In a distressing pattern that has come to define the fate of publishing in India, another book whimsically determined to have transgressed cultural sensitivities, has been withdrawn from circulation. Bowing to the diktats of a Delhi-based Hindutva group, Penguin Books India has agreed, in an out-of court- settlement, to recall, pulp and destroy all copies of Indologist Wendy Doniger’s 2009 bestseller, The Hindus: An Alternative History . The trouble for Penguin Books started with a 2010 legal notice by a Hindu fundamentalist group, Shiksha Bachao Andolan, asking that the publisher and the author unconditionally apologise for the book and withdraw it. By 2013 Penguin Books was enmeshed in a legal maze, fighting a civil suit as well as two criminal complaints. Penguin Books is an international publishing giant with a record of standing its ground in the face of the worst intimidation. As Kenan Malik pointed out in an article in The Hindu , the same publisher had shown exemplary courage in the defence of The Satantic Verses , arguing that what was at stake was the future of free speech itself.
Against this sterling backdrop, and given its not inconsiderable resources, Penguin was unarguably in a position to fight a longer legal battle in defence of Wendy Doniger’s right to be read, and by implication the right of every Indian to choose what she wants to read. That the publisher allowed itself to be browbeaten into submission by a little-known outfit that saw no contradiction in its own sweeping slander of the author — among other things, the petitioner called her “sex hungry” — is a comment on the illiberalism incrementally taking India in its sweep. To an extent this was unavoidable because the churn in Indian politics was inevitably leading to a heightened awareness about community identities and group rights. However, sensibilities have become so susceptible to hurt that virtually anything written can be contested and asked to be withdrawn. The intolerance, visible especially on the social media, is towards anything seen as modern and forward-looking, with the unofficial censors assuming the right to attack and abuse at will. This twin intimidation — of censorship combined with licence — has flourished all the more in a political environment increasingly supportive of moral policing and guilty of an almost kneejerk willingness to ban books. The Maharashtra government banned Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India , under pressure from vandals who attacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in protest. More recently, cartoon depictions of B.R. Ambedkar had to be withdrawn from NCERT text-books. A quarter century after The Satanic Verses , the written word seems to be more and more under threat.
Penguin’s decision spotlights other books that met with similar fate
Penguin India’s decision to withdraw from the Indian market and pulp the remaining copies of American-Indologist Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History has brought the spotlight on other books which met with a similar fate because of lawsuits.
According to the Indian chapter of PEN International, a global community of writers across 100 countries, at least four books have gone the same route in recent years: Siddharth Deb’s The Beautiful and The Damned , Jitender Bhargava’s The Descent of Air India , Tamal Bandyopadhyay’s Sahara: The Untold Story and the English translation of The Red Saree , a book on Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhi parivar.
Written originally in Spanish by Javier Moro, the English translation of The Red Saree was slapped with a defamation suit by the Congress in 2009.
Deb’s book was published without its first chapter on management guru Arindam Chaudhuri because of a defamation case filed by the Indian Institute of Planning and Management.
Bloomsbury India withdrew Bhargava’s book after Union Minister Praful Patel “obstructed its distribution” and served a legal notice, alleging the contents were defamatory. And, in the case of Bandyopadhyay’s book, the Sahara Group got a stay on its publication from the Calcutta High Court, and the case is still pending.
Mr. Bhargava told The Hindu that Bloomsbury, on which also the notice was served, decided not to pursue the case and instead agreed to offer an apology to Mr. Patel. “This decision of Bloomsbury was unilateral, and without discussing with me, as an author.” He said he would get his book published either on his own or through a new publisher.
Expressing concern at Penguin’s decision, Pen India said: “Choosing to settle the matter out of court, instead of challenging an adverse judgement, narrows India’s intellectual discourse and significantly undermines freedom of expression.
What does it mean to ban a book in 2014?
By now it’s too familiar a story to be surprising: a writer writes a book (often with years of slogging and painstaking research); someone—an individual, but often an individual claiming to represent a certain community—finds something about the book offensive or harmful (morally, sexually, politically, religiously, financially, and pretty much in any other manner). The hurt brigade takes the writer and the publisher to the court. The book gets banned: the exact legal clause could vary but, basically, bookshops stop selling, or even showcasing, that book.
So this time it’s Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, a fat scholarly book that credited the contribution of women, oppressed castes and others (including animals) to Hinduism, entities that often find no place in a sanitized upper caste storytelling of this ancient religion. In 2011, a retired school principal named Dinanath Batra, who felt Doniger’s approach to Hinduism was “jaundiced”, filed a civil lawsuit in Saket district court against the author and the publisher, Penguin India. Ironically, or may be not so ironically, the book-cover carries endorsements by well-known Indian writers who have written on religion: Sudhir Kakkar, Gurucharan Das, Pankaj Mishra.
On February 10, news spread in the social media that Penguin India had agreed to withdraw all published copies (and to destroy all remaining copies) of this critically acclaimed book after an out-of-court settlement between Penguin India and Batra’s NGO, Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti.
Penguin India is yet to issue any clarification on what forced the publishing giant to suddenly submit to the whims of a virtually unknown group of men and women with their simple-minded, puritanical interpretation of the book (and who threatened violence if their demands were not met). Or why Penguin India didn’t take the matter to a higher court: after all, it wasn’t just about a book, but against a culture of book bans.
Only two weeks ago, another book met a similar fate: The Descent of Air India by Jitender Bhargava. This book, to put it very shortly, told the story of how the former aviation minister, Praful Patel, meticulously planned and swiftly executed the demise of the government-run Air India. In this case, too, the publisher, Bloomsbury India, chickened out: "If the contents of the book have caused any embarrassment to Mr Patel, we sincerely regret... it was never our intention to discredit him in any manner."
Bloomsbury didn’t think it important to discuss the matter with Bhargava before issuing the apology. Bhargava said "everything stated in the book is true, based on documents", and that he will have the book reprinted "either on my own or through a new publisher".
There are others, too: two years ago it was Siddharth Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, which carried a profile of IIPM head Arindam Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri didn’t just file a suit against Deb, publisher Penguin India, and The Caravan magazine that carried an excerpt, he went on sue even Google India whose cache contained the relevant chapter.
Unfortunately, in all these cases, the bullies, acting as the hurt party, have met with a common failure: anyone who wants to read either of these books has been able to find one: the e-book of The Hindus can be easily downloaded from one of the many blogs (even from Facebook and Twitter links); everyone who wants to read the rather brilliant profile of Arindam Chaudhuri in Deb’s book can find a copy on the web (in fact, some pages can be read on Amazon, too); as for Bhargava, he has himself promised to release the e-book in the next few weeks.
Banning a book could have many benefits: political and religious gains, masochism, ego boost, etcetera etcetera. But in 2014—not very far from a time when a Kindle containing any thousand e-books of one’s choice would be cheaper than a single print copy—only the people least in tune with technological changes on planet earth would ban a book thinking no one would be able to procure a copy. No one can stop, as the great political economist Joseph Schumpeter once said, the “perennial gale of creative destruction”.
My advice for the retired school principal is, therefore, hopelessly old and simple: Rather than banning The Hindus, why don’t you, beloved sir, write a book—preferably a better book—that would expose the hypocrisies, biases and the “jaundiced” approach of Wendy Doniger? Let the real Hindu in you grab the opportunity of a lifetime.
So this time it’s Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, a fat scholarly book that credited the contribution of women, oppressed castes and others (including animals) to Hinduism, entities that often find no place in a sanitized upper caste storytelling of this ancient religion. In 2011, a retired school principal named Dinanath Batra, who felt Doniger’s approach to Hinduism was “jaundiced”, filed a civil lawsuit in Saket district court against the author and the publisher, Penguin India. Ironically, or may be not so ironically, the book-cover carries endorsements by well-known Indian writers who have written on religion: Sudhir Kakkar, Gurucharan Das, Pankaj Mishra.
On February 10, news spread in the social media that Penguin India had agreed to withdraw all published copies (and to destroy all remaining copies) of this critically acclaimed book after an out-of-court settlement between Penguin India and Batra’s NGO, Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti.
Penguin India is yet to issue any clarification on what forced the publishing giant to suddenly submit to the whims of a virtually unknown group of men and women with their simple-minded, puritanical interpretation of the book (and who threatened violence if their demands were not met). Or why Penguin India didn’t take the matter to a higher court: after all, it wasn’t just about a book, but against a culture of book bans.
Only two weeks ago, another book met a similar fate: The Descent of Air India by Jitender Bhargava. This book, to put it very shortly, told the story of how the former aviation minister, Praful Patel, meticulously planned and swiftly executed the demise of the government-run Air India. In this case, too, the publisher, Bloomsbury India, chickened out: "If the contents of the book have caused any embarrassment to Mr Patel, we sincerely regret... it was never our intention to discredit him in any manner."
Bloomsbury didn’t think it important to discuss the matter with Bhargava before issuing the apology. Bhargava said "everything stated in the book is true, based on documents", and that he will have the book reprinted "either on my own or through a new publisher".
