A Student of Resistance

My Mumbai Mirror column:

As India's students speak out, it seems worth recalling a film about a student who defied another regime

Sophie Scholl was 21 when she was executed by the Nazi stateCharged with having distributed leaflets co-authored by a non-violent political resistance group called the White Rose, she was guillotined after a trial on 22 February 1943. The 2005 German film Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, directed by Marc Rothermund from a script by Fred Breinersdorfer, dramatises her interrogation, trial and execution. Though perhaps “dramatises” is not the best word for a film so deliberately spare, choosing to rely almost entirely on the historical transcripts left behind by the Gestapo (the Nazi Secret Police) and the “People's Court” -- and thus unfolding, to a great extent, within the confines of an investigator's office and a courtroom.

Calling themselves the White Rose, the student group to which Sophie belonged brought out six different leaflets between June 1942 and February 1943. Distributed mainly in Munich, with copies also appearing in Stuttgart, Cologne, Vienna, Freiburg, Chemnitz, Hamburg and Berlin, the pamphlets warned Germans that Hitler was leading them into the abyss, and called for people to speak out against Nazi terror. “Support the Resistance Movement!” they urged, for “Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator-states”.

Those words from eight decades ago leap off the page in a month in which India has seen massive protests against a new Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAA), which together with the proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC), introduces religion as a criterion for Indian citizenship for the first time in the history of our republic. Watching Sophie Scholl, it seems no coincidence that the resistance to the CAA and NRC, which has gone far beyond criticism of the letter of the law to a sorely-needed defence of the secular spirit of our Constitution and of our democracy itself, has been spearheaded by students.

The power of Sophie Scholl: The Last Days is in the details – especially as you watch it in 2019 India, where everything from the aesthetic remodelling of middle class fashion to the lines of 'argument' used by Fascist officials in the film are chillingly recognizable from our real-life political situation today. The junior officer of the Third Reich who hustles the film's 21-year-old student heroine into the custody of Investigator Mohr, for instance, has a moustache clearly modelled on Hitler's. Later, as Sophie (Julia Jentsch) is led into her cold prison cell, we hear in the background one of the Fuhrer's numerous speeches to the nation on the radio, his rasping voice rising to the familiar nationalist frenzy as he identifies an internal enemy. “Total war is the demand of the hour,” he proclaims, to loud clapping from his audience. “We must also put an end to the bourgeois attitude which we have also seen in this war. The danger facing us is enormous. The time has come to remove our gloves and use our fists...”.

Many of the arguments levelled by the Nazis against anyone who criticised their government are voiced in the film by Mohr and later, the infamous judge Roland Freisler. Over and over, we hear them berate these students as “parasites” and “spoiled brat[s] who foul [their] own nest[s], while others are dying on the front.” They are painted as ungrateful wretches who do not appreciate that they are only able to be students “thanks to the Fuhrer.” Time and again, too, Sophie's refusal to buckle under pressure drives Mohr off the deep end. “How dare you raise your voice!” he shouts at her, the irony of the statement clearly invisible to him. “The Fuhrer and the German people are protecting you.”

Reading a pamphlet in which Sophie's brother Hans argued that the war needed to be brought to an end and expressed his hatred for “the way we treat the Occupied Territories”, Mohr yells: “This is troop demoralisation and high treason!” The insistence on celebration of the army, and the idea that being critical of militarisation is antinational will sound familiar to anyone who has lived through the last five years of BJP rule.

Some of the film's best moments come when Rothermund focuses on the bafflement of the fascist in the face of openness: familial, but also individual. It is a fascinating fact that Scholl had been, for a time, a member of a Nazi youth group, before she and her brother and his friends began to question what the regime wanted them to believe, based on things they had witnessed on the Eastern Front as well as information they had begun to access – about institutionalised violence against Jews and disabled people, among others. Asked why her father – a known critic of the regime who had served a sentence for describing Hitler as “God's scourge to mankind” – had even let Sophie join the Nazi Girls Organisation, she replies, “Our father never influenced us politically.” “Typical for a democrat,” sneers Mohr, lighting another cigarette. “Why did you join?” Sophie's reply should resonate with all Indians who live with the promise of Acche Din: “I heard that Hitler would lead our country to greatness and prosperity and ensure that everyone had work and food and was free and happy.”

