'Thank you for your defence of sanity'

Thank you for inviting me here (to the May Sahitya Mela in Davangere). I do not, as a rule, attend literary fests. It is not my circuit. And I am not a Kannada speaker – though my grandmother was a Telugu person from Bellary and she, my mother, and all my many aunts spoke excellent Kannada. In fact, in Chennai where I grew up, they spoke in Kannada whenever they wanted to exclude us children from any conversation.

But this LitFest, I just had to come. I wanted to come. And am honoured to be here. One, because the progressive writers and poets of Karnataka are at the forefront of the struggle to defend freedom of expression. Indeed, the struggle to defend sanity itself. They have fought against the attempts to make language and literature weapons of hatred. They are even today fighting the hypocrisy of re-writing history textbooks – fighting the substitution of history with a totally fabricated mythology. Kannada writers, academics, journalists have paid the ultimate price for the courage of their convictions – like a Gauri Lankesh or a M M Kalburgi.

But I was absolutely sure I wanted to be here when I knew you had invited Nabisaab Killedar, the watermelon vendor from Dharwad, to be part of this LitFest. In simply bringing him to this event, you honour us and yourselves, you honour me, you honour the LitFest, and you honour decency and humanity.

By placing Nabisaab Killedar on your distinguished platform, you try healing a great, gaping wound – one that is every day widened by conscious action. In enabling him to tell us his story, you publicly accuse and expose the vandals who destroyed his livelihood – and those important people behind them – and place them squarely in the dock. Today, you also place Nabisaab’s story before the conscience of this nation.

And you do this in one of our society’s darkest hours. Knowing that there could be consequences to your actions. Oh, writers and poets of Karnataka, your deed cannot but remind me of one of the greatest trials of the late 20th-early 21st century Europe. The wonderful French writer and litterateur Emile Zola authored one of the most widely-read and appreciated newspaper articles of all time. J’accuse (I accuse), published on January 13, 1898, on the front page of the Parisian daily L’Aurore. Written as an open letter to the President of the French Republic, it actually tore into the ruling elite of France of the time.

J’accuse, too, was published in an atmosphere of racism, chauvinism, religious hatred. In it, Zola exposed the frame-up that had cost an innocent soldier and army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, his career, his good name, and his freedom. Accused of treason by the very French army he served so faithfully, Dreyfus was actually paying the price for being a Jew. In Europe then, it was a time of great anti-Semitism. Today, in our time, it is anti-Muslim hatred, in a nation polarised by the active propagation of that hatred.

Dreyfus, in all this hysteria, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1894 and sent off the following year to the most notorious of French prisons – called Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. Zola’s devastating critique of the whole farce led to Dreyfus undergoing a new court-martial in 1899 – where he was again found guilty, but ‘pardoned’ by the President. The elite were wilting under the profound moral power of the great writer’s immortal prose in J’accuse. The debate sparked off by Zola continued. And in 1906, Dreyfus was finally cleared of all wrongdoing by a civilian court. The French army would only declare his innocence in 1995 – more than a hundred years after the frame-up.

Meanwhile, Zola the novelist, journalist, playwright, had to flee France in 1898. He was sued for defamation and criminal libel by the army and sentenced to a year in prison. He was disgraced and removed from The Legion of Honour. (In our country, I’m proud to say, many writers, including several from Karnataka, returned their State honours in the past few years). In 1902, Zola died of carbon monoxide poisoning as the chimney in his London house got blocked. Decades later, a Parisian chimney-sweep and roofer in London would confess to having deliberately blocked the chimney – the act which led to Zola’s death by suffocation, or carbon monoxide poisoning.

At Zola’s burial ceremony back in France, an assassin shot and wounded Alfred Dreyfus, who was there amongst the mourners, wounding his arm with a bullet. A court in Paris acquitted the would-be assassin, accepting his plea that he had only meant to hurt Dreyfus slightly, not to kill him. Does this remind you of anything in our own times?

Today, writers and poets of Karnataka, you are the Emile Zolas of this, our nation. Nabisaab is your Dreyfus. You are trying to restore to him not just his livelihood, but his dignity, his good name, and his faith in his fellow human beings. To the rest of us, you seek to restore our compassion and conscience, decency and humanity.

Thank you for that.

This is why I am here today, so proud to be with and amongst you.

(P Sainath is a senior journalist and Founder-Editor, The People’s Archive of Rural India. The article is an excerpt from his speech at the May Sahitya Mela, held in Davangere on May 27.)