There are others, too: two years ago it was Siddharth Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, which carried a profile of IIPM head Arindam Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri didn’t just file a suit against Deb, publisher Penguin India, and The Caravan magazine that carried an excerpt, he went on sue even Google India whose cache contained the relevant chapter.
Unfortunately, in all these cases, the bullies, acting as the hurt party, have met with a common failure: anyone who wants to read either of these books has been able to find one: the e-book of The Hindus can be easily downloaded from one of the many blogs (even from Facebook and Twitter links); everyone who wants to read the rather brilliant profile of Arindam Chaudhuri in Deb’s book can find a copy on the web (in fact, some pages can be read on Amazon, too); as for Bhargava, he has himself promised to release the e-book in the next few weeks.
Banning a book could have many benefits: political and religious gains, masochism, ego boost, etcetera etcetera. But in 2014—not very far from a time when a Kindle containing any thousand e-books of one’s choice would be cheaper than a single print copy—only the people least in tune with technological changes on planet earth would ban a book thinking no one would be able to procure a copy. No one can stop, as the great political economist Joseph Schumpeter once said, the “perennial gale of creative destruction”.
My advice for the retired school principal is, therefore, hopelessly old and simple: Rather than banning The Hindus, why don’t you, beloved sir, write a book—preferably a better book—that would expose the hypocrisies, biases and the “jaundiced” approach of Wendy Doniger? Let the real Hindu in you grab the opportunity of a lifetime.
No Bans, No Censorship
The decision by Penguin India to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History and pulp the remaining copies follows an out-of-court settlement of Penguin India with Siksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, a little known organisation led by a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh activist, well known for his role in the introduction of Hindutva distortions in school textbooks during the prime ministership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. What has been particularly shocking is the manner in which the publisher has conceded to these outrageous demands without even fighting them in the sessions court. As various commentators have pointed out, such surrender by a well-known and financially capable publisher has dangerous implications. It sets a (semi-legal) precedent, it emboldens the extremists and it pushes authors and other publishers towards self-censorship.
It is now, unfortunately, becoming all too common for publishers to bow to blackmail, both legal as well as extralegal, and withdraw books. Just some weeks ago, Union Minister for Heavy Industries Praful Patel forced Bloomsbury to withdraw Jitender Bhargava’s The Descent of Air India which argued that Patel was responsible for the financial and operational troubles of the national carrier. In both these instances, the formal legality of the action hid the coarse extralegal pressure which remained like the proverbial elephant in the room. In the case of Doniger’s book the unsaid was the very real possibility of violence against the publisher, bookshops, and even authors and institutions who may have collaborated with Doniger as happened in the case of James Laine, to “avenge” whose book on Shivaji the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute was vandalised. In a context where Narendra Modi is apparently politically in the ascendance, it is easy to frighten publishing houses which are also big businesses. In the case of Bhargava, it seems obvious that the publishers did not want to pick a fight with a powerful union minister.
That a prominent minister in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government could arm-twist a publisher to withdraw a book which criticises him, is a particularly galling finale to the way the fundamental right to the freedom of expression has been attacked under its watch. In the decade that the UPA has been in power, there has been a steady and dangerous erosion of this right. On one side are the acts of omission like the inability to protect and defend an artist like M F Hussain and authors James Laine and Taslima Nasreen, and the unwillingness to resist demands by different extremist groups claiming “hurt sentiments”. On the other side has been the UPA government’s acts of commission in corralling speech and expression within ever tighter legal restrictions, like the laws which criminalise expression on the internet, the increasing number of requests to block websites and the creation of a surveillance system for mobile and online communications.
It is this which has created an atmosphere where it becomes so easy for demands for bans and censorships of books, paintings, films, etc, to be made so successfully. What Penguin India and Bloomsbury have demonstrated is that a couple of decades after Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was blocked in India (technically it was only a ban on importing the book), it does not even need actual violence or the threat of violence for the government or publisher to buckle.
As Wendy Doniger has pointed out in her statement, it is the threat of criminal prosecution which weakens the stand of the authors and publishers. India has rightfully, like most democracies, made hate speech a criminal offence. However, our judiciary has interpreted this to include any statement which “hurts the sentiments” of a community, while being unpardonably lax in punishing actions which actually hurt and kill members of a community, particularly those who are minorities or marginalised. Under the present interpretation of “hurt sentiments”, B R Ambedkar would be sharing a prison cell for his Riddles of Hinduism with D D Kosambi for his Myth and Reality.
While the governments in India have always been willing to give into demands for protecting “hurt sentiments”, it is after the unfortunate decision by the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government to ban The Satanic Verses that this trend has strengthened. It needs to be remembered that there was hardly any demand for its ban or protest against its contents by Muslims in India or elsewhere. It was on the assumption of non-Muslims that Muslim sentiments will be hurt that the book was banned, an act which led to other countries like Pakistan and Iran taking even stronger action against the book and its author in a dismal show of grandstanding. There has been no effort by governments to reverse this trend and various organisations claiming to represent Hindu, Muslim, Christian and other community sentiments have come forward with demands against various paintings, films, books, songs, etc. The violence, which has often followed, and the threats of violence have never been resisted, other than by small civil society organisations. The governments and the courts have shown what can only be called a criminal neglect towards the need to uphold the freedom of speech.
This bodes ill for the health of democracy and secularism. It is necessary that the laws regarding hate speech are given a clearer and precise interpretation. It is also necessary that threats to freedom of speech and expression need to be punished and not tolerated. We need laws which will hold our governments and police liable for failing to protect the citizen’s fundamental rights; we need the Supreme Court to intervene and clarify the conditions under which the right to freedom of speech can be curtailed. Otherwise we can soon bid goodbye to this fundamental right.
Withdrawal of Doniger book highlights sway of Taliban-like forces in India
The withdrawal of scholar Wendy Doniger's bookThe Hindus highlights shrinking freedom of speech in India — and more. That Doniger's critics — led by 84-year-old Dinanath Batra of the perversely named Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, followed by Vishwa Hindu Parishad — expressed annoyance at her book by launching an indefatigable legal campaign won't surprise many. Hindutva's ideologues have led often violent movements to ban works of art and academia — like MF Husain's paintings and James Laine's book on Shivaji.
What is surprising is Doniger's publishers, Penguin India, buckling and agreeing to pulp her book. This reflects the growing power of bullying self-appointed censors, with governments, politicians and courts seldom standing in their way. If the law is trying to protect religious sentiment, the irony is that it is Doniger's work — not Batra's — that celebrates Hinduism. She appears to make the case that sex was treated by Hinduism as a natural, beautiful part of life, not to be treated with guilt and shame as Semitic religions may demand. This can hardly be construed as an attack on Hinduism. But by attacking Doniger's work for discussing sensuality in Hindu life, her opponents display a Victorian hangover with a Taliban temperament. Persistent attacks like these, and supineness of authorities, raise the question whether democracy — and India's future as a nation-state — can survive without freedom of expression.
For an answer, look to Pakistan. Indian laws which forbid offence to any religion mimic Pakistan's notorious blasphemy laws, and Hindutva is perhaps the only force in the world driven by Pakistan envy today. If we go down the path of hurt sentiments and incentivising professional offence takers, we will soon have no defence left against the radicalism tearing Pakistan apart.
Our fear of freedom: Doniger's is just the latest case of courts, publishers, politicians failing to protect artistic rights
It was from that fast-moving vehicle of hot news, Twitter, that i heard that my publishers, Penguin, had capitulated to a litigant in the district court of Saket who had demanded that they pulp Wendy Doniger's book The Hindus. The news was depressing, but not unexpected — some years ago, another of my publishers, Oxford University Press, had likewise submitted to the litigant in a lower court and withdrawn an essay by the late A K Ramanujan from circulation.
Doniger and Ramanujan are among the finest scholars of our religious and cultural traditions. They have enriched India's understanding of itself in a manner few other writers have. It is a sad commentary on the state of our nation, that a bunch of narrow-minded bigots (claiming to speak in the name of 'Hinduism') can so easily have their well-researched, very readable, and deeply insightful works banned or burnt.
Both Penguin and OUP have deep pockets. One would have expected, and hoped, that they would have appealed in a higher court to have the freedom of expression of their esteemed authors restored. Why did they not do so?
One reason could be that they wished to cut their losses. Another is that both Doniger and Ramanujan are (or were) academics in American universities. Had they been prominent Indian scholars, the resultant furore might have persuaded the publishers to fight out their corner.
The third and perhaps the most important reason why these famous, well funded, and well established publishers are so scared to defend the rights of their best authors is that the Government of India as well as governments of different states of the Union do not really believe in intellectual freedom. For politicians of different parties have shown themselves very willing to ban books and persecute authors.
