#flashreads for free speech/ Feb 14th

Update: Thanks to all those who participated in or started their own #flashreads groups in Delhi, Bangalore, Bombay, Kochi and Kolkata--what we had this year was several small groups of volunteers doing readings in libraries, markets and public parks. Special thanks to our youngest protestor in Delhi, 10-year-old Nikhil, who read from Luka and the Fire of Life.

Some of the suggestions that have come in for next year:

1) make it a larger protest. This wasn't my intention when starting #flashreads, which was meant to be a small and personal way of protesting, but it would be really nice if someone did want to organise it in a bigger way, and if they could raise issues around free speech and censorship in college campuses next year.

2) include more readings from more Indian languages--absolutely, and many thanks to those of you who read from Faiz, Paash, Muktibodh, Gadar and VM Basheer this year.

3) have a Free Speech week, instead of a single day, starting on February 11 (World Free Expression Day) so that this could go beyond just the issue of banned books and censorship.

Just keeping these up here as a reminder--and once again, thanks for your time and your ideas.

(All posters courtesy the generosity of Sanjay Sipahimalani--for all four free speech posters, go to Antiblurbs.)

#flashreads for free speech/ Feb 14th:

THE IDEA: To celebrate free speech and to protest book bans, censorship in the arts and curbs on free expression

WHY FEBRUARY 14TH? For two reasons. In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the death of Salman Rushdie for writing the Satanic Verses. In GB Shaw’’s words: “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”
February 14th or Valentine’s Day has also become a flashpoint in India, a day when protests against “Western culture” by the Shiv Sena have become an annual feature. In Chandigarh, 51 Sena activists were arrested by the police after V-day protests turned violent in 2011. Our hope is to take back the day, and observe it as a day dedicated to the free flow of ideas, speech and expression.

#flashreads is a simple way of registering your protest against the rising intolerance that has spread across India in the last few decades. At any time on February 14th—we suggest 3 pm, but pick a time of your convenience—go out with a friend or a group of friends and do a quick reading. If you'd like some suggestions/ selected passages, here's a link to some short passages. If you want more and longer selections, email me or leave a message on twitter.com/nilanjanaroy, and we'll send you a selection. Or pick your favourite passage on free speech, or passages from a challenged book or the works of any writer who has faced sedition charges, a book ban or other forms of censorship.



One way to do an effective #flashreads is to work like a traditional #flashmob: with a group of three-ten friends, select what you're going to read in advance, and do the reading without announcement in a place like a Metro station, the area outside Dilli Haat, the open spaces in malls, each person picking up from the previous reader. Have fun.

Places where you might do public readings: subway and Metro stations, public parks, coffee shops, open areas in malls. If you’re talking about Flashreads on Twitter, please use the #flashreads hashtag.

If you have a blog, a tumblr or a website, an easy way to join in is to post Tagore’s poem, “Where the mind is without fear” (see below) on your site for a day, or choose any other passage on free speech/ censorship that appeals to you. Or write a post about free expression and what it's meant to you in your own life.

Where the mind is without fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

~Rabindranath Tagore

The "free" in free speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also read: From Chandni Chowk to China: Salil Tripathi

India's Authoritarian Lapse: Salil Tripathi

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

#TheInsecureIndian: Samar Halarnkar

Open Letter to Shashi Tharoor: Gaurav Sabnis

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!

The BS Column: Silenced in Burma

(Published in the Business Standard, November 12, 2010)

At the height of Stalin’s rule, Mikhail Bulgakov was learning an aspect of the craft of writing that is rarely taught in creative writing courses today: the art of outwitting the censor. This practice, well-known to all writers who live under dictatorships, could lead to bizarre leaps of creativity.

In his 1925 Heart of a Dog, for instance, Bulgakov created the tale of a scientist who transplants human organs into the body of a dog called Sharik, who then becomes more and more human as the book unfolds. The donor of the organs is a drunk called Chugunkin; this was considered bold nomenclature on Bulgakov’s part, because Chugunkin translates as “iron”, which was seen as a reference to Stalin (“man of steel”).

