Indian Cinematograph Committee

The Indian Cinematograph Committee was established by British Raj in 1927 to "investigate the adequacy of censorship and the supposedly immoral effect of cinematograph films", and subsequently the Indian Cinematograph Committee Evidence and Report 1927-1928 was published in the following year.

In the 1920s, just as the early twilight of the British Empire was approaching, a slightly familiar battle was fought, in a slightly unusual terrain, Cinema. The American film industry had by the twenties already started to dominate the global film market, with American films eclipsing English films in most parts of the British Empire. In response to a number of demands being made by the British film industry for the setting up of quotas in favour of Empire films in the colonies, and as a result of increasing anxiety about the spread of the new technology of cinema in the colonies, the colonial government put together a high level committee, the Indian Cinematograph Committee (“ICC”) to enquire into the working of cinema and censorship in India. The report, and the evidence of the ICC which ran into five volumes, and thousands of pages of oral and written testimonies makes for a fascinating document, which has unfortunately been ignored in most debates on film censorship.

At the British Imperial conference held in England in 1926, a number of the delegates raised questions about the adequacy of film censorship to deal with the problems posed by the exhibition of American films. They were, in part, responding to the complaints registered by the Federation of British industries to the board of trade about what they considered to be a virtual monopoly enjoyed by American films within the empire. This trade organization had represented their case not merely as a matter of protecting British business interests, but also because American films were "detrimental to British prestige and prejudicial to the interests of the empire, especially in the dominions which contains large colored populations". In connection to these concerns, the imperial conference passed a resolution recommending that appropriate action be taken to combat the dominance of Hollywood's films by encouraging their production within the empire. In a very significant report prior to the ICC, it was advocated that “Great Britain owes a duty to the dominions; the dominions to Great Britain and to each other; and India owes a duty first to herself....The film can as well display the ancient dignity of the Mahabharata as teach the Indian peasant the elements of hygiene and sanitation"

It is important to remember that the nationalist movement which was on the rise, spurred on by a series of events including the formation of the Home Rule league, agitations against the Jalianwala Bagh massacre etc. helped to create the conditions under which the British empire found itself in a slightly precarious and vulnerable phase, needing ways to retain the symbolic fiction of the might of empire. It in this context, that claims were made of American films tarnishing the prestige of the Empire by portraying scenes of immorality, vice and violence. More particularly, because of the inability of the native to distinguish between different classes of white people, they tended to think of all of the portrayal as endemic to life in the west, and this degraded the image of white women in the eyes of the lustful native men. This is also a period marked by the uncertainty of the effect of cinema, and according to the British social Hygiene delegation that visited India between 1926-27 (just prior to the setting up of the ICC), cinema was the root cause of a large number of evils in India, They said that “in every province that we visited the evil influence of cinema was cited by educationists and representative citizens as one of the major factors in lowering the standards of sex conduct and thereby tending to increase the dissemination of disease"

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