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.
Showing posts with label banned books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label banned books. Show all posts
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Free speech: "Cannot you hold your tongue?"
(Published in Forbes India, January/ February 2011, for its Curators of Interestingness series.)
BOOKS: FREE SPEECH
“Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you?”
From Plato’s Apology, concerning the trial of Socrates.
In 399 BC, the finest and most prominent citizens of a state known for its commitment to justice and fairness gathered to decide on the fate of one of its best-known gadfly-philosophers. By the end of the meeting in Athens, Socrates had been sentenced to death, apparently for no greater crimes than “impiety” and “corrupting the youth”. He became the first free-speech martyr: his response to those who asked him to hold his tongue is often quoted.
“Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living—that you are still less likely to believe.”
These lines have formed the bedrock of the argument for free speech for centuries, along with John Stuart Mill’s 1859 pronouncement in On Liberty: “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”
The trial of Socrates, as it has been presented by Plato and Xenophon, is heartbreaking: there you have the Western world’s first free-speech martyr, put to death in the twilight of his life by a cruel state. The problem with this view, as IF Stone has pointed out, is that Athens was not a tyrannical state—it did not share the views of modern-day China, Burma or Korea on the evils of free speech and the value of censorship. The citizens of Athens acted out of character when it came to the trial of Socrates; they condemned him perhaps for political reasons (he had not spoken out against the rule of tyrants), perhaps for personal ones (the corruption of the youth previously mentioned), and only in part because his opinions made the state and its citizens uncomfortable.
The great contemporary battles over free speech are not dissimilar. We accept, in theory, that free speech is necessary for any functioning democracy; in practice, freedom of expression has never been a comfortable virtue to exercise. It’s not about what books one should be allowed to read, or about whether an author is right or wrong—free speech debates go to the heart of exploring any society’s areas of discomfort. Sometimes those have to do with sex and love; often they have to do with religion and faith; and occasionally, the discomfort comes from having one’s implicit beliefs about the society you live in challenged. Sometimes it’s the state that feels under attack, or that will work to protect itself against perceived criticism. But what we attack, as readers in India or the United States, tells us a great deal about what makes us deeply uneasy as human beings.
For two excellent primers on free speech issues, read PEN’s Freedom of Speech is No Offense—a collection of writings on free speech by authors across Britain—or Seagull India’s excellent Censorship series.
In the Germany of 1933, what we refer to now as the Nazi book-burnings began as a student protest, calling for a cleansing, a “Sauberung”. The German Student Association called for “Action against the un-German Spirit”, spoke of a need to “purify” German language and literature against the taint of Jewish intellectualism, and organized a series of book burnings across the country. The schedule was meticulously drawn up: a torchlight procession of students would arrive to parade music, the song ‘Brothers, Forward’ would be sung, and selected books and journals would be burned, followed by a group sing-a-long.
And so did Bertolt Brecht, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, among thousands of others, go to the flames. The list of authors burned is a very revealing list—from Thomas Mann to Erich Marie Remarque, Marcel Proust to Emile Zola and Upton Sinclair, what the young students in Germany were really blocking out was any kind of thought that might oppose Hitler’s doctrines. The Nazi regime depended on its existence on the idea that “pure” German thought and nationalism was under threat; and that the only way to defend the true spirit of Germany was to call for a purge.
Thirteen years later, there would be an unpleasant echo of the Nazi book-burnings, when the Allied troops decided in 1946 to purge about 30,000 books—all “undemocratic, militaristic and Nazi” literature and paintings. The principle was the same; the only difference is that the Allied armies did not continue their purges for as much time as Hitler’s youth.
In India, perhaps the most significant book ban after 1947 was the ban placed on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The ban on the Verses came into force in October 1988, and has never been lifted. The grounds for the ban were that the supposed blasphemy of the novel—where Rushdie uses the “Satanic” verses to explore and attack aspects of Islam, as part of a larger framework where he explores multiculturalism and diasporas—might cause violence in the country.
The logic of the Verses ban seems, at first glance, impeccable. An author has written a novel that is perhaps inflammatory, and that may offend many Muslims—it may even cause those offended, whether Muslim or not, to take to the streets in violence. But the deeper principle at work in the Satanic Verses case was whether India would uphold two basic and linked rights: the right of any citizen or writer to criticize faith in general and a religion in particular (the right to blaspheme, in effect), and the right of ideas that go against the flow of mainstream thought to be protected. Behind the legal ramifications of the Satanic Verses ban lies a simple question: are you free to question religion, or should religion be above question?
The Indian state, like many other democracies, has not made up its mind on the subject. In terms of offence, the rants of the Hindutva rightwing, for instance, or of hardline Muslim preachers, have been far more offensive, and urged listeners on to far more hatred than Rushdie has ever espoused. We are, as a country, sensitive on the subject of religion; in 1956, shortly after Independence, India banned Aubrey Menen’s Rama Retold. Menen’s retelling of the Ramayana was ruled to be scurrilous (it was, deliberately so) and potentially explosive. We are not yet comfortable with the idea that religion can be challenged—and mocked—in fiction.
Other Indian attempts to corral free speech have been largely political in nature. The brief ban on Taslima Nasreen’s Dwikhandito in West Bengal, the recent attempt to pillory Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and to present it as obscene and offensive, the ban on James Laine’s Shivaji—all of these were part of attempts by various political parties to gain mileage. Sometimes, it’s the state’s own broader concerns that come into play, as with Stanley Wolpert’s Nine Hours to Rama—banned because of Wolpert’s revelations about lacunae in the security given to Mahatma Gandhi.
