There's a story about Bruce Willis I may have told before, but it has become apt again, so let me repeat it. A few years ago, the Hollywood star was in London to promote the latest of his Die Hard series of action thrillers, a series in which John McClane, the hard-bitten New York cop played by Willis, curses, maims and kills his way to victory over extremely villainous international terrorists and sundry psychopaths. Appearing in Jonathan Ross's TV chat show, Willis was asked about his son, who was then thirteen. "Does your son like the Die Hard series?" Willis rolled his eyes and shook his head, "Oh god, no! We don't let him watch those movies!" Ross nodded sympathetically, "Because of the extreme violence, right?""No, no," Willis shook his head again, "because of the bad language." At which point, the bunch of north London boys I was sitting with, aged between eight and fifteen, all serious Die Hard fans, burst into raucous, disbelieving laughter.

For me, it was telling that a father from a society where many parents start teaching their kids how to handle lethal firearms at startlingly early ages, a man who had built his career on the depiction of spectacular and ruthless use of those weapons, would try and protect his son only from the impropriety of bad language. It was equally telling that a bunch of kids, growing up in a society where they were unlikely to ever get their hands on a gun, were all extremely familiar not only with McClane's fighting skills but also his spectacularly foul mouth. It may have been a slight simplification, but the series of high school shootings had already begun in the US and it occurred to me that I'd rather have offspring who released their anger through 'inappropriate' bad language than the efficient use of semi-automatic weapons they'd ordered off the net.

When I read the list sent out by the new chief of the Central Board of Film Certification - the list of 'bad words' that are from now on supposed to be proscribed in Indian cinema - I was hit by a comparable wave of absurdity. Was this actually real? Was someone emptying their humour-bladder on an unsuspecting public? Had some sensitively-placed secretary at the CBFC (still called the 'Censor Board' by most people) had too much to drink before sending this out of his own accord to welcome the new Censor chief into a national embarrassment? Clearly and sadly not. It was the good gentleman himself who had decided, probably as his first act upon being appointed Chief Commissar of Public Audio-Visual Morals, to turn us all back into swachh aur nek, nanhe-munne baalak (clean and well-behaved, innocent infants) from a non-existent, fantastical past.

But, before we examine the present, let's briefly look at the past that actually did exist. If we take just two cinema industries, those of Hollywood and Bombay, we can see that each has had its own uneven progression through different stages and types of censorship. Early Hollywood was reined in somewhat by the Hays Code of dos and don'ts before the Second World War and rapidly rising tolerance levels (or, if you like, the public's rising impatience with interference from the different Churches and moral conservatives) led to a different set of film classifications. Even after this, it was only from the mid- to late-1960s that certain graphic scenes of violence, more open depictions of sexual exchanges and more grainy language began to be seen in American movies. Even so, in 1971, Clint Eastwood, playing John McClane's great progenitor/ancestor, 'Dirty' Harry Callahan in the eponymous film, hardly utters any cuss word worthy of the tag. The shootings and physical brutality in Dirty Harry are, if anything, far more raw than in the Die Hard movies (where it all feels highly choreographed, both for blood as well as laughs), but the language used in the midst of all the high-calibre early 70s mayhem is very muzzled. It would take a decade or so after Dirty Harry for mainstream Hollywood to get fully unshackled, and it would become so in the face of a huge, reactionary Republican-led movement called the Moral Majority.

Bombay films, too, went through various censorship acts as authorities realized the potential this cinema stuff had to inflame passions, both sexual and political. Since just after Independence, we've been stuck with a Cinematograph Act that stems from the 19th Century and the idea that the white colonial masters had the right to control what subject the natives got to read or not (and later what they were allowed to see on the screen). The Indian government grabbed this racist, imperialist 'right' for itself, continuing to place all of us in the position of infantile and volatile natives who would riot and tear apart the whole country if they saw a man and woman kissing each other on the mouth. Commercial film-makers ( a broad term in which I also include scriptwriters, lyricists, actors, camera-people and editors) in the big three centres were nothing if not inventive and highly competitive product-developers, and censorship led to some of the most bizarre and deliciously lewd sequences, bits of cinema that will make us legends down the path of time. There was also, however, the great need and desire among many film-makers to actually depict our society as it is, just as all the other great, serious cinema practitioners the world over were portraying their respective realities.

Mr Pahlaj Nihalani's urge to sweep all of the few bad words he knows under the carpet can partly be connected all the way back to Nargis objecting to the depiction of poverty in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali - we are sabhya Indians and we don't curse, or have sex, or live in abject poverty. The situation continued to change, 'under the weight of history' as some Marxist might put it, and soon chinks of daylight began to appear. I still remember the shock when, during a film festival screening, we saw Smita Patil's servant woman character slap Amol Palekar's 'malik', the slap perfectly accompanied by the epithet ' ma*** **od'(mother****er). This was in Kumar Shahani's Tarang, an extremely arty, non-mainstream film released in the early 1980s. While violence (including rape scenes) became more and more graphic in commercial Indian cinema, it would still be many years before we heard normal ma-behen, mother-sister, abuses in Bollywood releases. An intermediary phase was when, for example, a hit film like Rang De Basanti kept using nonsensical abuses like behen ke takey. But soon afterwards some people somewhere saw the light (the spread of the internet perhaps being the small mallet on the head that opened up some common sense), and suddenly we found ourselves looking at Indian films made by Indian adults for Indian adults. Not all of them were great cinema, or even 'tasteful', but at least we seemed to be finally free of the coy, jejune, cringe-making miasma of euphemism that will have people still laughing at us hundreds of years after we are all long gone.

It may have seemed so, but one can never assume that something good or sensible will have an easy ride, at least at the outset. So now, under the Achhey Din dispensation, we have the new CBFC director being unloaded upon us. Mr Nihalani is, of course, very far from being Bruce Willis. Among the many differences between the two, here is one: Willis has sometimes been known to insist on doing his own dangerous stunts. Mr Nihalani is, at the moment, clearly carrying out some other people's dangerous stunt on their behalf. As he and his cohorts take over the CBFC, fingers stabbing down on their favourite button, the one marked 'moral rewind', what Nihalani & Co are completely missing is this: whereas a normal cuss word might now pass unnoticed in a film, there are a thousand ways for someone with a modicum of verbal creativity to heavily outline the missing but implied dirty word. One could be a dastardly person and easily brew Nihalani in his own juice, forcing him to go duck himself in the nearest pond. One could point out to Mr N that he's buried himself in the deep slit between sycophancy and absurdity. One could laugh at the fact that in his enthusiasm to appellate the moral majority-wallas, he's gone off at half-cock, sucked into some deluded sense of power, left holding a hollow stick. Life is a total stitch-up anyway, a practical trick on all of us, a series of nasty pricks, a farce, holed through like cheese with the idiocies of our fellow humans. Art in general and truly good fiction in particular, whether in books, theatre or cinema is one of the great consolations of existence and we don't need an old cart-before-the horse type to be messing around with our access to it. We could try and point this out, or we could just wait for the bomb-bays of the box-office to open on the CBFC's head.