Sangam House residencies: last date July 31

The applications for the Sangam House Residencies for 2012/ 2013 are online. The last date to apply is July 31.

I spent two weeks at their Tranquebar residency last year. It was a beautiful place, and we were lucky enough to have huge rooms at Neemrana’s Bungalow-on-the-Beach. I wrote all day, and went for long, peaceful walks, listening to the sea break over the black jagged rocks of the shoreline, watching the fishermen mend their nets. In the evening, a loose coalition of Danish and Indian writers shared conversation, and food, and stories.

But it wasn’t just a memorable experience. The Sangam Residency is perhaps the only working writing residency in India. Everyone wants to run literary festivals, companies want to sponsor literary prizes, but fewer people want to work on the unglamorous bits--the building of good public libraries, the steady running of writing residencies, all of that back-end stuff that goes into the making of writers.

It was the first time in my life that someone had given me the freedom to write. The deadlines, the cooking, the niggling business of daily life were erased for two weeks. After years spent pleasantly enough as a hack journalist, here was the luxury of someone else giving me the time I needed to work on writing that wasn't intended for a newspaper or a magazine. After Tranquebar, I learned, as everyone does, to make that time—by waking up an hour earlier, or doing fewer columns, or letting the books on the shelves go undusted so that you might write your own book for a change. But without that gift of space from strangers, I would never have made the time, because until then, it had seemed so indulgent to take time off to write for myself.

And I would never have met Arshia Sattar and DW Gibson. Arshia—writer, editor, translator, actor in her own right—hung around at the airport for two hours to greet all of us personally, and then handed each of us the biggest snack pack I’ve ever seen. There were sandwiches and cake and chips and bananas and fruit juices and Bombay khara biscuits and oranges and Coke and lemonade and patties and more fruit and – well, she was worried we’d be hungry on the drive.

DW Gibson, who’s just finished his book Not Working, ambled around, settling all of us in, never letting on that he, his wife and Arshia had taken the smallest, shabbiest rooms, leaving the large, comfortable, sea-facing or garden-facing ones to all of us. I’m sure there are fancier five-star residencies elsewhere in the world, but there is only one residency I know of where two writers will give up their own precious writing time in order to make a bunch of strangers feel at home. Go apply.

Speaking Volumes: Fifty Shades of Gah

(Published in the Business Standard, June 2012)


By the end of June, Fifty Shades of Grey had become such a runaway bestseller that EL James’ Sadism 101 manual had reached the most unexpected places. It was on sale in a Mapusa supermarket, at all airport bookstores, available at Delhi traffic lights where young children hawked copies: “Grey, Darker, Freed—take all together for discount, madam!”

Were these volumes of cleverly packaged bondage fantasies feminist, in their exploration of middle-aged Fantasyland soft porn, or anti-feminist, in their insistence that the woman’s role be essentially submissive? If you, like me, fondly call the book Fifty Shades of Gah in tribute to the scenes where the English language is tied up, flogged and ruthlessly dominated by the excessive use of exclamation marks, are we disastrously out of step with the mainstream?

It doesn’t matter, because the key to the surprising success of Fifty Shades is that it isn’t about the quality of EL James’s writing. As a bestseller, it’s surprising only because it’s succeeded in print; it’s an indicator of how powerful fan fiction/ reader-driven fiction has become in the last five to seven years.

Fan fiction began as an Internet phenomenon, where viewers of TV serials, films or engaged readers contributed their own homages to the series. Fan fiction writers might rewrite the plot of some episodes of a TV soap, or use characters made already famous—Harry Potter, Mr Spock—to create their own mashup. Soon, sites devoted entirely to fan fiction began to attract large and active communities, but there was more to this Internet phenomenon than just the homage to TV serials.

