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Journalism of Courage
This week,readers across the world participated in a Virtual Read-Out protest against censorship. Readers uploaded onto a dedicated Banned Books Readout channel on YouTube videos of people reading from books that have been banned or challenged at some time and visuals of book-banning episodes in their regions. Among them were books that have over time become classics and part of syllabi,like John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath,F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby,Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird and J.D. Salingers The Catcher in the Rye.
Banned Books Week,the American Library Associations annual celebration of intellectual freedom,had its inception three decades ago in 1982. Until last year,libraries across the US organised local events around banned and challenged books,while the ALA hosted a physical readout a continuous reading of banned or challenged books. This year,YouTube has taken the awareness campaign to the Internet.
Supporters of censorship argue on the grounds of obscenity,treason or religious heresy. But as an attempt to control the movement of information and ideas,censorship tells us about our deepest fears and insecurities as a society. Almost absurdly,a childrens picture book is among the most challenged books in the US: And Tango Makes Three,based on a true story about two male chinstrap penguins in New Yorks Central Park Zoo that hatch an egg and care for an orphaned chick. Instead of welcoming the book for a sensitive portrayal of same-sex parenting,adoption and caring in the animal world,homophobia and opposition to same-sex parenting have resulted in the book topping the list of most challenged books in the US in every year but one since 2005 when it was published. This is not the only childrens book to have been challenged: the Harry Potter books as well as Maurice Sendaks classic Where the Wild Things Are have been challenged for supernatural elements.
Censorship has existed as long as books have existed,and history is full of instances. In just one example of censorship in the 20th century,Erich Maria Remarques World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front was banned in Nazi Germany in the 1930s,with copies of the book publicly set on fire. Further back in history,Thomas Paines Rights of Man,with its support of the French Revolution,resulted in his being tried in absentia and convicted for seditious libel. Long before that,Plato was particularly wary of what he called the undesirable emotions that poetry could arouse.
Most recently,and especially in the years since 9/11,censorship has been complicated by the problem of hate speech. But perhaps,as Milton argued in his Areopagitica 1644,freedom of expression is also the only enduring way to redress grievances: This is not the liberty which we can hope,that no grievance ever should arise8230; that let no man in this world expect; but when complaints are freely heard,deeply considered and speedily reformed,then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained.
What books might we see at a Banned Books Week Readout in India,if someone were to organise such an event? The list would have to start with the most well-known case of book-banning in India,Salman Rushdies The Satanic Verses 1988. Another example would be American religious studies professor James Laines scholarly work on Shivaji,which among other things led to the attack on the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.
One of the more recent additions to the list is Rohinton Mistrys fine novel Such a Long Journey,which was withdrawn from the syllabus by the University of Mumbai after a protest by St Xaviers College student Aditya Thackeray,the grandson of Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray. Mistry wrote a response in which he advised the young student to read Tagores Gitanjali,in particular the verse,Where the mind is without fear8230;.
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