(Thought I'd put this together for the record; this is incomplete and lacks several citations, for the Saleem Kidwai case, attacks on art galleries and any other book bans that have escaped my notice. I'd welcome additions and corrections. Thanks.)
Sept. 26, 1988: Viking Penguin publishes Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in London.
Oct. 5, 1988: India bans The Satanic Verses.
Feb. 24, 1989 : At least 12 people are killed and 40 wounded when police fire at Muslims rioting in Mumbai against the novel.
July 1993: The Government of Bangladesh bans Taslima Nasreen's Lajja. (Bangladesh will subsequently continue to ban books by Nasreen, most notably her autobiography.)
1997: BBC refused permission to film Midnight's Children in India after state government of Maharashtra expresses reservations.
November 1997: The government of Sri Lanka withdraws filming permission for Midnight's Children from the BBC.
1998: Filmmaker Deepa Mehta receives a death threat after the first screening of Fire. In late 1998, Shiv Sena mobs storm cinema halls in a successful attempt to stop screenings of Fire. Indian film censors withdraw the film from theatres for a second review. After five weeks, the film returns to theatres.
April 26, 1998: Shiv Sena members disrupt and halt a concert by Ustad Ghulam Ali. "We shall not allow any Pakistani singer to perform in India, because no Indian singer was welcomed in that country," says an unnamed Sainik.
May 3, 1998: Shiv Sena members storm the house of artist M F Husain in protest against his painting, Sita Rescued, damaging paintings and property. Thackeray says, "If Husain can conduct himself as he pleases with regard to our gods and goddesses, we won't be averse to entering his house."
1999: Pradeep Dalvi's play, Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy, is banned in the state of Maharashtra. The play is written from the perspective of Gandhi's assassin, Nathuram Godse.
Feb. 4, 1999: India grants Rushdie a visa to return to his native land.
January 2000: A 2,000-strong mob burns down the set in Varanasi where Deepa Mehta's Water is being filmed; it touches on the lives of widows in Varanasi. The Hindutva parties feel that it "shows Hindu culture in a bad light" to depict widows in the manner that Mehta has.
February 2000: The UP government orders filming on Water to cease, saying that it has "provoked civil disorder".
2001: The BJP and the VHP urge their members to burn copies of historian D N Jha's The Myth of the Holy Cow, just before the publication of the book. It is banned by the Hyderabad court on the grounds that "it might hurt religious sentiments".
2002: Film-maker Anand Patwardhan is asked to make 21 cuts in his anti-nuclear film, War and Peace. Patwardhan protests and the courts decree the cuts unconstitutional.
2003: The Indian Censor Board bans Sridhar Rangayan's Gulabi Aina, a film on Indian transsexuals, saying that it is "vulgar and offensive". Rangayan's film is yet to be officially screened in India, but has won several awards worldwide.
June, 2003: James Laine's Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India published in India by Oxford University Press India.
21 November 2003: Oxford University Press India apologised and withdrew the book from the Indian market. (The book continued to be listed in the OUP India catalogue until mid-January, but has since been removed. The book remains in print and available outside India.)
November 2003: The West Bengal government bans Taslima Nasrin's Dwaikhandito on the grounds that its contents could inflame religious passions.
2004: Rakesh Sharma's film Final Solution addresses the 2002 riots in Gujarat and is banned by the film censor board for being "highly provocative". The ban is finally lifted in October 2004.
5 January, 2004: Over 150 activists from the Sambhaji Brigade attacked BORI, ransacking the building, defacing books and artworks, and destroying property.
14 January: Despite the fact that OUP had already withdrawn Laine's book from the Indian market two months earlier, the Maharashtra government moved -- eventually successfully -- to have Laine's book banned, again citing Sections 153 and 153A of the Indian Penal Code.
153. Wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot (...)
153A. Promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony
16 January: Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee speaks out against the book-ban on Shivaji.
March 2004: Gopinath Munde admits that he was wrong to have asked for a ban on Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India, on the grounds that it contained passages derogatory to Shivaji. "I ama politician and not a scholar like Y D Phadke (who was the first to point out that the book said nothing against Shivaji). But there is no change in my party’s stand—it will not tolerate any insult to national heroes like Shivaji."
September 2005: West Bengal High Court overturns the ban against Taslima Nasrin's Dwaikhandito.
March 2006: Advocate Arvind Shrivastava files a case against Husain for allegedly depicting Hindu goddesses in an obscene manner in the Haridwar district court.
February 2008: The UP government bans Jaishree Misra's Rani, a work of historical fiction, on the grounds that it contains "highly objectionable" material about Rani Lakshmibai's personal life--ie, a reference to a (fictionalised) chaste romance between Lakshmibai and a British officer.
March 29, 2009: M F Husain pulls his film Meenaxi--A Tale of Three Cities from cinema halls after protests from Muslim organisations of his word 'Noor' in a qawwali. The All India Ulema Council says it is blasphemous to use "noor", since the word should be employed strictly to describe the divine love of the Prophet. Husain says that to him, "noor" is the light of the Lord that stays with us in the hours of darkness, but withdraws the film.
