Censor board’s three monkeys

The sparkling dome of the Taj Mahal in Agra has been witness to the Bharatiya Janata Party the reigning patron of the rewriting of history winning the Lok Sabha elections here since 2009 Agra is indeed the city that should be excited over watching the film The Taj Story which due to be released this week recycles the discredited theory that Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan converted a temple into a wondrous monument of love mdash Taj Mahal mdash to his wife Mumtaz MahalInstead therersquos a sense of foreboding among members of the Tourism Guild of Agra Its former president Rajiv Saxena said The Taj Story resorts to fiction to provoke emotions and distort history by disregarding archaeological facts and textual evidence ldquoWe will not allow the Taj Mahal to be ridiculed or diminished by unfounded claims The Tourism Guild of Agra strongly condemns rejects and distances itself from such misleading narrativesrdquoSaxenarsquos sense of history is lacking in members of the Central Board of Film Certification mdash sardonically dubbed the lsquocensor boardrsquo mdash who cleared the Taj Story They ostensibly chose to gloss over the judiciaryrsquos repeated dismissal of petitions seeking to have the Taj Mahal declared a temple and also the Archaeological Survey of Indiarsquos assertion in a 2017 affidavit to an Agra court that the Taj Mahal is a tomb not a templeDebunked has also been The Taj Storyrsquos attempt to create a mystery regarding the 22 locked rooms in the monumentrsquos basement These rooms ASI officials have said originally constituted an arched corridor to which doors were attached at a later date to better regulate the flow of tourists No inscriptions are in these room nor images of any Hindu deity These details establish that The Taj Story is one big lie about Indiarsquos pastAll imaginings of the documented past are fictitious or grossly exaggerated in the sense that these couldnrsquot possibly have happened in the manner usually depicted in Indian cinema These portrayals until the last 10 years were largely romances or expressions of valour and patriotism offending none But now as in politics so in films history is being relentlessly mined to manufacture hate For instance The Taj Storyrsquos trailer portrays Shah Jahan as a destroyer of temples incapable of conceiving as exquisite a monument as the TajThe Taj Story is an addition to the list of films in which Muslims are projected as villains who perpetrated extreme violence on Hindus or are a drag on the nation Think Chhaava The Bengal Files The Udaipur Files The Kashmir Files The Kerala Story Hamare Baarahhellip the list is longAntiMuslim films are often justified as dramatic renderings of recorded histories and legends whether authentic or dubious Yet the censor boardrsquos seemingly laissezfaire attitude to films on the past and present of Muslims is in sharp contrast to its queasy sensitivity regarding depictions of the Statersquos selective brutality and the malaise of casteism which too have been extensively documentedTake Honey Trehanrsquos Punjab lsquo95 a biopic on human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra who was disappeared even as he was investigating the abduction and extrajudicial killings of citizens by the Punjab Police Submitted to the censor board in 2023 itrsquos still stuck there with 127 cuts demanded of it ldquoThe 127 cuts are not on the film but on the democracyrdquo Trehan said in an interviewSandhya Surirsquos Santosh narrates the story of a police constable who discovers that a Muslim has been wrongly accused of raping and murdering a Dalit girl The weaving together of police conduct and the victimisation of Dalits and Muslims had the mighty censors demand according to Suri cuts running into several pages effectively aborting Santoshrsquos screening Homebound celebrating the camaraderie between a Dalit and a Muslim escaped with just 11 cuts perhaps because the two friends endure discrimination without challenging the State as is expected of their communitiesNineteenthcentury social revolutionary Jyotirao Phule railed against casteism and Brahminism in his writings but the censors insisted on modifications to his biopic ordering that caste names and a reference to ldquoManursquos system of casterdquo be removed In Dhadak 2 love trumps caste but not the censors who sliced scenes from the movieOverthetop platforms donrsquot require a priori approval for streaming a film but they have taken to selfcensoring themselves with the severity of the censor board lest Hindutva trolls entangle them in court cases or the BJP government blocks them For instance Netflix financed Dibakar Banerjeersquos Tees a story of the PanditMuslim relationship in Kashmir but shied away from platforming it SonyLIV reneged on its announcement to screen Arun Karthickrsquos Nasir which narrates the experiences of a Muslim salesman in a city reeling under HindutvaItrsquod seem the censor board like Mahatma Gandhi has ldquothree monkeysrdquo mdash or principles mdash for judging a film Does it portray the State darkly Does it refer to caste conflict Does it treat Muslims with empathy without alluding to their villainy A yes to any of these three questions will have the censors scissor the film to feed the dystopian fantasy of a new India where hatred is entertainmentThe writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon Challenging CasteSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper