Speaking Volumes: Emperors, apostates and absences

(Published in the Business Standard, August 14, 2012)

The price Raja Rammohan Roy paid in the early 19th century for expressing his views on Hinduism and sati was not minor. His mother ostracized the Brahmo reformer, and declared that he should not be allowed to inherit family property because he was an ‘apostate’.

The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohan Roy chronicles the anger of the Hindu community. The Raja’s criticism of Hindu traditions prompted some Hindus to throw the bones of cows into his courtyard. The reformer asked the women of the house to ignore them, though the practice continued for months.

In the words of the book, “…Great excitement was produced in Hindu society, and the orthodox feeling against Rammohun soon became very hostile”. Raja Rammohan Roy’s weapon was his knowledge of scripture (he translated the Upanishads, for instance), his zest for debate, and his ability to gather strong allies around him. He survived threats, excommunication attempts and much scurrilous gossip.

There were two kinds of persecution, however, that writers like Raja Rammohan Roy didn’t have to face—the direct death threat, or the threat that his views had incensed his assailants so much that they would relieve their emotions by attacking innocent members of the public. That distinctly medieval reaction has become such a commonplace today that it is now considered unremarkable.

For Indian writers, one of the saddest truths about living in this moment is the acceptance that they write with a gun held to their heads, if they are any kind of radicals. Last week, the poet, novelist and editor Jeet Thayil wrote a reflective piece in The Guardian after he was told that the opera Babur In London (with a libretto by him) could not be performed in India, because of fears of protests or violence.

The merits or demerits of Babur In London are not the subject of my column; the fact that most of the sentiments expressed by the Emperor’s ghost in the opera may be found in the Baburnama or in the emperor’s letters is no defence in these times.

It was the writing of histories, especially of Hindu mythological figures and historical heroes, that shut down first, after increasingly trenchant attacks on academics from Romila Thapar and AK Ramanujan to Wendy Doniger and James Laine. (Except for the Mughals, few historical figures are safe territory in India, and most publishers will not touch anything controversial, in the face of the very real fear of protests, riots, court cases and worse.) In the absence of true histories, what the Indian reader now has is pulp retellings of myth, unchallenging but safe.

The next to go were the plays: the late Habib Tanvir’s oeuvre was a repeated target, and many plays, especially some of Vijay Tendulkar’s more incendiary ones, seemed to fade from the stage. More books were challenged, and more disappeared from the shelves, from Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey to AK Ramanujan’s Collected Essays.

Each decade brought not just more book bans, but a slow tightening of the net as more subjects became effectively taboo, and almost literally, unthinkable. In the present, congratulatory state of Indian writing, where we celebrate the power of the mass market bestseller, literary festivals will soon start editing out the more inconvenient authors--the security risks, the arsonists--just as the mainstream has. Some dissent is tolerated, because it allows a judicious blindness: we can safely ignore those who are no longer welcome at the banquet, if we have a few genuine activists to leaven the lump.

This is not China, to lay that classic, knee-jerk argument to rest, and perhaps one of the reasons why what Thayil calls the rise of self-censorship is so insidious is because we’re more like Turkey or Malaysia. Authors have a buffet line of acceptable subjects to pick and choose from—the butter paneer of India travelogues, the savoury khichdi of intelligent fiction that stops just short of being truly challenging.

It’s hard to see what is lost when there’s so much still there; it is only the empty shelves that act as reminders. The shelves of the non-fiction missing from the Indian canon because it is impossible to write an honest life of Shivaji—or even Rammohan Roy—without stepping into controversy, the novels not written and thoughts left unarticulated because they might be too incendiary, disturbing the peace. The freedom of intellectual inquiry once claimed by Ramanujan, of complete creative fearlessness, claimed by Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, the freedom to voice desire and discontent, claimed by Lal Ded or Andal: few writers living in India could confidently claim these freedoms today.

As Thayil says, quoting Nissim Ezekiel, most authors accept that no book is worth dying for—even when the author is not the person who wields the gun, the knife, calls up the mobs. And so we live with absences and silent ghosts, the permanent tenants of the censored mind.

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

The JLF columns: Unhearing the words

(Published in the Business Standard on January 23rd and 24th; both were written at the Jaipur Literature Festival. This is the first piece.)


There were two Jaipur Literature Festivals this year. The first was the festival that attracts readers by the thousands, to hear celebrities like Oprah, writers of the calibre of Tom Stoppard or Bama Faustina, to have their books signed by Chetan Bhagat, Kapil Sibal and other literary heavyweights. This festival was a grand success, drawing record crowds. (Also see: Ten of the Best.)

The other Jaipur festival was the one that Salman Rushdie couldn’t attend, after being informed of threats to his life that appear not to have been actually made. At this festival, when Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil, Hari Kunzru and Ruchir Joshi read excerpts from Rushdie's banned novel, The Satanic Verses, in protest at the writer’s absence, they were asked to leave; the festival that had been willing to take on the burden of the security concerns raised by the invitation to Rushdie was unable to guarantee their safety.

For a brief while, it seemed as though the JLF itself might have to shut down, as the organisers and the authorities tried to measure the possible fallout from this form of dissent, and to calculate the possible risks, which were considerable. But as session after session, from the ones on censorship and protest to the conversation on the Enlightenment between AC Grayling and Steven Pinker, noted and protested Rushdie’s absence and discussed the actions of the Gang of Four, the debate over free speech became intense — and polarising.

The lines were rapidly drawn, and the argument that played out over the next few days at the Diggi Palace was fascinating in the accuracy with which it reflected the debates over free speech in India in the last ten years. Many writers were angry and uncomfortable with what S Anand, independent publisher, memorably called the organisers’ pusillanimity and their failure to defend the writers’ right to extreme gestures of dissent. Several writers didn’t see why reading out from a book, even if it was a banned one, should be wrong at a festival of literature, especially when that festival had panels on censorship and dissent.

