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Dalit community to not take offence at the cartoon of Dr BR Ambedkar, drawn by the great cartoonist Shankar in 1949, withdrawn from NCERT textbooks by Indian members of Parliament earlier this month.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.

User's guide to Indian free speech

A list of controversial subjects Indians shouldn’t write about if they want to avoid giving offence (and going to jail)

1) Dr Ambedkar, Mamata Banerjee, Bal Thackeray
2) Dead politicians
3) Living politicians
4) Mahatma Gandhi
5) And his sex life
6) Rama, Sita, Ramayanas, Ramanujan
7) Just kidding. You can write about Ramanujan.
8) Hindu gods and goddesses
9) The Prophet and Islam
10) Any other gods, goddesses, temples, mosques, gurdwaras, churches, systems of belief, places of faith past and present, religious rituals, scriptures, priests, followers etc.
11) Duh. Religion.
12) Sex is fine, especially if it involves starlets, but not if it involves 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 and 11.
13) Savita Bhabhi. (All other Bhabhis are exempt.)
14) Maoists
15) Maoists masquerading as college girls
16) Anything about 1 to 15 on the Internet
17) Under the IT Rules, do not post anything on the Internet that might encourage terrorism, drugs, satire, political discussion, religious discussion, criticism of corporations, criticism of the Indian government, criticism in general. Spam and Shahrukh Khan jokes are fine.
18) If you intend to be disparaging about the IT Rules, do not write about it on the Internet, because the IT Rules make disparagement and certain kinds of criticism on the Internet illegal, even though they are legal forms of free speech. To clarify, you may disparage the IT Rules, which are about the Internet, anywhere except on the Internet. This is what literary theorists call “very meta”.
19) Since it is probably dangerous to write about sex, religion, politics, and the Internet, what can you write about? I suggest mangoes. This year’s crop is especially fine, and worthy of your attention.

Ctrl-Alt-Del: On being our own censors

It is always tempting to blame politicians for the sorry state of things, partly because a) that’s what they’re there for and b) it’s often their fault. But in the case of two recent controversies over cartoons—the Ambedkar cartoon controversy, and Mamata Banerjee’s persecution of a professor for circulating cartoons depicting the West Bengal Chief Minister in a poor light—there are good reasons why we shouldn’t blame politicians. Because the present situation isn’t their fault, it’s ours.

The Ambedkar cartoon controversy erupted when a few MPs drew Parliament’s attention to a cartoon by Shankar depicting Nehru’s impatience at the slow pace of Constitutional reform, which was carried in an NCERT textbook on the making of the Constitution. The argument was that by showing Nehru whipping Dr BR Ambedkar, the cartoon offended the sentiments of Dalits.

As far as I can make out, few members of Parliament pointed out the obvious: 1) Ambedkar was quite used to being caricatured, as were most politicians of that era in marked contrast to this 2) political satire may need to be placed in context, but it should be protected 3) to see the cartoon as anti-Dalit in the first place is stretching a point, given that Shankar followed the workings of government closely and spared nobody 4) if the image may now be perceived as anti-Dalit, and if the image of Ambedkar being whipped is a subtle reminder of centuries of discrimination against the community, the need is to open up a discussion, not shut one down. It is no longer important whether a cartoon, a book, an article, or any work of art actually is offensive, or whether that offence is so serious that it actually warrants censorship—just the claim of possible offence is enough to raise a demand for silence.

That’s why it would not have mattered if some MPs had spoken up and ranked themselves on the side of commonsense, because we have already allowed and tolerated a situation for decades where all any community has to do is to claim offence to shut down a discussion. In other words, it would have made no sense for any MP to stand up for free speech, or for plain logic. No one suggested that there was another way to address hurt sentiments that went beyond ripping pages out of a book, tearing cartoons out of the official history of India. If they had, those MPs would have risked being branded as anti-Dalit, for little gain: no party would have been willing to stand up and defend a supposedly anti-Dalit cartoon, even if, and this is where we enter the realm of complete absurdity, that cartoon was not seen as anti-Dalit in its time.