Think of it this way. In the pre-Gutenberg era, the power of the written word rested in the hands of those who controlled monasteries, and the scribes who laboriously copied manuscripts. Post-Gutenberg, power shifted first to the publisher and the printer, and then, as printing presses became less rare and more ubiquitous, power transferred to the writer. (The writer would argue that in the 21st century, it shifted back to agents and large publishing conglomerates, but that’s another discussion.)

For more than two centuries, to be a writer meant that you had started your apprenticeship as a reader. Most writers had the required 10,000 hours worth of writing under their belts when they began publishing, in the shape of unpublished short stories and abandoned first drafts of novels. But they also, for the main part, had 10,000 hours worth of reading behind them.

This view of writing is based on the idea that skill is essential, craft important.
But in order to enjoy the best that literature (which means no more or less than “things made from letters”) has to offer, the ideal reader would also have his or her 10,000 hours of reading. Without that apprenticeship, few of the greatest writers are accessible—not Tagore and Premchand, with their long descriptive passages, not Coetzee’s challenging ideas, nor Pamuk’s playfulness, nor Murakami’s magical landscapes.

This just doesn’t work for readers who deal with present-day challenges. One of these is the easy availability of less demanding entertainment, from the glass tit of television to the micro-stories of the Twitter feed. Another is the stressed attention span; recent studies show that contrary to popular belief, we cannot really multi-task.

Take the average intelligent person, force him or her to fragment their attention across the insistent demands of 21st century life, and what you have is someone who lacks the time or the attention demanded by the most challenging books. Add to this an unpopular but true fact: even as people develop better social media skills, gaming skills and visual skills, the average vocabulary level drops sharply, unless you make an active effort to sharpen your verbal skills.

The number of writing communities and story sharing sites on the Internet make a few basics clear. There is no lack of demand for stories in this age, and there is no lack of readership. But today’s readers are more comfortable following intricate plot twists than they are following stories that require engagement with a complex internal world, or writers who use very complex language. Fifty Shades of Grey reads like an omnibus of fantasies easily available online, compiled in one place by a writer who understands that today’s Marquis de Sade would have to communicate differently, in simpler, more basic language, to reach the same audience.

And if it has a lesson—aside from the basic one about not wearing leather in the Delhi heat unless you’re a practicing masochist—it’s a useful one. For those who insist that popularity is an index of literary worth, Fifty Shades of Grey is the only rebuttal you need. Reading it was chastisement enough. I am now hard at work on a piece of fan fiction in tribute to plumbers (so difficult to find in Delhi), called Fifty Shades of Grout.

Speaking Volumes: The Happiest Bloomsday Ever

(Published just after Bloomsday, in the Business Standard)


The official menu for Bloomsday is not kind to vegetarians. To celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses in the manner of Leopold Bloom, start with thick giblet soup and nutty gizzards, move on to “a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes”.

The grilled mutton kidneys (which gave Bloom’s palate, memorably, a “fine tang of faintly scented urine) are optional for the squeamish, but then the squeamish are rarely among Joyce’s fans. This Sunday, when Bloomsday was celebrated in Ireland and elsewhere, the diehard Joycean had an excellent excuse to stuff himself—this is the year when Ulysses, and all of Joyce’s works, become public property.

Never was there a more jealous guardian of a literary work than Stephen Joyce. He was not so much heir to Joyce’s work as the dragon at the gates. He refused permission for scholars, biographers and dramatists to quote any more than the parsimonious allowance of words set down by the Copyright Act. He refused permission for James Joyce’s papers to be read or scrutinized, and he waged long and acrimonious battles against those who went ahead and wrote about Joyce, or Dubliners, or Molly Bloom, or Finnegan’s Wake anyway.

Under Stephen Joyce’s reign, few writers—even a newspaper columnist—would have felt free enough to quote passages from the works long enough to incur Stephen Joyce’s bitter wrath.

The end result, though Joyce’s books remained easily accessible, was to chop up his work into memorable phrases: “They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan.” “The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.” “Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!”

