IMPERILLING THE PRESTIGE OF THE WHITE WOMAN":

COLONIAL ANXIETY AND FILM CENSORSHIP IN BRITISH INDIA

Poonam Arora

The simple native has a positive genius for picking up false impressions and is very deficient in the sense of proportion. By the unsophisticated Malay, Javanese or even Indian and the Chinese, the scenes of crime and depravity which are thrown [sic] on the screen are accepted as faithful representations of the ordinary life of the white man in his country. Anonymous colonialist officer Between cinema buildings on the one hand and the cinema-going public on the other lie actual films, representations seen as inhabiting a public sphere by virtue not only of the place, but also the manner of their consumption. Annette Kuhn Anthropologists and historians of colonialism have established that "the arrival of large numbers of European women [to the colonies] in the middle of the nineteenth century coincided with an embourgeoisment of colonial communities and with a significant sharpening of racial categories (Stoler 1991: 64-65). This embourgeoisment was designed to provide colonial officials with a sense of "domesticity" away from home and to ensure that white men did not associate with native women. These social changes were affected through white women being "maintained at elevated standards of living, in insulated social spaces cushioned with the cultural artifacts of 'being European'" (ibid). What has not been examined so far by theorists of colonialism is how the insularity of European social spaces (predicated on the presumed "delicate sensibility" and the consciously cultivated and racially segregated lifestyle of the memsahib1) was also concurrently being undermined by another very different discourse,

namely, that of the on-screen image of the memsahib introduced through the advent of cinema into the colonies, at the turn of the century. Representations of the memsahib and the white man's ordinary life in filmic melodrama were at variance with the carefully constructed discourse on the ordinary life of the British in India. This essay, which is located at the nexus of colonial studies and psychoanalytic film studies, seeks to establish firstly, how, in the last half-century of the British occupation of India, cinematic narrative disturbed the prevailing power dynamics between the colonial regime and the native population; secondly, what psychological apprehensions compelled the British to regulate the institution of cinema in India; and thirdly, what impact this genealogy of regulation has had on postcolonial filmic practice. The regulation of cinema was not new to British policy- makers. In her book, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, Annette Kuhn has conclusively established that in roughly the first quarter of the twentieth century in Britain, sexologists, eugenicists, agents of "social hygiene" and sundry other self-appointed moralists came to regard cinema as a discursive field for the constitution of the "moral subject" through the regulation of "not only the place but also the manner of their [i.e. films'] consumption" (1988:116). During this period each of the above discursive agencies was striving, on the one hand, to protect British audiences from what it claimed were ideas of "degeneracy" inherent in certain film narratives, and on the other, to expose the same audiences to propagandist^ cinema which was mobilized to guard the British nation against a modernist cultural "moment of risk" (Kuhn 1988.1). Anxieties ranging from the fear of insurrection by the working class, the putatively deleterious effects of feminism on

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the birth rate of the nation, the danger of communicable (especially venereal) diseases spreading through the dimly-lit, poorly ventilated and enclosed auditoria, and the undesirable (read sexual) conduct of children were all blamed on the cinema. In tracing the continuities and disjunctures between the censorship of cinema in Britain and in India under British rule, I am going to argue that the sociosexual anxieties that Kuhn has discussed in the British context did not merely get exaggerated in the colonies, but took on a distinct social pathology of their own. It would be commonplace to claim that this pathology mirrored other colonial relations of power, necessitating the severest regulation of the production and exhibition of cinema under the British government in India, or to illustrate the equally subversive strategies of resistance that were devised by the indigenous Indian cinema in order to circumvent colonial censorship. Rather, I want to focus on how "the power relations involved in the creation of the public sphere of cinema placed certain films, modes of consumption and relations of spectatorship outside the limits of that sphere" (Kuhn 116). Of course, these modes of consumption and relations of spectatorship which were originally constituted under the regulatory practices of direct colonial rule, mutated in neo-colonial cultural production. This genealogy of regulation/ subversion ultimately left some rather indelible marks on Indian cinema and salient features of this now almost forgotten history of regulation have come to define the very "Indianness" of Indian cinema and Indian audiences.
THE PUBLIC SPHERE OF CINEMA

Indian nautch girls,2 discontinued the practice around the late 1850s.3 Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857 the cultural and racial superiority that had hitherto been the raison d'etre of colonial rule had suffered a serious setback. It was believed that if the British Raj were to survive in India, the British must re-establish their superiority with the Indian populace. Toward the middle of the Victorian age the British at home and in the colonies commonly believed that any informal social interaction with the natives in general, and the unbridled sexual adventures of the military and civilian officials in the colonies in particular, had had the effect of diminishing their prestige as rulers. This led to a sudden withdrawal from Indian cultural life generally and Indian forms of entertainment in particular. Increasingly the British came to be entertained either by performers travelling from Europe or they put up their own theatrical and musical performances.4 By the 1860s neither the Indians nor the British were present at the other's venues of entertainment. The advent of the memsahib in the 1860s further cemented this racial segregation. As Ballhatchet points out: As wives they [memsahibs] hastened the disappearance of the Indian mistress. As hostesses they fostered the development of exclusive social groups in every civil station. As women they were thought by Englishmen to be in need of protection from lascivious Indians (1980:5). With the coming of cinema the cultural scene, at least in the cities, changed significantly. Even though initially cinema theaters were owned and operated by the British, by the mid-1920s Indian capital started to take over the distribution of cinema throughout South Asia. J. J. Madan, a prominent Indian entrepreneur, expanded a part of his family business to start a chain of theaters. Madan's original holding of fifty-one theaters in 1920 increased dramatically to eighty- five theaters in 1927 and one hundred and twenty-six in 1931 (Bamouw and Krishnaswamy 1980:65). These theaters, which exhibited Indian, British and American films, were concentrated in metropolitan centers with Indian and British populations. Unlike other venues of entertainment, film theaters were open to audiences regardless of their race, class, religion or caste. The resulting breakdown of socially-enforced segregation

When cinema was introduced to India in 1896 venues of entertainment had been racially segregated for almost four decades. Whereas Governor General Warren Hastings (1774-85) had headed "essentially a cosmopolitan society in which reciprocal entertainments between Indians and the British were common" (Hyam 1990: 116), toward the end of the eighteenth century these policies were suddenly reversed. Governor General Wellesley (1789-1805) put a complete stop to the practice of entertaining Indians at Government House (ibid), a venue where Indian elite had previously been invited to western forms of entertainment. By the same token, British men, who had hitherto frequented

Poonam Arora teaches Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She is working on a book on the cultural politics of cinema in India.

