Odd literary feuds: Greene vs Coward

From Norman Sherry’s The Life of Graham Greene:

“Greene suddenly and without warning began to assail one of the original talents of the world of theatre—Noel Coward. There was no obvious reason for seeing Coward as his bête noire. Perhaps for Greene the ever-popular Coward was a suspect talent, though periodically Greene felt an almost insane urge to lash out, working off some of his bile in a review."

Three savage reviews later, Coward responded in verse.

Dear Mr Graham Greene, I yearn
So much to know why you should burn
With such fierce indignation at
The very fact that I exist.
I’ve been unable to resist
Sitting up later than I need
To read in ‘The Spectator’ what
Appears to be no more, no less
Than shocking manners. I confess
Bewilderment. I’ve seldom seen
Another brother-writer press
Such disadvantage with such mean
Intent to hurt. You must have been
For years, in secret, nourishing
A rich, rip-snorting, flourishing
Black hatred for my very guts!
Surely all these envenomed cuts
At my integrity and taste
Must be a waste of your own time?
What is my crime, beyond success?
(But you have been successful too
It can’t be that) I know a few
Politer critics than yourself
Who simply hate my plays
But do they state their sharp dispraise
With such surprising, rising bile?
Oh dear me no, they merely smile.
A patronizing smile perhaps
But then these journalistic chaps
Unlike ourselves, dear Mr Greene,
(Authors I mean) are apt to sneer
At what they fear to be apart
From what they conceive as art.
You have descried (also with keen
Sadistic joy) my little book
About Australia, one look
At which should prove, all faults aside,
That I had tried, dear Mr Greene,
To do a job. You then implied
That I had run away, afraid,
A renegade. I can’t surmise
Why you should view your fellow men
With such unfriendly, jaundiced eyes.
But then, we’re strangers. I can find
No clue, no key to your dark mind.
I’ve read your books as they appear
And I’ve enjoyed them all. (Nearly all.)
I’ve racked my brains in a sincere
But vain endeavour to recall
If, anytime or anywhere,
In Bloomsbury or Belgrave Square,
In Paris or Pekin or Bude,
I have, unwittingly, been rude,
Or inadvertently upset you.
(Did I once meet you and forget you?
Have I ever been your debtor?
Did you once write me a letter
That I never got—or what?)
If I knew, I shouldn’t worry.
All this anguish, all this flurry,
This humiliating scene
That I’m making, Mr Greene,
Is a plea for an explanation
For a just justification
By what strange Gods you feel yourself empowered
To vent this wild expenditure of spleen
Upon yours most sincerely
Noel Coward.


A month later, Greene reviewed Coward’s play Blithe Spirit, calling it “a weary exhibition of bad taste”. So much for the soothing power of verse, though twelve years later, the feud had finally died down, and Greene rented Coward’s house in Jamaica as a holiday home. A curious footnote: Coward acted the part of Hawthorne in the film version of Greene's Our Man In Havana.

How to illustrate your news story on rape

(From the Feb 2012 Times of India story, 'Constable booked for raping minor':



(From the Times of India story on the Kolkata car rape victim)



(From IBN Live news reports; this seems to be a standard IBN visual for rape news stories)



(From IBN Live news reports; FirstPost carried the same screengrab)

The BS column: Dilli's dastangois

(Published in the Business Standard, February 2012)

If you were telling a story in the Cameroons, you might start with: “A fable! A fable! Bring it! Bring it!” Most Bengalis know the folktale riff on “Once upon a time”: “Once there was a king, once there was a queen…” Many tales begin with: “Once there was, once there wasn’t”. The older storytelling traditions may invoke a truly ancient past: “In the time when men and animals talked to one another…”

For the last seven years, Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain have begun their dastans with an ode to the cup-bearer, setting aside the minor impediment that their silver cups are often filled with nothing more innocuous than water. The traditional invocation is as much part of their act as are the spotless white kurtas or the ancient story-cycles that they’ve recited from the steps of the Jama Masjid, the monuments of Old Delhi and more prosaically, the IIC auditorium stage.

The dastangos began their performances at an interesting point of time in Delhi’s history: the mushairas and sawal-jawab oral poetry baithaks had died out, replaced by the often grimly ritualistic evening of book readings. Few of the readings that were attended by growing numbers of aspiring writers and curious readers in the 2000s ever migrated out of the comfortably narrow confines of South Delhi. A handful of events were in Hindi or Urdu and the Sahitya Akademi did its best to bring in writers from across India.

