Censorship is inherent in any social contract. Taking up the relevant archives – the cultural seminars on dance, music, drama and film hosted by the Indian government in the 1950s the artist-activist group Sahmat the Haksar Committee deliberations of 1988–1989 – the article argues that this modernist vision of censorship as a form of interference in what is otherwise the potential, pure transmissibility of speech, is a fallacy. This article looks at cultural politics in India at two critical moments of its history: in the 1950s, when major state institutions of culture – the Akademis, the National School of Drama, etc – were first established under the ‘liberal’ aegis of the Nehruvian administration and at the turn of the 1990s, when these institutions might be said to be undergoing a certain crisis owing to major shifts in the governmental arrangement, accompanied by severe challenges from civil society groups and the right. Theories of censorship tend to describe censorship as a force of proscription or exclusion, imposed from above: a supervening authority, a bureaucracy, the demotic mob, corporate media, etc, produces a barrier against talking, acting or behaving in the way we want to or what needs to be said.
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