BY JOHN DAYAL
Several state units of the All India Catholic Union, an
85-year-old laity organisation claiming to speak
on behalf of 1.6 crore Catholic men, women and children, launched a major
campaign against Vinod Pande’s film Sins, which purportedly shows a
Catholic priest sexually exploiting a woman.
The Bombay Catholic Sabha, an affiliate unit of the All India
Catholic Sabha and its president, human rights activist Dolphy D’souza, staged a
successful media and street protest but were overruled by the local courts who
denied them their request that the film be withdrawn.
AICU’s other units were more successful and the film was
actually withdrawn in Kashmir, Shimla and parts of Himachal Pradesh and some
other places. The Catholic media also devoted several metres of newspaper space
to the issue, discussing the pros and cons of the film as much as whether the
community should demand its withdrawal by the government or by the Censor Board,
or leave it to the conscience of the filmmaker and the filmgoer who may well
reject the film by not buying a ticket or by walking out of the theatre.
Religious leaders of the Church, including the Archbishop of
Delhi, in fact set up an expert committee of local Christian leaders to see the
film dispassionately and then give their opinion before the Church made a formal
response to the authorities, including the ministry of Information and
Broadcasting. As the national president of the All India Catholic Union, I have
been honour-bound to respect the sentiments of my regional units and their
leadership. The All India Catholic Union has therefore not issued a separate
statement on this subject but has rested with the statements issued from Mumbai,
Shimla, Jammu, Kolkata or other places.
However, the film Sins has succeeded in precipitating a
concerned debate and discussion within both theological and general sections of
our community, particularly women, because of the many points it raises. The
first, of course, is the manner in which the film depicts the Catholic clergy as
well as the community at large, aspects of demonisation or typification –
stereotyping of the Christian community.
Are Christian, especially Catholic, clergy and nuns beyond
reproach and beyond public scrutiny? Can such depiction of the community be
abused or misused to target the community and alienate it from society? Can the
community demand a restriction on the freedom of expression of others while
seeking unbridled freedom of expression for itself under various provisions of
the Constitution?
It also opens up a discussion of the basic debate on State
censorship and the media’s depiction of women and its portrayal of sexual matter
with the focus being on the woman’s body.
I was a film critic between 1970 and 1990 and in this period of 20 years, which
included membership of national and international film festival selection
committees and the occasional jury duty, I must have seen thousands of films
including scores of films dealing with sex and religion and particularly sex in
the Church.
Most of them are obviously made in the West and qualitatively
the best ones are made in North Europe. I mention this because the one point
that has not been mentioned about Sins is its cinematic mediocrity and
its pathetic pretence at analysis. Vinod Pande is a good man but his reputation
is based on the obvious sexual titillation of his films, from the film Ek
Baar Phir downwards.
Would the film Sins stand as an effective inquiry into
morality or a sensitive analysis of the complex conscience of the besotted
priest if you remove all scenes of female nudity or the pretended sexual act
from the film? The problem is, if you remove sex from the film nothing remains.
However, if you remove the priest from the film you still have an hour-long
film, a pornographic film, and that is the problem with the film.
I wish we, the Christian community, had as forcefully condemned
the cheap depiction of a woman’s body in this film by Vinod Pande. For my part,
I would be more bothered by the demeaning of the woman and the manner in which
the filmmaker has used her to commit cinematic violence on the vows of chastity
of the Catholic clergy.
It is nobody’s argument that there are no black sheep in the
Church and it is nobody’s plea that such elements should not be exposed. That
can be done in a hundred ways – all lawful, not hurtful, and which preserve the
human dignity of the person concerned as much as the values of the Church. The
moral conflict in a priest, the psychological tension and his struggle with his
conscience can be depicted powerfully and with great impact, but it would take
scriptwriters and directors greater than Vinod Pande to do justice to the theme.
For decades the Christian community has been the brunt of jokes
and caricatures in Hindi cinema. Criminals and bar girls, drunks and prostitutes
– with the occasional kind priest or nun thrown in as a sop – this is the
illiteracy and poverty of Indian cinema. We can only pray that in time Indian
filmmakers will learn about the sociology and reality of Indian minorities,
including Dalits, tribals, and religious groups such as Christians and Sikhs.
I must caution filmmakers and fellow writers that the
demonisation of such communities exposes them to opportunistic political attack
by communal and vested interests. Occasionally, such attacks can become
physical, with tragic results. However, at the end of the day, as a Catholic, as
a writer, and as a civil society activist, I must differentiate between the hate
language and idioms of the sangh parivar and the aberrant and crass
commercial motive of a filmmaker like Vinod Pande. Pande may hurt us for the
moment but the hate campaign and the hate idiom can hurt deeper and fatally by
damaging and injuring secular equity.
I would urge filmmakers, therefore, to be sensitive and to
encourage not just the Christian community but all subaltern groups, including
women, who strongly support the freedom of expression and the freedom of
artistic creativity. I remain a fundamental supporter of freedom of expression
and artistic creativity with the only riders being human dignity and the rule of
law.
(John Dayal is national president of the All India Catholic
Union and a senior journalist
and human rights activist).