A curious incident struck Nepali cinemas on 22 January. After barely a few days on screens, the government of Nepal pulled the Bollywood movie Chandni Chowk to China from theatres, purportedly for offending the Nepali public by briefly suggesting that India was the land of the Sakyamuni Buddha's birth. The claim was contained in dramatic narration studded within a cinematic blizzard of depictions of Delhi a scarce minute into the movie. Arguably, it might have been employed in order to juxtapose India with China, the eponymous destination of the movie. The latter is, after all, a land that took to Buddhism more strongly, even to the point of sending emissaries to reclaim the relics of the Buddha that had gone neglected in the Subcontinent. Bollywood, with its casually jingoistic tendencies, often plays up India's religious diversity, a satisfied self-congratulation to its supposed secular identity. In the Nepali context, however, given that the historical Buddha was born in what is today Nepal, it hit against a countervailing nationalistic sentiment: there, the reference is another unforgivable slight by a dismissive and presumptuous neighbour. Indeed, today much of the skittishness on the part of the overseers of the Nepali film industry has less to do with content than with nationalism, particularly vis-à-vis India – a potent echo of what is taking place in the larger political landscape.
The remarkable thing is that the offending piece of narration – a mere snippet, really – had already been struck from the movie by its Nepali distributor on the instructions of the country's Censor Board. Apparently, the protests that it garnered in Nepal stemmed from elsewhere. It is possible that the bootleg version that had hit the market was to blame; or, as is often seen in the Southasian context, perhaps it was denounced without actually having been watched. The Nepal Film Development Board (FDB), on the recommendation of which the government ordered the movie to be pulled, was at the time stretched between two difficult choices. On the one hand, the swift action could be read as unnecessary, considering that the offending clip had already been removed by the Censor Board, a parallel agency. On the other hand, the bruised nationalist ego of the public had resulted in acts of violence on claims even slimmer than the dim-witted and somewhat innocent film at the centre of the sudden brouhaha.
Compounding the issue, it was scarcely a week after the Chandni Chowk incident that the then-Maoist-led government issued a gazette notification revising Nepal's Regulation on Film. Much of this dealt with specifically foreign films and filmmakers: all promotional materials for foreign films now had to be submitted to the censors, in addition to rather meticulous information about the script and biographies of those chiefly involved; new restrictions were placed on foreign filmmakers working in Nepal, while foreigners were wholly excluded from owning theatres. The new regulations even forbade the screening of a foreign film in the same hall as a Nepali one, in an attempt to extract taxes on the former, as domestic films are exempt from additional tariffs. While the proximity of the banning of Chandni Chowk and the unveiling of the new regulations may be largely coincidental (FDB officials insist that the amendments were being worked on for some time), the former casts the latter in an ominous light.
Sense and censurability
The FDB has long been a source of both promise and frustration to the various constituents of the film community in Nepal. Made up of three political appointees by the standing government and three representatives from various ministries, the Board essentially has a regulatory function and is responsible for licensing films for exhibition. But as an advisory body that shapes policy, it has – as the Chandni Chowk incident demonstrates – the unenviable and impossible task of balancing the competing interests of the public, the combative and fractured Nepali film community, business interest and the government. Being drawn from vocal film-industry-related organisations and with their short, two-year stints, the Board positions have the appearance of musical chairs, with one office-bearer regularly replaced by a rival or critic. In fact, the aborted tenure of the Maoist-appointed Ganesh Bhandari was in some ways a break from the past, leading to a more public and transparent Board that sought to project itself as responsive and rational, conducting numerous press conferences and professionally courting reporters.