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Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema by Monika Mehta. University of Texas Press 2011. $60.00 hardcover, $30.00 paper. 318 pages
reviewed by Nilanjana Bhattacharjya
Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema emerges with a handful of other recent books as an essential contribution to the dynamic field of South Asian film stud- ies, as well as studies of film censorship. Mehta (who, in full disclosure, has collaborated with me as a coauthor) has in the past written widely cited articles on the topic of Bombay film and censorship. While she revisits some of these earlier arguments and subjects in this book, the arguments are further clarified and placed within the context of film studies as a whole, to be made relevant to a wider readership.1 The book's overwhelming strength is its consistently rich array of theoretical and methodological approaches and their grounded applications. Mehta notes that her own inquiry into the topic began with Foucault's distinction "between asking a question that begins with 'how' and asking one that begins with 'why' or 'who."'2 Questioning the practice of censorship and its entanglement with gender and sexuality on these lines provokes Mehta to define a more expansive vision of censor- ship in which the practice and operation of "cutting"' is not necessarily limited to the state but also includes actions by directors and editors, audiences who select some films over others, and scholars who focus on some films over others. Viewing censorship in these terms produces a fascinating rupture between subject and practice that results in a constant blurring of the identities of players and processes, as well as of those identi- ties' meanings and locations.
As Mehta herself notes, existing explorations of film censorship have been lim- ited by their methodologies and reliance on archival research and secondary scholarly sources, often to the exclusion of any close readings of the text and qualitative field- work. Furthermore, she notes a troubling tendency in current scholarship to restrict the definition of censorship to prohibition, which then fails to acknowledge that the practice of censorship can exclude and include. As an example, she mentions one study that discusses censorship's engagement with politically controversial films such as Bombay (Mani Ratnam, 1995) and War and Peace (Anand Patwardhan, 2002) to for- ward...