I would find it difficult to write 10,000 words about the Tamil Cinema of the Fifties and Sixties without revealing at least one piece of information unknown to a non-Tamil. Yet, writing of her native Maharashtra, this is the extraordinary achievement of Shailaja Paik.
‘To Kiss or Not to Kiss?’ Cinema, Vulgarity and Marathi Manus in 1950s and 1960s Maharashtra Shailaja Paik Faculty of History, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Asian Studies, University of Cincinnati, USA
First let me mention that Bombay Cinema did depict kissing though films featuring lots of passionate kisses did not do well- e.g. Ezra Mir's 'Zarina', in 1932, or even Devika Rani's 'Karma' which was also released in England and was well received there. After Independence, censorship tightened up though kissing was not banned per se. Western films did have them and Indian films could do so too. Still, the kiss in Satyam Shivam Sundaram greatly incensed the CM of Tamil Nadu- the great film star MGR. There was no particular regional or caste angle to this sort of fury on the part of politicians. MGR was an anti-Brahmin 'rationalist' who led a 'Dravidian' party.
ABSTRACT Critiques of vulgarity, sexuality and class featured prominently in the social, cultural and intellectual life of post-Independence India.
As they had done for the previous seventy years. When it came to poetry and magazines stories, there were important obscenity trials and at a later point 'Dalit Panther' writers in poetry made a point of outraging middle class sensibilities. Films however were subject to certification. Moreover, because industrialization had stalled, there was no market and thus no motive to épater la bourgeoisie. However, since the middle class was bureaucratic rather than mercantile, the Capitalist class could be denounced in hysterical terms.
This article focuses on the discourse of chumban bandi (banning kissing) in the 1950s and 1960s Maharashtra and analyses how it became a particularly unique index of heightened transgressive pleasure.
Film makers didn't think they could make money from it so there was not much 'discourse' on the issue. The fact is, you could go see a Hollywood film where there was plenty of smooching. But watching others kiss isn't particularly entertaining. India, thanks to Nitin Bose- Satyajit Ray's Uncle- had 'play-back singing'- which meant that the hero and heroine could warble melodiously instead.
I situate this discourse within a larger public debate,
There was no such debate. Nobody greatly cared.
where dominant caste middle-class elites
MGR, like Kamaraj, was lower class. I should mention that films depicting cross-caste romance did well at the box office. Devika Rani's 'Acchut Kanya' (untouchable maiden) had done well in the late Thirties. So did 'Sujata' starring Nutan in 1959. But for commercial success, the Dalit girl has to be depicted as chaste and of noble character.
took upon the responsibility to shepherd supposedly recalcitrant dominated castes
who didn't have the money to go to the cinema
and low-class masses towards decency, civilized action and citizenship.
In the cities, non-dominated working class people were welcome to go see Hollywood films. But they weren't interested.
Many elites energetically worked on their ideology, which was rooted in high-caste, middle-class and patriarchal values to create Marathi manus and nation.
Bal Thakeray is the name most associated with 'Marathi manus'. But he was no prude. True, his goons harassed Dilip Kumar over his support for the supposedly Lesbian film, 'Fire', but this was because of a personal falling out between Thakeray and Kumar. Similarly, only after Manisha Koirala asked Thackeray to intervene did his goons disrupt the screening of 'Ek Chotti si Love Kahani'. The director said he'd used a body double for the 'indecent scenes' because Manisha had become fat. This was silly. Manisha would still be gorgeous even if she was heavier than an elephant.
Drawing upon hitherto neglected Marathi language texts,
which aren't neglected by those who can only read Marathi
I show how elites
e.g. the billionaire Tata or, the great scientist. Homi Bhaba?
policed the kiss to both ban on-screen kissing
there was no ban. 'Lustful kissing' more particularly by the villain was banned- but that applied to Western movies as well. Basically, if it could give you a hard-on, it was out.
and paradoxically harness its energy to engage in the politics of Marathikaran (creating Marathi regional identity) and create a new Marathi identity as modern, moral and decent.
Nonsense! The Marathas had created a great Empire centuries ago. Nobody has ever said Maharashtrians aren't moral and decent. They are quite conservative but would have been considered a bit more modern than Madrasis. The Marathis language cinema and theatre was more religious and had higher quality singing. I suppose this was one reason Cinema was more respectable among Hindus than Parsis who would get upset if a Parsi girl appeared in a film.
In 2022, both Marathi and Hindi films
like films made in other languages
commonly feature explicit, intimate sexual scenes that include intense mouth-to-mouth kissing and passionate lovemaking.
Not really. If you want porn, you can watch it on your smartphone.
This, however, was not the case six decades ago, in the 1960s, when both the state and dominant caste elites of Maharashtra sought to censor aspects of Marathi (and by extension Indian) culture they deemed perverted and vulgar.
Very true. Guys fucking goats did not become overnight TikTok sensations.
They surveilled language, literature and the arts in order to cleanse the Marathi social imaginary of elements they feared would undermine the image of Marathi society as respectable, modern and casteless.
No they didn't. Elites focused on living large and getting more power and wealth. They didn't give a fuck about goat-fuckers who espoused casteist or reactionary sentiments. As recently as 1974, during my sojourn in Bombay, I was disappointed to find elite was not surveilling me at all even though I was doing something very naughty.
Elites felt threatened from within as they vigorously engaged in the politics of Marathikaran (creating a Marathi regional identity).