The first, and arguably fundamental, mistake in this regard was the decision by Rajiv Gandhi's government in 1989 to ban Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses on the grounds that it offended 'Muslim sentiment' (India, in fact, banned Rushdie's book even before Iranians and Pakistanis had done so). At the time, historian Dharma Kumar wrote that the ban was "a sign of the government's weakness. In a secular state blasphemy should not in itself be a cognizable offence; the President of India is not the defender of any nor of all faiths".
Rajiv Gandhi's pusillanimous act emboldened the bigots of all religions (and regions). In Maharashtra, chauvinists took aim at James Laine, whose scholarly study of Shivaji they deemed not deferential or reverential enough. They forced the state government to ban the book, while also vandalising the premises of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, whose collections Laine had used for his study.
The government ban on Laine's Shivaji was overturned by the high court. But the publishers (OUP) were still too scared to stock or sell the book. They feared that their offices would be attacked by goons, with police (as is their wont) merely looking on.
In this respect, atheistic communists have not been far behind religious chauvinists. The Left Front government of West Bengal banned the works of Taslima Nasreen, merely because a few angry men had claimed they were 'unIslamic'. Nasreen had been exiled from her native Bangladesh, and naturally wished to be based in a Bengali-speaking region of India. But the communists refused even to provide protection for her in Kolkata, so that she had to leave the city to seek refuge elsewhere.
In this regard, Hindu bigots have matched, and perhaps even outperformed, their Islamic counterparts. Before they trained their guns on Ramanujan and Doniger, they had set about persecuting Maqbool Fida Husain. Exhibitions of his work were vandalised in several cities. Then, in a malevolent, systematically orchestrated campaign, a series of cases were filed against him in many different locations. In desperation, Husain moved overseas. India's best-loved painter had been forced to flee his homeland.
How can this trend of persecution and harassment be reversed? It would help if the lower courts do not so recklessly entertain cases so clearly mala fide in intent. It would also help if at least the bigger publishers show more courage in the face of intimidation. And it would help most of all if the political class shows some commitment to upholding the ideals of free expression enshrined in the Constitution.
The first two seem unlikely, and so, regrettably, does the last. In December 2006, when Husain was still alive, i wrote an article suggesting that, in the next Republic Day awards, he be given the Bharat Ratna, with Salman Rushdie being simultaneously honoured with the Padma Vibhushan. That would have been a just assessment of their respective contributions to art and literature, as well as a blow for artistic freedom. And it would have equally offended Hindu and Islamic bigots.
My proposal did not fly, because the government of Manmohan Singh lacked not just courage, but also imagination. And future governments (and prime ministers) are likely to be as unimaginative, and perhaps even more nervous of offending fundamentalists. For the foreseeable future, India's democratic record will continue to be tarnished by the capitulation of courts, publishers and politicians to religious bigots and chauvinists.
Withdrawal of Doniger book highlights sway of Taliban-like forces in India
The withdrawal of scholar Wendy Doniger's bookThe Hindus highlights shrinking freedom of speech in India — and more. That Doniger's critics — led by 84-year-old Dinanath Batra of the perversely named Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, followed by Vishwa Hindu Parishad — expressed annoyance at her book by launching an indefatigable legal campaign won't surprise many. Hindutva's ideologues have led often violent movements to ban works of art and academia — like MF Husain's paintings and James Laine's book on Shivaji.
What is surprising is Doniger's publishers, Penguin India, buckling and agreeing to pulp her book. This reflects the growing power of bullying self-appointed censors, with governments, politicians and courts seldom standing in their way. If the law is trying to protect religious sentiment, the irony is that it is Doniger's work — not Batra's — that celebrates Hinduism. She appears to make the case that sex was treated by Hinduism as a natural, beautiful part of life, not to be treated with guilt and shame as Semitic religions may demand. This can hardly be construed as an attack on Hinduism. But by attacking Doniger's work for discussing sensuality in Hindu life, her opponents display a Victorian hangover with a Taliban temperament. Persistent attacks like these, and supineness of authorities, raise the question whether democracy — and India's future as a nation-state — can survive without freedom of expression.
For an answer, look to Pakistan. Indian laws which forbid offence to any religion mimic Pakistan's notorious blasphemy laws, and Hindutva is perhaps the only force in the world driven by Pakistan envy today. If we go down the path of hurt sentiments and incentivising professional offence takers, we will soon have no defence left against the radicalism tearing Pakistan apart.
Our fear of freedom: Doniger's is just the latest case of courts, publishers, politicians failing to protect artistic rights
It was from that fast-moving vehicle of hot news, Twitter, that i heard that my publishers, Penguin, had capitulated to a litigant in the district court of Saket who had demanded that they pulp Wendy Doniger's book The Hindus. The news was depressing, but not unexpected — some years ago, another of my publishers, Oxford University Press, had likewise submitted to the litigant in a lower court and withdrawn an essay by the late A K Ramanujan from circulation.
Doniger and Ramanujan are among the finest scholars of our religious and cultural traditions. They have enriched India's understanding of itself in a manner few other writers have. It is a sad commentary on the state of our nation, that a bunch of narrow-minded bigots (claiming to speak in the name of 'Hinduism') can so easily have their well-researched, very readable, and deeply insightful works banned or burnt.
Both Penguin and OUP have deep pockets. One would have expected, and hoped, that they would have appealed in a higher court to have the freedom of expression of their esteemed authors restored. Why did they not do so?
One reason could be that they wished to cut their losses. Another is that both Doniger and Ramanujan are (or were) academics in American universities. Had they been prominent Indian scholars, the resultant furore might have persuaded the publishers to fight out their corner.
The third and perhaps the most important reason why these famous, well funded, and well established publishers are so scared to defend the rights of their best authors is that the Government of India as well as governments of different states of the Union do not really believe in intellectual freedom. For politicians of different parties have shown themselves very willing to ban books and persecute authors.
The first, and arguably fundamental, mistake in this regard was the decision by Rajiv Gandhi's government in 1989 to ban Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses on the grounds that it offended 'Muslim sentiment' (India, in fact, banned Rushdie's book even before Iranians and Pakistanis had done so). At the time, historian Dharma Kumar wrote that the ban was "a sign of the government's weakness. In a secular state blasphemy should not in itself be a cognizable offence; the President of India is not the defender of any nor of all faiths".
Rajiv Gandhi's pusillanimous act emboldened the bigots of all religions (and regions). In Maharashtra, chauvinists took aim at James Laine, whose scholarly study of Shivaji they deemed not deferential or reverential enough. They forced the state government to ban the book, while also vandalising the premises of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, whose collections Laine had used for his study.
The government ban on Laine's Shivaji was overturned by the high court. But the publishers (OUP) were still too scared to stock or sell the book. They feared that their offices would be attacked by goons, with police (as is their wont) merely looking on.
In this respect, atheistic communists have not been far behind religious chauvinists. The Left Front government of West Bengal banned the works of Taslima Nasreen, merely because a few angry men had claimed they were 'unIslamic'. Nasreen had been exiled from her native Bangladesh, and naturally wished to be based in a Bengali-speaking region of India. But the communists refused even to provide protection for her in Kolkata, so that she had to leave the city to seek refuge elsewhere.
In this regard, Hindu bigots have matched, and perhaps even outperformed, their Islamic counterparts. Before they trained their guns on Ramanujan and Doniger, they had set about persecuting Maqbool Fida Husain. Exhibitions of his work were vandalised in several cities. Then, in a malevolent, systematically orchestrated campaign, a series of cases were filed against him in many different locations. In desperation, Husain moved overseas. India's best-loved painter had been forced to flee his homeland.
How can this trend of persecution and harassment be reversed? It would help if the lower courts do not so recklessly entertain cases so clearly mala fide in intent. It would also help if at least the bigger publishers show more courage in the face of intimidation. And it would help most of all if the political class shows some commitment to upholding the ideals of free expression enshrined in the Constitution.
The first two seem unlikely, and so, regrettably, does the last. In December 2006, when Husain was still alive, i wrote an article suggesting that, in the next Republic Day awards, he be given the Bharat Ratna, with Salman Rushdie being simultaneously honoured with the Padma Vibhushan. That would have been a just assessment of their respective contributions to art and literature, as well as a blow for artistic freedom. And it would have equally offended Hindu and Islamic bigots.
My proposal did not fly, because the government of Manmohan Singh lacked not just courage, but also imagination. And future governments (and prime ministers) are likely to be as unimaginative, and perhaps even more nervous of offending fundamentalists. For the foreseeable future, India's democratic record will continue to be tarnished by the capitulation of courts, publishers and politicians to religious bigots and chauvinists.
Process as punishment
I start this column with a sense of eerie déjà vu. One more book has suffered censorship in the hands of a fringe player, and some of the writers to the Readers’ Editor office are invoking cultural particularism to justify this blatant attempt at silencing a voice with which they differ. Some have gone to the extent of blaming this newspaper’s secular credentials for speaking out against the withdrawal of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus .
There are some principles that are universal and they cannot be violated at whim by invoking cultural particularism. The Indian Constitution rightly terms them fundamental rights. Freedom of Expression is one such right guaranteed by Article 19 and the subsection 19 (2) has a provision only for reasonable restriction. The interpretation of this constitutional provision by the higher judiciary is generally to give accent to the enabling provisions, and to use the limiting or the restrictive provisions only in cases that really warrant an intervention.
The idea of banning, burning and pulping books is repugnant. Thought police is not a co-terminus of a free society. The Hindu had consistently opposed these excesses. I have been a journalist for three decades and I can list any number of instances where the newspaper took a proactive stand in these 30 years against the muzzling of free voices.
The paper rejected the idea of the draconian ‘defamation bill’ introduced by Rajiv Gandhi in 1988 and played a significant role in getting it withdrawn. In the same year, India became the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses . This newspaper took a progressive stand against the ban. It was in the forefront to oppose the Iranian fatwa against the author. There was no wavering in the case of the Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin and the renowned Indian painter, M.F. Husain. When state after state tried to ban the film version of Dan Brown’s “ The Da Vinci Code ,” this newspaper meticulously explained that to ban the film, reacting to demands from some, was a grave constitutional impropriety, besides being imprudent. The editorial ‘Responsibility to protect’ (January 25, 2013) reaffirmed the newspaper’s stand: “In banning the screening of Kamal Haasan’s ‘ Vishwaroopam ’ for a period of two weeks, the Tamil Nadu government has recused itself from a fundamental responsibility — that of protecting the right to free expression. It has relied on the old chestnut — maintenance of law and order and public tranquillity — to justify the indefensible.”
Role of lower judiciary
What disturbs me is that the role of the lower judiciary in India has a propensity to admit cases on issues despite the well settled Supreme Court rulings regarding the freedom of expression. Further, the ease with which fringe groups invoke the Indian Penal Code and in particular Section 295A of that code, in the lower courts to initiate the criminal procedure is scary.
Readers should know this colonial legal provision of vintage 1860: “Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of citizens of India, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise, insults or attempts to insult the religion or the religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both.”
The Indian lower courts rarely take into account the progressive interpretations of laws of the higher courts before granting an interim stay or initiating a criminal procedure on issues that have wider social and political implications. For instance, the Supreme Court in the Nakkheeran versus the State of Tamil Nadu case has clearly prohibited prior restraint. In the M.F. Husain case, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul, of Delhi High Court looked at Sections 292, 294 and 298 of the Indian Penal Code and came up with a brilliant framework where the role of thinkers and artists are protected against the fury of the fringe groups.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court delivered an important judgment and it ended a protracted 21-year-old legal case. It was over a cover photograph, in Sportsworld (a now defunct publication of theAnandabazar Patrika Group), of tennis player Boris Becker covering the breasts of his then fiancée Barbara Feltus with his hands and a text that read: “Posing nude, dropping out of tournaments, battling racism in Germany, Boris Becker explains his recent approach to life.” The apex court rejected the puerile arguments against the photograph and the publication. Justices K.S. Radhakrishnan and A.K. Sikri have taken the trouble to make the crucial observations that should guide the lower judiciary in deciding on any issues relating to freedom of expression.
Some of their observations in the final judgment were: “A picture of a nude/semi-nude woman … cannot per se be called obscene….the obscenity has to be judged from the point of view of an average person, by applying contemporary community standard(s)…Further, the photograph, in our view, has no tendency to deprave or corrupt the minds of people in whose hands the magazine… would fall.”
While the editors of the Anandabazar Patrika Group were finally vindicated, it does not take away the fact that they had to endure a two-decade-long legal battle. In every case that involves the freedom of expression, it is the process that is the punishment. Unless there is some drastic legal overhaul at the lower levels of our judiciary, there will be no respite from thought police and vigilante groups.
The right of the reader
It is hard to believe that one could feel sickened by the simple act of taking a book off a shelf. But when it means that this book is going to be shredded and pulped, the consequences make my stomach turn. If self-appointed custodians of faith and culture can use outdated laws to intimidate publishers and silence a writer, it is time for us to ask whether India, as a modern democracy, has the kind of political and judicial leadership that can make these irrational attacks a thing of the past. Surely, there are much more important issues in our country than protecting the feelings and sensitivities of fringe groups who are afraid of honest scholarship and discourse.
Dina Nath Batra, convener of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, has successfully forced Penguin Books India to withdraw and destroy Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. He claims that her book is “written with a Christian Missionary Zeal and hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus and show their religion in poor light”. Though I have never had the pleasure of meeting Doniger, I know for sure that she is not a Christian missionary. And nobody dedicates her career to interpreting classical works, as she has done, with the intention of ridiculing the very traditions she reaffirms and celebrates. As a translator of Sanskrit texts, from the Rig Veda to the Kamasutra, Doniger has done an enormous service to Indian literature and philosophy by making these texts accessible to contemporary readers of English, many of whom live right here in India today.
Most troubling of all is the fact that isolated passages in a book can be twisted into controversial claims that are usually exaggerated, almost always inaccurate and invariably motivated by ignorance rather than any genuine concern for cultural integrity. India is too great a country to be dragged down by voices of prejudice and defensive alarm. Whose sentiments are really being hurt? Are we going to stagnate as a culture that continually touches the feet of intolerance? Are we going to surrender our ideals of free speech to a limited number of individuals who happen to have the time on their hands to file frivolous yet malicious lawsuits against legitimate authors, all in the name of dogmatic purity and pious sanctity? Surely, our many gods, if they are as omnipotent as many of us believe, can easily defend themselves against occasional blasphemies and heretical critiques? Why do human devotees need to intervene on behalf of immortal deities, who can destroy the world in the blink of an eye or create the cosmos in their dreams?
Much has been made of Doniger’s focus on sexuality in Hindu tradition. She is accused of perverse and prurient interpretations of ancient stories, art, rituals and beliefs. Yet I remember reading her masterful translation and commentary on the Kamasutra, co-translated with Sudhir Kakar, and thinking that this was one of the first renditions that elevated it above the level of archaic porn and exotic smut. Dozens of other crass rip-offs of Vatsayana’s classic, mostly available in airport bookstores, reduce it to a level of vulgarity that might titillate a curious adolescent but hardly shocks anyone above the age of 16. So, let’s get over our inhibitions, please, particularly when it comes to erotic mythology. Coital metaphors, whether they motivate demons, kings or Bhakti saints, lie at the heart of our human yearnings.
In an age when books are already threatened by new technologies that promise to digitise our words and disperse them throughout cyber space, it is remarkable that so much anxiety and anger is expended over ink on a page. When I read about attacks like these, against perfectly balanced and commendable books, I believe that in addition to the annual Padma awards, which bestow the glory of the holy lotus on those who make India proud, there should be a parallel set of awards for others who bring shame to the nation. With all due respect, I propose that the “Besharam Booti” awards be given to individuals who vandalise good literature, alongside corrupt politicians, odious godmen, match-fixers and other specimens of human depravity.
A religion and a culture that has flourished for more than three millennia does not need apologists or champions of orthodoxy. Those who take offence at academic and literary freedom are only demonstrating their own intellectual inadequacies. Both as a writer and as a reader, I am deeply offended that anyone should dictate what I may read or write. As an author born in India, and after living here for most of my life (albeit with a name that, like Doniger’s, marks me as a foreigner), I am fully aware that some readers may be suspicious of my knowledge and approach to subjects such as the mythology of the Ganga, the religious significance of elephants in India or even Bollywood films. But I am also fully aware that nobody is being coerced into purchasing and reading Doniger’s writings or mine. Penguin books cost good, hard-earned money and if you do not like them, you can save yourself several hundred rupees by simply leaving them on the shelf for someone else to buy and read.
The regressive state
As of now, the only establishment voice, political, executive or judicial, to have spoken publicly on the Wendy Doniger case is the president’s. Inaugurating the World Book Fair in Delhi on February 15, Pranab Mukherjee said it was imperative for a plural culture like India’s to “preserve, protect, promote and nurture” the ideals of a liberal, democratic, multiethnic, multilingual, multi-religious country. Freedom of speech, he reiterated, is one of the most important fundamental rights in the Constitution.
Although only an oblique reference to the withdrawal and eventual pulping of Doniger’s book by her publisher, it is nevertheless the only affirmation of an individual’s right to freedom of expression that we have heard from the upholders of our Constitution. No single political figure, party spokesperson, judicial functionary, and none of our vocal MPs who wax eloquent on television, have spoken on the subject. Secular or not, rightwing or left, centrist or liberal, their silence has been deafening.
As with every other such instance over the last 10-15 years, the Doniger case conforms to a familiar pattern. Someone decides that a particular representation of a religion or its customs and observances “offends the sensibilities” of a particular community (for instance: M.F. Husain’s painting, Deepa Mehta’s film Water, M.S. University’s student exhibition, Taslima Nasreen’s autobiography, James Lane’s book, Ajeet Cour’s gallery, A.K. Ramanujan’s essay). A mob descends and intimidates, through direct violence, the individual or group responsible for making public this “offensive” representation by displaying or disseminating it. More often than not, the individual or group is intimidated and forced into silence or withdrawal of the “offending” material. The mob, exultant, disperses. The agencies of the state, charged with protecting those very fundamental rights that the president asserted the importance of, stand by. Not one of them intervenes to safeguard the individual or group under attack. Indeed, in one infamous instance, a state government was actually instrumental in hounding a writer out of the state for being a potential threat to “communal harmony”.