The reason why I don’t blame Parliament for demanding the withdrawal of the NCERT textbooks is not because they’re right—they couldn’t be more wrong, given the range of options that they had. They could have re-examined the chapter and included more cartoons, to give a wider range of opinion on the making of the Constitution. They could have asked for the chapter to be rewritten to include some context on how Dr Ambedkar was routinely depicted in cartoons of the time, and whether he was in any way depicted as different from the non-Dalit leaders of the national movement. They could simply have opened up a debate in Parliament on the right of satire to exist, but instead, they appear to have moved towards asking for legislation that would ban the use of cartoons and satire, and presumably humour, in most textbooks.

But they are only doing what any closed group will do, given a chance—ie, protect its own interests. All political parties understand the benefits that accrue with being seen as the protector of Dalit rights (the Ambedkar cartoons), Muslim hurt sentiments (the Jaipur Satanic Verses readings), offended Hindu sentiments (the Shivaji-Laine book), and so far, these benefits have been tangible and have translated into actual or perceived gains in different vote banks. The fact that these separate instances have also actively encouraged any community, religious or caste-based or political, to claim offense as a means of getting attention or gaining much-needed clout, is not the point. Until there are tangible consequences for politicians, in terms of losing votes or support, there is no practical reason for them to support free speech rights—only ideological reasons. As the historian Romila Thapar suggests, we should investigate claims that religious or other sentiments have been hurt much more rigorously seeing who stands to benefit, before resorting to a book ban or a withdrawal of a book.

Nor can you blame politicians for wanting to use existing laws to shut down criticism of political parties, as Mamata Banerjee and Kapil Sibal have done in very different ways. Any closed group, given a choice between upholding abstract free speech rights and upholding its own interests, will choose the latter. The problem may run a little deeper—ie, if our laws allow the arrest and prosecution of a professor for the “crime” of forwarding a cartoon, or if Internet laws can be used to silently shut down articles critical of politicians, we need to look more closely at how those laws are being misused.

Where the general community has failed is in convincing both politicians and its own members of the uses of free speech, and the need to allow widespread free expression, even when that expression is offensive to some. Almost all of what we write on free speech and censorship issues is in reaction to an event such as the Ambedkar controversy, but there are relatively few of us, including myself, who actually talk about the importance of free speech outside these controversies. Or we end up making obvious points—shutting down the Ambedkar cartoon and the Mamata cartoons will have a chilling effect on the media criticism of politicians, for instance. (As you might imagine, politicians are really, really worried that they might face less criticism as a consequence of their recent actions.)

On a few occasions in the past year—at a blogger’s meet on censorship, at a few readings and a literature festival—some of us passed around index cards where we invited people to answer two questions. Where did people feel censored or silenced in their own lives? And how would they feel if they could talk about these silences? It is not always easy to draw a direct line between apparently distant acts of censorship—the censorship of art, books, textbooks, cartoons—and censorship in one’s personal life, but the two are deeply connected.

End of rant, and meanwhile, here are some of the answers, shared with the permission of their authors.

Things people can’t talk about:

“I can’t talk about my childhood.”
“I want to tell my father how angry he makes me when he reads the papers and starts abusing Muslims, but my Muslim friends can’t even come home.”
“Censored about family violence and beatings.”
“Can’t share my political beliefs with my colleagues at the bank because then I might lose status with them.”
“Never could talk freely about my emotions and what I really wanted to do in my life.”
“Can’t tell husband he’s embarrassing me by shouting at servants in front of some of our friends.”
“Can’t say anything to my parents about my life or feelings, it’s not important to them.”

How they’d feel if they could speak without censorship:

“I’d cry and cry and let it out.”
“If he stopped it would make me so happy.”
“It would change my life. I want someone to understand why I’m so angry all the time.”
"I'd feel like less of a fraud and a liar in the daily office conversations. More my real self. More honest."
“I don’t know.”
“I would tell him how much I hate what he does and how small it makes me feel. Also, it goes against my beliefs, and that should be important.”
“I would feel like a real person at last.”

