Commendable judicial activism

Tribune anthology

Before I shifted to Delhi in 1977, my morning reading would be the Times of India and after the Emergency, the intrepid Indian Express. My acquaintance with the Tribune was owing to the Privy Council opinion in 1939 which held that the Trust under which the Tribune was created could qualify as charitable because the object of supplying the Province (Punjab) with an organ of educated public opinion was an object of general public utility.

The wide range of the articles in the recently released The Tribune — 125 years — An Anthology 1881-2006 amply justifies the Privy Council judgment. Articles which appeared during the British rule are interesting. For example Rabindranath Tagore’s letter from his sick bed in June 1941 protesting against one Miss Rathbone’s open letter to Indians in which she chided Indians who had “drunk deeply at the wells of English thought” for their ingratitude. Tagore’s spirited retort was “I have seen our people perish of hunger and not even a cartload of rice brought to their door from the neighbouring district . . . Shall we then be grateful to the British”. Another article is about the discovery of a living snake in Nehru’s prison cell in Dehra Dun. The jail superintendent, in order to minimise the gravity of the situation, stated that “it was only a small reptile, about 20 inches long” and “a postmortem examination of the snake showed that it did not possesses the usual signs of a poisonous variety”. How ungrateful of Indians not be thankful for these small mercies!

Vindication of artistic freedom

Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul of the Delhi High Court, in his recent judgment regarding the 91-year-old painter M.F. Husain, has struck a much-needed blow at the menace of intolerance and also vindicated artistic freedom. His lordship lamented that artists depicting nudity have come under fire, making them think twice before exhibiting their work of art. That is precisely what leads to self-censorship in various fields. At present it is virtually impossible to write an authentic biography of a spiritual or historical personality because any justifiable criticism or unpalatable comments will result in dire consequences for the author at the hands of “a largely ignorant crowd in the name of Indian spiritual purity”. Our Supreme Court has repeatedly held that nudity per se is not obscenity, otherwise several masterpieces of art and artists would be consigned to dark dungeons. Justice Kaul trenchantly observes: “We have been called the land of Kamasutra . . . then why is it that in the land of Kamasutra, we shy away from its very name? Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder and so does obscenity.” That is the crux of the matter. We must always remember that one man’s lyric can be another person’s obscenity.