[Article for the thehoot on the Jaipur Literary Festival 2012]Over the last few weeks, as everyone geared up for the largest literary festival in Asia, speculations had been rife regarding the presence of Salman Rushdie at the Jaipur Literary Festival 2012. Unfortunately, on the eve of the second day of the festival, we were informed by the festival authorities that the author ofThe Satanic Verses would not be able to grace us with his company due to a security hassle.
When
Rushdie tweeted that he had been informed about the Mumbai mafia coming down to
the fest venue to assassinate him and thus would give it a miss, the attending
intellectuals came down on the festival organisers for failing to
give Rushdie the requisite protection facilities. Coincidentally, the phrase
“freedom of expression” turned out to be the
most discussed human right in the talks of the second day of JLF
2012. Rushdie’s shadow had arrived to haunt us.
Tata Steel Front Lawns was the venue
of an animated discussion on 'Creativity, Censorship and Dissent'amongst Siddhartha Gigoo, Tahmima Anam,
Prasoon Joshi, Charu Nivedita, Cheran; it was
moderated by Shoma Chaudhury. While every author condemned the recent
instance of curbing of one’s right to voice one’s opinion, the problem of
censorship was carefully dissected in the context of various communities and
whether instances of censorship can afford for us valuable sociological lessons
regarding the state and its subjects.
Cheran, who writes on the Sri Lankan
Tamil diaspora, answered most of the questions with
personal anecdotes and his views provided the listeners with two pertinent social problems
allied to the notion of censoring literature - the diminishing readership of
books and the censorship promoted by the “intelligentsia”.
Cheran doesn’t face censorship among
speakers of his mother tongue or the language in which he writes. In fact, his
fame rests on the Malayali translations of his works. What is lamentable is
that no one reads Tamil literature anymore, and this amounts to an absence of
censorship of Cheran’s works in the Tamil literary world.
Picking up from Cheran’s argument,
Bangladeshi writer Tahmima Aman raised
a vital point that not only does censorship reflect the State in its most fragile
condition in dealing with its subjects but it also amounts to books being read,
driving people away from the lure of the distracting world wide web/e-books and back to the good old
paperback or hardcover editions. Cheran lamented the way in which the intellectuals at a university
had come down upon a play he had directed and the conservative culture that’s
still in vogue in Tamil Nadu.
Prasoon Joshi, on being asked why
enough subversive films aren’t
being made in Bollywood, came up with an interesting suggestion for film
makers. They should not
just throw in cuss words randomly into the script or lyrics or show a couple of
explicit scenes just to be subversive. Instead, subversion should occur at the
level of plot. He elaborated by saying that
the plot should deal with social issues of a subversive nature.
My most memorable incident from this
session was the two questions raised by the co-founder of Bangalore Slut Walks. She asked whether
an author should seek to be self censoring or should censoring (if at all)
happen on the basis of its “consequences,” i.e.-the
socio-political response to a text that is being read. Secondly,
she wanted to know how authors struggle to balance a personal experience
against the over-bearing responsibility of being politically correct. Owing to
a shortage of time, the listeners never found out the answers to these two
questions.
Next, I simultaneously attended, two talks, one which saw Amy
Chua defending her new book “Tiger Mothers” and
the other, a very informative debate between Gandhians and Ambedkarites.
Amy Chua argued as to why her text should not be read as a self-help manual but as a satirical take on the plight of a Chinese-American
woman’s dilemma in bringing up a second generation. She shared her views on how
people pass judgment on texts without ever having read them.
This tied up nicely with a widely
agreed with comment made by Shoma Chaudhury during the session at Tata Steel Front Lawns. Most
people who condemned Rushdie’s misfortune hadn’t read the text for which he had
been banned and the audience seemed only too eager to agree. No one urged any publisher
or author to launch a campaign for the re-publishing of The Satanic Verses.
It is this idea of reading literature
and closely following a
particular history of a nation closely which enlivened the discussion amongst Joseph Lelyveld, MJ Akbar,
Sunil Khilnani, Aruna Roy, S. Anand; it was moderated by Urvashi Butalia. While S. Anand’s acerbic
attacks on the JLF organisers have attracted the mass media’s attention, most of us have forgotten to
notice that a pertinent aspect of “freedom of expression” was spelled out in
this discussion. That “freedom of expression” should not amount to the hearing
of a handful of voices (the leaders of a movement who may be removed from the
ground root struggles of his followers) andthat only a section of society condemns
censorship of certain texts as long as it doesn’t harm their vested political
interests. This talk actually made one wonder whether all the hue and cry over censorship doesn’t stem from a widespread
ignorance about the multi-ethnic fabric which composes modern society.
After having waited
over an hour for A.C. Grayling to arrive and “defend” the European Enlightenment, I was surprised to hear him speak
about the fallibility of reason, its wielder-man, and scepticism which empowers
an individual to question widely held dogmas. Freedom of expression was one of
the fundamental outlooks of the European Enlightenment, as suggested by Grayling. Steven Pinker
nuanced this argument further by
suggesting that being rational in the judgment of things, even while
freely expressing or questioning certain dogmas, one must see to a proportion being maintained
between the critic’s emotions and her/ his reasoning faculty. Every individual who questions dogma must distinguish between the things he can
criticise and the inevitable biological truths which if criticised, might purport to an offensive value-less
remark.
This seemed like a perfect nugget of thought to call into
question some of the language problems discussed in the session on ‘Inglish,
Amlish, Hinglish: The Chutneyfication of English'. Here, Rita Kothari, Tarun
Tejpal, Ruchir Joshi were in conversation with Ira Pande. Freedom of expression
doesn’t only refer to the content of one’s argument but also the form in which the argument is presented to the listener.
Arguably, most speakers seemed to agree
that the chutneyfication of English has benefitted both languages and that
changing times necessitate changing modes of communication. Hindi has not stayed stagnant,
it has modified itself to accommodate the consciousness of a fragmented and
geographically widespread Indian society. Some sixty years back, this kind of
expressive capability would have seemed impossible to imagine.
