Censorship and Ethnographic Film: Confronting State Bureaucracies, Cultural Regulation, and Institutionalized Homophobia in India

Abstract

Based on my encounters with the Indian censor board while trying to get my films approved for broadcast on Indian television, I explore how bureaucratic institutions such as the Indian Central Board of FilmCertification (CBFC) operate as instruments of the nation-state to control speech, regulate culture, and stifle dissent in the interest of advancing the Indian government's nationalist, paternalist, heteronormative agendas and policies. I also look briefly at how nongovernmental actors like special interest religious and political groups attempt to regulate even the transnational domains of media circulation online, which offer some possibilities for transcending the regulatory mechanisms of the nation-state. Citing my experiences to show how ethnographic films and scholarship are continuously shaped by the various mediascapes within which they circulate, this article opens up a conversation about what it means to submit our scholarship for sanctioning by the nation-state in which we carry out our research. [censorship, ethnographic film, gender, India, sexuality]

“Found Objectionable”

“…Referring to approaches from Judith Butler (1998) and Pierre Bourdieu (1991), my theoretical framework brings the state back into the picture to comprehend how film censorship in Turkey operates. It contributes to the existing anthropological literature in the non‐Western hemisphere where censorship is employed to promote, at times, “the nationalist, paternalist, heteronormative agendas and ideologies of the nation‐state” (Gill 2017, 62) through state institutions such as the Central Board of Film Certification, which formalize cultural regulations in India (Kaur and Mazzarella 2009) or the non‐state actors aligning and working together with the state in the Turkish case (Karaca 2011), to name a few.…”

“…Films challenging that image, such as those including on‐screen kissing or gay and lesbian relationships, gets censored or rated 18+. Following Harjant Gill (2017, 62), I argue that this censorship typology illustrates how the “heteronormative agenda and ideologies of nation‐states implemented by state institutions” arbitrarily regulate and shape (non‐)acceptable contents that cultural producers can(not) circulate in the public sphere.…”

Bad Habitus: Anthropology in the Age of the Multimodal

“…Ahmed asks, “how is ‘white men’ a building” (154)? And she provides abundant illustrations from everyday life in the university, such as academic citations in the Ivory Tower that continue to be built on the alleged legitimacy of the able‐bodied white man, reproducing white habitus (Bonilla‐Silva, Goar, and Embrick ), heteronormativity (Gill ), ableism (Nakamura ), and so on in academia.…”

“…Such critiques inevitably called for a revision of our ethical engagements, a speaking nearby rather than speaking for (Chen and Trinh ; Ruby ; Trinh ). More recently, Harjant Gill (, 63) has asked the important question: “How are our films and our scholarship continuously shaped by the various media‐scapes within which they circulate, and how does institutional power condition what is knowable in the form of ethnographic accounts?” (see also Gill ).…”

Jane Brett Morgen, dir. 90 min. English. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2017.

“…Ahmed asks, "how is 'white men' a building" (154)? And she provides abundant illustrations from everyday life in the university, such as academic citations in the Ivory Tower that continue to be built on the alleged legitimacy of the ablebodied white man, reproducing white habitus (Bonilla-Silva, Goar, and Embrick 2006), heteronormativity (Gill 2017), ableism (Nakamura 2013a), and so on in academia.…”