But by the end of the decade, the Delhi book reading was like a burra khana for Indian English writers; an evening of chiefly ceremonial significance, as the writer Mukul Kesavan has remarked. Through dastangoi, the two performers brought back a much older tradition of storytelling.

Mahmood Farooqui is a historian with a background in theatre; Danish Husain is an actor and poet. It was in 2005 that Farooqui began to study the cultural history of the dastans, the storytellers who carried a library around in their heads. The first performances he did that year along with Himanshu Tyagi—Danish would join in later—were from the Tilism-e-Hoshruba, a magnificently fraudulent epic.

“Know then that from 1883-1893 in Lucknow, two rival storytellers, Syed Muhammad Hussein Jah and Ahmed Husain Qamar wrote a fantasy in the Urdu language whose equal has not been heard before or since,” writes Musharraf Ali Farooqi, writer and translator of the Hoshruba. The epic was 8,000 pages long, and was “a monstrously elaborate literary hoax”: it passed itself off as one of the great ancient story cycles, perhaps even part of the legendary Adventures of Amir Hamza, but was actually the creation of a small group of storytellers in Lucknow.

They wove an indelible tale, one that was made to be told to a circle of awed listeners, and that was labyrinthine in its twists and turns. “These stories were here before Tolkien, and—if we dare say so—are much better than Tolkien’s work,” boasts an online Urdu bookseller’s Hoshruba page.

Over their seven years of dastangoi, Danish Husain and Mahmood Farooqui have departed from the old classics—the Hoshruba or the tales of Amir Hamza—in order to experiment with newer works. Recently, they did a Dastaan-e-Sedition to protest the imprisonment of Dr Binayak Sen in Chattisgarh.

To mark Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary, the two performers took up his revolutionary novel, Ghare Baire, exploring the separation between the home and the world, and, as they put it: “Vande kya hai, Mataram kya hai”. The two switch easily between the three roles—Sandip, the fiery revolutionary driven by greed, desire and patriotism, Nikhil, the temperate zamindar offering reasoned arguments against the excesses of nationalism, Bimala, Nikhil’s wife, stepping across many boundaries as she is seduced by the outside world and by Sandip’s many persuasions.

The performance, and their translation of Ghare Baire from Bengali into Urdu-studded Hindustani, is successful—as most of their performances have been. Danish Husain said once that the virtue of dastangoi also lay in its portability—the performance/ readings could take place in auditoriums or at a bus stop.

After the show, Mahmood says: “The old stories are the stuff that we live for.” The “modern” stories, based on novels that so closely mirror contemporary concerns, are easier for the performer to feel; but the old story-cycles promise a more ancient connection. It’s what the translator of the Hoshruba, Musharraf Farooqi, means when he says his role is to “beat the kettledrums”.

“What dastangoi is about,” says Mahmood Farooqui, “is a combination of four things—Urdu, theatre, performance, literature. People who do theatre in India often feel the burden of having to do something worthy, relevant, serious. But eventually, it’s about telling a good story. It’s meant to entertain.”

The storytellers of Delhi are done, until the next performance. As the traditional Russian closing has it: “The story is over, I can’t lie any more.”

(Image from the Dastangoi site.)

Baboos and Bande Mataram: India's little magazines

(Baboo Jabberjee, BA, by F. Anstey; from the Project Gutenberg free e-book)

(Published in the Business Standard, February 2012)


Their anniversaries slide by unremarked, except for a handful of scholars and critics who remember the little magazines from a century ago. It’s hard to imagine that era now, when the printing press was as much a symbol of the new technology as the Kindle might be today.

It’s equally hard for all but a few historians and scholars of the calibre of Ramachandra Guha, Aloke Rai, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra or Shahid Amin to imagine the excitement of that time, and the zest of the journals and periodicals that flourished a century ago. Today’s magazine stands offer journals on everything from film stars to motoring to parenting, but a century ago, political commentary, fledgling literature and (admittedly terrible) poetry reigned.

Many took for their model a British original, subverting it in the way of the wily Oriental. 140 years ago, the Indian Charivari joined a long and distinguished list of magazines inspired by the satirical eye of Punch. The Parsi Punch, one of the earliest imitators of the original, was to transmute itself into the Hindi Punch, and Muhammad Sajjad Hussain was to make the Oudh Punch famous as an “Indian vernacular serio-comic paper, the first of its kind ever published in Northern India”.

The Indian Charivari began by reviewing, often favourably, such subjects as the efforts of British painters at the Simla Exhibition, but moved rapidly into political commentary. It was famous for bringing an Indian style to its lampoons, using references to Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings and local folk art in its caricatures—including a celebrated one of Lord Curzon, depicted as the goddess Saraswati in a commentary on educational reform.

