The BS Column: The sofa-cum-bed conundrum

(This was first published in the Business Standard, 2nd November, 2010)










In the 13 years since Arundhati Roy wrote and won the Booker Prize for God of Small Things, her position in the pantheon of small goddesses has shifted and changed radically.

She and Salman Rushdie were, for a while, part of the India Shining story. Middle-class India chose not to engage with the content of their work—Rushdie’s obsession with restoring a certain view of history, his insistence on the freedom to question faith, Arundhati’s early and constant need to rock the boat, to ask inconvenient questions of the Indian state.

These obsessions, which lay at the core of their work, were edited out for many in India; they were just Booker winners, the equivalent of the Indian beauty queens who walked away with Ms Universe titles and “made us proud” on a global stage.

Rushdie has always been a writer; Midnight’s Children was followed by 14 books, including novels, essays and short stories. Roy, who had once remarked that being called a writer-activist was like being called a sofa-cum-bed, yielded to her more polemical side.

In the decade that followed God of Small Things, she was rumoured to be at work on a second novel, but what she produced was a series of broadsides. They were passionate but often solipsistic pieces, and the argument for her increasing irrelevance as an opinion-maker or analyst has grown in force over the years.

Over the last week, what we’ve seen is a curiously Indian tamasha, where the sense of being caught in a poorly-scripted television drama is inescapable. Arundhati Roy makes a statement about Kashmir that echoes views she has earlier put forward, and views (the state has “never been an integral part of India”) that have been articulated elsewhere, by others.

The BJP, for its own politically motivated reasons, and a TV channel, for the sake of driving up TRP points, jumps on the writer; there is much reference to sedition laws; her home in Chanakya Puri witnesses staged protests by the BJP’s Mahila Morcha wing, where the TV cameras are invited in advance to capture this spontaneous outpouring of public wrath. This isn’t farce—it’s parody.

But there is one point to be made, and it’s the question that often comes up in TV debates—about Rohinton Mistry, about Salman Rushdie, about Taslima Nasreen and about Arundhati Roy. Someone always asks, “Shouldn’t writers be more responsible?” or there’s a suggestion, as was often made during this recent affair, that writers should stick to their writing—no sofa-bed confusion for us.

This is actually a very new idea in modern-day India. The British came up with this argument often, and used it—unsuccessfully--against Bankimchandra, Michael Madhushudan Dutt and other young firebrands, who ignored the suggestion that writers should stick to literature and leave politics out of it. Politics and the political situation of India fuelled their writing, and banned or not, they continued to write about indigo plantations, the cruelty of British rule and the inequities of language. You might add Lokmanya Tilak and Veer Savarkar to the list of those who faced sedition laws, just as an indication of how bad laws make strange bedfellows.

In more recent times, few writers maintained a division between their politically engaged selves and their literary selves. If they had, we would never have seen a Faiz, or a Saadat Hasan Manto, or a Nayantara Sahgal, whose novels chronicled the shifting political landscape of an emerging nation. Perhaps the most towering example of this today is Mahasweta Debi, whose journalism has marched side by side with her stories—it is impossible to extricate the activist from the writer, because they are both the same person, and one couldn’t survive without the other.

Arundhati Roy is not in the same league as Mahasweta Debi. But consider the roots of her engagement, and consider God of Small Things; that early novel was also about caste wars, about women’s financial and legal rights, and about the fragmenting and forgetting of history. Everything she has done since then, from her reportage of the Narmada Dam to her travels with the Maoists and her exploration of Kashmir, is consistent; she may be a very naïve interlocutor of India, and you may disagree with her analyses, as many do, or be tired of her simplifications, as many are, but you cannot doubt the intensity of her engagement.

Writers are, in the end, also citizens. The best writers in every age have also been deeply engaged citizens, and to ask, as we are now doing in India, for writers to stick to their writing is a little like asking investigative journalists to stick to their knitting. What we’re really asking, when we pose the question of a writer’s responsibility, is for writing to be like bonsai-growing, or ikebana: a strictly ornamental occupation that challenges nothing, shakes up nothing. That is not how our writers have worked in the past, and it’s not how they can continue to work in the future.

Criticising the media--Mitali Saran's column

(I've written for Business Standard for over 15 years now, and never in that time been asked to censor my opinions. The only column they couldn't carry was one on the Ambani book, Polyester Prince, because the matter was sub-judice and we couldn't legally comment on it at the time.
It was very distressing, then, to hear that the newspaper wouldn't carry Mitali Saran's column on the India Today plagiarism issue, on the grounds that it was too dated to run. Mitali, who blogs at Stet, has since withdrawn her column from the paper. Here's the link to her blog, the column, and some background.)

From Stet, by Mitali Saran:

The case of the missing attribution*
*This week, for the first time since its inception in August 2006, Stet was not published in Business Standard's weekend edition (October 30, 2010) . You'll find the likely reason for that in the second-last paragraph of the spiked column, reproduced below:

"Amongst other crimes such as those listed in the Press Council of India report which nobody in the media wants to talk about, is rampant plagiarism. Nobody in the media wants to talk about that either. It’s not as if ours is the only media in the world with big problems. But when ours is confronted with its own scandals, you can hear the clang of a fraternity closing ranks, followed by the weird sound of thousands of furious back-scratchings, followed by the thunderous silence of stones not being thrown in glass houses."

