We seem to be living through minefields of social threats, staged as readiness to claim “hurt” as both lived experience and a cause for political sanctuary, waiting to go off.
Events such as the killings of rationalist scholars, the cultural vigilantism around beef-consumption claiming innocuous lives, the contempt proceeding against Arundhati Roy for allegedly making “scandalous and scurrilous” remarks against elected governments, the witch hunt of Perumal Murugan leading to a declaration of his death-as-author, the furore in Mumbai over a comedy “roast” which was self-admittedly adult in nature, the vengeful responses to Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History as also to a public reading from Salman Rushdie’s banned novel The Satanic Verses at a Literary Festival, the fractious debates in the Indian Parliament over an Ambedkar cartoon in the NCERT school curriculum, and the arbitrary removal of a Ramanujan essay on the Ramayana from university textbooks are symptomatic of larger tendencies in political expression.
Positioned within such an epidemic of sentimental outrage, it comes as no surprise that university spaces are now being used to “mobilise public opinion” around religious sentiments pertaining to the Ram Janmabhoomi temple, or that academic lectures on secularism are considered likely to hurt those same sentiments and provoke lumpen assaults of the state.
To have a former general secretary of the education wing of RSS wage wars on AK Ramanujan’s Three Hundred Ramayanas, Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, and Sekhar Bandopadhyay’s From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India is no longer constitutive of institutional-curricular modes of censorship, but merely an instrument of “academic reform”. What however marks this moment of “censorship as reform” is the breach of ethical responsibility that universities or publishing houses bear toward their reading publics, as spaces that enable the reception and circulation of alternative knowledge practices.
The heightened susceptibilities of those entrusted with the task of archiving the life of thought only confirm our perpetual coincidence and cohabitation with a “state of hurt”.
In a letter dated May 16, 2014 to Megha Kumar – author of Communalism and Sexual Violence: Ahmedabad Since 1969 – the President of the Humanities and Social Sciences Section at Orient Blackswan, Uday Rao, writes:
“On 14 April 2014 we received a notice from Mr Dinanath Batra’s lawyer accusing us of publishing a book that is defamatory and derogatory to the RSS… It is a book that is a careful history, written in the best traditions of historical writing. As a company we believe strongly in the freedom of expression and in academic freedom…. However, because of the above issue, the Board of Directors of the company has been advised by legal counsel to undertake a pre-release assessment of books that might attract similar reactions. Such assessment may extend to examining the possibility of legal proceedings, especially under the Penal Code, being filed against authors, the company and its employees. Quite apart from the legal proceedings, our concern is that our authors, our staff, and the families of both, could be exposed to the risk of violence, endangering their life and safety.”
The point where institutions of knowledge dissemination begin to perceive law as a “threat” to the safety of its “authors and staff” is a moment of deep crisis. This is particularly ironic, given the exactly antithetical role of the legal apparatus in protecting life and its claim to reason.
The consequent chronicle of a retreat of despairing publishers into zones of “safety”, well-guarded from the “terror of hurt” does not bode well for either the state of democracy or its machinery of justice dispensation. We have reached a state where even the hint of law – supposedly a defender of the citizen’s right to free existence – “realises” the possibilities of violence for both producers and preservers of academic thought.
At such a moment when the slightest reference to “legal action” comes cloaked not with a promise to heal but with multiple threats to hurt—when what was to redress only encourages repression – it is not entirely unexpected of a Penguin Books India to publicly justify its betrayal to Doniger’s readership in the name of “respect[ing] the laws of the land, however intolerant and restrictive those laws may be.”
To use the legal pledge as a suicidal excuse for self-censure and the repeated references by publishers to Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code as running counter to the rights enshrined in the Constitution summon forth a dire need for introspection.
The terminological puzzle that Section 295A presents has often come up for discussion in court judgments relating to charges of blasphemy, and the verdict delivered by the Calcutta High Court on September 22, 2005 in the case of Sujato Bhadra vs. State of West Bengal famously touched upon the debate. Relating to Taslima Nasreen’s Dwikhondito, which was banned by the Government of West Bengal under Section 95 CrPC, the bench of judges decided to set aside the state’s declaration of forfeiture by deeming the book not violative of the concerns in Section 295A IPC. Addressing the issue of the framing and semantic applicability of the law, the judgment maintained at one point:
“The outrage to religious feelings or insult to religion or religious belief, if made unwittingly or carelessly or without any deliberate or malicious intention, then the same would not come within the purview of Section 295A IPC.”
A question, however, lingers on. How might a scholarly or creative piece of work convicted of mischief under IPC prove itself “unwitting”, “careless” or “intentionless”, when its mettle precisely lies in the nature and duration of its premeditation? How does one differentiate the nature and degree of “premeditation” between a historian like Wendy Doniger and a Hindu Mahasabha leader like Kamlesh Tiwari? Who, of the two, might be believed to be “deliberately” appealing to constituencies of sentiment, and how?
Is all work of history – given the arduous process of “deliberation” and “intention” that necessarily precedes it – liable to be convicted of “malicious intention”? Further, what is an exact measurable quantum of malice that is deemed sufficient for “outrage”? Is one word enough to outrage an entire “class of citizens” or one phrase or one sentence?
Might the historian – who treads a perilously thin line between reason and prison – know the difference between “outrage” and “insult”, though both have been deemed equally punishable? It is worth noting that not all of the same “class of citizens” might necessarily share the same “religious feelings” or “religious beliefs.” How many then must share a feeling for it to be “outraged” or “insulted”?
It is this issue of membership within a belief-system vis-à-vis the collective sanction of hurt that got highlighted in a landmark judgment of the Supreme Court on August 25, 1958 in the case of S Veerabadran Chettiar vs EV Ramaswami Naicker and Ors – a judgment that even Batra makes an out-of-context reference to in his notice to Penguin Books India–Doniger. The case in question was under Section 295 of the IPC (relating to defilement/destruction of objects held sacred), against an incident of public demolition of a Ganesha idol by the members of an anti-idolatrous Dravida Kazakam party in 1953. The Apex Court judgment maintained:
“Courts have got to be very circumspect in such matters, and to pay due regard to the feelings and religious emotions of different classes of persons with different beliefs, irrespective of the consideration whether or not they share those beliefs, or whether they are rational or otherwise, in the opinion of the court.”
The final clause in the text – “whether they are rational or otherwise, in the opinion of the court” – ascertains the place of the non-rational and grants singular credence to “states of sentiment” as legally admissible claimants for redress. In dealing a decisive blow to the cause of rational inquiry and thought, the judiciary rules in favour of “religious feeling” as separable from “the opinion of the court.”
In effect, it orders an event of self-suspension, only to place the legal object at the service of a currency of hurt. When it comes to matters of religion, the law self-admittedly stands to witness its own dissolution and abdicates its sovereignty unto the irrational.
This is tantamount to an acknowledgment of the law’s own fears when pitted against the superior sovereignty of god. At the heart of the law’s failure to safeguard the voice of reason is an event of its own censorship by the community of sentiment.
The article includes excerpts from Sentiment, Politics, Censorship: The State of Hurt, edited by Rina Ramdev, Sandhya Devesan Nambiar, Debaditya Bhattacharya, SAGE India.
(Sentiment, Politics, Censorship: The State of Hurt explores a cross-section of authors from diverse spheres of social relations such as academia, law, film, art, literature, activism, to revisit these ideas in our hurtful times. In doing so, the book seeks to create dialogues not only within academia, but with civil society at large. It is this felt expediency that led to the idea of such a plurality of readings as the authors reflected in their own personal and public practices, this threat of being both the agents of hurt as well as the affected claimants of it.)
