PoV: FILTERS OF OBSCENITY
If putting a Snapchat dog filter on a politician’s lookalike can be called obscene, not in jest—but seriously, with legal consequences—then words have clearly lost all meaning. Last week, the Mumbai cops booked the comedy crew, All India Bakchod or AIB, for precisely this, under Section 67 of the Information Technology Act. They were also booked for criminal defamation, but that’s another story.
Obscenity is defined in the law through four words: Lascivious. Prurient. Deprave. Corrupt. Here’s the expanded form: ‘... any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons.’ Can anyone seriously believe that this image is about sexual desire or lustful thoughts? Or can deprave and corrupt? Strong words, all four. I, for one, must confess there were no stirrings on seeing it. #Purelychaste.
This is the moment when words don’t just lose meaning. They fail you. Billions of us clown around with online filters—dog, cat, faceswap, whatnot—every day. We use these on ourselves, on friends, family and strangers. These are image filters, for god’s sake, almost like wearing digital make-up, dressing up your face, thinning it, fattening it, poofing and pouting it. It’s play. It’s fun.
Now that the police have dubbed a playful image ‘obscene’, the mind just boggles at the (im)possibilities. Would the cops have considered a cat filter obscene? What about the Gay Pride filter? Would that result in a booking under Section 377? Or #Faceswap, which allows me to change my face to another person’s in the same photo. What if the cops see this as impersonation and book me under Section 416 of the Indian Penal Code?
For many years, my Facebook profile carried a quote from the British playwright Tom Stoppard: ‘Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.’ But nowadays it feels like we’re being nudged towards one of Haruki Murakami’s parallel realities where otherworldly forces rule an unrecognisable universe.
In this surreal landscape, words are unholy. Dangerous thought-bearing objects that call for disrespect. Or detention. Just look at them filtering down like fine sand through Censorship’s hourglass. There’s ‘cow’, ‘Gujarat’ and ‘Hindu India’, which the Censor Board wants to beep out of Suman Ghosh’s documentary, The Argumentative Indian. That was this month. Filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar was asked to make 14 cuts in his Emergency-era Indu Sarkar, including ‘communists’, ‘Kishore Kumar’, ‘Akali Dal’, ‘RSS’ and ‘PM’. Also this month.
Remember how Alankrita Srivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha was denied a censor certificate for being ‘lady-oriented’ even as the powers-that-be droned on about respecting women? That was this year too. And remember the middle-finger raising online campaign that the Lipstick team struck back with? If hindsight is 20:20, it’s nothing short of a miracle that the word ‘lipstick’ still hasn’t been considered a deadly thought-weapon. And banned. Or burkhas.
Homosexual. Lesbian. Balls. Vagina. A**holes. These fly high in the roll-call of words dubbed dangerous in the last two years. Oh, and of course, ‘intercourse’, which is to be removed from the film Jab Harry Met Sejal. Unless one lakh Indians support keeping the word. Remember. Parallel reality. Outercourse is intercourse, which is how 1++ billion of us have been born.
In yet another instance of the post-real, the Mumbai cops last year booked a man who posted a photo of the Maharashtra chief minister’s family relaxing on a yacht. Guess what they booked him for? Obscenity. Under Section 67 yet again. Looks like obscenity is the new kid on the censorship block. But what should we call these unending attacks on words and images themselves? Paranoid? Grotesque? Dangerous? Or in the parallel universe we now inhabit, where words can be mutated and mangled to mean almost the opposite—obscene?
Bishakha Datta (@busydot) works at the intersection of gender and sexuality, runs Point of View in Mumbai, writes and films non-fiction, and is perennially interested in what’s not freely expressed
Now that the police have dubbed a playful scene ‘obscene’, the mind just boggles at the (im)possibilities