In much of the public imagination, this is what remained of Ulysses, these slivers of Joyce—the gimmicks, but not the heart and the swift juxtapositions that made him such a great, sensitive writer. Here is Stephen Dedalus, thinking of his mother, now dead, no more than “an odour of rosewood and ashes”. In his mind, he continues: “A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.”

So many years after it was first published (and reviled, and then reclaimed), Ulysses remains surprisingly fresh, untarnished by time. The writers Joyce spawned did less well; Joyce, who was begat by Tristram Shandy, begat far too many bad imitators, who rise up in experimental flares every decade and are rapidly forgotten. Some, like GV Desani, whose Hatterr received permission for his linguistic exuberance from Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, have survived and are still admired. But All About H Hatterr, for all of its wonders, has dated and acquired a creaky patina that Ulysses never did. Molly Bloom stirs in bed, Leopold Bloom buys a cake of soap that smells of sweet lemony wax and eats the liver and kidneys, stately, plump Buck Mulligan bears his bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed; and the story Joyce tells, against the background of the ancient story of Odysseus, Greece dissolving into Ireland’s streets, remains sharp and clear.

The ones who did well among Joyce’s literary descendants weren’t those who tried to imitate his style, but those who understood why he had moved from the straightforward, hungrily observed stories of the Dubliners to the structural heights and freedom of Ulysses, until he finally demolished language itself in Finnegan’s Wake. The first school spawned a rash of writers who turned out passages of the “Thrash, kick, bite. Thrash, kick, slap” sort under the impression that they were being Joycean. Which is a little dangerous, like assuming you bought madeleines at the bakery and can now write like Proust.

The second school includes an enormous range of writers, from Arun Kolatkar to David Mitchell and Haruki Murakami, who sensibly cultivated their own particular, indelible styles, but understood what Joyce was trying to do in Ulysses—to capture all of life, instead of interpreting it. He crafts Ulysses with such skill that it seems to present life as it happens, in all of its inescapable, tangled, human messiness.

There are two ways to look at your existence, said Joyce in Ulysses. One is to see it as a short, nasty business: “Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled.” The other was to celebrate the “warm beds: the warm fullblooded life”. He gave both of them to his readers, in dense paragraphs that ran on for two pages or fragmented sentences, and let them choose.

And on this Bloomsday, this year, with an end to Stephen Joyce’s petty tyrannies, the choice was easy. “Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out.”

Speaking Volumes: Ray Bradbury, October Country

(Published in the Business Standard, a few days after Ray Bradbury's death.)



In 1938, the pulp magazine Imagination! carried a story by a new and very young writer. Ray Bradbury, who died last week at the age of 91, was just 17 when he wrote Hollerbochen’s Dilemma, and neither he nor the title character survived this experience unscathed.

Hollerbochen was blown up. Bradbury discovered that when you’re writing for the pulps and your story stinks, readers will let you know. Bradbury survived. He even put Hollerbochen back together so that he could rescue the author, who was in this sequel held captive at his typewriter by legions of disappointed fans. For the next few years, Bradbury would continue to write terrible stories, until he started to write slightly less terrible stories. He ran a magazine of his own for a brief while—Futuria Fantastica, shortened to FuFa.

By the early 1940s, he had honed his craft; if pulp magazines like Weird Stories or Astounding Science Fiction gave him a sense of the technical tricks required, reading Steinbeck gave him a feel for the epic, which he would later use in the Martian Chronicles. He earned his place among the ABC of SF writers—Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke, shapers of imagination who were as influential as Heinlein or Philip K Dick.

The pulps are too easily dismissed today. Their lurid covers featured menacing aliens, improbable planets, space cowboys and the occasional wench of dazzling, interstellar comeliness. Many of the stories they carried were leftover werewolf trash or recycled tentacle terror. But as much as the New Yorker or Esquire, two US magazines that were also opening their doors to short story writers, pulps like Amazing or Weird Tales were excellent nurseries for a certain kind of writer. Bradbury wrote some of his best horror for pulps in the 1940s—many of these were later collected in October Country.

