Film censorship in India has always been subject to, and defined by the whims and caprices of those appointed as the tsars of dictating the terms for movie and documentary viewership. There was no mandatory legal requirement to give a fair and proper hearing to film-makers before arriving at a final decision. Similarly, there have been cases galore - like the Supreme Court’s ruling in the KA Abbas case- that a film must be seen as a whole before deciding upon censoring it. Moreover, there have been many instances where the censors have been sitting over decisions, resulting in mounting losses for directors and producers alike. Doughty directors had to knock on the doors of the courts to get their films released, and were often compelled to insert excisions as the censors demanded.