Mookerjee’s Magazine was founded slightly earlier, in 1861, and was among a score of emerging journals published across the country, from Bengal to Madras, that allowed themselves extraordinary licence. Its stated aim was to cover “Politics, Literature, Sociology and Art”, and within a few years, it had drawn criticism. This was not for its poetry, which was in the best traditions of splendidly awful Indo-Anglian verse (Song of the Indian Conservative, for instance, or an ode to Mohinee, the Hindu Maiden), but for its politics.

In its pages, a defender writes: “That Mookerjee’s Magazine should be deemed notorious, and the quality of its articles depreciated by certain Anglo-Indian writers who see nothing commendable in any independent Native undertaking is not at all surprising. Chime in with their views and write yourself down a humble admirer of Hugrut and his oracles, and you are sure to be petted and fondled as a very respectable Hottentot… “

The contents of Mookerjee’s ranged from the comfortably obscure—a plaintive essay asking Where Shall the Baboo Go, much pedantry about Indian religious texts—to the surprisingly contemporary.

In our current obsession with memoirs from the “insider”, it’s worth remembering that Mookerjee’s Magazine published the drily critical Reminiscences of a Kerani’s Life in serial form, which skewered Baboo and Sahib alike. The Indian fascination with long-form journalism showed up in its pages as well—the current affairs magazines at the turn of the century thought nothing of carrying a roughly 40-page history of famines in India, for instance, as Mookerjee’s Magazine did.

This article, Indian Famines in the Past, was just one of the many instances where Indians spoke out against the erasure of their history—in this case, British India’s perceived indifference to the plight of the famine-stricken. The piece was written just after the famines in the Upper Doab, Orissa and Rajputana, and just before the great famines in Bihar, parts of South India and the Ganjam famine.

By the 1890s, the figure of the intellectual, especially the Bengali baboo, was a familiar enough one to be caricatured—both by fellow Bengalis and by writers like F Anstey, whose Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee B.A. was immortalized in 1897. About 105 years ago, after Mookerjee’s Magazine had quietly folded up its shamiana, another journal would become the most influential Indian English periodical of its time. The Modern Review, started by the journalist and reformer Ramananda Chatterjee, would have among its contributors Rabindranath Tagore, Verrier Elwin, Sister Nivedita and remained determinedly non-partisan all through its existence.

Ramchandra Guha adds an unusual contributor to that list—Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote a splendid rant against himself under the pen-name Chanakya. Chatterjee, like many of the intellectuals of the age, was comfortably bilingual, and edited the Bengali journal Prabasi as well as the Review, which may also have given the Modern Review its inclusiveness and eclecticism.

Most of these journals, and the early pamphlets and periodicals published in Madras, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and other printing hubs around India, are almost forgotten, rarely archived. Some of this indifference to the past may be changing—The Best of Quest, edited by Laeeq Futehally, Arshia Sattar and Achal Prabhala, brought back a sense of the intellectual debates of the 1950s. But few remember Mookerjee’s Magazine or the Oudh Punch, or the biting wit of the Hindi nationalist journals of the previous century. That’s a big gap in our memory of ourselves.

I’m at: twitter.com/nilanjanaroy

Speaking Volumes: The fatwa against reading

(Published in the Business Standard on February 14, 2012)

Among the many things forgotten about the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentine’s Day 1989 is that it did not stop at naming Salman Rushdie for writing the Satanic Verses. The author was condemned to death “along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents”.

In retrospect, this was a fascinating inclusion. There was the minor matter that by including Rushdie’s editors and publishers, the Ayatollah had effectively declared war against the publishing industry in general—the typesetters who laid the book out, the printers and proofreaders, all the innocent footsoldiers caught in a battle that they had not chosen. He had also declared war against those not of the faith—if Rushdie was guilty of the crime of blasphemy, then arguing that one was not of the same religion and did not share the same beliefs was no longer a defence.

More crucially, the Ayatollah’s argument was both a curiously modern and a vengefully medieval one. His recognition that awareness itself of the contents of a potentially blasphemous work was a crime was both an acknowledgement that knowledge is dangerous, and stands as an indictment of readers along with writers.

This understanding of reading as an act of will, just as potentially subversive as anything actively written or imagined by a writer, goes back centuries. It is typically, either the state or organized religion that has been the policeman at the borders of reading. If in ancient China, the knowledge of the existence of certain texts was at one time enough to constitute a crime, British India had a milder form of this view of reading as subversive, which influenced the laws of the state.