I will leave you with what to me is the film's most important exchange. Mohr insists that what he is doing is only to execute the law of the land. “What can we rely on if not the law?” he says. Sophie's answer seems simple, but it is one all of us need to hear: “On your conscience!”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Dec 2019

The life therapeutic

My Mirror column:

A new webseries called Sex Education offers a rare mixture of insight, humour and warmth on sex and its many minefields. It’s about British teens, but might work well for a lot of us.

An indie publisher recently spoke at the launch of a book called Why Read? about how her father's exhortation to read and “try everything” led to her borrowing Erica Jong's 1970s novel Fear of Flying from his bookshelf and trying to make sense of its era-defining portrait of angst-ridden female sexuality, at age 12. She had me smiling in recognition. Different book(s), same story.

Reading as a way for young people learn about sex has only amplified in scope in the post-internet era, though massively supplemented and likely often superseded by a visual media explosion that we couldn't have dreamt of growing up in the '90s. While mainstream television (not just in India) remains somewhat coy about sex and sexuality, basing its self-censorship on the somewhat fictive vision of the family audience, the internet now offers wide-open access to just about Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask). If you have a few minutes alone with a data-enabled mobile phone, you can now ask Google.

 

While this easy, anonymous access to sexual – both information and imagery – is a vast improvement on the secret economy of traded porn mags/videos that once undergirded school life (with very few girls ever seeing any of it), even contemporary young people could do with some curation of what's out there. Because there's plenty, and the democracy of plenty necessarily means contradiction and confusion. Not to mention the fact that most sex-related content is porn, and most of that porn is meant for the bulk of existing consumers, i.e. straight men, and that the set parameters of mainstream straight-man porn seem to limit the possibilities of sex more than open them up.

It is into this eager but utterly confused universe that Netflix dropped, earlier this year, the first season of a series called Sex Education, created by the playwright Laurie Nunn. A comedy about horny teenagers, packed with high school stereotypes – the nerdy boy, the rich clique, the overachieving headboy, the slutty girl – may seem like a predictable sort of place for predictable sort of raunch. But Nunn does several truly sharp, fun things. For one, she gives us American high school stock characters but from very British family backgrounds, including a repressed, disciplinarian headmaster. Second, all the stereotypes are undercut – or perhaps I should say layered by the addition of unexpected details: the girl known for promiscuity likes sex but also likes 19^th century feminist writers, the overachieving headboy is on anxiety medication, the girl who's always got a boyfriend doesn't actually have any idea what she likes in bed.

 

Nunn also scores by making her primary character not just a nerdy boy who's still a virgin, but a nerdy boy whose lack of sexual experience in practice is compensated for by his seemingly instinctive grasp of sex – in theory. The 'therapy business' is orchestrated by 'slutty' smart girl Maeve Wiley, who happens to witness the protagonist Otis give a male schoolmate sex-related advice – and then learns, on the female grapevine, that the advice worked.

 

Nunn's character arcs and subplots display a markedly rare and genuine ability to see the many things sex can be to different people, or to the same person at different times: clandestine but exciting, boring but display-worthy, a desperate object of desire or a source of terrible anxiety, obligatory or shocking or just overhyped.

Apart from the warmth and humour (and when it chooses that register, sexiness), what I think I really enjoyed about the show was its ability to both take therapy’s insights seriously and simultaneously make fun of it a little, see its blind spots. 