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led to considerable anxiety on the part of the British. This anxiety was "managed" not, as one might have expected, through a regulation of the venue of cinema, but through its content and distribution. Just as the initial mistrust for the institution of cinema had travelled from Britain, the anxiety emanating from its presence in the colonial context was dutifully communicated back home. Upon her return to England, Constance Bromley, a former secretary and manager of the Opera House, Calcuttaa premier picture house of the Eastwrote an inflammatory newspaper article titled "Films that Lower Our Prestige in India: Imperilling the Prestige of the White Woman." Quoted subsequently by several members of parliament in debates on the urgent need for film censorship in India and throughout the Far East, the article was to become a battle cry for pressure groups which sought to regulate cinema in the colonies for a variety of reasons; chief among these being the desire to preserve the "prestige of the white woman." According to Bromley: It is the presentation on the film of the white woman in objectionable situations that gives rise to an attitude of increasing disrespect on the part of the native. The memsahib nowadays does not move about with her former freedom.,.The casual observer shrugs a shoulder and dismisses the matter as a mere reflection of political unrest or race antagonism, from which India is never free, but surely the trouble goes deeper than that (1926:5). Since British and Indian urban elites had hitherto enjoyed very different forms of mass entertainment, the trend toward the screening of British and American films made venues such as the Opera House one of the first sites of social interaction between the two audiences, albeit an indirect one. What is more, unlike other institutions of entertainment, the Opera Housea strictly commercial enterpriseenjoyed relative freedom from the patronage/interference of state, social club, church or temple. Nevertheless, control of what visual and narrative messages could be projected through the cinematic apparatus became yet another contested site in an already fraught political situation between the colonial regime and Indian nationalists. Spectatorial trajectories of power were reconstituted when the memsahib became available to the native gaze not only on the screen, but in the racially integrated public sphere of the cinema house. This

marked a distinct departurefromthe visual inavailability of the memsahib, which had been carefully preserved by British urban planners who had designed new civic centers along racial lines, making sharp distinctions between the City, (where the Indian population lived), the Cantonment (which were permanent military stations located in the urban periphery), and Civil Lines (where the British population lived). Even those Indians who, as servants, soldiers or employees in the civil service, had access to the Cantonment and Civil Lines' residential areas, must have refrained from making eyecontact with the memsahib in keeping with their own cultural codes of modesty. Hamid Naficy, in establishing the relationship between the semiotics of veiling and cinema in Iranian films, has pointed out that traditional societies have not merely enjoined the woman to conceal herself from the male gaze, but have prevailed upon the man to avert his own gaze when he is faced with the spectacle of a woman he is not supposed to look upon (Naficy 1991:47). Similar gender-specific codes of looking were firmly rooted in the culture of the Indian subcontinent, when with the introduction of British and American films to Indian audiences, the memsahiba gendered and racial subjectwas no longer "safe" from the native gaze and was "imperilled" by a cinema which sought to direct the native gaze not away from the memsahib but toward her. I want to suggest that Bromley's alarmist rhetoric made a strong impact on the British readership precisely because the physical space of the "picture palace" and the discursive space of melodrama, which at this historical juncture had already converged at the site of the cinema in Britain, was further exacerbated by the racial anxieties of the British in India. The most threatening feature of this anxiety was the fear of miscegenation. According to the 1928 annual report of the British Board of Film Censors, miscegenation and the negative portrayal of the British army and the white race were identified as two of four issues the representation of which was to be carefully monitored in Britain and elsewhere in the empire (Richards 1984: 137).5 Meanwhile, following the international success of Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), the Fox company of America had become especially interested in inter-racial romance narratives, for, as Jeffrey Richards points out, Miscegenation was a popular theme of melodrama and calculated to produce an ambivalent/raw/i as

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tinted potentates sought to paw white girls or dusky vamps attempted to seduce white men from their duties (1984: 138).
SEEING BUT UNSEEN

In the social sphere of the colonies, meantime, miscegenation was feared by whites and non-whites alike, each concerned with preserving its respective "racial purity." When British and Indian audiences came together, presumably in pursuit of an innocent form of entertainment, something more insidious took place in the colonial imaginary. The Opera House, and other institutions like it, created an intermediary social space that bridged the psychological distance between Cantonment/Civil Lines and City. It enabled the native gaze to penetrate the civic spaces of the British, which were embodied in the architectural design of the colonial bungalow and the memsahib who presided over it. The voyeurism inherent in the cinematic apparatus was uni-directional; while it penetrated the civic spaces of the British, the Hindu and Muslim practices of segregation for domestic and civic life along gender lines remained largely unaltered. The architectural design of the gendersegregated spaces of Indians within the home and other public spaces was replicated by cinema houses, thereby shielding the native woman from the colonial gaze6 In order to ensure the attendance of native women the management (whether Indian or British) of cinema houses such as the Opera House made arrangements for gender segregated spaces. Indian women entered the theater through a separate entrance; unseen by the general public and unrecognizable even by those who knew them personally.7 Advertisements for forthcoming attractions at the better equipped movie theaters prominently announced that special arrangements for ladies in purdah were in place. (See figure 1) Bromley educated her English readership about the social customs of the Indians as follows: All respectable Indians keep their women folk set apart from the public gaze. They walk and take air in parks and secluded places specially reserved for them where no man may set his foot. The, purdah nashin [veiled] ladies are heavily veiled and when they visit any place of public entertainment it is usually in small parties, sitting in boxesthe front of which is entirely covered with what looks like a huge mosquito netseeing, but unseen (1926:5, emphasis added).

