New Delhi: In 2020, Arun Karthick had the sort of CV that young independent filmmakers dream of. His debut film, the Tamil language Sivapuranam, had premiered four years earlier at the respected International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), and he was back there with his sophomore venture.
A poignant portrait of a Muslim salesperson in Coimbatore where Hindutva was on the rise, Nasir won an award for best Asian feature at IFFR. A warm reception at other global and Indian festivals followed.
Next came the usual struggles of Indian indie cinema to get a mainstream release. In 2022 there was good news on that front: SonyLIV, an Indian over-the-top (OTT) streaming service, announced that it would platform Nasir in May.
Then, Nasir disappeared.
The Bermuda triangle that swallowed Arun’s film is among the distinguishing characteristics of India’s censorship regime since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) formed the union government in 2014, sucking in works with the potential to displease the party or the Hindu right wing at large.
When contacted for this article, Arun declined comment. After eight months of not responding to interview requests, SonyLIV, too, declined. Since then, the OTT platform appears to have taken down its Twitter and Instagram posts about Nasir’s release including the film’s trailer on Instagram.
A source involved with Nasir confirmed though that just before the scheduled release date in May 2022, SonyLIV officials panicked and voluntarily submitted the film to the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), commonly known as the Censor Board, though the law requiring a CBFC clearance is not yet applied to streaming platforms.
For many years now, India has made more films per annum than any other country in the world, with the unique distinction of producing cinema in over a dozen languages.
Domestic and international productions earned combined revenues of Rs 11,833 crore at the Indian box-office in 2024, according to a report by the Mumbai-based consulting firm Ormax Media, while 883 million visited theatres that year.
Add to this the increased reach that films now enjoy with the advent of OTTs over the past decade or so along with rising smartphone sales, and it is evident why cinema is an essential tool in the BJP’s attempts to mould public opinion, influence public choices and change Indian narratives across all arenas, from education to history and culture.
When this story was written, SonyLIV had not released Nasir.
Meanwhile, the Hindi film Santosh—about the murder of a Dalit girl and a contender for the prestigious British Academy Film Awards or BAFTA—was scheduled to arrive in Indian theatres on 10 January 2025, but did not make it because the CBFC had not cleared it.
A source associated with Santosh confirmed this information off the record, but the Indian distributors, PVRINOX Pictures, and Suitable Pictures, the Indian co-producer on this UK-Germany-France production, were not willing to comment. Santosh’s UK producer Good Chaos did not respond to a request for a reaction.
A clue to the Censor Board’s specific objections to this Hindi film made by the British Indian director Sandhya Suri perhaps lies in the positions it takes in portraying patriarchy in India, Dalit oppression, police torture and the targeting of Muslims by the law-enforcement machinery.
Ecosystem Of Censorship
Filmmakers and the CBFC have never had an easy relationship, but the post-2014 era has spawned an ecosystem of censorship in which the CBFC is just one element, I found in an 11-months-long investigation for Article 14, during which I spoke to over 50 film and non-film professionals and CBFC insiders.
Several were willing to be quoted and identified but most, fearing retribution, asked that their identities not be disclosed or backed out after giving me interviews. All of them spoke of an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, and forces bigger than the Censor Board—including right-wing Internet trolls—dictating terms both to the board and to filmmakers.
The present system, they explained, is marked by Censor Board arbitrariness and low tolerance for anything remotely challenging the government, the Hindu nationalist establishment, Hinduism or socio-cultural practices deemed to be Hindu.
Instructions are routinely conveyed unofficially, they said, and rulings often replaced by no rulings at all, as was the case with Nasir and, according to sources, the Pakistani film Joyland, toast of the Cannes Film Festival 2022.
In 2023, Joyland’s official Instagram page announced the film’s global theatrical release schedule that included March 10 in India by PVR (now PVRINOX). Instead, months later, Joyland began streaming online. Dharmesh Datta, vice president of PVRINOX Pictures, the distribution arm of PVRINOX, India’s largest cinema exhibition chain, confirmed to me what industry watchers have suspected since then.
“We could not get certification for the film from CBFC and therefore did not release the film in India theatrically," said Datta. He declined further comment on the grounds that he was not with the organisation when the issue arose.