Guys who were doing that were working class. They wanted more jobs for their own people. Madrasis should just kindly fuck off back where they came from. Elites, by contrast, were perfectly happy to employ Madrasi Accountants and Architects and Actuaries.
The truth is 'elite' Maharashtrians may have a Sanskritic identity or a pious Zoroastrian or Islamic identity. But they want to speak excellent English and demotic Hindi. Their Marathi, however, may be such as is only spoken to spouses and servants.
Although vulgarity and sexuality have been targets of reform in South Asia at different moments, here, I focus on the limits of in(decency) that emerged through the unique postIndependence public discourse on, in the terms used by Marathi writers, chumbanbandi (prohibition on showing kissing) in Maharashtra.
There was no such prohibition. True, prior to 2014, there was a double standard whereby Hollywood kisses could be umpteen but Indian kisses might attract age restriction.
Concerns about cinematic depictions of kissing, nudity and sexuality—coded in the gender, class and caste inflected discourse of vulgarity—emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the contingent, ambivalent, anxiety-ridden construction of Marathiness,
because Shivaji hadn't created a great Maratha empire. Also, Peshwaji was always roaming about naked and having sex with goats. Brits put a stop to this. Sadly, in 1947, they ran away. Maharashtrian elite became very anxious and thus started surveilling everybody and saying to them 'chee chee, put your clothes back on and leave that goat alone. Don't you know you have Marathi manoos and thus should not be kissing goats and roaming around naked?' Dalit Maharashtrians were thus forced to give up their favorite recreation. But they prayed to Dr. Ambedkar that a 'chosen one' be born to a Dalit family. She would slay lots of vampires and go to Amrikaka and write a big big book deploring the manner in which Elite surveilled Dalits and forced them to put on clothes and leave the goats alone. Did you know Thakceray was a Kayastha? That's upper caste. He was very cruel to naked Dalit ladies who were gaining empowerment by getting giraffes to go down on them. This led to Neo-Liberal Globalization.
a joint venture of patriarchal and patronising state officials and middle-class, dominant-caste elites.
State officials were middle-class. There can't be a joint venture between yourself and yourself.
This article is part of a larger project,
of stupidity
wherein I document the ambivalence and anxieties that inflected Marathikaran
you haven't documented shit. You have simply stipulated that such things existed. The plain fact is neither Marathas nor Madrasis nor Malaysians were ambivalent or anxious about their own people turning into naked goat-fuckers or gals who got giraffes to go down on them.
and the making of the Marathi manus (literally personhood, but here meaning identity) in the context of debates, for example, over Tamasha and Tamasha films in Maharashtra.
Some Dalits thought their own people shouldn't go in for such things. But then plenty of wealthy Parsis hadn't wanted their girls to star in films.
In this article, I show how the bourgeoisie obsessed with the building of the nation looked to cinema to reinforce conventional heterosexual love, family, and citizen-making.
As opposed to goat fucking. Proletariat wants to roam around naked shagging everything in sight. Neo-Liberalism opposes this because it would reduce productivity and therefore profits. This is also the reason Joe Biden is refusing to undergo gender re-assignment surgery preferring to sodomize trillions of Nethan-Yahoos instead.
1 Marathi elites sought a modern, sovereign, political region and demonstrated their commitment to regional self-governance by
creating their own linguistic state and retaining Bombay as part of it. They are smart people.
attempting to create a virtuous and virile nation within post-colonial India throughout the 1950s and into the next decade, following the creation of the State of Maharashtra in 1960.
Marathas have always been virtuous and virile. It is not the case that Mahars or Mangs wanted to wander around naked shagging beasts of the field.
Elites and the post-colonial Maharashtra state’s construction of a progressive and modernising Marathi manus in independent Maharashtra,
It is not independent. It is part of the Indian Union.
like the British mission to ‘civilise’,
There was no such mission. The French may have talked in that way. The Brits said they administered India according to its own immemorial laws and customs.
produced a paternalist developmentalist discourse of uplift and improvement of supposedly ignorant and backward people
I suppose the Ford Foundation thought they were lifting up this lady when they gave her a scholarship to study abroad. Hopefully, she will succeed in convincing the American working class to get nekkid and have sex with barnyard animals.
who, in their eyes, were the main obstacles to national development.
Shailaja may have been such an obstacle. Thankfully, the Ford Foundation removed her from India.
As a result, the responsibility of reforming social habits, civilising the masses, and inculcating the values and virtues of Indian modernity became the task of state institutions,
which they failed because they were utterly shit
the elites and the social world of the high-caste-middle-classes they represented.
But for whom Indian Dalits would be running around naked shagging everything in their path.
To underscore the legitimacy of their ideas and the new nation, the new government and elites morally surveilled all Marathis: they appealed to a normative high-caste, Hindu, middle-class morality; deployed censorship laws; and engaged in social-political propaganda to eliminate the ashlil (vulgar) in all forms.
e.g the traditional Dalit practice of running around naked shagging everything in your path.
Through these tactics they sought to create new values for the newly emerging chauvinistic Marathi manus and ‘great nation’, as was evident in the name (Maha[n]rashtra) of the state itself.
Why did they not call it 'Tattirashtra'- 'shit-nation'- instead? Also how come the Brits talk of Great Britain not Shitty Country Where Folks aren't allowed to run around naked shagging everything in their path?
Post-colonial India and its citizens had a complex and intense ambivalence toward the modern art of cinema:
No. Cinema wasn't important. The big mistake was to make Akashvani Radio as boring as shit.
they viewed it with a mix of pride and disdain, hope and fear.