The most subversive book in the country for years was the Bhagavad Gita, which kept strange company in the minds of British officials. The report of the “sedition committee”, led by Justice Rowlett, published in 1918-1919, states: “The conspirators [against the British government] designed a special syllabus for the people indoctrinated in the same belief. It included the Bhagwat Gita, the writings of Vivekananda, the life history of Mazzini and Garibaldi.” These books, the report continues, were used by “scheming and artful people” to influence the “weakhearted” to indulge in crimes against the state.

To be a writer in those years was to live on intimate terms with censorship, internal and external. The British established a long chain of guilt between printer, press, distributor, writer and reader—all were held responsible for crimes that ranged from sedition to disaffection, just as the Ayatollah would hold publishers and editors responsible for the perceived crime of blasphemy, many decades later.

Bankimchandra’s revised editions of the incendiary Anandamath are an interesting case study of what it meant to try to live within the system while being critical of it. Bankim was also a government servant, and his revisions and amendments to Anandamath are particularly revealing. Anandamath was widely received as a revolutionary text, and became something of a revolutionary manifesto. The first edition came out in 1882; the second edition changed key lines to soften the call to revolutionary defiance.

The third edition made the most sweeping changes—by now, Bankim had been transferred elsewhere by the British government and was trying to ensure that the book was not banned. In the third edition, he deleted many anti-British passages; in the fifth, he added a caveat to the unflattering portrayal of a British officer. “The British officials posted in India in those days were not men of unblemished moral character—quite unlike their counterparts today.”

Perhaps the changes had their intended effect; the book was not banned, Bankimchandra managed to return from the wilderness in his professional capacity as a servant of the British government. Despite all his attempts to soften Anandamath, the edition that circulated most widely in all of its fiery glory was the second edition, modeled closely on the first, defiant, uncensored one printed in the magazine Bangadarshan.

Khomeini and the British differ sharply in many respects, and a major one is that the Ayatollah did not need to be seen as just or fair. In the 23 years since the fatwa on Satanic Verses was first pronounced, much has been written about the responsibility of writers—most of it a veiled justification of censorship—or about Rushdie’s plight. But the Ayatollah’s fatwa cut out the possibility of engaged criticism by the faithful—disallowing them an expression of dissent or offence--just as surely as the Hindu rightwing succeeded in shutting down any kind of intelligent discussion on either Shivaji or the multiplicity of Ramayanas some years ago.

The only difference is that the Ayatollah shut down the discussion with an axe rather than a fist. And that what he indicted 23 years ago was not just the act of writing, but the crime of reading.

I’m at twitter.com/nilanjanaroy

#flashreads for free speech/ Feb 14th

Update: Thanks to all those who participated in or started their own #flashreads groups in Delhi, Bangalore, Bombay, Kochi and Kolkata--what we had this year was several small groups of volunteers doing readings in libraries, markets and public parks. Special thanks to our youngest protestor in Delhi, 10-year-old Nikhil, who read from Luka and the Fire of Life.

Some of the suggestions that have come in for next year:

1) make it a larger protest. This wasn't my intention when starting #flashreads, which was meant to be a small and personal way of protesting, but it would be really nice if someone did want to organise it in a bigger way, and if they could raise issues around free speech and censorship in college campuses next year.

2) include more readings from more Indian languages--absolutely, and many thanks to those of you who read from Faiz, Paash, Muktibodh, Gadar and VM Basheer this year.

3) have a Free Speech week, instead of a single day, starting on February 11 (World Free Expression Day) so that this could go beyond just the issue of banned books and censorship.

Just keeping these up here as a reminder--and once again, thanks for your time and your ideas.

(All posters courtesy the generosity of Sanjay Sipahimalani--for all four free speech posters, go to Antiblurbs.)

#flashreads for free speech/ Feb 14th:

THE IDEA: To celebrate free speech and to protest book bans, censorship in the arts and curbs on free expression

WHY FEBRUARY 14TH? For two reasons. In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the death of Salman Rushdie for writing the Satanic Verses. In GB Shaw’’s words: “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”
February 14th or Valentine’s Day has also become a flashpoint in India, a day when protests against “Western culture” by the Shiv Sena have become an annual feature. In Chandigarh, 51 Sena activists were arrested by the police after V-day protests turned violent in 2011. Our hope is to take back the day, and observe it as a day dedicated to the free flow of ideas, speech and expression.