But the organisers’ actions, however right or wrong they may have been, should be seen in another light — as the actions of decent people, and as an accurate reflection of what civil society does when it finds the space it holds precious under threat. By and large, decent people in India have not defended the extreme and the margins; they have defended only the mainstream, the centre.

The argument most often heard at the festival was that reading from The Satanic Verses was an illegal act. This was presented as a matter of fact, but there is some doubt over this (*in fact, it is not illegal), and some lawyers say there are loopholes — the publication, distribution and dissemination of the physical book is clearly banned, but there isn’t as much clarity over the question of whether reading an excerpt is illegal.

The real fear was an understandable one. The JLF, to a great extent, opened up the space for literary festivals, and many people genuinely fear that this space may be threatened, by gestures of dissent or by the evocation of a banned book that has, truly, become the book that must not be named. Writers like Chetan Bhagat spoke about the need for authors to be more responsible, to refrain, in the tired old phrase, from hurting religious sentiments.

Much of this speculation and many of the arguments that the Gang of Four, so to speak, had stepped across a line was of great interest, but it suffered from a major flaw. The four authors who had held a peaceful, non-violent reading in the festival’s halls were not there to speak for themselves. Rushdie, who had chatted with friends and readers and addressed crowds on these lawns in 2007, was not here to speak for himself, and at the time of writing, there was a question over whether he would be allowed to speak over the video-link.

The problem for the JLF is not the present situation, but the future of the festival. It is very easy to ensure that this sort of incident doesn’t happen again — don’t invite the potentially incendiary. Keep the public commons of the festival safe by retaining the entertaining sessions, and allow some space for free speech. That seems reasonable enough. But the question is, who’s going to decide what that space will be? And when someone crosses another line, who will draw that line for us?

(This was the second part, written on the day that the JLF organisers were bullied by protestors and couldn't have the Rushdie conversation on videolink.)

Five minutes before Barkha Dutt is supposed to speak to Salman Rushdie via videolink at the Jaipur Literature Festival, the air is thick with tension. News reports say that the festival directors have received death threats. In the lawns, a tight knot of protestors declare their intention to disrupt the proceedings if the Rushdie conversation goes ahead.

The crowds at the Palace watch with more curiosity than fear, at this point. There are three rings around the protestors, with the police and the media adding concentric layers around that small, tight knot.

What happened to trigger this? An invitation was sent to a writer; a book he had written over 23 years ago was read out to an audience who listened politely and then continued on their way to the rest of the festival without rioting. That was all, but that seems to be enough.

Festival organiser Sanjay Roy announces that the conversation with Rushdie cannot take place because of the very real threat of violence, the presence of people who, in his words, are offended not just by the idea of Rushdie’s presence at the festival, but by his image on the screen. As he and the rest of the team come down off the stage, they receive a sympathetic round of applause. They had no other choice, in the circumstances.

This is the way in which the conversation on free speech has gone for far too long. Step across this line, and risk violence — or worse, be blackmailed by people who will threaten other people with violence.

There are some things that are unlikely to happen. The writers who read from The Satanic Verses earlier at the festival are facing cases, and the organisers face threats as well as cases.

But the protestors who moved so freely through the crowds just a few minutes ago are unlikely to face legal action for the threats of disruption they made, nor are the people who made death threats against the organisers likely to appear in a court any time soon. This violence is always one-way, to the point where the simple act of reading is interpreted as an equivalent act of violence, even though, as Hari Kunzru pointed out, a book is neither a bomb nor a knife.

At the centre of this circus is a book that refuses to die. As news stories have reported, it is actually not illegal to read The Satanic Verses, or to read out from it — the book is banned under a section of the Customs Act that prohibits its import and distribution in the country, but the law does not ban the reading of the book. Public readings were held at the time of the book ban twenty years ago, and a public reading being held today as a form of protest is merely echoing an old tradition. Private readings of The Satanic Verses have become so much easier once it became available on the Internet.

A festival might choose, for reasons of public safety, in Tarun Tejpal’s words, not to turn the lawns of the festival into the site of a “bloody battle”. The argument for keeping the festival safe and neutral is being made as I write, and after witnessing the protests, few people here will disagree, unfortunately. Free speech battles, bloody or not, will be left outside the gates of Diggi Palace in future — the festival will continue, but in considerably different form.

But it isn’t possible to step away from the book itself any more, if only because the “other side” will not let The Satanic Verses go. In a looking glass world where a book reading is considered equivalent to an act of violent provocation, perhaps it’s worthwhile asking why a book banned 23 years ago refuses to lie down and be forgotten. Many banned books drop into the black hole of irrelevance, and either the ideas or the language they contain are often rendered obsolete by time.

The real problem with The Satanic Verses is that those who wanted the book banned have not been able to ban the ideas in the novel; how do you separate the language from the content, the text from Rushdie’s philosophy? Today’s demand, for instance, from the protestors was not just that Rushdie be silenced; it was a demand that he not be seen. And what is becoming apparent is that the only thing that would pacify Rushdie’s protestors would be for the book to be unwritten, the words to be taken back. As the author Lionel Shriver said in a different context today, this is what is deadly about the written word: it cannot be taken back.

Somewhere deep in their bones, the people who would rather shut down a festival or threaten people with death than listen to an author understand this: The Satanic Verses cannot be unwritten, and its ideas cannot be erased. The central fact of the Verses is not that it’s blasphemous; it’s that the book argues that religion may be no more than the creation of humans and may be questioned as such. A day before, Richard Dawkins asked why the only prejudice we kowtow to is religious prejudice. One answer today is that it comes armed and dangerous into our lives, ready to kill for its certainties.

Perhaps the fear of violence will prevail, in the short run. But this fear has already taken too many prisoners. What became clear today is that if you cannot safely read from The Satanic Verses today, you cannot step away from it either — the book and what it stands for follow us everywhere we go. Even into spaces that were meant to be safe, and free.

