Living with the censors

SPEAKING VOLUMES

It was billed as a "black comedy", but there has been nothing comic about the fuss that Behzti has caused. Gurpreet Kaur Bhatt's play revolves around sexual abuse, rape and murder in a gurdwara.

Last week, about a thousand Sikhs protested outside the theatre in Birmingham where the play was being performed. The theatre shut down the play, but the protests didn't diminish.

Bhatt went into hiding after receiving death threats. Seven hundred artists from across Britain signed a petition calling the protests an attack on free speech; Rushdie had scathing things to say about the UK government's silence on the issue; after the fatwa, no one has been in a better position than him to appreciate how much support a beleaguered writer needs.

What struck me most about the reaction in the UK literary community was the automatic assumption that free speech must be protected, at any cost.

It is taken for granted that any writer should and must be at liberty to write what they choose; it is understood that it is a terrible thing for a writer to have to live in fear of her life, or to be forced into self-censorship.

The outrage at those who shut Behzti down and who forced Bhatt into hiding is not a denial of the fact that their sentiments may have been deeply hurt.

Instead, it is the way in which they chose to express their hurt""demanding a ban on the play, threatening the playwright""that is seen as absolutely incorrect. If the Sikh community had asked to debate Bhatt, or had engaged in any form of civilised dissent, they would have been heard.

Instead, some of the news reports that appeared in the wake of the Behzti affair portrayed the Sikh community as backward, blinkered immigrants who haven't yet come to grips with the cultural norms of the place they now find themselves in.

Only one report noted that there was dissent within the community itself: many who were angered or upset by Behzti would have refrained from demanding a ban on the play. And recently a group of Sikh elders issued a statement denouncing the death threats against Bhatt.

If this had happened in India, I suspect the drama would have unfolded quite differently. We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as free, but it takes a Behzti to uncover the invisible censors who run our lives.

Cinema in India has always been trammelled: every filmmaker has his own tale to tell of battling the censors. In Maximum City, Suketu Mehta wrote of his brush with the film world.

He spoke of the nervousness that gripped directors and script writers, their automatic understanding that certain barriers must not be crossed, that Indian crowds could be volatile, that you would compromise a great deal in order to avoid having your film censored, banned, or picketed in a cinema hall.

When there's been a battle between the right to free speech and the fear of "mob violence", the latter often orchestrated by political parties, the mob has usually won.

Filmmakers like Anand Patwardhan are censored as a matter of routine""Patwardhan's documentaries, which tend to be both hardhitting and honest, have always faced legal battles.

We take those hurdles for granted, just as we assume that the only natural response of any government to hooligans who trash cinema halls will be to shut down the hall, not the hoodlums.

Theatre provokes strong responses, too. The assumption again is that it's the troupe and the playwright who will "adjust", by pulling the play, or moving it to a different venue. We speak of responsibility, meaning that it is the writer who must be more responsible.

We talk of offending the cultural sensibilities of India, forgetting that those who don't want their precious sensitivities offended by a play are free not to buy tickets to the performance.

With books written in English, the response is more complex. Many books in English have escaped the censor and the bonfire merely because the pool of readers is relatively small compared to the pool of, say, Hindi film enthusiasts.

The few books that are seen as threatening are shut down without much debate or protest. With Rushdie's Satanic Verses, India was among the first countries in the world to ban his book.

When Taslima Nasreen's autobiography drew protests from Bangladeshi authors, the state of West Bengal banned Ka instantly. When James Laine's scholarly book on Shivaji enraged the Hindutva rightwing brigade so much that they ransacked a library in Pune in their righteous wrath, the book was yanked from bookstores by the publishers.

In all three cases, I heard a great many arguments against the books themselves. Satanic Verses was deliberately offensive to Muslims; Nasreen shouldn't have written so openly about her sexual exploits; Laine had made grievous errors or misunderstood certain aspects of Shivaji's life.

And in all three cases, what I had to say was simple: you're missing the point. Behzti, for instance, isn't a particularly good play in terms of literary quality, and it deals with stereotypes. I wouldn't go to see it, but that doesn't mean other people shouldn't be free to see it if they wanted to.

If a book contains errors, it's the author's responsibility to clean them up and you have a right to protest (peacefully, please) if he or she doesn't.

But if you disagree with a book, or are shocked by it, or offended, or deeply bored, you have several options open to you: don't buy it, argue about it, tell your friends not to buy it, write about it. By the nature of the object, a book cannot impose its opinions on you; all you have to do is close it to be no longer offended.

What do people who ask for a ban, be they Holocaust survivors deploring a favourable biography of Hitler or Sikhs upset by a playwright who has cast aspersions on their place of prayer, really want?

It's not as simple as asking for the offending object to be removed from their sight, because they could do that by not reading the book, refusing to see the play. Asking for a ban is asking for silence, is demanding that other people's opinions be muffled, is demonstrating a tremendous fear of ideas that threaten your own certainties.

This happens rarely in England, so rarely that Behzti has provoked furious reactions from writers; in India, we are used to bans, to censors in our heads, to not hurting the sentiments of this one and that one. The only thing we're not used to is protecting writers, and free speech, and that is the real dishonour.

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