One of the murkier areas for free speech is, for obvious reasons, sex: what is obscene to one person is another one’s liberating read. Ulysses, by James Joyce, was banned on the grounds that it might cause American readers to harbour “impure and lustful” thoughts; Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, was banned in France, and copies were seized in the UK after the Sunday Express called it “sheer unrestrained pornography”.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by DH Lawrence, became the subject of a landmark 1959 trial—against its use of “unprintable words” and the complaint that it was not the kind of book one would wish one’s “wife or servants to read”, the publishers successfully argued that it had literary merit. John Cleland’s cheerfully pornographic Fanny Hill is remarkable for having attracted obscenity suits from 1748 down to 1977, when it was proved to have sufficient “artistic value” to offset Cleland’s memoirs of a courtesan.
Closer to home, Ismat Chughtai’s Lajja (The Quilt) became the subject of an obscenity trial for its depiction of a relationship between two women—but the trial foundered on language; Chughtai had used no explicit terms. Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra was attacked for its sexual content—and for the fact that a woman was writing freely about desire—in the courts of a state known for the vast quantities of pulp Hindi porn it produced.
Perhaps the most fiercely contested areas of free speech have to do with politics. For years, Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter could not be read in South Africa, because her analysis of racial and sexual politics in the country flew in the face of the ruling regime’s lines of thought. George Orwell’s Animal Farm has always made some regimes deeply uncomfortable; countries supportive of Russia would not print it, and in Kenya, it was banned because Orwell’s animal insurrections were seen (correctly) as a criticism of corrupt leaders. In Russia, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s unsparing depiction of life in the gulags—and his extension of the metaphor of the gulag to the whole country—threatened the entire moral basis of the state. The manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago had to be typed in several friends’ houses, in hiding; and had to be smuggled out of the USSR before it could be printed.
And the most absurd instance of a free speech ban was probably the one that operated for years in China on Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll’s classic was placed on the list of dangerous books not for its incendiary content, or for its political ideas, but because “it was disastrous to put animals and human beings at the same level”. This line always calls up an image of an official in the Hunan province, deeply disturbed that Carroll’s Cheshire Cats and caterpillars have shaken up the natural order of the world!
BOOKS: FREE SPEECH
“Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you?”
From Plato’s Apology, concerning the trial of Socrates.
In 399 BC, the finest and most prominent citizens of a state known for its commitment to justice and fairness gathered to decide on the fate of one of its best-known gadfly-philosophers. By the end of the meeting in Athens, Socrates had been sentenced to death, apparently for no greater crimes than “impiety” and “corrupting the youth”. He became the first free-speech martyr: his response to those who asked him to hold his tongue is often quoted.
“Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living—that you are still less likely to believe.”
These lines have formed the bedrock of the argument for free speech for centuries, along with John Stuart Mill’s 1859 pronouncement in On Liberty: “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”
The trial of Socrates, as it has been presented by Plato and Xenophon, is heartbreaking: there you have the Western world’s first free-speech martyr, put to death in the twilight of his life by a cruel state. The problem with this view, as IF Stone has pointed out, is that Athens was not a tyrannical state—it did not share the views of modern-day China, Burma or Korea on the evils of free speech and the value of censorship. The citizens of Athens acted out of character when it came to the trial of Socrates; they condemned him perhaps for political reasons (he had not spoken out against the rule of tyrants), perhaps for personal ones (the corruption of the youth previously mentioned), and only in part because his opinions made the state and its citizens uncomfortable.
The great contemporary battles over free speech are not dissimilar. We accept, in theory, that free speech is necessary for any functioning democracy; in practice, freedom of expression has never been a comfortable virtue to exercise. It’s not about what books one should be allowed to read, or about whether an author is right or wrong—free speech debates go to the heart of exploring any society’s areas of discomfort. Sometimes those have to do with sex and love; often they have to do with religion and faith; and occasionally, the discomfort comes from having one’s implicit beliefs about the society you live in challenged. Sometimes it’s the state that feels under attack, or that will work to protect itself against perceived criticism. But what we attack, as readers in India or the United States, tells us a great deal about what makes us deeply uneasy as human beings.
For two excellent primers on free speech issues, read PEN’s Freedom of Speech is No Offense—a collection of writings on free speech by authors across Britain—or Seagull India’s excellent Censorship series.
In the Germany of 1933, what we refer to now as the Nazi book-burnings began as a student protest, calling for a cleansing, a “Sauberung”. The German Student Association called for “Action against the un-German Spirit”, spoke of a need to “purify” German language and literature against the taint of Jewish intellectualism, and organized a series of book burnings across the country. The schedule was meticulously drawn up: a torchlight procession of students would arrive to parade music, the song ‘Brothers, Forward’ would be sung, and selected books and journals would be burned, followed by a group sing-a-long.
And so did Bertolt Brecht, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, among thousands of others, go to the flames. The list of authors burned is a very revealing list—from Thomas Mann to Erich Marie Remarque, Marcel Proust to Emile Zola and Upton Sinclair, what the young students in Germany were really blocking out was any kind of thought that might oppose Hitler’s doctrines. The Nazi regime depended on its existence on the idea that “pure” German thought and nationalism was under threat; and that the only way to defend the true spirit of Germany was to call for a purge.
Thirteen years later, there would be an unpleasant echo of the Nazi book-burnings, when the Allied troops decided in 1946 to purge about 30,000 books—all “undemocratic, militaristic and Nazi” literature and paintings. The principle was the same; the only difference is that the Allied armies did not continue their purges for as much time as Hitler’s youth.
