Profanity in Hindi movies was restricted until recently to phrases combining canines and nasty people and individuals of suspicious intent. The general rule was that the villains did the swearing and the heroes lost control of their tongues only when provoked.
By the time Shekhar Kapur’s controversial Phoolan Devi biopic Bandit Queen was released in 1994, the era of niceties and politesse had passed. Two related strains came together on the screen: many more movies were being made on real-life characters and incidents, and writers and filmmakers were tinkering with formulas and templates and presenting narratives and characters that were more flesh than stock. This version of real life meant that gangsters and college students had to sound like they might if they were in our midst. They had to drop f-words, jokingly refer to various bodily functions, and doubt the ancestry of those they were seeking to insult.
The Central Board of Film Certification that is headed by its recently appointed chairperson, potboiler producer Pahlaj Nihalani, doesn’t approve one bit of the uptick in on-screen cussing. The censor board has issued a list of words and phrases that will invite bleeps or outright deletions even if the movies using them are meant for adult viewers. Some of the utterances the censor board wants to axe can be classified as profanity, while others are double entendres and euphemisms.
Where does this directive leave writers, film-makers and actors, especially those who work on themes revolving around crime and adaptations of actual incidents? Scroll.in spoke to some of them to understand the importance of profanity in a fictional universe. The overall consensus: the CBFC’s latest diktat is poorly timed, deeply autocratic and heavily undesirable.
Richa Chadda
The actor’s many roles include Nagma Khatoon, the sharp-tongued member of a family of racketeers in Anurag Kashyap’s two-part crime saga Gangs of Wasseypur.
You don’t expect a girl who is uneducated and married to a gangster to use cultivated language. In the real Wasseypur, there were ten year-olds who would abuse in one day as much as you and I would in a whole year. How can you have a realistic portrayal without abuses?
Besides, nobody questions the fact that male characters abuse all the time. People assume, for instance, that I like to swear in real life. After Wasseypur, I got many scripts with swear words in them.
I am sure the Censor Board will have to change the list of banned words. It is arbitrary and even stupid in parts – for instance, the list mentions the fact that you can’t say “Bombay.” At this rate, we will have orders saying we can’t use Bangalore or Calcutta.
Characters don’t swear simply to sound cool. If the CBFC has a problem, it should be with films that are tasteless in their depictions of society, especially about sexual attitudes. It feels as though a monitor has been appointed to scold us. But we are not in school. It’s nobody’s case that the guidelines should be relaxed entirely. But should movie entertainment be given this attention? There are greater evils in society.
Saurabh Shukla
The film and theatre actor is also the co-writer of several movies including the 1998 gangster drama Satya, and the director of such titles as Pappu Can’t Dance Saala.
Censorship has been going on for a long time, and the sad part is that it conveniently changes depending on the people concerned. Pappu Can’t Dance Saala didn’t have any abusive language because it didn’t require any, but there is a line addressed to a character from Benares. Another character tells the boy when he hears where he is from that he is an “angoor” as well as a “langoor”, meaning, he is a good person but he can also be crooked. It wasn’t offensive, but one gentleman in the censor board said he was from Benares and he wouldn’t allow the line to pass because it offended the people of his city. I told him that the board had passed a line in Dabbang in which Salman Khan’s character tells another character that he will make so many holes in him that he will not know from where to fart or shit.
We had to eventually change the line in Pappu Can’t Dance Saala to avoid an Adults only certificate. Fortunately for Satya, they didn’t cut out a single word. We were on guard and we were ready for anything, so it was a bit of an anti-climax.
In art, you have to see the intention, otherwise even an artist like Michelangelo can be labelled a porn painter. Any use of rough language in films, literature or theatre is with the intention of projecting a reality. I have read the CBFC’s list. What does it even mean? Will abusive language end in real life if we stop using these words on the screen? The people who are applying this kind of censorship on society, can they claim to never use such words themselves?