The purdah nashin women who were "seeing, but unseen," challenged and subverted the power of the colonial gaze, whereas the unveiled British woman seen in a public space became increasingly subject to the native's scopophilic pleasure. Even though only a relatively small percentage of Indians could actually afford the price of the admission ticket at theaters such as the Opera House, the presence of provocative posters all over the city encouraged a voyeurism which was not confined to the actual experience of going to the movies. As Bromley points out: Huge bills show a dark-skinned Mexican abducting a lovely white girl (every picture goer knows this type of American film); Think a moment what posters and films like this must inevitably suggest to the unsophisticated mind of our Eastern brother (1926: 5). It is easy to see how, and why. for the British audience, the image of the "dark-skinned Mexican" on the hoarding and in the film narratives got displaced onto the dark-skinned Indian and how the memsahib became interpellated as "a lovely white girl" in danger of being abducted by the native.8 Bills posted on walls and hoardings on vertical push-carts gave the racially charged narratives of certain films an added currency, thereby increasing the memsahib s perception of vulnerability and the concomitant anxiety of the British vis-a-vis the cinema. It is no wonder that the memsahib was eager to emulate the dress code of the purdah nashin woman, especially when the former was at the movies. Bromley's disingenuous explanation goes as follows: So unaccustomed are they [Indian women] to the western fashion of evening dress, that European ladies visiting the principal native theaters do so in high necked dresses or cover their bare shoulders with a shawl or cloak out of respect for this custom [i.e., veiling] (1926:5). One suspects that despite the above explanation, the "courtesy" extended by the memsahib to her Indian sister was not free from ulterior motives; it sought to minimize the vulnerability of the memsahib to being the object of the native gaze. Not withstanding the sheer discomfort of having to wear additional clothing in the muggy heat of Calcutta, the memsahib thought it wise to take the precautionary step of covering her neck and
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Sj. DURGADAS BANNERJEE The Handsome actor of the Bengali Stage in the role ofGOVINDALAL. MISS PATIENCE COOPERthe famous screen star in the role ofROHINI. MISS SITADEVIthe Screen's Noted Beautyin the role of VRAMAR. PROBODH CHANDRA BOSE as MADHURINATH. SCREEN'S SUPREMIST CREATION ! It is a picture that will bring a smile to your lips, a throb to your heart, a tear to your eyes and contentment to your soul A DRAMATIC THUNDERBOLT ! Book Your Seats Well in Advance. Special Arrangements for Purdah Ladies.

Figure 1. Untitled advertisement for a film. India office file no. L P & J 6 1747. pg. 418. shoulders. This voluntary veiling9 of the memsahib was in sharp contrast with the official colonial stand on veiling practices in India. The British in general were not interested in understanding how the compulsory, though somewhat different, veiling practices of Hindus and Muslims in India were germinal to the maintenance of family and kinship patterns in a multi-religious and caste stratified society. It is ironic that after half a century of openly condemning the veiling practices of the Indians as "barbaric," the British were not averse to taking the cue from the purdah nashin Indian women themselves when it came to protecting and maintaining their own racial and cultural superiority.
CORRALING THE NATIVE GAZE

The need to corral the native gaze had become quite clear to the British even before cinema became so popular among Indians and the British. In 1913, when a certain Miss Maud Allen, a ballet dancer of some notoriety in Britain, wanted to tour India, none other than the British Secretary of State tried to persuade her to cancel her trip. But the dancer was adamant. The government of India wrote: The objections to performances in this country by a white woman of her dramatic reputation, to the dances of the type that have become associated with her name are obvious (Bhaskaran 1975: 3). Before the British Cinematograph Act of 1918 came into effect in India, the British government in

India had already armed itself with "powers, to demand full information about any performance seven days ahead and to prohibit any show which may lead to disorder" (Bhaskaran 1975: 3). Needless to say, the colonial authorities were not obliged to justify to the native audience why one performance or exhibition may lead to disorder and another may not. Even though the Cinematograph Act of 1918 stipulated that the British government would ensure that films made by other countries and exhibited in the colonies be sensitive to subjects and attitudes that may inflame the native population, actual imperial policy was insensitive or largely indifferent to these issues. For instance, when a German film, The Sultan of Delhi, tried to draw audiences through its claim to showing "a real Indian harem of 300 ladies," there was a strong editorial protest in an Indian newspaper, The Bombay Chronicle, of October 7, 1925. Neither the embarrassment of the Indian community in Berlin, nor the editorial protest in the Bombay newspaper brought any action from the British government. Likewise, when in 1927 an Indian member of the Legislative Assembly of Madras province drew the assembly's attention to an American filmIndian Rajain which the protagonist was "a villain who abducts white girls and who is keeping a big harem in America...and who after inviting the ladies shuts them up in his room," the British government made no move to censure that film.10 In a comparable situation when Alexander Korda' s The Drum (1938) was being made at Paramount Studios, the British Charge D'Affairs in the U.S. approached W. H. Hays of the Motion Pictures Producer

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and Distributor Association of America to try to persuade the studio authorities to modify the original story of the film, which was based on historical events around India's first struggle for independence in 1857 and which clearly showed the British in an adverse light. The revised story of The Drum, originally titled The Drums ofOude, made an unambiguous reference to the princely state of Awadh, which was one of the states that the British had taken over on the grounds that its ruler was incapable of performing his duties. The revised version of The Drum featured a pro-British prince played by the Indian boy star Sabu. When the film was shown in Madras and Bombay, angry Indian audiences protested the film1 s representation of the proBritish prince. Following violent riots in the two cities, the film was withdrawn from the rest of India and other British colonies throughout South East Asia (Richards 1984: 137). It is obvious that the colonial government was concerned only with the negative impact that cinema might have on its own prestige but not the prestige of Indian monarchs, many of whom actually supported colonial rule against the aspirations of the emergent nationalist movement which sought home rule. During the mid-to-late 1920s, when control of the regional Censor Boards in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and Rangoon passed into Indian hands, the British government's regulatory control weakened considerably and it was unable to effectively intervene before a performance or exhibition reached India. Consequently, as Bhaskaran reports, the colonial administration began to rely on, British envoys in other countries alerting India Office in England to films which were considered harmful to British interests in India. Such was the case with After the Storm (1927) on which the British resident in Singapore reported to London, 'a white woman is shown drinking in an asiatic saloon, surrounded by asiatics and very drunk' (1975: 7). Clearly the colonial imaginary was unable to reconcile the stereotype of the morally corrupt and corrupting woman of early British and American narrative cinema with the equally stereotypical morally upright though vulnerable memsahib in the colonies, on whose unimpeachable integrity rested the prestige of the empire.