It was considered a 'luxury' to be taxed. Some patriotic or 'Social Reform' films were given a tax exemption. But they tended to be very dull.
Filmmaking—in contrast to agriculture, famine, refugee resettlement and infrastructure—was not viewed explicitly as an important sphere of economic activity in nation-building.
Which is why nobody greatly cared about it though the Government did try to promote a more boring and stupid type of film-making.
From its earliest days, it drew charges as a pit of vulgarity, and especially in post-Independence India, both the state and elites perceived cinema as frivolous and corrupting.
Nonsense! It was in the interests of film-makers that their banal fare be seen in this light. Nobody will pay good money if there is no risk of being corrupted.
The category of ‘vulgarity’ was typically applied to arts patronised and created by those of low-class and low-caste status.
Only if they had a bawdy element. But, plenty were religious or as boring as fuck.
In cinema, the term vulgarity was applied to double entendre in dialogue, fetishistic displays of women’s private body parts, expletives and sexually suggestive gestures that would be deemed inappropriate to watch, especially in a mixed generational setting.
In other words, stuff considered vulgar in Russia or China or America, was considered vulgar in India.
Tamasha
which is a word all Indians are familiar with
is a popular form of public theatre practiced predominantly by Dalits
In traditional societies, landless or artisanal communities produced a few talented individuals who worked in such travelling theatrical groups. In Medieval Germany, many were Jews or of Romani origin. In Maharashtra, there were Brahminical groups as well as the Parsi travelling theater but there were also non-landowning castes with an artistic tradition. It is a recent innovation to lump all such groups together as 'Dalit'.
and is considered a traditional Dalit cultural performance art. Tamasha films are films based on Tamasha.
Just as Indian films are based on India. This isn't exactly informative.
To counter vulgarity broadly and create a moral nation, there were attempts to create regional and national guidelines. Though these attempts failed to culminate in any specific state ban on on-screen kissing, it did result in both an atmosphere of state censorship and an unwritten rule in the film industry banning on-screen kissing, which Marathi writers referred to as chumban-bandi.
But this 'unwritten rule' was the outcome of the commercial failure of films with lots of kisses which came out in 1932 and 1933. This was simply a case of entrepreneurs adopting to the market.
In 1951, for instance, India’s government combined censorship guidelines from different regional offices regarding rules restricting the representation of sexuality. They were particularly interested in the Bombay (now Mumbai) office’s guidelines, noting that it was the only regional office to ‘have a guideline restricting [on-screen] kissing in particular’.
So what? Everybody knows that, prior to Independence, India had had Provincial autonomy and that Bombay time was different from Madras or Calcutta time. Since Nehru & Co decided to have a strong center, everything was standardized including Time.
In India, a film which is passed by the Central Film Board may still be banned by the State film board. It is noteworthy that this hardly ever happens in Maharashtra compared to Gujarat or Punjab. However, thanks to the Shiv Sena's populist style of politicking, Bollywood producers saw it was in their interest to stay on the right side of Bal Thackeray. But this was because of his popularity with the Marathi working class. The man wasn't a prude and had zero interest in promoting a puritanical Gandhi-giri.
While the written rules of Bombay’s Film Certification Board, founded in 1952, prohibited ‘excessively passionate love scenes’, there was no specific prohibition of kissing in the censorship guidelines. Thus, the focus on chumban-bandi in the 1950s and 1960s seems to be based on the pre-1951 Bombay guidelines.
That focus only arose because mention of sex attracts eye-balls to worthless journalism or psuedo-academic shite.
Indeed, a 1969 Report of the Enquiry Committee on Film Censorship led by G.D. Khosla reported that the prohibition on kissing was based on an ‘unwritten rule’. Even in the absence of specific state legislation, and perhaps driven by the discussion of chumban-bandi in the 1950s and 1960s, there was definite public support for such a ban; indeed, Khosla’s 1969 report found that 51 percent of respondents to a general questionnaire ‘expressed the view that kissing scenes should be deleted from Indian films’, and, not surprisingly, 52.45 percent of men voted for a stricter code.
In which case there was no statistical significance to gender. Also, the thing didn't make any fucking difference.
The opaque legislative picture, combined with a definite and particular concern about on-screen kissing in Bombay, and later Maharashtra, raises a number of questions: why did only the Bombay office have a guideline restricting kissing in particular?
Because the two kissing films which bombed were made in Bombay.
Why and how did such an unwritten, de facto ban, an extra-constitutional form of censorship, become a potent social force
It didn't. Nobody gave a fuck.
leading to violence and direct action in Maharashtra in the form of burning movie posters or protesting outside theatres?
That only happened because Marathas were seeking dominance in Bombay. The film industry was controlled by outsiders.
How did the kiss become a particularly unique index of heightened transgressive pleasure in Maharashtra?
It didn't. You are making this shit up.
Why did Maharashtrian audiences and state agents focus their censorship energies on kissing and not on, for instance, cabaret dancing by scantily clad women?
Because films with cabaret dancing did well at the Box Office. The plain fact is that Hollywood has perfected the screen kiss. The Indian variety looked awkward. Also our women tend to be rather aggressive in that Department. During the Hollywood golden age, actresses swooned into a smooch. they didn't try to eat the other person's mouth or abruptly push the dude's head down to their nipples or their clit. As I said, Indian women can be very aggressive. I think it may have something to do with insufficient meat in their diet.
Debates about chumban in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate both the majoritarian muscle and the chauvinistic Marathi regionalism that was deployed to make a moral, modern and grand Maharashtra.
