellectual. The endangered word (lively, inventive, poetic) confronts the complacent philistinism of the censor (sluggish, pedantic, literal-minded). But censorship may also be understood as a generative technology of truth. Far from only silencing, censorship can be read as a relentless proliferation of discourses on normative modes of desiring, of acting, of being in the world. Censorship, then, would be not so much a desperate rearguard action as a productive part of the apparatus of modern governmentality (Foucault 1977, 1981, 1985; Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991). We find, for example, that the discourses on Indian women's sexuality that emerge out of censorship practices are internally contradictory in interesting ways (Mehta 2001a, 2001b). Moreover, as many recent public controversies over obscenity in the media have demonstrated, these discourses are routinely brought up against equally normalizing but quite different narratives of Indian sexuality — the compulsory invocation, by "cosmopolitan" critics of censorship, of Vatsyayana's Kamasutra and the erotic temple carvings at Khajuraho and Konarak as an integral part of the South Asian civilizational heritage is a case in point (Mazzarella 2003).
Then there is the issue of censorship as the action of states or state-sanctioned institutions. This raises two questions. The first is one of location: where is censorship? What are its sites? Where should we look for its logic and its motivation? Should we be examining the utterances and ideologies of those individuals authorized by states to intervene in the public field? To what extent does it makes sense to say that the person who enacts censorship is better placed to comment on it than the person who is subjected to it? The Foucauldian commandment would of course encourage us, at the very least, to situate the deliberate utterances of practitioners within a wider institutional field. But what is the best way to discern the play of censorship in the textual traces left by its operation? How should we read the relationship between the carapace of case law and the relatively ephemeral rhythms of public debate?
The second question is: what counts as censorship? Are we stretching the term too far if we force it to accommodate not only the operations of official regulatory authorities (the courts, the police, censor boards), but also various "extra-legal" or "extra-constitutional" initiatives and interventions? Some, for example, speak of the "silent censorship" that market forces (or, better, the social relations that are reified as such) exert on the contents of the media ( Jansen 1988). Does violent action against the screening of a film count as censorship? Or indeed any of the many "nonviolent" tactics by which activists in South Asia often seek to prevent particular events from unfolding — bandh, hartal, dharna, gherao, morcha, and so forth?
What about the connections between legal and extra-legal forms of censorship? Does it matter if violent or nonviolent "extra-legal" protests are linked, by either alliance or overt sympathy, to those who in fact do control the official machinery of regulation? Such, for instance, was the case at the time of the Shiv Sena's agitations against Deepa Mehta's Fire in Bombay and Delhi in 1998. Only recently ousted from political power in the state of Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena smashed theaters and intimidated actors, and its actions were greeted ambiguously by the national government. National political leaders deplored the "lawlessness" of the violence, but regionally affiliated allies at the center expressed solidarity with the Shiv Sena and approval of its actions. And the Minister for Information and Broadcasting was in fact, to the dismay of many, persuaded to return the film to the Censor Board for recertification (a practice that the Indian Supreme Court declared illegal in December 2000).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Censorship in South Asia by Raminder Kaur, William Mazzarella. Copyright © 2009 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments1. Between Sedition and Seduction: Thinking Censorship in South AsiaWilliam Mazzarella and Raminder Kaur2. Iatrogenic Religion and PoliticsChristopher Pinney3. Making Sense of the Cinema in Late Colonial IndiaWilliam Mazzarella4. The Limits of Decency and the Decency of Limits: Censorship and the Bombay Film IndustryTejaswini Ganti5. Anxiety, Failure, and Censorship in Indian AdvertisingAngad Chowdhry6. Nuclear RevelationsRaminder Kaur7. Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, the Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan's Postcolonial PredicamentAsad Ali Ahmed8. After the Massacre: Secrecy, Disbelief, and the Public Sphere in NepalGenevieve LakierList of ContributorsIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"This is an exciting and innovative volume that will become the standard reference in the field for some time to come."
This is an exciting and innovative volume that will become the standard reference in the field for some time to come.
This is an exciting and innovative volume that will become the standard reference in the field for some time to come.