In a similar vein, consider one of the most famous literary controversies in contemporary China. In 1978, the poet Bei Dao wrote a poem that contained these lines: “Life. The sun rises too.” Chinese officials spent a great deal of time analyzing and dissecting these lines—were they a reference to the “red sun” of Mao Tsetsung? If so, Bei Dao was being deeply critical of Mao; if not, it was just another innocuous poet’s metaphor. The journal founded by Bei Dao, Jintian, was shut down in 1980, when Beijing decided it had had enough of dealing with potentially subversive lyricism.

Just a few months before Dawa Aung San Suu Kyi was released from her 15-year term of house arrest in Myanmar, where the regime has held ‘The Lady’ in effective imprisonment, there was a small, sad but heartening news story in the Burmese press. In July, an unnamed 14-year-old boy was arrested in Rangoon for hawking copies of Suu Kyi’s Freedom From Fear, which is banned in Burma. He was also selling a book by pro-democracy dissident Win Tin, who was imprisoned for 19 years and wrote about his experiences in, “What’s that? Human hell?” which was promptly banned on its release.

The boy’s fate is unknown; but the reports of his arrest pointed to the fact that the military dictatorship in Myanmar has been unable to suppress the appetite in the country for the writings of Suu Kyi, Win Tin and other writers, like Pascal Khoo-Thwe.
Khoo-Thwe and Aung San Suu Kyi have never veiled their writings. Khoo-Thwe’s Land of Green Ghosts is, like so many other works of Burmese literature, not available within Myanmar. His account of the history of Burma was a straightforward narrative, uncensored and open. Suu Kyi’s hard-hitting and mesmerizing Letters From Burma were written for a Japanese newspaper, and has been in print since its 1998 publication in the West. Along with Freedom From Fear, it is one of the most celebrated and revered “missing” books in Myanmar, and despite the efforts of the military junta, samizdat copies continue to circulate.

The history of her father, General Aung San, and his writings, have been more fraught. In the 1990s, references to Aung San began to be edited out of the country’s textbooks: the second weapon of dictatorships and military regimes, after censorship, is erasure. Editing textbooks is a classic way of manipulating history—do it for two generations, and you have succeeded in changing a country’s memory of its own past.

Among the list of guidelines handed down to Burmese printers and publishers in 1975—guidelines that continue to dictate what may and may not be published—is this blanket provision: “Any incorrect ideas or opinions which do not accord with the times.” Put that together with the prohibition on publishing “anything detrimental to the Burmese Socialist Program”, and that leaves very little in the way of “acceptable” writing.

In this climate, censorship becomes a theatre of the absurd. Travelling in Burma, Emma Larkin writes in Secret Histories of the wry joke about George Orwell’s “Burmese books”. Intellectuals and scholars jest that Orwell didn’t write one novel about the country but three—Burmese Days, Animal Farm and 1984.

Give censors a free hand, and as in Stalin’s time, the absurdities begin to take on a bizarre life of their own. One of the more famous cases of censorship cited concerns an anthology of short stories published in the 1990s. This was a volume of stories put together in tribute to the writer MoMo (Inya), who had died in 1990. On the cover was an image of MoMo’s head, embossed on a gold medallion. In 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Though none of the stories in the anthology in MoMo’s honour concerned Aung San, the publishers were directed to cover up the image of the medallion. The regime feared that readers would be reminded of Aung San’s Nobel win—and so the book was finally published, with a strip of gold paper pasted over the features of the writer it honoured.

The BS column: Imagining Shivaji

It was in 2003-2004 that a minor academic work by the scholar James Laine set off a fierce, orchestrated campaign of political protests that led to the state banning of a book, threats to the author and other Shivaji scholars and the ransacking of the BORI library in Pune by members of the then little-known Sambhaji Brigade.
In the wake of the recent Supreme Court judgement overturning the ban on Laine’s Shivaji, two things are very clear. The first is that the Shivaji case is no longer about free speech, but about complex political reactions. And the second is that the Shivaji case goes beyond just free speech and free expression; at the heart of Laine’s continuing travails is the question of what we’re free to think and explore in contemporary India.

The Supreme Court judgement turns on an apparently minor point: can an act (Section 153A) that invokes the possibility of censorship in cases where religious sentiments may be hurt apply to a great historical figure who is, however, neither a prophet nor a God? The Maharashtra government was forced to admit that Shivaji, however great a Maratha hero he might be, is not a religious figure, and the state ban on the publication of James Laine’s Shivaji was overturned on this technicality.