Speaking Volumes: Listening To Rushdie

(Published in the Business Standard, January 17, 2012)

In all the claims made for Chetan Bhagat, tireless father of the Indian bestseller, this is one you will never hear: he disturbs the peace. In all the arguments made against Salman Rushdie’s attendance at the Jaipur Literature Festival this week, the gist of them is just this: he disturbs the peace.

Bhagat’s Revolution 2020 (‘Love. Corruption. Ambition.’) is, like his four previous novels, reassuringly familiar and comfortably accurate in its reflection of contemporary Indian concerns. The obsession with success, the difficulties of modern relationships, small town heroes battling a corrupt system—every one of his blockbuster novels articulates the concerns of the civic-minded Indian with absolute fidelity, and not one offers anything in the nature of a revolutionary or subversive idea.

Chetan Bhagat is the most visible face of the unchallenging new Indian bestseller, comfortable in its certainties, mildly anti-intellectual. Most of the criticism of this school of writing has focused on its lack of grammar and style. This is less obvious in Bhagat’s own writing—pedestrian to a fault, but positively literate when compared to the bestsellers from Shrishti Books.

Srishti’s line of books might be summarized as the revenge of the inarticulate on the literate, and have eloquent titles: ‘Sum Thing of a Mocktale: At JNU Where Kurta Fell In Love With Jeans’, ‘Ouch! That Hearts!’ These books conceal a secret contempt for the reader, assuming that s/he is no longer deserving of even the basic courtesies of grammar and fluency.

From Bhagat to fantasy writer Amish Tripathi to the Srishti authors, none of these writers have built their careers by challenging the accepted wisdom of their times. The argument for welcoming Rushdie to Jaipur is a simple one. His early works, which include Midnight’s Children, Shame and The Satanic Verses, are unsettling and uncomfortable, and we need that discomfort much more in 2012 than we need the safe formulas of the new bestsellers.

The opposition to Rushdie’s attendance at the Jaipur Festival comes from theologians at the Darul Uloom Deoband who have in all probability not read his books, and who would probably be made very uncomfortable if they did. Midnight’s Children tears up the textbook version of Indian Independence; one of the ways to counter, for instance, the hagiography of the Gandhi family, those full-page ads featuring Indira and her progeny is to read Rushdie’s portrait of the Widow and what she did during the Emergency.

But in these times, there are other writers who continue to write against the grain of the official histories—the more official, the less likely to be true. Amitav Ghosh’s Opium War series swings the perspective around to the Indian view, Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim stands (as Rushdie’s Shame did some two decades ago) as a reproach to those who would deny the bloody history of Bangladesh.

There are fewer writers who write against the grain of religion. Tahmima Anam is one of them, and The Good Muslim is a mercilessly accurate exploration of two kinds of tyranny—the tyranny of the righteously faithful, and the twinned tyranny of the righteous liberal who stands against the excesses of faith. In many ways, Anam writes against the backdrop of the question Rushdie asked many years ago, when he wrote Satanic Verses.

Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief.

Doubt.

This brief meditation lies at the heart of the controversy over the Satanic Verses, which has extended into the present and ridiculous debate over whether Rushdie should be “allowed” to attend Jaipur. The real question is why the Deobandis, who rarely come to literary festivals, should want to stop others from listening to Rushdie’s views.

When the Satanic Verses comes up in debate, it is rarely the book that is discussed. As with many other kinds of forgotten history, the version of the Verses we talk about is moth-eaten, fragmentary, the complexity of a novel about migration, magic, angels and devils, the certainties of religion and madness reduced to the simplistic idea that this is a blasphemous book.

In the two decades since the Satanic Verses were banned, it has become increasingly hard to discuss the idea Rushdie puts forward in his work, which is the idea that doubt is necessary and valuable. But in that time, India has also moved closer to accepting, blindly and without much fuss, a worryingly widespread belief. This is the belief that at worst, questioning any faith or religion is in itself a kind of blasphemy—and at best, it’s an esoteric activity that the majority can safely ignore.

In 2007, Rushdie spoke at Jaipur, to a packed audience. He touched upon the silences in the official histories of Kashmir, on meeting some of the men responsible for the Gujarat riots, on growing up among “extremely practicing but incredibly open-minded Muslims” in his family. He spoke about authors and books, writing and reading, and all the other things you hope to hear from writers.

In 2012, I don’t know what he would want to speak about: literature, free speech, fables, memoir writing, perhaps. But I do know that, like so many other readers, I want to hear what he has to say, and it would be a great loss if the manufactured controversy around his visit silenced his voice, yet again.

Email: nilanjanasroy@gmail.com

The "free" in free speech

(This is a response to Shashi Tharoor's article, which appeared in the Deccan Herald today. Other links of interest: the India Ink round-up of censorship in the country, and the NYT India blog post that reported Union Telecom minister Kapil Sibal's attempt to ask for "pre-screening" of certain social media sites. All views expressed in this post are strictly personal.)

Shashi Tharoor begins by saying, "The controversy over the government’s alleged desire to censor Facebook, Twitter and other leading lights of the social media has obscured some genuine and urgent questions we need to address about free speech in our society."

Tharoor is a writer I used to respect; his Great Indian Novel is one of the staples in my library, but his years as a diplomat and the UN haven't made him much of a free speech advocate. He's been notably silent on most of the urgent free speech and censorship debates of the last five years, and this video of a debate between him and Christopher Hitchens is fairly representative of his position on free speech--he advocates limitations on free speech, especially in the face of threats of violence. Tharoor has a great deal of credibility as a writer, but it should be noted that his views on censorship are not necessarily shared by most other writers and artists.

The problem arose when the New York Times reported on Monday that our Kapil Sibal, had called in senior social media executives from Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo and allegedly asked them to “prescreen user content from India and to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online”.

Such a request inevitably sparked off a firestorm of Internet protest against the minister, without waiting to hear his side of the story.

