The BS Column: Meenakshi Mukherjee: The Death of a Critic

(This was a week of loss and funerals; and memories. Meenakshi Mukherjee taught me years ago at JNU, and helped me make the key decision to pursue freelance writing instead of a PhD; I think her acute eye saw what a misfit I'd have been in academia. We stayed in touch sporadically over the years, calling each other to discuss new books, reviews, translations, ideas. "You lead a much more productive life away from the Delhi social whirl," she told me when she moved some years ago to Hyderabad. "Most of it is distraction. I enjoy not being distracted these days."
She died of a sudden heart attack at Hyderabad airport, on her way to Delhi for a book release, in a year when she was on the panel of judges for the Shakti Bhatt prize and at 72, was humming with the productivity she'd wanted so much in her sixties. "What have you been reading?" she asked in our last conversation. I told her; she listened. "So many good books! We're lucky to have time to read, aren't we? Which ones should I buy first? Have you read this? And that?" That energy, that appetite, that freewheeling curiosity: I'll miss all of these.)

The Prospectus of the 19th century Mookerjee’s Magazine declared that, “Our Magazine will be a receptacle of all descriptions of knowledge and literature, Poetry, the Drama, vers de société, Criticism, Prose Fiction, Sketches, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology…” and so forth for another two ambitiously inclusive lines.

Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, scholar, critic and writer, who died last week at the age of 72 of a sudden heart attack at Hyderabad airport, sometimes quoted the Prospectus; in some ways, it reflected the contents and broad scope of her own formidable mind. (She gave vers de société a wide berth, but was open to the rest.)

Criticism of Indian writing in English suffers from two major problems. Much of it is unintelligible, especially criticism as practised by followers of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and requires the skills of an expert in linguistic forensics to decode. Much of it is invisible, relegated to obscure academic journals or to the thriving but insular seminar circuit. Very little of it is actually influential, or lasting, but Meenakshi Mukherjee’s contributions are likely to fall into this category.

There was no sense, in her presence, of reading literature as dead texts from a distant past. Her years in research, and her long partnership with her equally distinguished husband, the late translator and academic Sujit Mukherjee, gave her a holistic view of Indian writing in English that few other practitioners possessed. Meenakshi Mukherjee could trace the lineage of IWE much further back than Bankimchandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife—considered the first true novel written by an Indian in English. Through her scholarship, she offered a much more interesting history than the accepted one of a novel, imitative of its Western counterparts, that sprang out of nowhere from Bankim’s mind.

In her excavation of history, the Indian novel had been emerging in unusual form well before the 19th century. The first two books that snagged Meenakshi Mukherjee’s attention dated back to 1835 and 1845 respectively—both were works of alternate history, imagining an uprising against the British, and a future without English rule.

Years later, when she translated Lokenath Bhattacharya’s The Virgin Fish of Babughat, she was fascinated by the question of imagination. The Indian expression of it may have been influenced by magic realism, or by the European novel, but it had a different fountainhead, in her opinion. Bhattacharya’s novel, for instance, is set in an imaginary prison where the inmates have the “freedom” to explore sexuality. But it’s the guards who decide on the pairings of prisoners, and erotic exploration soon becomes just another fatigue-inducing prison ritual. The narrator of The Virgin Fish of Babughat is bound by different rules—he must commit his thoughts to paper, by order, and he is rendered frantic by the fear of losing language, the necessity of facing blank page after blank page every day.

In one of the last conversations we had, just before Meenakshi Mukherjee was supposed to come to Delhi for the launch of her biography of R C Dutt, we discussed the Indian writer’s love for fantasy, for the picaresque and for alternate histories—all these exerted a powerful fascination for the early pioneers, before the conventions of the middle-class novel took over.

It’s sad that one set of writers will remember only the skirmish between the professor and the writer Vikram Chandra, which he documented, memorably, in an essay called The Cult of Authenticity. Meenakshi Mukherjee had noted the tendency of some Indian writers in English to exoticise India unnecessarily, to produce the modern equivalent of sadhus and maharajas in an attempt to establish their authenticity.