Speaking Volumes: The Bunderful Mr Lear

“What to do, my Dear Fortescue, when I return to England!!??.” At 36, Edward Lear had both of the qualities that make an artist an excellent traveler—an ability to feel at home anywhere, even in Devonshire (“Lord! How it rains!”), and an insatiable curiosity about other places.

“The more I read travels the more I want to move,” wrote Lear. It is difficult, reading Lear’s lively letters and journals, to believe that this is the 200th anniversary of his birth: there is little Victorian about either the prose or the mind.

In his thirties, the ‘Nartist Cove Named Lear’, known for his landscapes, would become famous as the Author of the Book of Nonsense. He was a seasoned traveler; Ireland, Italy, the Lake District in England and Corfu had already drawn him away from the rains he deplored so much at home, because they brought on his “assma”. He had given Queen Victoria 12 drawing lessons, but something in his nature balked at the comfortable life of a court painter.

He wanted to visit India, but as Corfu pulled him in and Jerusalem beckoned, Lear postponed his plans indefinitely. It stays there, off to a side—in 1857, he writes with great interest of the Mutiny, noting that The Times is probably wrong in its assessment that the fuss will blow over in a month or two. But it was only in his sixties that Lear would finally visit India, and by that time, he was not just a seasoned traveler, but a most interesting one.

Lear viewed the attempts of fellow Victorians to rescue their savage brethren with a gently caustic eye. “I’ve been reading Brooke’s Borneo lately. What do you think of a society for clothing and educating by degrees the Orang Outangs?” he writes to a friend. Nor does he stick to the conventions of travel writing, as this letter from Corfu demonstrates: “I meant to have written a lot about the priests & signori, and the good peasantry, & the orange-trees, and sea-gulls, and geraniums, & the Ionian Ball & what-not, but I am too sleepy.”

He was an accommodating traveler, and one of the few places that brought out the worst in him was Jerusalem—“uniting people in a disagreeable hodgepodge of curiosity and piety.” Travelling in the region, Lear nursed an understandable dislike of “marauding Arabs”, 200 of whom relieved him of his possessions in Petra. They took “things of no use to them but I believe taken as diversions for their nasty little beastly black children.” It’s a rare, ill-tempered outburst, one of the few times when the Victorian in him rose to the fore.

He approached India with curiosity and an open mind. In a letter to Lord Abedare, written just before his Indian journey, Lear thanks him for his good wishes: “But will you not tell me if you have any special wish for one view more than another. Shall I paint Jingerry Wangerry Bang or Wizzibizzigollyworrybo?”

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lear found a way around the heat and dust and crowds. He noticed all of it—“heat always great here stuffy puffy muffy”—he writes in his letters, and elsewhere, he complains bitterly of the political gossip and exhausting parties of “Hustlefussabad”, his name for Government House in Calcutta. The ekkas and palanquins made him wish for an extra set of bones, and he cast a fascinated eye on certain native habits: “All these devout and dirty people carry out their theory of attendance on Public Wash-up on a great scale, by flumping simultaneous into the Holy Gunga at sunrise on April 1 squash.”

But Lear found his feet when he discovered the Dak bungalows, which suited him so much better than staying in private homes or in hotels. It was hard, he noted, to say to the lady of a house as you might in a dak bungalow: “Ma’am, I want tea at 5 a cold luncheon and wine to take out with me, and dinner precisely at 7, after which I shall go to bed and shan't speak to you."

The bungalows restored his sense of independence, and using them as staging points, Lear did some of his most beautiful work while in India, over 2,000 drawings of “old Indian temples and rivers” made as he travelled through Punjab, Bengal, fell in love with large parts of South India, explored the Ganges to his heart’s content.

The landscapes, collected in an out-of-print book by Vidya Dehejia, have almost been forgotten—but Lear’s Indian year is memorialized in The Cummerbund. “She sate upon her Dobie/ To watch the evening star/ And all the Punkahs as they passed/ Cried, “My! How fair you are!”

This was, if you like, his return present to India—many travelers had commented on the language, but only Lear could have given us “gold-finned Chuprassies”, “green Ayahs” perched in trees and the vision of a monstrous, fearsome Cummerbund, second cousin to the Jabberwock. It was, in his words, “a truly bunderful” journey.