Is there ever a case where a minister's attempt to ask companies to turn censor, screening and shutting down content for offensiveness according to guidelines that are not transparent and not released to the public, would be considered acceptable democratic practice? The minister made no attempt to bring the issue up for public debate, and that is also what's sparked widespread indignation and protest--it's censorship through the back door. The complaint that the minister's side of the story was not heard belies the fact that Sibal didn't want to make his attempts to pre-screen Internet content public!

But — and free speech advocates hate that “but”! — every society recognises some sensible restraints on how free speech is exercised. Those restraints almost always relate to the collectivity; they arise when the freedom of the individual to say what he wants causes more harm to more people in society than restricting his freedom would.

This is the start of a somewhat specious argument, where Mr Tharoor ignores the fact that the Indian Constitution has already placed restrictions on free speech and expression, in Article 19 (2). These restrictions have often been debated, and should be open to debate in any democracy. The apparent reasonableness of the "harm" argument has also, in the Indian context, often been used to remove expressions of political dissent. Behind Mr Sibal's original attempt to ask for pre-censorship, said the first news reports, was the discovery of a page that made offensive comments about Ms Sonia Gandhi.

Since societies vary in their cultural&political traditions, the boundaries vary from place to place. Free speech absolutists tend to say that freedom is a universal right that must not be abridged.

Just an aside: please note the way "free speech advocates" has changed in this paragraph to "free speech absolutists". This also ignores the fact that most advocates of free speech have already considered, and accepted, exceptions to free speech covered under the harm principle.

Just as the commonplace practice of women taking off their bikini tops at St Tropez, Copacabana or Bondi Beach could not be replicated on the beaches of Goa, Dubai or Karachi without risking assault or arrest, so also things might be said in the former set of places that would not pass muster in the latter. It’s no use pretending such differences don’t exist. They do, and they’re the reason why free speech in, say, Sweden isn’t the same as free speech in Singapore.

Women taking off their bikini tops is equivalent to what, exactly? Expressions of dissent with the Congress party, or the kind of trolling one sees on Rediff discussion boards? If Mr Tharoor's making the argument that certain things are "against Indian culture", he might have chosen a less bizarre illustration. As for the comparison between free speech in Sweden and free speech in Singapore, I'm unconvinced that India should choose either the Singapore or China model of monitoring and extreme censorship as a role model for itself.

Even more, any individual with the basic literacy needed to operate a keyboard can express his or her opinion, create information, whether video or text, and communicate it immediately, without the delays necessarily wrought by editorial controls, cross-checking or even the synthesising that occurs in a “mainstream” newsroom.

Yes, but Mr Tharoor's ignoring two major factors in his analysis of social media. One is cognitive distortion. People like him, and other celebrities on Twitter who have large and faithful followers in the lakhs, are also exposed to a far higher than average level of trolling and offensive speech than the average Internet user. Mr Tharoor's view of social media is necessarily biased; just as he would receive more in the way of attention online than most users, he also receives a disproportionate amount of abuse.

The second is the fallacy that would place all Net users at the same level of credibility. One of the reasons why most Net users feel free to ignore a lot of the hate speech and offensiveness that occurs online is because most Net trolls have far less credibility--and reach--than mainstream Net users. It's highly dangerous to see the Internet itself as a published screed; the Net puts into print the average gossip, useless chatter and conversation of everyone on the street. The most useful filter on the Internet remain the Ignore, Block and Report Spam buttons--none of which require government regulation.

And yet this very freedom is its own biggest threat. It means anyone can say literally anything and, inevitably, many do. Lies, distortions and calumny go into cyberspace unchallenged; hatred, pornography and slander are routinely aired. There is no fact-checking, no institutional reputation for reliability to defend.

This has been an inescapable feature of the Internet since the 1990s, so why is it a problem now? And why is the nature of the Internet itself being used as an excuse to press for government regulation of the Internet? The most effective networks (Twitter, Facebook), web encyclopaedias (Wikipaedia) and forums online do not depend on silent censorship or overt censorship to be comfortable spaces for the average user. They rely on a combination of internal moderation--Twitter is ruthless about blocking fake and spam accounts, for instance, personalised screening, where every user sets his or her privacy levels, and the group's own, evolving standards of what is acceptable behaviour. What is acceptable on sites like Grindr, for instance, are highly sexual images; on sites like 4chan, abuse is part of the conversation; but Twitter would very quickly kick off users who attempted to recreate the ambience of those sites.

Mr Tharoor's real problem might be something that we all struggle with--the Internet in its present avatar requires much more from users than the passive consumption of news. It requires all of us to make choices about what we want to pay attention to, and the kind of communities we want to build, and it requires users to be active, responsible participants in their consumption of news and commentary. The state has no business taking over this mediation, or dictating how sanitised everyone's web experience should be.

Mr Sibal’s main concern was not with politics, but with scurrilous material about certain religions that could have incited retaliatory violence. People say or depict things on social media that might be bad enough in their living rooms, but are positively dangerous in a public space.

In that case, the remedy is to report these offensive pages to the social media sites concerned, and perhaps also to demand a public debate on whether this kind of hate speech should or should not be protected as part of free expression. Mr Tharoor continues to make the argument from violence--the argument that x book or y debate could potentially lead to riots or worse. This argument has been used to shut down everything from controversial histories of Shivaji, to films about lesbian love, to provocative art, to books that dare to discuss religion, in the past few decades in India. Colleagues of mine have argued elsewhere that this has led to a situation that encourages people, especially political parties, to create the threat of violence in order to shut down anything, from Rohinton Mistry to Ramanujan, that makes them uncomfortable.