Mukherjee picked on Chandra’s collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, as an example of this trend, for his use of words like Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha in the titles. In retrospect, she was right about the anxiety of writing India that infected a certain group of writers—and perhaps still does. But she was dead wrong in her selection of offenders—Chandra couldn’t be accused of this particular crime. When some of us taxed her with evidence to the contrary, years ago, she was delighted. “A proper argument!” she said, and settled to it with her trademark relish and acumen. Neither side succeeded in convincing the other, but we, at least, retired with a far broader sense of our literary history once she was done with her examples.

This isn’t my favourite Meenakshi Mukherjee memory, though. That would be one shared by generations of students at JNU and the many other universities where she taught: the memory of engaging with “MM” as she opened up our forgotten literature and unexplored past to us via Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, inviting us to claim Indian English, in all its richness and complexity, for ourselves. To borrow from the title of one of the many anthologies edited by her, there was another India out there, and she wanted every reader to make their own explorations of that familiar and unknown country.

Repairing Brindavan: by Ruchir Joshi

(Reproduced with permission from Tranquebar and Ruchir Joshi, the introduction to Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Anthology of Erotic Stories. Copyright with Ruchir Joshi.)


Repairing Brindavan — An Introduction

In asking writers to contribute to this book we laid out criteria that were loose to the point of being promiscuous: there was a dearth of good erotic writing in the Indian Subcontinent (by which please read ‘writing in English’) and we wanted to try and start to counter that absence; the writing had to be around and about the erotic, the sexual, and it could be as graphic or not as the writer liked; it had to be a work of fiction and it had to be previously unpublished.

The responses were varied and interesting.

One senior Indian writer, who writes brilliant erotics, disdained to even answer my email. Three others did variations of spluttering into their beer, ‘Me write porn for you!?! No fucking way!’ and promptly crossed their legs, all three. One star of the firmament smiled very sweetly and said, ‘If I find the time, I’ll certainly think about it.’ If I had such a thing as a Wall of Rejections, and if there had been a way to collect that smile, it would certainly have had pride of place. Another writer couched his refusal in the form of a tough question: if it wasn’t to be porn, surely a passage about sex and desire had to be an organic part of a larger narrative about something else? In setting out this model wasn’t I, in fact, inviting sex writing for the sake of sex writing, i.e. that highly undesirable substance called ‘bad sex writing’?

While the putting together of this book, I’ve kept that question firmly in mind because it is a very good question.

When I got the tough question, I had several arguments crowding my head:

What’s wrong with a piece of writing that’s written primarily or solely to excite sexual desire? Surely, as in the eating of puddings and the making of love, the proof lies in the actual experience of the act rather than any a priori idea or theory? Surely, if the writing was good enough, it could transcend grosser examples of whichever genre? Some of our greatest miniature paintings are the porn comic-strips of their day; Anais Nin wrote The Delta of Venus to pay the rent, at the rate of so many francs per page, and it’s a fulcrum work of twentieth-century literature; one of the best film directors working today, Pedro Almodovar, cut his teeth in the Spanish porn film industry and imported many of the industry’s tropes into his mainstream films; and so on and so forth.

Would you, I wanted to ask, have had the same problem if I’d written to you and asked for a story centred around food and eating, or about music and sound, or about the pleasures and traumas of driving in the Subcontinent? And what if I’d said recipes and sheet music and detailed descriptions of gear-boxes were most welcome but not strictly necessary?

How do you know what will emerge if you put your mind, memory and imagination to thinking about desire and sex?

I had all these returns of serve and more, but I also had an idea that the only way to properly answer the challenge was by producing a book that would hold a serious reader. For all those who said ‘no’ there were more writers who said ‘yes’ — again, in equally varying and entertaining ways — and they have produced, each in her or his own style, what I hope is part of a satisfactory reply to our fellow storyteller.

