‘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.’