In all of this, Mr Tharoor doesn't ask either himself or his readers a simple question: why does India want to become one of the few countries to demand censorship and "pre-screening" of the Internet? What would the fallout of such censorship be? Would we start by erasing the obviously offensive--morphed pictures of the gods, hurtful, inflammatory speech--and then continue by deleting, say, fierce criticism of the government's actions in Kashmir, or of riots that were not, astonishingly, sparked off by offensive images on the Internet such as the one in Gujarat, or of corruption in public life? Once we set a precedent--pre-screening is acceptable and the state has the right to decide what is and isn't acceptable, where do we stop?

The free speech "absolutists" Mr Tharoor speaks of live with the downside to free speech, which means tolerating and allowing the expression of beliefs that run counter to one's own most dearly held values. We don't do this because we're masochists or martyrs. We do this because the cost of comfort--of never being exposed to a world where you will experience trolling, abuse or hatred--is too high; such a world would also end by excluding dissent or debate.

It takes a longer time to enforce community standards across a social media site than it does to filter out all unpleasantness, but it is possible--and while Mr Sibal and Mr Tharoor might focus on the ugliness of the trolls, many of us have also experienced the other side of social media, as a place where people can tweet their needs in the aftermath of a bomb blast, where a blog can become a line of communication between those stuck in Bombay floods and those worrying about their safety. The Net is a place where, years ago, I met a truly frightening troll online, a man who sent threatening and poisonous messages for years; but it's also the place where I've met some of the loveliest and most generous writers, journalists, thinkers and artists from across the world. It's like real life in its swirls and eddies, in its unedited untidiness, and like real life, it is impossible to edit unless you police all of its boundaries with considerable ruthlessness.

As a man who was once one of India's most provocative writers, Mr Tharoor should understand why we place such a high value on free speech. Even when it means putting up with the relatively tiny percentage of Net users who put their vitriol out there, hoping to be heard, but all too often speaking into silence. It is that silence, the refusal to respond or give them any space, that is far more effective in making the Net a civilised space than any attempt at government or corporate censorship would be.

Also read: From Chandni Chowk to China: Salil Tripathi

India's Authoritarian Lapse: Salil Tripathi

Hate Speech Must Be Blocked: Kapil Sibal defends his stance.

#TheInsecureIndian: Samar Halarnkar

Open Letter to Shashi Tharoor: Gaurav Sabnis

Silencing Ramanujan

(I had just finished editing the chapter on censorship, part of my collection of essays on reading, when we heard that Delhi University had voted to drop Ramanujan's essay on Many Ramayanas from its history syllabus. One of the saddest parts of writing the censorship chapter is that it's never finished: there is always a new ban, a new act of censorship. This is a rough draft-in-progress of the latest addition, and I hope this will be the last.)



There are many official versions of the Ramayana—the one written by Kalidasa, the one by Kamban, Arshia Sattar’s luminous translation of Valmiki's telling of the great tale, Nina Paley's retelling that brings together several different versions. But there has never been a single, authorized, definitive version of India’s great epic.

Among the many Ramayanas I grew up with, there was the comic book Amar Chitra Katha version that ironed out all ambiguity. Rama was handsome and muscular and good, and he was clearly the hero, Ravana had ten heads and the bug-eyed expression that Amar Chitra Katha illustrators gave to all rakshashas and asuras, and he was clearly the villain. The television epic, with cheesy side-effects and paste jewellery, was surprisingly compelling, as much as any of the complex narratives staged every year at the Sriram Centre, or any of the epic retellings and translations that illuminated a different corner of the myth.

One year in Calcutta, I watched a mildly Communist Ramayana, where Sita waved the Left Front’s hammer-and-sickle flag to signal her deep distress at being kidnapped by Ravana.

Another year, Sudama, who worked in my parents’ house, asked my sister and me whether we would loan him a silk sari, dark glasses and a necklace. He had been selected to play the part of Sita in the local version of the Ramlila. We stared at him; Sudama was a strapping, muscular man who suffered from premature baldness. He didn’t fit any image of Sita we might have had in mind.

“Are you sure you’re playing Sita,” we asked gently. “Not Rama, Lakshman, Hanuman, Ravana?” He was sure; he had read her lines with such feeling, he explained, that the troupe had chosen him on the spot. Also, he had offered to punch in the heads of any dissenters.

We enjoyed Sudama’s Ramayana. He played Sita with a surprising delicacy of feeling, putting on the dark glasses to stare down his wicked abductor, Ravana. Rama was played by a 14-year-old who did splendidly until his voice broke on stage in the middle of the battle scene with Rama and his monkey army pitted against Ravana’s Lankan troops. Rama left, overcome by woe, and his stage brother Lakshmana had to step in, announcing that the departure of Rama had struck fear into the hearts of Ravana’s cohorts, for they knew not what fearsome weapons he would return with. The demons, who knew a good cue when they saw it, surrendered in a great joyous clamour; the Ramayana continued to its ambiguously happy ending.

Most Indians have similar stories—depending on where you grew up and whether you heard the Ramayana or read the Ramayana, your sense of the epic will be complex, and will involve multiple versions.

The late poet AK Ramanujan was a scholar and a connoisseur of the many versions of the Ramayana—he had read many of the translations in the original tongues, and he wrote about the epic with a kind of abstract, pure love. The versions he spoke of were far more elevated than the rough exaggerations of our street Ramayanas, but they all had in common what the Communist troupe and Sudama’s friends shared—an understanding that the Ramayana was public property. The 15th century Bengali poet Krittibas had come out with a version that was faithful in its own fashion; it was as legitimate a version as the oral tradition popular among the Muslims of Kerala, called the Mappila Ramayana. Nabaneeta Dev Sen has a brilliant essay on women's versions of the Ramayana.

It’s unclear how and why some rightwing parties decided to target the late poet and scholar, AK Ramanujan, more specifically his classic essay on ‘Many Ramayanas’. This may have been part of the general climate of intolerance and the battle over who had the right to tell the country’s history and its myths that was part of the Indian landscape between the 1980s and the 2000s. The objections to Ramanujan’s essay appeared to be based on simple and willful misreadings of his writings.

