The "free" in free speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also read: From Chandni Chowk to China: Salil Tripathi

India's Authoritarian Lapse: Salil Tripathi

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

#TheInsecureIndian: Samar Halarnkar

Open Letter to Shashi Tharoor: Gaurav Sabnis

Book review: The End of the Gods, AS Byatt

The End of the Gods: The Myth Of Ragnarok
AS Byatt
Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin India
Rs 399, 177 pages


“Writers don’t make up myths,” Marina Warner observes, “They take them over and recast them.” This, she says, is what Jorge Luis Borges calls the murmuring exchanges of writers across time and cultures. “The more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become.”

In 2005, the independent Scottish publishing house Canongate launched one of the most ambitious ventures of its kind in modern times, inviting authors to retell and reimagine some of the world’s greatest myths over the span of the next few decades. In an age when “ambitious” is a word applied to anything from a new vampire series to a rewarmed Stephen King bestseller, it is useful to be reminded of what the word actually means.

But can the great myths be rewritten to order? Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth, which began the series, was a crisp, comforting but not revolutionary reminder of this great collective inheritance. Margaret Atwood’s reworking of the Iliad from Penelope’s perspective was a feat of imaginative brilliance, a feminist corrective; but David Grossman’s gentle spin on the Samson tale was a bland, back-to-basics work, where the novelist’s voice felt muffled under the burden of retelling this ancient tale.

Philip Pullman and Dubravka Ugresic wrote the most iconoclastic books in the series. Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ is the kind of questioning and reworking of Christianity’s core gospels that may no longer be possible, because of the careful fostering of competitive intolerance, in either Islam or Hinduism. (Canongate’s list of myths does not, at this stage, include any drawn from the rich heritage of Hindu mythology, which is just as well given that we still have arguments over whether the Ramayana is to be read as the gospel truth or as one of the great myths.)

Dubravka Ugresic’s chilling reclamation of the Baba Yaga story asks uncomfortable questions about the nature of witches, and the role of the overlooked, persecuted but often powerful old woman who crops up in all of the world’s myths. More than any of the other writers in the Myth series, Ugresic gave herself the freedom to write and reshape myths in the language of myths, and her Baba Yaga book has moved from being just a retelling to becoming a classic in its own right.

If there is any other contemporary author who might perform a similar transfiguration, it is AS Byatt. There may be few tasks harder than reworking the Norse myths; their telling was crystalline, and to tackle the stories that define the word “saga” is something that only the most confident of storytellers would attempt.

Byatt pulls us in to the world where the twilight of the gods will happen via a child, a thin girl born at a time of war, and a book: “A solid volume, bound in green, with an intriguing, rushing image on the cover, of Odin’s Wild Hunt on horseback tearing through a clouded sky amid jagged bolts of lightning…” The child’s mind settles not in the world where there is a war on, or in the gentle legends of Jesus meek and mild—instead, Byatt writes, it “veered away, to where it was alive”.

In Byatt’s understanding of myth, there is this unspoken truth: the myth that you are drawn to, without perhaps knowing why you are drawn towards it, will shape who you become, much more than any other story read and retold. It is possible to settle for cartoon versions of myths, but some, like the thin child in her story, will be drawn back towards the real, complex, darker version.

Uncovering the myths is often unpleasant. The world, in the Norse myths, is shaped from the bones, flesh and hair of a dead giant. “The thin child was disturbed at having to imagine this; there was no scale by which she could measure it.” Maggots and worms become dwarves, trolls and dark-elves; the giant’s eyebrows become a bushy fence that contains Midgard, the Garden of Middle-Earth, in which is placed the home of the Gods, Asgard.

As she meets Odin, and hears yet again the tragic story of Balder the Beautiful, killed by the trickster Loki’s clever machinations, the fettering of Tyr, the thin child steps into the darker corners of mythology. “Wolves run strongly through the forests of the mind,” writes Byatt, “… the loping, padding, tireless runners are both out of sight and inside the head.”

