In the 1990s Hindi cinema was firmly entrenched in the contentious sphere of the political. India's Censor Board of Film Certification (or the Censor Board as referred to henceforth), historically considered a primary regulatory mechanism of Hindi cinema and the custodian of public morality by both the citizenry and the State, found itself at the centre of a Through these three vignettes of landmark censorship controversies, "which reveal how deeply political the whole exercise has become in post-colonial India" (Pendakur, Indian Popular Cinema 79), I attempt to map the field of power relations that existed among the Censor Board and the State, the Hindu Right, the viewing public and various interest groups at a historical conjuncture and to locate various competing yet hierarchical, shifting and diffused sites of political pressure and influence in the public sphere. As Lee Grieveson suggests, such "a struggle over culture and cultural space is, indeed, virtually a defining feature of democratic societies, which almost inevitably involve a complex negotiation between public authority and the dissemination of facts, ideas, and representations in public"("Policing Cinema" 13). In order to contextualise the persistent regulatory concerns of the state apparatus over "obscene, indecent and/or immoral" cinematic material a brief overview of the 'media-effects' based logic prompting direct State interventions, regulation and the State-instituted codes of censorship is required.
This article, seeking to address a gap in the study of post-millennial female stars in popular Hindi cinema, examines the reasons behind the rising stardom of Vidya Balan, tagged as 'the fourth Khan' in the Bombay film industry. It represents an early intervention in understanding how a female star in a predominantly male-oriented industry has become a 'gamechanger' as a result of the conjuncture of favourable industrial and technological changes, and transforming spectatorial tastes and practices. These include radical changes in the sites of exhibition such as the multiplex; shifts in cinephilia driven by urban youth audiences; distinctive marketing and promotional strategies that have partially engendered Balan's 'hatke'/offbeat stardom; and the establishment of new production houses that have encouraged a new generation of young directors and scriptwriters to create substantive female characters endowed with narrative agency and a feminist sensibility. It also argues that Balan's stardom is an intriguing anomaly when compared with her female contemporaries in terms of her performance style, consistent box-office success, and choice of unconventional roles that have narratively reduced the male hero to a formality.
This murky film-mafia nexus came to the fore with the murder of music conglomerate owner, Gulshan Kumar in 1997, and the attempted killing of prominent film personalities such as producer Rakesh Roshan in 2000. There have been legal trials, notably of major film financier Bharat Shah and
This article constructs a chronological narrative based on a decade of epistolary communication involving India's Central Board of Film Certification, the Information & Broadcasting Ministry, the police, right-wing parties, and the citizenry in order to trace a continuum of state and right-wing interventions in the process of censoring 1990s Hindi cinema.
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