INFANTILIZING THE NATIVE

Throughout the year following the publication of Bromley's article in 1926 horrified members of the British parliament listened to testimony on how American films lowered the prestige of the British in India. Authorities in Britain and in India came to believe that the only way to corral the voyeuristic native gaze directed at the on-screen image of the white woman "insufficiently clothed, or struggling in the arms of a male captor"was to enforce a strict policy of film censorship. Rather than admitting that film censorship was meant to bolster the discourse of colonial cultural superiority, the colonial regime claimed that film censorship needed to be instituted with a view to the sexual "innocence" of the natives. As in so many previous instances of the regulation of Indian civic and political life, censorship became an aspect of the colonial civilizing missionanother white man's burden. The British justified censorship in the name of essentialist racial differences between Europeans and Asiatic populations. Bromley merely echoed the popular sentiment of the day when she claimed: The Asiatic matures early, but the development of his mentality does not keep pace with his physical growth.. .At maturity he is still a child, and childlike he remains. He never appears "grown-up." The native of India is astonishingly credulous, and the plays and stories he delights in would bore to death an English child of tender years by their simplicity (1926: 5). In what must be considered a brilliant fiat of colonial policy, the strict and inflexible rules of film censorship were justified on the grounds that the "primitive" mind of the native misunderstood western humor or failed to understand the narrative strategies of western cinema, since the latter differed radically from Indian epic and folk narratives. According to a classified report"Pernicious Influence of Picture Shows on Oriental Peoples"the writer, a former resident of Netherlands, India argued: [A]n enormous cultural interest will be served by the fact that in future it will be made impossible for foreign film manufacturers to spoil, from motives of crass lust of gain, the minds of the great masses of the simple, for the greater part unsophisticated,

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rural population by the exhibition of immoral, American sensational films, films whereby, in the unsophisticated mind of the uneducated rural population the belief is established that the most deplorable and repulsive abnormalities and sporadic extravagances of American society represent the ordinary conditions obtaining among westerners! (Harloff 1934:434). Responding to the charge that the "unsophisticated mind of the uneducated rural population" of India did not comprehend western films, the bi-racial Indian Cinematograph Committee's report claimed that Indian audiences "were no different from audiences the world over" (Indian Cinematograph Committee Report 1927: 111, cited hereafter as the Rangachariar Report). According to the report, A striking example was afforded by the audience in a cheap cinema in Madras, where an old fashioned serial was being exhibited. The white heroine in every reel was being persuaded by a cosmopolitan band of villains whose leader was an Oriental and whose rank and file comprised other Orientals. Whenever the white hero made a timely appearance or the heroine escaped from the toils, spontaneous applause broke forth, and on one occasion when the screen showed the heroine about to fall into the hands of her Oriental persecutor, an excited voice cried out in Tamil, "Look out, Miss, look out!" No more convincing argument could be adduced to show that the sympathies of Indian audiences are not alienated or seriously affected by the portrayal on the screen of a life that is strange to them (Rangachariar Report 1927: 111-112). Even though the Report provided ample evidence that Indian audiences did not treat western films merely as straightforward ethnographies of western society, the colonial regime continued to look to cinema as an easy scapegoat and continued to ascribe the destabilization of its power during the 1920s and 1930s to the negative influence of films. What is more, in an otherwise intractable situation, this kind of reasoning permitted the colonial administration to deny the growing momentum of innumerable nationalist movements in different Asian colonies of the British empire and to locate an enemy without, whether that be American

narrative films or communist propaganda films. I will return to these two genres later. At the International Parliamentary Commercial Conference held at Ostend, Belgium, in 1932 delegates from Great Britain, France, Japan and the Netherlands presented ajoint report to theirrespective governments, according to which, "Cooperation between colonial governments was highly desirable to combat the pernicious influence of picture shows on Oriental peoples" (Harloff 1934: 430)11. Quoting Sir Hesketh Bell, a British colonial expert, Harloff s report claimed: Until the cinema laid bare the worst sides of the life of the white man, most of the natives were ignorant of the depths of vice which afflict certain sections of white society. To the vast mass of black, brown, and yellow people, the inner life of the European was unknown: until the American films showed them a travesty of it (430-431). In a concerted effort to prove that western films were unsuitable for phylogenetically inferior eastern people, Harloff, a former member of the Council of Netherlands, India, took Sir Hasketh Bell's already racist characterization of Asians as "black, brown and yellow people," and went on to infantilize the colonial subject: The little brown or yellow child can feast its astounded eyes on the sight of a Sahib [white master] strangling a semi-nude woman with blue eyes and golden hair To his primitive mind such pictures must come as an amazing revolution (431, emphasis added). What is more, the "homology between childhood and the state of being colonized" (Nandy 1983: 11), acquires definite Oedipal overtones when the "little brown or yellow child" is positioned as the spectator/voyeur of a kind of primal scene between the sahib and the memsahib in the film narratives.
THE OEDIPAL DRAMA

Since the mid-1970s, Film Studies as a discipline has departed from a formalist analysis of film texts to studying the ideological impact of specific film genres in the socio-historical contexts of their reception. This

