Who’s Afraid of the Written Word?

 

   









 

‘The value of art lies in the love it engenders, not hatred. It’s love that makes books last.’

             Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton

 'It is a dangerous power in the hands of a government; the right to determine what shall be read and what shall not...’

             Jawaharlal Nehru (1929)

The latest furore over censorship in India is at the publisher Penguin India’s decision to withdraw Professor Wendy Doniger’s book ‘The Hindus: An Alternative History’ (Penguin USA 2009, Penguin India 2010) and turn all the existing copies into pulp. Penguin has been fighting a four year law suit against Shiksha Bachao Andalon, an organisation that took umbrage at Professor Doniger’s scholarship and writing as ‘a shallow, distorted and non serious presentation of Hinduism’ riddled with ‘heresies and inaccuracies’. On the grounds of disparaging a religion and culture, the petition comes under Indian Penal Code 153 A (causing enmity between religious groups) and 295 A (deliberate and malicious acts to outrage religious feelings). What is curious and revolting about this outcome is that Prof Doniger’s work notwithstanding her controversial positions has been denied the critical scrutiny it deserves and the upholding of the stifling archaic laws codified under a colonial government and the alarming frequency with which it has been used recently in India to silence works of art and scholarship.

India can ill afford to disavow its history and heritage of tolerance and the presence of a democratic and secular polity. It is a land of a million gods and every four hundred miles or so, a language changes. Its culture has been born and nourished in the silent valleys of its mountains by its tribes as much as on the shingled beaches of the coasts by the merchants and foreigners. Its people have thronged the vast plains, kingdoms have flourished along the twisting banks of epic rivers and its capacious terrain of space and time can accommodate various voices with the munificence of a gracious host. In India everyone is both an insider and an outsider and to nurse a peevish scornful attitude to the other is unfriendly as much as rankle the other severely and ask him to exit without compunction is unworthy. There is nothing fixed and unassailable here except perhaps the loquaciousness of the argumentative Indian that Amartya Sen famously described in the book ‘The Argumentative Indian’. In this land of such vicissitudes, there has also been a capricious mood to be brittle and vicious with someone one does not agree with. 

The fate that met Prof Doniger’s work has its chilling parallels in many works of fact and fiction, that have been shown the exit door from India under three main rubrics- that of offence, obscenity and threatening national security. Two of the laws that support grounds of censorship are codified as is the freedom of free expression, guaranteed as a fundamental right in the Indian Constitution.  The two articles in question are Indian Penal Code (IPC) section 295 A that recommends a punishment of three years of imprisonment or fine or both for insult or attempt to insult as given by ‘deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs by words spoken or written or by signs or visible representations’.  Article 153 A of the IPC  states that ‘promoting enmity between different groups on ground of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language etc by doing acts prejudiced to the maintenance of harmony through words, signs or representation, acts to disturb public tranquillity, organisation of a movement to enforce criminal violence or offence committed in place of worship. Besides these sections often used against artists and writers, the Indian Customs has sweeping powers not to allow any printed material enter the country that they think is objectionable. Together this triad of elements prove dangerous in the hands of intolerant religious and cultural groups and pro-rich privacy laws.

A history of censorship in India in the last century makes the case amply clear. As early as 1930s, when India was still in the throes of colonial government, Katherine Mayo’s ‘The Face of Mother India’ was banned for being a ‘drain inspector’s report’. This string of banning books portraying Indian negatively would become commonplace instead of pointing out shoddy research and partisanship if found any. Then there was the ubiquitous category of ‘salacious content and obscenity’. Arthur Miles’ ‘Land of the Lingam’ went out and so did Bernard Stein’s ‘The Scented Garden’. There were also inexplicable bans on certain books for ‘intemperate expose of the powerful class’ as in Max Wylie’s ‘Hindu Heaven’ and Frank Richards ‘Old Soldier Sahib.’ As Nilanjana Roy describes in her excellent essay on book bans in India, from the 1940s a new category of banned literature came into prominence- that of religious outrage and sedition. Perhaps, it was inevitable in the climate of growing nationalism and the looming partition of India . Post independence, ‘anti national’ journals and specific works of fiction came under the scanner. With the brief flirting with emergency in the mid 1970s, books that ‘misrepresented’ the image of India were also shown the door.  In the beginning of the new millennium however, specific state governments ruled by the ideologies of specific political parties have a strong say in the kinds of books that can circulate in the state. For instance, Jayashree Mishra’s book on Rani Lakshmi Bai did not find favour with the Uttar Pradesh government as was Habib Tanvir’s plays in Chattisgarh. Rohinton Mistry’s ‘Such a long Journey’ found frowning reception in Maharashtra for inaccurately portraying the Maharashtrians.  Arundhati Roy had to fight long court battles to get her Booker winning ‘God of Small Things’ going in many states.

What piques one in the current case is that there was effectively no call for a ban and yet Penguin recanted after four years of legal pursuit.  What is disappointing is that the freedom to imagine and express is curbed and along with it the implicit freedom from fear. What is illuminating is that from the times of Socrates to Jesus Christ to Galilieo, it has always been trials of heresy and wars wrought in the name of religious persecution.  The secular and even anti religious tradition of Boccaccio, Chaucer and Rabelais teaches us that any move that questions our intent also questions our freedom and there are only two positions in this argument. Either you are with the idea of freedom to freely express thoughts, to contest and debate opinion in the private and the public sphere without being afraid of offending anyone. Factual inaccuracies can be countered by scholarship and obfuscation of truth by revelation. Words have to be battled with words, thoughts with thoughts all under the purview of reason and certainly non-violence. This freedom of artistic and intellectual liberty is not a luxury but the life line of progress of human kind, that enrich and clothe their lives with words, dreams and memories. You cannot be coerced to think selectively, act submissively and dream with conformity. There are as many vantage points as there are minds and what is hidden from a view is revealed in another. The secular front that has an open mind cannot be divided, unorganised or indifferent.  It is worth taking a stand for books today because as Heinrich Heine presciently remarked ‘where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.’