Censorship – The Arts

America-based filmmaker Roshan Sethi’s rom-com A Nice Indian Boy has become yet another victim of the Central Board of Film Certification’s (CBFC) crude erasure. The film, based on Madhuri Shekar’s play of the same name, is a queer love story between Naveen, an Indian-American doctor, and Jay, a white man. Before the film was released in Indian cinemas on October 17, the censor board demanded that ‘Indian’ be dropped from the film’s title, seemingly to separate the nation from the core theme of the film.

The film’s distributor, Pictureworks, in an Instagram post revealed that they were compelled to remove ‘Indian’ owing to the “censorship rules” in India. “Remember when the Aligarh mayor wanted Aligarh [2025] banned because she thought a gay protagonist made her city look bad? Seems like the CBFC now fears that calling a gay man ‘A Nice Indian Boy’ might make the whole country gay,” tweeted Aligarh’s writer and editor Apurva Asrani, reacting to the incident.
Following Mirror’s October 25 report on Indian cinema’s battle with the censor board, Sethi spoke on the arbitrariness of these alterations. “I think censorship is historically always very dumb, and doesn’t really work. This title change achieves nothing. Anyone who wants to watch the unaltered film via other means can and will. I suspect all of the people who watched the film already knew its real title. A censorship board composed of people who believe they know what’s best for the public is a silly exercise in pretend power, and the best thing we can do is to repeatedly puncture the appearance of that power,” he said.