In India, perhaps the most significant book ban after 1947 was the ban placed on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The ban on the Verses came into force in October 1988, and has never been lifted. The grounds for the ban were that the supposed blasphemy of the novel—where Rushdie uses the “Satanic” verses to explore and attack aspects of Islam, as part of a larger framework where he explores multiculturalism and diasporas—might cause violence in the country.
The logic of the Verses ban seems, at first glance, impeccable. An author has written a novel that is perhaps inflammatory, and that may offend many Muslims—it may even cause those offended, whether Muslim or not, to take to the streets in violence. But the deeper principle at work in the Satanic Verses case was whether India would uphold two basic and linked rights: the right of any citizen or writer to criticize faith in general and a religion in particular (the right to blaspheme, in effect), and the right of ideas that go against the flow of mainstream thought to be protected. Behind the legal ramifications of the Satanic Verses ban lies a simple question: are you free to question religion, or should religion be above question?
The Indian state, like many other democracies, has not made up its mind on the subject. In terms of offence, the rants of the Hindutva rightwing, for instance, or of hardline Muslim preachers, have been far more offensive, and urged listeners on to far more hatred than Rushdie has ever espoused. We are, as a country, sensitive on the subject of religion; in 1956, shortly after Independence, India banned Aubrey Menen’s Rama Retold. Menen’s retelling of the Ramayana was ruled to be scurrilous (it was, deliberately so) and potentially explosive. We are not yet comfortable with the idea that religion can be challenged—and mocked—in fiction.
Other Indian attempts to corral free speech have been largely political in nature. The brief ban on Taslima Nasreen’s Dwikhandito in West Bengal, the recent attempt to pillory Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and to present it as obscene and offensive, the ban on James Laine’s Shivaji—all of these were part of attempts by various political parties to gain mileage. Sometimes, it’s the state’s own broader concerns that come into play, as with Stanley Wolpert’s Nine Hours to Rama—banned because of Wolpert’s revelations about lacunae in the security given to Mahatma Gandhi.
One of the murkier areas for free speech is, for obvious reasons, sex: what is obscene to one person is another one’s liberating read. Ulysses, by James Joyce, was banned on the grounds that it might cause American readers to harbour “impure and lustful” thoughts; Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, was banned in France, and copies were seized in the UK after the Sunday Express called it “sheer unrestrained pornography”.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by DH Lawrence, became the subject of a landmark 1959 trial—against its use of “unprintable words” and the complaint that it was not the kind of book one would wish one’s “wife or servants to read”, the publishers successfully argued that it had literary merit. John Cleland’s cheerfully pornographic Fanny Hill is remarkable for having attracted obscenity suits from 1748 down to 1977, when it was proved to have sufficient “artistic value” to offset Cleland’s memoirs of a courtesan.
Closer to home, Ismat Chughtai’s Lajja (The Quilt) became the subject of an obscenity trial for its depiction of a relationship between two women—but the trial foundered on language; Chughtai had used no explicit terms. Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra was attacked for its sexual content—and for the fact that a woman was writing freely about desire—in the courts of a state known for the vast quantities of pulp Hindi porn it produced.
Perhaps the most fiercely contested areas of free speech have to do with politics. For years, Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter could not be read in South Africa, because her analysis of racial and sexual politics in the country flew in the face of the ruling regime’s lines of thought. George Orwell’s Animal Farm has always made some regimes deeply uncomfortable; countries supportive of Russia would not print it, and in Kenya, it was banned because Orwell’s animal insurrections were seen (correctly) as a criticism of corrupt leaders. In Russia, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s unsparing depiction of life in the gulags—and his extension of the metaphor of the gulag to the whole country—threatened the entire moral basis of the state. The manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago had to be typed in several friends’ houses, in hiding; and had to be smuggled out of the USSR before it could be printed.
And the most absurd instance of a free speech ban was probably the one that operated for years in China on Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll’s classic was placed on the list of dangerous books not for its incendiary content, or for its political ideas, but because “it was disastrous to put animals and human beings at the same level”. This line always calls up an image of an official in the Hunan province, deeply disturbed that Carroll’s Cheshire Cats and caterpillars have shaken up the natural order of the world!
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
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
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
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
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.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
PEN India statement on Rohinton Mistry and Such a Long Journey
(My apologies, this should have been posted earlier; I'm travelling at present.)
PEN Statement on Rohinton Mistry Ban
THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE
20 October 2010
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
The PEN All-India Centre strongly condemns the removal of Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Such A Long Journey, from the SYBA syllabus of the University of Mumbai’s Literature course. We also express our great disappointment at the manner in which politicians belonging to the supposedly centrist and liberal parties, including the Indian National Congress, have consented to this ban, demanded by the scion of a right-wing political party, the Shiv Sena.
...
India has lapsed into the worst kind of competitive populism, with political forces seeking to outdo one another in destroying and banning works of literature, art, theatre and cinema, in the name of an aggrieved religious, ethnic or regional sensibility. Not only does this constitute a betrayal of the liberal Enlightenment ideology that ushered India into postcolonial freedom, but it also makes nonsense of our claim to being a 21st-century society, marked by openness, tolerance of diversity, and respect for the creative imagination.
There is only one name for a society that bans and burns books, tears down paintings, attacks cinema halls, and disrupts theatre performances under the sign of an aggressive chauvinism. ‘Fascist’ is too gentle a description. The exact name is ‘Nazi’. It is a matter of extreme sorrow that Mumbai in 2010 is exactly what Munich and Berlin were in 1935. It is for civil society in our city to decide whether we want to plunge deeper into the abyss of Nazi-style obscurantism, dictatorial oppression and a savage destructiveness towards every impulse that is open, receptive, creative and compassionate -- or whether we shall resist it.
