ELIZA JOHNY EARNS A LIVING watching movies until 7 pm on most days of the week. She knows, as does her boss, that most people think she has a great job. It’s true that Johny likes her work, but all the same, it sometimes wears her down. She spends four hours watching a film that’s only 120 minutes long. And she doesn’t get to pick them: Johny watches everything Sony Pix, the TV channel she works for, acquires. She just sits there, in one corner of the office, beside her small television with a DVD player perched above it, rewinding, skipping forward, and pausing just enough to let the meaning of words sink in so that when a movie finally goes on air, it’s clear of anything that could cause offence—which means that when Cameron Diaz danced to something called ‘the penis song’ in the movie The Sweetest Thing (2002) as it aired on Sony Pix in early February, it sounded something like this: “What a lovely ride. Your [blank] is a thrill. Your [blank] is a killer. A giant coupe de ville. Your [blank] packs a wallop. Your [blank] brings a load. And when it makes deliveries, it needs its own zip code.” This was Johny’s work, shaped in part by rules laid down by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), guidelines of the Indian Broadcasting Federation, and the channel’s internal standards and practices committee, which acts as a final filter.
One movie channel had recently removed the word ‘beef’ from a subtitle, leaving behind ‘cake’—the omission was severe, and reeked of overcaution. It was alarming; what exactly leads to censorship of this magnitude?
Between Johny and Aarti Mandelia, who looks after operations, movies broadcast on Sony Pix are cut and their subtitles modified, ironically, to protect works from the unpredictable feedback of censors in Bengaluru who issue the U or UA certificate a movie needs to be broadcast on television. A dictat from a panel of censors has to be obeyed, and appeals take time, so before the censors see a movie, channels snip parts off themselves.
Although internal and external censors have a general idea of what others will find offensive, the process involves an ever-changing group of characters with vastly different likes and dislikes, and so uniformity in decisions occurs rarely. I asked Swaroop Chaturvedi, the channel’s associate creative director, if he had ever gone overboard in preempting the censor’s objections. He said he had.
Sunder Aaron, the executive vice president and business head for Sony Pix, told me that the certification process had become more consistent since they began sending all their films to the same CBFC center. But Chaturvedi pointed out that under these rules, he had to be far more careful: “The censors might not understand what ‘carpet-munching’ means. But we’ve got to take it out.”
In March 2004, Pratibha Naithani, a professor of Political Science at St Xavier’s College in Mumbai, filed a public interest litigation over adult content on television. Naithani claimed that films such as Kamasutra broadcast on daytime television had an adverse effect on children. In October of that year, the Bombay High Court ruled that to be shown on television, movies needed a certificate by the censors. In 2007 the Supreme Court passed an order Naithani called “good”.
The effects of regulation and changing definitions of offence can be seen in a list of banned words the channel let me have. The censor board bars 30 offensive words, including ‘fuck’, references to mothers and genitalia, ‘testicles’, ‘screw’, ‘ass’, and the words ‘call girl’ and ‘prostitute’. But the channel’s list is 70 words long, and it sees as avoidable words such as ‘pee’, ‘scumbag’, ‘crap’, ‘fart’, ‘crappy’, ‘broad’, and, in its eagerness to distance itself from vulgarity, even ‘porn’. Then I noticed a word whose inclusion left me at a loss: “‘Panhandle’? What’s wrong with ‘panhandle’?” Chaturvedi had explained to me earlier that anything, absolutely anything that could be misinterpreted, had to be removed. Now he grimaced and shook his head, and said in resignation, “Don’t ask.”