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shift has been facilitated by the political uses of psychoanalysis introduced by cultural semioticians and poststructuralists to the study of cinema. My use of psychoanalytic film theory to explain the fascination of native audiences for narratives rooted in a markedly different culture and the anxiety of the British vis-a-vis this fascination is opportune here. Given the previously discussed infantilization of the native, the Oedipal over-determination of the "little brown or yellow child," the violent "sahib "and the "semi-nude woman with blue eyes and golden hair," within the colonial imaginary is self-evident. What does require comment are the ramifications of the "brown or yellow child," i.e., the infantalized native being interpellated as the white sahib violating the blue-eyed, blonde, semi -nude memsahib in and through filmic narrative. Thus, for instance, A. J. W Harloff s outrage at "the prolonged and often erotic exhibitions of osculation frequently shown on the screen, [which] cannot but arouse in the minds of unsophisticated natives, feelings that can better be imagined than described" (1934:431) and Bromley's complaint that the representation of the memsahib "in objectionable situations gave rise to an attitude of disrespect on the part of the native" (1926:5), were symptomatic of a more pervasive cultural anxiety not only among the British in India but among other Europeans throughout the colonies. It could be argued that this anxiety stemmed from the fact that for the first time the sahib and the native derived a common scopophilic pleasure from the spectacle of the white woman on the screen. Whereas the native felt free to express his pleasure in "remarks and catcalls which often proceed[ed] from the cheap seats occupied by young coolies"12 (Harloff 1934:431), the sahib's pleasure must have been disrupted by the painful reminder that, unlike her veiled Indian counterpart who was "seeing, but unseen," the white woman at the movies, rather like her proxy on the screen, was subject to the native gaze and that her spectacle provided the native male audience a taboo pleasure. And in a highly charged symbolic context it is no wonder that the remarks and catcalls of the native population were "enough to make the (sahib's) blood boil" (ibid). I want to argue that the psycho-social dynamics between the "native child," the sahib and the memsahib, instituted by the screening of melodramatic films before a racially mixed audience resulted in the Oedipal anxieties of the Father unable to restrict the sexual

advances of the Child toward the Mother. Within the colonial Imaginary this was construed not merely as a weakening of the Father's sexual authority, but his political authority as well.
UNDERMINING THE STRUCTURE OF COLONIAL CIVILIZATION

This metonymic displacement of sexual anxiety onto the political scenario came to a head when the film
The Private Life of Henry VIII was released in India in

1934. I return to the scenario of a picture palace in Calcutta, where the film was being shown after having initially been restricted by the Bengal Censor Board. The pleasure that the white male spectator was likely to have derived from watching the libidinous adventures of an English king from whom the audience was separated by 400 years could not but be mitigated by the suspicion that the "coolie," who was also watching the film at the same venue, may confuse the sixteenthcentury monarch with George V, the reigning monarch of England and the Father of the imperial family. In a letter to the Chief Secretary of the Government of Bengal, J. W McKay, a senior colonial official, pointed to what must have been the most embarrassing aspect of the film Henry VIII for the British audience in India: In one scene from the film the royal barber remarks to the king who is unable to have a male heir, "There comes a time when the well runs dry!" The king blazes angrily back at the barber, 'The well runs dry!" and promptly marries again (McKay 1934: 420). Another scene, according to Mckay, carries the insinuation, It was not the king's efforts which produced a Prince of Wales or a Duke of York but that this was due to the fact of a nurse placing a charm under the king's pillow in the marriage bed (ibid). Apart from this, the film contains innumerable coarse jokes about the royal bed and a "pointedly vulgar conversation with 'Anne of Cleeves' about what happens when a man marries a woman" (ibid). There is no evidence to suggest that the sexual content of the film was offensive to contemporary

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British audiences. However, the British government's desperate attempts to proscribe the film belies more than mere prudishness. Rather, it betrays the colonial regime's desire to perpetuate the infantilizing of the native through a pathological denial of the fact that the black, brown or yellow child had come-of-age, not just sexually but politically as well. For the colonial power to acknowledge the "failure" of the libidinous drives of one of its kings would have been tantamount to virtually admitting its own diminishing political strength in the 1930s. Henry the VIIFs suggestion that the English king may have been sexually impotence seems to have become displaced onto the contemporary political scene. My argument is strengthened by the fact that McKay wrote an urgent letter to the Chief Secretary of the Government of Bengal arguing against the public exhibition of Henry VIII at the Old Empire theater on January 6,1934, on the grounds that such important representatives of the crown as His Excellency the Governor of Bengal and His Excellency the Viceroy of India were expected to be present at the screening of Henry the VIII on that date. Despite this and innumerable other letters of protest against the screening of the film that were sent to the Censor Boards of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, the respective presidents of these censor boards, which by this time were chaired by Indian civil servants, refused to proscribe the film. It is as though the native as child had not only come-of-age, but could incur the risk of defying the authority of the parental figures! The refusal of the censor boards to proscribe Henry the VIII in India sent shock waves throughout South East Asia. There was, after all, a real danger that any undermining of the authority of the reigning house in England might lead to a weakening of the "prestige of the western leader, on whom to a considerable extent, the structure of colonial civilization work has been based" (Harloff 1934:430). Making reference to Henry the VIIV s representation of licentiousness, coarseness and duplicity, Harloff asked the following rhetorical question (ibid): [How can we] westerners, in our own colonies, scatter our highest moral values among those who are frequently the scum of the people whom we have made it our task to impart our civilization, our higher moral and social ideas?

