At a literary festival held by Sahitya Akademi in Shimla in June this year, the panel discussion with novelist Geetanjali Shree drew a full house. Shree, the English translation of whose Hindi novel, Ret Samadhi (Tomb of Sand), had won the International Booker Prize a few weeks earlier, talked about her sensibilities as a woman writer.
And then, with great humility, she said that a big-ticket literary prize is akin to a torch, but it not only illuminates the person who receives the prize — it also shines on the zameen (the country or the culture) that has produced her, the same zameen that has thrown up so many other remarkable literary talents, who may not have been duly recognised as yet.
Her words came back to me last week when an event in Agra to felicitate her was cancelled because someone in Hathras had filed a police complaint, alleging that her Booker-winning novel contained derogatory references to Shiva and Parvati, divine consorts in the Hindu pantheon, and hence was offensive to his religion. While the cops did not register an FIR, they did say that they would read the novel to find out if the charge had merit, and act accordingly. Shree declined to go ahead with the event, perhaps out of disgust that her critically acclaimed novel was being drawn into the infinite loop of Indians taking umbrage at something or the other for an alleged insult to their religion or culture.
This is not the zameen that Shree was speaking about that day. The zameen that she was speaking about is one that births, nourishes and gives play to myriad artistic voices, one where creative expression blooms and thrives. The Agra incident spotlights a different kind of zameen altogether, that which is mired in bigotry, fired by religious and cultural fanaticism, and driven by hatred — all of which is inimical to the free flow of creative expression. In India today, creative freedom survives if, and only if, it escapes the stern eye of the offence-mongers. It doesn't matter if the so-called reason for protesting against a particular artist or her work is bizarre, ill-informed or entirely imaginary. The mere claim of offence taken and sentiments hurt is enough to put them in jeopardy and subject them to relentless hostility and harassment.
On Monday, actor Aamir Khan, found himself facing an avalanche of hatred on social media, for no reason other than the fact that his latest film, Laal Singh Chaddha, is poised for release later this month. Twitter trended with the hashtag #BoycottLaalSinghChaddha, because someone had unearthed snippets of a 2015 interview of Khan, where he had said that his then wife, Kiran Rao, wanted to leave the country because of the growing atmosphere of intolerance. There had been a savage outcry over Khan's words back then, with the haters declaring them to be proof that Khan, a Muslim, was a traitor of sorts.
Since then, the actor has been careful not to make a single controversial statement. However, that does not deter the social media pack wolves with a visceral hatred for Bollywood's Muslim superstars. They are now out to crucify Aamir Khan's new film by the simple stratagem of circulating his much-maligned words from seven years ago.
The saddest part of this sorry saga was that the actor issued a rather pathetic appeal, asking people not to boycott his film based on the belief that he is not a patriotic Indian. "I really love India," he said, almost as if he felt that despite his enormous contribution to Indian cinema, despite his millions of fans, in this new India, he needed to come out with a grovelling public avowal of love and loyalty towards his country to protect both his film and his rights as an Indian citizen.
To be sure, protests and bans against books, films and any other form of creative expression are not new in India. Starting from the government banning Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1988 to pander to the "hurt" sentiments of Muslim protestors to the violence and vandalism over artist MF Husain's nude depictions of Hindu goddesses in the 1990s to the outrage over Perumal Murugan's novel, One Part Woman (2010), or the pulping of Wendy Doniger's book, The Hindus, or the brouhaha over Sanjay Leela Bhansali's film, Padmavat in more recent times, there have been numerous such incidents in the past.
The difference one sees now, however, is the sheer frequency of these incidents. In the last seven days alone, an FIR was filed against actor Ranveer Singh for publishing his nude portraits online, #boycottAamirKhan trended on Twitter, a police complaint was lodged against novelist Geetanjali Shree, and there was a spectacular uproar in Parliament because Congress leader Adhir Chowdhury had referred to President Droupadi Murmu as "Rashtrapatni".
The last had nothing to do with creative freedom of course, and was clearly meant as a belittling reference to the new President's gender. But the shrillness and ferocity with which the ruling party attacked the Congress, especially its leader Sonia Gandhi, was eye-popping. Evidently, snide remarks can no longer be part of the usual cut and thrust of politics. If they come from the Opposition, and the Congress, in particular, every unfortunate word will be savagely attacked, even as the minions of the ruling dispensation get away with such nefarious utterances as "goli maro saa*** ko".
Needless to say, much of this vicious outrage against someone's word or work is targeted. Shree is said to be unloved by the powers-that-be, which is perhaps why the government did not congratulate her after she won the Booker. (It could be that her second novel, Hamara Sheher Us Baras, which is loosely based on the incidents around the demolition of the Babri Masjid, is held as a black mark against her.) And there were protests, too, when she was felicitated earlier at her alma mater, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
As for Aamir Khan (like Shah Rukh Khan), he has long been in the crosshairs of Hindutva groups. Similarly, last year, stand-up comedian Munawar Faruqui saw repeated cancellations of his shows because wherever he went, protesters turned up and agitated against him for comments about Hindu gods that he never made.
However, there are signs now of a community spread of this virus of offence-taking, of a narrowing and hardening of religious and cultural attitudes that are expressed in an all-encompassing urge to be petty, angry, hate-filled, forever on the boil and ready to be triggered into a thuggish display of outrage. Recently, a young man who was kissing his wife in Ayodhya's Sarayu river, was hauled out of the water and thrashed by some people apparently because they felt that the two were behaving in a manner injurious to "family values".
What sort of a culture finds it intolerable to watch a man and a woman express their affection for each other? What sort of a culture acts as if it has forgotten the qualities of grace, sensitivity, knowledge and courtesies towards each other, and instead, makes a fetish of its intolerance and illiberality?
One wonders about the harvest that will be reaped from this zameen.
(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.