BANNED IN INDIA: MY CENSORSHIP BATTLE
On March 5, 2015, the Indian Censors declared that the film Unfreedom couldn’t be certified for public viewing in India. In the following satiric piece by the film’s director, Raj Amit Kumar, based on actual statements made by the Indian Censors about his film, he is questioning not just their decision about his film, but the validity of their authority to censor any film.
BOLLYWOOD BOOK REVIEWS
For abecedarians of popular Indian cinema—coming out of the Bombay film industry and produced primarily in the Hindi language with a mix of Urdu, English, and Arabic—Tejaswini Ganti’s book Bollywood lives up to its titular expectation: It is a guidebook to popular Hindi cinema. The book is for a general, quick, one-evening study of Hindi cinema, clearly written, keeping a Western audience in mind …
THE LOWER-STALL: A SLEAZE-SEX FILM INDUSTRY IN INDIA
Outside Naaz (Dignified), a run down movie theatre in Bombay,1 a hoarding reads Kaliyon Ka Chaman.2 With its sexual connotations the title poorly translates as “young girls bodies.” Some thirty or forty men, a little tense and a little excited, on a Sunday evening hide from each other, making sure that any familiar faces do not see them…
REPRESENTATION OF MARGINAL IDENTITIES AND SUBJECTIVITIES IN THE WORKS OF WOMEN FILMMAKERS IN INDIAN CINEMA
Women’s sexuality has been presented in popular Indian cinema through patriarchal perspective – women are either sexualized objects or desexualized caretakers. Meaning productions of morality, nationality, ownership of the body and female-sexuality-as-threat marks women’s bodies…