Indian censors cut profanities from 'Gully Boy'

MUMBAI: Indian censors have cut several profanities from Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt starrer ‘Gully Boy’.

India’s Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) has ordered filmmakers to remove every mention of three expletives from “Gully Boy”, a drama about an aspiring hip-hop star from a Mumbai slum.

“Gully Boy” stars Bollywood icons Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt and is about a young couple yearning to break out of their families to realise their dreams.

The female-directed movie premiered to great acclaim at the Berlin film festival at the weekend and hits screens across India on Thursday.

According to a filing on its website, the CBFC granted “Gully Boy” a UA rating on the condition it replaced an English-language expletive and two Hindi slang terms “wherever (they) occurred”.

UA stands for an unrestricted adult rating, which means parental guidance is required for children under 12 years old. Only films with that rating reach a mass audience.

“We made some minor changes,” Ritesh Sidhwani, the film’s producer, told AFP, adding that the songs in the movie were “intact”.

Singh, 33, stars as Murad who is turning the squalor and tension of his home life into poetry until a popular local rapper convinces him to try hip-hop.

Bhatt, 25, plays Safeena, who wears a headscarf but resists her family’s attempts to arrange her marriage and wants to become a surgeon.

The movie is inspired in part by Mumbai hip-hop stars Divine and Naezy and sees Singh doing his own rapping.