ABSTRACT
Censorship is a perennially traversed topic in scholarship on Indian cinema. Several recent studies have delved deep into the intricacies of film censorship, certification and regulation, especially the role of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) and its operations under the aegis of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Paradoxically, Censor Board is consistently used as a self-referential tag in the official communiqus of Prasar Bharati, India's national public broadcasting system, an organisation significantly influenced by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Transitions in the Indian socio-political matrix can be identified in the granting of legal recognition to India's transgender community, the hijras, as an official third gender. The ambivalence inflecting India's push-pull between mythic homogenising time and the current time of undecidability facilitates the emergence of multiple articulations from the interstitial third space. These include transgressive, self-reflexive or iconoclastic political enunciations and imaginings on censorship.