Ranjit Hoskote
Naresh Fernandes
Jerry Pinto
For The Executive Committee
THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE
More links:
The Shiv Sena explains its position via invective. (Suggesting that Rohinton Mistry is a nobody wanting to be a somebody gives you some idea of that party's levels of ignorance):
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-debate/Shiv-Sena-professes-moral-censorship/articleshow/6790779.cms
PEN Canada backs Mistry, asks Mumbai University to reinstate Such a Long Journey on the syllabus: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2010/10/21/pen-mistry.html
PEN Statement on Rohinton Mistry Ban
THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE
20 October 2010
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
The PEN All-India Centre strongly condemns the removal of Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Such A Long Journey, from the SYBA syllabus of the University of Mumbai’s Literature course. We also express our great disappointment at the manner in which politicians belonging to the supposedly centrist and liberal parties, including the Indian National Congress, have consented to this ban, demanded by the scion of a right-wing political party, the Shiv Sena.
...
India has lapsed into the worst kind of competitive populism, with political forces seeking to outdo one another in destroying and banning works of literature, art, theatre and cinema, in the name of an aggrieved religious, ethnic or regional sensibility. Not only does this constitute a betrayal of the liberal Enlightenment ideology that ushered India into postcolonial freedom, but it also makes nonsense of our claim to being a 21st-century society, marked by openness, tolerance of diversity, and respect for the creative imagination.
There is only one name for a society that bans and burns books, tears down paintings, attacks cinema halls, and disrupts theatre performances under the sign of an aggressive chauvinism. ‘Fascist’ is too gentle a description. The exact name is ‘Nazi’. It is a matter of extreme sorrow that Mumbai in 2010 is exactly what Munich and Berlin were in 1935. It is for civil society in our city to decide whether we want to plunge deeper into the abyss of Nazi-style obscurantism, dictatorial oppression and a savage destructiveness towards every impulse that is open, receptive, creative and compassionate -- or whether we shall resist it.
Ranjit Hoskote
Naresh Fernandes
Jerry Pinto
For The Executive Committee
THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE
More links:
The Shiv Sena explains its position via invective. (Suggesting that Rohinton Mistry is a nobody wanting to be a somebody gives you some idea of that party's levels of ignorance):
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-debate/Shiv-Sena-professes-moral-censorship/articleshow/6790779.cms
PEN Canada backs Mistry, asks Mumbai University to reinstate Such a Long Journey on the syllabus: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2010/10/21/pen-mistry.html
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
India: The Rushdie effect--bans, burnings and other acts of censorship since 1988
(Thought I'd put this together for the record; this is incomplete and lacks several citations, for the Saleem Kidwai case, attacks on art galleries and any other book bans that have escaped my notice. I'd welcome additions and corrections. Thanks.)
Sept. 26, 1988: Viking Penguin publishes Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in London.
Oct. 5, 1988: India bans The Satanic Verses.
Feb. 24, 1989 : At least 12 people are killed and 40 wounded when police fire at Muslims rioting in Mumbai against the novel.
July 1993: The Government of Bangladesh bans Taslima Nasreen's Lajja. (Bangladesh will subsequently continue to ban books by Nasreen, most notably her autobiography.)
1997: BBC refused permission to film Midnight's Children in India after state government of Maharashtra expresses reservations.
November 1997: The government of Sri Lanka withdraws filming permission for Midnight's Children from the BBC.
1998: Filmmaker Deepa Mehta receives a death threat after the first screening of Fire. In late 1998, Shiv Sena mobs storm cinema halls in a successful attempt to stop screenings of Fire. Indian film censors withdraw the film from theatres for a second review. After five weeks, the film returns to theatres.
April 26, 1998: Shiv Sena members disrupt and halt a concert by Ustad Ghulam Ali. "We shall not allow any Pakistani singer to perform in India, because no Indian singer was welcomed in that country," says an unnamed Sainik.
May 3, 1998: Shiv Sena members storm the house of artist M F Husain in protest against his painting, Sita Rescued, damaging paintings and property. Thackeray says, "If Husain can conduct himself as he pleases with regard to our gods and goddesses, we won't be averse to entering his house."
1999: Pradeep Dalvi's play, Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy, is banned in the state of Maharashtra. The play is written from the perspective of Gandhi's assassin, Nathuram Godse.
Feb. 4, 1999: India grants Rushdie a visa to return to his native land.
January 2000: A 2,000-strong mob burns down the set in Varanasi where Deepa Mehta's Water is being filmed; it touches on the lives of widows in Varanasi. The Hindutva parties feel that it "shows Hindu culture in a bad light" to depict widows in the manner that Mehta has.
February 2000: The UP government orders filming on Water to cease, saying that it has "provoked civil disorder".
2001: The BJP and the VHP urge their members to burn copies of historian D N Jha's The Myth of the Holy Cow, just before the publication of the book. It is banned by the Hyderabad court on the grounds that "it might hurt religious sentiments".
2002: Film-maker Anand Patwardhan is asked to make 21 cuts in his anti-nuclear film, War and Peace. Patwardhan protests and the courts decree the cuts unconstitutional.
2003: The Indian Censor Board bans Sridhar Rangayan's Gulabi Aina, a film on Indian transsexuals, saying that it is "vulgar and offensive". Rangayan's film is yet to be officially screened in India, but has won several awards worldwide.
June, 2003: James Laine's Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India published in India by Oxford University Press India.
21 November 2003: Oxford University Press India apologised and withdrew the book from the Indian market. (The book continued to be listed in the OUP India catalogue until mid-January, but has since been removed. The book remains in print and available outside India.)
November 2003: The West Bengal government bans Taslima Nasrin's Dwaikhandito on the grounds that its contents could inflame religious passions.