The judgement has caused a political storm. Various rightwing Hindutva parties have protested and threatened violence; Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan has announced that his party shares “public sentiments” on the sanctity of Shivaji and may not endorse the SC judgment. This is a red herring: given the track record of Indian publishers and booksellers, few of them are likely to demonstrate the moral courage required to put the James Laine book back in stores.

In this debate, free speech is invoked only cursorily; and the phrase “offended sentiments” is reflexively, thoughtlessly invoked—in 2010, the Laine case is all about the political battle, not the censorship issues.

The ostensible reason for the protests and the thuggish violence that led to the 2004 ban on the book was a brief section in Laine’s work that reported the “naughty” tradition of speculation on Shivaji’s parentage. But what was really at work was a question of ownership of the Shivaji legend and franchise. James Laine asks: “Can one imagine a narrative of Shivaji's life in which, for example: Shivaji had an unhappy family life? Shivaji had a harem? Shivaji was uninterested in the religion of bhakti saints? Shivaji's personal ambition was to build a kingdom, not liberate a nation?”

These points were pounced upon as evidence that Laine was a “sensationalist” historian, seeking more readers. But when we speak of defending free speech, it is this question that is really at the heart of current free speech and censorship debates in India.

Political parties often frame free speech in strictly negative terms: no one should have the right to offend or harm the sentiments of an (undefined) public. The alternative to this line of thinking would be: “Everyone should have the right to engage in debate, intellectual exploration or questioning, however uncomfortable this process of debate may be, so long as it is not malicious.”

Few political parties in contemporary India have ever thought deeply about the implications of curtailing—or supporting—free speech, which is why we’ve seen a process of death by deification where it comes to understanding the lives and times of our national leaders.

If you look more carefully at Laine’s argument, it gives you a better understanding of the ban, the violence, and the current unrest after the Supreme Court judgement. What Laine, in his naivete, is really asking is this: are we free to step away from a rigid, politically defined way of looking at a great historical figure, be it Shivaji, Nehru, Sardar Patel or Mahatma Gandhi, and examine the more human, and to him, more complex and rich, narrative around that figure?

Gandhi is an exception: in his inconvenient fashion, the Father of the Nation aired his life with such ruthless honesty and such thoroughness that he is impossible to sanitise beyond a certain point. But with other historical figures, especially those being claimed by the Hindu rightwing as Shivaji currently is, the answer to that question is a blunt no. We’re not free to imagine the life of Shivaji within the perspective of his own times, or to see him as a human subject to human biases—because that open narrative is directly threatening to the present-day mythology of Shivaji.

And this is what makes the Laine case so crucial. The Supreme Court has upheld free speech, if on a technicality. Political parties, in contrast, are unlikely to see the importance of allowing the imagination and contemporary scholarship to remain free. Step away from Laine for a moment: the larger question is, are we free to write, or imagine, an honest, questioning history of some of the most important historical figures in India? At present, the answer to that is, unfortunately, no.

From the archives: The power of offence

(This is an old piece, written and published in August 2007. Posting it chiefly for my personal records.)


When an author, artist or a film-maker is attacked, the assumption most people make is that the assailants hate the person in question. This is not true.



Most assailants, whether they are bigots, religious fundamentalists, old-world conservatives or merely unemployed, have good reason to love the objects of their wrath. Without an M F Husain to offend their sensibilities, entire cadres of a certain political party would be out of business. Without a Taslima Nasreen, obscure Muslim clerics and little-known political organizations would never get their 15 minutes of fame.



The assault on Taslima Nasreen happened at a book launch in Hyderabad on 8 August, when three MLAs from the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) disrupted the event by shouting threats and attempting to physically attack the author. This has been followed by a general baying for Nasreen's blood by Muslim clerics in Calcutta, the revival of a fatwa against her, and the offer of sums ranging from Rs 50,000 (for anyone who can blacken Nasreen's face) to Rs 1,00,000 and "unlimited", but unspecified, rewards for anyone who kills her.