Her retelling spares us nothing; the twilight of the gods is every bit as beautiful and terrible as the original. By the end of the tale, a certain kind of order has been restored, the war is over, and the thin child’s family has found, if not happiness, then a settled and sedate ending. But for her and for the reader, what Byatt has evoked cannot be easily banished into the pages of a book. The task before Byatt was not the retelling of a myth, which is relatively easily done; it was to remind us what it was like to read these myths for the first time, and to live in a world where the myths were not separate from our own lives.

A gate closes in the thin child’s head, and on one side of it is a house, a garden, a home, peacetime. On the other, there is “the bright black world”, containing “the wolf with his hackles and bloody teeth, the snake with her crown of fleshy fronds, smiling Loki with fishnet and flames”.

There is either the world of dailiness and contentment, or the dark black world where the old stories run like wolves at our heels. You can have one or the other, says Byatt. Choose.

Book review: The Possessed, Elif Batuman

(This review was written at high speed, and I wish I'd done more justice to Batuman's book. The Possessed sent me back to the Russian classics after a decade, and what Batuman does is make you read the books as though you're reading them again for the first time. Review published in the Business Standard, October 2011.)

The Possessed
Elif Batuman
Granta Books/ Farrar Straus Giroux
Rs 753

PG Wodehouse took a bleak view of Russian novelists. Vladimir Brusiloff, introduced to his readers in The Clicking of Cuthbert, specialized in “grey studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, where the moujik decided to commit suicide”.

Perhaps if Wodehouse had met Elif Batuman, New Yorker writer and literary critic, she might have persuaded him, as she does us, that reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Pushkin and company has (give or take a depressed moujik or two) much to offer the open-minded reader.

The Possessed is a startling collection of essays on reading: funny, wise and imbued with Batuman’s particular brand of scattershot brilliance. The Russians draw her in little by little, as she succumbs first to Eugene Onegin, and then to Anna Karenina: “Nobody in Anna Karenina was oppressed, as I was, by the tyranny of leisure. The leisure activities in Tolstoy’s novel—ice skating, balls, horse races—were beautiful, dignified and meaningful in terms of plot.”

Batuman really means to be a novelist, but her creative writing career doesn’t survive the reality of workshops: “Why was it
automatically good for a writer to live in a barn,” she asks, “reading short stories by short-story writers who didn’t seem to be read by anyone other than writing students?”

Russia pulls her in gradually; this student of literature, born to Turkish parents and raised in New Jersey, finds herself drawn to study the Russian novelists in Russia, through a series of complicated detours. (One of them involves judging a shapely leg contest for adolescent boys in a village in Hungary. Batuman has a knack for memorable asides.)

As she warms to her accidental subject, she writes: “I stopped believing that theory had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?”

In Moscow, she dates bankers, for “the first and last time” in her life; elsewhere, she meets Isaac Babel’s formidable, larger-than-life older daughter Nathalie; in St Petersburg, she attempts, unsuccessfully, to stay overnight in the replica of an ice palace modeled on the fully furnished House of Ice commissioned by Ivan the Terrible’s niece, a palace that has “no clear purpose, and therefore many unclear purposes”. She lives briefly in Samarkand, where she learns why it is impossible for women to be saints, how to eat lepyushka, and shares with us her readings of the life of the Emperor Bobur (as the name is spelled in those parts) and the fact, unrelated in Indian histories, that he suffered terribly from gemoroi or haemorrhoids.

Behind the exuberance of the travel writing and the conversational digressions, there is also real scholarship (many of these essays were first published in the New Yorker, the LRB and other magazines). At a Tolstoy conference, Batuman argues, only slightly mischievously, that the writer may have been murdered, but the discussion veers off into a heated argument over whether he had or hadn’t read Alice in Wonderland. Dostoevksy’s poor intellectuals, the ones in his book The Possessed who inspired the book’s title, descend into madness as Batuman asks why the Russians required so much grotesquerie.

Just a few decades ago, The Possessed might have been read differently—Russia has slipped from its position as one of the great powers, and perhaps because of that relative erasure from the world stage, the country is once again new territory for a traveler and writer of Batuman’s stamp. She is free to explore it without having to explain it, and free to explain—always obliquely—why the Russians took such a firm grip on her imagination, why their larger-than-life stories were so much more compelling than the stories she had fled from, where “middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions… and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things”.