What I learned from "The Patriarchy"

(Note: This blog doesn't do autobiographical posts as a rule, but perhaps this post could be considered a response to an ongoing conversation, the one started by Saba Dewan on Kafila.)

Reading Saba Dewan's post, on patriarchy and St Stephen's, was a release. For years, I had struggled to make sense of two contradictory things—my years at college were some of the happiest of my life, but the institution that was held up to us as one of the best in India was also built on a flawed and deeply discriminatory set of beliefs.

(It's hard to write about this in part because it always felt like complaining about what was, in essence, a very privileged life--those of us who went to St Stephen's were by definition lucky, in our acquisition of English, in our officially liberal families, in our assumption of a secure place in the hierarchies of power in India.)

St Stephen's in 1989 had many of the elements Saba Dewan describes. The chick charts had gone only slightly underground, but the unofficial college magazines were widely read and almost always singled out “loose” women for harsh, punitive treatment. The editors of Kooler Talk Spice, the unofficial Residence magazine, felt free to comment on women’s figures, attractiveness or perceived sluttiness in terms that were often viciously degrading. Women who protested were marked down as humourless and told that they couldn’t take a joke. This was as much part of the general atmosphere as was the knowledge that you would have to fend off sexual harassment if you took the bus. (NB: My thanks to Amitabh Dubey, who gently pointed out that Kooler Talk, the official college magazine, was not guilty of these crimes.)

When Barkha Dutt ran for college president, one of the more vociferous arguments against having a woman as President was a viciously circular line of reasoning: women weren’t part of the all-male Residence, the college hostel, and so a woman president wouldn’t be able to handle college issues 24/7. The fact that a woman wasn’t able to be on the college premises 24/7 because the college in question had made it impossible for her to stay on the premises was treated as irrelevant.

When several of us, including Barkha, asked Principal Hala why there was no hostel for women, we were told there was no room to build a hostel. Just a few years later, room was found, but the argument was revealing: St Stephens, which had room for some of the finest, most dedicated teachers, room for libraries and tennis courts and a shooting range, room for debate, ideas, engagement of all kinds, had, in the most literal sense, no room for women.

I don’t want to stop with the argument that my college was, in a fundamental and unexamined way, profoundly sexist—Saba has already made that point. Nor do I want to turn this into a rant about a college that in many ways I loved, then and now, even though its present principal seems to want to return to the bad old days by introducing 40 per cent reservation for men, because women are doing so much better than them that the men can’t get their coveted college seats without a little help from Principal Thampu. The fact that no Principal of the college felt the need to intervene when the gender ratios were skewed in the other direction, when the student body had over a 60-70 per cent male composition instead of a 60-70 per cent female composition, is revealing and tells its own story.

But what Stephen's taught me about the way patriarchies work was unexpectedly valuable, and perhaps that might be worth sharing.

Institutions that are deeply, profoundly unfair often do not look the way you expect them to; it may take some time to recognize that you’re living in an unjust system. Logical corollary: an unjust system often co-opts otherwise good, kind, ethical people. Nice people are also part of a functioning patriarchy.



(This is just as true of families as it is of institutions.) Stephen's had some wonderful teachers, inquiring students, and even its architecture—the open windows leading on to the gardens—spoke of open minds and inclusiveness. It was in many ways a fine college, with a tradition of respect for debate and discussion, and this made it harder to either see or believe the extent to which sexism was embedded into the system, to the point of refusing women in my generation an equal right to residence or to political representation in any meaningful way.



For me, in retrospect, this was useful—Stephen's may have been the first environment in which I encountered subtle discrimination that was woven into the system rather than made obvious. Nor was this a function of the times—JNU, in exactly the same era, was far more casually equal, far less insidiously patriarchal.



Patriarchal institutions are not necessarily unequal in other respects--as a friend pointed out, you can have a boy's club that is also staunchly not casteist or classist. But often enough the failure to address deeprooted gender bias can make it easier for an institution, even a highly respected one, to overlook other kinds of prejudice.