 

Otis turns himself into the school's secret sex therapist, using a certain kind of formal language that he's absorbed from living with his (actually qualified) sex therapist mother Jean. The show treads a fun line, between showing Jean’s self-consciously verbose therapist persona as funny and her analytic work as actually valuable. And what we see Otis do repeatedly is to run with his instinct – about relationships, selfhood, identity and shame – sometimes goofing up, but revealing his own vulnerabilities and thus, perhaps, coming across as a warmer, nicer, more identifiable therapist than the therapist.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 April 2019.

Game of thrones

My Mirror column:

Despite its '70s sarkaari aesthetic (Akbar Hotel's modernist Mughalia and Doordarshan-style songs), Kissa Kursi Ka is a piece of our cinematic past that speaks uncannily to the present.

“Main pratigya karta hoon ki ya toh bhrashtachar ko khatam kar doonga, ya khud khatam ho jaaunga [I swear that I will either wipe out corruption, or be wiped out myself],” announces the nation's supreme leader, thumping his chest in emotion as a roomful of parliamentarians clap obligingly.

Seem familiar? Here's another scene from the same film: the Great Leader is terribly under the weather. He lies in bed, complaining of various sorts of discomfort. His physician can find nothing wrong with him. He asks the Great Leader's private secretary -- who goes by the darkly ironic name of Deshpal -- if the GL has inaugurated anything recently. No, muses Deshpal, but there's something on the schedule. At the very mention of an inauguration, the Great Leader jumps up, cured.

Watching the brilliant Manohar Singh's performance in Kissa Kursi Ka in mid-2019 produces a strange sense of the uncanny. Fact can often feel stranger than fiction, more so when fiction manages to presage fact. In this case, it feels like it's done so by four decades. Kissa Kursi Ka was submitted to the Central Board of Film Certification in April 1975, but it did not see the light of day until 1978, after Emergency had been lifted. (Interestingly, Amrit Nahata made the film while still a Congress MP, though he became a Janta Party member soon after.)

Even if it hadn't had its reels infamously destroyed by Sanjay Gandhi (under the supervision of his yesman VC Shukla), Kissa Kursi Ka wasn't the sort of film that was likely to become a big hit. Now freely available on Youtube, Nahata's political fable has the bizarre quality of seeming even more apt in 2019.

Nahata used the tale of a poor man coached for an electoral win by a small coterie of kingmakers to depict what democracy can look like in a poor country at the mercy of power-hungry politicians. Many scenes are simplistic, but effective. In one, the new President is visited by an industrialist who “wants to solve the problems of the poor.” “Give me 10 crores,” he says, “and I'll set up one factory to make small cars. Another to make toys, to keep the people amused.” Leader Saheb initially balks, but since Garibdas donated five lakhs to his campaign, he is "mortgaged" to him. (The reference to the people's car factory acquired a bizarre layer when the Maruti factory became the site of the film's burning by Sanjay Gandhi).

Later, the transformed Manohar Singh, having gone from Gangu the jamura's grimy ganji to a maroon suit and Meerschaum pipe worthy of the 70s villain, decides that the country must be distracted from his economic failures. He makes a secret visit to the neighbouring kingdom, Andher Nagri, not to make peace but to propose a 15-day war. “Pandrah din ki ek ladaai ho jaye. Tum deshbhakti ka bhaashan dena, hum bhi deshbhakti ka bhaashan denge.... Deshbhakti ka yeh nasha paanch saal toh chalega hi. Our seats will be safe another five years. Then? We'll play another tournament.”

“Janta ko busy rakhna zaroori hai,” agrees primary kingmaker Meera (an unrecognizably youthful Surekha Sikri, enjoying herself to the hilt). The strategy is apparently foolproof enough to succeed even forty years later. Where demonetisation fails, Balakot will work.

To make its point, the darkly comic KKK steps away from the realist path. One of Nahata's favoured techniques is animation: for instance, the kursi throws off the President who's spinning excitedly 

around on it. The chair then delivers a set of eight commandments about how she should be treated: she assumes divinity, demanding worship. Like Mrinal Sen's Chorus, which presciently released a year before Emergency, KKK also uses real footage of marching boots, soldiers at the border and assemblies of protestors.

