ABSTRACT
This chapter tracks changes in on-screen depictions of sexuality and morality in mainstream Indian cinema. It explores national and regional differences in India’s increasingly sexualised film content, the critical responses to films that contain such images, and the ways in which the state’s censorship bodies regulate such films. Home to 1.3 billion people, India is a nation whose populace has a much more intimate relationship with film than, arguably, any other nation. Enormous and productive cinema industries operate in various corners of the nation, with regional states ensuring a constant supply of a staggering number of films that firstly resonate with their home cultural and linguistic audience, and then nationally and in many cases, globally. Southern India’s Tamil film industry (Kollywood), for example, produced 262 feature films in 2012, more than the most commonly recognised Hindi film industry that produced 221 films (mostly Bollywood films) in the same year (CBFC 2012). Further north the Telugu cinema industry (Tollywood cinema) produced 256 features, and Malayalam cinema produced 185; then there are the ‘smaller’ cinemas such as those of the Bengali film industry (also, confusingly, sometimes referred to as Tollywood) that produced 123 films in 2012 (CBFC 2012). Nationally, this results in around 1,200 feature films produced each year, considerably more than Hollywood’s annual production (2012 figures) of 819 feature films, France’s 272, the UK’s 299 and Australia’s 43 (UNESCO 2014). Each of these localised Indian film industries reflects local cultures and their respective moral and religious values. Such differences appear in the types of films that emerge from each region, at times testing the national regulatory codes that apply to Indian cinema.