Street censorship or censorship by the mob is not new, and in some cases it might even pre-empt state action on a contentious issue, obviating the need for a formal response. No one, after all, is responsible for a mob. Moreover, unlike an individual or an identifiable group, a mob is faceless and forms and dissolves spontaneously. This is why it is almost impossible to charge a mob with criminal intent — no FIR can be registered against it. The mob knows it. The police know it. The administration knows it. The courts know it.
However, the most alarming and sinister aspects of this situation are that the state and its agencies have abdicated their responsibility to individuals and to society, first by withholding protection and allowing violent intimidation and second, by shifting responsibility and culpability away from those who attack onto those who try and defend themselves. Thus, it is Husain and Mehta and Ramanujan and Doniger and all the others — and us — whose bounden duty it is not to “offend”. If we, and they, are foolhardy enough to behave “irresponsibly”, we must accept the consequences. The state cannot help. Neither, actually speaking, is it concerned enough with one individual’s rights and claims on the state’s duty to uphold its constitutional responsibilities.
Having worked on the issue of informal censorship for over a decade, having moved the courts and written and spoken out about it on innumerable occasions, I now think we need to change tack. Necessary though it is to register our protest at those who succumb to such pressure, it’s time to seriously challenge the inaction of the state and hold it to account.
In the Doniger case, for instance, on what basis did the court accept the petitioners’ contention that her book was an “insult” to Hinduism? Which Hindu community were they representing? Whose sensibilities did they claim had been offended? There are countless other Hindus in the country whose dearly held values of tolerance and non-violence (no less “Hindu” even according to the most fundamentalist Hindu) have been equally offended and outraged by the petition. So, one might add, have their respect for freedom of speech, of mobility and association. Why, in the court’s opinion, was D.N. Batra’s claim and contention admissible? Why are governments, courts and the police so susceptible to the “injury” claimed by one set of people that they willingly suspend their obligation to society? Is this an indication of aggressive mob, regressive state?
Then, Sections 153A and 295A of the Indian Penal Code are liable to serious misuse and abuse by anyone and everyone. Even if — and it’s a pretty big if — one were to concede that “religious” sensibilities can be “offended”, by what logic does that become criminal, an offence against the state? Section 153A deals with “promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc” and “doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony”; and Section 295A says: “Deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class
by insulting its religion or religious beliefs… Whoever, with deliberate or malicious intention of doing the above with regard to citizens of India… shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or both.” Section 153A carries a maximum five-year imprisonment and/ or fine.
by insulting its religion or religious beliefs… Whoever, with deliberate or malicious intention of doing the above with regard to citizens of India… shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or both.” Section 153A carries a maximum five-year imprisonment and/ or fine.
It doesn’t take much to see that, going by this loose and all-things-to-all-people description of “religious feelings”, anyone, anywhere can claim to be “offended” or “insulted” by even the most casual comment in conversation, let alone by a book or painting or film. How, then, can the police or courts decide when to register a case or admit a plea? What yardstick can reasonably, legally and validly, be used to gauge “religious feelings” and how they have been offended? And what argument, after all, can privilege a D.N. Batra’s “religious feelings” above yours or mine, creating a spurious hierarchy of hurt and injury?
There are millions of Indians who find succour and affirmation in religions of their choice, and it is their inalienable right to do so. And there are equally millions of India’s citizens who look to the state to protect their inalienable right to security, freedom of speech and association. But what if church and state are the wolves that howl at the door? What deliverance, then, can we expect?
By all means, let us continue to protest and picket, but unless we expose the pusillanimity of the state and its institutions and call them to account, even our freedom to protest may be withdrawn.
In defence of the offensive
In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 , the main protagonist, Guy Montag, is a “fireman” whose task is to burn all books. Set in a fictional town in the American Mid-West, Fahrenheit 451 is about a society where “firemen” hunt people who hide books, raze their houses and burn all literature. Out of curiosity, one day Montag steals a copy of the Bible from the house of an old woman, who chooses to set herself aflame along with her books in an act of defiance. Shocked by the incident, Montag begins to read, eventually joining a group of drifters that memorise books for a futuristic time when society will need books again.
Responses to literature
Mr. Bradbury’s inspiration for Fahrenheit 451 came from three diverse political phenomena that preceded the novel. The first occurred on May 10, 1933 when members of the German Students Union burned a reported 25,000 books written by Jewish, French and American authors that were considered subversive, anti-National Socialism and un-German. The second phenomena was the Great Purge conducted by the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union when many anti-communist thinkers, writers and philosophers were arrested and executed along with thousands of peasants in an attempt to consolidate the communist regime. The third was the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938 that blacklisted the Hollywood Ten — a group of scriptwriters and directors thought to be sympathetic to communism.
I invoke Mr. Bradbury’s book precisely because the incidents that inspired him crossed the boundaries of political ideologies suggesting that many varying regime types have the capacity to censor free speech and expression. By caving in to Dinanath Batra’s call to ban Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History , it has become ‘reasonable’ for a group of individuals to hold metaphorical knives to the necks of established academics engaged in research. By effectively banning this book, Mr. Batra and Penguin India are encroaching on the Freedom of Speech and Expression because the right to free speech also includes a right for people to be exposed to differing points of view. To quote the Indian Supreme Court’s judgment in Union of India vs. Association for Democratic Reforms , “One sided information, disinformation, misinformation and non-information, all equally create an uninformed citizenry which makes democracy a farce. Freedom of speech and expression includes the right to impart and receive information which includes freedom to hold opinions.”
Book purges and burnings have been a staple of regimes trying to establish authority and legitimacy by ensuring that there can be no criticism against them. Salman Rushdie, another proscribed author, writes about becoming Joseph Anton — borrowed from Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov — in his memoir. He says that an Iranian man on his deathbed, Ayatollah Khomeini, who hadn’t even read his book, banned The Satanic Verses . A fatwa was issued and Rushdie lived his life under the constant threat of being murdered for writing some brilliant prose and upsetting Muslims.
A call for action
The pulping of Dr. Doniger’s book is the latest in a steady stream of books that have been similarly treated because, it is claimed, such books offend communities. I offer here a slightly different argument in defence of her book. Dr. Doniger’s book does not do Hinduism a disservice. It is a call for action against the historical priestly expurgations that have accompanied the evolution of Hindu epics and history. She re-injects the lost narratives of Dalits, women and other lower castes — narratives that were removed by design by some male Hindu priests who sanitised the books to suit their agendas. In order to dislike a book one first has to read it. Mr. Batra’s petition has encouraged mob behaviour where Hindus, who don’t even know what’s in the book, are now participating in the rising Indian Cult of the Offended.
At its foundation, religion is mostly about trusting the unknown. It is about handing one’s resolve to some being that may or may not exist, to accept individual fate as something decided by powers outside one’s control and by regaining that control over one’s life through meditation, prayer and charitable deeds. Nowhere does Hinduism say that to reinforce and express one’s faith Hindus must destroy books that are deemed offensive. Nowhere does Hinduism say that one cannot use Freudian analysis as a theoretical frame to comment on the structure and history of Hinduism. In fact, the very basis of Hinduism, and what has made it persist, is its ability to incorporate varying critical arguments that have broadened the scope of the religion.
The objections to Dr. Doniger’s book come because she injects sex and lust into Hinduism by reclaiming desire as an important, yet hidden, story arc in Hindu texts. Anyone who knows Dr. Doniger or has attended her lectures will know that she has a witty style of writing and presentation. She often uses modern metaphors to explain her point about Hinduism and sees humour and meaning even in incidents where she has been attacked, one notably where an audience member threw an egg at her. Much of her writing uses anachronisms to describe epic characters and storylines.
There is nothing wrong or offensive about this. Other critics have also argued against Dr. Doniger’s books because they don’t agree with her point of view. This is called academic debate. Debate and discourse is how societies try to push thinking about issues and circumstances to other levels. The truth is Hinduism does have a rich transcript of desire. Hindus are free to argue against it and say it is embarrassing or they can take pride in it for having such an openly sexual past. Either way, one can pulp a few books, but it is virtually impossible to suppress a book in the digital age, and second, one cannot really brush a temple like Khajuraho under the carpet in the vain hope that no one will notice the naughty bits carved into the walls.
