Indian Cinematograph Committee
From Wikipedia,
The I C C was established by British Raj
in 1927 to "investigate the adequacy of censorship and the supposedly
immoral effect of cinematograph films", and subsequently the Indian Cinematograph Committee Evidence and Report 1927-1928 was published in the following year.[1][2]
Background
In the 1920s, just as the early twilight of the British Empire was approaching, a slightly familiar battle was fought, in a slightly unusual terrain, Cinema. The American film industry had by the twenties already started to dominate the global film market, with American films eclipsing English films in most parts of the British Empire. In response to a number of demands being made by the British film industry for the setting up of quotas in favour of Empire films in the colonies, and as a result of increasing anxiety about the spread of the new technology of cinema in the colonies, the colonial government put together a high level committee, the Indian Cinematograph Committee (“ICC”) to enquire into the working of cinema and censorship in India. The report, and the evidence of the ICC which ran into five volumes, and thousands of pages of oral and written testimonies makes for a fascinating document, which has unfortunately been ignored in most debates on film censorship.At the British Imperial conference held in England in 1926, a number of the delegates raised questions about the adequacy of film censorship to deal with the problems posed by the exhibition of American films. They were, in part, responding to the complaints registered by the Federation of British industries to the board of trade about what they considered to be a virtual monopoly enjoyed by American films within the empire.
This trade organization had represented their case not merely as a matter of protecting British business interests, but also because American films were "detrimental to British prestige and prejudicial to the interests of the empire, especially in the dominions which contains large coloured populations". In connection to these concerns, the imperial conference passed a resolution recommending that appropriate action be taken to combat the dominance of Hollywood's films by encouraging their production within the empire.
In a very significant report prior to the ICC, it was advocated that “Great Britain owes a duty to the dominions; the dominions to Great Britain and to each other; and India owes a duty first to herself....The film can as well display the ancient dignity of the Mahabharata as teach the Indian peasant the elements of hygiene and sanitation"
It is important to remember that the nationalist movement which was on
the rise, spurred on by a series of events including the formation of
the Home Rule league, agitations against the Jalianwala Bagh massacre
etc. helped to create the conditions under which the British empire
found itself in a slightly precarious and vulnerable phase, needing ways
to retain the symbolic fiction of the might of empire.
It in this
context, that claims were made of American films tarnishing the prestige
of the Empire by portraying scenes of immorality, vice and violence.
More particularly, because of the inability of the native to distinguish
between different classes of white people, they tended to think of all
of the portrayal as endemic to life in the west, and this degraded the
image of white women in the eyes of the lustful native men.
This is also
a period marked by the uncertainty of the effect of cinema, and
according to the British social Hygiene delegation that visited India
between 1926-27 (just prior to the setting up of the ICC), cinema was
the root cause of a large number of evils in India, They said that “in
every province that we visited the evil influence of cinema was cited by
educationists and representative citizens as one of the major factors
in lowering the standards of sex conduct and thereby tending to increase
the dissemination of disease"
An article published in the Westminster Gazzette in 1921 was widely
circulated amongst the provincial governments, and the article claimed
that "one of the reasons for the hardly veiled contempt of the native
Indian for us maybe found in the introduction and development of moving
pictures in India ...imagine the effect of such films on the oriental
mind. Like us, the Indian goes to see the movies, but he is not only
impressed by the story of the film, but by the difference in dress, in
customs and in morals. He sees our woman in the films in scanty garb. He
marvels at our heavy infantile humour - his own is on a higher and more
intellectual level; he forms his own opinions of our morals during the
mighty unrolled dramas of unfaithful wives and unmoral husbands, our
lightly broken promises, our dishonored laws. It is soaking into him all
the time, and we cannot be surprised at the outwards expression of this
absorption. It is difficult for the Britisher in India to keep up his
dignity, and to extol, or to enforce moral laws which the natives sees
lightly disregarded by the Britons themselves in the picture palace"
Similarly a 1920 report in Bioscope claimed that the main motivation of
these regulations was "the fact that there have been numerous complaints
that the films were being imported into India which hold up Europeans
to ridicule and lowered the native estimation of the white woman"
Similarly, Sir Hasketh Bell, a former colonial governor warned that “The
success of our government of subject races depends almost entirely on
the degree of respect that we can inspire”
The demands for the establishment of a Committee that would look into
the ways in which censorship, and other protective measures that could
be taken up to prevent the tarnishing of the might of the empire.
The
economic context, namely the trade rivalry that the British film
industry was engaged through 1920s in a competitive film market, with
film producers from the United States was always understated. The
argument of the cultural invasion and corrosion by Hollywood, was linked
centrally to the attempt by the British film industry to bolster what
they saw as their national markets including the colonies. Priya
Jaikumar terms this as the “imagined audience” of Empire films, a
project of both economic consolidation, as well as cultural hegemony.
One of the reasons for the instrumental failure of the ICC was the fact
that its dual agenda of staging a moral panic around the bodies of
white women, to set in place a system that would ensure economic quotas
for Empire films etc. just did not work out as planned............................................................