But the film's most overused form is visual allegory, casting Shabana Azmi as an annoyingly gendered personification of the country's populace. Azmi as the mute “Janta” spends the film in a fetching yellow blouse and green sari with a big Telugu-style bindi, as if she's walked out of her debut film, Shyam Benegal's Ankur (1974). Awakened from slumber by the new leader's promises, Janta is oppressed but hopeful -- only to be crushed each time she takes his new schemes at their word.

Perhaps the most chillingly resonant part of KKK is Ganga Ram's speech in Parliament, addressing members who are losing confidence in his fake promises: “Yaad rakhiye, you have not made me president. The people have. And the people are with me.”

Even as the country collapses around him, the Great Leader remains convinced by his own fictions. “I want to know what I've done that has been so bad for the country,” he whines and then preens. “Every developing country has to go through troubles. My country, too, is on the path to progress... Today we are not poor, backward, weak. Not one person is unemployed today. Everyone has been admitted in the army or police. Our janta is now filled with a new josh, a new swabhimaan. Isliye desh ki janta mere saath hai. Ab aap ko faisla karna hai ki aap kiske saath hain [Now you have to decide, who are you with]?"

The crazed Manohar Singh points at the leader of the opposition, but really, he's looking at all of us.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 April 2019

The Sharpshooter

My Mirror column:

Ismat Chughtai would have turned 107 on August 21. Who was she and why should she be the subject of a column on cinema?

The Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai (right) in a still from Shyam Benegal's 1857-set drama, Junoon (1978). Also seen: Jennifer Kendal Kapoor (left) & a very young Nafisa Ali

It was in 1942 that Ismat Chughtai wrote what still remains her most talked-about story. ‘Lihaaf’ (The Quilt) first came out in an Urdu journal called Adab-e-Lateef and then in a collection of Ismat’s short stories published by Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi.

In December 1944, Ismat and her literary contemporary Saadat Hasan Manto were charged with obscenity. The second and definitive hearing in the case took place in Lahore in November 1946. Here is Ismat, in her autobiography Kaghazi Hai Pairahan, recounting with not a little relish how the case fell apart in the courtroom:

The witnesses who had turned up to prove “Lihaaf” obscene were thrown into confusion by my lawyer... After a good deal of reflection one of them said: “This phrase ‘… drawing lovers’ is obscene.”

“Which word is obscene, ‘draw’ or ‘lover’?” The lawyer asked.


“Lover,” replied the witness a little hesitantly.

“My lord, the word ‘lover’ has been used by great poets most liberally. It is also used in naats, poems written in praise of the Prophet. God-fearing people have accorded it a very high status.” “But it’s objectionable for girls to draw lovers to themselves,” said the witness. “Why?” “Because… because it’s objectionable for good girls to do so.”

“And if the girls are not good, then it is not objectionable?”

“Mmm… no.”

“My client must have referred to the girls who were not good. Yes madam, do you mean here that bad girls draw lovers?”

“Yes.”

“Well, this may not be obscene. But it is reprehensible for an educated lady from a decent family to write about them.” the witness thundered.

“Censure it as much as you want. But it does not come within the purview of law.”

The issue lost much of its steam thereafter, writes Ismat. The implied sexual relationship between an aristocratic woman and her devoted maid which made 'Lihaaf' so controversial in its time still remains a hot-button topic. Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya (2014) made a sidelong reference to Chughtai’s story while depicting the bond between Begum Para (Madhuri Dixit) and her maid Muniya (Huma Qureshi). A proper film adaptation by Rahat Kazmi is also in production, starring Tannishtha Chatterjee.