By the last chapter, where Batuman explores one of Dostoevsky’s more enigmatic works, a novel called Demons, she has taken us halfway across the world and back. Everything that most critics would edit out of their work is here—the backstories, the failed relationships and minor missteps, the cult-like intensity that might sweep a community of academics—perhaps because Batuman knows, and makes the reader see again, the value of digressions and secret histories.

The question that animates this chapter is not really about literature or books or scholarship: what is worth devoting your life to, asks Batuman? She cannot imagine studying, say, Islamic fundamentalism forever; another person might not be able to imagine being a bread-maker in Samarkand.

“If I could start over today,” Batuman writes, “I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.” The Possessed, peopled with a cast of eccentrics but free of suicidal moujiks, will convince many readers to at least begin that search.

Silencing Ramanujan

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book review: The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje

(Published in the Business Standard, October 5, 2011.)






The Cat’s Table
Michael Ondaatje
Jonathan Cape,
PRICE NOT MENTIONED, 287 pages


“There’s a great line by Ornette Coleman about music,” Michael Ondaatje said in a recent interview. “He says you begin with the territory and what follows is the adventure.”

In his sixth novel, Cat’s Table, Ondaatje knows both his landscapes well. There is the Oronsay, a liner that feels like a castle to the 11-year-old boy who boards the “first and only” ship of his life, bound for England in the 1950s. When most writers use a ship as a setting, it remains just a backdrop, a convenient way to bring a band of characters into close contact with each other in extreme isolation. The sea acts like the white space on the page---anything could happen here, where the normal rules of life on dry land stand suspended.

For a few writers, though, Joseph Conrad, Patrick O’ Brian and now Ondaatje, the sea is elemental in the best sense of the term, and a shipboard journey may either bring forth powerful passions in its inhabitants or strip them down to their elemental selves. The nine people Michael will meet at Table 76, the least privileged and the most distant from the Captain’s Table, include two boys, Cassius and Ramadhin, and “several interesting adults”. Cassius, Ramadhin and Michael will form a gang whose actions on board the Oronsay range from the exuberantly exploratory to the actively dangerous.
If The Cat’s Table feels like a memoir in parts, this may be because Ondaatje took a similar voyage from Ceylon to England in the 1950s, at the age of 11. “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was,” the narrator writes in the first chapter, and this imagining belongs both to him and to Ondaatje.

The Oronsay is fascinating, from the engine room “at Hades level” to the gold-painted First Class swimming pool. The passengers include a great philantropist who is suffering from hydrophobia, an accomplished shipboard thief called Baron C and Michael’s beautiful cousin Emily, a first-class passenger. There is a shipboard death, a shackled murderer who inspires a plot among the boys to free him, and there are the secretive, often unsavoury lives of the other passengers who sup at Table 76.

But the real adventure, which will reverberate in the lives of Cassius, Ramadhin and Michael long after they have completed their 21-day voyage, is not so much in the plot as in the magnificent strangeness of coming of age on board ship.
In both children’s fiction and novels that feature child protagonists, there is an unspoken acknowledgement that childhood is as mysterious and as alien a world as any unexplored Amazon forest or distant planet. The best novels step into this world acknowledging that writing from a child’s point of view is essentially an act of the imagination as much as an act of reclamation.
There are very, very few can do it—many novels feature child protagonists who are basically miniaturized adults.

Michael Ondaatje is one of three writers who wrote great books underpinned by a basic truth: children see the world with a kind of merciless clarity, and with few of the calming fictions of adult life. The other two were William Golding and Richard Hughes, and it is interesting that Hughes set his eerie little masterpiece, A High Wind in Jamaica, on board ship. His protagonists, like Ondaatje’s in The Cat’s Table, were children carefully separated from their parents; generations of writers have also recognised that it is only when you allow children to be on their own that you can fully understand them.

