Speaking Volumes: Bans and Banana Republics

(Published in the Business Standard, April 5, 2011. Also read Salil Tripathi in The Daily Beast on India's troubled history of limiting free speech.)




At the height of the uproar over Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography of Gandhi, one question deserved to be asked: what would we do with a negative, critical biography of a revered national figure? The answer, sadly, is dismal: we would probably ban it.
Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India is a respectful look at the philosophical growth and evolution of Gandhi’s philosophy. The current controversy centres around two minor sections in the book, and also around the larger question of whether we’re comfortable with honest examinations of national heroes as humans, not gods.

The biography deals briefly with Gandhi’s ambiguous relationship with the architect and bodybuilder Kallenbach; they exchanged letters calling each other “Upper House” and “Lower House” in which Gandhi testified often to the closeness he felt for his friend. Gandhi was open on the subjects of sexuality and relationships, detailing his struggle to maintain celibacy with the same exactness as his other experiments with truth, and his relationship with Kallenbach was one of a series of not easily classifiable relationships.

Lelyveld clarified that he had never directly called Gandhi bisexual or homosexual in his biography; the outrage felt and exploited in states like Gujarat and Maharashtra, which imposed premature bans on the biography, was misplaced. (A question few asked is why we should be outraged at the idea that Gandhi, or any other national figure, might be homosexual—or are we officially a nation of homophobics?)

The second issue remained largely unexplored in the Indian media, but in many ways is a far more uncomfortable matter—was Gandhi a racist? Reading many of the letters he wrote in South Africa reveals his open airing of his prejudices about the “kaffirs”; and Lelyveld raises the right questions here.

In both cases, the Lelyveld biography broke no new ground. The Kallenbach letters are in the National Archives; they are also readily accessible on the Internet as part of a broader collection of Gandhi’s letters from that period, the deep, complex affection between both men very evident. Gandhi’s letters where he speaks of “troublesome, very dirty” ‘kaffir’ convicts are also a matter of public record.

Lelyveld’s reaction to the proposed ban on his biography was the puzzled anger of the outsider unused to India’s bizarre political circus. For any author, a ban on one’s writing is the most unjust of edicts—it’s an erasure of one’s words, a brutal silencing of one’s voice. Lelyveld couldn’t believe that a country that calls itself the world’s largest democracy would countenance a ban of a book on the basis of biased reviews—but he had little way of understanding the history of India’s bans, which have been largely political in nature over the last two decades.

Lelyveld’s book has revealed nothing of Gandhi’s political thoughts or private relationships that was not already in the public domain. He has speculated freely, but not irresponsibly. Nothing Lelyveld has written about Gandhi is any more incendiary than Gandhi’s own letters and autobiographical works—but as many commentators have said, today’s politicians would ban Gandhi’s own words if they could.

What Lelyveld’s case demonstrates the ways in which book bans work in India. They are now largely symbolic; the courts have subsequently overturned almost every ban on a book issued by various state governments. They are almost always demanded by political parties, not by private individuals or the ordinary reader; the book ban is now roughly the same as the one-day fast, a token, banal gesture of protest.

They will also always mis-represent the book, so that Rohinton Mistry’s beautiful exploration of the common man’s Bombay and corruption in India can be called a book that contains swear words, and Lelyveld’s words can be twisted beyond recognition.

The damage done to the cause of free speech as states and politicians vie to be the first to ban a book is immense—but it is also almost secondary, because the politicians who seek book bans, from any party, are not thinking of the complexities of free speech issues.

So what does a book ban, of the kind the Narendra Modi government has sought on the Lelyveld book, mean in today’s India? At its simplest, a ban is just an opportunity for a political party to claim the mantle of protector—protector of a faith, of a community, of a national figure, of Indian culture. It is a no-cost opportunity; the small minority of readers in English is not considered a useful votebank, and banning a book offers immediate access to national television.

There are tiny signs that politicians may have over-used the book ban. The Central government and the Congress have backed away from supporting a ban on the Gandhi biography, and it is very likely that the state bans will be overturned by the judiciary.

So far, though, no politician has had the courage to step up and say what Lelyveld has said: this ban, with its disregard for the basic principles of free speech, is shameful. Nor have our politicians acknowledged another sobering truth: our record on book bans and our lack of support for free speech is more appropriate to a banana republic than a democracy.

Previous columns on book bans:

The marketplace of outrage


Rohinton and the Rat Pack: on the targetting of Such a Long Journey


Why we should lift the ban on the Satanic Verses...


...and the Rushdie effect: censorship after the Verses


James Laine and the banning of Shivaji...






