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.

The BS column: Teenage wasteland/ What to read before you get old

(This is a longer version of this week's Speaking Volumes column, carried in the Business Standard, September 1, 2009)


Teenagers watch movies and play online games, but they don’t read any more. Today’s children aren’t interested in books. Familiar complaints, often voiced in “readers are an endangered species” arguments, but they miss two crucial points.

Most literate cultures lose readers in the teenage years. Though most teens continue to be highly connected to reading, narrative and textuality—through Twitter, social media networks, graphic novels and comics, films, and new technospeak argots, they seem to move away from books.

In India, we could hardly complain that teenagers don’t read any more, if we had so little to offer them to read. But there’s been a sharp shift over just the last few years, though, with writers like Siddharth Sharma (The Grasshopper’s Run, which blends action adventure and contemporary history), Shazia Omar (Like a Diamond in the Sky--crossover fiction) and others joining writers like fantasy veteran Samit Basu, who has considerable crossover appeal, or Paro Anand and Anshumani Rudra, whose writings increasingly appeal to teens.

This week, four publishing insiders share their views on the young adult writing scene in India: Thomas Abraham, Managing Director, Hachette India; Sayoni Basu, Publishing Director, Scholastic India; Anita Roy, Commissioning Editor, Zubaan Books; and Sudeshna Shome Ghosh, Editorial Director, Puffin Books.

Is there a growing demand for young adult fiction?

Sayoni Basu (Scholastic): There’s a very definite age group between the Enid Blytons, Nancy Drew and the Sidney Sheldons! To an extent, the classics fill that gap, but that gets quite boring. Young adults—roughly between the ages of 14-18, have their own interests and issues--first love, growing up, career choices--which few children's or adult novels deal with. So they’re looking for reading that’s greater in complexity and ideas than a children's book--but that’s still not quite about marriage or jobs or suchlike.


Sudeshna Shome Ghosh (Puffin): Young readers want books that are written for them and that feature their thinking; Puffin is actively looking to commission original fiction for this segment.

Anita Roy (Zubaan): There is undoubtedly both a need and a demand for YA Fiction - you only have to look at the sales for this sector to know that it's healthy and growing. The growth has been a relatively recent phenomenon - previously you just had "adult" and "children's" literature: the huge commercial success of writers like J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman and Stephanie Jordan has been due, in no small measure, to the fact that their series have been read by adults as well as kids. They have pioneered the term "cross-over fiction." If you're a pessimist, you might put this down to the fact that adults are less inclined to read serious, grown-up, 'high' literature in the modern day, and see this as a kind of 'dumbing down' of literary tastes. If you're an optimist, you could see this - as I'm more inclined to do - as the fact that really good writers are telling really gripping stories which appeal to readers regardless of their age.


Thomas Abraham (Hachette): We’re seeing a huge sales spurt in this category, but that’s fuelled by one or two series—Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight series, the House of Night series. These are huge phenomena worldwide, but the rest of the category is as dead as it always was. We have a whole imprint that caters to YA with top notch writers in it like Jordan and Scott Card, but these don’t sell at all. So one is faced with the old problem that once teenagers cross the 15+ threshold (with rare exceptions), we seem to lose them where leisure reading is concerned (to parties, internet, hangouts, TV?). A lot come back when they are early 20s mainly for non-fiction that ‘must be read’ (read career advancement reading which will include some trade reading too that will stand them in good stead in interviews), but this at one level is the biggest demographic challenge being faced today by the Indian trade publishing industry. Children’s writing is seeing a sort of resurgence, but unless we have initiatives to get the teen segment reading for pleasure, this whole young populace that we’re rolling out in economic surveys (50% of India is below the age of 30 etc) will be a non-reading population even if it is a literate one.

What does this age group want to read? And what challenges do Indian writers face?

Sayoni: Parents are still uncomfortable with the idea that their children might be interested in knowing about sex or relationships. I find it quite interesting that some school teachers have no problems with Mills and Boon but do with Judy Bloom. I think the 12 to 18 year-old has any many diverse interests as an adult. So a similar range of genres, and perhaps themes and treatments that are more relevant to their lives. Also stories which relate to their lives or stories with protagonists of a similar age group.