Rise of the right wing
Dinanath Batra, a former school principal and the founder of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, is offended by the book. He also asks if Muslims can ban books that offend them, why not Hindus? Most Hindus he claims to speak for have not read the book because it is written in English and is over 600 pages long. If we square this away with our literacy rates, it seems unlikely that more than a fraction of the very diverse Hindu community has been able to access the book. From this set, many have spoken out against the book but have done so through the written word, not by a call to ban the text. Mr. Batra has chosen to speak for a very diverse set of people counting on the fact that they will not look at the book themselves and make up their minds. His organisation attacked Dr. Doniger, by saying that she is driven by “Christian Missionary Zeal and hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus and show their religion in poor light.” On the contrary, Dr. Doniger wants to show that Hinduism was and is much more than a written record of priestly literature. She shows how the forgotten people, the oppressed and the women whose voices were silenced under an overarching control by male priests and their translations were in fact crucial to the formation of modern Hinduism. She gives these voices a place of respect and dignity in the existing Hindu narratives.
Mr. Batra stated in one interview that he wanted “Indianness” in the field of education and was on a mission to purify the minds of the youth and keep them free from “corruption” (read Westernisation). For all his rhetoric, he seems to have missed one central point – in a country as diverse and as rich in divergent cultures as India, he barely has the right to speak for his own neighbourhood let alone all Hindus across the world. What is most disconcerting is that Penguin India has kowtowed to this act of bullying citing that it has a responsibility to protect its employees from threats.
These threats do not come from a court order or a fatwa , as Arundhati Roy crucially has pointed out. These threats come from groups in society that want to advance a carefully constructed purist vision of a Hindu nation, knowing full well that their hand will be strengthened by the possible and perhaps pre-eminent electoral emergence of a right-wing party. It is these same groups that beat up couples on Valentine’s Day, attack women in nightclubs, and impose dress codes on women for no good reason, except that a woman’s knees or armpits somehow offend them. The problem, from my perspective, is that the capturing of the corridors of power by a right-wing party strengthens groups in society with a narrow vision of modernity, a deep dislike of intellectual freedom, a commitment to sanitise Hindu history, and to persist in an unabashed encroachment on the rights of others.
Dishonesty on Doniger
Blame it on the Indian Penal Code, says Penguin, publishers of the American “scholar” Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, for their decision to pulp its Indian edition. Despite this clear confession of the reason for the book’s withdrawal, the trench soldiers of “liberalism” are threatening and condemning the publishers. More, they are targeting their ire on the so-called Hindu right.
That itself shows their bias. Surprisingly, the same liberal left came down on the government, asking it to ban The Satanic Verses, did not rush to save Taslima Nasreen from a screaming mob in Hyderabad for her novel in which the Islamic orthodoxy found anti-Islamic sentences, or protest when a ban was imposed on Joseph Lelyveld’s book Great Soul for its hints at Mahatma Gandhi and his friend Hermann Kallenbach’s relationship.
As for another great liberal, the Congress, why did its Abhishek Manu Singhvi, as counsel for Sonia Gandhi, go to court to block Spanish writer Javier Moro’s novel The Red Sari? Moro was accused of writing around Sonia Gandhi. Even if that inference is true, it would not affect the sentiments of millions, and why can’t the great liberals and followers of Jawaharlal Nehru take in their stride some lampooning of their leaders? The Congress government in Jaipur resorted to a dirty trick to keep world-renowned author Salman Rushdie from attending the Jaipur Literature Festival two years back, just because the Islamists and their “secular” followers would not even countenance the author of Satanic Verses.
But that is not all. From one left liberal to another, including “secularists”, the cry has gone round that, with the publisher withdrawing the book, freedom of expression is in danger in this country. Is that the truth? Has the book been banned, and who wanted the ban? The fact is that nobody, not even the so-called Hindu right, asked for any ban.
The simple fact is that the publisher bowed out in response to a complaint filed by the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti against the book. The complaint was only pointing out in its suit certain flaws, factual errors and deliberate attempts to insult Hindu sentiments in the book. That is not asking for banning the book.
The publishers had the option of contesting the claim or appealing to a higher court. They could have countered the accusation in the complaint with their version of the facts. As the complaint was registered in court under the provisions of the IPC, the law itself could have been challenged as violating the freedom of speech provisions in the Constitution. In that, the self-proclaimed liberals should have targeted not the publisher but the IPC itself, or its Section 295. They did not condemn the IPC’s clause when it was used to ban Satanic Verses or several other books. They did not go to court when Nasreen or Rushdie were targeted in India.
Before we deal with the book itself, let us assert that Hindus do not require any lesson from the so-called liberals on pluralism, tolerance and welcoming critical reviews of either the vast expanse of the Hindu religion or its traditions and literary or other cultural content. Hinduism itself is a pluralist religion, starting with the fundamental thesis that while the truth is one, the pundits speak about it in different ways (ekam satyam, vipra bahuda vadanti).
The countries west of the Indian subcontinent have a long history of burning alive or executing heretics. In their tradition, all three religions originating there asserted that only they were right and others wrong. In contrast, a Hindu India gave a secure place in its territory to those who were oppressed elsewhere for their beliefs. The Jews, the Parsis and countless other communities were given protection by Hindu kings. But the moment other religions acquired political power in this country, they started placing before the people the choice between converting to their faith or the sword, much against Hindu tradition.
Speaking about the impugned book itself, no one would have scoured it had it been a truly academic inquiry about Hinduism or any aspect of it. What is wrong with the book is the selectivity on one hand, and the use of odd events to debunk the religion and its followers and its timeless civilisation. No doubt all inquiries, however distasteful, should be welcome in the true spirit of intellectual freedom. But when biased people pretend to be professors and put out books that are passed on as serious intellectual inquiry, someone needs to protest the sham.
The poverty of the quality of intellectual inquiry is evident right from the cover picture of Doniger’s book. The cover depicts an erotic image claimed to be from a temple in Odisha. It is not. Critics of the book were quick to pick up several such untrue claims in the book.
Had it been only a question of false claims or the depiction of untruth as a true picture of the Hindus, it could still have been dismissed as nothing more than the outcome of a biased mindset. But when such false claims form the bedrock of the denigration of a people and their culture as well as religion, it certainly comes within the mischief adumbrated in Section 295 of the IPC.
It would be an act of being honest with themselves if our liberals accepted the charge that the entire exercise of the book is the fashionable trend in the West, especially in America, of denigrating India, more specifically Hinduism and Hindus, since 150 years ago, when Swami Vivekananda took that country by storm through his address to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago with his exploration of Hinduism, overshadowing all the exponents of other religions.
Why we write books
Penguin India’s decision to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History , from publication — as a result of legal and possibly extralegal pressure from a right-wing organisation — has thrown up a series of questions in the public sphere. These include questions around the ethics of corporate action and the limits of corporate responsibility in supporting and protecting authors; the prevalence of two sets of laws in India — those governing freedom of expression and those governing insult and injury to groups defined around different vectors of identity, including religion and caste — and how these laws might constrain or override one another; and looming questions about the kinds of effects that a neo-nationalist and majoritarian political regime is likely to have on the spectrum of civil liberties and citizens’ rights in the coming months.
Together with five senior historians and Indologists of repute, I co-authored a public petition to our Parliamentarians and the Law Minister about the Doniger issue — (“Signing for freedom,” Comment page, The Hindu , February 15, 2014). Within a week of being up on the website Change.org, this petition garnered nearly 3,500 signatures worldwide. Whatever the actions of the book’s publisher, and whatever our judgment of those actions, I believe that a public conversation leading up to the review and reform of colonial-era laws dealing with hate speech and the incitement of communal passions is absolutely vital to expanding and strengthening freedom of expression in democratic India. But I write today as a scholar and an author, rather than as an expert on the law, or as an advocate of legal reform.
Section 295(A) of the Indian Penal Code, when pressed into service in a dispute of the kind involving Penguin India and the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, requires that the plaintiffs prove malicious intent — the intention to hurt and slander a community — on the part of the author. (It was not in fact pressed into service beyond a point in this particular case because the parties settled out of court, so let us not say this case but rather this type of case.) As a historian, I would like to examine this business of authorial intention more closely. When reframed as a problem of deciphering intent, the question really becomes: Why did the author write this book? (The implied answer being: In order to injure a given community, as assumption that, per IPC 295(A), the plaintiff must then prove by providing a corresponding interpretation of the text.) But if prima facie we reject this notion, that the author wrote with the intention of causing harm, then we must answer the next logical question: Why did the author write the book? More broadly, as scholars, why do we write?
