The Importance Of Film Censorship

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Our constitution gives the media and the public an ‘almost absolute’ right to freedom over speech and expression. The founding fathers of the Indian constitution attached great importance to this right and knew that this right is inherently important for a democratic society. The right is subject to certain restrictions mentioned in Article 19(2), one of which is that this right can be restricted by the state subject to obscenity and morality. The contrast of a free and continuously developing media along with a restriction of this sort to preserve our nation’s culture and traditions is bound to give rise to various challenges that pose questions on the extent of the freedom to express. There is a constant hysteria about our culture being…show more content…
This controversy was particularly fascinating because here the producers used the temptation attached to the forbidden to lure the public and to increase their profits. Monika Mehta talks about this in her article on film censorship and makes an extremely fascinating observation that when a controversial text enters the public domain, it becomes a marketable property due to its lure as a forbidden object. Its status as a forbidden object is constructed by the known act of censorship. Censorship in this case was fuelled desire. An effect of this was that the producers got an opportunity to capitalize on this desire and lust and increase their profits. This became a quite popular tool of marketing and came to be known is ‘profitable provocation’. In other words, capitalists banking their profits facts on the assumption that the insecurities of the public relating to sex is something extremely obvious and can easily be manipulated for their gains. It’s as easy as simply keeping the rat trap open and knowing for a fact that the rat will walk in. That’s how gullible our insecurities relating to sex make us. This goes to show that people are aware that the obsession with the sexual in the minds of the people is something very obvious and natural. However, the fear of…show more content…
The erupting forces of the contemporary forms of sexual speech, images are seen as a fundamental challenge to our dominant cultural norms. However, they are not trying to challenge these notions but are trying to become a part of the script of Indian culture. They want both sides of the argument aim to achieve the same thing – Indian culture in its purest, most naked form. If you look back to Vedic times, we were very open about sex and sexual practices, it wasn’t seen as something that was distinct from the culture but it was a part of it. Even till date, many elements of our cultural heritage contain sexual content, like the shivalinga, temples at khajurao and Kornak. It was only on the advent of invaders in our country that codification started and stringent laws were created and a distinction was made between decent and indecent and the sexual was put in the indecent category. And surprisingly, those invaders, such as the British for instance, don’t follow these laws themselves. By relying on a penal code that is a century old, we are only curbing our progress as a

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