Nasreen, who has been unsuccessfully seeking asylum in India ever since her writings provoked the wrath of religious fundamentalists in Bangladesh, has remained calm. Her tourist visa has just been reissued, allowing her to stay in this country for another six months, and she has announced that she is contemplating a sequel to Lajja, the book that turned her into a permanent exile.



Think of similar incidents of this nature--an assault on a filmmaker (the attack on Deepa Mehta, the recent disruption of a screening of Anand Patwardhan's War and Peace) or the banning of a book (Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses) and look at the manner in which we react in India.



The first reaction is a furious debate over the work itself. After sixty years of Independence, we are not yet comfortable, in our democracy, with the idea that freedom of speech is an absolute freedom, and that artistic freedom is essential. So our reactions, even "liberal" reactions, are nervous, often tentative. There's nothing wrong with Deepa Mehta's film on Hindu widows, but what if it provokes violence, how can we be responsible for that? Of course Salman Rushdie has the right to think freely as a novelist, but his work has after all offended religious sentiments, shouldn't he have been more responsible? Taslima Nasreen is free to suggest that religions oppress women and that the holy book of the faith she was born into is obsolete, but shouldn't she have expected strong reactions?



"Responsibility" is seen as an authorial function: few people see that those who may be offended have an equal responsibility, which is to set out their arguments in a way that at the very least, does not include physical violence.



All of this sends out a very strong message to writers and other creative artists: you are free to write whatever you want, provided you are willing to bear the consequences alone and unprotected by the might of the state.



The way we really feel about writers—our own and those who have come to a free, democratic country in search of shelter—can be seen in what we do not do. The people who make death threats are often powerful. They may be religious or political leaders who wield considerable force and influence. But they are also citizens of this country, and in theory at least, subject to the laws of this land. If you make a death threat in a public forum, you should be arrested. If you attack another citizen who has done you no physical harm, you should be arrested. If you threaten to hold an entire country to ransom by declaring that you will unleash violent mobs if a particular painting is not destroyed, if a particular book is not banned, if a particular author is not silenced, you and your mobs should be arrested as a danger to common citizens.



How often, in these sixty years of this independence that we pride ourselves on, have we seen the real culprits punished? How often, instead, have we effectively licensed and condoned the right of those whose "sentiments have been offended" to extract retribution?



The weakest argument, not from a moral but from a logical standpoint, is that of the religious fundamentalists—of any religion. If you believe as a matter of faith that a certain book is blasphemous, and therefore dangerous for the faithful to read, then you have a simple solution. Tell the faithful that they must not read it. If they are truly faithful, they will obey, and be saved from the perdition you fear for them. If they are not of the faith, or have lapsed in their faith, then to read a blasphemous book will only damn them a little bit further. That is really, as a mindful officer of the faith, none of your business—your only concern is to ensure the obedience of the faithful.



Leave the rest of us, writers and readers, alone.

Speaking Volumes: Faith and free speech

(Published in the Business Standard, March 30, 2010)

“As for Jesus, there isn't any single Jesus. There are Jesuses and Jesuses and Jesuses and Jesuses.”
Harold Bloom, in a 2005 interview for his book, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine.







Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ is part of Canongate’s excellent Myths series. Pullman is better known as the author of the controversial His Dark Materials trilogy for children, and his sceptic’s view of Christianity and faith have often caused controversy. Before the publication of The Good Man Jesus, he had already attracted hate mail from the faithful.

Strictly speaking, Pullman’s perspective in The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ is that of the heretic, not the blasphemer. His fictionalized rendering of the Gospels creates a twin brother for Jesus—the scoundrel Christ—who tempts Jesus in the wilderness, rewrites and manipulates his story, and will ultimately engineer his betrayal. Not so long ago, Pullman would have been cast out of the Church for his writings; and just a few centuries ago, he would have been introduced to either the stake or the torturer.

The world’s great religions have an ebb and flow in their levels of tolerance. Pullman may be denounced from the modern-day pulpit we call the TV talk show, and his mailbox will probably carry the whiff of brimstone for a while. But he is unlikely to have to face down death threats, permanent bans on his book or howling mobs. If you take a look at how the world’s major religions have handled an author’s right to express his/ her own, possibly even blasphemous, views on faith and religion, it seems that the three major faiths are in very different places.