By the 1950s, his style had shifted, and many of the stories he wrote in the late 1940s and the early 1950s still carry resonance, especially for fellow writers. Junot Diaz found in Bradbury’s stories an echo of the experience of being an immigrant, a resident alien—Bradbury knew both kinds of alienation, the kind that came with having green tentacles, and the kind that came from being so different that you might as well have had green tentacles. His aliens were seldom repulsive (“dark they were and golden-eyed”, he writes of the Martians); Bradbury understood that just being different was enough to bring forth hostility.

For Neil Gaiman, who wrote a touching tribute on his blog, Bradbury’s realm of fantasy and alternate realities just beyond the human horizon opened up brave new worlds. (And sometimes, Bradbury’s world bleeds into Gaiman’s, or into Atwood’s, as though for a brief space, these very different writers occupied the same alien planet in a galaxy far, far away.)

The short story collections have an unusual quality, shared only by the very best science fiction and fantasy writers—from The Illustrated Man to The Martian Chronicles and The Golden Apples of the Sun, they have dated well. Some readers today know Bradbury for his love stories, or for his exuberant Irish stories.

Many know him by the science fiction of his early and middle years, where an eager hunter travels back in time to bag a dinosaur, and discovers the butterfly effect in action or where children manouevre a pair of adults into an early, eerie version of a virtual reality game with a very nasty ending. And many know him for Fahrenheit 451, the novella with its dark refrain and with its warnings of a world where burning books for the ideas that they carry is institutionalised: “Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner.”

In the same period, he wrote The Pedestrian, less well-known but equally terrifying in its vision of a time when men might be arrested simply because they don’t fit in, and because they make the police uneasy. “Business or profession?” the (robot) police car asks Leonard Mead. “I guess you’d call me a writer,” he says. “No profession,” said the police car, as if talking to itself.”

Bradbury wrote this in 1951, anticipating a time when writers wouldn’t be writing because television had taken over. “Magazines and books didn't sell any more. Everything went on in the tomblike houses at night now, [Mead] thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multicolored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.”

After the soaring heights of the pulps, where he could take a reader to Mars and back, this was the grey reality he thought might lie ahead. But Bradbury’s dark future did and didn’t come true. The police states, the free expression debates, the iron rule of television, all of these happened; but the books didn’t die. It will always be October country, somewhere.

Speaking Volumes: From Pondies to Weight Loss

(Published in the Business Standard, June 2012.)

One of the perks of the reviewer’s job is that you will find deathless prose in the most unexpected places, even when it arrives concealed as, say, a weight-loss manual.

“Trying to lose weight? Running around in circles where you Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. No wonder it’s difficult to stay in shape. Because circles go on and on…. What if losing weight doesn’t begin with what’s on your plate but with what’s on your mind? Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind.”

Two decades on, “Eat.Delete” will probably be considered a classic example of vintage Indian pulp, right up there with Now That You’re Rich Lets Fall In Love or Anything For You Ma’am. The terse prose, the one-word sentences, and the attempt to grab the reader’s attention are all typical of the current pulp bubble in Indian English writing. The inadvertent, febrile surrealism may be easily lampooned, but it’s also the hallmark of the current crop of Indian bestsellers.




(Image from The Harappa Files, by Sarnath Banerjee)


Each month brings its new, derivative haul of books; if Chetan Bhagat inspired a slew of writers trying to capture the voice, love affairs and angst of contemporary urban Indians, Amish Tripathi is to blame for the current spate of terrible mythological-historical writing. But despite the effortless badness of their imitators, Indian pulp may have a larger story to tell.

