Living in India, as all Indians know, is a daily struggle between you and your God. If you’re poor, it’s for survival; if you’re not, it’s for the patience to deal with the lack of fundamental civic services and civil liberties. Through it all, we ask that perennially pesky question to our Maker that can best be paraphrased as: ‘What’s it all about?’ If you’ve been following the Jaipur Literary Festival fracas, you may partly have an answer to that question: It’s all about politics. To have ushered in 2012 and still live in a country that bans books seems to herald some kind of disturbance in the space-time continuum; it’s too absurd to be real.
But the reactions to Salman Rushdie not being able to go to the JLF, and four writers who read from ‘The Satanic Verses being hounded out of the city, that’s so real it’s absurd. Interestingly, one of the writers, the wonderfully-excitable and ever-articulate author Ruchir Joshi says The Satanic Verses is, “All kinds of hodge-podge, some of it brilliant story-telling and word-play, some of it stodge, some of it dull polemic about religion and belief”. But it is as a means to an end that the book is used, not for the merits or otherwise of its prose, or the old chestnut about “hurting religious sentiments”.
Manu Joseph, editor of Open magazine, gives an insight into that: “Rushdie has the right to visit India,” he says on Open’s website. “But what is more important is that he has the right to blasphemy. … The issue is Rushdie’s right to offend Muslims, and Hindus, and Christians, and everybody. That is at the heart of freedom of speech, and that is the most important freedom literature demands from the world.”
How ironic that JLF Directors William Dalrymple, Namita Gokhale and producer Sanjoy Roy don’t understand something so basic. If publishers only handled books that did not offend, the only paper we would be dealing with would be the toilet roll as we mused in the loo. Mused about the story of Pontius Pilate calling for a bowl of water so that he would have no responsibility for crucifying people – read out to us at some underground meeting by rebels because, of course, the Bible would have been banned. Dalrymple, Gokhale and Roy, instead of protecting the rights of their invited authors and not just trying to protect themselves, slapped Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil and Ruchir Joshi with documents which they had to sign absolving the festival from all responsibility for reading parts of a banned book.
Hari Kunzru explains on his website: “A lawyer appeared (the son-in-law of Namita Gokhale) who closeted himself with the festival organizers. He drafted a statement, which we were asked to sign, making clear that the festival was not responsible for our actions. It was left to my friend Sara Chamberlain to find someone to provide legal advice to me.”
Dalrymple, Gokhale and Roy spoke about the Constitution, they spoke about the 60,000 visitors there, they spoke about security, but for some reason it all appeared like steam wafting off a collapsing souffle just at the very moment it needed to rise to the occasion. We can understand the need for the festival show to carry on, even the hard work that goes behind getting it off the ground every year, but the organisers’ unholy rush to distance themselves from those who were upholding the freedom of a writer to write…unconscionable.
“I do not want to allow the enemies of free speech to close this festival,” Dalrymple has explained since in an interview. Apparently, he doesn’t need them.
The law, by the way, states that while you cannot import The Satanic Verses to India, you can certainly read from pages printed off the Internet which comes under the IT Act – as stated by a Supreme Court lawyer in the January 24 edition of The Hindu.
This idea of India lives on
Sunil Khilnani was in Jaipur and I point this out because he is the one who reiterated another fundamental law in his mandatory reading ‘The Idea of India’: That this is one of the few countries where the State does not protect its citizens. Not the State, and not individuals who should have your back. In fact, the longer you live in India, you learn to be less yourself, less passionate, less idealistic, less hopeful. The only way to fight that, and we must fight that if we want to be more ourselves, may be one person at a time standing up for what is right; at Jaipur we had four. Thankfully, there are others who feel the same way.
As we speak, literary critic Nilanjana Roy is organising signatures to un-ban The Satanic Verses, and publishers are standing behind their writers who are under attack. A fifth person read a paragraph from The Satanic Verses. BJP MP Balbir Punj says in The New Sunday Express that “what sticks out in this…controversy is the silence of the lambs, the secular crowd…not one of them has spoken out or asserted that India is a democracy where different opinions have the right to be not just spoken but promoted.”
This is the real issue of Rushdie/Jaipur/the Four. We have a situation now, as Praveen Swami says in The Hindu, (http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article2817926.ec) where “the rule of law has been contracted-out to god’s agents”. Today, it’s Rushdie, yesterday it was Husain, tomorrow it will be You.
In the end, though, one thinks of Rushdie. In the many hate tweets he has received, one said how apt the title of his banned book was because it “was written by Satan”. Apart from smiling at the sweet naivete that imagines the existence of hell (maybe it’s true, because reading lines like that certainly makes you believe in hellspawn), one can only wonder what life has been like for Rushdie since 1989. Yet he has managed to retain his humour, his creativity and his zest for life. We should honour him just for that.
Although religion is a non-issue in the Jaipur affair, the real focus is the UP elections, considering how potent the former is as a weapon, perhaps the last words belong to Praveen Swami: “No sensible person ought argue….that some purpose is served by buttressing the faith of adults in djinns, immaculate conceptions, or armies of monkeys engineering trans-oceanic bridges. It is legitimate for individuals to believe that cow-urine might cure their cancer — not for the State to subsidise this life-threatening fantasy.”
Other life-threatening fantasies? One person on Twitter warbled something on the lines of: “Of course this is all an anti-Muslim movement. It is no surprise that all four authors are Hindu.”
It would be funny but that tinge of mob mentality based on anything but fact is also depressing. So the only question that remains is: ‘What’s it all about?’
Sheba Thayil is a journalist and writer. She was born in Bombay, brought up in Hong Kong, and exiled to Bangalore. While editing, writing and working in varied places like The Economic Times, Gulf Daily News, New Indian Express and Cosmopolitan, it is the movies and books, she says, that have always sustained her. She blogs at http://shebathayil.blogspot.com/