| Free speech: The year threw up several challenges to free speech, starting with the furore over Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's Behzti. In December 2004, Sikhs in Britain stormed the Birmingham production of Behztie. Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti was forced into hiding. In January, she wrote: "I certainly did not write Behzti to offend... In my view, the production was respectful to Sikhism... I believe that it is my right as a human being and my role as a writer to think, create and challenge." This month, PEN's English chapter brought out Free Expression is No Offence, a passionate argument in favour of free speech that examines the Behzti case and new laws that might encourage censorship in the name of banning "religious hatred". Writers from Salman Rushdie to Monica Ali, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Hanif Kureishi, Philip Pullman and Ian Buruma argue strongly and persuasively against muzzling the writer's voice. |
| In the US, the Patriot Act was criticised for a provision that would force libraries to reveal the reading habits of citizens to the FBI. |
| The year ended on a sombre note as Turkey prepared to prosecute one of its best-known writers, Orhan Pamuk, for making statements about the slaughter of Armenians in Turkey. The much-criticised law under which Pamuk has been booked prohibits a Turkish citizen from saying anything that might be injurious to the reputation of Turkey. The case has become a cause celebre; Pamuk's trial has been postponed to February, and Turkey's entry into the European Union will to a great extent depend on whether they choose to pillory a great writer for speaking his mind or not. |
| RIP: The year claimed its usual toll of writers. Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller were deeply mourned. Hunter S Thomson shot himself; his ashes were blasted off from a cannon, as he had wanted. Shama Futehally died of cancer. Nirmal Verma died after a long and pathbreaking career. Amrita Pritam and V K Madhavan Kutty died within weeks of each other. O V Vijayan left behind a tremendous legacy, as did Arun Kolatkar, whose Jejuri finally found its way back into print. The year also claimed Peter F Drucker, the maverick Guillermo Cabrera Infante and John Fowles. |
| Landmarks : Google caused a controversy with its plans to build the world's largest library of scanned and searchable books, Google Print. Publishers aren't happy about the potential for copyright violation, but Amazon and Yahoo! are now also working on digitised libraries. |
| The official word of the year was "podcast", according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, or "integrity" if you preferred to follow Merriam-Webster. Euphemisms of the year were "deferred success" in preference for "fail" and "misguided criminal" in place of "terrorist". |
| The first International Man Booker Prize went to Ismail Kadare; the next will be announced in 2007. |
| Harry Potter swept sales, predictably, with the latest in J K Rowling's spectacularly successful boy wizard series. However, it didn't make it to the mammoth (over 2,700 pages) Norton Anthology of Children's Literature. |
| Rushdie was more successful this year in his role as the head of PEN International than as an author. By the end of 2005, Shalimar the Clown had sold just 26,000 copies according to one commentator. |
| Tailpiece: Just to put 2005 into perspective, consider this. It's been 170 years since Macaulay wrote his notorious minute. It's been 70 years since Bankimchandra's Rajmohan's Wife, considered the first Indian novel in English, was published in book form""a full four decades after the author's death. It came out in 1935, the same year that R K Narayan's Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable were published. It was 65 years ago that Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi was published, 50 years ago that A K Ramanujan's first book""a collection of Kannada proverbs""was published, and 30 years ago that Naipaul visited India during the Emergency gathering material for what would become India: A Wounded Civilisation. |
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