If you’re trying to understand a country, pulp is far more useful than literary fiction. No matter how good it might be, the hallmark of what’s called literary fiction is its self-awareness. Pulp fiction is its sloppy, belly-scratching twin; pulp fiction is where a nation leaves the contents of its messy cupboards on display. If the job of serious fiction is to make sense of secret histories, or to shape our sense of history, what pulp fiction does is hold up an often mercilessly accurate mirror to what a nation really is, in all its ugliness and strangeness.

In India, it was the printing press in Pondicherry that began producing first English and then Hindi pulp—steamy, mildly pornographic paperbacks that would be called “Pondies” in tribute to the presses. The English Pondies, popular in the pre-Independence decades, were said to be written by Anglo-Indians, perhaps because they featured half-caste heroines called Helen and Linda. They were rapidly overtaken by their Hindi counterparts, which brought the attention back from vamps and cabaret dancers to more homely objects of lust—sahelis and bhabhis. The English Pondie died in about a decade, reviving only recently as an online cartoon strip that featured a well-endowed lady called Savitha Bhabhi; the Hindi pondie thrived, spawning sub-genres in detective and horror fiction along the way.

The two most interesting shifts in pulp fiction worldwide are happening in Japan and in Mexico. Japan’s long tradition of manga comics—cheap, poorly produced but enormously cross-categorised—is evolving yet again. Manga briefly went respectable as an American import, but the vogue for manga appears to be flickering out—and in Japan, mainstream manga publishers are increasingly challenged by the rise of self-published comics.

It is also impossible to talk about the manga industry—or manga comics—as though they represent a single, identifiable genre; instead, manga in Japan caters to an incredible variety of needs, from very dark porn to innocuous super-hero tales, romance or fashion-oriented manga for schoolgirls. This might be one of the directions that Indian pulp will take—more specialization, and as with Japanese manga, very little focus on quality.

Indian pulp is revealing in its prejudices and obsessions—weight loss, sex, money and arranged love marriages are all desirable and replace any political engagement beyond the superficial, stereotypes (of different communities, Americans, foreigners etc) crop up often and remain unexamined. But Indian pulp in English retains a kind of primal innocence—so different from contemporary Latin American writing.

The Latin American pulp market was once ruled by soap opera fiction—books that derived their plots from the “telenovellas”. Now Jorge Volpi writes about the “contamination” of the new narco-literature. The rise of the drug novel started in Colombia and has taken root in Mexico. Volpi’s grouse is with the shallowness of the genre: it “teaches no lessons, passes no moral judgments, and is barely an instrument of criticism”.

In both cases, Japan and Latin America, pulp thrives alongside good and often great literature. But Indian writing in English is in one of its periods of uncertainty and flux. Pulp takes up more space than any other kind of writing in English at present. It’s changing form and shape at high, almost viral speed. In another decade, perhaps this will be as dead as the English pondies of a previous era—unless it finds a way to evolve beyond today’s weight loss and arranged marriage clichés.

Speaking Volumes: "The Babu's style is clear and good"

(Published in the Business Standard, May 26, 2012. Happy Revolting Season.)





The Revolt of 1857 broke out on “a stiflingly hot Sunday” in May, as Christopher Hibbert writes. Summer was Mutiny season, and the British papers of the day mentioned both the unbearable heat and the unexpected betrayal.

The more seasoned British Indian papers were less surprised by either the weather or the fact of the Revolt itself. As historians of 1857 have chronicled, the warning signs were everywhere. Two tracts, in particular, would become part of the larger history of Indian writing in English—Kylas Chunder Dutt’s A Journal of Forty Eight Hours on the Year 1945 (published in 1835), and Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s The Republic of Orissa (published in 1845).

The Dutts were a fashionably literary family; Shoshee and his brothers were collectively dubbed the “Rambagan nest of singing birds”. Kylas was a cousin; the young poet Toru Dutt was also related to Shoshee Chunder; and Shoshee’s nephew, Romesh Chunder Dutt, was a well-known economic historian, whose first publication in 1877 was a history of the literature of Bengal. Shoshee and Kylas were Macaulay’s children, from Shoshee’s glad embrace of Christianity to their mutual belief (not shared by Romesh) that English was far superior to their native Bengali.

