[atlasvoice]

Published date: Free Press Bulletin

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OBSCENITY. Vulgar display. Indecent exposure. Suggestive gestures. We’ve been hearing a lot of such phrases, ever since the Cinematograph (Censorship) Act was passed in 1952. Even today, they look back with nostalgia to the days when there were kissing scenes in Hindi films, and Himansu Rai is an often-mentioned name. 

Ever since 1952, the audience has had the privilege of perching on ringside seats and watching the tussle between progressive filmmakers and the statute and morality-conscious Censor Board. The struggle, to use an Americanism, has been “real keen”. And it promises to be keener. 

The more foreign films a filmmaker gets to see here, the greater the ‘inspiration he draws. Film festivals have become occasions for giving our repressed sexual drives an outlet, and there are incredibly wild scenes when tickets for a movie like Godfather are on sale. During the recent festival in Bombay, a number of journalists who got to see most of the films screened were flooded with telephone calls from eager friends with questions like “which movie has the hottest scene?” and “are there any frontal nude shots?” There was that ridiculous rush for tickets for a film titled Matanza, because people had heard it was a really ‘blue’ movie. And there were thousands of sheepish faces when it was discovered that this Matanza was a15-minute documentary on fishing! 

On the sidelines, our festival jurists and foreign-returned editors complain in woebegone articles that films like Last Tango In Paris or Savages will never be commercially released in this country. We tend to overlook the fact that such movies are not all nudity, but that they have psychological and social messages too. 

We’re thousands of miles away from the Scandinavians, even in matters of sex. There the sex films have come and gone, and the Danes and the Swedes have brought undiluted sex to the man in the street. And today, when the over sated populace there is clamouring for ‘cleaner’ cinema, we find ourselves clamouring for the remnants of that Culture of Fornication. 

Our sole “sexstone” so far has been the Khosla Report. We enjoy reading about Simi suing a ‘progressive’ editor for publishing a nude still of hers from Siddhartha, (although both privately agree that it was good publicity). We are envious of Shashi Kapoor because he’s the only Hindi star to have acted in so many English films, and consequently the only one to have kissed so many times on the screen. The kiss, to us, is the zenith of sexual independence. 

Isn’t is a tragedy that some of our most virile celluloid males should die unkissed? We are compensated for this lacuna by the legions of young, nubile heroine-aspirants who willingly pose for two-piece bikini-clad pin-ups. 

Our puritans agree that the age of abstinence died with the Mayflower, and that fleshly indulgence is the fashion of the day. But, they counter, consider our history, our culture, our basically religious and uncorrupted gentle herds of humans. Promiscuity is the opium of the decadent West, they say. Copulation is for the dogs, they insist. Look at the drug-stuffed wreck-age out there, they finish, pointing to the setting sun. 

But then we’ve forgotten our Ingenious story-writers. Necessity is the mother of invention, they mumble, and proceed to give us more violence and more suggestion. And so we arrive at a new milestone in both with the seventy-millimetre, stereophonic Sholay. And the weary Censors decide to slap a ‘U’ Certificate on the film, and Khushwant Singh begs to differ. 

Freud would have called it “Titillatory Gratification”, this cartoon of our audiences licking their chops and, in the sleazier cinema houses, wolf-whistling when a Helen or a Faryal or some other “sultry, seductive siren” bares her legs in a “sizzling cabaret number.” To cap this pathetic, clevage-ridden situation, we have to swallow Bindu’s claim to the title of Hindi filmdom’s Sex Symbol. 

Our lyricists prove equally Imaginative, and we get to hear umpteen love poems frilled out by Ms Bhosle and Ms Mangeshkar to the accompaniment of a sixty-piece orchestra. All that the producer producer has to do is to ask the lyricist to toss in some masala, and he can be sure his L.P. will sell like hot kababs. 

The cabaret sequence has thus proved to be a sure-fire box-office magnet. The recent ban on drinking scenes would have knocked out an important prop for the cabaret scene from under the scriptwriters. Nevertheless, the cabaret scene continues to be a favourite, and the audience loves getting lost in the sequined, wriggling cacophony that the dance director concocts. To the saner sections of filmgoers, however, the cabaret has become more of a danse macabre. 

Stripping is a topic for intense debating. Entire interviews with heroines revolve around the question “Will she strip or won’t she strip?” We get to read titles like “I will not strip, says —,’ and “I would strip if it had any artistic significance—,” All the same, we have only a few stray Chetnas to keep up the charade. 

It’s time we solved this continuing state of hypocrisy. It’s time we paid attention to what D. H. Lawrence wrote: “They in-sist,” he said, “that a film-heroine shall be a neuter, a sexless thing of washed-out purity. They in-sist that real sex-feeling shall only be shown by the villain or the villainess….” And to what Theodore Schroeder wrote in “A Challenge To The Sex Censors”: 

“Once let the public become sufficiently clean-minded to allow every adult access to all that is to be known about the psychology, physiology, hygiene and ethics of sex, and in two generations we will have a new humanity, with more health and joy, fewer wrecked nerves, and almost no divorces….”