JOIN USCensorship and its insidious faces
Freedom of expression is every human being’s birthright and it should not only be guarded zealously but also practised faithfully. Every right comes with a responsibility and so is the case even with freedom of expression.
But Rushdie episode exposes the insidious faces of censorship that operates not just on the surface but also exists as a silent simmering undercurrent in the subterranean social structures.
What happened in the past few weeks was nothing short of censorship in its most virulent form. The banning of Rushdie is a case in point of how various forces try to manipulate and crush free and critical thinking.
The banning of Rushdie’s novel itself was ridiculous but stopping his entry for the Jaipur literary festival just to appease some bigots will be remembered as a blot on Indian political parties stooping to rake in petty political gains.
The vacillation of political parties apart, the sinister impact of the entire episode throws up a lot more deeper questions of how expression of thoughts is being strangulated and banned.
The issue is not as simplistic as it is made out; in fact deeper questions which had lain buried in our contemporary society has once again surfaced to haunt all those who attempt to grapple and try to unravel the unseen forces that operate, influence and mould the psyche of society.
When a writer or a novelist or a poet tries to depict or analyse critically a social reality or a social phenomenon or for that matter try to re-interpret a mythological work, then it is but natural that certain sections deriving or extracting benefits from a moribund warped interpretation, show animosity and hostility.
Thin dividing line
The line between true explorations of human or social consciousness through realistic presentation and a deliberate crass depiction to humiliate or demean in the world of art is no doubt thin. Take for example erotic art. There is a vast difference between the sublimity in erotic art and sheer crass titillating pornographic visuals that has one primary aim: demean sensuality to a crass level and act as a feeder to voyeuristic tendencies.
This sharp difference is also there between a writer with inclination towards realistic school of writing using swear words and by those writers who deliberately infuse it as a publicity gimmick.
It is an irony that while lewd and obscene gestures, words and songs sprinkled without any context in a film gets the nod from the establishment and the religious clergy, a radical interpretation or serious work of literature trying to open a new window of thought gets slammed as being “blasphemous.”
Rushdie’s case is just one incident in the long list of the powers that go around throttling thoughts that jolt the consciousness from a stupor or provide a deeper insight into social phenomenon. In fact, a study of laws and political-economic processes reveals a sub-textual fear towards the idea of nurturing freedom for dissenting thoughts.
Multi-censorship
And it is not just through banning of books that censorship operates. It operates more subtly through political-economic processes. Jaipur Lit Fest is itself an example of censorship slithering through manufacturing larger-than-life size images of three-pence English writers who themselves in private sneer at their own work and consider it “trash.”
The so-called literary festival hardly has representation of indigenous languages from India itself. It may be a colonial hangover but it is also a silent strangulation of thoughts, ideas, perspectives of the natives. There are hardly writers, poets or thinkers from China, Far East, Africa or Latin America.
The literary festival discreetly enforces the dominance of English language writers by excluding writers from other languages. This censorship is covertly insidious. It is a silent murder of languages. And if on one hand, there is a silent genocide of indigenous languages then the multinational publishers through the dictatorship of money are also hyper-marketing spectacles through which only one world-view is refracted.
As told to Prabhat Sharan
(Prof Dixit is former Head of Hindi Dept, St Xavier’s College, Mumbai and a Hindi novelist, litterateur and screenplay writer.)
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