Indeed, Macaulay’s infamous Minute (“we have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated in their mother-tongue”) came out in 1835, the same year that Kylas Chunder Dutt’s work of speculative fiction was published. “The languages of western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar,” Macaulay observed.

And yet, the first serious work of fiction, speculative or otherwise, in English by an Indian writer was Kylas’s destabilizing vision of an India in 1945, rising up against the “subaltern oppression” of British rule, where “the dagger and the bowl were dealt out with a merciless hand” by the “British barbarians”. His projected rebellion fails; but the man who leads the Indians against Governor Lord Fell Butcher is a graduate fluent in English, using his education against the British.

In the light of the way in which the Revolt of 1857 garnered public support in India just 22 years after Kylas penned his fantasy, it’s interesting that he imagines a rebellion supported by “many of the most distinguished men—Babus, Rajas and Nababs”. And he is prescient when he writes that the “contagion of Rebellion would probably have infested every city in the kingdom, had it only had time to perfect its machinations”.

Ten years later, Shoshee could imagine a happier ending for those who would rise up in revolt. “The Republic of Orissa” is written as a page from the imagined annals of the 20th century, an alternate history imagined as the truth. Orissa is independent, and extending its borders into British India, ruled by “untamed men”, tribes who combine great strength with intrepid courage.

In Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s reworking of the Noble Savage theme, the tribes rise up against the British after a Slavery Act is passed in 1916. They are goaded into final action by the imprisonment of publishers, printers and the suppression of a free press. (Present-day governments might want to take note of Dutt’s assumption that the curbing of free expression would bring on rebellion faster than a Slavery Act, in his vision of India.) As the fierce and courageous Bheekoo Barik confronts “drunken John Bull”, the question the tribals aim to answer is crucial: Are the Juggomohuns and Gocooldosses, the Opertees and Bindabun Sirdars fit persons to be intrusted with the management of a vast empire? Shoshee’s answer is a stirring yes, and the rest of The Republic of Orissa introduces a full-scale tribal rebellion, aided by beautiful women disguised as fakirs and other little flourishes of the novelist’s art.

“The Baboo’s style is clear and good,” said The Englishman. “It will be a grand thing indeed for India when all her most influential families can be as much Anglicised as this Hindu gentleman,” wrote the Calcutta Literary Gazette. They were responding, however, to Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s poetry, and his articles on Hindu caste and practices—not to this vision of triumphant native rebellion that ends with the overthrow of the British.

In many ways, Shoshee was exactly the kind of Baboo Macaulay had imagined—in a rant that praised the superiority of English over Bengali literature, he also refers to the native press as “servile, low and indecent”. But as time went by, his writings made the British who had praised him for being such a good Baboo more and more uncomfortable, whether it was his diary of a Keranee (published in Mookerjee’s Magazine), or this subtly subversive early work. The natives had taken to English, as Macaulay had hoped, but they were restless. As the first two works of speculative fiction in Indian writing in English prove, what they had to say in that tongue was not just prescient, anticipating the events of 1857, but also unabashedly subversive.

Speaking Volumes: The case for context

(Published in the Business Standard, May 22, 2012)

(Three cartoons by Shankar. Note the way in which he uses whips and ropes to make his point in three completely different political contexts.)

It is unreasonable to expect the Dalit community to not take offence at the cartoon of Dr BR Ambedkar, drawn by the great cartoonist Shankar in 1949, withdrawn from NCERT textbooks by Indian members of Parliament earlier this month.
This is not because the cartoon is offensive, in its historical context. It depicts Dr Ambedkar holding a whip as he rides a snail, which represents the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution of which he was the Chair, with Nehru wielding a whip behind him.

