Deconstructing Indian Censorship “India’s film censorship machinery and its agenda has been criticised for being caught in a colonial past. But in reality, the censorship regime in India presents a problematic engagement between the colonial past and the post-colonial present that supersedes any Victorian legacy. The need is to examine how far the present departs from the past and to what extent the past still resides in the present. While modes of content control characteristic of colonial times still exist, these too are constantly being manipulated in response to emerging modes of address — seeming to create a facade of change” (Bhowmik 3148) This research paper is the cumulation of a new interest in deconstructing the words colonial, postcolonial, and decolonization. Through my research I encountered several interesting works on postcolonial theory that would primarily focus on the etymology of these words, defining their relation to space and time. While these metaphysical works are mainly interested in challenging the dominant discourse, I would like to bring this new understanding of post- colonial theory to a more grounded application. Accordingly, I propose that we explore Indian film censorship in light of these concepts in order to highlight the country’s colonial heritage. Therefore, I will argue that India, or any other country for that matter, cannot be defined as a postcolonial state, for postcolonial needs to be dissociated from its temporal linearity. Instead of conceptualizing postcolonialism in terms of the different temporal stages in the development of a country’s social and political infrastructure and of its national identity, I would like to bring us to an understanding of the theory that would take into consideration its spatial fixity and relativity. In addition to its dissociation from its temporal marker, we need to fragment its outreach so as to become more inclusive of minorities and their colonial experience. The goal of which is to change the focus of the theory from the countries’ material condition to the people who inhabit it, especially to the minorities whose voices are censored. This fragmentation is fundamental as it emphasizes post-colonial individual experiences as opposed to the all-encompassing grand