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CENSORIUM

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................................................viiINTRODUCTION The Censor's Fist..............................................................................1CHAPTER 1 Performative Dispensations: The Elementary Forms of Mass Publicity................................29CHAPTER 2 Who the Hell Do the Censors Think They Are?: Grounds of the Censor's Judgment.....................76CHAPTER 3 We Are the Law!: Censorship Takes to the Streets..................................................115CHAPTER 4 Quotidian Eruptions: Aesthetic Distinction and the Extimate Squirm................................156CHAPTER 5 Obscene Tendencies: Censorship and the Public Punctum.............................................190Notes.......................................................................................................223Bibliography................................................................................................257Index.......................................................................................................275

Chapter One

THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF MASS PUBLICITY

This chapter presents a history of the censors' present. I explain the emergence of film censorship as a response less to particular image-objects and more to a structural challenge that is inherent to mass-mediated societies: the open edge of mass publicity. Part historical fiction, part genealogy, this chapter ends where the introduction began, with the so-called cultural emergency at the end of the twentieth century. I argue that we can understand neither the cultural emergency nor its earlier iterations without understanding the peculiar way in which the cinema intensified and consolidated regulatory anxieties that took shape vis-à-vis print and theater during the second half of the nineteenth century. From the beginning, these anxieties touched on the volatile relationship between performative force and representational meaning, a relationship that, I suggest, preoccupies censors because it lies at the heart of any claim to authoritative cultural order or, in the terminology of my own argument, any claim to a performative dispensation. My argument thus implies that while at one level these anxieties were specific to the context of colonial India, at another they are both continuous with the Indian present and relevant to the problem of legitimating sovereign authority in mass-mediated societies everywhere.

At the beginning of this history lies a myth.

OUTLINE FOR A SHORT FILM IN FOUR SCENES

SCENE 1 The First Play, Ancient India, Mythical Time

We join the action as the sage Bharata and his sons, enchantingly assisted by a group of celestial dancers created for the occasion by the god Brahma, are putting on the first play. Or to be precise, they are staging the first play that aspires to the status of "dramatic art," with all the aesthetic—and in this case also moral—ambition that this implies. There have been earlier, rustic performances in a vulgar mode of lowbrow comedy; indeed, the general vulgarity and dissipation of the age is what has prompted the god Indra to ask Brahma to create a theatrical diversion that might reach beyond the educated classes (who have access to the laws of the Vedas, even if they could do more to follow them) and bring the increasingly insolent subaltern classes to heel by instructing them even as it entertains them.

And thrillingly crowd-pleasing the new theater certainly is: full of fights, explosions, roaring voices, singing, dancing—in short, all the spectacular action that ordinary folk enjoy. But Bharata's theater also takes its ideological duties seriously. Having given Bharata his dramaturgical instructions in the form of a new treatise on stagecraft, a "fifth Veda" called the Natyashastra, Brahma points out that a most convenient occasion for the first play would be Indra's Banner Day—the day commemorating the time that Indra, together with a host of other deities, defeated the forces of the demons, thus safeguarding the social and cosmic order. Having rehearsed his one hundred sons and his dancing girls, Bharata duly resolves that his first play will be a dramatization of this noble triumph of good over evil.

The show comes off exceedingly well, and the gods who have been watching are delighted. They shower Bharata and his players with gifts: Indra gives them his banner staff, Brahma gives them a crooked stick, Varuna a gourd, Shiva blessings, Vayu a fan, Vishnu a throne, and so on. But other onlookers are not so happy. The demons whose defeat has been so conclusively depicted are furious at their humiliating (mis)representation and round up some goons with whom they rush the stage, screaming that they will not tolerate this kind of thing and casting a spell on the performers that paralyzes their ability to talk, move, and even remember. Indra, who had been taking great pleasure in Bharata's dramatic celebration of his military prowess, is livid at the intrusion of this rowdy mob; he seizes his banner staff and bashes most of them to smithereens with it. Still, the surviving rowdies refuse to be cowed and proceed, in their uncouth way, to heckle and harass the blushing heavenly dancing girls.

Bharata is exasperated and asks Brahma to figure out a way that he can put on his plays in peace, without constant interruptions from the demons and their ruffians. Bharata gets his friend Vishvakarman, the celestial architect, to design and build a proper theater for Bharata's company, a separate space under the protection of the gods, each of whom takes responsibility for overseeing some part of it. Indra installs himself as divine patron, officer of order, and exemplary spectator and seats himself on one side of the stage, right next to the action and quite visible to the rest of the audience. His banner staff, still warm from pulping the demons and their hired heavies, stands as a constant warning to those who might presume to breach the integrity of his divine patron-police powers.

Having ensured proper protection for the playhouse, Brahma then decides to give the assembled spectators—gods, demons, and ordinary folk all together—a little tutorial in appropriate spectatorship. He addresses everyone, but he is mainly speaking to the remaining and rather sulky demons, who have clearly not yet learned to back off, to not get so worked up, and to start treating hegemonic ideology as art. Smilingly, Brahma tells the spectators not to take what they see on the stage so literally, but rather to understand that it is fiction. He asks them to remember that the theater belongs to them all, that it serves all of their interests, and that it offers a reflective and refined engagement of all the senses with all the attitudes and arts in creation. Finally, he reminds Bharata and his actors that the Natyashastra requires that the sanctity of each performance be preceded by a sacrificial ritual of devotion to the stage, lest the talents and wisdom of the players be wasted and all involved be reincarnated as beasts.

SCENE 2 A Parsi Theater Performance of the Indar Sabha, 1860s

The scene begins with a shot of a crowd milling around outside the entrance of a Parsi theatrical production in a North Indian town. The walls of the theater...