This book has examined formal as well as informal measures of censorship in colonial and post-colonial India. The latter included friendly chats with editors, threats of prosecution and a system of voluntary censorship, or ‘press advice’, during and after the Second World War. Censorship did not always involve an intolerant censor with a red pencil; it could be achieved equally successfully over a cup of tea. What are the insights generated by this historical survey of three crucial decades?

‘Liberal Imperialism’, Public Opinion and Anxiety

After a detailed and careful study of the operation of the 1908 Newspapers Act in colonial India, historian Robert Darnton concludes that the colonial state in India censored via elaborate trials rather than more drastic methods in order to demonstrate the justice of their rule to the ruled, and to themselves. In his words, ‘Liberal imperialism was the greatest contradiction of them all; so the agents of the Raj summoned up as much ceremony as they could, in order to prevent themselves from seeing it.’ The ‘legal ritual’ was, in his opinion, ‘to demonstrate the justice of their rule to the “natives”, and even more important, to themselves’. As this book has shown, at every step the colonial state attempted to make its censorship measures legally unassailable. The legal ritual manifested itself when the state tackled mass movements too.

This oxymoron—‘Liberal Imperialism’—has been explained by historian Peter Robb thus: ‘Repression was thus represented as liberal in a higher sense, because it sought to prevent the perversion of public opinion, and because it protected a great work in which no fundamental change was needed.’ In this sense, censorship was a measure of protection for the Indian public (to prevent them from going astray). Censorship is dependent on surveillance and complementary to propaganda. Richard Popplewell, in his book on intelligence gathering in colonial India between 1904 and 1924, comments on the self-image of the GOI as that of a ‘fair-playing’ state; one which used intelligence gathering minimally and only in exceptional circumstances. Like intelligence-gathering activities, censorship too conflicted with the self-image of a liberal colonial state.