Delete Punjab From Punjab ’95
The power the government wields over India’s film industries via the censorship machinery is made clear by director Honey Trehan’s much-delayed Punjab ’95 starring singer and actor Diljit Dosanjh.
In the film, Dosanjh plays the activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, who investigated the murders and unauthorised cremations of civilians by Punjab Police in the insurgency-ridden 1980s-90s. Six police personnel were convicted for murdering Khalra in 1995.
Produced by Ronnie Screwvala’s RSVP Movies with MacGuffin Pictures, a production company co-owned by Trehan and Abhishek Chaubey, this Hindi venture was initially called Ghallughara (Genocide). It was submitted for certification in end-2022.
A source who asked not to be named told me the producers were not officially intimated when the examining committee of the CBFC rejected it—the decision was verbally communicated. Revising committees then ordered scores of alterations for months, according to more than one person involved.
When they did not get a certification even after accepting these stipulations, the producers approached the Bombay High Court in May 2023. Sources who spoke on condition of anonymity told me that an attempt at an out-of-court settlement ensued.
When the film was selected for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2023, a source told me a Censor Board representative informally requested the producers to pull out of TIFF. They complied. At one point they were asked to delay the release until after the 2024 Parliamentary elections. The demands continued.
Here is a near-exhaustive list of the board’s strictures since 2022, shared by reliable sources who did not wish to be identified:
- Drop the original title, Ghallughara
- Don’t specify that Khalra was probing 25,000 murders – be vague
- Don’t mention Tarn Taran in Punjab
- Give fictional names to Tarn Taran, Amritsar, Ludhiana
- Remove the word Punjab from every mention of the Punjab Police and minimise the use of Punjab in other instances
- Remove specified lines that refer to the “government”, “sarkar”, “system”, “Dilli” (when used to indicate the union government in Delhi) and “judiciary” including instances of the judiciary being described as “lame” and “paralysed”
- Don’t specify Rajasthan where a character mentions that the Rajasthan government says canals flowing into the state from Punjab are filled with corpses
- Don’t mention Indira Gandhi
- Don’t mention Delhi’s Trilokpuri where Sikhs were massacred in 1984 after her assassination
- Don’t specify any year
- Remove portrayal of Khalra’s torture or reduce its duration by 80 per cent
- Remove a scene in which Khalra is killed or reduce its duration by 80 per cent
- Remove/modify a scene in which Khalra speaks in Canada
- Remove/modify lines indicating that there was international pressure on India to address Khalra’s concerns
- Don’t mention Canada, London, Europe, America
- Remove all national flags, including the Indian flag
- Edit a mention of the killing of a police officer on the steps of the Golden Temple
- Remove/modify multiple lines and scenes drawn from actual events that are a matter of public record, but generically described by the board’s committees as having the potential to incite communal and/or anti-national attitudes, having the potential to radicalise Sikh and other youth, challenge India’s integrity and sovereignty, show the country in a poor light and/or strain India’s friendly relations with foreign states
- Remove text on screen saying the film is based on true events
- The clincher: drop Jaswant Singh Khalra’s name altogether
“If you add all these up, they come to about 120 changes,” a source said.
Why is the CBFC censoring a film that could damage the Congress’ image, since Khalra’s work and murder occurred when Congress was in government at the Centre and in Punjab?
Explanations circulating in the industry include the ongoing deterioration in India-Canada ties during Modi’s tenure, and Dosanjh’s support for protesting farmers. The singer has been so vocal about his politics that a highly-publicised reverential rendezvous with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January left many liberals perplexed.
Days later, Dosanjh made this cryptic announcement in his Instagram Stories: “Punjab ’95 in February.”
In a month of rapid news developments, shortly after a public confirmation that Punjab ’95 would be released worldwide—though not in India—on 7 February 2025 (“Full Movie, No Cuts,” according to Dosanjh’s Instagram posts), Trehan announced on Instagram that the plan was cancelled “due to circumstances beyond our control”.
When this article was written, a Censor Board verdict on Punjab ’95 was still awaited.
From 2022 till date, each meeting between the producers and CBFC reps has been followed by long silences, according to sources. A number of filmmakers have told me that such “ghosting” is now a habit with the board.
Punishing Dissenters
The fallout of the ongoing 360-degree censorship, producer-director Anubhav Sinha told me, is that “filmmakers are now holding back in the creative process.”