This narrow-focus way of reading texts—scanning them only for “offensive” phrases—would happen a year later with Rohinton Mistry’s subtle tale of Bombay and India in the Indira Gandhi era, Such a Long Journey, where many of those who demanded a ban on the book had not read it, but could quote the few sentences where Mistry’s characters had slammed Bal Thackeray and the Shiv Sena.

It had happened before, reducing Salman Rushdie’s complex Satanic Verses to a series of deranged blasphemies about the Prophet, obliterating the migrant stories and the humour that also went into the Verses. Selective misreading had caused a bizarre situation where the abridged, distorted versions of books and essays circulated and inspired outrage, while the originals were either placed beyond the reach of readers or left unread. Often, it seemed as though the real battle was between those who read freely and those who instinctively feared the subversive potential in books.

In 2008, members of the student wing of the BJP, the ABVP, reacted violently to the inclusion of this essay in the Delhi University history curriculum, and some of them assaulted the head of the History Department. At that time, the department stood firm, defending their decision to allow students to read Ramanujan’s brilliant explorations of the multiple forms in which the epic had been told across India and other countries.

http://communalism.blogspot.com/2008/03/crying-wolf-ramayana-ramanujan-and-abvp.html

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?236875

So why would the Academic Council decide, three years later, to withdraw Ramanujan’s essay from the syllabus?
http://www.firstpost.com/fwire/du-to-scrap-ramanujan-essay-on-ramayana-that-incensed-right-wingers-104127.html#en

There are easy defences; as was the case with Mumbai University’s craven decision to withdraw Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey from the syllabus, this will in all probability be called a purely internal matter. Despite the apparently furious dissent expressed by nine members of the Academic Council, there is little hope that the decision will be put up for review—changes to the syllabus are made slowly and once made, are usually final.

The damage might seem limited: what prevents a handful of history students from finding Ramanujan’s essay on their own, reading it and discussing it if they so choose? But the real damage is caused by the act of censorship, by the precedent the University sets when it says: this idea is dangerous, or controversial, or too explosive to be discussed. You expect academics and scholars not just to defend free speech, but to defend the work of a man who was probably one of the greatest writers and thinkers in contemporary Indian literature. You also expect them to stand up for the tradition that insists there were always many Ramayanas—that the oversimplified, often chauvinistic version of the epic that the right-wing has often put forward is not, by any means, the only one.

This July, many of us watched in dismay as a screening of Nina Paley’s Sita Sings The Blues was cancelled in New York after a group of Hindutva fundamentalists threatened to picket and protest the film.

Aseem Chabra on Sita Sings The Blues and censorship: http://www.mumbaimirror.com/article/54/2011080720110807052728135114f274a/Battling-for-free-speech.html

Salil Tripathi on Nina Paley and free speech issues in India: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/24/sita-sings-the-blues-hindu-film-causes-a-stir-in-queens.html

The “offence” Nina Paley’s version of the Ramayana causes is just as specious as the ways in which Rohinton Mistry or Ramanujan have caused offence, but we now have a situation in India where all that is needed to shut down a work of literature is to declare that one’s sentiments have been offended. The real problem lies in the way Ramanujan began his essay:
“How many Ramayanas? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas, a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been?”

It took me some time to understand why this idea might be so threatening, because the way we were taught to deal with books or essays or ideas we didn’t like was the way put forward in the great epics: the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are filled with debate, with digressions into discussions of what exactly dharma might be. Most of us are intrigued by the multiple versions of the Ramayana—the feminist version, the rough, bawdy village versions, Nina Paley’s elegant cartoon version, they all have their place.

But if you live in a climate of intolerance, a book that questions the tenets of faith and offers a provocative re-imagining of a religious text might be considered so blasphemous that its author will be persecuted for years (The Satanic Verses). A novel that highlights an inconvenient part of the history of contemporary India, speaking openly of corruption in the Prime Minister’s office and the slow stirrings of narrow-mindedness in a once-great city will be erased from the college syllabus (Such a Long Journey). Ramanujan’s great essay on the tradition of many Ramayanas threatens those who would prefer one version, their version, and so it is removed, and his voice is silenced (Many Ramayanas).

In the “debates” over these books, we no longer debate the ideas they contain. Almost every argument breaks down once the threat of violence is made. The courts have rarely upheld censorship in India, but the other places that should protect free speech—universities, publishing houses, art galleries, bookshops--often crumble in the face of either threats of violence or the staging of actual acts of violence. We are such excellent censors of ourselves, and we rarely talk about the basics of free speech, rarely have a consensus on why freedom of expression is important, or where the tradition of free speech in India comes from.

(Some of the most important free speech battles were won almost accidentally, as demonstrated by Ismat Chughtai’s obscenity trial for her short story, Lihaaf:
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/15/28naqviExerpt.pdf )

If you find ideas and stories threatening, if your way of life depends on having just one rigid view of faith, or history, or mythology, then there is no possibility of debate. It is in this perspective that the actions of the Hindutva rightwing parties makes sense: the goal is never to encourage dissent and conversation, but to shut it down. There can only be one point of view, one truth. In that world, making a university back down on what it allows students to learn is a major victory, and it holds out the possibility that one day, it will be only this narrow view of history that will prevail, that we will learn only one kind of history, one Ramayana.

In his essay, Ramanujan does not comment on which telling of the Ramayana is the most accurate, the most authoritative one. Instead, he offers us a bewildering array of Ramayanas: “Hundreds of tellings of a story in different cultures, languages, and religious traditions.” The Ramayana cannot be owned; it is no one’s property. And this is the idea that the ABVP finds unbearable, so unbearable that it must be silenced.

