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Digitised records are in public domain for the first time> “In reel 3, omit the entire boisterous song and foolish mimicries of boys in college in presence of women when Raj Kapoor and another boy come into the classroom crouching under the ground, omitting however all dialogues between the two while in that position.”
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> “In the same reel, omit all the shots showing Nimmi (the character) resting her head on the breast of Raj Kapoor and other amorous gestures while sitting on the beach in the night besides the fishermans shack.”
THESE WERE among the elaborate instructions given by the censor board on January 4, 1951, to makers of Aag, Raj Kapoors directorial debut, when the movie came up for “further revision” and obtained a U certificate.
And these are now available for all to see online.
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They have been posted under a section titled Film Censor Records, which is part of a vast trove of over 2,500 pages of film files that the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), Pune, has digitised and made available on its official website from Wednesday in the form of Bombay and Bengal government gazettes, 1920-1950.
Classified under six sections, these records include information on each film examined: name, number of reels, length, who applied for certification, who produced or released it, country of origin, date of examination, and number and date of certification. The digitisation was carried out in 2009-10 but they were available only for visitors to the NFAIs library.
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Among the earliest directives is from 1925 — of Poona Raided, a silent film made by Deccan Pictures Corporation and directed by B V Varerkar. Among the scenes ordered deleted is one in which Mughal commander Shahiste Khan refers to Shivaji during his raid on Poona: “The Crescent Moon! Who calls him a Satan? He is the beloved of the Lord”.
The scenes description states that Shivaji then transforms into Lord Shankar with the crescent moon on his head and is re-transformed into his original form as Shivaji. This scene and dialogue, spanning 22¾ feet of reel, had to be chopped because of the “anti-imperialist metaphor” — the film was certified on August 15, 1924.
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The records show that in the pre-Independence period, most of the movies that came for certification were from abroad, mainly the US and the UK.
The Volga Boatman, an American silent film produced and directed by Cecil B DeMille in 1926, was refused certification because it portrays “class hatred, violence, degrading lust and brutality as accompanying the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia”.
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The Indian Express
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