The division of the world into good girls and bad girls had always been of abiding interest to Ismat. The ninth of ten children, she grew up learning to ride and shoot and climb trees alongside her six brothers and three sisters. Her father, a deputy collector in places like Agra and Aligarh, was a remarkable man who gave all his children an education and the freedom to speak of anything under the sun. In a 1972 interview, Ismat attributed her early success as a writer to her frankness, and that frankness to her upbringing. “We were all frank, my father, my brothers, all of us. We never used to sit in separate groups, women in one place, men in another... We were all considered bold, rude and quarrelsome,” she told the Mahfil interviewer.


But her autobiography makes clear that her forthrightness was highly unusual for a young woman, getting her “bashed up often for telling the truth”. “Purdah had already been imposed on me, but my tongue was a naked sword,” she writes. Here is an example of Ismat’s sword, piercing through the hypocritical veil of 'decency': “The apparently shy and respectable girls... allowed themselves to be grabbed, hugged and kissed in bathrooms and in dark corners by young men who were related to their families. Such girls were considered modest.”


Ismat’s first visit to Bombay was as an inspector of municipal schools. She took the opportunity to reconnect with Shahid Latif, whom she had met in Aligarh and who worked in Bombay Talkies. Upon her urging, he took her to watch a film being shot. The lure of the cinema was a powerful one, and Ismat soon began writing scripts for films. Her first script — Ziddi — was bought by Ashok Kumar, then helping to run Bombay Talkies, for the highly impressive sum of Rs 20,000. To offer a comparison, Ismat tells us the heroine Kamini Kaushal, then already a star, was signed on for Rs 20,000, while Dev Anand — for whom this was one of his first roles — got Rs 6,000.

Between the late 1940s and late 1950s, Ismat went on to write scripts for many other films in Bombay. Of these, Aarzoo, Sheesha, Buzdil, Fareb, Darwaza, Lal Rukh, Society and Sone ki Chidiya were all produced and directed by Shahid Latif, who was by then her husband. But while some of these (Buzdil, Aarzoo and Sone ke Chidiya) were both commercial and critical successes, it is clear that Ismat's screenplays were necessarily a toned-down version of her literary self. (Asked by the 1972 Mahfil interviewer if there was “any adverse effect on writers who get involved in film writing”, Ismat burst out, “how can I say anything against films because it's through films that we’ve been fed!”)
The one film through which one can experience the unexpurgated Ismat is MS Sathyu's Garm Hava, whose portrait of a Muslim family remains the most nuanced cinematic depiction we have of the effects of Partition.

But Ismat also wrote about the film world. Her novel Ajeeb Aadmi ('A Very Strange Man') is about the talented director-producer Dharamdev, his Bengali wife Mangala who is a talented playback singer, and his affair with the actress Zarina which ends up devastating all their lives. The central characters were entirely recognisable, embedded though they were in a sharply realised fiction that shows exactly how power works in the film industry. They remain recognisable today, even though two of the three are long dead. Perhaps some day soon, someone will make the film, and Ismat’s naked sword will again shine in use.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Aug 2018.

The Year of Sex - I

My Mirror column:

Looking back at what sex has meant in 2017, both onscreen and off. The first of a two-part column.

Looking back at Hindi cinema in 2017, it seems to me that the theme of this year was sex. I’m not suggesting at all that we’ve suddenly got it all figured out; no, that we certainly haven’t. In the world outside the screen, the anxieties of politicians and principals alike coalesced around matters sexual – condom advertisements on television were banned as “indecent”, two teenagers were suspended from a school because they were seen hugging…. These anxieties reached ridiculous heights when it came to the silver screen. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) tried to block Lipstick Under My Burkha for its “lady-orientedness” and delayed the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer, When Harry Met Sejal because its trailer contained the word “intercourse”.

Later in the year, the international award-winner Sexy Durga was rechristened S Durga and then unceremoniously dropped from the Indian Panorama section of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), along with a Marathi film called Nude. A censored version of S Durga was later screened for the jury following a directive from the Kerala High Court.