Christianity: In 1960, when Nikos Kazantzakis published The Last Temptation of Christ, there were still six years to go before the Pope would formally abolish the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The Church’s official index of prohibited books had last been updated in 1948, and Christianity’s history of relative tolerance is very newly minted indeed. Calls for book bans in the US still come chiefly from the Bible Belt, and Pullman, like Kazantzakis before him, is likely to trigger fierce reactions. The Last Temptation was a narrative of Christ’s life from the perspective of a fallible, human Jesus; it remains one of the great literary works of its time, but was banned on several occasions.

Islam: Perhaps no religion has been more strongly involved in the free speech-versus-faith debate than Islam. True believers argue that their religion is often misunderstood and misrepresented, and the debate over who has the right to speak for the faithful is a thorny one. Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was not approved of by many Muslims; but few believers would defend Rushdie’s right to explore the Satanic verses of the Koran in literary form, or his right to create his own version of the Prophet. Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja triggered death threats from Islamic fundamentalists, and sent the author into exile.

The stereotype of the Islamic reaction to any kind of literary or artistic dissection of the faith is exaggerated, especially in the West. But in this century, the fanatic fringe of Islam have been more willing to use violence—mob violence, bombings, death threats and fatwas—than most other believers. In the same period, research into the origins of the Koran has grown—and it seems necessary for modern-day Islam to find and create the space for debate rather than violence, which is ultimately just an extreme refusal to engage in debate.

Hinduism: In 1997, it was still possible for Kiran Nagarkar to write Cuckold—which dissected the relationship between Mirabai and Krishna from the point of view of Mirabai’s cuckolded husband—without attracting consequences more damaging than heated debate. And back in the 1970s, Gore Vidal’s admittedly bizarre Kalki could create a cult leader who claimed to be the final avatar of Vishnu, without consequence. Much of the protests from fanatic Hindus have focused on academic works since then—but there have also been very few works of fiction that question Hindu beliefs. Scholars such as DN Jha, James Laine and Wendy Doniger have been repeatedly attacked by what Ashok Malik calls “a collective of the intellectually inadequate, the professionally frustrated and the plain bigoted”, who “represent the collapse of Hindu politico-intellectual space into a caricature of the very Talibanism it opposes”.

Three religions, three evolving approaches to artistic freedom and tolerance. As the Pullman protests gather force this week, perhaps the path for readers to follow would be the Buddhist path—mindful engagement, an abjuration of violence and an awareness of the impermanence of both skepticism and fanaticism. At least, I can't remember the last time there was a Buddhist fatwa.

The Pather Panchali complaint

(Written in October 2006 for the Hindustan Times)



Here are two of the more curious phrases you might Google for: "insulting being a Turk" and "Kiran Desai sari".

In February 2005, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk said in an interview, "Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody dares to talk about it." To say that Turkey is sensitive on this subject is an understatement. Anti-French protests erupted in the country this week after France's lawmakers passed a bill making it a crime to deny that the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during World War I amounted to genocide.

Some months after Pamuk's 2005 interview, Turkey's parliament introduced a new penal code. Article 301 made it a crime for any citizen to insult "being a Turk", and Article 301/3 stated: "Where insulting being a Turk is committed by a Turkish citizen in a foreign country, the penalty…shall be increased by one third." Pamuk, who had been forced to leave Turkey briefly because of the vehemence of the protests against him, was charged retroactively for "insulting being a Turk" and returned to face the charges. Thankfully, the case was dropped before it came to trial in January 2006.

For those of us who had followed Pamuk's writings from the early days of The White Castle and The Black Book to the more recent My Name is Red, Istanbul and Snow, the trial played out like scenes from an absurdist drama.

In many ways, Pamuk exemplifies the "rooted" writer. He speaks fluent English, but writes chiefly in Turkish. His first novel, the monumental Cevdet Bey and His Sons, traces the history of modern Turkey through three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family, and on Pamuk's own request, has never been translated into English.

In Istanbul, his dense and rather beautiful biography of the city, he writes: "I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets and neighbourhoods of my childhood…. Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul—these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots, but through rootlessness; mine, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am."

