Censorship and loving Dev Anand

Illustration/Uday Mohite

In 2003, Ravi Shankar Prasad was Minister of State, Information and Broadcasting. It fell on him to decide on a Censor Board chief - soon after his predecessor had had a run-in with the erstwhile chief Vijay Anand, over the idea of special theatres for adult films. Mr Prasad decided to ask someone he loved: Dev Anand. The latter refused, too busy making a new film.

The film Dev Anand was busy with at the time was called, no lie, Censor. In it, a director (Dev Anand) makes a radical film about modern relationships. The film is denied a censor certificate by the Censor Board chief, played by Rekha, who chews pan during the screening, in a rousing role-play reversal from tawaif to patron. There is a court case. The film is smuggled to Hollywood via Arachana Puran Singh's fake American accent and faker poodle. It wins not one, but two Oscars. This leads to an assassination attempt.

Mr Prasad seemed doleful with the refusal of his "hero since childhood". A paper quoted him saying, "It's very sad." Mr Prasad's party has shown a bionic commitment to censorship in all forms. It now wishes to amend the Cinematograph Act to revoke already granted censor certificates. And not only films that earn the dispensation's displeasure. They will also respond to "receipt of any references" yaniki anyone's objections. What the Karni Senas once had to do physically, they can now do through a kind of reverse RTI process. One can argue that anyone can object, so all objections are equal.

But we know how that works. Social media platforms use the same form of censorship. It's called Community Standards. Those of us who do work like running sex education platforms are well acquainted with how, the more the audience for our work has grown, the more repressive and regressive these standards have become. Who is the community? Apparently only the most conservative members. And the rest of us?

Dev Anand was passionately loved by generations of young Indian men because he was associated not with zealous nationalism or morality, but a zestful contemporaneity. A figure not imprisoned by the past or determined by a known future, but someone who could inhabit the present through style, pleasure, insouciance and personal confidence of an open mind. Colloquially, a modern person.

In Censor, Dev Anand argues against sanskar-centred censorship with a simple assertion: I too am part of this society and hence, what I say is also a part of the culture. Who is to decide what is ‘Indian' culture? Liberal folks would like that speech while cringing at the rest of the film (it is very tacky). Yet, the idea that Dev Anand turned down the role of cultural gatekeeping, in pursuit of his work, however tacky, is as compellingly political. It upholds art as its own domain - ‘azad khayal' not subservient to agendas.

It is one thing to fear the future. But what does it mean to fear the past, like an insecure boyfriend? We have already been changed by films we have seen, poems we have memorised. Can censorship undo that? The film Censor is almost impossible to find, so my memory commits to it more, rendering it somehow uncensorable. Art raises naughty knotty questions, which power cannot resolve. That is why it has so many gatekeepers. They should ask themselves - can you un-love Dev Anand?

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com