Sinha is one of the few Hindi filmmakers whose work continues to overtly defy the right-wing, pro-government, Islamophobic wave engulfing his Mumbai-based industry since 2014 (here and here). He has been penalised for his resistance with orchestrated attacks by virtual mobs and the CBFC knife.
In 2023, for instance, he was left feeling “helpless” when the CBFC inflicted large-scale changes on his film Bheed. After its theatrical run, Netflix streamed Bheed’s censored version, though the government does not currently enforce this requirement for online platforms.
Everyone is “nervous”, Sinha explained. “They say freedom of expression is not unlimited, but as a filmmaker there are things you want to say that you know can have constitutional, extra-constitutional and unconstitutional repercussions. Then you choose to let go of certain things. And I think that’s the idea.”
Asked if he meant that the goal of those pressuring filmmakers was to ensure self-censorship, he replied, “Yes.”
The young Kannada director Natesh Hegde describes such pressure as “a Censor Board in the back of our minds”.
Second-Guessing The Right
A film can be released in Indian theatres or on TV only if it has been certified by the CBFC, a statutory body under the union information and broadcasting ministry.
Ratings granted by the CBFC are: U (for unrestricted public exhibition), UA (unrestricted public exhibition but with a marker indicating a cautionary note for parents of children below seven, 13 or 16), A (adults only) and S (for members of a specific profession or class of persons).
At Level 1, a film is viewed by a government-appointed examining committee drawn from the general public. This committee could either clear a film without objections or on condition that certain changes are made, or deny clearance. A filmmaker can appeal against the ruling to a revising committee.
Earlier, disputes with revising committees could be taken to the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT), which comprised experts in the field, was chaired by a retired judge, and swiftly dispensed verdicts.
In a sense, the BJP government proclaimed its designs on cinema when it scrapped the FCAT in 2021. Now, to get revising committee decrees overturned, filmmakers must mire themselves in lengthy, expensive court proceedings.
In these circumstances, everyone is second-guessing the CBFC, the government and the Right—writers while writing, producers while selecting projects, directors while casting, shooting and editing, streaming platforms while commissioning or acquiring. Streaming majors have even set up what one producer described as “internal self-censorship committees” to pre-empt the government and the mob.
Some filmmakers I interviewed said that CBFC committees too constantly second-guess the board’s bigwigs, the government and random entities that could surface anytime anywhere.
Anurag Kashyap described it as “a fear of the invisible”—the anticipated thin-skinned protester or litigant. “Even people on censor committees are afraid that some film they clear might offend someone, because everybody’s getting offended these days, too many cases are being filed, including cases against the board itself,” the award-winning Hindi writer-director-producer explained. “To protect themselves, they keep asking for this and that cut.”
Conversely, a CBFC official mentioned receiving threats from filmmakers with “influence in certain quarters” because the board held back a clutch of right-wing propaganda projects—films “with political motivations”, this person said—till after the 2024 general election, in compliance with an Election Commission order of 2019.
The acclaimed Malayalam director Jeo Baby told me that CBFC committee members acknowledged a strategy when he resisted the UA rating awarded to Kaathal: The Core (2023), his Mammootty-Jyothika starrer about a gay man married to a woman.
Jeo said the committee told him it was standard practice to give a UA certification “to any film that can be considered even slightly anti-establishment by any yardstick, which does not necessarily mean anti-government cinema but even films that are, say, pro women’s rights or not homophobic”.
Filmmakers prefer U because of the censure intrinsic to UA and A, and because a U favourably affects public perception, increasing a film’s potential to attract audiences. Jeo concluded that the aim of refusing U certifications to anti-establishment films is that “in coming years, any content that creates problems for the government, any progressive content, will not be made”.
The bete noire of Natesh Hegde’s Kannada debut film Pedro was not the CBFC but one of the extra-constitutional authorities Sinha alluded to.
Pedro revolves around a poor Christian from an oppressed caste being hounded by majoritarian extremists. Despite being produced by the influential actor-director Rishab Shetty, and praised at prestigious festivals, Pedro was rejected by the Bengaluru International Film Festival (BIFFes) 2022 for what one organiser, a BJP acolyte, described as its “religiously sensitive topic”.
