In 1991, Mumbai didn’t exist. I was born into a post-colonial khichdi of a family: Sindhi, Brazilian mulatta, Portuguese and East Indian. My ancestor, Viscount Inacio Caetano Carvalho of Bardez fled to this Good Bay in 1895 to outwit censorship in Goa, and publish his libertarian piece de resistance on the mutiny of the Maratha soldiers he patronised. Bombay’s angry young men took up cudgels against their own import, substituting paindus (village folk) inspired by Hollywood’s gangster glamour during the Prohibition, though this was a fashion statement, a lifestyle rather than livelihood. Within a generation, the jiving, scatting, rock ‘n’ rolling bad boys of the 1930s, like my grandfather and my uncles in the 1950s and 1960s who had their very own high school gang in Bandra named after an old Hudson car, gave way to real life smuggler-gangsters like D-company, which began a sordid love affair with Bollywood. While Bollywood boomed on black money, it was difficult to differentiate artiste from muse. I was a few months old when the shootouts took place in my neighbourhood in Lokhandwala, a few years old when the police used my terrace for similar reconnaissance. Although the film fraternity was always close to home in the form of family friends, yet unrelated to my life in terms of what it depicted, often as hypocritical as it was fantastical. I grew up unable to name a single film Salman Khan acted in, but I had off by rote stories from when he grew up with my maternal uncle, Carl and his rambunctious brothers, all similarly clad in tight jeans with ginormous biceps. I grew up knowing I’d narrowly escaped being named “Zoya” by his father, Uncle Salim Khan. I cannot remember taxi rides to Auntie Tanuja’s to play with Kajol, although I do remember thinking how very different my aunt Moon Moon Sen was from how she was portrayed. I associate her with literature, unspoken charity, lessons on collecting art, a voice that titters articulately in Bengali and English, tête-a-têtes, unpretentious bargain-hunting and great Tiprasa food. There was a conspicuous disconnect between Mumbai media’s sexualised imposters and Bombay’s beautiful denizens. Truth is I began my life at the end of a fierce freedom-loving era, when ugly regionalism and moral policing by the Shiv Sena gave me the handiest taxonomy to separate my ‘Bombay’ from the state-sanctioned claustrophobia of ‘Mumbai’. As histories were rewritten in saffron, and varnished with the fear of the co-opted, censorship became pervasive, alienating filmmakers from their subjects. This Bombay versus Mumbai struggle played out in government’s attempt to turn Bollywood into Mollycoddle-wood, mainly because of how much nanny-ing the industry through the National Board of Film Certification (NBFC/Censorship Board) could bring it in fees, fines and graft. As leisure was surrendered for frenetic economic activity, most films that survived censorship were those with magic realism intoxicating enough to take the working class away from drudgery, or plot-lite hodgepodge where strongmen dishoom-dishoomed over saucy minxes. Bollywood existed as escape, not very different from a soma holiday in Huxley’s super-specialised Brave New World. Nevertheless, Bollywood came into its own and proved soft power for India in the former Soviet Union and Afghanistan. Heady colour, romance and materialism helped us win strategic partnerships with those whose liberties were similarly bartered. As India embarked on the biggest state-building mission, the temptation to manufacture civic attitudes like patriotism and secularism led Nehruvian socialists to establish the CBFC in 1951, doing away with the autonomous police-controlled city censor boards. Socialism, spirit of the time, suffers from the assumption government exists to protect adults from their own choices, and that imagined Indian innocence remain unviolated by reality’s inconvenient protrusions and cutting-edge truths with the help of bubble wrap bureaucracy. Censorship left the virulent logic of Raj’s civilising mission unchallenged! Holding Bollywood to illogical standards of purity and political blandness became more frequent upon the deaths of India’s first generation of statesmen, especially as CBFC positions became rewards for party workers. Bollywood is now flying off the handle against CBFC chief Pahlaj Nihalani’s ludicrous cuts to Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab, a nebula of a film produced by Anurag Kashyap and Ekta Kapoor. It depicts how drug abuse devastates Punjab’s social ecosystem through the eyes of four protagonists: a doctor (Kareena Kapoor), migrant worker (Alia Bhat), rockstar (Shahid Kapoor) and policeman (Diljit Dosanjh), who collide in the war on drugs. With less than a week until release, some liken the 94 proposed cuts by Nihalani’s morality police to how Iran’s youth reportedly buy off Basiji (religious police) to avoid 100 lashes as penalties for stolen liberties. Others like Congress’s Amarinder Singh opine Nihalani’s dislocating crusade to remove references to Punjab and words like “MLA, MP, parliament and elections” stem from his entirely noble allegiance to BJP and their allies Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), lest viewers make the connection between their politicians and those on screen who reportedly use their security details to logistically assist drug traffickers, in the run-up to elections in 2017. Nihalani alleges Udta Punjab is funded by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a claim I personally find hilarious, having written AAP donation receipts for “Rs two only” as a former volunteer during the 2014 general elections. However, having dined with Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen in December, I can empathise with his desperation as Sen forecasted a big win for AAP. While everyone seems eager to deface social issues with simplistic electoral arithmetic, we may be ignoring UNODC statistics that 29 percent of South Asia’s heroin users live in Punjab where three-quarters of households report at least one drug user; growing mistrust as India suspects ISI smuggles Afghan opiates into its frontiers to cripple our millennials, and that it is our fault for exploiting and under-employing young labour. Despite discarding progress-postponing anachronisms like the Planning Commission, the Modi sarkar (government) in the fine socialist tradition have preserved central government’s retarding influence on broadcasting. It leverages bubble wrap bureaucracy to project a lacerated notion of the nation. For the spin-doctors, it is more important for their mangled idea of India to be seen as robust than to allow the arts to hold up a mirror to spark social reform. This politweaker cannot understand the fuss around Shyam Benegal’s highly conservative committee recommendations that are to be enacted on June 20. They do little to prevent movies from being masticated by moral police before they get to us. If ‘democratator’ Modi wants to be re-elected, he needs to do away with the NBFC in the film certification process altogether, just like he improved the lives of ordinary Indians by allowing them to self-attest their personal documents instead of having to pay notaries to authenticate them. Instead of pretending the tired quota route to multi stakeholder representation on the NBFC is going to make it less of an offence for filmmakers to criticise gurus, for instance, for preaching gonad removal to get closer to God (true story!), or that the censorship board can get by on a budget of a million dollars while it doctors more Bollywood’s 1000 annual releases, let’s acknowledge Nihalani and co may be recovering their operating costs from you and me as consumers too via extorting desperate production houses. It is counter-intuitive not to allow creative people to specify whether their films are for adult audiences and guarantee the legality of their content. While there cannot be all-encompassing safeguards, moviemakers risk being sued for getting it wrong. Perhaps South Asia would be plagued by less outrage over freedom of expression by the vocal minority if state censorship bodies bankrolled by taxpayers were abolished. When the cost of taking offence is low, the supply of moral outrage is highly exaggerated. Let them who take offence move court only after they write their lawyers big fat cheques instead of doing it at our cost. Bollywood, after all, is the Archimedean point from which South Asia’s attitudes on liberty can be moved. The writer is a politics and governance professional, integrated media strategist and Gross National Happiness researcher. Her column Politweak reimagines paths to peace in South Asia, and she can be reached on Twitter @LatoyaFerns