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media and street protest but were overruled by the local courts who denied them their request that the film be withdrawn.

AICU’s other units were more successful and the film was actually withdrawn in Kashmir, Shimla and parts of Himachal Pradesh and some other places.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.