When I spoke to a friend in British publishing about doing this book, his response flickered between disinterest and mild horror. Both the ennui and anxiety came from the fact that even the best bookstores in the UK now have ‘Erotica’ sections overloaded with graphically sexualised versions of Mills & Boons and autobiographies of porn stars with titles like ‘How to Give Great Blowjobs’. Around, above and below these archaic repositories of the printed word is the net, with its ceaseless traffic of virtual bodily fluids, with its elevator-musak of groans, grunts and gasps, with its Calipornification of everything from small animals to large forklifts.

I wanted to tell my friend a story to explain where I was trying to come from: a Baul singer was taken on a tour of Germany in the late ’80s. The man, let’s call him S-Baba, was also one of the greatest living exponents of the millennium-old Bengali folk-music tradition that he represented. But S-Baba, then in his fifties, was also famous for his unceasing libido. One of his hosts, who knew this, thought it would be a lark to take S-Baba into a sex store. For the longest time S-Baba silently wandered around the aisles, staring at the dildos, vibrators, whips, leather suits and crotchless panties. After a while, with great sorrow on his face, he spoke. ‘My god, is this what they’ve done to Brindavan?’

When I first heard the story, twenty years ago, I roared with laughter. The image of the King of Randiness, the one who was willing to chase with his charm any woman between sixteen and sixty, being gobsmacked out of his sex-drive was impossible to resist.

I don’t laugh at the story any more.

I’ve heard the old Baul sing the song many times now: I want to find the road to Brindavan, who’ll show me the way? Nominally, Brindavan is, of course, the woodland of lore where the cowherd Krishna played with the Gopis, stealing their clothes while they bathed, making love, moving from one to the other, pulling everyone around him, women and men, into the dance of love. But the Brindavan for which the song searches is a space that can only be found inside oneself. For me, the denudation of that Brindavan, that ancient subcontinental psychic forest of erotic freedom, where love and physical desire go hand in hand with tenderness, grace, laughter, mischief and the worship of the ecstatic that resides in all our beings, is no less a tragedy than the drying up of our rivers or the inundation of our coastlines.

What I wanted to tell my English friend was that we in the Subcontinent are now sandwiched in a double rape of our Brindavan. If, out of one direction, comes the inexorable rumble of the bulldozers of mostly male-driven hard porn, from the other direction comes the snap and crackle of people setting fire to the forest from inside. This project was conceived in the shadow of the exiling of M.F. Husain on a ridiculously spurious ‘charge’ hatched by the Hindu fascists, and the beginnings of the resurgence of the Taliban goons in Afghanistan; the volume comes out in the shadow of the assault by the Hindu Taliban on young women drinking in a pub in Mangalore. Hopefully, in its own small way, this book will join the resistance against those and other such depredations.


Recently, when I described some of the stories to a friend, they said, ‘Oh, so are you going to call it “Erotica Designed to Disappoint Horny Teenagers”? My reply isn’t printable, even in this preface, but the serious answer is: no, I hope sexually avid subcontinental youth do get some kicks out of reading this; God knows they deserve some home-grown excitement after all we went through when we were ourselves fighting our way through puberty, hiding under our beds everything from low-level, pirated porn to high-level, impenetrable nineteenth-century gumball prose, none of it having anything to do with our lives, which were of course supposed to be sex-free zones in the delusionary chapel of our parents’ world-view.

But, equally, I hope older readers will also feel their boats floating every now and then, boats both sexual and literary. Looking through the stories, I’m happy to argue that this is an anthology which contains some of the most exciting writers working today in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, plus the one from suburban South London.