But such anxiety is a barometer of cultural transformations. It should perhaps come as no surprise, then, that what did manage to reach our screens revealed a society in the midst of unbuttoning – and so intent on the task at hand that it no longer cares if some people are gaping.

The year began with Shlok Sharma’s wonderfully rich and strange debut, Haraamkhor, with a radically nonjudgemental portrait of sexual comingof-age that was buoyed by Shweta Tripathi’s simply stellar turn as the teenaged schoolgirl Sandhya. Less stark but equally significant was Vidya Balan’s thoroughly charming portrayal of the non-posh, non-svelte housewife in Tumhari Sulu. Balan’s channelling of her character’s warm, enthusiastic, sari-clad self into a public persona as radio jockey on a late-night-show gave us a rare model of sexiness based on being comfortable in one’s own skin.

Other female characters speaking of sex and actually acting on their desires appeared in Alankrita Shrivastava’s imperfect but pioneering film Lipstick Under My Burkha. The radicalness of these depictions came from their wrenching frankness about the body’s yearnings, forcing viewers to think about how the possibility of pleasure is suppressed by an overarching social discourse of shame.

Sex and shame were also on the menu in one of the year’s chirpiest films, Shubh Mangal Savdhan, with director RS Prasanna serving up the unspeakable subject of erectile dysfunction with remarkable warmth and wit. Ayushmann Khurana and Bhumi Pednekar followed up their previous pairing as a just-married-and-havingproblems couple in Dum Laga Ke Haisha with an often hilarious turn here, aided in no small measure by Seema Pahwa’s magisterial comic timing and Ali Baba, gufa and Chaalis Chor euphemisms.

Irreverent humour was crucial to another of the year’s most ambitious bad girl films, Simran. In one of the film’s emblematic dialogues, Kangana Ranaut’s Gujarati-American heroine Praful tells a joke. A small girl asks her mother, “What is a boyfriend?” “If you become a good girl, you will get one,” the mother says. “And if I become a bad girl?” the little girl asks. “Then you will get many!” concludes Praful, laughing hysterically. Praful’s guilt-free pursuit of the good life includes a happy hook-up with a stranger at the bar, made even more fun by her abandonment of the proceedings when she discovers he has no protection.

Something particularly pleasing about this year’s crop of films was that it wasn’t only bad girls who made out: whether it was Parineeti Chopra’s Bindu Shankar Narayanan in Meri Pyaari Bindu’s 80s Calcutta, or Anushka Sharma’s rural Punjabi poetess from a century ago in Phillauri, the good-girl-fromgood-family is now allowed to sleep with a lover without being disqualified from niceness.

Sex scenes of charm and intensity also appeared in films that weren’t necessarily ‘about’ sex at all – I think, for instance, of the spontaneous erotic encounter that sets Sandeep Mohan’s quirky road movie Shreelancer off in an atmospheric new direction, or the moving seduction of Rajkummar Rao’s bespectacled hero in a ratty bedroom in Trapped.

Sex in a ratty Mumbai bedroom also made an appearance in Tu Hai Mera Sunday, with Avinash Tiwary’s Rashid as the player who brings home a stream of attractive young women. But Tu Hai Mera Sunday, despite having several unexpurgated discussions of all sorts of things, seemed to me to hold back when it came to sex. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the film judges Rashid or his sexual partners as immoral (in fact it makes a point of having Rashid tell us – and his male buddies -- that these young women are all “decent”), I wondered why it needed to shake love apart from sex. Because sex, then, seems naturally to fall to the bottom, emerging somehow as the inferior of the two.

The question of sex versus love is of course, the great chestnut – and I shall return to it next week.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31 Dec 2017.

Lady-Oriented Lipstick Dreams

My Mirror column on 5 Mar:

Making sense of the CBFC’s recent ruling is tough, but not impossible. Our columnist reaches a speculative conclusion.

In a letter to Prakash Jha Productions, dated January 25, the Censor Board of Film Certification (CBFC) refused to certify for exhibition a Hindi feature film called Lipstick Under My Burkha, directed by Alankrita Srivastava.