A scholar’s journey
Writing is a deeply solitary and, at the same time, radically intersubjective exercise. One writes to engage with ideas, with language and with texts, but one writes also to communicate the outcome of that engagement to others. Most human beings think about things; writers take the further step of arranging those thoughts to convey them to a readership. A scholar’s labour is immense. One undergoes long and rigorous training; one tolerates poverty and material hardships; and one faces the very real prospect of never getting a big audience. One deals with the indifference, ignorance, contempt, misunderstanding, ridicule or sometimes outright hostility of others towards one’s work. Scholarship requires a belief in the meaningfulness of the human condition, a moral commitment to the idea of human flourishing, a desire to share in, understand and, if possible, alleviate the suffering surrounding us. Often, a scholar’s life is also a teacher and researcher’s life, spent educating hundreds of young people over several decades (like Wendy Doniger), and exploring the immense archives of human knowledge available in the different civilizations of the world. One plumbs the depths of the past to imagine a better future. One learns unfamiliar languages in order to enter, imaginatively, cultural worlds that can be jarringly unfamiliar, sometimes close to incomprehensible. One attends closely to what people say and how they say it, to the complex ways in which words generate reference, implication, connotation, and in certain sublime moments, an intimation of truth. Like artists, scholars too can tell you about the joy that comes from solving an intellectual problem — the “Eureka!” moment when everything falls into place. The perfection of certain sentences after hours of struggle to arrange the words just so. The sudden opening of a vista in the mind where immense swathes of jumbled, disparate human experience fall into a pattern, like the undulations in a landscape seen from a great height.
Indic traditions provide several concepts that begin to approach the inner processes of scholarship:sadhana , consistent practice which leads to perfection; tapas , a fiery determination to endure all the tests that truth demands; karuna , compassion for all sentient beings who suffer the ravages of time;maitri , the conviviality and goodwill without which no learning or teaching is possible; rasa , what it means to be human, to possess a consciousness shot through with impressions, passions and insights that can be recorded in language to outlast our mortal frames; samvad , the exchange and circulation of ideas in an intellectual community, the architecture of dialogue; chintan-manan , contemplation and reflection, turning things over in one’s mind, meditating on fragments so they may cohere into a whole, figuring out the effects of one’s statements on others. Every responsible scholar must cogitate deeply, to untangle the knots of meaning, to assess the flow of words, and to project the future entailments of whatever is claimed to be the case. Two of our greatest contemporary philosophers, Daya Krishna and Ramchandra Gandhi, even added swaraj to this list of what scholarship is about: the complete and final mastery over the self — self-knowledge, self-rule. In such knowledge alone, of and about the self, is there freedom.
Who becomes a scholar in order to insult and injure others? Apart from the Nazi academy, I am not aware of any other example in history of such a perversion of scholarship. If my agenda is harm, I will adopt the methods of himsa , intentional violence, not the laborious and fundamentally humane protocols of scholarly writing. I will go out and do politics, fight wars, extort the poor and crush the weak, not dedicate my entire existence to the love of language and the pursuit of truth. Whoever claims that scholars are power-hungry, money-grubbing, exploitative, aggressive, greedy, self-serving hate-mongers has no inkling what a scholar’s temperament, practice or life is like.
Wendy Doniger — like most of those who have signed our petition to revise the law and keep her book in print — is a practitioner of humanistic inquiry. So many of us work in the disciplines of philology, philosophy, history, literature, classics and the study of religious and cultural systems. Like her, we — Indians and foreigners, men and women, Hindus and non-Hindus, secular and pious — have devoted our lives to engaging the languages, texts, traditions, histories and knowledge systems of the vast universe we call India. What we do is, and cannot be other than, a labour of love. We do what we do because we are committed to our work, not because we expect great success, fame or riches.
As scholars we write because we want to share the knowledge we painstakingly discover and amass; we want our claims to be tested against the experience of others; we want to educate our readership, to enliven public life, to participate as best we can in the decisions that shape our collective future, and to improve the overall condition of our societies. We are in the business of comprehension and communication. It is the bigots, propagandists, trolls and fundamentalists of the world who trade in insult and injury. We reject their methods and condemn their motivations.
Law for bad behaviour
These are grim times for scholars who study India. For years, in both India and the US, the RSS and its allies have bullied and attacked scholars of ancient history and religion who do not portray the past and the gods according to their narrow orthodoxy. What is different now is that the politics of fear is in the ascendant. People previously committed to open scholarship and public debate are running for the hills. And now, with the withdrawal and pulping of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, the bullies have scored a major victory. Penguin, after fighting the legal case against Doniger for four years, suddenly folded, saying that it would be difficult to continue defending Doniger without “deliberately placing themselves outside the law” — the law in question being Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which forbids “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class of citizens”.
Penguin’s claim is ridiculous. The lawsuit is extremely weak. It is poorly written and argued, contains absurd errors (even the purported quotes from the book are inaccurate), and its attempt to satisfy the law’s demand for malicious intent is childish — accusing Doniger, a secular Jew, of “Christian missionary zeal” and suggesting that her historically accurate references to sexual elements in the tradition were motivated by her being “a woman hungry of sex”. Ironically, the parts of the book that, according to the lawsuit, show Hinduism in a bad light are simply parts that are true and there: the Hindu tradition is replete with non-judgemental allusions to a variety of sexual desires and activities, including those of the gods, whether the new Hindu fundamentalists like this or not. So how could anyone be convicted of defaming a religion simply because she points to texts that some people would rather forget? As Doniger said recently in The New York Times, the shoe is on the other foot: it is they who say parts of their own religion are bad, whereas she admires Hinduism’s treatment of sexuality as natural and beautiful.
Indeed, even a cursory study of Doniger’s career would reveal a passionate love of Hinduism, combined with scholarship of the highest order. Doniger, a woman of boundless energy, humour and joie de vivre, can be found teaching approximately double the required load, so eager is she to make sure that the major texts are taught in their original languages. She describes her career as motivated by a dissatisfaction with the narrowness and rigour of other religions, and a fascination with Hinduism’s more variegated and tolerant portrayal of human beings and the conflicts they face — “the difficulty of being good”, as Gurcharan Das put it in his book of that name, written after spending two years at the University of Chicago studying Sanskrit with Doniger.
The case, then, was eminently winnable, and Penguin’s attempt to hide behind the law is a transparent excuse for cowardly capitulation. The real story is told in Penguin’s statement that they “have a moral responsibility to protect our employees against threats and harassment where we can”. Fear of violence has won; the conglomerate caves before a vague (or perhaps not-so-vague) threat. Such things have, deplorably, happened before. This time, however, there is the prospect (on which the lawsuit’s primary plaintiff, Dina Nath Batra, waxes ecstatic in an interview to The New York Times) that the RSS will soon have the power to suppress all the books it doesn’t like.
What, then, of law? Is Section 295A utterly irrelevant to the current dire situation of free speech and scholarship in India? Certainly, law does not explain Penguin’s failure to fight a winnable case. But law, I would argue, is not nothing either: it does collaborate with the political situation, opening a door through which bullies may walk with their heads held high.
Group defamation is a trendy topic in the law. Particularly in Europe, where incivility to minorities is distressingly common and well-meaning people want to protect their dignity, it has become fashionable to defend such laws or urge their adoption where (as in the US) they are not yet present. A particularly influential argument for group defamation laws was recently made by the eminent British legal scholar Jeremy Waldron, in The Harm in Hate Speech. Waldron’s concerns are admirable: equal respect and full inclusion. How, he asks, can Muslim immigrants ever feel themselves fully equal citizens when a sign can be put up on a New Jersey street saying, “Muslims and 9/11! Don’t serve them, don’t speak to them and don’t let them in.” (The example is apparently fictional.) Waldron argues that the usual ways of dealing with such insults (non-discrimination laws, social norms) are insufficient: the law must intervene, ensuring that minorities have confidence that their dignity will not be assailed by public utterances.
Waldron focuses on dignity, not offence; he thinks mere hurt feelings are insufficient grounds for legal regulation. But he gives little guidance on how the distinction would be made, nor does he convince us that judges in a polarised nation would be good line-drawers. All such laws are vague in a way that allows the offended party ample scope to represent a statement, a placard or a book as an assault on its dignity. If a requirement of malicious intent is added, that too is vague, and such laws often give no guidance as to how to establish it. The vagueness of the Indian statute gives a virtual invitation to bullies to use it to suppress whatever they don’t like.
This brings us to a second problem. Although Waldron’s admirable concern is with the social inclusion of minorities, group defamation laws throughout history have been overwhelmingly used by powerful groups to suppress dissident or heterodox voices: “a terrible track record”, says legal scholar Michael McConnell, reviewing Waldron’s book. What else would one expect, when the powerful passed the laws in the first place and typically control the judiciary that will interpret it?
A third problem is that when the topic is either sex or religion, almost anything anyone says will offend someone. Pluralistic societies contain puritans who feel sexual references demean their dignity and others who think that the suppression of sex removes a vital part of their dignity; they contain religions, and strands within religions, which harbour mutual suspicion and animosity. Group libel laws, according to Waldron, make society safe for all groups. What they really do is prevent all serious public debate or research on these touchy topics, since someone somewhere is sure to feel insulted.
A third problem is that when the topic is either sex or religion, almost anything anyone says will offend someone. Pluralistic societies contain puritans who feel sexual references demean their dignity and others who think that the suppression of sex removes a vital part of their dignity; they contain religions, and strands within religions, which harbour mutual suspicion and animosity. Group libel laws, according to Waldron, make society safe for all groups. What they really do is prevent all serious public debate or research on these touchy topics, since someone somewhere is sure to feel insulted.