It is easy to criticize the slender, tenuous, adventure-filled plot that forms the skeletal structure of The Cat’s Table. But it is also an unrewarding exercise. What makes this one of the most compelling and haunting novels of recent times goes far beyond the question of whether it is well-plotted, or whether its deft, deadly vignettes of characters on the Oronsay, offered up in brief chapters, add up to a satisfying whole. “Over the years,” Michael writes towards the end, “confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.”

Ondaatje offers us three subtly different voices in which to hear this book (it’s hard to escape the sense that The Cat’s Table should be read aloud). There is the voice, filled with a cautious rapture, of Michael the child; there is the assessing voice of the older Michael as he weighs up his regrets against the many tiny illuminated corners of his life; and there is, like a background murmur, the assured voice of Ondaatje himself, the writer in his prime, spinning out one story after another.

It would be a very bloodless reader who could resist the temptation of taking a seat at The Cat’s Table and revisiting childhood as it was, not as we would like to think it should have been. And it would be a very churlish reader who didn’t succumb to the magic of Ondaatje’s summoning up of “all new things in life”, carried by a boat that comes breasting out of the mist.

Banned Books Week, 26 September-1 October 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

Delhi: Emergency numbers

Police numbers/ stations/ helplines:

Police
100

Commissioner of Police 3319661(O) 3319721(O)

Police Headquarters 3352678

Chanakyapuri Police Station 3011100, 3012003

Parliament Street Police Station 3361100, 3542700

Tughlak Road Police Station 3014878, 3012100

Tilak Marg Police Station 3382100

Fire Service 101

Ambulance 102

Accident & Trauma 10999

Hospitals

Emergency numbers for #RML hospital: 23348200 23404446 23743769 23404478
Emergency numbers for AIIMS 26588700;
Emergency numbers for Safdarjung Hospital: +91-011-26101925, +91-011-26161960, +91-011-26194690, +91-011-26165032, +91-011-26168336,

Blood Banks in Delhi (via ClickIndia):
CENTRAL DELHI

Connaught Place
Indian Red Cross Society
Located in Connaught Place, Indian Red Cross Society is a voluntary humanitarian organization which provides relief in times of disasters/emergencies and promotes health & care of the vulnerable people and communities.
http://www.indianredcross.org/

Red Cross Road, Janpath
New Delhi - 110029
Tel:+(91)-(11)23711551/6441

Karol Bagh
Bajaj Blood Bank
Bajaj Blood Bank is situated in Karol Bagh. It has a collection of all blood components, who wants to take on emergency basis.
Karol Bagh
New Delhi 110005
Tel:+(91)-(11) 28712849
Blood Bank Organisation
Located just opposite Telephone Exchange, it is an organization which provides blood when it needed to the patient admitted in various hospitals.
11/6 B, Shanti Chamber, Oppositte Telephone Exchange, Pusa Road
New Delhi - 110005
Tel:+(91)-(11) 25721870, 25711055, 25730773
Fax:+(91)-(11) 25745208
Sir Ganga Ram Hospital
The Blood Bank at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital is housed in a newly renovated larger area. It has been equipped to provide not only good quality blood but also the blood fractions required for the treatment of various haematological diseases and complications in medical cases.
http://www.sgrh.com/

Rajinder Nagar
New Delhi 110060
Tel:+(91)-(11)25735205, 25861463
Fax:+(91)-(11)25861002



EAST DELHI
Mayur Vihar
Dharmashila Cancer Foundation & Research Centre
Situated close to Noida, it is well equipped with ultra modern facilities. It has a list of voluntary donors from whom blood can be collected on urgent basis.
http://www.cancerdch.org/


Vasundhara Enclave
New Delhi - 110 091
Tel:+(91)-(11)-43066666, 43066688, 22617771-75
Tel:+(91)-(11)-22617770, 22619033


NORTH DELHI
Civil Lines
Sant Parmanand Hospital
The hospital's Blood bank is situated in the basement. Platelets, Plasma, Packed cells are available round the clock. It has the latest Apheresis system for preparation of Mega units of platelets (Single Donor Platelets).
http://sphdelhi.org