The deliberately cultivated cultural and psychological distance that the British had maintained from Indians for three quarters of a century came to be diminished by the democratizing effects of filmic narratives and the desegregation of social spaces associated with the cinema. The two highest values upon which colonial rule was premised, namely, "the prestige of the white woman," and the "traditional reverence which Indians have exhibited to the reigning house of England" (Bartley 1934: 419), were both dramatically compromised by film culture.
CENSORSHIP AN INTERCOLONIAL AND BIPARTISAN VENTURE

In a spirit of ultimate inter-colonial co-operation (a marked departure from the competition that characterized the relations between colonial regimes throughout the nineteenth century), Harloff recommended an interchange of facilities in order to protect the "highest vital interests of the colonial communities and their mother countries!" (1934: 436). The Ostend Report made the following recommendations to the member nations of the International Parliamentary Commercial Conference: * Every colonial Government henceforward should personally take in hand the supreme control of film manufacture on behalf of the millions which form its native population. For this purpose it should monopolize the industry, with the object of either exploiting it personally, or having it exploited either in the form of a mixed enterprise, or by private persons, provided it always reserves and secures for itself a dominating influence with respect to the choice and working out of the scenes to be filmed. * The industry should have in view the making of films by nativesfor natives, and that of scenes more especially attractive to the great mass of the population. * In the centres (ports, commercial and industrial centres and other conglomerates of the population, i.e., places where Europeans and Indians lived in close proximity) the authorities should see to it that in addition to the picture houses which exhibit

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foreign filmson behalf of those who prefernative films, there is a sufficient number of picture houses catering to native taste and where exclusively native films may be shown (Harloff 1934:433, emphasis added). It is clear from the cultural, political and commercial range of the above recommendations that colonial regimes throughout the world had realized cinema's full ideological impact. Hence, according to the recommendations of the Ostend Report, it was not enough that a colonial government "monopolize the industry," but that it "secure for itself a dominating influence with respect to the choice and working out of the scenes to be filmed." The recommendation that a "sufficient number of picture houses [be built] catering to native taste and where exclusively native films may be shown," was clearly aimed at securing a racially re-segregated public sphere, "where Europeans and Indians lived in close proximity," rather than championing the cause of indigenous film production. Despite the attention to detail, the recommendations of the Ostend report were ignored by Indian civil servants who, by the mid-1930s, were beginning to take over regional civic administration, which included film censorship boards. Eventually the debate over what should be permissible in films shown in the colonies came down to a contest between four different social agencies: the British Social Hygiene Council; the British Federation of Industries; the British government in India; and the Indian nationalists. The British Social Hygiene Council (formerly the National Council for Combating Venereal Disease), which wanted to "cleanse the screens" both at home and abroad, sent a delegation to India in 1926. An important member of the delegation, Mrs. C. Neville Rolfe, wrote a memorandum to the British government stating: In every province and State visited by the Delegation the evil influence of the cinema was cited by educationists and the representative citizens as one of the major factors in lowering the standard of sex conduct, and thereby tending to increase the dissemination of disease (Quoted in the Rangachariar Report, 1927:116). Nineteen-hundred and twenty-six was also the year in which Constance Bromley's article enumerating the

ways in which cinema was "imperilling the prestige of the white woman" in India had attained considerable notoriety. The accounts by these two women, Bromley a journalist and Rolfe a social worker, led to the legislative assembly of the British government in India recommending to the Governor General that a committee be appointed to "examine and report on the system of censorship of cinematograph films in India." In 1927 a bipartisan committee was set up under the chairmanship of Diwan Bahadur Rangachariar. Even though Rangachariar was an Indian, he "did not inspire any enthusiasm in [Indian] nationalist circles," for his prestigious titleDiwan Bahadurwas bestowed on him by the British. Consequently, it was natural for the Indian nationalists to doubt whether the censorship committee, despite having an Indian majority, would be able to protect the interests of the burgeoning Indian film industry, and ultimately the Indian people. As Eric Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy establish in their important book, Indian Film : The committee would, of course, make no ultimate decisions; it would study and report. Through its inquiry, it was asked to lay the foundation for protection of "Empire films." For British purposes the resolution was well-worded. The phrase "Empire films" was elusive, but the committee was urged to consider it as including Indian as well as British films. There was a spirit of partnership about this. In stating the problem in terms of a Western threat to Indian ways, the resolution was of course echoing favorite theme of the [Indian National] Congress and especially of Gandhi himself (1980:44). The detailed evidence, based on hundreds of interviews and presented by the Rangachariar Report in four volumes, was successful in establishing that a regulation of cinema could be a bipartisan venture. While the Report dismissed the charge of the Social Hygiene Council that cinema was responsible for the spread of disease, it nevertheless recommended a regulation of cinema for reasons other than those put forth by the colonial regime; Indian nationalists, and Gandhi in particular, were eager to differentiate between Indian and western cultural production in their attempts at forging a distinct national identity. As Barnouw and Krishnaswamy argue:

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Figure 1. Still from Devdas (1935) showing a westernized male protagonist recently returned to his village to meet his chilhood beloved who is standing in the doorway of a temple. Photograph courtesy of the National Film Archive of India. In a characteristic utterance Gandhi had declared: "India's salvation consists in unlearning what she has learned during the last fifty years. The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors and such like have all to go." The committee was now asked to consider whether "such like" did not include Western films...chiefly from America (1980:44-45). Despite the remonstration of the social purity movement and the paranoia of the British living in India, the British government was not inclined to restrict the exhibition of films entirely, for it had realized that films had a tremendous potential for strengthening its image both at home and abroad. Even as late as 1940, the director of the British Film Institute, an independent agency working to strengthen the British film industry, wrote to the Secretary of State for India as follows: It might be desirable to encourage the production of films whose object it would be to increase the determination of the people of this country to sustain with fortitude any hardships that the exigencies of the times may demand. Again, the Government might desire to call attention to the unity of the Empire and India, and to that end might encourage production of a series of films with plots set against Imperial backgrounds; or to call attention to the relations with subject races through encouragement of films demonstrating the success and qualities of British colonial administration (Bell 1940:2). In accommodating the contesting claims of the colonialists, Indian nationalists and the British film industry, colonial censorship policy concentrated principally on restricting two genres of cinema: first, American narrative films which depicted a travesty of western life and second, communist propaganda films. The Private Life of Henry VIII was, of course, the prototype text which best exemplified how western films "undermined the prestige of the western leader," by conveying to the native the inner life of the European. Even the British, however, were not naive enough to believe that the disclosure of the inner life of the European, whether at the picture palace or on the screen, was the sole