In the composite picture that comes together, we have sex and desire, anti-sex and the despair that comes from unfulfilled desire, we have great detail and subtle allusion, we have more humour than sorrow, and we definitely have more love than we do hate. This is a collage of a book that works on its own terms. For instance, it is not a representational sampling of the region: people unfamiliar with the Subcontinent will hopefully avoid concluding that there is no same-sex love in these parts, or that Sri Lankans and Nepalis either can’t write about desire or don’t have sex at all; equally, since lust and desire are essentially about keeping rules and other things slightly flexible, we have one extract from a novel that’s beaten this collection to the press, we have stories that do not fit into a strict definition of ‘sex writing’, where other narratives over-ride the sexual without quite managing to lose the undercurrent of desire; in other words, we have a mix and, inshallah, we have a match.

As you open this book and explore it, I hope there will form the charge and bond that should happen between writer and reader, an erotics of discovery which, while being different from the current that passes between two lovers, is not entirely unrelated.

Ruchir Joshi

Calcutta 2009

Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories

This one's personal.
Back in the late 1990s, a friend in publishing asked me to scan the manuscript of an anthology of Indian erotica. It was a magnificent anthology, accurate in all respects, containing excerpts from every key ancient and medieval Indian manuscript on the subject--the Koka Shastra, the Ananga Ranga and of course, the Kama Sutra (non pop-up version).
It was also the least erotic book I have had the honour of reading. As I ploughed through the grimly earnest taxonomy and the stern injunctions of our ancients, what came through was the sense of sex as yet another social duty and domestic chore to be studied alongside the granary yield figures or the household accounts. Indians had the answer to the population problem in their own backyard--if we taught the ancient erotic shastras in school, burdening young minds with the 15 different kinds of permissible fingernail marks you can leave on your lover's body and the correct occasion on which to make the cry of the peacock as opposed to the moan of the jungle cat, no one would ever have sex again in this country.
Years passed, I joined publishing briefly, and one of the first things I heard was that Ruchir Joshi was doing a contemporary erotica anthology for a rival house. My colleagues and I suppressed a moan (the low moan of the twice-kicked street dog, not the full-throated moan of the langur at dusk, if you're wondering) and came to terms with our jealousy--it was the right editor/ author for the right book at the right time. Chiki Sarkar at Random House did a superb job of setting the book on its way, but for various reasons, the book moved on from Random, and we at Tranquebar were lucky enough to get it.
Electric Feather is out; the launch is at the serendipitously named Love Hotel, Ai, tomorrow (17th September) at 7 pm (Delhi, MGF Mall--please RSVP Tranquebar if you'd like to attend); and I'm very happy that Tranquebar brought the project to term despite my departure.
Because of the zealousness of the moral police in India, and their touching insistence on peering into the bedrooms of the rest of us, we've had an odd gap in Indian writing. There is bad literary sex (Indians find themselves nominated for the Bad Sex award on a routine basis), Ye Ancient Indian sex as diligently classified by the dry quills of the sages of the past, any erotic sting drawn by time, and oceans of bad Bhabhi Porn. Contemporary lust, and love, and all those many in-between shades, has been left in a dusty file marked "Not For Public Consumption", and as authors from Paromita Vohra to Samit Basu, Jeet Thayil to Sonia Jabbar, Ruchir himself to Abeer Hoque prove, what is in there is rich, and alive, and filled with a kind of crackling electricity. Of all the books that I commissioned or that came to me as gifts at Tranquebar, this is the one I'm most pleased to see in print. Read it, preferably in bed.

The BS Column: Should Google own the world's words?

(Published in the Business Standard, September 14, 2009. I ducked writing on Google Book Search for as long as I could--it's a complex issue, and if you're writing at this word length, you're not going to do more than reiterate the basic arguments--but finally had to put my two cents in. Oh well.)

Who owns literature? And would you be comfortable if the answer to that was: “Google”?



This is only a slight oversimplification, and it’s the key question in the ferocious debate raging currently over Google Book Search. In late 2004, Google kicked off the Google Print Library project. The search engine behemoth announced plans to partner with some of the world’s biggest libraries in order to digitize books.