Here is Ramanujan’s essay—read it, and tell me whether you understand why students shouldn’t be allowed to explore the Ramayana(s) through his ideas.
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft3j49n8h7&chunk.id=d0e1254

Banned Books Week, 26 September-1 October 2011

Every year around this time, I dust off two old pieces I'd written on banned and censored books in India, here and here. I read through these lists with a sense of failure: for all of our pride in India's democracy, the rise of Indian writing in English and this country's openness to argument and debate, we still have a deep unease when it comes to protecting free expression.

As a reader, which is what I've been for most of my 20 years in the workforce, whether in journalism or in publishing, I find it terribly saddening and disheartening that we haven't been able to examine previous bans on books. Would the earth really shake if we made copies of Aubrey Menen's gloriously subversive take on the Ramayana, The Ramayana Retold, available? Is there no way we can come back to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, 23 years after it was banned in India, and allow readers to discover the book for themselves? It often seems to me that Satanic Verses marked a turning point in the history of Indian thought: the day we banned this book was the day we lost nuance, and lost shades of meaning.

Every argument about the Verses in the two decades since then has stalled on gross simplifications: this is the book where Rushdie "insulted" Islam, and that is the end of all debate. Denied the right to read the Verses for themselves, Indians are unlikely to discover the layers to the Verses, the migrants' story at its heart, the exploration of insanity, the questioning of faith that Rushdie permitted himself. It followed, from the ban on the Verses, that we set a precedent that dissuaded authors from exploring the big questions about faith, belief and religion. It's easy for a contemporary writer to criticise the India Shining story--but faith has slid silently out of the frame, no longer to be discussed with ease.

Banned Books Week makes me envious. The reverence with which the US still--by and large--regards the right of its citizens to free speech is not encoded into our own DNA. We haven't yet had a political party or an individual politician stand up for free expression rights, even though a culture that bans books freely is also often a culture that will work very hard to shut down other forms of debate and dissent. Few of us would be surprised if school libraries banned books--in fact, in most schools, the librarian is expected to act as a kind of moral guardian, and many "filter" out books that might be seen as too violent or too unsettling for their constituencies.

The courts have consistently worked to protect free speech rights, but as a culture, I think we prefer silence to dissent and we would all too often choose the right not to be offended over the right to have our minds and beliefs challenged. We very rarely connect all the dots and ask what a book ban pronounced (and never re-examined) twenty years ago might have to do with a state that thinks it's all right to deport foreign journalists who are asking inconvenient questions, or another state that thinks it's okay to force Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey out of Bombay bookshops because his writing does not spare the Shiv Sena.

Perhaps we could start Banned Books Week here in India just by talking about, and thinking about, censorship. There's the censorship of the state, but there is also the far more insidious and damaging self-censorship that we often practice, or the intolerance many might face when they express views that differ from the hard certitudes of the moral majority. I hope to spend at least part of Banned Books Week thinking about the ideas and debates that make me uncomfortable, and trying to figure out where, and why, I have been silent in my own life. And if I have time, I'll try to share posts about books that have been banned in India, and what they might still have to offer us as readers. Feel free to share your own thoughts.

Speaking Volumes: The Yossarian Effect

(Published in the Business Standard, July 12, 2011)


Perhaps the most sympathetic portrait of the censor’s hard lot in life is to be found in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, where Yossarian is assigned the task of censoring letters while he’s in hospital. It is a monotonous job, and Yossarian does his best to innovate:

“To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the.”

For the hundreds of citizens employed as censors in China, the Yossarian Effect is inescapable. In 2009, a list of words and phrases banned in China was leaked, and offered a somewhat unsettling picture of what the regime considered dangerous or threatening. The banning of words like “democracy”, or phrases like “Falun Gong”, “Tiananmen Square”, “dictatorship”, “brainwashing” and “do not love the party” is to be expected. Some phrases are less explicable: “lonely young woman” is apparently as much to be abhorred as “toilet slave” and “bondage”, and I am unclear why the regime decided that its citizens should not search for either “take the kidney in vivo” or “Li Hong hemorrhoids”.

But the logic of censorship also dictates that euphemisms and veiled references must be censored, which can lead to bizarre twists. With every successive anniversary of Tiananmen, the phrase “16 years ago” or “18 years ago” would be censored. As rumours of Premier Jiang Zemin’s death circulate, the word “Jiang”, which means “river”, is censored — and so is the phrase “Jiangsu Province”. A few months earlier, fears of a growing “Jasmine Revolution” in China led to search engines censoring searches for jasmine tea, and in the offline world, the sale of jasmine flowers was briefly banned.

Getting past the censors in China has become a complex, almost pleasurable game. Many micro-bloggers and bloggers are quick to grasp the essential truth of censorship — unless you shut down all speech, reducing the Internet in China to a space where everything is blacked out except “a”, “an”, and “the”, people will find creative ways of getting around any block. “Writing on the Internet,” says a Chinese blogger who asks for anonymity, “is double-edged. You can find ways to say things that would never make it into print. But you have to be very dexterous to get past the censors online, and sometimes what we write is impenetrable to anyone outside a small circuit, because we have to use so many unusual euphemisms.”

Back in India, a more conventional publishing dilemma made me ask questions about how much the presence of ebooks and the Internet complicates censorship. The author Siddhartha Deb spent several years working on a book about contemporary India, The Beautiful and The Damned. One of the chapters in his book is about the founder of Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), Arindam Chaudhuri, and Deb took a careful but critical look at Chaudhuri’s empire.

The essay was carried in The Caravan magazine a few months ago, and last month, IIPM filed a lawsuit against Deb, The Caravan and his publishers Penguin India. They also sued Google, the search engine, on the grounds that Google had been the means of spreading Deb’s IIPM essay — an unusual, and risible, step that generated much mockery. Caravan and Deb are fighting the libel charges in court, and many legal observers feel they have a strong case.