Hegde has since moved on to his next project, Vaghachipani (Tiger’s Pond), announcing in mid-January that it had been selected for a world premiere at the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival in February 2025.
But his disappointment that Pedro was robbed of one of the biggest stages for Kannada cinema lingered.
“It’s absurd and disheartening that the whole world is going gaga over this film but you can’t show it in your own land,” Hegde told me on a video call from his Karnataka village. “Even the Censor Board couldn’t find anything religiously sensitive in it.”
Pedro has a UA rating. In an India where small indies rarely get a mainstream release, it has not yet come to theatres or an OTT.
Censorship Before, After & In Between
Indian filmmakers now grapple with three tiers of censorship: pre-CBFC, at the CBFC, and post-CBFC, as Suman Ghosh, director of documentaries and Bengali fiction, has learnt.
Ghosh, an economics professor in Miami, spoke to me about the limbo in which Aadhaar, his first Hindi feature, hung. A comedy about a man who volunteers to become the first person in his village to get an Aadhaar card, it premiered at the Busan International Film Festival 2019 and was rated U by the CBFC that year.
In 2021 though, Ghosh told the media that shortly before its scheduled release in theatres, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the body that issues Aadhaar cards, demanded 28 cuts in the film.
Aadhaar has since vanished.
Ghosh said he was “surprised” that “even after being so cautious not to hurt anyone or any government or anything”—because he is “very aware of the situation in India now”—this was the reaction to what he insisted was a comedy that did not criticise the government.
“I’ve always said, show my film to the government top brass,” said Ghosh. “I don’t think Modi or Amit Shah care about it. Why would they care about a small film by a no-name director? But people lower down are scared of what the top brass will think.”
Aadhaar’s producers, Drishyam Films and Jio Studios, did not respond to a request for comment on why they were heeding the UIDAI’s disapproval—“completely informal, not written,” according to Ghosh— though a CBFC clearance is a legal sanction for release.
I sought comment from UIDAI over email and phone. Twice, I received this response over email, “The issue raised by you is not clear/not related to Aadhaar.” When I phoned their helpline and explained my questions, I was advised to write to the email address to which I had already written. This story will be updated if there is another response.
Ghosh said Drishyam and Jio now ignored his queries. Nevertheless, “diligently, every 3-4 months I write an email, pleading, coaxing, begging,” he added. “Till I die I will go on writing to them every 2-3 months to please do something with the film.”
The Iranisation of India
“We used to be shocked at restrictions placed on filmmakers in Iran by the government, the arrests of filmmakers there and so on,” said Jeo Baby. “But now that’s the level India is descending towards.”.
Jeo first personally experienced this Iranisation of India when he had to release The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) on a then-new platform called Neestream after it was rejected by Netflix, Amazon and Kerala’s satellite channels. While the OTTs gave him no reason, he told me at the time that TV channels admitted they could not risk telecasting it because of its feminist stance on women’s entry to the Sabarimala temple.
All this changed when the film went nationally viral on Neestream. Months later, Amazon bowed to public demand and began streaming it too.
The Great Indian Kitchen’s path, however arduous, is a reminder that even in this dismal milieu, questioning films do get past the CBFC, the government, bigots and other vigilantes.
In a country that makes anywhere between 1,600-2,500 films annually, it is impossible for the Right to monitor all productions, then attack every anti-establishment venture.
Instead, as documentary filmmaker Vinay Shukla explained, “Every once in a while, a big project is targeted for, say, something said by its lead actor who’s a super celebrity, a lot of trolling happens on Twitter, which has a domino effect on the small people who think, if this can happen to that person then we don’t stand a chance.”
Cue: self-censorship.
Shukla himself fought the CBFC in 2017 when it laid out stringent conditions for the clearance of his film An Insignificant Man that he directed and produced with Khushboo Ranka.
The producers contested the decision in the FCAT and won. An Insignificant Man is a chronicle of the anti-corruption protests that bred Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party. With While We Watched, a profile of journalist Ravish Kumar’s valour and values, Shukla conserved his energy by taking a direct-to-streaming route.
Such pushback against the censorship regime is coming almost entirely from documentaries, indies and mainstream film industries other than Hindi.
Hindi Filmdom’s Collective Capitulation
“Hindi filmmakers are not putting up a fight these days,” Kashyap told me.
