Deccan Herald · 17 April 2026
Lights Out
What Aandhi, Vishwaroopam and The Voice of Hind Rajab tell us about cinema’s oldest struggle
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. 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. Then, in a single scene, the mask drops. And yet it was this very film, already certified by the CBFC, that was halted by district collectors in Tamil Nadu following protests. 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 rejected outright by the CBFC without even a pretext.
Three films. Three different eras. Three competing anxieties — political, communal, diplomatic. One identical outcome.
Indian cinema has produced some of its most enduring work precisely by pushing at these boundaries. 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 lights go out. But the projector keeps spinning.
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