But Deb’s book was due to be launched this summer, which presented his publishers with a problem — to hold off the release until the case is decided makes no sense. So Indian readers of The Beautiful and the Damned will, according to some reports, receive a copy of the book without the IIPM chapter —which is a key part of Deb’s observations about wealth, aspiration and the new millionaires in India. This is an awkward, but understandable, solution, though it’s unclear whether the UK copies of the book will contain the offending chapter — they should, since the lawsuit pertains only to India.

In the age of the Internet, though, it’s not that easy to censor a writer. The Caravan has pulled the article off their site, in compliance with the lawsuit filed by IIPM. But it is cached on Google, and the flurry over the suit against Deb, who is greatly respected for his two previous works of fiction (Surface, Point of Return), meant that more Indians had read the cached article. Another magazine, n+1, had withdrawn the issue containing the same article — and recently put it back in the public domain, as a way of protesting the lawsuit.

For either China or parties like IIPM, the question is whether it’s at all possible to censor the Net. The physical book is relatively easy to censor, and so perhaps is the ebook version. But Siddharth Deb’s case illustrates the power of the hivemind and of the online cache. The Web might end up creating multiple versions of the same book, from uncensored to emasculated, for different constituencies.

Speaking Volumes: Bans and Banana Republics

(Published in the Business Standard, April 5, 2011. Also read Salil Tripathi in The Daily Beast on India's troubled history of limiting free speech.)




At the height of the uproar over Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography of Gandhi, one question deserved to be asked: what would we do with a negative, critical biography of a revered national figure? The answer, sadly, is dismal: we would probably ban it.
Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India is a respectful look at the philosophical growth and evolution of Gandhi’s philosophy. The current controversy centres around two minor sections in the book, and also around the larger question of whether we’re comfortable with honest examinations of national heroes as humans, not gods.

The biography deals briefly with Gandhi’s ambiguous relationship with the architect and bodybuilder Kallenbach; they exchanged letters calling each other “Upper House” and “Lower House” in which Gandhi testified often to the closeness he felt for his friend. Gandhi was open on the subjects of sexuality and relationships, detailing his struggle to maintain celibacy with the same exactness as his other experiments with truth, and his relationship with Kallenbach was one of a series of not easily classifiable relationships.

Lelyveld clarified that he had never directly called Gandhi bisexual or homosexual in his biography; the outrage felt and exploited in states like Gujarat and Maharashtra, which imposed premature bans on the biography, was misplaced. (A question few asked is why we should be outraged at the idea that Gandhi, or any other national figure, might be homosexual—or are we officially a nation of homophobics?)

The second issue remained largely unexplored in the Indian media, but in many ways is a far more uncomfortable matter—was Gandhi a racist? Reading many of the letters he wrote in South Africa reveals his open airing of his prejudices about the “kaffirs”; and Lelyveld raises the right questions here.

In both cases, the Lelyveld biography broke no new ground. The Kallenbach letters are in the National Archives; they are also readily accessible on the Internet as part of a broader collection of Gandhi’s letters from that period, the deep, complex affection between both men very evident. Gandhi’s letters where he speaks of “troublesome, very dirty” ‘kaffir’ convicts are also a matter of public record.

Lelyveld’s reaction to the proposed ban on his biography was the puzzled anger of the outsider unused to India’s bizarre political circus. For any author, a ban on one’s writing is the most unjust of edicts—it’s an erasure of one’s words, a brutal silencing of one’s voice. Lelyveld couldn’t believe that a country that calls itself the world’s largest democracy would countenance a ban of a book on the basis of biased reviews—but he had little way of understanding the history of India’s bans, which have been largely political in nature over the last two decades.

Lelyveld’s book has revealed nothing of Gandhi’s political thoughts or private relationships that was not already in the public domain. He has speculated freely, but not irresponsibly. Nothing Lelyveld has written about Gandhi is any more incendiary than Gandhi’s own letters and autobiographical works—but as many commentators have said, today’s politicians would ban Gandhi’s own words if they could.

What Lelyveld’s case demonstrates the ways in which book bans work in India. They are now largely symbolic; the courts have subsequently overturned almost every ban on a book issued by various state governments. They are almost always demanded by political parties, not by private individuals or the ordinary reader; the book ban is now roughly the same as the one-day fast, a token, banal gesture of protest.

They will also always mis-represent the book, so that Rohinton Mistry’s beautiful exploration of the common man’s Bombay and corruption in India can be called a book that contains swear words, and Lelyveld’s words can be twisted beyond recognition.

The damage done to the cause of free speech as states and politicians vie to be the first to ban a book is immense—but it is also almost secondary, because the politicians who seek book bans, from any party, are not thinking of the complexities of free speech issues.

So what does a book ban, of the kind the Narendra Modi government has sought on the Lelyveld book, mean in today’s India? At its simplest, a ban is just an opportunity for a political party to claim the mantle of protector—protector of a faith, of a community, of a national figure, of Indian culture. It is a no-cost opportunity; the small minority of readers in English is not considered a useful votebank, and banning a book offers immediate access to national television.

There are tiny signs that politicians may have over-used the book ban. The Central government and the Congress have backed away from supporting a ban on the Gandhi biography, and it is very likely that the state bans will be overturned by the judiciary.

So far, though, no politician has had the courage to step up and say what Lelyveld has said: this ban, with its disregard for the basic principles of free speech, is shameful. Nor have our politicians acknowledged another sobering truth: our record on book bans and our lack of support for free speech is more appropriate to a banana republic than a democracy.

Previous columns on book bans:

The marketplace of outrage


Rohinton and the Rat Pack: on the targetting of Such a Long Journey


Why we should lift the ban on the Satanic Verses...


...and the Rushdie effect: censorship after the Verses


James Laine and the banning of Shivaji...






Taslima Nasreen: The Power of Offence


Sedition, censorship and the crime of disaffection--the British legacy of banning books

Blasphemy laws and censorship in Pakistan


And: A Pawn Called Taslima


The Care and Feeding of Book Bans

...the freedom to explore: Imagining Shivaji


Book bans in India, Part One
...and Part Two