2004: Rakesh Sharma's film Final Solution addresses the 2002 riots in Gujarat and is banned by the film censor board for being "highly provocative". The ban is finally lifted in October 2004.
5 January, 2004: Over 150 activists from the Sambhaji Brigade attacked BORI, ransacking the building, defacing books and artworks, and destroying property.
14 January: Despite the fact that OUP had already withdrawn Laine's book from the Indian market two months earlier, the Maharashtra government moved -- eventually successfully -- to have Laine's book banned, again citing Sections 153 and 153A of the Indian Penal Code.
153. Wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot (...)
153A. Promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony
16 January: Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee speaks out against the book-ban on Shivaji.
March 2004: Gopinath Munde admits that he was wrong to have asked for a ban on Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India, on the grounds that it contained passages derogatory to Shivaji. "I ama politician and not a scholar like Y D Phadke (who was the first to point out that the book said nothing against Shivaji). But there is no change in my party’s stand—it will not tolerate any insult to national heroes like Shivaji."
September 2005: West Bengal High Court overturns the ban against Taslima Nasrin's Dwaikhandito.
March 2006: Advocate Arvind Shrivastava files a case against Husain for allegedly depicting Hindu goddesses in an obscene manner in the Haridwar district court.
February 2008: The UP government bans Jaishree Misra's Rani, a work of historical fiction, on the grounds that it contains "highly objectionable" material about Rani Lakshmibai's personal life--ie, a reference to a (fictionalised) chaste romance between Lakshmibai and a British officer.
March 29, 2009: M F Husain pulls his film Meenaxi--A Tale of Three Cities from cinema halls after protests from Muslim organisations of his word 'Noor' in a qawwali. The All India Ulema Council says it is blasphemous to use "noor", since the word should be employed strictly to describe the divine love of the Prophet. Husain says that to him, "noor" is the light of the Lord that stays with us in the hours of darkness, but withdraws the film.
May 6, 2009: On the orders of a court in Haridwar, Mumbai police begin attaching Husain's property in Bombay, in connection with the March 2006 case against Husain alleging that his paintings of Hindu icons are obscene.
May 2008: The Delhi High Court today dismisses criminal proceedings against M F Husain for allegedly hurting public sentiments by painting obscene pictures of Hindu goddesses. “The matter (allegation) is baseless,” Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul said, while granting relief to the 91-year-old painter.
July 8, 2009: The Chattisgarh state government bans the late Habib Tanvir's play, Charandas Chor, written in Chattisgarhi with a 20-year record of performances in the state, on the grounds that it shows the followers of the Satnami Panth community in a bad light.
August 20, 2009: The Narendra Modi government in Gujarat bans Jaswant Singh's Jinnah-India, Partition, Independence, on the grounds that it tarnishes the image of Sardar Patel.
September 4, 2009: The Gujarat High Court overturns the ban on Jaswant Singh's Jinnah, saying that the State needs to have more respect for the fundamental rights of citizens.
Sept. 26, 1988: Viking Penguin publishes Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in London.
Oct. 5, 1988: India bans The Satanic Verses.
Feb. 24, 1989 : At least 12 people are killed and 40 wounded when police fire at Muslims rioting in Mumbai against the novel.
July 1993: The Government of Bangladesh bans Taslima Nasreen's Lajja. (Bangladesh will subsequently continue to ban books by Nasreen, most notably her autobiography.)
1997: BBC refused permission to film Midnight's Children in India after state government of Maharashtra expresses reservations.
November 1997: The government of Sri Lanka withdraws filming permission for Midnight's Children from the BBC.
1998: Filmmaker Deepa Mehta receives a death threat after the first screening of Fire. In late 1998, Shiv Sena mobs storm cinema halls in a successful attempt to stop screenings of Fire. Indian film censors withdraw the film from theatres for a second review. After five weeks, the film returns to theatres.
April 26, 1998: Shiv Sena members disrupt and halt a concert by Ustad Ghulam Ali. "We shall not allow any Pakistani singer to perform in India, because no Indian singer was welcomed in that country," says an unnamed Sainik.
May 3, 1998: Shiv Sena members storm the house of artist M F Husain in protest against his painting, Sita Rescued, damaging paintings and property. Thackeray says, "If Husain can conduct himself as he pleases with regard to our gods and goddesses, we won't be averse to entering his house."
1999: Pradeep Dalvi's play, Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy, is banned in the state of Maharashtra. The play is written from the perspective of Gandhi's assassin, Nathuram Godse.
Feb. 4, 1999: India grants Rushdie a visa to return to his native land.
January 2000: A 2,000-strong mob burns down the set in Varanasi where Deepa Mehta's Water is being filmed; it touches on the lives of widows in Varanasi. The Hindutva parties feel that it "shows Hindu culture in a bad light" to depict widows in the manner that Mehta has.
February 2000: The UP government orders filming on Water to cease, saying that it has "provoked civil disorder".
2001: The BJP and the VHP urge their members to burn copies of historian D N Jha's The Myth of the Holy Cow, just before the publication of the book. It is banned by the Hyderabad court on the grounds that "it might hurt religious sentiments".
2002: Film-maker Anand Patwardhan is asked to make 21 cuts in his anti-nuclear film, War and Peace. Patwardhan protests and the courts decree the cuts unconstitutional.
2003: The Indian Censor Board bans Sridhar Rangayan's Gulabi Aina, a film on Indian transsexuals, saying that it is "vulgar and offensive". Rangayan's film is yet to be officially screened in India, but has won several awards worldwide.
June, 2003: James Laine's Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India published in India by Oxford University Press India.