The reasons for 'Certificate Refused' to the film, as stated by the CBFC were as follows: “The film is lady oriended, their fantasy above life. There are contanious sexual scenes, abusive words, audio pornography and a bit sensitive touch about one section of society.”

Yes, that's it, folks. So take a minute. Let the words sink in.

And now, shall we attempt to extract the CBFC's intended meaning from its garbled prose? Let's assume “lady oriended” to be an uncle-ish (and misspelt) version of 'women-oriented', or 'female-oriented'. The Oxford Dictionaries site online explains 'femaleoriented' as “Biased toward, dominated by, or designed for women.”

It doesn't take a genius to tell you that we don't have too many cultural products like that, not in India. But funnily, until the CBFC clarified matters, I had been fooled into believing that Uncle-jis across the land were cool with lady-oriented stuff. Because (a) it vaguely gestures to the West that Bollywood (thus India) can be modern, too, and (b) d-uh, men don't actually watch stuff made by or for women (In fact, most women don't either). So 'women-oriented' = simultaneously useful and harmless.

But clearly, having actually watched Srivastava's film, the CBFC's members – both men and women – have come to the conclusion that a certain sort of women-orientedness is dangerous stuff. The clue to why they think so is the CBFC's four-word phrase after “lady-oriended”: “their fantasy above life”. I have only seen the trailer of Lipstick, but it seems to be about four women from different backgrounds giving their long-fettered sexual desires a chance to escape into the real world. (The original title was Lipstick Wale Sapne: literally, Lipstick Dreams.)

Mamta Kale, CBFC member, told the Times of India that Lipstick is absolutely not about women’s empowerment. “Being a woman, you can talk about your sexual rights but you have to keep one thing in mind as to how you are showing that issue. Can families go together to watch such a movie? No, they cannot," pronounced Kale.

Kale's remarks reminded me that the CBFC in 2016 allowed Leena Yadav's Parched through, with the minimal blurring of a breast (in an almost-love-scene between two women) and the removal of some verbal abuses. Parched was also very much about women's sexual desires – except (a) the women in the film lived in rural Rajasthan and were horribly oppressed by men, which means that it was undeniably 'about women’s empowerment', and (b) as I wrote in this column, Parched is a feminist fairy tale. The realization of women's desires in Yadav's film takes the shape of a fantasy: the three friends abandon their context, rather than succeed in reshaping it. Perhaps in so doing, their fantasy doesn't threaten to go “above life”?

Another film – also featuring a sexually desirous young woman – that was held up for a year by the CBFC's rejection is Shlok Sharma's Haraamkhor. There, the CBFC objected that it “shows the teachers in a bad light, which is unacceptable to the society.” Guneet Monga, the film's producer, told Hindustan Times in June 2016 that she “tried to reason that these things do happen.” and that “In fact, the film’s director was inspired by real life stories.” The implicit argument there: life above fantasy.

Monga's line didn't work, however. Maybe because the CBFC doesn't actually like real life: not when it doesn't agree with their fantasy of what the world is? Happily, Haraamkhor finally released earlier in 2017, after the Film Certificate Appellate Tribunal (FCAT) reversed the CBFC's decision. Sharma's film is a dark, radical portrait of a young woman who embarks on a sexual relationship with her tuition teacher. But here I want to draw your attention to what the FCAT actually said in its decision: it suggested the film could be used “for furthering a social message and warning the girls to be aware of their rights”. We might also note here [Spoiler alert] that Haraamkhor is a tragedy. Sharma's intentions become irrelevant here, because the film can then be read as follows: Girl is misguided; terrible things happen; let that be a lesson to you.

Lady-orientedness, then, can be allowed in one of two cases. One, if it seems like it’s telling women that desire (outside of love and marriage) really doesn't pay. Or two, if it makes sure to suggest that real life, as the CBFC knows it, won't really be altered by it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Mar 2017.