India has had an alarmingly crowded history of banning books, plays and films. The authority to ban books is vested in the Union government and state governments. If Aubrey Menen’s Rama Retold was banned nationally in 1955, E V Ramasamy Periyar’s book Ramayana Retold, translated into Hindi as Sacchi Ramayan, was banned from circulation in Uttar Pradesh in 1969. Sadly, many mighty writers have suffered due to India’s love for pustak bandi (book banning). They include, to name just a few, Katherine Mayo, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Koestler, Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. Mayo’s The Face of Mother India was the first post-Independence victim of the book ban. The books banned have not just been ones about Rama, Krishna, the Gita, Allah, Gandhi, or India’s “image”. When Koestler’s The Lotus and the Robot was banned — though not his widely circulated The Yogi and the Commissar — it was perceived to have cast aspersions on yoga. In current times, any expression seen as “anti-government” rouses the ire of administrations —whether in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai or Chennai. The most recent case is that of the BBC documentary about the Gujarat riots of 2002.
If one were to look at the love for pustak bandi in different nations, one finds at the top of the list Singapore with 34 books banned, followed by China with 31 books banned, including the harmless Victorian classic by Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre. Not much behind these countries are Ireland (24 books), India (23 books) and Australia (21 books). In contrast, since the end of the Second World War, Germany has banned only one book. In India, at one time, Hind Swaraj (1909) by Mahatma Gandhi was banned by the colonial government. The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels was banned in Russia before the October Revolution.
However, banning books or ideas is not just a legal issue or an open-and-shut case handled by the state. It is also not just a case of the offended sensibilities of a section of society. It invites complicated debates related to the ethics of creative expression, constitutional rights, individual liberties and, most of all, the freedom of expression. Indeed, these debates are not yet fully resolved. Since societies comprise sections and individuals that are interdependent, it will never be possible to draw in black and white lines the boundaries of an individual’s freedom of expression as against the even more amorphous “sensitivity of a given segment of society”.
Given the complexity and the grey zones in which these abstract notions are located, every ban on a work of imaginative expression is open to the charge of arbitrariness. When Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Adivasi Will Not Dance was banned in 2017 by the Jharkhand government, it was difficult to ascertain if the Santhal people had at all read the work or if an issue was just created around it.
In most cases of kitab bandi, political ideologies appear to play a crucial role. In Germany, Adolf Hitler had his followers take books out of the Berlin University library and burn them in 1933. The burning of libraries built by a regime’s opponents has been a “war weapon” in many civilisations. To think of the legacy of burned libraries can make any modern human hang one’s head in shame. Of course, it is not only the libraries, books, plays and other creative expressions that have suffered this fate in the past. Individuals too have been killed out of fear of their ideas. From Socrates, Jesus Christ and Galileo to Lincoln, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, there have been many individual victims of violent intolerance of ideas. In regimes that are founded on intolerance, the intolerance keeps growing and the war cries for the suppression of dissenting voices rise with a frightening frequency. The suppression of the documentary depicting the Gujarat riots and the rise of Narendra Modi as a national leader and the call by an S P leader to ban Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas around the same time is a coincidence, curious or otherwise, reminding us of how intolerant we have become to criticism.
Tulsidas’s 16th-century poem in Awadhi has ruled over the hearts of people in the Subcontinent for five centuries, with its simplicity of rhythm, familiar diction and evocative depictions of human sentiments. It humanised Rama for the people who had been kept away from the world of Sanskrit learning. The suggestion that it should be banned is ludicrous because the Ramcharitmanas is not just a text. It is a subculture in itself and it is too late for anyone to think of removing it from people’s memory.
In this context, it would be most pertinent to see how B R Ambedkar looked at the epics. He was critical of the protagonist of the Valmiki Ramayana as he viewed the plot from Sita’s perspective. But, he never advocated the banning of either the Ramayana or the Mahabharata. One must at once add that Ambedkar had mobilised the burning of the Manusmriti. He was aware that a text like the Manusmriti lends support to Brahminical hegemony. But, with the epics, though he considered them complicit in the counter revolution in ancient India, Ambedkar understood that they had a place in the emotions of Indians. Moreover, he was aware that access to these epics had not been denied to any social class in tradition, as the access to the Shastras had been.
For us today, it is necessary to identify and counter sources of suppression and intimidation rather than raking up dispensable shadow fights. Sri Rama has taught us the value of satya vachan, truth. Valmiki has taught us karuna, and profound empathy. Tulsidas brought to both a new life in his 16th-century Awadhi. Shouldn’t we turn to subjects closer to our times and to democratic India’s concerns and awaken truth and compassion? Is it not necessary to openly question the blocking of the BBC documentary on contemporary issues, rather than criticise a 16th-century poet for the accident of his birth in a particular caste?
The writer is a cultural activist