Sudeshna: We’re looking at books that are based on the reality around us today—relationships, friends, peer issues--or at highly popular fantasy adventure books. Suchitra Krishnamoorthi’s Swapnalok Society series, for instance, are set in a residential society in Mumbai and follow the trials of a group of children 12 years and over. Faces in the Water by Ranjit Lal, set in modern Delhi, offers a surreal take on female infanticide.

Anita: Basically, good writing. Sounds simplistic, but it's the only answer I can really come up with. Stories which capture the imagination, and don't talk down to the reader; strong characters, gripping plots, books which reflect young lives and are not afraid to tackle difficult subjects. There has been much hand-wringing in the West about the very dark and difficult books which feature on today's YA lists - The chair of judges and the Guardian's children's books editor Julia Eccleshare says of this year's Guardian Children's Book Prize: "This longlist shows there is absolutely no subject which children's authors aren't willing to tackle... there is nothing which is not capable of being dealt with in a children's book."
Indian writers, I feel, too often hamper their own creativity by deciding what 'can' and 'can't' be written about for children. And publishers, too, prejudge what will get past the "gatekeepers" - librarians, teachers, parents - which can lead to erring on the side of the 'safe'. I see signs that in the next few years, however, we'll see more and more writers and publishers taking risks - and those leading to a healthy crop of Indian books for young adults which challenge, delight, disturb, entertain and provoke. The field is wide open right now, and the next few years are going to be exciting!

Thomas: Vampire and paranormal romance fiction has obviously sunk its teeth in! Abroad, this category offers perspectives on growing up and discussions on major political and social themes. We have, for instance, Arjun Rao’s Third Best coming out, a gritty, almost hard boiled look at life within a residential school that we will market to teens. Unfortunately, the top teen bestsellers would probably still be the guides to SAT, and IIT-JEE etc. Leisure reading needs to catch up.

Recommendations, aside from books already mentioned: Ranjit Lal: The Battle for Number 19, Paro Anand’s Weed and No Guns at My Son’s Funeral, Kavita Daswani: A Girl Named Indie, Michaela Clarke: The City of Jewels, Siddhartha Sarma: The Grasshopper’s Run, Subhadra Sen Gupta: Double Click, Arun Krishnan: The Loudest Firecracker (disclaimer--this was commissioned and published by Tranquebar, my former publishing house) and the works of writers like Samit Basu, Payal Dhar, Sarnath Banerji, Amruta Patil.

The BS Column: The care and feeding of book bans

(This is a longer version of the piece published in the Business Standard, August 25, 2009)




In Delhi’s Coronation Park, you’ll find a circle of empty plinths. These pedestals were intended for the statues of viceroys past, and a few, like Willingdon and Hardinge, have found their perches. But by and large, the crumbling figure of George V presides over a neglected graveyard of pedestal-less statues—the men who ruled India, now abandoned.

Perhaps politicians should be given a mandatory tour of Coronation Park, just to remind them of the futility of trying to keep the past on its pedestal. Propping up the past doesn’t work, either, as Upamanyu Chatterjee noted in English, August, where the cheerfully corrupt sculptor Tamse makes his Gandhi statues from such shoddy materials that the Mahatma must be supported by a bamboo protruding from the rear.

Over the last week, the debate over Jinnah—India, Partition, Independence, the book by former foreign minister Jaswant Singh, resulted in the author’s expulsion from the BJP. In Gujarat, chief minister Narendra Modi announced a statewide ban on the book. He felt Jinnah insulted the memory of Gujarati icon Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel by examining whether the freedom fighter carried some responsibility for Partition. (Someone should remind him that Jinnah, too, was Gujarati.) Proving that stupidity is not a prerogative of any one political party, Congress MPs in Madhya Pradesh asked for a ban on Jinnah—Patel is an icon in Madhya Pradesh too—but the CM in that state (and the Karnataka CM) declined to oblige.