Take a word like “haraam.” It is not inherently profane. We are not allowed to use animals in films, we are not allowed to show smoking and drinking. What is the censor board trying to do – make propaganda films about a world that doesn’t exist, one without cars, dogs, cigarettes, alcohol and people without quirks? A world where everybody is nice and good? How will you become human in that case?
Nasreen Munni Kabir
The author of several books and produced television series and documentaries on cinema also provides subtitles for Hindi movies.
As long as profanity is not gratuitous, it’s fine. The context of the narrative should set the tone of the language. In a film like Vicky Donor, it would be odd if the characters used cuss words, but in Gangs of Wasseypur, it would be odd if they didn’t. The context is everything.
Cuss words in dialogue usually mean the film will be categorised for adults, so one assumes parents will not take their children to an Adults only film. Is it that the Censor Board does not trust the parents to respect their categorisations?
There isn’t a blanket rule for subtitling cuss words. Subtitling means to accurately translate the dialogue. So it is wrong to tone down strong language because it would be diluting the intent of the film. That said, many subtitlers do tone down cuss words, sometimes because the “M-f” family of cuss words are just too long and the subtitle needs to last a very few seconds on the screen. Or sometime a familiar euphemism is used.
Bastard is the usual word used for haraami, rascal or rogue would work for “saala”, but often, saala is an add-on without specific intent. Think of Pappu Can’t Dance Saala, where saala isn’t meant as a cuss word. “Haraami” means to insult the other character, so you’d have to have a subtitle that is stronger, hence, “bastard.”
Atul Sabharwal
Director of the television crime drama Powder, the gangster movie Aurangzeb, and the documentary In Their Shoes.
Rahi Masoom Raza’s body of work in Hindi literature as a novelist and poet stands among one of the highest. Among the films and serials that he has written, it is enough to remember that BR Chopra’s Mahabharat was one of them.
Raza wrote a novel Os Ki Boond (A Drop Of Dew) in 1970. The novel is set in Uttar Pradesh against the backdrop of communal tension. I am reproducing some of the dialogue below.
“Ee bahinchod ka ee hausla.” “Maa chod daalenge hum ee bhosdiwalan ki. “Kismate saali gandu hai.” And I have barely moved away from the page that I am on.
What is interesting is the preface of the novel. Raza says in the first line, “Seniors have often told me to not write cuss words. They say I would have received the Sahitya Akademi Award if I had not written cuss words. But do I write to receive awards? If my characters sing songs, I write songs, if they abuse each other, I write abuses.”
In 2013, an expert committee headed by Justice Mukul Mudgal prepared a new Cinematograph Bill to update the old Cinematograph Act of 1952. The report is available for download from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s website. The report begins thus, “The Committee is [of] the view that the provisions of the Act dealing with guidelines for certification must include provisions which protect artistic and creative expression on the one hand while on the other requiring the medium of cinema to remain socially responsible and sensitive to the values and standards of society.”
While the first part dealing with artistic freedom is pretty clear, it is the second part – what is socially responsible, what are the values and standards of society – that the report urges the industry and the government to debate together. The new CBFC guidelines have shut the scope of that debate.
If Raza had participated in such a debate, he would referred to the same preface where he further writes, “My family does not have a tradition of abuses. But I hear people swear on the streets. I hear them in my neighbourhood and I don’t shut my ears. I don’t think you shut your ears either. My characters are swearing in their own house. Those characters are not living in your house, nor in my house. Then why do you chase me?”
One would like to believe that as a democracy, the years between 1970 and 2015 have taken us forward and hopefully upwards in our intellect and tolerance. The reality, however, is otherwise.
No such blanket ban is justifiable or ever was. There is no merit in enforcing it nor ever was. I haven’t heard a swear word in a movie that was purely an invention of movies.
Urmi Juvekar
The documentary film-maker has written screenplays including Darmiyaan, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, Shanghai and I Am.