#flashreads is a simple way of registering your protest against the rising intolerance that has spread across India in the last few decades. At any time on February 14th—we suggest 3 pm, but pick a time of your convenience—go out with a friend or a group of friends and do a quick reading. If you'd like some suggestions/ selected passages, here's a link to some short passages. If you want more and longer selections, email me or leave a message on twitter.com/nilanjanaroy, and we'll send you a selection. Or pick your favourite passage on free speech, or passages from a challenged book or the works of any writer who has faced sedition charges, a book ban or other forms of censorship.



One way to do an effective #flashreads is to work like a traditional #flashmob: with a group of three-ten friends, select what you're going to read in advance, and do the reading without announcement in a place like a Metro station, the area outside Dilli Haat, the open spaces in malls, each person picking up from the previous reader. Have fun.

Places where you might do public readings: subway and Metro stations, public parks, coffee shops, open areas in malls. If you’re talking about Flashreads on Twitter, please use the #flashreads hashtag.

If you have a blog, a tumblr or a website, an easy way to join in is to post Tagore’s poem, “Where the mind is without fear” (see below) on your site for a day, or choose any other passage on free speech/ censorship that appeals to you. Or write a post about free expression and what it's meant to you in your own life.

Where the mind is without fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

~Rabindranath Tagore

#flashreads for free speech:

(All posters courtesy the generosity of Sanjay Sipahimalani--for all four free speech posters, go to Antiblurbs.)


SHORT READINGS FOR #flashreads—SUGGESTED PASSAGES.
(For more selections, email me or drop me a line at twitter.com/nilanjanaroy.)


How many Ramayanas ? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas , a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been? ~ AK Ramanujan

He could say something radical -- that burning and banning books will not feed one hungry soul, will not house one homeless person nor will it provide gainful employment to anyone (unless one counts those hired to light bonfires), not in Mumbai, not in Maharashtra, not anywhere, not ever. ~ Rohinton Mistry

From Luka and The Fire of Life, Salman Rushdie:
“The nerve!” squeaked the Border Rat. “That you say you are offended, insults me mortally. And if you offend one rat mortally, you offend all Rats gravely. And a grave offence to all Rats is a funeral crime, a crime punishable by--.”

Haroun, in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories:

“He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that have ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and to become yet other stories, so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.”



RULES FOR CITIZENS

A poem by Jeet Thayil

Let us govern those who undertake the telling of stories.
Censorship is good governance. Self-censorship is an attribute of the highest civilization.
If an actor speaks of God, he will be chastised. He will be refused an encore. If he repeats the speech, he will have his license revoked.
Let us govern those who undertake praise of the next world, since what they say is neither true nor useful to us.
Our best recourse is to be warlike.
We do not deny that storytellers are good at their job and give people what they like to hear. But the better they are, the less we wish our children and men to hear them.
We shall refute their attempts to be wise. We shall scoff when they repeat their vile allegation, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.
We will do away with the dirges of famous men and leave them for women, and not the best among women either.
Let us abolish those fearful and terrific names, Cocytos, the River of Lamentations, Styx, the River of Fear, Ganga, the River of Death in Life, Lethe, the River of Bliss, Tigris, the River of Affliction.
We shall disallow travel and the mingling of songs.


“Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has an affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence. ” ~ Mahatma Gandhi, on the sedition laws

"We cannot let our republic, our beloved republic, our constitutional republic, our free and free-speaking republic, be hijacked by fear. It happened once in the Emergency. It must never happen again.
We cannot let them close our mouths and eyes and ears.
We cannot let them break the pen or ration the ink. ~ Vikram Seth, speech at the Kolkata Book Fair.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth…
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

~ Rabindranath Tagore



THE LONGREADS VERSION:


From AK Ramanujan’s Three Hundred Ramayanas, withdrawn from Delhi University’s syllabus after protests from Hindu rightwing groups:

