Udta Punjab: Indian Censorship on a High

In recent weeks, the Indian media has been all about the number of cuts Udta Punjab was about to suffer. Fortunately, Udta Punjab is not a person; it’s a Bollywood movie that deals with the issue of drug abuse and drug smuggling in the state of Punjab in northwestern India. The title literally means “Flying Punjab” in Hindi and was aptly rendered into English as “Punjab on a High.” (The title should also be pronounced more like Oortah Punjab, the “d” in Udta being a cumbersome, colonial English way of spelling the Hindi retroflex “ra.”)

Udta Punjab ran into controversies in both India and Pakistan from the start. The biggest moral charge levied by the Indian censors against the film is that it promotes the partaking of drugs. This accusation is unfounded. One of the movie’s protagonists, a popular musician named Tommy (played by the famous Bollywood actor Shahid Kapoor) is an addict that at the beginning has no issues with singing about drugs and a rules-free lifestyle. Yet, he comes to a realization that his songs and the example set by him in personal life corrupt the minds of his audience. And there is a heroine (yes, heroine, not heroin), a poor migrant worker played by the actress Alia Bhatt whose attempt to sell a packet of white powder that she had chanced upon changes her life from miserable to much worse. By no stretch of imagination can these instances serve as evidence of the movie’s call to consume narcotics. The other main protagonists also turn out to be fighting against a drug dealers” mafia. It is worth adding that the movie’s producer is Anurag Kashyap, “the angry man of Bollywood,” who does not shy away from difficult subjects and loves experimenting with various kinds of movie forms. One of the movies once directed by him is No Smoking which, as even the title implies, supports the idea of smoking cigarettes as much as Udta Punjab promotes the idea of drug abuse.

Yet the Revising Committee of the Central Board of Film Certification – an Indian central government body that hands out pre-release certification for movies deciding which kind of audience they are suitable for  – suggested a number of changes to be made in the film before it could be given the “A” (for adults only) certificate.

The list of proposed cuts is telling. First, the censors wanted to free the movie from any kind of vulgar vocabulary, such as the term behenchod (“sisterf**ker”). To be sure, such strong words, while readily heard in the spoken language, do not appear on Indian movie screens and would be cut out from most, if not all films meant for general audiences. Similarly, a few scenes – such as of Tommy urinating on his audience and of a Sikh man scratching his bottom – have been found to be obscene; the close-ups during the scenes of ingesting drugs were also to be erased. Yet, the other suggested changes are far more questionable and not so typical (one Indian medium even termed them “bizarre”). The censors sought to delete the signboard with the name “Punjab” at the beginning of the movie and leave out references to the state or any city within it, occurring either in dialogue or in the background. In other words, the government body wanted to hide the fact that it the plot is taking place in Punjab, despite the obvious truth shown in the title. Should the change be made, the movie would depict a nameless border area… which most of the audience would guess to be Punjab anyway, as parts of the dialogues and songs are in the Punjabi language.

In my view, the board clearly went overboard with its political correctness, even more by recommending deletion of the words: “Election,” “MP” [Member of Parliament], “party” from “party worker,” “MLA Punjab” [Member of the Legislative Assembly of the state of Punjab] and “Parliament.” Clearly the body did not want any implication that a politician may be a linked to the drug-dealing mafia. These suggestions were interestingly summarized with the call that the movie open with the following disclaimer:

“The film focuses on the rising menace of drugs and the war against drugs and is an attempt to show the ill-effects of drugs on today’s youth and the social fabric. We acknowledge the battle against drugs being fought by the Government and police. But this battle cannot be won unless the people of India unite against the menace.”

Thus, the stress was to be placed also on the government’s role, while simultaneously the censors wanted to delete all references to politics from the dialogue.

Political?

Some claim that the reaction was political. The representatives of Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), the party ruling in the state of Punjab, claimed (apparently without real evidence) that the movie was supported by their political rivals (the Aam Aadmi Party) and made with the objective of “defaming” the Punjabi people. Yet, it should be added that the SAD government in Punjab did not ban the movie in its state, something a state government is entitled to do within India’s federal structure. Others point out that there was a case of a SAD politician being linked to the drug mafia and that there is a similarity to this story in the movie plot. According to some, the fact that SAD is in coalition with the party ruling all of India (the Bharatiya Janata Party) explains why so much pressure was mounted to evict any mention of Punjab from Udta Punjab. The film was also cut in 100 places in Pakistan (which shares with India the same legacy of the British colonial system of movie certification) where the censors claimed that the work is “anti-Pakistan.” As the broader, historical area of Punjab had been divided between India and Pakistan in 1947, the movie’s idiom and style can be easily understood on the other side of the border. But another thing shared on both sides is narcotics. Pakistan is flooded with opiates produced in Afghanistan and a large quantity of these are being smuggled on to India, precisely through the divided Punjab – which is one of the reasons for the state’s rising drug abuse problem. Udta Punjab is not against Pakistan: It simply points out that smuggling is a part of the problem. Thus, the alleged “anti-Pakistan” flavor of the movie is as true as the allegation that it is a film “defaming” Punjab. In both cases, politicians and government body members sought to apply political agenda to a work that points out to a dire social problem that cuts across federal and international borders.

Yet, my assumption is that the movie would have faced similar problems even without the allegations of a political agenda. The deeper problem is how the government bodies – and, in fact, certain segments of the audience – react to works that try to deal with the real and internal problems of the country in a straightforward manner, rather than indulging in the sugar-coated escapism for which Bollywood has become famous. Despite its high-profile cast, Udta Punjab is not a typical Hindi movie. It is not only vulgar and blunt but also harsh and brutal. But this is exactly a kind of movie which would usually be forced to remain on the margins of Bollywood.

The whole process of censorship in India is often understood as dealing not with the way of saying something but with selecting what the work should say at all. Thus, the fight with social problems is interpreted by some as one based on silencing any mention of those problems in the movies. The film certification system contains elements of the colonial and Victorian attitudes left by the British. A similar case is the (also colonial-era) law that deals with outraging “religious feelings” and which is still part of the penal (rather than the civil) code. This section of the code is so general in its wording that any member of a community can try to construct his reaction to a work as a “religious outrage.” The law has often been used to ban or withdraw works that were understood to in some way attack elements of religion. Foreign works dealing with difficult Indian issues are particularly prone to be condemned as “anti-Indian,” even if they deal with problems existing not only in India and problems that ordinary Indians are equally critical of (such as with the recent case of the banned Daughter of India documentary that told the gripping story of one gang-rape). If they deal with issues specific to India, they can be attacked as being “against Indian culture” (as with the movie Water, which showed that the issue of widow abuse is directly linked to how widows were being treated in traditional Hindu societies).

This story would be incomplete without mentioning the outcome. The certification board suggestions were challenged in court and the Bombay High Court found most of them to be baseless, agreeing only that the scene of the star urinating on his audience should be omitted. If the certification board was more radical in its approach than usual, the court appeared to be more liberal than before, since, as I have mentioned before, the vulgar vocabulary and obscene sequences of certain sorts usually do not make it to the screen (though many sexually charged scenes are pardoned). The “Flying Punjab” was subsequently released and exceled at the box office. It earned a handsome amount in its opening weekend of 18-19 June, the controversy around it possibly adding fuel to its popularity (the soundtrack rights had earlier been sold for a record sum, by Bollywood standards). It is not obvious, therefore, how many Indians share the censors’ view that dealing with social problems is best done by remaining silent.