There was no debate. One or two journalistic wankers might have recycled that shite from time to time if there was nothing better to write about.
My focus is twofold: centring the discursive aspects of the debate—what various people assumed about chumban in Indian society;
it was stuff that women did to men. Still, if it led to the birth of bouncing babies, it was tolerable.
the place of women and youth in it; what they understood to be culture and nation; how they reconstituted it in the 1960s; and the impact it has into the present times. The concern about kissing in film was both an example of the larger battle on the vulgar but also an exceptionally intense site of struggle.
Actually, the problem with kissing was that it was private and, truth be told, sloppy. Since the hero and heroine could dance and sing and thus provide a public 'tamasha', that was preferable. My guess is that Hollywood had lots of kissing because back then teenagers liked necking in the dark. But this was part of the Puritan courtship ritual like 'bundling'. American women were expected to kiss a lot of frogs before they settled on the dude who would father their children.
Since pre-marital kissing was not part of Indian customary morality, it represented an unacceptable public display of affection and thus was kept out of Indian cinema.
Chumban-bandi took on a life of its own in the process of Marathikaran:
Nope. Nobody gave a fart about it.
it complicates our understanding of censorship to include unwritten rules,
No it doesn't. Censors are welcome to ban a thing because it breaks an unwritten rule- e.g. depicting a goat being sodomized by the POTUS when, as everybody knows, only donkeys are degraded by such treatment- at least during Republican administrations.
revealing how it became central to the production of class, identity and the subjectivity of the Marathi manus.
It had no rule in this whatsoever. Marathi manus was about jobs for the 'bhumiputra'- i.e. the sons of the soil.
Chumban-bandi as a tool of the larger processes of cultural regulation yields insights into social relations and the differing attitudes and responses to on-screen sexuality, but also into broader anxieties, ambiguities, and majoritarian muscle. The state government and elites sought to create a new identity for a modern and moral nation by further inflating the category of vulgarity, banning prostitution, Tamasha, alcohol and ashlil cinema posters as well as on-screen chumban. The vulgar penetrated everything and I am interested in its metonymic slides in general, and its exceptionality in the form of the kiss in this article. Leelavati Munshi (1899–1978)—a Gujarati woman, politician and member of both the Bombay Legislative Assembly (1937–46) and the Rajya Sabha (1952–58) as representative of the State of Bombay, and the wife of the famous Gandhian politician, K.M. Munshi—was a key figure in the agitation against vulgarity in film and is largely credited with kissing vanishing from Indian cinema.
It didn't vanish. Hollywood films had kisses and were shown in India. All that the Amendment to the Cinematography Act did was show that the limits which applied to free speech also applied to films- as if this wasn't fucking obvious. Conservatives like Munshi were worried about two things- the first was the new Hindu personal law and secondly the supposedly subversive influence of Leftwing film-makers. One might say Mr & Mrs 55 was the film industry's response. But, for artistic reasons- which were also commercial- it was actually very conservative. After all, rich girls are supposed to marry and stay faithful to the poor struggling artist- in the opinion of the poor struggling artist.
I examine Leelavati Munshi’s aggressive efforts in the 1950s to repress and limit in(decency) in cinema and the traction those efforts found with the elites.
She was a lightweight and hence focused on wholly unimportant issues.
For instance, on June 22, 1959, Munshi declared vehemently ‘Must stop vulgarity in cinema’.
Which politician was saying 'we must have more vulgarity in cinema?'
To discuss this prohibition, the editor of Navakal
it was pro-Congress back then
sought public opinion and published men’s intensive debates on vulgarity in chumban, cinema posters and cinema. Debates about chumban-bandi also appeared in other regional Marathi vernacular periodicals, such as Chhaya and Rasrang. I look into these debates, focusing on how chumban-bandi registered in people’s consciousness, specifying the notion of Indian tradition as they reinterpreted it, and how people engaged with the state's regulation of sexuality and sexual behaviour.
What concerned people at that time was the linguistic reorganization of States. If audiences wanted Raj Kapoor to smooch with Nargis, the industry would have demanded the right to show this.
Focusing on these vernacular sources and their low-brow and popular appeal to a broad Marathi readership, rather than on the cosmopolitan discussions of vulgarity in such English-language film magazines as Filmfare, Stardust and Screen, affords us a new critical perspective on the relationship between film and identity in postIndependence India.
No it doesn't. The issue mattered to nobody at all- save perhaps a handful of film producers.
The writing in these hitherto neglected sources is evidence for how chumban-bandi was written about and debated for and by a film-viewing public with an appetite for the subject. Film Studies scholars have singularly depended on English-language sources to focus on a macro-level historical view and genealogy of censorship;7 however, I pay attention to a specific Marathi public that constituted cinema as a sphere of regulation to shape an atmosphere of censorship and create a new, modern, developed and legitimate Maharashtra.
They had no power to constitute shit.
Many contributors to these vernacular sources did not disclose their names
some journalist made them up.
and authorial voice because of stereotypes of public decency.
The 'contributors' did not exist. If it's a slow news day, you just make up shite like this. Did you know that 23 percent of the people interviewed by this blog said that they felt not enough goats are being sodomized on Fox News? Oddly, 134 percent of goats agreed.
Local, high-caste (and often anonymous)
not to mention wholly imaginary
elites colluded to generate the truth of the ashlil, to govern and institutionalise a modern discourse of decency,
they also spread the rumor that it is wrong to eat your own shit
and to shape new notions of private and public. Elites enjoyed the privilege of anonymity.
No. The masses enjoyed the privilege of anonymity because nobody wanted or needed to know their name. Members of the elite had telephones in their own homes. Even in mid size metros, you just picked up the phone and said 'connect to me the Doctor Sahib/ Lawyer Sahib/Engineer Sahib whose name I don't recall but his Uncle was the Dipty back in 1932.'
Shaped by anxieties about sexuality, vulgarity and respectability, Marathiness
stopped masturbating in public
also reduced the reform of caste to a matter of voluntary attitude,
Caste exists all over South Asia. Maharashtra was similar to other states. Thus it can't be the case that Marathas getting their knickers in a twist over kissing on the screen had any effect on caste reform.
and both the state and elites demonstrated their modernity through the performance of a casteless identity.
Nonsense! Politicians used their caste identity to get votes. This isn't because they give a fuck about caste. It's because votes means power and power means money. Everybody wants money.
Elites did not mention caste explicitly in their writings. Indeed, they shrouded caste in the cloak of class as they paraded their casteless selves in modern India.
Paik parades herself in America where the pay is better.
Certainly, they policed the kiss to show their superiority to the West as well as keep a distance from low-class and low-caste people.
Paik thinks high caste peeps, like Priayanka Gandhi, don't kiss.
Attempts to ban on-screen kissing implicitly, and paradoxically, harnessed the energy of those kisses to preserve a moral Marathi identity.
But the politician she says did so was Gujarati.
The ambivalent state and elites used the anarchic energy of the vulgar kiss to call attention to its moral politics, in order to politicise it and repress it.
Nope. Devika Rani- a nice of Rabindranath Tagore- had engaged in a 4 minute long on-screen kiss in 1933. But the film bombed in India. That's why the industry preferred song & dance numbers to smooching.
Scholars have yet to pay attention to people’s attitudes and perceptions of a new moral and modern Marathi nation,
by Shivaji?
the ambivalence and spectacular tactics of publicity, and the way it led to direct action. Only one Film Studies scholar, Madhava Prasad, has dealt, to an extent, with the prohibition of the kiss in cinema. To him, the prohibition was a site of informal negotiation between the post-colonial state and indigenous feudal patriarchy.
'Film Studies Scholar' means 'shithead' in any language.
As such, the kiss marks the realm of the private and nuclear family.
James Bond is not doing kissing. He is shooting people only- right?
Elite feminists have long debated interconnected questions of sexual morality
e.g. should you fist yourself at the board-meeting?
and the social and were anxious about the rights and respectability of the dominant-caste, ‘ideal’ Hindu woman
Who doesn't fist herself vigorously while talking to her mother-in-law.
As they committed to a respectable Indian wifehood and equal citizenship, they also paid little attention to the anxieties of lowcaste and Dalit women, who were sexually vulnerable.
Paying attention to this Maharashtrian Dalit woman causes me to think all such creatures have shit for brains. Then I remember Kalpana Saroj.
I depart from these contests over respectability to illuminate a new idiom and materiality of vulgarity that emerged in the forging of a new nation. Contesting vulgar films and cinema posters Campaigns against vulgarity in film in India began in earnest in the 1950s in Maharashtra, with attempts to reorganise and reinvigorate the system of independent regional censorship boards established by the colonial state with the 1920 Cinematograph Act.
It was superseded by the 1952 Act which made certification by the Central Film Board mandatory. Regional boards could be constituted for purposes of consultation but their members would not be paid salaries.
As an agent of the post-colonial Indian state, Munshi was aware of the state’s power to enact policy and to legislate morality, and as a result, she sought government action to eradicate vulgarity in film.
It didn't exist. Anyway, she was Gujarati not Marathi.
She founded the Society for the Prevention of Unhealthy Trends in Motion Pictures in Bombay in the early 1950s, through which she targeted cinema that, in importing Western filmic depictions of romance and creating film celebrities, threatened to undermine Indian morality and the memory of early Indian nationalists, and thus inhibited the nation-building potential of Indian cinema.
The 1952 Act already specified that indecency or immorality were reasons to withhold certification.
Munshi consistently advocated for stricter censorship in her speeches and writings, campaigning for amendments to the 1952 Cinematograph Act, which had established the Board of Film Certification (the Censor Board). As a member of the board, she argued at the Bombay Presidency Women’s Council in March 1952: I feel that something has to be done to prevent the unhealthy influences in some films produced locally or imported from outside. Films are the great weapon which can make or mar future generations. Drink, crime, sex and brutality … will influence the subconscious mind of the younger generation and make children with their formative minds, lose more values.'
Nobody cared what the dim bint thought. Her husband wrote well but both were political lightweights.
Thus, to Munshi, the film spectator was a vulnerable child who needed constant attention and protection from the vulgar.
No. It was obvious that Munshi had zero political importance. She was talking about something nobody cared about.
Therefore, she argued that ‘unhealthy films’ that aroused ‘the baser instincts of man’ needed to be curtailed. Her 1954 resolution to prohibit screenings of ‘undesirable’ films was eventually adopted by the Maharashtra government and incorporated into the amended 1959 Cinematograph Act.
No. The amendment gave the Centre the power to 'issue such directions as it may think fit setting out the principles which shall guide the authority competent to grant certificates under this Act in sanctioning films for public exhibition.' In other words the Center could say 'Films must show Americans as evil and Soviets as good', or vice versa. This was important in the Cold War contest. Communists looked forward to a time when no Hindu priest or temple could be shown in a favorable right. What was important about the amendment is it reduced the independence of the Film Board.