The suppression of Doniger’s book was not caused by Section 295A. It was caused by bullying, power politics and cowardice. But law has given public sanctity to bad behaviour, allowing Penguin to portray itself as law-abiding rather than egregious, and allowing the plaintiffs to represent themselves as wounded citizens seeking justice, rather than the ominous thugs they are. In the US, without such laws, scholars of Hinduism have been threatened with violence. But the thugs who threaten them put themselves outside the law and are investigated by legal authorities: scholar Paul Courtright’s house was staked out by the FBI after Hindu rightwing threats apropos of his book on Ganesha. Policemen pay attention to law, and so do law professors. At the time, the head of the HSS (the RSS’s American wing) was a law professor. So far was Ved Nanda from hauling Courtright into court that he issued a public apology to him for the harassment, in my hearing, at a conference sponsored by Doniger and me at the University of Chicago (about democracy and the Hindu right, shortly to appear as an edited book, whether anyone in India will be able to read it or not). After all, Nanda, as a law professor, had to be manifestly on the side of law. Tough laws protecting free speech create social norms which make it impossible for a respectable law professor to defend such intimidation tactics. Later, when threats were directed toward employees of the Harvard University Press before the publication of my own 2007 book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future, I called Nanda and asked him to stop the people who were doing this — and the pressure stopped. After all, the bullies were on the wrong side of the law. To my knowledge, no work of scholarship on Hinduism has been suppressed in the US, though many have been amply insulted.
Law, in short, is not everything, but it is not nothing either. Group defamation laws issue an invitation to thugs to suppress speech that they don’t like, while representing themselves as the righteous ones. Unfortunately, in today’s political climate in India, there are all too many people ready to take up this ugly invitation.
Democracy versus majoritarian will
It is disappointing, and even condemnable, that Penguin India capitulated to pressure from the Hindu far right in deciding to pulp all remaining copies of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History . Penguin’s claims that Indian law — particularly Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code — makes it “difficult for any Indian publisher to uphold international standards of free expression without deliberately placing itself outside the law,” is only partially correct. The law on the subject is often onerous, and the courts’ interpretation of it is frequently inconsistent making the battle for free speech not only a difficult one, but also impossible to predict. Yet, by all reasonable accounts, Ms Doniger’s book, even if a most conservative reading of the law were employed, would not have been injuncted from publication. What’s more, the chances of Penguin and the author facing prosecution under Section 295A were distant and implausible. The publisher’s reasons for settling, therefore, appear, at best, insincere.
Individual’s right and larger society
But, read together with, among other incidents, Bloomsbury India’s decision this past January to withdraw copies of The Descent of Air India , after a complaint for defamation filed by Union Minister Mr. Praful Patel, Penguin’s choice foretells a dangerous future: one in which publishers are unwilling to fight the law’s evils. It seems even the supposed vanguards of free speech are losing faith in the state that we live in — a democracy which suffers from an ingrained illegitimacy, where a person’s right to free speech is limited by the majority’s perceived levels of tolerance. To restore India as a liberal democratic nation, it will require more than a mere conduct of regular, supposedly free and fair, elections. We will need to shift the goalposts of our attentions to the fundamental tenets that make a democracy; our political debate must subsume the philosophy of rights.
It is easy enough to begin any discussion on this matter with the Constitution of India as anchor, for subject to certain limitations it grants a right to freedom of speech and expression. But, we would do well to set aside the document for a moment, and think about what rights a democracy, properly understood, must guarantee. Our tendency, unfortunately, is to often think of democracy as a form of majoritarianism, where the will of the greatest number ought to always prevail; we, therefore, seek to balance an individual’s right with the supposed interests of the larger society. If restricting certain speech would make the majority of us happy, then such societal happiness, it is argued, would constitute good reason for restricting such speech. But this model for framing the purport of our moral rights, as the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, among others, argued, is fundamentally flawed. It does not comprehend what democracy, which at its heart is an interpretive concept, really means.
If democracy were to be a truly legitimate form of government, it must contain certain inherent value; and since it is difficult to argue that majoritarianism has any such value over and above its ability to institutionalise the larger goals of a legitimate government, we must reject any definition of democracy that rests purely on the rule of the majority. In other words, democracy cannot be considered an end by itself, but must represent a means to attain justice. In order to be genuinely participatory, democracy must entail more than just a commitment to elections; it must treat certain fundamental rights as distinct and incapable of being transgressed purely on the caprice of the majority.
Our greatest failing as a nation is to allow whimsical decisions of the majority to override the most fundamental moral rights that we enjoy as citizens. When the Indian Constitution says, as it does in Article 19(1)(a), that citizens have a right to freedom of speech and expression, it is memorialising a particular moral right. The limitations that it places on this right through Article 19(2) by allowing the State to make reasonable restrictions in the interests, among other things, of public order, decency or morality, are therefore to be invoked only when compelling reason is presented. The question is: what constitutes compelling reason?
The grounds that the Constitution of India provides in Article 19(2), as its text says, ought to be reasonable. And what is reasonable is to be tested not on the threshold of majoritarian will, but on larger, scrupulous standards. For example, it would be reasonable to constrain speech if it is absolutely apparent that such speech would incite the committing of an offence. Such a test was, in fact, devised by the U.S. Supreme Court in the famous Brandenburg v. Ohio case: it is only speech that incites “imminent lawless action,” the court held, which is constitutionally unprotected.
Extending American law to the Indian context is often frowned upon, especially in the context of free speech, given that the U.S. Constitution contains no equivalent of Article 19(2). But it is important to bear in mind that both the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (which for many decades was thought only to be a bar against prior restraint of speech) and Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution are abstract expositions of the same moral principle. The restrictions that Article 19(2) imposes are, therefore, to be interpreted on the touchstone of the same moral guidelines. It is no doubt true that according free speech an absolute status, as in America, can give rise to a number of problems, where the inherent value of speech is lost. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court, seemingly with a view to uphold the First Amendment, allows big corporations to spend unlimited funds on political advertising, thereby treating companies on a par with real people. Free speech must unquestionably partake more than the ability of the wealthy to speak, and the state has an important role to play in achieving this goal. But the restrictions that the Indian government often places on speech have little to do with such concerns of equality.
On the contrary, speech is limited in the supposed interest of the majority on a utilitarian assumption that such restriction benefits the interests of the larger society. Where the impact of a certain speech is uncertain, the benefit of doubt must be accorded to the speaker; any divergent, utilitarian argument would run counter to the theory of rights. Unfortunately, the Indian Supreme Court — and concomitantly the courts below it — allows our right to freedom of speech to wither at the first expression of an objection, where violence is implausible let alone being imminent.
This is not to suggest that the Supreme Court has never upheld the right to free speech. There have been plenty of instances where the court has overturned bans on books, movies and other forms of expressions. If Penguin had indeed lost in the trial court, it is reasonable to presume that the higher judiciary would have overturned any injunction. But, collectively, the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in allowing speech to thrive is so poor as to make the prospect of restraining prior governmental action or more principled decisions from the lower judiciary an abandoned dream. The court seems to lack the philosophical bent of mind to consider certain rights as inviolable, as superior to the impulses of the majority.
Justifying totalitarian power
Take, for example, its decision in 2007 in Sri Baragur Ramachandrappa and others v. State of Karnataka and others . Here, the State government had issued a notification banning Dharmakaarana, a Kannada novel by Dr. P.V. Narayana on grounds that certain paragraphs in the book were objectionable, purportedly probing the character of Akkanagamma, the elder sister of the 12th century saint, Basaveshwara. The Supreme Court, contrary to questioning the government’s legitimacy in banning the book on dubious grounds that it hurt the sentiments of the “Veerashaivas,” when there was no threat of any violence, struck a dagger into the heart of free expression in India. What’s more, inexplicably, the court suggested that the onus to dislodge and rebut the government’s opinion that the offending publication was offensive lay on the novelist. This was a case of the Supreme Court justifying a totalitarian power at the hands of the state at the cost of our most fundamental rights. Regrettably, the decision is no aberration, but is symptomatic of the general approach of the apex court. That the decision represents the law of the land was made clearer when the Bombay High Court, in 2010, relied on the decision to uphold a ban on a book, Islam: A Concept of Political World Invasion …. Here, the court was unequivocal in holding that there needs to exist no clear and present danger to justify a ban on speech. It suffices to show, the court wrote, that “the language of the writing is of a nature calculated to promote feelings of enmity or hatred.”
The Supreme Court in framing its jurisprudence on free speech from the perspective of restrictions as opposed to the inviolability of the right has ensured that laws that are blatantly anti-democratic are allowed to stand. In the process, speech, which, in fact, incites offence, goes unpunished, while speech, which is found offensive by a given majority, is constrained on ambiguous grounds. What the court has effectively done is to say the government is entitled to bar speech when it believes that such constraints would benefit the community as a whole. These developments threaten not merely liberty, but democracy too. It is, perhaps, time we took our rights seriously.