18, Sham Nath Marg, Civil Lines
Delhi -110054
Tel:+(91)-(11)23981260, 23994401
Fax:+(91)-(11) 23974706
Pitampura
Lions Blood Bank
One of the newly opened blood bank in the town, Lions Blood Bank is equipped with all the latest technologies & testing facilities and it is a 100% voluntary blood bank.
AK - 100, Shalimar Bagh,
Delhi -110086
Tel:+(91)-(11)- 47122000, 42258080, 9717897500

SOUTH DELHI
Greater Kailash
G K Medical Centre Blood Bank
G K Medical Centre Blood Bank is situated in Greater Kailash. It operates on a round the clock issue basis.
E49, Greater Kailash II
New Delhi 110048
Lajpat Nagar
CPC Blood Bank
Located in the posh shopping area of Lajpat Nagar, CPC Blood Bank provides the safe healthy tested blood when it needed to the patient admitted in various hospitals. It has the full stock of Platelets, Plasma, Packed cells.

J-36 Lajpat Nagar-II
New Delhi 110024
Tel:+(91)-(11) 26834101
Mehrauli
Batra Hospital & Medical Research Centre
Located near Hamdard Nagar on the Mehrauli Badarpur Road, Batra Hospital provides the blood on a round the clock issue basis. Blood and apheresis component donations are carried out from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (week days).
http://www.batrahospitaldelhi.org

1, Tughlakabad Institutional Area, Mehrauli Badarpur Road
New Delhi - 110 062
Tel:+(91)-(11)-26056148, 26056153, 26057154

Rotary Blood Bank
Located in Mehrauli, it has been established to alleviate the tremendous shortage of healthy, fully tested blood and blood components. Whole blood, platelet concentrate, fresh frozen plasma and packed cells are available any time.
http://www.rotarybloodbank.org/

56-57,Tuglakabad Industrial Area, Mehrauli - Badarpur Road,
New Delhi - 110044
Tel:+(91)-(11)29054066, 29054067, 29962078

Safdarjung
All India Institute Of Medical Sciences (AIIMS)
The Deptt. of Transfusion Medicine at AIIMS is running a full time Blood Bank whcih is open round the clock. It is one of the Regional Blood Transfusion Centre for south Delhi. It collects blood from all the healthy donors who wants to donate blood in the Blood Bank and in the Blood Donation Camps organised in and outside Delhi.
http://www.aiims.edu/

Ansari Nagar
New Delhi - 110029
Tel:+(91)-(11)26588500, 26588700
Fax:+(91)-(11)26589900

South Extension
Sunil Blood Bank and Transfusion Center
Located in Kotla Timber Market, Sunil Blood Bank and Transfusion Center provides the various blood components on emergency basis.
806 Arjun Nagar, Kotla Mubrakpur,
Opp Defence Colony
New Delhi 110003
Tel:+(91)-(11)46507646


WEST DELHI

Janakpuri
Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital
It can be access through Dwarka – Connaught Place Metro line, just 02 km. from Hospital. It provides the various blood components on urgent basis.
Hari Nagar
New Delhi 110064
Tel:+(91)-(11)25494403 Upto, 08, 25125259
Fax:+(91)-(11)25494264

Rohini
Jaipur Golden Hospital
Jaipur Golden Hospital is housed in Sector 3. There is not only good quality blood in fact it has also the blood fractions required for the treatment of various diseases.
2-Institutional Area, Sector-3, Rohini
New Delhi - 110085
Tel:+(91)-(11)27525984-88
Fax:+(91)-(11)27518121

NCR
Noida
Kailash Hospital & Research Centre
The hospital's blood bank is located in Sector 27, Noida. Platelets, Plasma, Packed cells, platelet concentrate, fresh frozen plasma are available. It has been provided with high-tech refrigerators, freezers, and cell separator.
http://www.kailashhospitals.com/

H-33, Sector-27
Noida-201301
Tel:+(91)-(120)2444444, 2440444
Fax:+(91)-(120)2552323

General link to a list of hospitals/ ambulance services, from the Delhi Traffic Police site.