Tolerance has long been the quality most Indians have cherished about our civilisation. India has been the land of live-and-let-live for millennia, a place where people of varying beliefs and customs lived side by side, unchallenged by those who followed differing ways. In the last century, it was the virtue most avidly preached by Mahatma Gandhi and, since independence, the national attribute most assiduously celebrated by legions of Indian publicists. Yet, today it is gravely under threat, and Indians seem largely oblivious to the danger that the finest values of our civilisation are being undermined from within.
Consider the evidence: Salman Rushdie is driven out of Mumbai by protests at his presence organised by Samajwadi Party hooligans and extremist Muslim groups. Taslima Nasreen is not only obliged to live in hiding, but the Communist Government of West Bengal claims it is unable to protect her, and a Congress Union Minister from that State, once a byword for liberal culture and intellectual freedom, demands that she apologise “with folded hands” to her tormentors. India’s Picasso, M.F. Husain, a national treasure, spends his 90s in exile in Dubai and London because he cannot stand the harassment of multiple lawsuits that have been filed against him and fears he cannot set foot in his native land without being hauled off to a police lock-up.
Vying to get hurt
The film “Jodhaa Akbar” cannot be screened in Rajasthan because Rajput groups object to the very name of its heroine. And now two Congress Party MLAs in U.P. persuade the Mayawati government, through a device absurdly called a “notice of propriety”, to ban a historical novel, Rani by Jaishree Misra, for allegedly depicting the legendary freedom fighter Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi in a “bad light”. This had, they claimed, “badly hurt” the people of the State, particularly in Bundelkhand (whose reading habits must indeed be unusual for a historical romance to have “badly hurt” them).
It almost seems as if each group in our diverse polity is vying with the next for the right to be more offended by a work of art than anyone else. I am perfectly happy to allow any sensitive souls to sulk or to dash off outraged letters to the editors of our national newspapers, but when their sense of wounded self-esteem manifests itself in acts of violence and vandalism, in the burning of effigies of authors and artists, and in hounding creative people into exile, then it is Indian civilisation itself that is under attack. And it is I who am outraged when the institutions of the Indian State, instead of rising to protect the freedoms guaranteed by the Indian Constitution and fundamental to the preservation of our democracy, submits cravenly to the agents of intolerance.
Restrained portrayal
The banning of Jaishree Misra’s Rani is a particularly egregious example of this trend — and of the fatuousness of most of the objections of the petty politicians who have loudly taken offence at the creativity of others. I have read the allegedly offensive passages of the novel, and find it difficult to believe that the author’s restrained portrayal of the growing intimacy (falling well short of sexual contact) between Rani Lakshmibai and a British Major could upset anyone’s sensibilities. The novel’s publishers, Penguin, have gone so far as to assure the public that the Rani’s “portrayal is beyond reproach. It shows Rani Lakshmibai as a woman of deep courage and humanity, who took all her decisions with the best interests of her people at heart, including leading a life of lonely and dignified widowhood before eventually dying bravely in war.” But with all respect to my friends at Penguin, this is hardly a line of defence; it essentially seems to accept the notion that only a positive portrayal of the Rani is acceptable. What kind of freedom of expression are we defending in that case? I would argue that had the author gone further in imagining the Rani’s conduct, that too should be defended — and indeed, it is precisely what historical fiction has done, all over the world. After all, the Rani of Jhansi herself has been portrayed as having a love affair with George Macdonald Fraser’s anti-hero Harry Flashman in Flashman in the Great Game (although Fraser suggests in his endnotes that a dancing girl took the Rani’s place in Flashman’s bed, fooling his protagonist). That book has been freely available in India for more than three decades, and no one has suggested ba
Source: The Hindu
