Bollywood is cleaner; Censor scissors southern films more

Contrary to popular perception, Bollywood is not the bad boy of Indian cinema. Tamil and Telgu cinema are worse than Bollywood when it comes to violence and showing women in bad light in celluloid. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 9, 2013, 23:58:21 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Contrary to popular perception, Bollywood is not the bad boy of Indian cinema. Tamil and Telgu cinema are worse than Bollywood when it comes to violence and showing women in bad light in celluloid.

The Indian cinema's watchdog - the Censor Board - had to use its scissors more on regional cinema from southern India than the usual culprit Bollywood to ensure that the movies are fit for screening even under adult category.

Information provided by the board under Right To Information Act to Pune based Vihar Druve shows that since 2008 the maximum number of cuts imposed were on Tamil films followed by Tamil, Kannada and Hindi films.

In the five year period, the board cut 592 scenes from Tamil films, 509 from Telgu and 457 on Kannada films. Hindi was fourth in the list with 222 cuts even though it had maximum number of films cleared by the board during the period.

Analysis of the data shows that the board had to cut a scene from every second Tamil and Telgu films whereas in case of Bollywood the rate was one scene in every four films. Proportion of the cuts applied to the total number of movies cleared in other regional language movies such as Bhojpuri, Marathi and Gujarati during this period was higher than Bollywood.

But, the cuts in movies had irked noted film-makers. At a recent conference to celebrate 100 years of Indian cinema, film directors like Ramesh Sipply of Sholay fame and K Hariharan from southern cinema expressed their anguish at unnecessary intrusion in the creative work by the board.

"It is time to disband a board which is colonial remnant of attempt to restrict freedom of expression," Hariharan had said.

The I&B ministry officials had, however, defended the board but agrees that there was a need to have a re-look at rules and make them more industry friendly. "Many scenes have been allowed in recent years which would have been a clear no in the past," said a senior censor board official, explaining that the board has moderated with time.

Movies such as Delhi Belly, Dirty Picture, Vishwapooram and Aandhi had trouble with the Censor Board in recent past. The board had also been under attack for being a moral inspector for the cinema.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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