Update November 2, 2010: Business Standard's view that the post below was too dated to run is utterly unpersuasive, and I'm afraid I don't believe it. They also say that since this post was put up on the blog, along with comments about BS, the question of carrying it in the paper does not arise. We shall have to agree to disagree on this whole thing, and I will write a post about that in a few days; but meanwhile, I have terminated my arrangement with them with immediate effect. As of this week, Stet will no longer appear in Business Standard....

The BS Column: The marketplace of outrage

(I'm running behind on blog updates--my apologies. This was published on 26th October in the Business Standard. This is part of a series of articles and columns I've been writing over the last ten years on censorship and free speech issues--I wish the politics of this country hadn't made that archive necessary.)





“What we have developed today is a marketplace of outrage. And if you And if you set up a marketplace of outrage you have to expect everyone to enter it. Everyone now wants to say, 'My feelings are more hurt than yours'."~ Monica Ali, author of ‘Brick Lane’.

In recent weeks, we witnessed the Shiv Sena attack on Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, which resulted in the book being burned outside Mumbai University and then withdrawn from the syllabus.

What was instructive weren’t the well-worn, shabby arguments in favour of the ban, arguments that sought to portray one of the great Bombay novels as an “obscene” book that was against dabbawallahs, the Marathi manoos, Indira Gandhi and the Sena, not necessarily in that order. Instead, it was the alacrity with which politicians of different parties brushed aside concerns over free expression in India, and their willingness to support book bans in general, that was fascinating. Perhaps one way to understand the thriving dhanda in today’s marketplace of outrage is to trace the evolution of book bans in the country through some of the most significant ones.

Rama Retold, Aubrey Menen, banned in 1956: Now almost forgotten, Aubrey Menen was at one time something of a standard-bearer for his generation, known for the elegance of his mind and his somewhat baroque work. Rama Retold was a deconstruction of the Ramayana, told with Menen’s trademark refusal to respect pedestals and the icons that stood on them. In the 1950s, this became one of the first books to be banned by the Indian government on the grounds that it might offend religious sensibilities—opening the door to future displays of competitive intolerance.

Nine Hours to Rama, Stanley Wolpert, banned in 1962: Wolpert’s analysis of Gandhi’s assassination had nothing to do with the Ramayana—it was his research into the gaps in the security arrangements surrounding the Mahatma, and the suggestion of conspiracy theories, that attracted the state’s censorship. This set a second, and equally dangerous, precedent, allowing the state to consider banning books that might deliver inconvenient insinuations about any ruling government.

Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie, banned in 1988: Rushdie’s Verses is perhaps the most controversial book of our times. India was the first country in the world to ban the Verses, a ban that was propelled by the fear of a strong Islamic reaction against what was seen as blasphemy. Rushdie has often argued for the right—and the necessity—of authors to explore all subjects, including faith, and the right of authors to be, if necessary, blasphemous.

The result of banning Satanic Verses was direct and disastrous—it encouraged political parties and religious groups of all stamps to play the “competitive intolerance” game. Once it had been established that offending religious sensibilities may be cause for a book ban, anyone who wants to shut down inconvenient ideas or lines of inquiry into any faith can demand a ban by insisting that their sensibilities are offended.

Shivaji, by James Laine, banned by the Maharashtra government in 2004: Laine’s work on Shivaji sourced gossip about the Marathi icon’s parentage and origins, fuelling a rampage against the BORI library in Pune by Sambhaji Sena activists. What is most telling about this particular book ban is the way in which Laine’s scholarship and willingness to examine the complex myths around a historical figure have been reduced to gross simplicities.

Laine’s work may have been flawed—some scholars have argued this point—but in the popular imagination, his Shivaji book is the “book that insulted Shivaji”, written by a “foreigner and outsider”. The only way to keep a book on a banned-books list is to do precisely this—rob it of its complexity, and drop it down a memory hole. Few now remember that the real issue at stake was the far more complex issue of how we choose to remember our histories, and who gets to be the custodian of these histories.

Such a Long Journey, Rohinton Mistry, not banned but withdrawn from a university syllabus, 2010: There are two lessons to be drawn from this particular case. One is that book bans have become an almost symbolic ritual—the burning of books, once a powerfully frightening image, now reduced to parody, the conjuring up of protestors just a demonstration of political muscle, not genuine outrage. The other is that in the marketplace of outrage, bribery and force work if you want to orchestrate a book ban, or subvert a university.

In all of this, as one book after another drops into an Orwellian memory hole, what we’re losing is the power to insist that we have a right to read, and to think for ourselves. Each successive ban creates a demand for the manufacturing of more ersatz outrage. What we need is a freemarket of ideas, not the thriving marketplace of outrage that’s set up shop in India today.