Many of us saw this as a potentially good thing at the time, especially with regard to hard-to-find books, books that are out of copyright, or rare books that might not be easily accessible otherwise. A vast, worldwide, easily accessible electronic library is everyone’s Borgesian dream come true. But as early as 2005, fears surfaced that this might give Google too much power—and would the company be able to digitize books currently within copyright, or “orphan books” (books for which copyright is under dispute or hard to trace)?



By October 2008, Google had 20,000 partners in what was now known as the Google Book Search project—and had digitized over 7 million books. This sounds, again, like a good thing—the world’s largest library, the rescue and recovery of forgotten or lost books, perhaps even a shift in the power equation between authors. Instead of being biased, inevitably, towards books published in our current time and age (bookshops will carry far more recently published works than classic works), we gain access to the work of the human imagination down the centuries.



Here’s the catch. As the Google Books Search Settlement goes to court, one of the key issues at stake is whether Google will effectively own the world’s largest library. As author Cory Doctorow explains, thanks to an ill-judged class action settlement between the Authors Guild and Google Book Search, “Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books [including orphan books] in search results... The real risk is that Google could end up as the sole source of ultimate power in book discovery, distribution and sales. As the only legal place where all books can be searched, Google gets enormous market power: the structure of their search algorithm can make bestsellers or banish books to obscurity. The leverage they attain over publishing and authors through this settlement is incalculable.”



I like Google as a company. But do I trust them with this much power? Consider this, too: Google’s tools are fairly (if quietly) invasive. The reason why authors like Michael Chabon and Cory Doctorow are protesting this settlement before the hearing on October 7, and why several publishers have joined hands with them, is that Google Book Search has a dark side to it. Google’s system can monitor not just what books you buy, but what you search for, what you read, down to how much time you spend on a particular page. This may seem paranoid, but to give one company this much power when their databases also include tools on the lines of Google Maps and Gmail is insane.



That’s an awful lot of information that could be compiled in a way that is deeply invasive of your privacy. Imagine, for instance, that for excellent reasons, the courts might want the right to monitor the reading and online search habits of released paedophiles on probation. Google has that information. Should it assist the courts, especially if x paedophile’s probation officer suspects that he may be about to commit another crime? Now imagine a slightly different scenario, where you’ve fallen foul of say, an IT official in India, and he decides to ask Google for your reading records, discovers a lot of searches for erotica, and had you prosecuted under anti-porn laws.



These are simplistic examples, but there is a chilling effect to giving one company this much access and control over your personal information. And there’s a very human factor to be considered here: most people object to invasions of their privacy—but they object a lot less when that invasion is discreet and almost imperceptible. If Google Book Search was to come into our homes every week and demand to see our reading lists, as well as install security cameras to monitor exactly what we read, we would protest. But this is an online, invisible invasion. There aren’t going to be that many protests.



Google argues that the project is intrinsically good, and points to their reasonably strong track record at respecting the privacy of individuals—except in China. But I’m not comfortable with the idea, as a reader, of giving one company that much control over my life—and no, Google’s Privacy Policy isn’t enough of a reason to trust them. Add the invasion of privacy issues to the massively large database of literature that would now be in Google’s hands, and you have a big problem. The world may still need and use a digitized library. But there are very good reasons not to hand over the keys to that library to one company. Even if it is Google.

India: The Rushdie effect--bans, burnings and other acts of censorship since 1988

(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.

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.

Book review: Empire of the Moghul

(Published in the Business Standard, September 3, 2009)

Empire of the Moghul: Raiders from the North
Alex Rutherford
Hachette, Rs 495, 434 pages


In a classic essay on Babur, Amitav Ghosh wonders: “What made him pen this immense book [the Baburnama] and how on earth did he find the time? Between the moment when he gained his first kingdom at the age of 12 and his death 35 years later, there seems scarcely to have been a quiet day in Babur’s life. His first kingdom was the only one he didn’t have to risk his life for: he inherited it from his father, a scion of a dynasty that was far richer in aspiring rulers than in thrones.”