Profanity should be allowed in films certified for adults. In fact, there shouldn’t be a ban on anything in adult films. They are not hoardings that you will look at no matter what.
The acts of banning things and constantly forcing people to subvert give rise to a kind of repression that manifests itself in strange ways. This behaviour seems to be a by-product of consumerism, where people think that they have no choice because everything is going out of control and being forced down their throats. People feel that there is no compass any more – faith, religion, morality – and they hit out at anything that seems to be annoying. Slowly, whatever you do not buy will begin to annoy you.
I don’t know how this word control will create better cinema. Profanity is not offensive, but a guy who constantly chases a girl who keeps saying no is. By controlling words, how will you control the content? Besides, if a villain is using such words to demean a hero, I would obviously want him to say them.
Vinay Shukla
The director of Godmother and Mirch has also written the screenplays of such films as Aitbaar and Virasat.
There was no profanity in Godmother [inspired by Gujarati gangster Santokben Jadeja and starring Shabana Azmi] but there is a line where a contractor whose tender is not passed by Shabana’s character tells her something on the lines of, “tere ko nanga karke is office se nikalwaa doonga.” The CEO of the CBFC at the time said this line was insulting to women, and we had to change it. The censors also had problems with the fact that Shabana’s character smoked, but the chairperson, Asha Parekh, watched the film and said it was integral to the story.
Profanity is a form of language. It depends on the character, his or her upbringing and milieu. There are filmmakers who use profanity gratuitously and for shock value, but there are many people who use offensive words with discretion.
The CBFC’s list of banned words is absurd and makes no sense. In real life, cuss words emerge especially when a person’s vocabulary is limited. What is it that you are preserving, especially when all kinds of things are available on the internet? It’s like saying a girl is promiscuous just because she has a mobile phone.
The censor board is acting against whatever it feels is harmful to public morality, which is very subjective. Cinema should not be judged from the yardstick of what is moral and immoral. If there is a social responsibility on the filmmaker, it should be with regard to whether a film’s content is relevant or irrelevant.
Kissing in films has become common and no longer elicits feeling because we are used to it. If cuss words are imperative to communicate and convey a character and the atmosphere being portrayed in the film, then there is no way out. All the members of the censor board need to sit down together and take a decision on this autocratic way of functioning.
Sriram Raghavan
Writer and director of crime dramas Ek Hasina Thi, Johnny Gaddaar, Badlapur, and the spy thriller Agent Vinod.
The first time it hit me that profanity can work for a film was when I watched Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas [about a mafia outfit in New York City between the fifties and the eighties].
I personally don’t use profanity in my films. I do find that sometimes, there is profanity for its own sake. Of course, people do talk like that. Profanity can sometimes be an easy way out, but there can be ten other ways to say the same thing.
Villains often swore in Hindi films. Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya used vulgar colloquialisms that were perfectly in sync with the characters. A film like Bandit Queen stands out in its effective use of profanity. But it is impossible to say that you cannot ever be allowed to use words like “fuck” or “bitch” in a Hindi movie.
Yasser Usman
The television journalist and producer with ABP News is the author of the biography Rajesh Khanna – The Untold Story of India’s First Superstar.
Ten or 15 years ago, there was a great deal of focus on getting the language right, whether at home or in public. People don’t bother any more. Even in films, language per se has deteriorated.
Profanity sounds good in gangster films, but some of it is forced – you sometimes wonder whether a script need such profanity, and whether swear words are being used in the name of cinematic liberty. However, Pahlaj Nihalani is being completely hypocritical. He produces films which had double-meaning songs like Angna Mein Baba Dware Pe Ma [from Aankhen, 1993] and Khada Hai Khada Hai [Andaz, 1994].