In his November 1949 speech to the Constituent Assembly, Dr Ambedkar made it clear that he was aware of the complaints—one member had called the Drafting Committee the “Drifting Committee”, for instance. “It was being said that the Assembly had taken too long a time to finish its work, that it was going on leisurely and wasting public money,” Dr Ambedkar said, before rebutting his critics.

It is hard to argue, as many have, that Shankar’s cartoon was a deliberate attempt to depict a Brahmin whipping a Dalit. The cartoonist lampooned Nehru, Jinnah and other national leaders with as much sharpness. He was treating Dr Ambedkar as an equal to his peers, equally worthy of satirical treatment. Some Dalit commentators have made the more accurate point, which is that what was not offensive in 1949 may be felt as offensive in 2012.

To argue that the Dalit community should place freedom of expression above their sense of offence ignores the ground reality of the Indian experience in the last two decades. In recent times, few communities, political or religious leaders and groups have placed a principle ahead of the prospect of gain. Brahmins stung by Habib Tanvir’s criticism of their caste successfully shut down performances of Ponga Pundit in Chattisgarh.

The Shiv Sena, setting itself up as the guardian of Hindu sensibilities, has stalled all scholarship into the lives of revered icons such as Shivaji and Bal Thackerayji. And a handful of Muslim leaders found it easy to capitalize on vote bank politics in order to prevent Salman Rushdie from speaking at a literary festival, allowing fanatics who felt that even Rushdie’s image on a screen caused great offence to represent the entire community.

The Dalits, already underprivileged, should have their chance along with upper castes, politicians and religious leaders who put on their best performances in TV studios, to reap the benefits of claiming offence. These are considerable benefits, in 2012: claim offence and you claim valuable space, while shutting down art galleries, textbooks, scholarship, criticism and reasoned argument.

In all of these debates over the limits of free speech and the need to be sensitive to the dangers of giving offence, we have lost more than just our free expression rights, important as that is. One loss is a relatively minor loss of perspective: all of the threatened violence over books, cartoons, textbooks, art and cinema has been organized by political parties. Though we may choose not to acknowledge this, it makes that violence much more containable than the kind of spontaneous outrage over literature and art which, frankly, hasn’t happened in decades. (Unless you’re including the people who insist on asking paragraph-length questions at book launches in the ranks of the dangerously violent.)

The other loss is major. This is the loss of the idea that if you’re dealing with art and especially satire that has cut deep, adding context is better than deleting the offensive material. The late MF Husain’s paintings of goddesses lose their ability to offend when you place them besides similarly naked ancient sculptures of the gods. Rohinton Mistry’s criticisms of Indira Gandhi or Thackeray should be read alongside say, Shankar’s cartoons of the Emergency, or chronicles of the rise of the Sena in Maharashtra.

With the Ambedkar cartoon, why ask for erasure when you should ask, instead, for more? Why was a Dalit blamed for the delays in drafting the Constitution? Because he was the head of the Drafting Committee? Or because there were more subtle caste politics at work? Broaden the discussion, and ask why Dalit academics weren’t part of the process of critical pedagogy, but don’t tear the cartoons out of all textbooks.

In that 1949 session, Dr Ambedkar began by addressing the criticism that the Constitution had been drafted at snail’s pace. But a little later, he came to a point that concerned him greatly: “In India – where democracy from its long disuse must be regarded as something quite new – there is danger of democracy giving place to dictatorship.”

He was echoing his colleague, TT Krishnamachari. In answer to a question about why the fundamental rights to liberty—including freedom of expression—were not stronger, Krishnamachari said: “If the Parliament of the future is not going to safeguard the liberty of the individual, I do not think that anything we put in this Constitution can possibly safeguard it.”

Perhaps once Parliament is done with protecting itself and any group that screams offence from any kind of criticism, past and present, it may have time to address Ambedkar’s fears.