A long and difficult relationship between the law and images is the necessary backdrop to examining the Indian courts' censorship of film.
Sometime in 1996, the High Court of Andhra Pradesh received an anonymous letter informing the court that pornographic films were being shown in a cinema hall called Ramakrishna 70MM. The court proceeded to send two 'lady advocates' to ascertain the facts. In their subsequent affidavit, the advocates informed the court that they had gone to watch a film in the theatre and, after repeated obstacles – the ticket seller refusing to sell them tickets, the doorman asking them to go home, etc – they finally managed to find a seat inside the theatre. There, they were promptly informed by the manager that the film that was to be screened could not be seen by ladies, and they were ordered to leave. Following the report by the advocates, the court proceeded to have all the prints seized, and arranged for a screening for various officers of the court. The officers found the films to be a hodgepodge of short films, films-division features, advertisement films, political-party propaganda films, Hindi and Telugu feature-film bits and, of course, lots of porn clips thrown in for good measure. The court then ordered the closure of the theatre.
This would seem like just another day at the office for someone interested in the relationship between law, cinema and sleaze. But let us pause and consider one moment in this narrative a bit longer, as it contains a key to understanding the secret relationship between law and cinema. Let us look more closely at the moment when the officers of the law are huddled together in a small dark room, with notepads and pens, watching a montage of images – what must that have been like? Was there a conspiratorial silence when the nude descended the stairs, or a nervous giggle when the camera lingered for a second too long on the French kiss?
Alas, we are not likely to know what happened in that room. So, where facts fail, fiction has to fill in the gap. In the mental reconstruction of this writer, the moment is necessarily a sensuous one. And if we are unable to capture the affective dimension of what happens when censors watch an erotic film, we will fail to understand the secret that acts of censorship uncover. The sociologist Ashish Nandy once described Hindi films as revealing to us the secret politics of our desires. If that is the case, the banned films reveal to us the secret politics of the law's desires. Is it not the case that, in deciding to withhold from general consumption certain images, the law claims to have knowledge of the real ways in which images work? The graphic is treated as a secret from which the general public must be protected. The traditional liberal response to the problem of censorship has been to see it as an interruption of the circulation of the image, and the argument is the need for a separation of the domain of law from aesthetics.