How many Ramayanas ? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas , a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been? And there are stories that answer the question. Here is one.
One day when Rama was sitting on his throne, his ring fell off. When it touched the earth, it made a hole in the ground and disappeared into it. It was gone. His trusty henchman, Hanuman, was at his feet. Rama said to Hanuman, "Look, my ring is lost. Find it for me."
Now Hanuman can enter any hole, no matter how tiny. He had the power to become the smallest of the small and larger than the largest thing. So he took on a tiny form and went down the hole.
He went and went and went and suddenly fell into the netherworld. There were women down there. "Look, a tiny monkey! It's fallen from above? Then they caught him and placed him on a platter (thali ). The King of Spirits (bhut ), who lives in the netherworld, likes to eat animals. So Hanuman was sent to him as part of his dinner, along with his vegetables. Hanuman sat on the platter, wondering what to do.
While this was going on in the netherworld, Rama sat on his throne on the earth above. The sage Vasistha and the god Brahma came to see him. They said to Rama, "We want to talk privately with you. We don't want anyone to hear what we say or interrupt it. Do we agree?"
"All right," said Rama, "we'll talk."
Then they said, "Lay down a rule. If anyone comes in as we are talking, his head should be cut off."
"It will be done," said Rama.
Who would be the most trustworthy person to guard the door? Hanuman had gone down to fetch the ring. Rama trusted no one more than Laksmana, so he asked Laksmana to stand by the door. "Don't allow anyone to enter," he ordered.
Laksmana was standing at the door when the sage Visvamitra appeared and said, "I need to see Rama at once. It's urgent. Tell me, where is Rama?"
Laksmana said, "Don't go in now. He is talking to some people. It's important."
"What is there that Rama would hide from me?" said Visvamitra. "I must go in, right now."
Laksmana said, "I'11 have to ask his permission before I can let you in."
"Go in and ask then."
"I can't go in till Rama comes out. You'll have to wait."
"If you don't go in and announce my presence, I'll burn the entire kingdom of Ayodhya with a curse," said Visvamitra.
Laksmana thought, "If I go in now, I'll die. But if I don't go, this hotheaded man will burn down the kingdom. All the subjects, all things living in it, will die. It's better that I alone should die."
So he went right in.
Rama asked him, "What's the matter?"
"Visvamitra is here."
"Send him in."
So Visvamitra went in. The private talk had already come to an end. Brahma and Vasistha had come to see Rama and say to him, "Your work in the world of human beings is over. Your incarnation as Rama must now he given up. Leave this body, come up, and rejoin the gods." That's all they wanted to say.
Laksmana said to Rama, "Brother, you should cut off my head."
Rama said, "Why? We had nothing more to say. Nothing was left. So why should I cut off your head?"
Laksmana said, "You can't do that. You can't let me off because I'm your brother. There'll be a blot on Rama's name. You didn't spare your wife. You sent her to the jungle. I must be punished. I will leave."
Laksmana was an avatar of Sesa, the serpent on whom Visnu sleeps. His time was up too. He went directly to the river Sarayu and disappeared in the flowing waters.
When Laksmana relinquished his body, Rama summoned all his followers, Vibhisana, Sugriva, and others, and arranged for the coronation of his twin sons, Lava and Kusa. Then Rama too entered the river Sarayu.
All this while, Hanuman was in the netherworld. When he was finally taken to the King of Spirits, he kept repeating the name of Rama. "Rama Rama Rama . . ."
Then the King of Spirits asked, "Who are you?"
"Hanuman."
"Hanuman? Why have you come here?"

"Rama's ring fell into a hole. I've come to fetch it."
The king looked around and showed him a platter. On it were thousands of rings. They were all Rama's rings. The king brought the platter to Hanuman, set it down, and said, "Pick out your Rama's ring and take it."
They were all exactly the same. "I don't know which one it is," said Hanuman, shaking his head.
The King of Spirits said, "There have been as many Ramas as there are rings on this platter. When you return to earth, you will not find Rama. This incarnation of Rama is now over. Whenever an incarnation of Rama is about to be over, his ring falls down. I collect them and keep them. Now you can go."
So Hanuman left.
This story is usually told to suggest that for every such Rama there is a Ramayana .[1] (end of excerpt)

From Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey, removed from the Mumbai University syllabus after Shiv Sena members protested against and burned copies of the book:

Dinshawji: “What to do with such low-class people? No manners, no sense, no nothing. And you know who is responsible for this attitude—that bastard Shiv Sena leader who worships Hitler and Mussolini. He and his ‘Maharashtra for Maharashtrians’ nonsense. They won’t stop till they have complete Maratha Raj.”
Dinshawji’s narration had brought them to the main intersection of Flora Fountain, where the great traffic circle radiated five roads like pulsating giant tentacles. Cars were pulling out from inside the traffic island and recklessly leaping into the flow. … With the dead fountain at its still centre, the traffic circle lay like a great motionless wheel, while around it whirled the business of the city on its buzzing, humming, honking, complaining, screeching, rattling, banging, screaming, throbbing, rumbling, grumbling, sighing, never-ending journey through the metropolis.”

From Rohinton Mistry’s open letter about the targeting of Such A Long Journey:

In this sorry spectacle of book-burning and book-banning, the Shiv Sena has followed its depressingly familiar, tediously predictable scripts of threat and intimidation that Mumbai has endured since the organization’s founding in 1966. … A political party demanded an immediate change in the syllabus, and Mumbai University provided deluxe service via express delivery, making the book disappear the very next day.

