They were, in part, responding to the complaints registered by the Federation of British Industries to the board of trade about what they considered to be a virtual monopoly enjoyed by American films within the empire.
In a very significant report prior to the ICC, it was advocated that “Great Britain owes a duty to the dominions; the dominions to Great Britain and to each other; and India owes a duty first to herself....The film can as well display the ancient dignity of the Mahabharata as teach the Indian peasant the elements of hygiene and sanitation" It is important to remember that the nationalist movement which was on the rise, spurred on by a series of events including the formation of the Home Rule League, agitations against the Jalianwala Bagh massacre, etc.
This is also a period marked by the uncertainty of the effect of cinema, and according to the British social Hygiene delegation that visited India between 1926-27 (just prior to the setting up of the ICC), cinema was the root cause of a large number of evils in India, They said that “in every province that we visited the evil influence of cinema was cited by educationists and representative citizens as one of the major factors in lowering the standards of sex conduct and thereby tending to increase the dissemination of disease" An article published in The Westminster Gazette in 1921 was widely circulated amongst the provincial governments, and the article claimed that "one of the reasons for the hardly veiled contempt of the native Indian for us maybe found in the introduction and development of moving pictures in India ...imagine the effect of such films on the oriental mind.
He marvels at our heavy infantile humour - his own is on a higher and more intellectual level; he forms his own opinions of our morals during the mighty unrolled dramas of unfaithful wives and unmoral husbands, our lightly broken promises, our dishonored laws.
It is difficult for the Britisher in India to keep up his dignity, and to extol, or to enforce moral laws which the natives sees lightly disregarded by the Britons themselves in the picture palace" Similarly, a 1920 report in Bioscope claimed that the main motivation of these regulations was "the fact that there have been numerous complaints that the films were being imported into India which hold up Europeans to ridicule and lowered the native estimation of the white woman" Similarly, Sir Hasketh Bell, a former colonial governor warned that “The success of our government of subject races depends almost entirely on the degree of respect that we can inspire” The demands for the establishment of a Committee that would look into the ways in which censorship, and other protective measures that could be taken up to prevent the tarnishing of the might of the empire.
The argument of the cultural invasion and corrosion by Hollywood, was linked centrally to the attempt by the British film industry to bolster what they saw as their national markets including the colonies.
In other words, the colonial governmental machinery was put into motion to ensure that the study was comprehensive and thorough, covering all parts of the then British India from Lahore to Rangoon to Chennai to Delhi.
Priya Jaikumar states that “Perhaps more than any other event in the 1920s the ICC helped to establish persistent themes in ways that the cinema and its audiences in India have been understood, evaluated, criticized and described ever since” .
One of the reasons for the instrumental failure of the ICC was the fact that its dual agenda of staging a moral panic around the bodies of white women, to set in place a system that would ensure economic quotas for Empire films etc.
This plan was dependent on the construction of an idea of native audiences, and their vulnerability to the new technology of cinema, but the committee constantly encountered an intelligibility problem of another sort while collecting their data.
While in one sense the ICC can be seen as yet another component of the colonial logic of governmentality, where it exercised power through a complex mode of rendering it into a process of knowledge by means of data collection, historiography, documentation, certification, and representation.