Dawn
May 21, 2007
‘WHERE ONE BURNS BOOKS, ONE WILL SOON BURN PEOPLE’
by Jawed Naqvi
DEV Varam, a former colleague from Reuters, became a script-writer for Telugu TV plays and movies. One day he came over to check out a line from Allama Iqbal, which he wanted to use to show, in his own maudlin way, the supposedly nationalist nature of India’s Muslims. It didn’t matter to Varam that the line from Iqbal’s poem Naya Shivala he was about to use would convey a totally wrong meaning if it didn’t accompany the first line too. The complete verse would be – “Patthar ki moorty me samjha hai tu khuda hai, Khak-i-watan ka mujhko har zarra devta hai.” (You believe that God resides in stone idols, O Brahmin. To me, each grain of dust of my motherland is God personified, fit to be worshipped).
Varam, a mystical Hindu (who could also play the sitar quite well) was seeking to show Indian Muslims as devotees of their motherland, which is not a bad idea, but he did not want to give space to their assertion against the benefits of idol worship. “Half truths lead you nowhere except to more half truths,” I cautioned him. Varam smiled and went on to use only the second half of the verse he had set out to highlight to the exclusion of the context. This is benign censorship.
A more pugnacious version of proscription has been raging across the country for many years. Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, Marathas, Gujaratis, Bengalis, Kashmiris – there’s hardly any one who has not been singed by the menace. There is of course another, equally criminal impediment to a free quest of knowledge in a democracy, and that is corporate censorship. How the Birlas and the Ambanis among other tycoons have taken turns to ban books exposing their murky backstage is hardly ever discussed in the mainstream media. But that is not the issue right now and we will discuss it at an opportune time, hopefully quite soon.
However, cultural censorship is rapidly gathering steam in India. A drawing student was recently picked up from an arts college in Baroda and thrown into prison because religious zealots raided the campus and objected to his painting of Hindu gods and goddesses. M.F. Hussain, the maverick “barefoot” artist is another example. He is living in exile because of court cases and death threats against him, again because he painted Hindu gods and goddesses in ways that were not liked by the mobs. And here we thought only Muslims were excitable when it came to religion.
Interestingly, during his days as a nominated MP, Hussain had sketched his fellow parliamentarians by simply observing the intense debates in the Rajya Sabha. He gave each of the characters his own funny twist. One such may have rubbed L.K. Advani the wrong way. It was a drawing of the veteran BJP leader that showed him vertically stretched at the temple, from the ear to the bald pate. It was titled, “The Man with an elongated temple”. The reference was as much to the looks as undoubtedly to Advani’s obsession with a temple project in Ayodhya. Reason enough for Hussain to be menacingly targetted.
But Ustad Faiyyaz Khan, honoured in the 1950s as Aftab-i-Mausiqi for his elegance as a classical vocalist, had not threatened anybody’s religion or ethnic sentiments. On the contrary, his “Manmohan Brij ko rasiya”, an early morning composition in Raag Paraj, and “Vande Nand Kumaram”, an early evening composition in Raag Kaafi, among other soul-searching “bandishes”, were actually celebrations of Lord Krishna, a beautiful syncretic thought coming from a devout Muslim. Yet Faiyyaz Khan’s grave in Baroda was ripped apart during the violence in Gujarat in early 2002.
Similarly the shrine of Wali Dakani, the renowned 17th century Urdu poet who sang paeans to Gujarat and its Hindu-Muslim bonhomie, was flattened and became part of a metalled road in Ahmedabad, also during the violence. Therefore, it seems that the recent attack on Gujarat’s young artist who was sent to jail does not have its origins in religious sensitivities alone. It is more likely rooted in a growing culture akin to Germany in the 1930s. It is useful to note that the graves in Gujarat were razed just before the state elections of 2002. Now Gujarat’s artists are being threatened, again just before the state elections fall due later this year.
In the neighbouring state of Maharashtra too, there was a bizarre public response when the High Court lifted a politically endorsed ban on James Laine’s book Shivaji – Hindu King in Muslim India recently. Laine’s effigies were burnt in several places and his publisher, Oxford University Press, were warned against selling the book. The chief of the Shiv Sena urged the public to burn copies of the book. Other political parties joined him in the demand. Ironically, when Rajiv Gandhi banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses months before Iran shook the western world over the issue, the Hindu right termed it as Muslim appeasement.
On May 9, The Times of India shockingly reported that the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute that was vandalised by people offended by a passage in Laine’s book, had now decided to support the ban. A research institute seeking ban on a book is unheard of. The institute was apparently seeking proscription after a recent ruling by the Supreme Court when it rejected an appeal challenging the Karnataka government’s ban on the book Dharmakarana. That book is claimed to have hurt the sentiments of the followers of saint Basaveshvara and the Veerashaiva community.
‘Hurt sentiments’ now threaten to become a judicially acceptable ground for banning works of scholarship, literature, and art – some of them alleged to be maliciously motivated. Films are routinely attacked and cinema halls forced to shut down by religious zealots of practically all communities. Dev Varam may not belong to the category of these extra-constitutional law-enforcing mobs, but in his own way he was trying to avoid “hurting the sentiments” too – perhaps of Hindu idol worshippers. It is another matter that Allama Iqbal did not quite endear himself to the Muslim fundamentalists either, who issued fatwas on him for alleged apostasy. This is the normal pattern, for this was what became of the liberal ground across the world much before the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
The writing on the wall looks ominous. Barring a few exceptions, the Indian media have made light of the attacks on the liberal intelligentsia. In this they are not too dissimilar to the response to the rise of Hitler that was reflected in American newspapers. About the book burning orgy organised by the Nazi mobs in May 1933, some newspapers called the German student actions “silly”, “ineffective”, “senseless”, or “infantile”. The New Yorker made light of the “extra-curricular activities” of Nazi students. Essayist E. B. White joked: “We never burn books except to keep them out of the hands of the grand jury.”
While some American editorial responses to the Nazi book burnings played down the event and referred to the “extra-curricular activities” of Nazi students, others did forecast the dawning of a dark age. In a political cartoon entitled “On the Altars of the Nazis”, Jacob Burck evoked the prophetic observation by 19th-century German writer Heinrich Heine: “Where one burns books, one will soon burn people.” This cartoon showed two pyres, the “altars of the Nazis” – Nazi victims, and condemned books. The piece was printed in the Daily Worker (Chicago), May 11, 1933, almost exactly 74 years ago.
It has taken us some time in India to acquire the skills, but, looking at the charred remains of 2002, we are getting there.
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