Films are more realistic and are showing whatever is happening in real life. When I am angry, for instance, I use cuss words. We are very used to seeing heroes and heroines as moralistic, but the lines have now blurred. I don’t know why we are discussing the issue in 2015. As an audience member, you are going into a movie of your own free will. I remember watching Bandit Queen in the cinema. Seema Biswas’s character says in the very first scene, “Main hoon Phoolan Devi behenchod, main hoon.” I turned around to see who was saying this only to realise that it was coming on the screen. The atmosphere in the cinema was charged, and I had to watch the movie a second time to see how wonderful it was, and how the cuss words were completely justified.
Habib Faisal
The writer and director of Do Dooni Char, Ishaqzaade and Daawat-e-Ishq has also written screenplays including Jhoom Barabar Jhoom and Fan.
We have always had somebody deciding what is good and bad for us, whether it is a play like Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder being banned, or something related to the Emergency. We are also a country in which Devika Rani and Himansu Rai shared one of the longest kisses on the screen in the movie Karma in 1933. We should have only gone forward from there.
All over the world, there are systems in place to ensure that impressionable minds do not get influenced. Even that is a constant debate – what was PG 13 when I was 13 is no longer applicable.
There is the problem of hypocrisy over the state of affairs. Time and again, public figures who have a more immediate and direct influence on their vote banks and their followers express all kinds of thoughts that are criminal according to Indian law. And I am not merely talking of incidents that have been reported over the last few months. This has been going on for years and across religious alignments. What is important is for these people to be gagged and stopped, because they are much more dangerous.
It is important to understand the filmmaker’s intended effect in using profanity or any other kind of expression. One of the most violent films made in India is Deewar [directed by Yash Chopra in 1975 and written by Salim-Javed]. It doesn’t have a single piece of profanity. Would Sholay’s bandit Gabbar Singh be less ferocious if he used swear words? A real Chambal dacoit would. But his character’s ferocity comes from his actions, whether it is killing an ant or an entire family. It is a complex situation, but the bottomline is that viewers are mature enough to judge what is good or bad.
On television, it is important to control family viewing time in some way and create time slots where adult programming is allowed. These practices are followed the world over, but we suffer from the knee-jerk syndrome. Who knows, the next CBFC chairperson will have a different set of rules. Nothing is constant.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
By the time Shekhar Kapur’s controversial Phoolan Devi biopic Bandit Queen was released in 1994, the era of niceties and politesse had passed. Two related strains came together on the screen: many more movies were being made on real-life characters and incidents, and writers and filmmakers were tinkering with formulas and templates and presenting narratives and characters that were more flesh than stock. This version of real life meant that gangsters and college students had to sound like they might if they were in our midst. They had to drop f-words, jokingly refer to various bodily functions, and doubt the ancestry of those they were seeking to insult.
The Central Board of Film Certification that is headed by its recently appointed chairperson, potboiler producer Pahlaj Nihalani, doesn’t approve one bit of the uptick in on-screen cussing. The censor board has issued a list of words and phrases that will invite bleeps or outright deletions even if the movies using them are meant for adult viewers. Some of the utterances the censor board wants to axe can be classified as profanity, while others are double entendres and euphemisms.
Where does this directive leave writers, film-makers and actors, especially those who work on themes revolving around crime and adaptations of actual incidents? Scroll.in spoke to some of them to understand the importance of profanity in a fictional universe. The overall consensus: the CBFC’s latest diktat is poorly timed, deeply autocratic and heavily undesirable.
Richa Chadda
The actor’s many roles include Nagma Khatoon, the sharp-tongued member of a family of racketeers in Anurag Kashyap’s two-part crime saga Gangs of Wasseypur.
You don’t expect a girl who is uneducated and married to a gangster to use cultivated language. In the real Wasseypur, there were ten year-olds who would abuse in one day as much as you and I would in a whole year. How can you have a realistic portrayal without abuses?
Besides, nobody questions the fact that male characters abuse all the time. People assume, for instance, that I like to swear in real life. After Wasseypur, I got many scripts with swear words in them.