Barring a minuscule minority, Hindi filmdom has collectively capitulated before the BJP government, thus handing a virtual cakewalk to the right-wing in India’s most high-profile film industry.
Kashyap for his part began clashing with the CBFC long before BJP came to power. He fought back then, and continues to do so post-2014. These days, he said, he has constant arguments with his colleagues.
“Raj Kapoor used to go himself for the censoring of his films. His stories are famous, especially the one about how he got Ram Teri Ganga Maili cleared,” said Kashyap. “You have to sit there with the film, own it, talk about it, argue. Don’t just send a representative. Filmmakers need to stand up for their films.”
Kashyap’s criticism is substantiated by Ghosh’s experience. Before Aadhaar’s run-in with UIDAI, Ghosh sparred with an Examining Committee in Kolkata in 2017 over his English documentary on Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian.
He was told it would be cleared only if he beeped out the words “Gujarat”, “Hindutva”, “cow” and “Hindu” used by Sen. As the film’s producer, Ghosh appealed against the decision and got a clearance in 2018. Unlike him, his Mumbai-based producers of Aadhaar appear not to have a stomach for conflict.
Ghosh, however, continues to stand up to the establishment, including with 2023’s Bengali hit Kabuliwala that he told me he made with the express purpose of telling a story with a Muslim hero, a role in which he intentionally cast Mithun Chakraborty because of his association with BJP.
What if he was Aadhaar’s producer? “The tribunal doesn’t exist now, so I would have gone to court,” he replied. “Even with The Argumentative Indian, if the board had not agreed, I’d have gone to court.”
Tamil & Malayalam Cinema Fight Back
Patterns of right-wing conduct indicate that the Right has realised it is safer to aim at the Hindi industry—including Hindi-focused Mumbai producers who occasionally work outside—than openly confront India’s other film industries.
This hypothesis is corroborated by the strategised takedown of Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food (Tamil, 2023) starring Nayanthara after an earlier failed offensive against the Vijay-starrer Mersal.
When Mersal was released in 2017, the Tamil Nadu BJP ran a high-decibel campaign against the film’s critique of union government policies. The masses and film industry vociferously backed Mersal during that storm, making it a blockbuster.
“If a film is attacked today in Tamil Nadu, the way Mersal was attacked, support for it would be tenfold,” the National Award winning Tamil director-producer Vetri Maaran told me. “Despite the larger political landscape, the prevailing mood among the citizenry here is pro-people. So anyone going after a film or filmmaker will find the Tamil Nadu public immediately objecting even louder now than they did back then.”
Having been humiliated over Mersal, the Sangh Parivar seems to have meticulously planned their next public move against Tamil cinema.
Targeting Tamil Nadu Via Mumbai
The tale of a Brahmin woman who becomes a chef and cooks meat, director Nilesh Krishnaa’s Annapoorani was certified U and released across India in end-2023 without facing any hurdles. Some industry insiders said they felt it was a subtly Hindu right-wing film.
However, when it dropped on Netflix weeks later, Hindutva proponents in the north filed police reports and wrote to the producers, Zee, in Mumbai in January 2024, alleging that it hurt Hindu sentiments.
Prominent film personalities across India backed Annapoorani, and sources said key Tamil industry figures were planning to write a letter of support despite their reservations about it. But Zee had already pulled the film off air and apologised before the complaints made headlines, thus creating an impression of a Sangh victory against the Tamil industry.
The withdrawal of Annapoorani is a watershed in the post-2014 erosion of filmmakers’ freedoms. Another is the outcry against the 2021 Hindi series Tandav directed by Ali Abbas Zafar, starring Saif Ali Khan and Dimple Kapadia.
When that show dropped on Amazon, BJP leaders demanded a ban. Among other accusations, they claimed it insulted Lord Shiva. FIRs were filed in various states against team members. Zafar apologised, the show was re-edited, and Amazon apologised repeatedly.
While the Tandav episode had a chilling effect on the Hindi industry, Zee’s surrender over Annapoorani sparked defiance in Tamil Nadu.
“In a democratic country, we cannot ban or threaten creativity,” the celebrated Tamil filmmaker Pa Ranjith told Chennai Times last year. “To cut down the voice of a film like Annapoorani—even after it was censored—is very wrong. It is strange to note that the production company didn’t fight back. If there was a fight, we would have all supported them.”