Taslima Nasreen: The Power of Offence


Sedition, censorship and the crime of disaffection--the British legacy of banning books

Blasphemy laws and censorship in Pakistan


And: A Pawn Called Taslima


The Care and Feeding of Book Bans

...the freedom to explore: Imagining Shivaji


Book bans in India, Part One
...and Part Two

The BS column: The reading life: Gandhi, Ambedkar, Nehru

(Published in the Business Standard, August 17, 2010)




As another August 15 passes by, here’s a thought: what would our country have been like if the leaders of the freedom movement had not been readers?

It’s easier to see them as writers. Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiographies, letters and other work have provided gainful occupation for thousands of scholars. Pandit Nehru, incarcerated in jail, bereft of reference books, set pen to paper and produced The Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History and Letters From A Father To His Daughter. BR Ambedkar’s Who Were The Shudras, Castes in India and the autobiographical Waiting For A Visa still hold the attention of readers.

And it is their progression as writers that historians and thinkers like Ramachandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani have written about. But to study the libraries of India’s leaders is to realize how relentlessly, and sometimes restlessly, all of them, from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad to Sarojini Naidu, read as a way of understanding the values by which India would be formed.

Gandhi came to English uneasily; the alien tongue made him a virtual prisoner of silence on his shipboard journey to England. In South Africa, as a lawyer who had got over his initial fear of speaking in public, he put together a formidable and eclectic library.

Even a partial list of books on Gandhi’s shelves makes fascinating reading. He read extensively on religion, from Syed Amir Ali on Islam to Moulton on Early Zoroastrianism, and read and re-read the world’s great religious texts. Tolstoy, Thoreau (on the duty of civil disobedience), Max Mueller and Patanjali share companionable space on his shelves.

There is the personal—a book on obstetrics, purchased and read before the birth of his first child, several works on naturopathy, The Vegetarian Messenger, hydrotherapy. In his first year in South Africa, he read “quite eighty books”: most of them on religion. The local histories he read remained influential—an education inspector’s report on Basutoland, for instance, played a key role in Gandhi’s determination to have Indian languages taught in Indian schools.

Nehru was the quintessential privileged reader, with tutors and libraries at home, and later, the libraries of Harrow and Trinity, Cambridge, open to him. His early experiences with the Theosophical Society taught him to read widely—and perhaps skeptically, given his abjuration of organized religion: “an empty form devoid of real content”. Nehru rarely mentioned or quoted the writers he read so voraciously, though one of the books that left a lasting impression on him was Trevelyan’s biography of Garibaldi.

He would, today, be classified as a disciple of Richard Dawkins, the scientist and flagbearer of atheism, and would probably have enjoyed The God Delusion greatly. Long after Nehru had left Trinity and his Tripos in Natural Sciences behind, he continued to read, and enthusiastically recommend, the study of science: “I realized that science was not only a pleasant diversion and abstraction, but was of the very texture of life, without which our modern world would vanish away…”

Ambedkar may have been the most passionate reader of the three. Denied the study of Sanskrit because of his Untouchable status, he had the opportunity to explore his love of books—and the world of empowering ideas they promised—as a young student at Bombay University and then at Columbia. He had mentors in John Dewey and Professor Muller, who lent him books, bought him books and perhaps most crucially, recommended the best of political and socioeconomic thinkers to him. His personal library ran to a vast 50,000 books, representing the range and depth of his interests, from the history of political struggles to Buddhism.

Ambedkar did, according to some scholars, read black protest literature while in America, though he made little direct reference to their works. But here’s an interesting footnote to his history. He wrote to WEB Du Bois, the redoubtable civil rights activist, who took note: “I have on my desk a letter from Dr BR Ambedkar of the Untouchables of India…” Ambedkar made use of his experiences in Slavery Or Untouchability?, arguing that untouchability was far worse as an institution.

But WEB Du Bois had an unusual Indian connection—aside from his friendship with Lala Lajpat Rai, he had penned a romance, Dark Princess, which combined politics and eroticism with admirable economy. In this astonishing work of fiction, Matthew Townes, a doctor discriminated against for his skin colour, meets Princess Kautilya, the beautiful head of an organization of people of colour who plan to overthrow Western imperialism. It ends with the birth of a messiah, “a palpitating bubble of gold”, in tribute to the love between the princess and the idealist.

Whether or not Ambedkar read Dark Princess is, unfortunately, not a matter of historical record. His reactions to a book that included the Ku Klux Klan and a Maharajah of Bwodpur would have been priceless.