It shocks me in retrospect to see what we accepted as normal, part of the Delhi University way of doing things—the easy division of our classmates into the Yadavs and the Rajputs, the ‘harrys’—Biharis, with each group virtually voting in separate blocs. Given that so many members of our college were quite politically aware and capable of passionate engagement with, say, the Israel-Palestine issue or apartheid, the widespread acceptance that this was the way things worked is even more disquieting. (I was equally guilty of not examining this disconnect, being a quiet student, an armchair radical rather than any kind of real revolutionary. Coming from Calcutta, I ascribed this inexplicable set of divisions to the general barbarism of North India rather than looking more closely at what was going on under the surface.)


Looking back, what strikes me about the Stephen's experience are absences—the missing women from the Residence and from key leadership roles, the missing or absent Dalits, the near-complete absence of support or understanding for the few SC or ST students. I don’t think these divisions, of caste and more rarely of class, could have taken such deep root if the gender discrimination had not also existed. This is hardly a radical observation, but it may bear repeating—many kinds of prejudice flourish once you allow one kind of discrimination to take root in any institution.



As a corollary from the previous point—patriarchy in action is every bit as damaging to men as to women, trapping men into a constant and often exhausting struggle for power, and relies on a constant erasure of its own past in order to thrive.


Though our batch had joined Stephen's only five years after Saba Dewan’s batch, their history of protest had been wiped from the collective memory of the college by the time we joined. I often wonder how different all of our experiences of college would have been if the authorities had encouraged discussion, instead of erasing this history of dissent down the years as inconvenient.



There were two interesting lessons from the Stephens’ years—one was that joining an institution that was by definition for the privileged, in terms of language, class, opportunity, was no protection against discrimination. The other was that each generation of women, each generation of students who suffered discrimination because they were darker or came from a lower caste or were called “Chinks” because they came from the North-East, felt that they were the first to fight these battles, and so we all fought our battles from scratch, in small, personal ways. None of us built on a previous history.



There were some unexpected lessons, too. Whether we talked about it or not—mostly not, given that most discussions of ‘College’ centred around the mince at the café, the idyllic October days on the lawns—the experience seems to have changed many of my batch, in quiet ways. So many Stephanians from my generation went on to fight for equality in their own private and professional lives. Perhaps we did learn something after all, and perhaps many of us chose to reject the lessons of discrimination and to keep only the better parts of our education.



The institution may have been riddled with discrimination, and it may to this day carry the legacy of decades of patriarchy; but the institution was also made up of teachers and students. What many of the teachers at Stephen's, from Vijay Tankha and Arjun Mahey to Nandita Narain, tried to pass onto their students went counter to the official history.



They taught us to think for ourselves, and to always speak our truth; in their own, often fierce, battles with the administration, they tried to teach us that it is worth fighting for the right thing, even if no one else around you believes that you’re right.



Perhaps what Dewan has started with her piece on Kafila will lead to a reconstruction not just of Stephens’ history, but of all of our private histories. Once you start filling in the gaps and the silences, it becomes so much easier to see your history for what it really is.



A few months ago, Gloria Steinem said in response to an interview question about the role of feminism today that perhaps the real need for all of us was just to imagine what equality would look like. It’s actually a very challenging, difficult idea; if you don’t live in a world where the genders are equal, it’s hard to imagine equality into existence.



In an ideal world, the places where we grow up—cities, families; the places where we learn—schools, colleges, playgrounds; the places where we work and live would all answer Steinem’s question. This is where Stephen's, for all its other virtues, failed my generation of men and women: it did not allow us to imagine what true equality would feel like. Perhaps, in the twenty years that have passed since my generation was in college, things have changed enough to allow this generation to see and experience what we couldn’t.

Divide-and-rule: the DRM effect

(Published in the Business Standard, May 2012)

A ferry crossing on a quiet Goan river is the perfect time to contemplate the advantages and disadvantages of ebooks for an Indian reader. The advantages rest in my backpack, where the twenty or so books on the week’s reading list reside in my Kindle, part of a growing portable library.

Unless I drop the Kindle into the Calvim River, I could theoretically spend the next three months in Goa and never need to visit a bookshop. For readers like me, or for the average business traveler, the ability to carry around our libraries is a significant advantage.