I am sure the Censor Board will have to change the list of banned words. It is arbitrary and even stupid in parts – for instance, the list mentions the fact that you can’t say “Bombay.” At this rate, we will have orders saying we can’t use Bangalore or Calcutta.
Characters don’t swear simply to sound cool. If the CBFC has a problem, it should be with films that are tasteless in their depictions of society, especially about sexual attitudes. It feels as though a monitor has been appointed to scold us. But we are not in school. It’s nobody’s case that the guidelines should be relaxed entirely. But should movie entertainment be given this attention? There are greater evils in society.
Saurabh Shukla
The film and theatre actor is also the co-writer of several movies including the 1998 gangster drama Satya, and the director of such titles as Pappu Can’t Dance Saala.
Censorship has been going on for a long time, and the sad part is that it conveniently changes depending on the people concerned. Pappu Can’t Dance Saala didn’t have any abusive language because it didn’t require any, but there is a line addressed to a character from Benares. Another character tells the boy when he hears where he is from that he is an “angoor” as well as a “langoor”, meaning, he is a good person but he can also be crooked. It wasn’t offensive, but one gentleman in the censor board said he was from Benares and he wouldn’t allow the line to pass because it offended the people of his city. I told him that the board had passed a line in Dabbang in which Salman Khan’s character tells another character that he will make so many holes in him that he will not know from where to fart or shit.
We had to eventually change the line in Pappu Can’t Dance Saala to avoid an Adults only certificate. Fortunately for Satya, they didn’t cut out a single word. We were on guard and we were ready for anything, so it was a bit of an anti-climax.
In art, you have to see the intention, otherwise even an artist like Michelangelo can be labelled a porn painter. Any use of rough language in films, literature or theatre is with the intention of projecting a reality. I have read the CBFC’s list. What does it even mean? Will abusive language end in real life if we stop using these words on the screen? The people who are applying this kind of censorship on society, can they claim to never use such words themselves?
Take a word like “haraam.” It is not inherently profane. We are not allowed to use animals in films, we are not allowed to show smoking and drinking. What is the censor board trying to do – make propaganda films about a world that doesn’t exist, one without cars, dogs, cigarettes, alcohol and people without quirks? A world where everybody is nice and good? How will you become human in that case?
Nasreen Munni Kabir
The author of several books and produced television series and documentaries on cinema also provides subtitles for Hindi movies.
As long as profanity is not gratuitous, it’s fine. The context of the narrative should set the tone of the language. In a film like Vicky Donor, it would be odd if the characters used cuss words, but in Gangs of Wasseypur, it would be odd if they didn’t. The context is everything.
Cuss words in dialogue usually mean the film will be categorised for adults, so one assumes parents will not take their children to an Adults only film. Is it that the Censor Board does not trust the parents to respect their categorisations?
There isn’t a blanket rule for subtitling cuss words. Subtitling means to accurately translate the dialogue. So it is wrong to tone down strong language because it would be diluting the intent of the film. That said, many subtitlers do tone down cuss words, sometimes because the “M-f” family of cuss words are just too long and the subtitle needs to last a very few seconds on the screen. Or sometime a familiar euphemism is used.
Bastard is the usual word used for haraami, rascal or rogue would work for “saala”, but often, saala is an add-on without specific intent. Think of Pappu Can’t Dance Saala, where saala isn’t meant as a cuss word. “Haraami” means to insult the other character, so you’d have to have a subtitle that is stronger, hence, “bastard.”
Atul Sabharwal
Director of the television crime drama Powder, the gangster movie Aurangzeb, and the documentary In Their Shoes.
Rahi Masoom Raza’s body of work in Hindi literature as a novelist and poet stands among one of the highest. Among the films and serials that he has written, it is enough to remember that BR Chopra’s Mahabharat was one of them.
Raza wrote a novel Os Ki Boond (A Drop Of Dew) in 1970. The novel is set in Uttar Pradesh against the backdrop of communal tension. I am reproducing some of the dialogue below.