As for the grandson of the Shiv Sena leader, the young man who takes credit for the whole pathetic business, who admits to not having read the book, just the few lines that offend him and his bibliophobic brethren, he has now been inducted into the family enterprise of parochial politics, anointed leader of its newly minted “youth wing.”
What can -- what should -- one feel about him? Pity, disappointment, compassion? Twenty years old, in the final year of a B.A. in history, at my own Alma Mater, the beneficiary of a good education, he is about to embark down the Sena’s well-trodden path, to appeal, like those before him, to all that is worst in human nature.

Does he have to? No. He is clearly equipped to choose for himself. He could lead, instead of following, the old regime. He could say something radical -- that burning and banning books will not feed one hungry soul, will not house one homeless person nor will it provide gainful employment to anyone (unless one counts those hired to light bonfires), not in Mumbai, not in Maharashtra, not anywhere, not ever.

He can think independently, and he can choose. And since he is drawn to books, he might want to read, carefully this time, from cover to cover, a couple that would help him make a choice. Come to think of it, the Vice-Chancellor, too, may find them beneficial. First, Conrad’sHeart of Darkness, in order to consider the options: step back from the abyss, or go over the edge. Next the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali. And I would like to urge particular to attention to this verse:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
...Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.







PASSAGES ON FREEDOM AND FREE SPEECH
Mahatma Gandhi on the sedition laws:

“Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has an affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence. But the section under which Mr.Banker [a colleague in non-violence] and I are charged is one under which mere promotion of disaffection is a crime. I have studied some of the cases tried under it, and I know that some of the most loved of India’s patriots have been convicted under it.”

Sedition, by Prasun Mukhopadhyay

“To serve the Muse is sedition
Sedition is assemblage
To think about the country is sedition
Sedition is to speak about hunger
To continue living in this country is sedition’.


FROM THE POEMS OF PAASH:

मेहनत की लूट सबसे ख़तरनाक नहीं होती
पुलिस की मार सबसे ख़तरनाक नहीं होती
ग़द्दारी और लोभ की मुट्ठी सबसे ख़तरनाक नहीं होती
बैठे-बिठाए पकड़े जाना बुरा तो है
सहमी-सी चुप में जकड़े जाना बुरा तो है
सबसे ख़तरनाक नहीं होता
कपट के शोर में सही होते हुए भी दब जाना बुरा तो है
जुगनुओं की लौ में पढ़ना
मुट्ठियां भींचकर बस वक्‍़त निकाल लेना बुरा तो है
सबसे ख़तरनाक नहीं होता

सबसे ख़तरनाक होता है मुर्दा शांति से भर जाना
तड़प का न होना
सब कुछ सहन कर जाना
घर से निकलना काम पर
और काम से लौटकर घर आना
सबसे ख़तरनाक होता है
हमारे सपनों का मर जाना



From Luka and The Fire of Life, Salman Rushdie:
“The nerve!” squeaked the Border Rat. “That you say you are offended, insults me mortally. And if you offend one rat mortally, you offend all Rats gravely. And a grave offence to all Rats is a funeral crime, a crime punishable by--.”

RULES FOR CITIZENS

A poem by Jeet Thayil

Let us govern those who undertake the telling of stories.
Censorship is good governance. Self-censorship is an attribute of the highest civilization.
If an actor speaks of God, he will be chastised. He will be refused an encore. If he repeats the speech, he will have his license revoked.
Let us govern those who undertake praise of the next world, since what they say is neither true nor useful to us.
Our best recourse is to be warlike.
We do not deny that storytellers are good at their job and give people what they like to hear. But the better they are, the less we wish our children and men to hear them.
We shall refute their attempts to be wise. We shall scoff when they repeat their vile allegation, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.
We will do away with the dirges of famous men and leave them for women, and not the best among women either.
Let us abolish those fearful and terrific names, Cocytos, the River of Lamentations, Styx, the River of Fear, Ganga, the River of Death in Life, Lethe, the River of Bliss, Tigris, the River of Affliction.
We shall disallow travel and the mingling of songs.
From Ismat Chughtai’s account of the obscenity trial for Lihaf:

We now waited impatiently for our second appearance in court. We no
longer cared if we were to be hanged. If we were hanged in Lahore we
would attain the status of martyrs and the Lahorewallahs would take out
our funeral processions with great pomp and show.
The second appearance was scheduled for the pleasant month of
November, in 1946, that is. Shahid was busy with his film. Seema’s ayah
had become very efficient and Seema was now very healthy and robust, so
I left her in Bombay and flew by plane to Delhi, continuing on to Lahore
by train, accompanied by Shahid Ahmad Dehlavi and his calligrapher. I
felt very embarrassed before the calligrapher. The poor man had been
dragged into all this for no reason at all. He was always very quiet, sat
with his eyes lowered, a weary expression on his face. Every time I looked
at him I’d be overwhelmed afresh by a feeling of guilt.