Munshi thus expanded the scope of censorship of films.
No. She had no power. The Leftists wanted the Amendment because they thought they would get the power to force the film industry to produce propaganda for them. The problem was that such propaganda would not attract viewers and so receipts from entertainment tax would fall. Anyway, the leading actors and directors were already Left-wing. Why bankrupt them?
Munshi was especially concerned with the effects of film indecency on the wellbeing of youth, which she addressed while presiding over a special discussion of vulgarity in the Mumbai Legislative Council in 1959, declaring the need to ‘strictly restrict vulgarity in cinema’.
Had Dr. Ambedkar been alive, he would have had no problem with that. Neither would his widow- probably because she was a Brahmin Doctor and thus of the 'elite'.
She continued: ‘Western civilization and films feature romance. Boys learn from cinema different ways to rob and follow and even tease women. Hollywood films are fueling sexual desire. Ashlil dance, romantic relationships, and even scary stories negatively affect the minds of adolescents’.
I suppose the Hindu Right did think that Leftists were sex-obsessed alcoholics. That is the sub-text here.
Munshi’s invocation here of ashlil dance
was a dog-whistle to the Hindu Right- particularly the conservative Gujerati community. These Leftists are all taking whiskey and watching dirty type of dancing. This is because they are atheists. Did you know that Nehru is doing ashlil dance with Krishna Menon?
makes implicit reference to debates about ‘vulgar’ Tamasha and Tamasha in film and would have made legible the association between film vulgarity and caste with reference to the perceived and expected sexual availability of Dalit and low-caste dancing women stigmatised as prostitutes.
Nobody gave a fuck about poor women. Let them become prostitutes by all means. The Right was, in a coded way, attacking the Left dominated film industry.
Munshi blamed the West and Western films for the promotion of immorality and vulgarity and sought to protect Indian youth from its onslaught.
But Marxism is Western! That was the real target. This woman truly is as stupid as shit.
She continued: One eight-year-old boy had the guts to write to a famous cinema actress. He addressed her as ‘my dear’. He did not stop there. He stole 50 rupees from his home and spent half of it on cinema tickets, traveling, and the rest on gifts for his favorite actor. He went to her place with those gifts. However, the actor was frustrated after repeatedly entertaining the boy, and she handed him to the police. He is now in a children’s remand home. Children watch cinema and abandon their homes to enter the world of cinema. [Hence] the government should work to eradicate ashlilta in films and people should raise their voices'
If you let your son watch those Leftist Raj Kapoor movies, he will go running to, that Muslim whore, Nargis's home after stealing all your money. If the lad is too young to satisfy her lust she will hand him over to the Police.
For Munshi, ashlilta encompassed a range of behaviours: inappropriate romantic or even sexual desire, stealing, watching films
not ones about Bhakti Saints or Hindu mythology but Leftist ones featuring seductive Muslim whores
and running away from home. To her, like in the developmentalist approach, films were pedagogical tools to create a robust nation and a future citizen.
Nope. She was following her husband's lead and thus was against Muslims, Socialists and Socialist crypto-Muslims. Don't go Cinema. Go to Temple or Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan instead.
She targeted films and the film industry and held cinema responsible for shaping minds and actions—a naïve view of the power of cinema to transform or form human subjects and motivate actions.
No. The Leftists really were making better movies and their actresses really were better looking.
It was also a brahmanical and communal view of cinema,
Which was that only films about Bhakti Saints or Hindu mythology should be released. Also, Akashvani should only broadcast 'Shastriya Sangeet'. Let Radio Ceylon make money by playing filmi music. We must make India as boring as possible.
given that to the elites this industry was probably one of the important spaces which enabled the vulgar mingling of people of different castes, classes and religions, something elites did not approve of because it would overturn hierarchies.
Cinema tickets were expensive. Only a small proportion of the urban proletariat could afford such luxuries. It was at the wrestling match or Ramleela or Kumbh Mela that the 'classes and the masses' mingled. But that didn't overturn hierarchies at all. Incidentally, in those days, Cinemas had a 'dress circle'.
Munshi’s reformist campaign against morality in film looked to both government and popular action to address the issue.
It wasn't reformist. It was right wing. But nobody bothered with it.
It both focused on certain shortcomings of the Censor Board—’The members accepted bribes’ —and cited the weight of popular opinion—’About 80–90 percent people feel that vulgarity in posters and films should be ended’.
Because kiddies demand you take them to the movies. That's money you could spend on a visit to the brothel. Gandhi had endeared himself to middle class India by arguing that it was wrong to spend good money sending kids to school or getting medicine for your wife.
Such censorship of films revealed the distinction between enlightened citizen and errant population and exemplified elite efforts for making Marathi civility and citizen.
Why the fuck would a Gujarati care about Marathi civility? Let them waste their money on vulgar tamashas rather than seek to gain control of Bombay's wealth.
Munshi’s agitation against vulgarity in film on both counts was largely supported by Marathi elite men who
lurved Gujjus. They never said 'Kem che? Saru che? Danda le ke maru che!'
wanted a purified national culture producing a modern cultured Marathi (Indian) identity.
Previously, the 'bildungsburgertum' had made a fetish about 'purifying' the vernacular. But people had lost interest in that project. The question facing India was whether it would move in a Leftist or Rightist direction. But, it would be puritanical in either case.
Elites took on this responsibility as enlightened citizens who would shepherd recalcitrant masses towards civilized action.
Fuck that. The masses are smelly. Let's hire some guys to do the shepherding for us. Well, when I say 'hire', I don't mean we'd actually pay them.
