Assistant Professor Swapnil Rai recently contributed to writer Gitanjali Poonia's Deseret News article "Why Bollywood Banned Kissing Scene in Movies."
In the article, Rai weighs in on Bollywood's fraught relationship with censorship and how that has been exacerbated with the arrival of over-the-top (OTT) streaming platforms in India. Citing the 2016 film Lipstick Under My Burka, which was delayed by the censor board for two years for being too "lady-oriented," Rai noted that censorship and the "depiction of sex and sexuality on screen has a verygendered power dynamic - when the woman is objectified and is the object of male desire, it’s accepted by the censorship board, but when women express themselves without being the object of male desire, it becomes problematic."
