ABSTRACT
The Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC) report of 1928 offers an insight into the ways in which British colonial rule in India felt threatened by cinema. The British were concerned about what the native population might be seeing through this new and popular medium. Cinema could potentially destabilise the existing relations of power between Britain as ruler and its subjects, and disrupt existing relations of governance, through its portrayal of Europeans and Indians. The question the report was to address, therefore, was how cinema in India should be censored, but before that the Committee needed to understand how films were actually being viewed. As a historical document on the regulation of cinema, the report of the Committee (henceforth the RICC) is invaluable. It not only provides one of the earliest surveys on the power of cinema and its effects in India, but it also explores the impact of this new cultural medium on relations between the British and Indian nationalists.