In recent years, the “state ban” rather than the nationwide ban on books has become a symbolic ritual. In 2003, the Left Front government banned Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen’s autobiography, Dwikhandita, for fear that it might offend the Muslim community. (The Kolkata High Court subsequently lifted the ban.)

In 2004, the scholar James Laine discussed Shivaji’s parentage in his book; in an retributive act of carefully planned spontaneous outrage, "defenders" of Shivaji’s reputation sacked the Bhandarkar library in Pune. In the process, they destroyed several historical manuscripts, including rare documents about the life of Shivaji, but the irony of their actions was lost on the mob. Laine’s book was banned in Maharashtra. In 2008, Uttar Pradesh CM Mayawati banned Jaishree Mishra’s Rani, because the book—clearly identified as historical fiction—suggested a romantic friendship between Rani Lakshmibai and a British officer. Very recently, Chattisgarh has banned the Habib Tanvir play Charandas Chor, on the grounds that it "hurts the sentiments" of a particular community. This "hurt" has been discovered after the play has had successful runs for over three decades. The late Tanvir would have been amused at one small point--the play was banned on the eve of a statewide "book reading week".

Those who asked for the ban had caught on to a fairly simple trend: it's much easier for any special-interest group to swing a statewide ban on a book today than it was just two decades ago. With each successive ban, we set more and more of a precedent for both a particular state and the Indian state to silence anything that doesn't fit with the preferred version of history, that offends and hurts the sentiments of a religious community, or that is just inconvenient. These are dangerous precedents to set, and with each uncontested ban, we give away a little of our own freedom.

The state ban crosses all party lines, and one could argue that the practice of banning books was embraced eagerly by a new, free generation of Indians. The British taste in book bans reflected a certain prudishness and insecurity: most books banned under British rule were either sexually explicit or openly seditious.

Post-Independence, books we banned included Aubrey Menen’s gleefully bawdy retelling of the Ramayana (Jawaharlal Nehru felt it might offend Hindus), works by and on Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, and biographies that questioned national leaders (Bertrand Russell’s China book was banned in part because he was scathing about Nehru). Over the decades, it became apparent that freedom of speech was offered, but not guaranteed, in India. If your opinions offended religious sensibilities, or offended our urgent and unexamined need to sanitise national icons, they would be censored.

The banning of a book, especially by a particular state, works wonderfully well in practice. It's much easier to organise a statewide rather than a nationwide ban, and even if the courts overturn the ban a few years later, the political point has been made. It allows politicians to express their willingness to defend a national figure or a religious belief—ignoring the fact that in most cases, that figure or belief is being questioned by the author, not attacked. It keeps the cadres happy, offers fodder for a string of stirring speeches, and is a cheap, easy gesture. The only constituency that is upset is the very narrow band of readers, publishers, and authors. We don’t constitute a vote bank, so our “right” to free speech is effectively irrelevant.

What we do lose with each ban, though, is the right to examine our own history. The bans against Nasreen and Laine had scholars and writers re-examining their work, for fear that they might attract the next ban—or angry mob. Publishing houses should be above the fear of lawsuits, so long as they believe in the author’s honesty and integrity—but many will now avoid anything too controversial. This has a devastating impact on research into the freedom movement, where few will now write about leaders as if they were more than statues on pedestals. And, contrary to what politicians believe, few readers want to read about statues.

The ban on Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah in Gujarat may well be lifted for political reasons. That won’t stop the BJP, or the Left Front, or the Congress from demanding a ban on the next book that happens to “offend people’s sensibilities”.

Perhaps they might profit from considering two outlandish, and ultimately ineffective, book bans. For many years, China banned Alice in Wonderland--because it raised animals to a human level, thereby insulting humankind. If you must ban a book, find a more splendidly moronic reason. More tellingly, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front became one of the most discussed books in Europe after its ban in 1933 because he had “insulted and offended the Wehrmacht”. The Reich rose and fell; Remarque’s books can be found in every German bookstore, even today.

(See also: Banned books in India: 1970s-2006)
And: The Complete Review's coverage of the James Laine/ Shivaji book
Salil Tripathi on the recent ban on Charandas Chor
Mridula and Aditya Mukherjee on the history textbook controversy