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explanation for the declining influence of the British in the colonies- They believed that it was the growing influence of communism in Asia, spread through the new medium of cinema, which was ultimately responsible for challenging the colonial status quo. The disintegrating influence of communist propaganda films, unlike the demoralizing negative influence of American cinema, could not be ascribed to any specific film texts, although Soviet films were believed to incite the masses to revolution. Here is what the author of a classified report"The Cinema in the East: Factors in the Spread of Communism," submitted to the British government and written by a newspaper correspondent travelling in Malaya and the Dutch East Indieshad to say about communist propaganda and cinema in the colonies: Whatever may be the effect of Communist agents in the Far East there can be no doubt that the relations between Europeans and natives, especially in the large towns, are very different from what they used to be. ..Without showing overt insolence there is, in [the attitude of servants and laborers] towards the whites, an undercurrent of impudence that borders on contempt. It is possible that this regrettable change of spirit may, in a large measure, be due to the persistent propaganda of those organizations which are bent on upsetting our present social fabric. At the same time there can be no doubt that the way for Communist influence has been greatly facilitated by a powerful and novel element, which in recent years has entered into the lives of semi-civilized people in all parts of the tropical world. That element is the cinema (Cinema n.d.:459). It is ironic that whereas the native was believed incapable of comprehending such genres of American cinema as romantic comedy or social parody, s/he was nevertheless credited with comprehending the narrative of such Soviet films as Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible and consequently being swayed by "Communist propaganda."
CINEMA AND COLONIAL RULE

sphere of colonial rule in India along racial, class and gender lines. The psycho-dynamics of the spectacle of woman inherent in the cinematic apparatus itself became the subject of active political concern when that woman could easily be mis/taken for the memsahib and all that the latter stood for in the colonial imaginary. The relations of spectatorship between colonizer and colonized that had been arduously maintained in the public sphere through a rigid code of racial segregation following the uprising of 1857, were re-configured when the trajectories of the sahib's and the coolie's gaze (which hitherto had originated from different subject positions) met at the site of the white woman in/ at the movies. This disturbed the stable Oedipal boundaries between Father and Son that had been the basis of colonial rule throughout the nineteenth century. If the colonial argument was that films like Henry the VIII weakened "the whole platform of respect on which the ascendancy of the white man rested," my post-colonial argument is that by locating the colonizer and the colonized in a common narrative matrix, cinema's inadvertently democratizing effect made it impossible to sustain that "ascendancy." When the cultural assumptions underlying such discursive constructs as the "purity of the white woman" and the "power of the monarch" came to be challenged by Indian audiences, albeit only for purposes of entertainment, the very foundations of colonial rule were undermined. When native audiences could encode and decode filmic narratives to suit the exigencies of their political condition, cultural icons such as the memsahib and the ladsahib13 became open to mediations other than that of direct colonial rule.
VESTIGIAL NEO-COLONIAL CENSORSHIP

The "extended moment of risk" which, according to Kuhn, was precipitated by cinema between 1909 and 1925 in Britain, escalated to dangerous proportions when film exhibition re-configured the very public

Since the history of cinema and the genealogy of its regulation in colonial times has been coterminous, post-colonial film culture in India has been unable to breakaway from that legacy of control. Itis notdifficult to explain why Indian cinema today is one of the most strictly censured in the world. In a classic case of selfdiscipline, Indian film culture has adhered to prohibitions which were first instituted by a nervous colonial regime afraid of the budding sexuality of its hitherto infantalized native population, then perpetuated by the nationalists to construct the Indian as sexually innocent vis-a-vis the sexually promiscuous western other. A half a century after official decolonization the neo-colonial regime is still constrained by the colonial

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binary. The Film Censor Board of India continues to impose restrictions on the depiction of adult sexuality in a weak, though desperate, attempt at maintaining an essentialist and nationalistic distinction between western and Indian character types in film narratives.14
CONCLUSION

The crisis of representation that has come to be associated with the postmodern condition had already erupted when cinema was introduced in the colonial context, although the crisis was not recognized for itself but rather became a characteristic of the colonial condition. The colonizer and the colonized, each from his own point of view, was convinced that films were not "faithful representations" of the ordinary life either of the white man or of the native. Both, however, were equally seduced by the verisimilitude of the medium and its ideological impact. Instead of questioning the medium itself, each mistrusted the narratives of the other. A supreme irony of the colonialist discourse of the "ordinary life of the white man" is that whereas the introduction of the memsahib to the colonies was aimed at inaugurating a deliberate process of embourgeoisment, this process was undermined by the filmic representation of the memsahib and the ladsahib. What is more, if this embourgeoisment was predicated on the memsahib being "maintained at elevated standards of living, in insulated social spaces," her physical presence in the racially integrated social space of the picture palace and her virtual presence on the film screen, where she was capable of creating the illusion of physical proximity and emotional intimacy, mitigated against such racial insularity. The colonial regime had good reason to suspect that the rhetoric of "sexual restraint" and "parental benevolence" that it had (in cooperation with the Christian missionaries) painstakingly directed at the infantilized native for nearly three quarters of a century, would eventually become impossible to sustain. By working against the physical and psychological segregation of the rulers and the ruled, filmic melodrama constituted the native gaze as inherently voyeuristic. By directing the audience's male gaze at the male protagonist looking at the female protagonist, cinema encouraged an identificatory pattern that ultimately challenged the hitherto unimpeachable status of the Ruler/Father-

Even in the face of imminent decolonization the Director of the British Film Institute tried to salvage the situation by delineating a useful function for British film productions in the colonies by recommending that the British government encourage the making of films which called attention to "the unity of the Empire and India" and demonstrated "the success and qualities of British colonial administration through such themes as the almost revolutionary social and industrial developments of recent years" (Bell 1940:2). Eventually the ambitions of the British film industry to capture the colonies as a lucrative market failed before the gains of Hollywood. Even though the British government championed the cause of the Federation of British industries in emulating the propagandist^ practices of cinema in Germany and the Soviet Union, it failed in that venture. Despite the colonialists' claims that the destabilization of the British empire could be indirectly ascribed to American narrative films or communist propaganda films or that the filmic medium was unsuited for "inferior peoples" in the colonies, once native audiences had already been sutured into the melodramatic economy of narrative films, the Indian film industry was poised to fully exploit the medium for its own nationalistic goals.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Extracts from Crown Copyright documents in Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library appear by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
NOTES