A united front against the Right is guaranteed to Tamil and Malayalam film personalities, going by the track record of their states.
Case in point: Mersal. Another: Minnal Murali. In mid-2020, Hindu nationalists destroyed a church set built beside a river for this Malayalam superhero flick, their objection being that a temple stood on the opposite bank. The public, the industry and the Kerala government instantaneously condemned the assault, and the perpetrators were promptly arrested.
“It is because of all this that I believe this is the first and last time such a thing will happen in Kerala,” Minnal Murali’s hero Tovino Thomas told me then.
More than four years later, Jeo said, “As practitioners of the arts in Kerala, we’re never alone. When we run into problems, many artists and systems stand with us. We have confidence even now in 2024 that we will not find ourselves isolated.”
This unity is precious because, as a leading filmmaker told me, right-wing aggression is rising in both states.
Shan (who uses one name), director of 2023’s Tamil hit Bommai Nayagi (Doll Heroine), said he was forced to mute the line, “We’ve got a judgment, not justice” in this sexual assault saga. He argued against the examining committee’s inclination to rate his film A, and managed to secure a UA.
“Movies questioning the social system or judiciary are unacceptable to them,” said Shan.
Mindsets That Steer Censor Committees
It is not legally mandatory for members of examining committees and revising committees to be experts in cinema, the arts in general or any relevant field.
Despite the systemic indifference to expertise, Shan told me that in Tamil Nadu, “before 2014, examining committee members were directors, writers and critics”. Post-2014 though, such regional disparities appear to be fading.
“When I sat with the committee for Bommai Nayagi, 2-3 members were actual BJP office-bearers,” said Shan. He names one: Narayanan Thirupathy.
In 2017, Thirupathy stated on Mirror Now that the Censor Board “should be punished” for clearing Mersal. According to his present Twitter/X bio, he is the Tamil Nadu BJP’s vice-president.
“Political parties want people in the Censor Board who believe in their line of thoughts,” a Mumbai-based filmmaker, Uday Shankar Pani, declared shortly after telling me he was an examining committee member himself from 2015-18 and again from 2019-21.
My interaction with Pani offers a glimpse into the mindsets steering these committees.
During an over one-hour-long video interview, Pani regaled me with tales of his gallantry, claiming he defended Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani (Hindi, 2015) against an examining committee edict that Bhansali himself, so he said, accepted.
Pani also recounted once ticking off the producer of a film starring Amitabh Bachchan and Farhan Akhtar with, “Listen boy…your film is bad.” He is a self-professed admirer of Pahlaj Nihalani, the Modi-led government’s first appointee as CBFC chairperson, who ended up becoming an object of national ridicule (click here and here).
Pani expressed reservations about the composition of examining committees—“housewives, schoolteachers, some salesmen, airhostesses, professionals, filmmakers, journalists… I remember the maidservant of a friend of mine was on the Censor Board”.
He said he believed they should be “more from cinema” because “we feel the pain of a filmmaker if you advise them to remove something objectionable.”
In the same breath he added, “I don’t recall whether I was on the examining committee for Udta Punjab, but I did represent the Censor Board in Arnab Goswami’s programmes to defend the board’s objections to the film.”
Udta Punjab is a Hindi film directed by Abhishek Chaubey, produced by Kashyap, Ekta Kapoor and others, starring Dosanjh, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Alia Bhatt and Shahid Kapoor. It was barred from release by the Nihalani-led CBFC unless multiple changes were made.
On a petition by the producers, the Bombay High Court struck down the CBFC ruling just days before the film’s scheduled release date.
Pani casually underlined the religious identity of two persons associated with the Censor Board that he discussed with me, describing one as “some Muslim gentleman” and another as “also a Muslim guy”.
More than once, he slid a mention of the Opposition Congress party into remarks about CBFC-related corruption and political machinations.
Wanted: A Homogeneous Culture
Shan’s experience encompasses another element of censorship today: the effort to erase Hindu heterogeneity. He said the committee interrogated him over a scene in Bommai Nayagi in which a kumkumam-wearing astrologer eats beef biryani.
“Not showing or promoting beef in films is part of their agenda though beef biryani is everywhere in Tamil Nadu, including in 5-star hotels,” said Shan.