So far, though, the ebook market in India has been as sleepy as the placid Goan backwaters, except for a relatively tiny number of early users. This is not for a lack of potential readership, or for lack of Internet access—retail giant Flipkart has proved, for instance, that a huge number of readers will buy books online if they are guaranteed safe delivery and enough choice.

Though the difference between the physical book and the book is often raised as a major deterrent, this hasn’t proved to be the case in equally sophisticated markets elsewhere. As the rise of ebook sales in countries from the UK to Canada, South Korea to China, demonstrates, the initial resistance to reading on a device melts away once readers discover the ease and convenience of ebooks.

A few purists lament the loss of beautiful typography and the feel of paper, but you only have to browse the average bookstore to see how few physical books are designed and printed with love. The mass-market paperback is not a thing of beauty; it is as functional as the average ebook, and as unlovely. But with ebook sales rivaling and sometimes exceeding paperback sales in many cases, the ebook versus paper rivalry has had unexpected consequences.

In an effort to underline the uniqueness of the physical book, many publishing houses have begun placing more emphasis on well-designed books—at least for the most prominent literary books on their list. It’s just a matter of a time before publishing houses start exploring the many—and unusual—possibilities of ebook design.

There are already creative sites out there--Booktrack, for instance, does editions of Rushdie and Garcia Marquez novels with sound effects, and some of the indie publishing houses are focusing on creative typography, understanding instinctively that the ebook also opens up possibilities that the plain printed page can’t match.

The market for Kindles and dedicated ebook readers is tiny in India—but the market for tablets such as the iPad and the Galaxy Tab, which double as excellent reading devices, is both sizeable and growing. The problem for the Indian reader is different: buying ebooks is an exercise in frustration, a return to the bad old days of socialism when everything you really wanted was tantalizingly displayed in the window of a shop to which you had no entry.

Most Indian publishers haven’t yet digitized their books—or haven’t digitized a significant percentage of their books, or don’t have an Amazon account—so most of the lost classics, drama, poetry, rare histories and biographies that you might want in ebook form are not available. Indian books in translation—which would make up the bulk of great Indian literature—are only sparsely available in ebook form from online retailers.

The global publishing industry’s insistence on DRM—digital rights management systems, which allow readers to access ebooks only in specific territory—has little impact on readers in the US or the UK. With large ebookstores and an ample selection, most US or UK readers have access to a far wider variety of books than do their counterparts in other territories, creating a kind of unofficial but deep-rooted system of digital inequality.

But for an Indian reader trying to buy ebooks legally, the reminder that you are part of a marketplace that carries over colonial inequalities is sharp. You will pay higher prices—given the dollar or pound exchange rate—in order to read some books. And because of DRM, even if you’re willing to pay higher prices, many ebooks will remain unavailable in India because of territorial copyright agreements.

Many of the arguments against DRM systems for ebooks have focused on the impractical nature of DRM. Because books, being essentially text files, are so much easier to pirate than other kinds of media, DRM is a barrier only for the law-abiding reader. The rest will switch to illegally downloaded books, benefitting neither author nor publisher.

But we rarely discuss the ways in which DRM continues to divide the world of books—and music, and films—into haves and have-nots. If you live in the First World, you are unlikely to realize how much greater your access is to world cinema and world literature, except for those writers who aren’t allowed in past the borders of Barnes & Noble or Amazon. If you live in the grey zone known as Elsewhere, you are unlikely to be allowed to forget how carelessly widespread the restrictions are on what you can read, and how much more you will be charged for the privilege of reading like a First-Worlder.

One might then argue that DRM functions as an unfair barrier. For readers and writers in many countries outside the West, the promise of ebooks was the promise of equal access—our writers could travel elsewhere, theirs could be read across borders. Instead, DRM sets up bristling electronic fences, dividing the world into territories of more and less privileged readers. Until these fences come down, the ebook market in India will remain a shriveled, bonsai version of what it could be.

I’m @twitter.com/nilanjanaroy

The Business Standard column: Lives, Unsanitised

(Published in the Business Standard, April 24, 2012)


Before the digital camera age, the venerable photo studios in most large Indian cities offered a tactful service for the recently bereaved.

