As somebody with strong links to Bengaluru, and as an imminent full-time resident, it’s hard to not see the cancelling of comedian Munawar Faruqui’s show as an assault not only on constitutional rights, but also an affront to the city’s mores.
Many Bengaluru-lovers drone on about its chilled-out, diverse ethos. But cities, like people, have their own versions of who they are, and these are often misleading. Like people, cities deceive themselves before deceiving others. Bombay, where I grew up, didn’t bat an eyelid before becoming Mumbai after the riots of the early 1990s. Indeed, all the social and political schisms were in place for its plurality to plummet. Over the last few years, with women revellers getting molested during New Year’s Eve in the heart of town, the killing of a firebrand editor, and now the censorship and dog-whistle against a young comedian, Bengaluru’s supposed openness lies in dregs as it joins other Indian metros where myriad toxicities abound.
Due to regular threats and insults to him and his kin, Munawar Faruqui declared in a trenchant Tweet that he would cease being a comic -- the artist had lost and hate and injustice had won. Kunal Kamra, too, has had his shows in Bengaluru snipped. At this time, one wishes performers, entertainers and artists do not, should not, must not, lose hope. In the past, in India and abroad, artists have parlayed the oppression they faced into creative work. Perumal Murugan, one of India’s great storytellers, declared that the writer within him died in 2015, when caste groups pressured and criticised his novel One Part Woman for showing them in a poor light in rural Tamil Nadu. Yet, he returned to writing, with verse and prose.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Saadat Hasan Manto was sued for obscenity in British India and Pakistan. He said he wrote what he saw and didn’t pull his punches. His stories, letters and prose only got better through those white-heat years. “A writer picks up his pen only when his sensibility is hurt,” he told a judge then.
Urdu writer Ismat Chugtai shook up Muslim conservatives of her time with the rock-the-boat story Lihaaf. Manto and Chugtai were saying things that needed to be said about our social realities and our inhuman social structures that required confronting. A slew of writers, artists, filmmakers during Mao and later Deng’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union or Franco’s Spain found varying ways to show us their truths. George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 are essays on oppression masquerading as fiction. The Indian press gets well-earned flak for its role during the Indian Emergency, yet there were bands within it that found subversive ways to speak the truth at the time.
Some of our stand-up comics are too talented and courageous to remain silent about the everyday circus, farce, tragedy, called India, for too long. There’s no doubt that Munawar Faruqui has been singled out due to his name and the faith he belongs to. What if he is as critical of his faith as anything else? How come we have been made to see not him, but his religious identity only?
Salman Rushdie once said that it takes a lot of effort to get offended by something, especially a piece of written work. For those who do get offended, there is the constitutional right to not engage with something. If you don’t like a film or show or book, don’t see it, or read it. Nobody is forcing anyone to watch a stand-up act. Oddly, though, all these questions relating to oppression have the potential to be sublimated into art. No matter how tough it may be right now, our stand-up comedians mustn’t lose this opportunity to convert their privations into humour and art.