A.C. Keluskar, writing for Chhaya, applauded the protest of Munshi, whom he described as a lone ‘socially awakened woman’, working against sexual disorder in films. He argued—with reference to both the sexual provocation of artistic women’s bodies, never men’s, and the implicit association of artistic women with sexual availability, through film—that ‘sex appeal means ashlilta’: 15 Sex appeal is the poison created by the devil. People have objected to it. … What does sex appeal mean? It means the discovery of the private parts of a woman’s body in a way that will provoke the sexual desire of men. Woman is at the forefront of all arts and from early times the woman in these arts has entertained men. [But] the devil of films started exhibiting different body parts of women. For that they have started recruiting beautiful women. Those who are ready to exhibit any part are prioritized.'
Keluskar understood that sex sells. Mentioning the private parts of beautiful women should be prioritized if you are writing a worthless article.
Keluskar also argued that the Censor Board members were ill-equipped to confront this issue because
they are not discovering private parts of various heroines. Kindly appoint me to the Board. I will make full investigation.
‘Board members had no knowledge and were picked arbitrarily. Hence it is full of defects’.
Journalists were patriotic enough to want to get paid fat salaries for watching movies and discovering private parts.
As a result, the Board required reform. Others, like Gandhian leader Morarji Desai (1896–95)—former chief minister of Bombay (1952–57), finance and home minister of India (1958–63 and 1978–79) and prime minister of India (1977–79)—argued for the importance of rallying popular sentiment against cinematic vulgarity, though he seemed less certain than Munshi that this popular sentiment already existed. Speaking at Sunderbai Hall, Mumbai, Desai vehemently argued, ‘It is essential to create strong public opinion against vulgarity’.
He too was a Gujju. At the time the Gujju considered the Marathas to be improvident. They wasted money on good food and tamashas. Even, they are drinking liquor and eating meat, fish! No wonder they are discovering private parts instead of investing in Stock Market. I recall my surprise when I first encountered a Mr. Dalal- who happened to be a Gujarati speaking Parsi. I was under the impression the word meant 'pimp' rather than stock broker or commission agent.
He reinforced Munshi’s and Keluskar’s agenda: ‘Appropriate changes should be made in the working of the censor board … . They should issue warnings to curb vulgarity in cinema posters and cinema itself’. To him, changes to constitutional law, the make-up and policies of the Censor Board, or any other top-down approaches were not likely to bring about broader social change; rather, it was important to activate people’s voices and agency: ‘Film producers create movies that the audience wants. Hence, to do away with the vulgar parts on posters and cinema, first [we] need to create strong public opinion against vulgarity’.
Desai understood that banning vulgar films would mean lower entertainment tax receipts. If tastes changed, vulgarity would disappear without Government revenue falling.
Most significantly, Desai personally took up the task of eradicating vulgarity: ‘I will be responsible and do the needful in the Mumbai Corporation area’.
Sadly, the good people of Bombay did not fuck the fellow to death. They continued to discover private parts of women only.
Similarly, Foreign Affairs Deputy Minister Laxmi Menon, speaking about the negative effect of cinema on society at a local Working Women’s Organization, advocated 1 both policy action in the form of a ‘ban on vulgar films’ and the mobilisation of popular sentiment: ‘People should act together and make producers stop production of vulgar and disgusting cinema’.
Like Desai, she was a prohibitionist. The Government couldn't afford to lose both the alcohol cess as well as the entertainment tax.
The official discourse on chumban was driven by deliberation on whether it could be safely prohibited through legislation. Officials strengthened their positions from within a common discourse on India that centred on an unreflective obedience to a modern Indian morality. Munshi was also angry about actors’ celebrity, which she felt resulted in them overshadowing, and other people forgetting, the efforts and sacrifices of national leaders, including, for example, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India. She argued, ‘[Lead Hindi film actor] Raj Kapoor is more popular than Nehru.
Both were Leftists who ate meat and had affairs
Actors’ popularity has increased and people throng to them’. Munshi was extremely angry that people were celebrating Raj Kapoor, who, in her eyes, was a cheap showman
like Nehru
who, despite being a married man, had affairs with many women. As such, he was a vulgar man who did not play any role in formal politics or the building of the nation.
Like Nehru. Munshi & Co thought, fellow Gujju, Sardar Patel had done all the heavy lifting.
Munshi, however, failed to recognise the significance of the post-colonial and early Cold War international context to debates about film, film stars and nation-building in India.
No. She was saying, in a coded way, that Leftists, like Kapoor and Nehru, ate meat, drank wine and discovered private parts. They were popular but vulgar.
Kapoor and his movies were immensely popular outside India, especially in the former Soviet Union,
because he was a Lefty.
the Middle East and Africa. Many non-Indians watched his films and sang his songs, building social and political bridges across countries and continents. Many a time, rather than a single act, official government censorship worked as a dispersed, self-regulated phenomenon–it hovered inside individual psyche and worked to repress individual desires.
No. Official government action of any type was shitty when it wasn't otiose.
Like Munshi, Keluskar, for instance, felt the kissing ban was important for building a healthy, modern and moral nation.
which refrained from discovering private parts
The state and national concern over vulgarity and sexuality arose in a transnational nation-building context. As such, Keluskar engaged with the global anti-vulgarity and anti-chumban conversation and connected discourses on films produced in Russia, the US, England and Germany: All movies made in Russia, America, and England have one common lesson, that it is our duty to make our nation mahan [grand, venerable] and we should be ready to do everything to achieve that goal. To live and die for the nation is our life. The real duty is to work for the greatness of the nation and not think about individual greatness!