21 November 2003: Oxford University Press India apologised and withdrew the book from the Indian market. (The book continued to be listed in the OUP India catalogue until mid-January, but has since been removed. The book remains in print and available outside India.)
November 2003: The West Bengal government bans Taslima Nasrin's Dwaikhandito on the grounds that its contents could inflame religious passions.
2004: Rakesh Sharma's film Final Solution addresses the 2002 riots in Gujarat and is banned by the film censor board for being "highly provocative". The ban is finally lifted in October 2004.
5 January, 2004: Over 150 activists from the Sambhaji Brigade attacked BORI, ransacking the building, defacing books and artworks, and destroying property.
14 January: Despite the fact that OUP had already withdrawn Laine's book from the Indian market two months earlier, the Maharashtra government moved -- eventually successfully -- to have Laine's book banned, again citing Sections 153 and 153A of the Indian Penal Code.
153. Wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot (...)
153A. Promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony
16 January: Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee speaks out against the book-ban on Shivaji.
March 2004: Gopinath Munde admits that he was wrong to have asked for a ban on Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India, on the grounds that it contained passages derogatory to Shivaji. "I ama politician and not a scholar like Y D Phadke (who was the first to point out that the book said nothing against Shivaji). But there is no change in my party’s stand—it will not tolerate any insult to national heroes like Shivaji."
September 2005: West Bengal High Court overturns the ban against Taslima Nasrin's Dwaikhandito.
March 2006: Advocate Arvind Shrivastava files a case against Husain for allegedly depicting Hindu goddesses in an obscene manner in the Haridwar district court.
February 2008: The UP government bans Jaishree Misra's Rani, a work of historical fiction, on the grounds that it contains "highly objectionable" material about Rani Lakshmibai's personal life--ie, a reference to a (fictionalised) chaste romance between Lakshmibai and a British officer.
March 29, 2009: M F Husain pulls his film Meenaxi--A Tale of Three Cities from cinema halls after protests from Muslim organisations of his word 'Noor' in a qawwali. The All India Ulema Council says it is blasphemous to use "noor", since the word should be employed strictly to describe the divine love of the Prophet. Husain says that to him, "noor" is the light of the Lord that stays with us in the hours of darkness, but withdraws the film.
May 6, 2009: On the orders of a court in Haridwar, Mumbai police begin attaching Husain's property in Bombay, in connection with the March 2006 case against Husain alleging that his paintings of Hindu icons are obscene.
May 2008: The Delhi High Court today dismisses criminal proceedings against M F Husain for allegedly hurting public sentiments by painting obscene pictures of Hindu goddesses. “The matter (allegation) is baseless,” Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul said, while granting relief to the 91-year-old painter.
July 8, 2009: The Chattisgarh state government bans the late Habib Tanvir's play, Charandas Chor, written in Chattisgarhi with a 20-year record of performances in the state, on the grounds that it shows the followers of the Satnami Panth community in a bad light.
August 20, 2009: The Narendra Modi government in Gujarat bans Jaswant Singh's Jinnah-India, Partition, Independence, on the grounds that it tarnishes the image of Sardar Patel.
September 4, 2009: The Gujarat High Court overturns the ban on Jaswant Singh's Jinnah, saying that the State needs to have more respect for the fundamental rights of citizens.
The BS Column: Unban the Satanic Verses
(Published in the Business Standard, September 7, 2009)
In less than a month, my country will observe an unusual, and shameful, anniversary: the 21st year of the ban in India on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. In these 21 years, the author has experienced exile, had a fatwa pronounced on him, gone into hiding, had his book burned in several countries.
Short of death, if there’s a price to be paid for writing a controversial book, Salman Rushdie has paid it. But while the Satanic Verses controversy has remained alive in people’s memories, we haven’t yet had a serious debate, citizens-to-state, on a key question: should the ban on the Satanic Verses be challenged and lifted today?
A little background, first. The Satanic Verses was published on September 26, 1988 by Viking in the UK. In the same week, it was nominated for the Booker Prize, though it eventually lost out to Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. On October 5, the Indian government banned all imports of the book under the Customs Act, after two MPs went to Rajiv Gandhi and said that the Verses would create a law-and-order situation.
Rushdie, and many of the early reviewers of the Satanic Verses, maintain that his critics have misread the book. The book’s two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladdin Chamcha, are engaged in trying to make sense of alienation, migration and belonging, more than faith and belief. The key section of the book that continues to provoke offence today is a dream-sequence emanating out of the disturbed mind of Gibreel Farishta, about an imaginary country built of sand where an imaginary prophet, Mahound, examines the “satanic verses” from the Koran.
There is little doubt that the book continues to offend Muslims, and stirs up a debate among non-Muslims on the subject of whether authors should have absolute freedom to criticise and examine religion and religious figures— even if they’re doing it through the medium of fiction or allegory.
To state this even more bluntly, there is little doubt that Rushdie had caused offence. The question is whether it’s a crime— punishable by censorship, book banning, fatwas or other means— to cause offence. Publisher and writer Urvashi Butalia puts it very well when she says that writers are bound by the consequences of their writing and must expect dissent (though not death threats)— but that, if an ordinary citizen were to challenge the ban on Satanic Verses today, she would support that action.
Salil Tripathi, author of Offence: The Hindu Case, says: “If the aim of the ban was to prevent bloodshed, it failed: I was witness to riots in Bombay in February 1989, when a Muslim mob wanted to attack the British Council Library because it was believed the library had the book— which it didn’t. In the riots that followed, several people died. In the years since, the state has failed miserably in protecting the rights of artists or writers— ask M F Husain, Deepa Mehta, Taslima Nasrin, and now Jaswant Singh. The consequence of that first original sin, when the State flinched and banned The Satanic Verses has been severely restricted, narrow discourse. This wasn’t what Tagore intended when he wanted his country to awake into that heaven of freedom.”
