Lights Out - What Aandhi, Vishwaroopam, and The Voice of Hind Rajab tell us about cinema's oldest struggle.

Darshim Saxena writes on cinema and culture. She founded The Second Seat, a platform and podcast dedicated to conversations about cinema beyond box office narratives, involving both creators and audiences.

Picture this: a film is running in theatres. Audiences are buying tickets, critics are writing reviews, and the projector is spinning. Then, one day, without warning, the lights go out. Not because the film failed. Because it succeeded a little too well at the one thing cinema does better than any other art form, making you see something you weren't supposed to.

It has happened before. It is happening now.

There is a quiet scene in Gulzar's Aandhi (1975) where the politician Aarti Devi spots her old caretaker in the hotel lobby where she is staying for an election campaign. Just a face from a simpler life, and on Suchitra Sen's face, an entire interior world collapses and reassembles in seconds. It is a deeply private moment about a woman caught between ambition and longing, and it is precisely this kind of intimacy that made the film, in 1975, feel dangerous. The resemblance between Sen's character and then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, right as the Emergency was being declared, was apparently too close for comfort. Aandhi returned to screens only after the political weather changed. Today it is considered a masterwork. Back then, it was considered a problem.

Nearly four decades later, Kamal Haasan's Vishwaroopam offered a moment of a completely different kind. For most of its first act, the film presents its protagonist as an unlikely, almost comical figure, an effeminate Kathak dance teacher in New York, clearly not to be taken seriously. Then, in a single scene, the mask drops. The dancer vanishes, and in his place stands something else entirely. Audiences, by all accounts, erupted. It was the film's central argument made visceral that things, and people, are rarely what they first appear. And yet it was this very film, already certified by the CBFC, that was halted by district collectors in Tamil Nadu following protests over its portrayal of a jihadi network, with law and order cited as justification. The irony is worth sitting with. A film whose entire thesis was about mistaken assumptions was itself the subject of one.

What makes the Hind Rajab case particularly striking is the nakedness of it, the documentary's raw footage of a six-year-old Palestinian girl's death in Gaza during Israel's 2024 Rafah offensive, rejected outright by the CBFC in early 2025 without even a pretext. Aandhi was banned under the Emergency, when the suspension of norms was openly declared.Vishwaroopam ban was dressed in the language of public order. The Hind Rajab rejection did not bother with a legal framework at all.

Three films. Three different eras. Three competing anxieties orbiting political, communal, diplomatic. One identical outcome: the CBFC certificate, that green light of official approval.

This is what these cases collectively expose about censorship in India. It is something more layered: the question of who a film implicates, and when. A fictional politician during a political emergency. A thriller about extremism in a religiously diverse state. A documentary embedded in an active geopolitical conflict. Cinema here exists at the intersection of art and audience, and of creative vision and collective anxiety. That tension is not unique to India, but here it has a particular intensity, because the country itself contains so many different versions of what is sacred, what is sensitive, and what is simply too close to the bone.

Indian cinema has produced some of its most enduring work precisely by pushing at these boundaries, and has also, at times, pulled back from them. What these films remind us is that cinema does not exist in a vacuum. Every frame is made somewhere, released somewhere, and watched by someone. The conversation between a film and its context is never really over.

The lights go out. But the projector keeps spinning.