Censorship in DMK Movies
The initial DMK movies were not victims of censorship since the party was little known to the censors, but as the party gained popularity in mid-1950s censorship became stronger. According to Murasoli Maran one of the techniques followed by the censors was to make sure that the coherence of the movie was lost so that it was a box office failure. At one point DMK, having had been a target of high censorship, had to move back to stage dramas. But the Dramatic Licensing Act brought censorship to stage plays as well, and two of Karunanidhi's plays were banned.
To evade censorship DMK scriptwriters chose to use puns and equivocal phrases. The most commonly used pun was Anna which is the word for older brother in Tamil and also was the popular name for DMK chief C. N. Annadurai. When Anna was praised on screen the audience would break into applause.
Read more about this topic: Tamil Cinema And Dravidian Politics
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