No other Indian artist, writer or filmmaker has had to brave censorship hurdles throughout his career as Anand Patwardhan. The legendary documentary filmmaker’s latest run-in is with YouTube, which has removed his seminal work on faith-fuelled machismo in India, Father, Son and Holy War. The two-part documentary has been flagged for “violent content”. It is a ridiculous charge against a film that was made in 1995, given a U/A censor certificate, won two national awards, and was telecast on Doordarshan under orders from the Supreme Court.
Father, Son and Holy War was made at a time when the Hindutva movement was muscling up to become what it is today. It contained footage of events around the Sati incident in Rajasthan in 1987, the Bombay communal riots in 1992–93 and the muscularity marches organised by the RSS in the early 1990s. The “violence” contained in it pales in comparison to the gory horrors YouTube casually hosts today. When Doordarshan quibbled over showing the film, the Supreme Court reviewed it and ruled that the footage was true to the artiste’s goal of portraying how hate was systematically stoked and how it brought misery upon innocents. That YouTube’s algorithm has failed, belatedly, to make that distinction simply exposes its moderation process as too crude for art, or too vulnerable to persuasion by authority.
By removing Father, Son and Holy War, YouTube has joined a long list of state or state-dictated agencies that have tried to stifle Patwardhan’s work. Almost every film of his has run into resistance from the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), Doordarshan, or the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF)—and now social media. That this attempted smothering has spanned five decades, different parties in power, left-wing as well as right-wing ruling ideologies and two autocracies fifty years apart tells you as much about Patwardhan’s battle-scarred career as about the authoritarian tendency in India.
One of his early works, Prisoners of Conscience, focused on political prisoners jailed during the Emergency and had to be screened in underground networks because of draconian censorship laws. Bombay Hamara Shaher depicted the brutality of slum demolitions in Mumbai, won the National Film Award for Best Non-Feature Film, but was refused a screening at the National Film Festival. In Memory of Friends focused on Sikh and Hindu groups striving for communal harmony amidst militancy in Punjab in the 1980s, but Doordarshan did not have the stomach to telecast it.
Ram ke Naam was internationally acclaimed for chronicling the Hindutva mobilisation before the Babri Masjid demolition in December 1992, but was initially denied a CBFC certificate and a Doordarshan showing. It took seven years of litigation before the Bombay High Court directed it to be telecast on the national TV network at prime time.
In 2002, Jang Aur Aman (War and Peace) took a stance against the nuclear weapons programmes of India and Pakistan and had to brave another long legal battle and 21 cuts ordered by the CBFC before seeing the light of day. In the Modi era, Reason investigated the assassinations of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare and fell foul of the BJP government. Patwardhan bypassed the CBFC entirely and opted to screen the film privately.
Such sustained resistance across decades, ideologies, and governments begs the question of why the state or its adjacent agencies unfailingly contest the truth of each Patwardhan film, and suggests the conclusion that it is perhaps truth itself that is the problem.