Just bullies

Barely a couple of months after Habib Tanvirs death,Charandas Chor,his acclaimed adaptation of a Rajasthani folk story,has offended the Satnami Dalit sect in Chhattisgarh,and has been summarily banned. A coruscating social satire about the impossibility of perfect truthfulness in a twisted world,it won the Fringe Firsts award at the Edinburgh festival,and has been performed hundreds of times by Tanvirs Naya Theatre in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. After a Satnami religious leader,Baldas,recently decided that the play maligns the sects Guru Ghasidas,the Chhattisgarh government decided to ban the play and remove the book from schools and libraries.

Habib Tanvir,of all people,would have been alive to the mordant irony of this ban. He was born in Chhattisgarh,and later sloughed off his RADA-schooled approach to theatre,returning home to start a uniquely Chhattisgarhi Naya Theatre. He wasnt trying to resurrect an imagined past or romanticise the rural his craft came from a stew of influences,local and cosmopolitan. Contrary to popular misconception,he didnt do agitprop and he didnt simply make Chhattisgarhs folksy Nacha tradition fashionable. His theatrical range was phenomenal,his politics nuanced whether a bare-bones adaptation of A Midsummer Nights Dream or a knockabout comedy taking off from Sudrakas Mricchakatika. Ponga Pandit pits itself against the caste system for which Tanvir was attacked by the right,while Hirma Ki Amar Kahani was about ambivalent encounters with modernity. That a work like Charandas Chor has been struck down by its narrow-minded interrogators only reveals the emptiness of their imagination.

The Chhattisgarh government has displayed plenty of can-do spirit on other occasions,but prefers to hunker down and play dead when confronted with a spokesperson of the 35-lakh strong Satnami community. The education minister,Brijmohan Agrawal,said,We see no point to the reading of Charandas Chor if it hurts peoples sentiments. Appeals to the hurt feelings of particular communities no matter how politically delicate are just a dodge,a convenient way of perpetrating anti-democratic impulses. What about the hurt sentiments of those who want to read and watch this theatrical tour de force? Censoring art doesnt lead to civic stability,and theres no end to the number of aggrieved constituencies that can exploit this precedent to stifle the best of our cultural works.