Gauri Lankesh murder: Death of a journalist

It seems very difficult to express sensitive issues safely in our own languages

The assassination of Gauri Lankesh is another indicator that what we can get away with expressing in English, we cannot in our own languages. 

This is not an original thesis. It was developed by one of our best minds, The Indian Express columnist Khaled Ahmed, whom I have had the good fortune of meeting three times in Lahore, and whose works I have read for over 20 years. 

What did Ahmed mean? He meant that the idiom of our languages carried something richer than did English. Not in the sense of more information (which they don’t), but more emotion. Our languages and their phrases and words also carry a powerful cultural consensus, which is difficult for us to resist. 

Let me give some examples to illustrate this. Honour killings are reported in Hindi newspapers with the English word ‘honour’. This is strange. Why not use ‘izzat’? The reason is that the phrase ‘izzat ke liye khoon’ (murder to recover izzat) can only be read positively. It does not communicate the carrying out of a crime so much as the legitimate recovery of family honour. 

The word ‘izzat’ is loaded with too much for the reader to view it neutrally. Similarly, Hindi (and also Gujarati) newspapers use the word ‘secularism’ and ‘secular’. The official term is ‘dharm nirpeksh’, which is not a real word but something concocted. It means literally ‘that which is not dependent on dharm’. Why is it so torturous? Because the word dharm is fully loaded. Anything that is stood apart from dharm cannot be a good thing, and we have no real word for secularism.

It may interest readers to know that in Pakistan, the word secular is a negative word. This is because in the political and religious discourse, the word secular is used as that which is opposed to the Islamic state. It is something that, in the Ahmedian thesis, Pakistanis will find difficult to accept just as much as we will recoil from ‘adharm’. 

These days, of course, in India also we are going through a phase, and perhaps an era, in which secularism has become a bad word. One clever and demented news anchor has coined the word ‘secularati’, a meaningless but catchy word that captures the contempt felt by many in India for those opposed to Hindutva. 

Actor Shabana Azmi joins a protest against the murder of journalist Gauri LankeshActor Shabana Azmi joins a protest against the murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh

Gauri Lankesh was properly bilingual. She conversed in fluent English and was from the Anglicised middle class in every way from the way she dressed to the way she led her life generally. But she edited a magazine in and wrote in Kannanda. This is probably where she caused offence. What we may get away with saying and writing in English, we may not in our own languages. So what did Lankesh write about?

As her surname suggests, this was an unusual woman. Who would identify with, much less glorify, the biggest villain in Indian mythology? The name Lankesh is a synonym of Ravana, as older readers who watched Ramayana on Doordarshan in the mid-1980s will know. Gauri’s father was named, or called himself Lankesh. He was an editor of the sort only South India produces. Interested in politics and culture, highly educated, bilingual, and relevant despite editing an organ with a limited circulation. 

Lankesh Patrike, meaning the letter of Ravana, was a biting, vicious and highly politicised publication that regularly got its editor into trouble. After the passing of Lankesh, this school of journalism passed on to his children, who set up similar publications. His daughter’s was called Gauri Lankesh Patrike, and it added one element that Gauri believed the times required: a crystal clear response to majoritarianism (also called Hindutva). 

This clarity made Lankesh attractive, and she was able to pull in towards her those figures who had been demonised for having the same views as her. In Bengaluru she was the point of contact for such people and she offered herself to them, with whatever limited resources she had, as their host. I mean such people as Kanhaiyya Kumar and Umar Khalid, the protagonists of Jawaharlal Nehru University’s sedition episode. And also Jignesh Mewani, who mobilised Dalits after the shameful episode at Una. 

This clarity also upset and angered those who could not understand opposition to Hindutva from the pluralist point of view that came effortlessly to Lankesh. The same problem we can see in the murder of the rationalist Professor Kalburgi. He wrote in Kannada about issues that carried a most powerful cultural consensus within his own Lingayat community: the role of their great 12th century founder, Basava. Kalburgi was murdered two years ago, on August 30, 2015, also shot by unknown assassins as was Lankesh. 

Would both these writers have survived had they only written in English? This is difficult to say, because often in things that are of interest in our parts, translations rapidly appear. And then the emotions get inflamed. But it is undeniably true that the edge that is carried by words and phrases when expressed in our languages is blunted to a large extent when expressed in English. 

Lankesh, whom I knew well, and who would come home, bringing these young men whom she mentored, knew the dangers of this. The Karnataka government said she had expressed no indication that she was under threat. This is not surprising, because she rarely spoke about herself, even when she expressed herself strongly. But it is unquestionable that, operating in the local language, and clearly and unequivocally, she would have known that there were many who hated her.

Why did she continue to write? Many of us are troubled by the things happening in India, but we lack clarity. That is because, on such a gigantic scale as India offers, it is not easy to spot cause and effect. 

Are things in decline? Are constitutional values in jeopardy? If so, who is responsible? Is it right to blame a group or party if it occasionally says the right thing? These questions are difficult to answer with certainty for most of us. 

For Lankesh there was no doubt. Hindutva and majoritarianism were dangerous for India, of this she was convinced. Her response was action, and it was a response that was expressed directly and powerfully in the idiom in which it would have hit home hardest.