Opinion What happens when people read to be ‘hurt’

More than the bewilderment with this idea of an antiseptic life, this room with curtains that allows us to draw them the moment we are forewarned, is my inability to understand this new culture of coding literary texts, a kind of classification with its biases and consequent anticipatory generic responses to settings and situations. There’s a more common name for trigger warnings outside a controlled culture such as academia or publishing – it is “hurt sentiments”. While the unit of “trigger warning” is the individual, that for “hurt sentiments” is usually a group. Like examiners, they pick on words and phrases, and, usually resort to the most childish manner of interpretation — the safety laziness of the literal — they read to be “hurt”, as if words were arrows and they dartboards.

A complaint was recently filed at Canacona police station against the Goan writer Datta Damodar Naik for “hurting religious sentiments”. Naik had apparently called the temple priests of Shree Samsthan Gokarn Partagali Jeevottam Math “dacoits and looters”. As I read this report, I found myself thinking of the many songs that call little Krishna our “makhan chor Nandkishore”. Why haven’t cases been registered against the singers — or the anonymous writers — of these songs that call Krishna a thief? Why aren’t “TA” alerts given to prepare readers for the violence in the Mahabharata?

“Literature” derives from “littera”, meaning both, characters in the alphabet and written communication. The latter would quite obviously have been written with the intent of getting a response — a letter from the receiver. The same impulse, of something in the DNA of the literary text that prompts one to act, whether to sit up and write a letter or rush on to the street, compelled by a vision of radical and equal love, is the reason why all literature is activism — it makes us act, the root word for “activism”, the way Krishna’s words move Arjuna to action. That is the primary effect of literature – it makes us move, the reason for the emergence of an expression such as “I was moved by …” This is the same question that the rasa theorists wanted to investigate — what is the difference between emotion and art-emotion, rasa?

But the Hurt Sentiments Reader’s response is not activism. “To him, his society assumes a parental status, his reaction to it is almost filial, veering between affection and gratitude on the one hand and resentment and rebellion on the other.” Though the artist K G Subramanyan writes this to explain the relationship between “tradition” and the “creative individual” in The Living Tradition, I think it is also useful to explain the category of the “Hurt Sentiments” Reader: “Most traditional forms have more than pragmatic constituents, such as the emotional proclivities of a people, or their attitudinal archetypes or certain generic characteristics that unite them into a culture group and thereby invest them with a special sense of group identity. The disappearance of that group identity makes them feel culturally impoverished or disoriented.”

It seems now that there only two possibilities that remain: That publishers use a HSP (Hurt Sentiment-Proof) mark on books, like certificates issued by film censor boards; or we have a new genre called Hurt Sentiment Literature, where we go to a bookshelf to get hurt, like we go to the thriller, to sweat in our armpits.

Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor at Ashoka University. Views are personal