In the course of his life, Babur won, lost and consolidated kingdoms, struggled in his early twenties with exile; as a young emperor, battled homesickness as he reviewed his conquests in India; and courtesy his unusually candid autobiography, revealed more of himself than elaborate court records reveal of his Mughal successors. All of this makes him the instinctive choice for the ambitious historical novelist, and with a planned cycle of five novels spanning the Mughal empire in the Empire of the Moghul series, Alex Rutherford is nothing if not ambitious.

Rutherford reveals little of his identity, beyond the fact that he lives in London, but in an afterword, his passion for history comes through: “I’ve visited nearly all the places important to Babur’s story. His ancestral kingdom of Ferghana…. is still a place of apple, almond and apricot orchards, with beds of juicy melons the size of footballs. I’ve slept in [the herdsmens’] conical felt tents, eaten their root vegetables, mutton and buttered rice, which would have been so familiar to Babur, and drunk the fermented mare’s milk that warmed him.” This is an almost familiar voice, combining a journalist’s curiosity with the trained or serious amateur historian’s eye for detail, and it promises much for the series.

Raiders From the North begins with the 12-year-old Babur witnessing the death of his father, Umair-Shaikh, killed in the collapse of his dovecote as the doves flutter “in the air like snowflakes” above the royal corpse. Babur’s adolescence is a tricky period for a novelist to cover; deprived of the intense, honest and almost chatty voice that informs the pages of the Baburnama, Rutherford must fall back on invention, and he struggles just a bit as the young boy-king attempts to handle intrigue, wicked viziers and the ambitions of his uncles. But Rutherford establishes much in the first few chapters, as Babur dons his father’s sword, Alamgir, but not the armour (“still too wide for him”) and prepares to claim one kingdom and hold on to another. He sets out the young king’s ambition, his fierce allegiance to the Timurid line, the deep but strong bonds between him, his sister Khanzada, his mother and his grandmother, Esan Dawlat, descended from Genghis Khan’s line.

At sixteen, Babur had attacked, won and lost Samarkand—and lost his own kingdom, Ferghana. At nineteen, he regained Samarkand, only to lose it again to Shaibani Khan. At twenty-two, he had captured Kabul; at 29, after briefly conquering Herat and being hailed as a saviour in Bukhara, Babur once again held—and once again lost—Samarkand. This final loss obliged him to turn his attention elsewhere; the prince without a kingdom found his way to India, and by the time of his death at 47, he had defeated the Lodis, demanded the allegiance of many of the Rajputs, and was emperor of India.

To cover this territory, Rutherford must use his licence to fictionalise, allowing us to see Babur through the eyes of Wazir Khan, Baisanghar and a market boy called Baburi. Through Wazir Khan, his father’s trusted lieutenant, we see Babur as a mentor would see him; through Baisanghar, commander of Babur’s army, we see the emperor as his soldiers would see him, and through the heavily fictionalised character of Baburi, we see Babur as a man caught between the driving force of his ambition and the constant presence of disillusionment. The pace is fast, and Rutherford carries off the battle scenes with élan, while his understanding of the landscape brings Babur’s story to life. The dialogue, so often the heart and the Achilles heel of historical novels, flows well but can sometimes retreat into stilted High Speech.

But while Rutherford doesn’t—yet—have the soaring imagination and absolute precision of a George R R Martin, or the finesse and depth of a Philippa Gregory, Raiders From the North deserves its position on the Indian bestseller charts. In a country saturated and steeped in history, we have so few good popular historical novels. We could debate the use of “Moghul” over “Mughal”—“Moghul” carries the faintly imperial hangover of out-of-date colonial textbooks—and occasionally question whether the characters are richly enough drawn.

Despite these quibbles, Raiders From the North is an excellent opening shot, miles better than the average page-turner. Whoever Alex Rutherford might be, he’s set the bar high for his next four novels—and this reviewer, for one, looks forward to the rest of the quintet.