Just as honeymooners were offered fake backgrounds—castle, Kashmir lake, eerily white Himalayas, portraits of the dead could be retouched to make the departed’s resemblance to a gargoyle less obvious. Mahatta’s, for instance, added a touch of actual paint to photographs to simulate rouge or lipstick; the paint slowly flaked off, gently ageing the dead as time passed.

One of the reasons why we have very little in the way of interesting contemporary Indian biographies of the famous stems from this need to garland the dead with metaphorical marigolds. The recent persecution of Peter Heehs, who has lived and worked in India for many years, for his biography of Sri Aurobindo, might be seen in this context.

His biography, a work of careful scholarship, is being attacked not because it is inaccurate, but because it interferes with the very Indian demand for a strictly sanitized version of the lives of the famous--as Heehs has said, his critics are “interested in establishing a Sri Aurobindo religion with themselves as popes, priests etc”.

There isn’t much point invoking Heehs’ right to free speech as a biographer—the right to independent, critical inquiry into the life of a public figure clashes with too many deep-rooted Indian beliefs. If you put two favourite North Indian admonishments together, they don’t leave much room for a cultural defence of free speech. Between “zubaan sambhal lo”—hold your tongue—and “aukat me raho”—stay within your bounds, it’s hard to argue that India today has a deep, abiding belief in the value of free speech.

This argument, extended, might also help us understand a fairly recent phenomenon: the persecution of scholars like Heehs, or before him, James Laine, Wendy Doniger and even journalists like Joseph Lelyveld, on the grounds of their foreignness. The crude argument leveled against Doniger and Laine was a racist one that ignored the accuracy of their research into either Hinduism or Shivaji’s life, in favour of the reductive argument that being foreigners, they could not possibly understand the subjects of their study.

When the Passport Office begins to examine the papers of a scholar like Heehs, to see whether he should be allowed to stay in a country where he has lived or worked for years, we’re back with the widespread belief that “outsiders” have no right to write about us. This is paralleled by the fear that “foreign” scholars will not respect the Indian need to enshrine and embalm either the dead, or the dead past.

Perhaps this is why so many arguments that are ostensibly over free speech issues lose their way in the murk, as one side invokes (Indian) culture and the other invokes a (Western) tradition of free speech. The defenders of free speech will always lose this version of the battle as these firangi principles are interrogated by the Indian thought control police.

But an issue that is often obscured is that Heehs and scholars like him are writing in exact accordance with the Indian tradition of biography and autobiography. In 2007, for instance, Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri published Bangal-nama, his memoirs—translated as The World In Our Time by HarperCollins recently. His memories of growing up in Barisal and Calcutta also include a thoughtful critique of Indian nationalism, and the slow erosion by which Muslims and the rural Indians stopped supporting or became invisible in the ranks of the Indian National Congress over time.

The freedom that Raychaudhuri accords himself when discussing national heroes or difficult subjects like bigotry is an old freedom. It can be seen, for instance, in Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s wonderful autobiography, In The Afternoon of Time, which in passing reveals that his sons, Amitabh and Ajitabh, were almost named Inquilab and Azad.

But it also includes a very amusing section on how the furore over his Madhushala poems grew to the point where he needed a certificate from Gandhi: “There’s no wine-glorifying in these verses!” said the Mahatma, rendering Bachchan’s poetry fit for mass consumption again. Nor does Bachchan hold back when it comes to describing his friend and fellow poet Nirala’s struggles with madness; he does this with compassion, but with the understanding that both biography and autobiography require truth, not elision.

The candour that Heehs and others like him claim is a very Indian quality, then. It can be seen in Mulk Raj Anand’s biography and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s letters, in the completely open letters and autobiography of Gandhi, and it might be glimpsed in Sri Aurobindo’s letters, too. “I am afraid I shall never be good for much in the way of domestic virtues,” Sri Aurobindo writes to his father-in-law. “I fear you must take me as I am with all my imperfections on my head.”

It’s excellent advice, especially to those who seek to embalm his life, garlanding him with dead marigolds.