Street Censorship Shardul Bhardwaj
The debate does not continue because nothing else of this nature
has happened again. I am very curious to see what will happen once
we open our play which is about a gay love story in the city.
The question is what the audience does when a case of active
street censorship takes place in an auditorium. The ones who
engage in the act of stopping a show are also performing because
the audience is passively viewing the act. These people who assume
the role of constables of Indian culture succeed in giving successful
performances all over India only because the other side sits passive
in most cases. The above mentioned case is a one of incident.
Most of the plays banned in India have not been first banned by
authorities. There has been massive outrage against plays like
which was about Gandhi’s assassin, the crowd started burning
tyres and buses without looking into the content of the play.
The play had been running with full houses for 17 shows. Those
audiences of those 17 shows had almost nothing to say against
this authoritarian censorship. This led to the government banning
the play in Maharashtra due to security purposes. Such cases have
come up in Gujarat, Mumbai, Pune and Delhi. In fact in many
cases the authorities have resorted to banning plays for political
reasons while the ostensible reason given has been security
purposes. The authorities have gotten away in many cases until a
court intervention because there have been umpteen number of
cases where the street censors have taken up the role of critic and
scholar, there has been no opposition from the audiences and civil
society in such cases.