The recent agitations in India against The Da Vinci Code, the US conspiracy film about the Catholic church, took some observers by surprise. For those who have been following the drift of India's media culture over the past few years, however, the real surprise was that the film was introduced in the country at all. Indeed, the movement to ban The Da Vinci Code comes at the end of a long string of controversies involving religious communities who claim their sentiments have been hurt by films – including Deepa Mehta's 1996 Fire and Rahul Rawail's 2005 Jo Bole So Nihaal, to name just two examples. Religious conservatives have also instigated riots over purely non-religious films, such as the lesbian-themed Girlfriend, which was also vehemently criticised by gay-rights groups in India.
Despite the turn to globalisation and liberalisation, it appears that India is in the midst of a spike in banning and resultant self-censorship. Censorship continues to thrive in India – though in a new paradigm, with the Indian government reduced to the status of an enabling bystander, as the threat of communalist-inspired theatre-burnings make directors and producers more circumspect than they need to be.
This new culture of censorship is cultural rather than governmental, which is to say that while it tends to be backed by political parties, it is intensely communal. In the British Raj, as well as through most of India's independent era, the main motive of state censorship in the domain of print was anti-popular: it aimed to stifle political subversion, whether it was anti-imperial propaganda in the 1910s or anti-Congress party writing in the 1970s. Up until the banning of Salman Rushdie's allegedly anti-Islamic The Satanic Verses (one month after its 1988 publication) most works prohibited by New Delhi were political in nature, and criticised either a historical nationalist figure or the current administration – this is why Michael Edwards' Nehru: A Political Biography was banned in 1975.
Since India became the first country to ban Rushdie's book, however, censorship has become increasingly 'communal', and works about religious figures and mythic cultural heroes have had to confront censorship. When a book or film makes it to the market past the censors, it is still liable to arouse protests and violence, forcing publishers and producers to withdraw the 'offending' work. In 2004, American religious-studies professor James Laine's book Shivaji: A Hindu King in Islamic India provoked the trashing of Pune's staid Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute for helping the author with his research, even after the book had been withdrawn by its publisher.