Modern Bollywood, A Decade Old: Bollywood and the Colonial Censorship

Introduction

This essay explains the journey of Bollywood (Indian Film Industry) and how it has changed itself and its audience’s perspective on Hindi Cinema. Applying the key features from Dennis McQuail’s “Normative Theory”, the relationship between Bollywood and the audience, controlled by the censorship board will be explained; and how both, the Bollywood industry and Censor Board are responsible for bringing changes to each other in the terms of rules, regulations, audience’s attitudes and their demands, in every period of time. According to McQuail (2010), a normative theory is adopted to clear the confusion prevailing in the information industry, that has become self-centred in modern days; and also to examine if the information created is to serve own self or the government. There have been endless debates by the contrasting individual ideas on how the media should be controlled from displaying unethical contents, and normative theory helps in guiding the individuals (theorists, writers, society and general public) to produce suggestions and ideas that media should follow, for the benefit of society and media (McQuail, 2010). The Indian Film Industry was established in 1913 but began to be known in 1920 (Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 2010). Bollywood, since then, was and is still controlled by the censor board, however the censor board went through a few transformations, from being independently owned by police heads of every region, to Bombay Board of Film Censors, and finally to the Central Board of Film Censors in 1952 (Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 2010). Cinema rules were reedited in 1983 and the censor board was re-named to the Central board of Film Certification (Indian Ministr...

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