1. During the colonial period, memsahib was a pidgin term for the white mistress, which was etymologically derived from "Ma'am" in English and "sahib" meaning master, in Hindustani. 2. In fact, it was the British who introduced the term "nautch," to the English language, c. 1810, (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary) to refer to the tawaif, or the courtesan who was central to the institution of the kotha wherein professional dancing girls were patronized by members of the Indian aristocracy during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 3. I derive this information from a number of Company paintings of the early nineteenth century, especially one untitled painting of Sir David Ochterlony (the Resident ofDelhi, 1803-1825) in Indian dress, smoking ahookah and watching a nautch (or classical Indian dance) in his

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house in Delhi. Commissioned by the British East India Company and painted by an anonymous Indian artist, c. 1820, the painting (Add.Or.2) is in the possession of the India Office Library in London. 4. The Lumiere Brothers' films, first shown at a Paris cafe on December 28,1895, were shown at the Watson Hotel, Bombay, on July 7, 1896. One can conjecture that the Lumiere Brothers' cinematographe took such a short time to get to India because major cities in India were already on the circuit for travelling shows from Europe and because cinema from its very inception followed the exhibition practices of shows like the vaudeville and the circus. 5. The other two issues dealt with the films offending foreign countries or subjects and attitudes inflaming native populations. Clearly the last two criteria were not enforced with any rigor comparable to the first two. 6. I should point out that the British had no taste for Indian films; they frequented the cinema mainly to see European and American films. The Indian elite, on the other hand, saw both Indian and foreign films. Consequently, whereas, the Indians could with impunity see white women on the screen, in all kinds of compromising poses and situations, the same was not true of British audiences. 7. This practice of creating a separate public space for women is an extension of the practice of dividing the domestic space into masculine and feminine spaces. The Indian railway even today reserves certain carriages as "ladies compartments," public transportation buses have seats reserved for women, and restaurants in small towns throughout India have a "family section" for women, or women accompanied by men, as opposed to a general section for men on their own. Even though the strict segregation of cinema houses that was prevalent in the colonial period has been relaxed, a selfimposed segregation still exists. Women going to the movies on their own or accompanied by men invariably select the more expensive seats in the balcony, which are the farthest removed from the lumpen proletariat who come on their own and occupy the least expensive seats closest to the screen. 8. It is interesting to note that E. M. Forster' s A Passage to India, published in 1924two years before Bromley' s articlerealized precisely the fear of the white girl being abducted by the native, even when according to descriptions of Adela Quested in the novel, she was far from the "lovely white girl" of American cinema. Judy Davis, playing the role of Adela in David Lean's A

Passage to India (1984), eventually did transform the homely Miss Quested into a lovely white girl. 9. I call the trend toward the covering of the neck and shoulders by the English women a kind of voluntary veiling because anthropologically veiling is the practice of covering any part of the woman's body which may evoke sexual desire in the male onlooker. Often it is as a consequence of this concealment that the part of the body that is veiled becomes sexually overdetermined. 10. Statement made by Muhammad Yamin Khan, a nominated member of the Madras legislative Assembly, on September 14, 1927. Reference paper in the India Office Library and Records L/P & J/6/1747. 11. In 1932 Japan was at the height of its imperialist expansion throughout Asia. Consequently the Japanese were not included in the category of "Orientals" but were regarded as "equals" by European powers. 12. The term "coolie" in Hindi means porter or any unskilled laborer who is paid a subsistence wage; the British used it as a derogatory term to refer to all Indians. Indians who were taken as indentured labor to African, Pacific and Caribbean colonies by the British in the nineteenth century also came to be referred to as coolies. 13. The word "ladsahib"the masculine version of memsahibwas pidgin for the white master. It was etymologically derived from the "lord," although it did not strictly refer to the British feudal system, but rather loosely to any white man in a position of authority. 14. Sex is referred to obliquely in Indian cinema; either through innuendo or through the exaggerated body movements of the actors. If colonial censorship was aimed at restricting the psycho-social development of the native through the regulation of the content and exhibition of films, Indian cinema subverted this control through certain stylized conventions (chief among these being the song and dance sequence) which are today the trademark of mainstream Indian cinema.

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BOOKS CITED

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS

Ballhatchet, K. 1980 Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj. New York: St. Martin's Press. Barnouw, Erik and S. Krishnaswamy 1980 Indian Film. New York: Oxford University Press. (2nd edition). Hyam, Ronald 1990 Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kuhn, Annette 1988 Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909-1925. New York: Routledge. Naficy, Hamid 1991 Women and the Semiotics of Veiling and Vision in Cinema. The American Journal of Semiotics, 8, 47-64. Nandy, Ashis 1983 The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Richards, Jeffrey 1984 The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930-1939. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Stoler, Ann Laura 1991 Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race and "Morality" in Colonial Asia. In Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Berkerley, CA: University of California Press.

Bartley, F D. 1934 Letter by the Secretary, Bengal Board of Censors to the Chief Secretary, Government of Bengal. Document No. L. P & J, p. 419. Bell, Oliver 1940 (January) Letter from Director, British Film Institute, to Secretary of State for India. Document No. 357,1940, India Office Library & Records, p. 1-2. Bhaskaran, Theodore 1975 Film Censorship and Political Control in British India, 1914-1945. Paper presented at the Indian History Congress, Aligarh, India. Bromley, Constance 1926 (August 26) Films That Lower Our Prestige in India: Imperilling the Safety of the White Woman. Leeds Mercury, pp. 5-6. Cinema in the East: Factor in Spread of Communism, (no date) Document No. L. P. & J. at the India Office Library and Records, p. 458-460. Government of India 1927 Indian Cinematograph Committee Report. Madras: Government of India Press. Harloff, A. J. W 1934 Pernicious Influence of Picture Shows on Oriental Peoples. Document No. L. P. & J. 135, p. 430436. McKay, J. W 1934 (January) Letter to the Chief Secretary, Government of Bengal. Document No. L. P & J. at the India Office Library and Records, p. 420-421.

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