“In Malayalam cinema, beef consumption is shown in every film—I don’t know if the board gives them problems, but here, although from my childhood we know of beef and beef shops, the board claims that beef isn’t our culture,” said Shan. “The right-wing mindset in Tamil Nadu is that beef is the food of Dalits or minorities, but that’s not true.”
Meat in general, not beef alone, has become contentious among examining committees across states.
In 2020, Kannada director Abhilash Shetty was told to blur shots of chicken being cut in a cooking scene in his debut feature Koli Taal (Chicken Curry). Shetty, who was 27 at the time, believes he offended the committee by responding sardonically that if they insisted on meat being camouflaged, he would blur vegetables too.
This could explain why his charming, innocuous film was rated UA instead of U, that too on condition that he mute all colloquial swear words.
Koli Taal, like Pedro, was also excluded from BIFFes 2022.
Now 31, Shetty is preparing to release Naale Rajaa Koli Majaa (English title: Sunday Special), a socio-political satire about a girl intent on eating chicken on a day when meat sales are prohibited. He’s making a chicken trilogy.
I asked why, considering his experience with Koli Taal.
“Outrage,” he replied. “It’s in my blood. I come from a warrior community and family. Many investors backed out, so I started my own production company called Plan A Films, as in, Abhilash Shetty plans. That name has many meanings. I decided to make more films, more raw films. There are alternatives to big platforms nowadays, so if it doesn’t get a theatre release, I can show it to the world through other platforms. But I won’t compromise on my vision, my storytelling.”
The Price of Corporatisation
Hindi filmdom tends to trivialise the courage of dissenters in other industries by claiming, in private conversations, that they are more vulnerable than the rest. The assumption is that cinemas and stars of other Indian languages are not important enough to be scrutinised by the union government and its cohorts, an incorrect assumption as this investigation illustrates.
During a meeting in Mumbai, veteran producer Shailja Kejriwal pointed me in another direction. Kejriwal, who has more than 30 years of experience across TV, films and web series, attributed the Mumbai film industry’s risk-averse nature to the fact that it was “totally corporatised”.
“The film business in other regions is still run largely by independent producers who don’t have other businesses that could get affected if they don’t toe a line of thinking,” said Kejriwal. “However large an individual producer might be, they have, in a sense, less to lose—though for him or her it’s their entire life—because for a corporate, films are a tiny part of their overall business, and self-censorship happens because of how it might affect the total business.”
Off the record, Amazon staff offered the same reasoning regarding their cautious response to the government and right wing.
“Since everybody is an individual producer in the Tamil and Malayalam film industries, they’re still making films for passion,” said Kejriwal. “That’s why people in those two industries come together—because they’re like-minded people making the films they want to make, their struggle resonates with other individuals who realise that what affects one person will affect all of them.”
“Corporates, however, work in isolation,” she said.
Self-Censorship In A Time of Intolerance
During my reporting, I encountered numerous examples of self-censorship by multi-language streaming platforms and the Hindi industry.
One director said producers had actively dissuaded people like him from casting Swara Bhasker, Sushant Singh and Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub due to their outspokenness.
The three actors were unsurprised when I told them of this. Zeeshan said he believed “the government is less focused on the film industry now because self-censorship has set in”.
When journalist Mohammad Ali’s 2020 story, “The Rise of a Hindu Vigilante in the Age of WhatsApp and Modi”, appeared in the US magazine Wired, the publication’s entertainment arm was keen on a visual adaptation.
However, Ali informed me while on a visit to Delhi, that Wired Entertainment “were told in an initial conversation with Netflix and other streaming platforms in India that they’re not touching even slightly sensitive subjects”.
A proposal to make a mini-series from T Prashant Reddy and Dinesh S Thakur’s 2022 book The Truth Pill: The Myth of Drug Regulation in India similarly crashed before take-off. The authors were approached by interested producers but, as Reddy recounted, “They said these days Netflix and Amazon’s lawyers kill any show that’s even mildly critical of the government.”
Though a large portion of the book concentrates on pre-2014 events, “they asked if there’s some way we could do this without criticising the government”. Reddy said such a series felt pointless, “because our entire book is about the State failing to regulate the pharma industry. If they didn’t want to concentrate on the State, that’s just not our book.”
