By Chiranjib Haldar
Delhi’s prominent Khan Market bookstore and hangout Bahrisons, tweeting the reappearance of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses on its shelves claimed, ‘This groundbreaking & provocative novel has captivated readers for decades with its imaginative storytelling and bold themes.’ The history of banned books in India is contentious, spanning decades of socio-political upheaval. From the colonial era to the present, governments and institutions have sought to censor books that they deemed to be subversive or offensive, leading to clashes with authors, publishers and free speech votaries. While some prohibitions have been lifted over time, one truism is certain. Literature and the novel as a genre can defy authority, incite debates and push boundaries in the face of repression and censorship. In post-independent India, the earliest book to be banned was Stanley Wolpert’s Nine Hours to Rama, a fictional account of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination portraying the slayer, Nathuram Godse with empathy. Interdicted in Nehruvian India of 1962, it was deemed to be promoting revulsion between communities.
When Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was legally liberated, the judgment had wheeled the spotlight on an open letter the novelist had written to then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1988. Rushdie expressed disbelief that the book had been banned by the Ministry of Finance and highlighted that the Verses ‘…is being proscribed for, so to speak, its own good!’ The official version was that the book was banned as a pre-emptive measure. What is ironic is that the Press Trust of India notification asserted that the proscription did not detract from the literary and artistic merit of Rushdie’s work. Can we extrapolate that thirty seven years after the ban, the nation, the literary world and readers en masse stand vindicated?
The print media terming the ban as ‘a philistine decision’ or ‘thought control’ and eminent litterateurs like Kingsley Amis, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter condemning the embargo as deplorable is one part of the story. In hindsight, the worldwide protests, book burnings, a prominent religious figurehead’s pontifical diktat all appear unjust and a misnomer for any kind of sacrilege. In 2012, the Rajasthan government sought the arrest of four Indian authors after they downloaded a few passages from the Satanic Verses and read them out at a literary festival in the city.
And it is not always charges of profanity or blasphemy that put an embargo on a book. Books inimical to regimes or business tycoons have also been put on the guillotine. Hamish McDonald’s The Polyester Prince, a saga on the life of Reliance Czar Dhirubhai Ambani’s rags-to-riches journey was banned in 1998 but the ban was later lifted. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House by Seymour Hersh, was briefly banned for contending Morarji Desai to be a CIA informer. The former US Secretary of State even testified unequivocally in court on the former Prime Minister’s non-culpability. The ban on Greville Wynne’s The Man from Moscow, a former MI5 operative’s memoirs, was triggered since it misrepresented the Indian government’s policies and created a furore among mandarins.
The practice of outlawing books was once a countenance for British authoritarianism towards their Indian subjects. Erotica was supposed to be harmful for the natives as were books that discussed the possibility of liberation for Indians. Maybe with bureaucratic maladroitness acting as a saviour for Rushdie’s The satanic Verses in India, we have reached a zenith where we can debate and not censor books we disagree with. The Satanic Verses was not about a religion but ‘about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay – deals with a prophet – who is not called Mohammed living in a city made of sand; it dissolves when water falls upon it,’ wrote Salman Rushdie.
In the United States, the 1950s saw a wave of censorship in response to the alleged peril of communism. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 remains one of the most iconic critiques of censorship and mass conformity ever. Similarly, the erstwhile Soviet Union censored many classics considered politically seditious; including those by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and George Orwell. Thus censorship has thrived and remains a powerful deterrent in the hands of regimes around the world to stifle independent thought using a range of justifications. India’s moral guardians believed in the maturity of Vox populi or else how does one explain D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover deemed obscene and sexually explicit in 1954 but acceptable in 1960.
Another book ban bites the dust and sceptics wonder about the ethical high ground against censorship. The revoking of the ban on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, is a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable in microcosm. Like Rushdie’s physical and literary resuscitation after the horrific Knife stab, this rescinding is a cherished, affirming meditation on life, loss and love. It symbolises permissibility in a modern, supposedly secular India to treat such leitmotifs. As Salman Rushdie bluntly put it in his novel Knife ‘Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back.’ Books are pollinators of our minds, disseminating self-replicating ideas through space and time.
(The writer is a commentator on politics and society.)