Fearing the written word by Palash Krishna Mehrotra

Since the history is full of nasty surprises,' writes columnist and poet Adil Jussawalla, 'the writer, like everyone else, will do no more than fall flat on his face several times in his life if he's lucky, or get censored or killed if he's not.'

Ovid was exiled by Caesar Augustus to a small island on the Black Sea. Lorca was killed by the Falangist thugs of Spain's Franco. The poet Mandelstam died in one of Stalin's labour camps.

That was then. India is probably the only democratic and free country in the world which continues to hound writers and ban books in the present day.

A.K. Ramanujan's essay Three Hundred Ramayanas was removed from Delhi University's syllabus after Hindutva students vandalised the history department in 2008. Peter Heehs was asked to leave India, where he had been living for forty years, because of his biography on Sri Aurobindo. When James Laine's biography of Shivaji was published by OUP in 2003, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute was ransacked; direct threats were issued to him and those who had helped him. The book was finally banned.

Indian law

In 2010, Rohinton Mistry's Such A Long Journey was removed from Bombay University's syllabus following a complaint by the Shiv Sena.

Most recently, Wendy Doniger's book The Hindus was withdrawn by Penguin under pressure from the Hindu right-wing. The publisher has blamed Indian law, which makes it a criminal rather than civil offense to publish a book that offends any Hindu. Doniger herself, in an official statement issued by her, quotes from the lawsuit in question, 'That You Noticee has hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus by declaring Ramayan is a fiction. "Placing the Ramayan in its historical contexts demonstrates that it is a work of fiction, created by human authors, who lived at various times?." (P. 662). This breaches section 295A of the Indian Penal Code.'

Besides the law, there is always the threat of violence and vandalism. Justifying its decision, Penguin said it did so also because 'we have a moral responsibility to protect our employees against threats and harassment where we can.' Much of this fear psychosis and vitriol is generated by the lunatic Hindu fringe, a small minority which seems to have a disproportionately big say in what Indians should or should not read.

In her piece on Dinanath Batra (the man who filed the case against Doniger), Kaveree Bamzai paints a picture of a man close to the RSS, and who holds some extremely backward and archaic views on contemporary society. He wants Sanskrit to be made compulsory; housekeeping should be taught to girls in keeping with their 'biological and emotional needs'. Schoolchildren should be taught about 'what Afzal Khan did to Shivaji.'

This fringe is also staunchly and shockingly defended in the largely liberal English-language media by mainstream websites like Firstpost. Doniger is accused of getting her dates wrong, and belonging to a colonial tradition of Indology stretching back to William Jones. Getting dates wrong is hardly any reason to file a lawsuit against a book. Her critics reduce rigorous colonial scholarship to being a mere tool of oppression, 'The British?needed these Indologists to interpret the Hindu traditions, custom and laws that in turn helped them shape policies to rule over the natives.'

Past and Present

The argument is facetious, if not patently false. Doniger is writing in the 21st century, not in colonial times. The past cannot be used to justify the present. Also, British scholars in colonial times were genuinely interested in scholarship and Indian history. It was more than just a desire to control the natives that lay at the root of their scholarly curiosity.

William Jones wrote, 'It is my ambition to know India better than any other European knew it.' As it turned out, he knew more about it than Indians themselves. Or in John Keay's words, Jones helped Indians discover India's past, a past that was lost to us. It was he who discovered what came to be known as the Indo-European family of languages; 'Jones's discovery clearly showed that the people of northern India, far from being savages, were of the same ethnic origin as their British rulers.' (Keay).

Censorship

It was 20-year-old Cunningham who stumbled upon and initiated the excavation of Sarnath. Indians had no memory of the stupa, or indeed Buddhism. The stupa was buried in time and mud and forgotten about.

But it's not just the Hindu right that is responsible for banning and burning books. The 'self -devouring self-creating Hydra' of censorship is a peculiarly pan-Indian beast. Jussawalla again: 'We sometimes fool ourselves into believing that only a very visible community?is responsible for it. It is not. It has become part of the air we breathe, the climate of fear we live in.'

It was the Congress that made sure that The Red Sari, a fictionalised account of Sonia Gandhi's life, was not published in India. IIPM's Arindam Chaudhuri ensured that a chapter on him in Siddhartha Deb's book The Beautiful and the Damned was dropped.

Recently, Bloomsbury apologised and withdrew The Descent of Air India, Jitendar Bhargava's tome against Praful Patel. Another book on the Sahara group by Tamal Bandhopadhyay is banned from release, pending a lawsuit filed by Sahara. It's ironic that in a country that records abysmally low book sales, and where the reading habit is considered a disease, the written word is held in so much terror.

The writer is the author of The Butterfly Generation