Lights Out

Picture this: a film is running in theatres. Audiences are buying tickets, critics are writing reviews and the projector is spinning. Then, without warning, the lights go out. Not because the film failed. Because it succeeded a little too well at the one thing cinema does better than any other art form, making you see something you weren’t supposed to. It has happened before. It is happening now.

There is a quiet scene in Gulzar’s ‘Aandhi’ (1975) that stays with me. The politician Aarti Devi spots her old caretaker in a hotel lobby. Just a face from a simpler life and on Suchitra Sen’s face, an entire interior world collapses and reassembles in seconds. It is a deeply private moment of a woman caught between ambition and longing. It is precisely this kind of intimacy that made the film feel dangerous in 1975. The resemblance between Sen’s character and then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, right as the Emergency was being declared, was apparently too close for comfort. ‘Aandhi’ returned to screens only after the political weather changed. Today, it is considered a masterwork. At that time, it was considered a problem.

Nearly four decades later, Kamal Haasan’s ‘Vishwaroopam’, already certified by the CBFC, was halted by district collectors in Tamil Nadu following protests over its portrayal of a jihadi network, with law and order cited as justification. The irony is worth sitting with. A film whose entire thesis was about mistaken assumptions was itself the subject of one.

What makes the Hind Rajab case particularly striking is its nakedness. A documentary carrying raw footage of a six-year-old Palestinian girl’s death in Gaza during Israel’s 2024 Rafah offensive was rejected by the CBFC in early 2025 without even a pretext.

Three films. Three different eras. Three competing anxieties. Political, communal and diplomatic. What I find myself returning to is not the fact of censorship, but the question of framing. ‘Aandhi’ was banned when the suspension of norms was openly declared. The ‘Vishwaroopam’ halt came dressed in the language of public order. The ‘Hind Rajab’ rejection didn’t bother with a legal framework at all.

What changes across these cases is how power chooses to explain itself. The lights go out. But the projector keeps spinning.

Darshim Saxena is a screenwriter and film analyst. She is the founder and host of ‘The Second Seat’, a conversation space for creators and audiences dedicated to cinema beyond box office narratives