“Ee bahinchod ka ee hausla.” “Maa chod daalenge hum ee bhosdiwalan ki. “Kismate saali gandu hai.” And I have barely moved away from the page that I am on.
What is interesting is the preface of the novel. Raza says in the first line, “Seniors have often told me to not write cuss words. They say I would have received the Sahitya Akademi Award if I had not written cuss words. But do I write to receive awards? If my characters sing songs, I write songs, if they abuse each other, I write abuses.”
In 2013, an expert committee headed by Justice Mukul Mudgal prepared a new Cinematograph Bill to update the old Cinematograph Act of 1952. The report is available for download from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s website. The report begins thus, “The Committee is [of] the view that the provisions of the Act dealing with guidelines for certification must include provisions which protect artistic and creative expression on the one hand while on the other requiring the medium of cinema to remain socially responsible and sensitive to the values and standards of society.”
While the first part dealing with artistic freedom is pretty clear, it is the second part – what is socially responsible, what are the values and standards of society – that the report urges the industry and the government to debate together. The new CBFC guidelines have shut the scope of that debate.
If Raza had participated in such a debate, he would referred to the same preface where he further writes, “My family does not have a tradition of abuses. But I hear people swear on the streets. I hear them in my neighbourhood and I don’t shut my ears. I don’t think you shut your ears either. My characters are swearing in their own house. Those characters are not living in your house, nor in my house. Then why do you chase me?”
One would like to believe that as a democracy, the years between 1970 and 2015 have taken us forward and hopefully upwards in our intellect and tolerance. The reality, however, is otherwise.
No such blanket ban is justifiable or ever was. There is no merit in enforcing it nor ever was. I haven’t heard a swear word in a movie that was purely an invention of movies.
Urmi Juvekar
The documentary film-maker has written screenplays including Darmiyaan, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, Shanghai and I Am.
Profanity should be allowed in films certified for adults. In fact, there shouldn’t be a ban on anything in adult films. They are not hoardings that you will look at no matter what.
The acts of banning things and constantly forcing people to subvert give rise to a kind of repression that manifests itself in strange ways. This behaviour seems to be a by-product of consumerism, where people think that they have no choice because everything is going out of control and being forced down their throats. People feel that there is no compass any more – faith, religion, morality – and they hit out at anything that seems to be annoying. Slowly, whatever you do not buy will begin to annoy you.
I don’t know how this word control will create better cinema. Profanity is not offensive, but a guy who constantly chases a girl who keeps saying no is. By controlling words, how will you control the content? Besides, if a villain is using such words to demean a hero, I would obviously want him to say them.
Vinay Shukla
The director of Godmother and Mirch has also written the screenplays of such films as Aitbaar and Virasat.
There was no profanity in Godmother [inspired by Gujarati gangster Santokben Jadeja and starring Shabana Azmi] but there is a line where a contractor whose tender is not passed by Shabana’s character tells her something on the lines of, “tere ko nanga karke is office se nikalwaa doonga.” The CEO of the CBFC at the time said this line was insulting to women, and we had to change it. The censors also had problems with the fact that Shabana’s character smoked, but the chairperson, Asha Parekh, watched the film and said it was integral to the story.
Profanity is a form of language. It depends on the character, his or her upbringing and milieu. There are filmmakers who use profanity gratuitously and for shock value, but there are many people who use offensive words with discretion.
The CBFC’s list of banned words is absurd and makes no sense. In real life, cuss words emerge especially when a person’s vocabulary is limited. What is it that you are preserving, especially when all kinds of things are available on the internet? It’s like saying a girl is promiscuous just because she has a mobile phone.
The censor board is acting against whatever it feels is harmful to public morality, which is very subjective. Cinema should not be judged from the yardstick of what is moral and immoral. If there is a social responsibility on the filmmaker, it should be with regard to whether a film’s content is relevant or irrelevant.