May 6, 2009: On the orders of a court in Haridwar, Mumbai police begin attaching Husain's property in Bombay, in connection with the March 2006 case against Husain alleging that his paintings of Hindu icons are obscene.
May 2008: The Delhi High Court today dismisses criminal proceedings against M F Husain for allegedly hurting public sentiments by painting obscene pictures of Hindu goddesses. “The matter (allegation) is baseless,” Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul said, while granting relief to the 91-year-old painter.
July 8, 2009: The Chattisgarh state government bans the late Habib Tanvir's play, Charandas Chor, written in Chattisgarhi with a 20-year record of performances in the state, on the grounds that it shows the followers of the Satnami Panth community in a bad light.
August 20, 2009: The Narendra Modi government in Gujarat bans Jaswant Singh's Jinnah-India, Partition, Independence, on the grounds that it tarnishes the image of Sardar Patel.
September 4, 2009: The Gujarat High Court overturns the ban on Jaswant Singh's Jinnah, saying that the State needs to have more respect for the fundamental rights of citizens.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
The BS Column: Unban the Satanic Verses
(Published in the Business Standard, September 7, 2009)
In less than a month, my country will observe an unusual, and shameful, anniversary: the 21st year of the ban in India on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. In these 21 years, the author has experienced exile, had a fatwa pronounced on him, gone into hiding, had his book burned in several countries.
Short of death, if there’s a price to be paid for writing a controversial book, Salman Rushdie has paid it. But while the Satanic Verses controversy has remained alive in people’s memories, we haven’t yet had a serious debate, citizens-to-state, on a key question: should the ban on the Satanic Verses be challenged and lifted today?
A little background, first. The Satanic Verses was published on September 26, 1988 by Viking in the UK. In the same week, it was nominated for the Booker Prize, though it eventually lost out to Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. On October 5, the Indian government banned all imports of the book under the Customs Act, after two MPs went to Rajiv Gandhi and said that the Verses would create a law-and-order situation.
Rushdie, and many of the early reviewers of the Satanic Verses, maintain that his critics have misread the book. The book’s two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladdin Chamcha, are engaged in trying to make sense of alienation, migration and belonging, more than faith and belief. The key section of the book that continues to provoke offence today is a dream-sequence emanating out of the disturbed mind of Gibreel Farishta, about an imaginary country built of sand where an imaginary prophet, Mahound, examines the “satanic verses” from the Koran.
There is little doubt that the book continues to offend Muslims, and stirs up a debate among non-Muslims on the subject of whether authors should have absolute freedom to criticise and examine religion and religious figures— even if they’re doing it through the medium of fiction or allegory.
To state this even more bluntly, there is little doubt that Rushdie had caused offence. The question is whether it’s a crime— punishable by censorship, book banning, fatwas or other means— to cause offence. Publisher and writer Urvashi Butalia puts it very well when she says that writers are bound by the consequences of their writing and must expect dissent (though not death threats)— but that, if an ordinary citizen were to challenge the ban on Satanic Verses today, she would support that action.
Salil Tripathi, author of Offence: The Hindu Case, says: “If the aim of the ban was to prevent bloodshed, it failed: I was witness to riots in Bombay in February 1989, when a Muslim mob wanted to attack the British Council Library because it was believed the library had the book— which it didn’t. In the riots that followed, several people died. In the years since, the state has failed miserably in protecting the rights of artists or writers— ask M F Husain, Deepa Mehta, Taslima Nasrin, and now Jaswant Singh. The consequence of that first original sin, when the State flinched and banned The Satanic Verses has been severely restricted, narrow discourse. This wasn’t what Tagore intended when he wanted his country to awake into that heaven of freedom.”
Free speech activists point out that you have the right to hold unpopular and unorthodox views— and that the corollary to having free speech is the need to respect the rights of others to their opinions. Asking for the ban on Satanic Verses to be lifted after these 21 years isn’t an option. It’s a duty for anyone who cares about their own right to free speech.
How practical is the lifting of the ban on the Verses today? The fear expressed by ministry officials in 1988 was not that the book itself was inflammatory— it was that passages from the book might be misused by other forces. You might want to ask the Indian state whether it has learned nothing of how to protect itself against these other forces in the last 20 years.
One aim of lifting the ban would be, eventually, to put the Satanic Verses back into stores, and let people make up their own minds on the book— through indifference, through their interest, through debate or dissent. It is possible that, if a legal action was successful and the ban was lifted, publishers and bookshops would still be wary of publishing or carrying the books.
But overturning the ban would be the first step to doing something we haven’t done so far, that is bigger than any one book or any one author— protecting our right as Indians to free speech. What happened 21 years ago pushed us in the direction of becoming more fearful, more regressive; and surely two decades is enough time for us to undo this old injustice.
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