Free speech activists point out that you have the right to hold unpopular and unorthodox views— and that the corollary to having free speech is the need to respect the rights of others to their opinions. Asking for the ban on Satanic Verses to be lifted after these 21 years isn’t an option. It’s a duty for anyone who cares about their own right to free speech.
How practical is the lifting of the ban on the Verses today? The fear expressed by ministry officials in 1988 was not that the book itself was inflammatory— it was that passages from the book might be misused by other forces. You might want to ask the Indian state whether it has learned nothing of how to protect itself against these other forces in the last 20 years.
One aim of lifting the ban would be, eventually, to put the Satanic Verses back into stores, and let people make up their own minds on the book— through indifference, through their interest, through debate or dissent. It is possible that, if a legal action was successful and the ban was lifted, publishers and bookshops would still be wary of publishing or carrying the books.
But overturning the ban would be the first step to doing something we haven’t done so far, that is bigger than any one book or any one author— protecting our right as Indians to free speech. What happened 21 years ago pushed us in the direction of becoming more fearful, more regressive; and surely two decades is enough time for us to undo this old injustice.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
The BS Column: The care and feeding of book bans
(This is a longer version of the piece published in the Business Standard, August 25, 2009)
In Delhi’s Coronation Park, you’ll find a circle of empty plinths. These pedestals were intended for the statues of viceroys past, and a few, like Willingdon and Hardinge, have found their perches. But by and large, the crumbling figure of George V presides over a neglected graveyard of pedestal-less statues—the men who ruled India, now abandoned.
Perhaps politicians should be given a mandatory tour of Coronation Park, just to remind them of the futility of trying to keep the past on its pedestal. Propping up the past doesn’t work, either, as Upamanyu Chatterjee noted in English, August, where the cheerfully corrupt sculptor Tamse makes his Gandhi statues from such shoddy materials that the Mahatma must be supported by a bamboo protruding from the rear.
Over the last week, the debate over Jinnah—India, Partition, Independence, the book by former foreign minister Jaswant Singh, resulted in the author’s expulsion from the BJP. In Gujarat, chief minister Narendra Modi announced a statewide ban on the book. He felt Jinnah insulted the memory of Gujarati icon Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel by examining whether the freedom fighter carried some responsibility for Partition. (Someone should remind him that Jinnah, too, was Gujarati.) Proving that stupidity is not a prerogative of any one political party, Congress MPs in Madhya Pradesh asked for a ban on Jinnah—Patel is an icon in Madhya Pradesh too—but the CM in that state (and the Karnataka CM) declined to oblige.
In recent years, the “state ban” rather than the nationwide ban on books has become a symbolic ritual. In 2003, the Left Front government banned Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen’s autobiography, Dwikhandita, for fear that it might offend the Muslim community. (The Kolkata High Court subsequently lifted the ban.)
In 2004, the scholar James Laine discussed Shivaji’s parentage in his book; in an retributive act of carefully planned spontaneous outrage, "defenders" of Shivaji’s reputation sacked the Bhandarkar library in Pune. In the process, they destroyed several historical manuscripts, including rare documents about the life of Shivaji, but the irony of their actions was lost on the mob. Laine’s book was banned in Maharashtra. In 2008, Uttar Pradesh CM Mayawati banned Jaishree Mishra’s Rani, because the book—clearly identified as historical fiction—suggested a romantic friendship between Rani Lakshmibai and a British officer. Very recently, Chattisgarh has banned the Habib Tanvir play Charandas Chor, on the grounds that it "hurts the sentiments" of a particular community. This "hurt" has been discovered after the play has had successful runs for over three decades. The late Tanvir would have been amused at one small point--the play was banned on the eve of a statewide "book reading week".
The state ban crosses all party lines, and one could argue that the practice of banning books was embraced eagerly by a new, free generation of Indians. The British taste in book bans reflected a certain prudishness and insecurity: most books banned under British rule were either sexually explicit or openly seditious.
Post-Independence, books we banned included Aubrey Menen’s gleefully bawdy retelling of the Ramayana (Jawaharlal Nehru felt it might offend Hindus), works by and on Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, and biographies that questioned national leaders (Bertrand Russell’s China book was banned in part because he was scathing about Nehru). Over the decades, it became apparent that freedom of speech was offered, but not guaranteed, in India. If your opinions offended religious sensibilities, or offended our urgent and unexamined need to sanitise national icons, they would be censored.
The banning of a book, especially by a particular state, works wonderfully well in practice. It's much easier to organise a statewide rather than a nationwide ban, and even if the courts overturn the ban a few years later, the political point has been made. It allows politicians to express their willingness to defend a national figure or a religious belief—ignoring the fact that in most cases, that figure or belief is being questioned by the author, not attacked. It keeps the cadres happy, offers fodder for a string of stirring speeches, and is a cheap, easy gesture. The only constituency that is upset is the very narrow band of readers, publishers, and authors. We don’t constitute a vote bank, so our “right” to free speech is effectively irrelevant.
What we do lose with each ban, though, is the right to examine our own history. The bans against Nasreen and Laine had scholars and writers re-examining their work, for fear that they might attract the next ban—or angry mob. Publishing houses should be above the fear of lawsuits, so long as they believe in the author’s honesty and integrity—but many will now avoid anything too controversial. This has a devastating impact on research into the freedom movement, where few will now write about leaders as if they were more than statues on pedestals. And, contrary to what politicians believe, few readers want to read about statues.