Kissing in films has become common and no longer elicits feeling because we are used to it. If cuss words are imperative to communicate and convey a character and the atmosphere being portrayed in the film, then there is no way out. All the members of the censor board need to sit down together and take a decision on this autocratic way of functioning.
Sriram Raghavan
Writer and director of crime dramas Ek Hasina Thi, Johnny Gaddaar, Badlapur, and the spy thriller Agent Vinod.
The first time it hit me that profanity can work for a film was when I watched Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas [about a mafia outfit in New York City between the fifties and the eighties].
I personally don’t use profanity in my films. I do find that sometimes, there is profanity for its own sake. Of course, people do talk like that. Profanity can sometimes be an easy way out, but there can be ten other ways to say the same thing.
Villains often swore in Hindi films. Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya used vulgar colloquialisms that were perfectly in sync with the characters. A film like Bandit Queen stands out in its effective use of profanity. But it is impossible to say that you cannot ever be allowed to use words like “fuck” or “bitch” in a Hindi movie.
Yasser Usman
The television journalist and producer with ABP News is the author of the biography Rajesh Khanna – The Untold Story of India’s First Superstar.
Ten or 15 years ago, there was a great deal of focus on getting the language right, whether at home or in public. People don’t bother any more. Even in films, language per se has deteriorated.
Profanity sounds good in gangster films, but some of it is forced – you sometimes wonder whether a script need such profanity, and whether swear words are being used in the name of cinematic liberty. However, Pahlaj Nihalani is being completely hypocritical. He produces films which had double-meaning songs like Angna Mein Baba Dware Pe Ma [from Aankhen, 1993] and Khada Hai Khada Hai [Andaz, 1994].
Films are more realistic and are showing whatever is happening in real life. When I am angry, for instance, I use cuss words. We are very used to seeing heroes and heroines as moralistic, but the lines have now blurred. I don’t know why we are discussing the issue in 2015. As an audience member, you are going into a movie of your own free will. I remember watching Bandit Queen in the cinema. Seema Biswas’s character says in the very first scene, “Main hoon Phoolan Devi behenchod, main hoon.” I turned around to see who was saying this only to realise that it was coming on the screen. The atmosphere in the cinema was charged, and I had to watch the movie a second time to see how wonderful it was, and how the cuss words were completely justified.
Habib Faisal
The writer and director of Do Dooni Char, Ishaqzaade and Daawat-e-Ishq has also written screenplays including Jhoom Barabar Jhoom and Fan.
We have always had somebody deciding what is good and bad for us, whether it is a play like Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder being banned, or something related to the Emergency. We are also a country in which Devika Rani and Himansu Rai shared one of the longest kisses on the screen in the movie Karma in 1933. We should have only gone forward from there.
All over the world, there are systems in place to ensure that impressionable minds do not get influenced. Even that is a constant debate – what was PG 13 when I was 13 is no longer applicable.
There is the problem of hypocrisy over the state of affairs. Time and again, public figures who have a more immediate and direct influence on their vote banks and their followers express all kinds of thoughts that are criminal according to Indian law. And I am not merely talking of incidents that have been reported over the last few months. This has been going on for years and across religious alignments. What is important is for these people to be gagged and stopped, because they are much more dangerous.
It is important to understand the filmmaker’s intended effect in using profanity or any other kind of expression. One of the most violent films made in India is Deewar [directed by Yash Chopra in 1975 and written by Salim-Javed]. It doesn’t have a single piece of profanity. Would Sholay’s bandit Gabbar Singh be less ferocious if he used swear words? A real Chambal dacoit would. But his character’s ferocity comes from his actions, whether it is killing an ant or an entire family. It is a complex situation, but the bottomline is that viewers are mature enough to judge what is good or bad.
On television, it is important to control family viewing time in some way and create time slots where adult programming is allowed. These practices are followed the world over, but we suffer from the knee-jerk syndrome. Who knows, the next CBFC chairperson will have a different set of rules. Nothing is constant.