Don't just keep discovering private parts. Do something to make your country great- e.g. write stupid articles about naughtiness of private parts.
Keluskar also praised films that did not explicitly show chumban scenes:
or discover private parts
I have seen 15–18 Russian films so far. Not a single one had an actor-actress pairing engaged in open, intense love scenes.
Boy loves girl. Girl loves tractor.
I did not see any chumban or love-addicted embraces between women and men.
Tractor's throbbing engine gave girl a big O.
To Keluskar, films were important for national identity and regenerating the nation and, as a result, they had to be clean, not vulgar. Writers like Keluskar added fuel to the fire,
there was no fire.
and continuing such arguments, a regular writer for Chhaya magazine compared the ban on chumban to a religious ‘fatva’ Taking into consideration the state-effect and the elites’ intensive contest over ashlilta, the newspaper Navakal published a discussion on February 9, 1961, in response to the question, ‘Should ashlil cinema posters be burnt?’ The editor had clearly sensed the mood of the people and the fiery debate on tearing and even burning cinema posters. The Indian Motion Pictures Act decided that film posters would also have to first seek permission from their committee before they could be posted. Mere prohibition of ashlil posters might not work, so some people resorted to violence, ‘burning posters’, as revealed in the editor’s topic for debate. After reviewing the submissions, the editor noted the gender trouble among both writers and readers: ‘Men participated in large numbers in the debate; however, women did not participate. It is disappointing that not a single woman has sent her thoughts’.
This is because women gain nothing by writing about how movie posters may motivate desire to discover private parts or sit on the face of Raj Kapoor.
Although such women as Leelavati Munshi and Laxmi Menon were prominent in discussions about vulgarity in film, the overwhelming voice heard in the state moralising project
but none of the Marathi people mentioned by Shailaja was part of the State. She has only quoted Gujju or Malayalee politicians and a couple of Marathi journalists.
was male, middle-class, and touchable. The male participants agreed on the need to abandon ashlilta in its different forms. Kabir Patil from Anjur, Thane, in Mumbai, argued: Ashlil posters should be burnt.
Nobody cared about this outcome.
But if you want to burn ashlil posters, then you also have to break idols in temples
in which case, muscular Hindus will kill you- unless Muslims are in the majority in the district
and museums that have stored such pictures and idols [naked bodies] in Ajantha and Elora caves.
Museums belong to the Government. You will be sent to jail.
Instead of burning posters it is important that they are not seen by adolescents.
Also women should not be seen by them. Otherwise they may try to discover their private parts.
The state government should intervene, and the censor board must sharpen its scissors.
Did you know Gandhi wanted all thinking Indians to give up sex? Sadly, his worthless sons and grandchildren refused.
Reinforcing the role of the government, Sitaram Sathe from Bhuivada Bajar Peth, Kolhapur, argued that the real problem was that ‘women wearing nylon have given up their maryada [moral constraints]’.
They are wearing brassiere and putting lip-stick. You can't tell me they aren't all whores. Also men are wearing trousers instead of dhoti. It is obvious that they are all bum boys. As for the indecent manner in which Holy Cow is displaying itself in the streets- don't get me started mate. All this is the fault of materialistic consumerism promoted by Capitalist West. In Soviet Union there is no sex.
He continued: Not only cinema posters, but today’s world is ashlil. See the pictures of [deities such as] Radha, [mythical heroine] Shakuntala, and so on, which have become the printing company’s trademarks. Look at the [pictures on the] bottles that advertise hair oils that cool the head. … Even the picture of mother Parvati [deity, Shiva’s wife] has abandoned restriction then what can we say about the maryada of women who are showing the darshan [image of the curvaceous contours of their bodies] through their nylon sari-blouse?
Bad enough that women are wearing nylon, nowadays even cows and Gandhian politicians have started adopting sexy gait. I once saw Vinobha Bhave doing pad-yatra. The way the fellow was swaying his buttocks was utterly indecent. Cows have taken to imitating Bhave because they are befooled by his claims of celibacy. But even if he is virgin, sight of his backside swaying is causing adolescents to get stiffy in their chaddi. Thus Holy Cow, too, is becoming instrument of devil! We must ban nylon sari, lipstick, brassiere, Vinobha Bhave, and lascivious cows which sway their hindquarters and say 'Moo!' in an erotic and suggestive manner.
To Sathe, private companies were at fault for sensually representing female deities on their trademarks. Colourful and provocative images of women’s fulsome, curvaceous bodies, even of deities who were to be worshipped and feared, actively corrupted passive men.
and cows- not to mention sex-pots, like Vinobha Bhave and Leonid Brezhnev, flaunting their haunches all over the place.
The fear and anxiety over female bodies (clad in nylon or exposed or closely focused on) was rooted in a hypocritical attitude toward public arts, including film, that had been wilfully casteified and sexualised.
It is true that some 'Dalit Panther' poets and intellectuals glorified transgressive sex in the late Sixties and Seventies. Sadly, this was a turn off. In a country where prostitutes were very cheap, nobody could get very excited about untouchables fisting themselves on the streets.
While men enjoyed sexual licence, women were split into the chaste wife or debased prostitute with erotic sexuality.
Did you know that men have penises and don't have to sit down to pee? How is that fair? In her next book this Professor will show how the post-Independence discovery of penises and vaginas constructed Marathi identity due to Neo-Liberalism is very evil.
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