“What do you think?”
I asked him, “Will we lose the case?
I can’t say, I haven’t read the story.”
“But Katib Sahib, you calligraphed it.”
“I see the words separately and write them, I don’t pay attention to the meanings.”
Amazing! And you don’t even read it after it has been printed?”
“I do. But only to catch printing errors.”
“Each word separately?”
“Yes.” He lowered his head in contrition. After a short pause he said,
“You won’t mind if I say something?”
“No.”
“You make a lot of spelling mistakes
May God bless calligraphers, they will keep my honor intact, I thought.”

***

There was a big crowd in the court. Several people had advised us to
offer our apologies to the judge, even offering to pay the fines on our
behalf. The proceedings had lost some of their verve, the witnesses who
were called in to prove that “Lihaf” was obscene were beginning to lose
their nerve in the face of our lawyer’s cross-examination. No word capable
of inviting condemnation could be found. After a great deal of searching a
gentleman said, “The sentence ‘she was collecting ‘ashiqs ’ (lovers) is
obscene.”
“Which word is obscene,” the lawyer asked. “‘Collecting,’ or
‘‘ashiqs’?”
“The word ‘‘ashiqs,’” the witness replied, somewhat hesitantly.
“My Lord, the word ‘‘ashiqs’ has been used by the greatest poets and
has also been used in na‘ts. This This word has been given a sacred place by the devout.”
“But it is highly improper for girls to collect ‘ashiqs,’” the witness proclaimed.
“Why?”
“Because … because … this is improper for respectable girls.”
“But not improper for girls who are not respectable?”
“Uh … uh … no.”
“My client has mentioned girls who are perhaps not respectable. And
as you say, sir, non-respectable girls may collect ‘ashiqs."

“Yes. It’s not obscene to mention them, but for an educated woman
from a respectable family to write about these girls merits condemnation!”
The witness thundered.

“So go right ahead and condemn as much as you like, but does it
merit legal action?”

The case crumbled.”

Khattam-Shud, in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and The Sea of Stories:

“What brought you up here, eh?” he asked in his dull, dull voice. “Stories, I suppose.” He said the word ‘stories’ as if it were the rudest, most contemptible word in the language. “Well, look where stories have landed you now. You follow me? What starts with stories ends with spying, and that’s a serious charge, boy, no charge more serious. You’d have done better to keep your feet on the ground but you had your head in the air. You’d have done better to stick to Facts, but you were stuffed with stories. You’d have done better to stay home, but up you came. Stories make trouble. An Ocean of Stories is an Ocean of Trouble. Answer me this: what’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?”

Haroun, in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories:

“He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that have ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and to become yet other stories, so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.”

Vikram Seth, speech at the Kolkata Book Fair on Kolkata, Kobi, Constitution and Kolom:

I will now go to the fourth ‘ko’ or Kolom. I have touched upon the word in law and literature. But especially when one thinks of Tagore, one also thinks of the word as a graphic form, a form of art. I am very happy that Sunil Gangopadhyay and I—as part of this inauguration—were asked to write the word ‘kolom’ in black paint on those white boards there. As you can see, Sunil Da has written it in Bengali and I have written it in English and Urdu. It is interesting that three of the world’s great civilisations, the Hindu, the Islamic and the Judaeo-Christian, are thus incorporated on those boards, just as they are part of our common discourse. This is the richness of our country; we cannot allow it to be filtered and thinned. This is the strength of our country; we cannot allow it to be contorted or distorted.

Let me end with the two opening lines of a poem by Tagore that I have known—in his own English translation—since I was eleven years old. It was one of our school prayers and it expresses his aspirations for India.

‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free.’
Let me repeat that: ‘Where knowledge is free.’

Those who try to cloud our minds with fear are the enemies of both knowledge and freedom.

We cannot let our republic, our beloved republic, our constitutional republic, our free and free-speaking republic, be hijacked by fear. It happened once in the Emergency. It must never happen again.

We cannot let them close our mouths and eyes and ears.

We cannot let them break the pen or ration the ink.
Kolome kali jeno na shokaye.
May the kolom flourish.

POEM, RABINDRANATH TAGORE:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
~ Rabindranath Tagore