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<b>Mihir S Sharma:</b> Offence is everywhere

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Mihir S Sharma
Last Updated : Feb 09 2015 | 10:19 PM IST
How much do you love your work, if you're an author? Can you just walk away from your entire oeuvre, everything you've written, from the author's life itself? Few people can; mostly, people who earn a living from writing find it addictive.

If you are Perumal Murugan, however, you may have no alternative.

Mr Murugan is the author from rural Tamil Nadu who chose, a few weeks ago, to renounce his 25-year-long writing career and retrospectively denounce his own books. It was a dramatic note, the one announcing his departure from the public eye: it was written entirely in the third person, and had the tone of an obituary notice. "Author Perumal Murugan has died," it began. "He withdraws all the novels, short stories, essays and poetry he has written so far ... All those who have bought his books so far are free to burn them. If anyone feels they have incurred a waste or loss in buying his books, he will offer them compensation."

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Mr Murugan was driven to this because of an odd sequence of circumstances. In 2010, he wrote the book Madhurobagan, set a hundred years earlier in the small Tamil Nadu town of Tiruchengode, where he was born and where he still lives. It was the story of a marriage, and of the pain of childlessness. One plot point: a festival at a local temple at which, for the day, women are permitted to have sex with a man not their husband - one way in which many societies have dealt with childlessness, while also giving some form of social sanction to (and asserting some sort of control over) the temptations of promiscuity.

The book did well. It was translated. Then, late last year, somebody from the broader Sangh Parivar read it and organised a book burning. Outrage in Tiruchengode grew, particularly among the community featured in the festival descriptions in the book. Mr Murugan was advised to leave home by the police (doing their usual sterling job of sticking up for free speech). When your entire town turns against what you write, you might well want to just give up your career.

The pernicious effects of a certain form of liberal censoriousness about speech were particularly visible in this case. Because Mr Murugan was writing about a community or a caste that was not dominant in the area, he laid himself open to charges of "punching down", of embedding his story in the long and problematic upper-caste narrative of lower-caste female promiscuity. The caste identity of the couple in the book was crucial; it was the reason the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chose to make an issue of it, as part of their southern attempt to alter Hindutva's image as an upper-caste enterprise. And it meant that some who may otherwise have been in Mr Murugan's corner were not as vocal as they need have been.

This is a more general problem, of course. Books are not the first target of aggrieved groups. That can be television, or newspapers - or, these days, even viral videos. The comedy group AIB, who offended pretty much everybody with a recent "roast" of two Hindi film stars, have been the subject of police complaints. They have even reportedly apologised to the Roman Catholic Church for making a few jokes about paedophile priests; several Roman Catholic groups had led the protests and legal campaign (using the pernicious Section 295A) against the comedians.

This was, naturally, in the groups' own interest. Competition over taking offence is how various organisations can claim to more effectively uphold community rights. In the case of Mr Murugan, the RSS was trying to do the same, upholding the right to take offence of a particular community, but for the organisation's own reasons. The liberal defenders of laws restricting criticism of religion imagine they are needed to protect oppressed communities. But they are actually used by the powerful in those communities to oppress - as the case of Shireen Dalvi, a woman who edits a Mumbai Urdu newspaper, should tell us. Ms Dalvi was arrested for reproducing some cartoons from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo; a woman and a Muslim, and, thus, the real target for the Indian state's blasphemy laws, laws inappropriately defended by liberals in India and the West as necessary to prevent oppression.

The trends constricting the freedom to write, draw and publish in this country are not driven primarily by right-wing politics. They are driven by the easy access to dissent (and, therefore, offence) the internet provides. And by a particular kind of group mobilisation - of which right-wing religious politics is the prime and dominant example, true - and by a liberal unwillingness to accept the primacy of free expression as a value that helps the weak. At this very moment, the Supreme Court is asking the government, in a case about the legality of the draconian Section 66 of the Information Technology Act, how the word "offensive" can be justified as a reason for a ban when it is "vague" and "subjective". And the Centre has said potential misuse wasn't a reason to throw out a law that sent people to jail for three years for offending anyone on the internet: "If the medicine is bitter, then we can have sugar after it, instead of throwing out the medicine."

That's bad news for Mr Murugan the writer, dead or not. The residents of Tiruchengode are not satisfied with his authorial passing. They want "action" taken against even those who just support his right to write. And, frankly, Mr Murugan's withdrawal is not enough to protect him, in the age of the internet and Section 66A. The Hindu reports that angry villagers "said that even after the writer had tendered an apology … the book without any deletion was still available free on the Internet".

True. We will never get rid of offence until we shut down the internet. Perhaps the government should try that next.

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First Published: Feb 09 2015 | 9:42 PM IST

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