‘Hypersensitivity’
The 2022 Hindi film Bhediya (Wolf) starring Varun Dhawan and Kriti Sanon originally contained a dialogue about a werewolf eating a cow. It was re-dubbed and the “cow” became a “mithun”, a cattle species indigenous to North-east India.
Kiran Rao, director-producer of the Hindi film Laapataa Ladies (2024), told me that the male lead in the story was originally called Shiv—since that name was not central to the character, the team felt it was not worth the risk of potentially offending devotees of Lord Shiva, so he was renamed Deepak.
A series creator was advised not to use direct shots of Hindu deities when a character is praying. “We had to imply from a side angle that it was a mandir in her home,” the person said.
In a yet-to-be-released Hindi streaming show, the script featured a man being beaten on the steps of a temple. Indian cinema often employs this juxtaposition to symbolise justice being dispensed in God’s presence. But the location was changed in this case, among other reasons because the actor set to do the beating was Muslim.
Such widespread trepidation parallels what an apparently progressive CBFC functionary described to me confidentially as “hypersensitivity” among “ideologically dogmatic” examining committee members who cannot tell “the difference between the particular and the general”.
For instance, “when you see people wearing a colour you consider sacrosanct, you think they can do no wrong”, the person added. “Like in India, most Hindus are named after gods. Someone will be Bhola, someone Shankar, someone Ram. But these days, when filmmakers name a character, it can be construed as defaming the religion.”
After phone calls, messages and emails to the CBFC CEO Rajendra Singh seeking an official reaction to my findings went unanswered for about two months, he finally messaged in the third week of January 2025, asking me to speak instead to another bureaucrat, the joint secretary (films) in the ministry of information and broadcasting. When I replied that my questions were specific to the functioning of CBFC, he fell silent again.
Responding to an interview request and specific questions on their policies, Netflix sent this generic statement: “We have an incredibly broad range of Indian films and TV shows, all of which speak to our long standing support for creative expression. This diversity not only reflects our members’ very different tastes, it also distinguishes our service from the competition.”
The first few times I mailed Amazon, I was told all their spokespersons were travelling. When asked to email questions, I did.
There’s been silence since then.
Criticising Hindutva: The Risks
“Religious references have always been an issue but in recent times, speaking against the government, especially against Hindutva in a film, is liable to get it into trouble with the Censor Board,” said Tanuja Chandra, director of Sangharsh (1999) and the docuseries Wedding.con (2023).
“OTT platforms were thankfully exempt from this pressure and filmmakers thought they were going to be able to make raw content, which could question authority, be subversive, rebellious, and truly unconventional,” said Chandra, echoing a lament I’ve heard from many filmmakers.
“However, platforms have been sued for what was termed ‘offensive’ content or themes that simply questioned society,” said Chandra. “When in our own living environment, leave alone dissenting or anarchic views, even questioning what’s happening around us is considered traitorous or anti-national, our storytelling is bound to reflect this.”
Actor-director Nandita Das suspects that today she would probably not be able to make Firaaq (Separation)—her 2008 Hindi film about the impact of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom—“not because it’s not relevant today, but maybe because no one will fund it”.
“Art needs to be provocative, a mirror to the reality of our times,” Das told me over email. “But increasingly, a culture of silence is growing in Hindi cinema. Artists and filmmakers, even the less mainstream ones, are telling stories that do not threaten the status quo, that would not ‘offend’ anyone, so they prefer to deal with only ‘soft’ issues.”
“As a result, many aspects of life and society are vanishing from our stories and thereby from our collective narratives,” said Das.
In this scenario, Jeo struck an optimistic note. He was convinced that if artists were pushed beyond a point, movements would emerge even in places where self-censorship has set in.
“The BJP is afraid of cinema,” said Jeo. “But artistes will find alternatives. If one platform blocks you, others will come up. If a film can’t be shown in theatres, we’ll find other places. We will come up with new systems in this new era.”
Jeo described this resistance as “ee kaalaththe samaram (the battle of our time)”, which could include using “new technologies and underground means” to take films to audiences.
“A majority of Indian artistes are not the sort to be cowed down by these fellows,” said Jeo. “Art will find a way out.”
(Anna M M Vetticad specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. She is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic.)
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