And yet, this most interestingly "Turkish" of writers, this man who has explored his country's history with passion and curiosity and its present with unflinching openness elicits complex reactions at "home". Reading Turkish newspaper reports about Pamuk over the last year, I was struck by how often he was castigated for his "arrogance", admonished for coming across as “superior”;—even when the reporter was sympathetic to him. Long before the genocide controversy, his success had made him suspect. “When my sales went up my welcome from the Turkish literary scene disappeared,” he told The Guardian once. He cannot be accused of being less than Turkish; but he is often accused of “belittling national values”, of “writing the wrong things”, in short, of insulting Turkishness.

Anxiety, suspicion of an author’s success, the urge to “correct” an author who is giving the “wrong impression” of his country, accusations of “arrogance” or of “distance”—but surely none of this could sound familiar in the Indian literary context? Consider the fascinating case of Kiran Desai’s sari.

When Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, it didn’t occur to me to question what she wore to the ceremony. I’m in the minority. Fox News and several other agencies reported, erroneously, that Kiran Desai wore “a traditional Indian sari”. Desai mentioned that her mother--writer Anita Desai--had told her to wear a sari, a family heirloom, but it was too transparent, so she settled for a dress instead.

On net forums, the symbolism of the sari-versus-the-dress was ruthlessly deconstructed--as indeed it was in this paper—surely this was a signal that Inheritance of Loss was meant not for a local, Indian audience, but for a wider, Western audience. I found both Fox’s reaction (Indian woman wins, ergo she must have been wearing a sari) and local reactions (what message was she sending out, by not wearing a sari) telling in their assumptions.

Desai’s book shifts between locales—the Kalimpong of the ‘80s, the grim underbelly of immigrant New York, a racist, inhospitable England dealing with its first flux of educated immigrants, the Indian village of Piphit adjusting clumsily to its first Western-returned local boy.

Desai, who still holds an Indian passport, once said that she cannot help seeing everything “through the lens” of her Indianness. She chose to write about the 1980s, she said in an interview with The Hindu, because that was the India that was most familiar to her, the place where she lived until she was 14 or 15: ”I find myself at a disadvantage because India has changed, moved on. I go every year, yet the subject belongs to Indian authors living in India.”

Just as Pamuk is questioned about whether he is the right kind of Turkish writer, Desai’s Booker win has raised a kind of anxiety in India. Is she writing as an “outsider”? (Hell, no.) Is her win a triumph for the ”diasporic” writer at the expense of the local, Indian kind?

Among a small group of NRIs, I hear what you might call the Pather Panchali complaint, in memory of those who excoriated Ray for making films about the “wrong” India. And why, when India is, as we all know, shining so brightly you can barely see what lies behind that hard, brassy light, would she write a passage like this, from the perspective of an Indian cook’s son struggling to survive as an immigrant worker in New York’s restaurants?

From other kitchens, [Biju] was learning what the world thought of Indians:
In Tanzania, if they could, they would throw them out like they did in Uganda.
In Madagascar, if they could, they would throw them out.
In Nigeria, if they could, they would throw them out.
In Fiji, if they could, they would throw them out.
In China, they hate them.
In Hong Kong.
In Germany.
In Italy.
In Japan.
In Guam.
In Singapore.
Burma.
South Africa. They don’t like them.

In Guadeloupe—they love us there?
No.

Nations make terrible readers, and nationalism is a blinkered guide to literature. To read Pamuk through the lens of nationalism, you must discard his beguiling imagination, the merciless clarity of his prose, the feverish intensity with which he blends the everyday with the fantastic, the complexity of his characters, the subtle nuances—tension, repulsion, fascination, tenderness—that hold east and west together and apart. In fact, you would lose everything that is essential about his writings.

If you see Kiran Desai through a set of applied labels—Plain Vanilla Indian, Diasporic Indian, Alienated Diasporic Non-Sari-Wearing Anti-National Indian, Good Little Prize-Winning Successful Indian—you miss the generous spirit, the humour, the sharp dissections of globalization, the deep understanding she brings to the figure of the outsider, the subtle crafting of her prose.

Writers belong to nations by accident and by default, but the only country that can really hold them is the borderless country of the imagination. We diminish ourselves as readers every time we forget that.