How did the censorship laws affect the acting companies?
Answers
Answer:
In general, censorship in India, which involves the suppression of speech or other public communication, raises issues of freedom of speech, which is protected by the Indian constitution.
The Constitution of India guarantees freedom of expression, but places certain restrictions on content, with a view towards maintaining communal and religious harmony, given the history of communal tension in the nation.[1] According to the Information Technology Rules 2011, objectionable content includes anything that "threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states or public order".[2]
In 2018, the Freedom in the World report by Freedom House gave India a freedom rating of 2.5, a civil liberties rating of 3, and a political rights rating of 2, earning it the designation of free. The rating scale runs from 1 (most free) to 7 (least free).[3] Analysts from Reporters Without Borders rank India 133rd in the world in their 2017 Press Freedom Index,[4] In 2016, the report Freedom' by Freedom House gave India a press freedom rating of "Partly Free", with a Press Freedom Score of 41 (0-100 scale, lower is better).[5]
Answer:
Censorship of the stage, like censorship of the printed word, was a widespread and well-established European tradition by 1815. However, while prior censorship of the press was eliminated throughout Europe by 1914, European countries almost universally retained prior censorship of the stage until (and sometimes well after) the First World War. Thus, in 1695 Britain became the first major European country to abolish censorship of the press, yet forty years later, in 1737, parliament systematised a formerly haphazard theatre censorship, and controls were not finally abolished until 1968. Most other European countries did not eliminate press censorship until about the middle of the nineteenth century, while maintaining theatre censorship throughout the century. Furthermore, they typically exercised much harsher controls over the stage than had been exercised over the printed word. Thus, the 1822 drama-censorship rules of the Italian state of Tuscany declared,
The general rules for the censorship of [printed] works in which are disseminated religious principles or principles that are politically subversive, or of works based on a malicious plan threatening to weaken or destroy veneration for Religion or for the Throne and which awaken in people’s minds emotions hostile to either of these, will be applied more strictly to theatrical performances.1