The ban on Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah in Gujarat may well be lifted for political reasons. That won’t stop the BJP, or the Left Front, or the Congress from demanding a ban on the next book that happens to “offend people’s sensibilities”.
Perhaps they might profit from considering two outlandish, and ultimately ineffective, book bans. For many years, China banned Alice in Wonderland--because it raised animals to a human level, thereby insulting humankind. If you must ban a book, find a more splendidly moronic reason. More tellingly, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front became one of the most discussed books in Europe after its ban in 1933 because he had “insulted and offended the Wehrmacht”. The Reich rose and fell; Remarque’s books can be found in every German bookstore, even today.
(See also: Banned books in India: 1970s-2006)
And: The Complete Review's coverage of the James Laine/ Shivaji book
Salil Tripathi on the recent ban on Charandas Chor
Mridula and Aditya Mukherjee on the history textbook controversy
Thursday, June 25, 2009
The BS Column: Will you take offence? One cup or two?
(Published in the Business Standard, June 22nd, 2009; this is the longer, uncut version of the piece that appeared in print)
A few years after the ban on Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses in India, I happened to be browsing in a London bookshop.
(*Corrected thanks to Rahul Siddharthan--the original line mentioned incorrectly that Khomeini's fatwa was followed by the Indian government ban. This happened the other way around--the Indian government, sadly, was one of the first to ban Satanic Verses.)
Rushdie’s works were laid out prominently and chronologically. Satanic Verses had its place between The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Seeing it there, on open display, not attracting hordes of enraged rioters, was an uncomfortable reminder of its absence from our lives in India.
For years afterwards, when I looked at my collection of Rushdie’s works, it was the gap in the shelves that glared back at me. A missing piece of Rushdie’s writing history, airbrushed out of existence in India. Twenty years have passed since the fatwa. The ban is still in force, and the original impetus of indignation that led to the underground spread of pirated, badly photostatted copies of the book has died down. At least one generation of Indian readers has grown up knowing all about the Satanic Verses controversy without ever reading a single page of the book.
Perhaps the reason why the Satanic Verses controversy stays alive today is because it tapped into issues that were much larger than a single ban, however unjust, on a single book, however controversial or worthwhile. The big fight over the last twenty years in countries across the world goes beyond censorship, and can be summed up in a simple question: does anyone have the right to offend, or to be offended? And if we do, can we live with the gaps that this might create in our lives—not just the missing books, paintings or films, but the missing ideas?
A collaboration between the Index on Censorship and Seagull Books takes up offence and censorship in two recent series. These are collections of essays, about 10,000-15,000 words in length, that take up “questions of rights, liberties, tolerance, silence, censorship and dissent”.
From the Offence series, the two books that will be of most immediate interest to Indian readers are Kamila Shamsie’s Offence: The Muslim Case and Salil Tripathi’s Offence: The Hindu Case. Shamsie examines the figure of the Offended Muslim and offers a measure of clarity. There is the strongly entrenched perception that “Offence is what happens when Muslims encounter the West”—but she points out that there’s a deeper issue here, that “the name of Islam is invoked over a range of perceived offences, most of them entirely without reference to the non-Muslim world”. She suggests that we recast the matter as religious hardliners versus anti-hardliners, by separating those who advocate violence in the name of religion from those who find violence offensive.
It’s useful to read Shamsie alongside Caspar Melville, who writes in Taking Offence: “We have been encouraged….to believe that we have the right to complain whenever we encounter something we don’t like so long as we can couch it in terms of offence.” So it’s not enough to dislike or disagree with the Satanic Verses; you gain legitimacy and power only by being offended. This is a seductive path—for those of any religion, and any set of beliefs. Melville also notes that the stereotypes of the “free” West versus the more hostile and violent Islamic believers allows the West to conceal its own attacks on free speech.
(Before discussing Salil Tripathi’s book, I should disclose that he has signed a travel book with Tranquebar, where I was formerly employed. However, we have not discussed the Offence series.) Salil Tripathi discusses the Indian state’s dismal record of protecting works of literature, art, cinema and scholarship: “The state takes the easier option of banning (any) work rather than promoting a liberal environment in which a more enlightened discussion is possible.” He continues, “Now Hindus want equal opportunity to be offended.” And why shouldn’t any religion, any special-interest group, want the right to be offended, when the rewards are so great? To be offended is to be rescued from invisibility, to be given a voice, however mean-spirited or illogical that voice might be.
What if the ban on Satanic Verses were to be overturned tomorrow? If you go by the way the Indian state has responded in the past, a large majority of readers would once again be held to ransom by a small, but vocal and possibly violent, minority. This is a source of deep frustration to readers like me. We're trapped: the right of (in most cases) a non-reader to be offended effectively trumps my right, as a reader, to fill that gap in my shelves.
There is also the larger issue of whether the state should be effectively supporting the suppression of a book that, however controversial, chooses to examine religion and belief as just another aspect of the human condition, as open to novelistic exploration as wars, or marriage, or the economy. And what, in the end, is truly more offensive? One author's thoughts and views, expressed in the form of a book that you may or may not choose to read? Or the threats of a mob that has no interest in reading the book or debating the ideas it contains, offering no arguments, only book bonfires, riots and violence to those who might want to read it for themselves?
But the Satanic Verses doesn’t exist in India as a novel, a work of the imagination, any more—it’s become a symbol. If you printed copies of the Satanic Verses with only the title and the author’s name, and blank pages inside, they would still be burned.
Cartoonist Martin Rowson sums it up in Giving Offence: “In the Babel of conflicting human opinions, the right to be offended works out, in practice, as just another tactic to win an argument by compelling your opponent to shut up because what they say is offensive.”
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