Few contestations are as confusing in today's India as those over free speech. Populist mobilisation, theories of liberalism, realpolitik, and class and community conflicts intersect and overlap here. Even those who agree on the ends - the creation of an accepting public sphere, with multiple voices, and lively dissent - disagree vehemently on the means. They do so for various reasons - because of the contours of specific hurts that speech could inflict, because India's concrete conditions might make free speech for all difficult to enforce, or because they imagine that when voices are free those voices with privilege may speak loudest. Thus, whenever speech is controlled to avoid "hurting sentiments", the response - whether in support or condemnation - can appear cacophonous.
Given the multiplicity of reasons for disagreement, and the ways in which they lie at angles to each other, developing rounded theories of what underlies this disagreement is difficult. We should all be grateful that three professors of English in prominent Indian universities - Rina Ramdev, Sandhya Devasan Nambiar, and Debaditya Bhattacharya - have edited a volume that attempts to delineate how "hurt" is felt and constructed, what "sentiment" might mean and where it comes from, and how Indian politics and the nature of its media shape the creation and response to "hurtful" speech.
In Sentiment, Politics, Censorship: The State of Hurt, the editors assemble 19 essays - along with their own preface and introduction - from writers who are academics, journalists, artists, lawyers, and activists. By and large, all the essays are worth reading - although some of them don't quite fit into the book's larger project. (A chapter on Delhi University teachers' protests against the semester system has been shoe-horned in with the flimsy justification that administrators accused teachers of "hurting" the ethos of the university.)
Given the varied standpoints and the argumentation of the writers, it would not be profitable to summarise or to categorise the essays here. Some do stand out - and not necessarily those most closely related to the supposed theme. For example, Mushirul Hasan's attempt to trace the history of "hurtful" accusations against Muslims spends a great deal of time on examining what lies behind the anti-Muslim statements of, say, Nirad Chaudhuri and V S Naipaul, although nobody has asked for Chaudhuri to be banned or pulped of late. Nevertheless, that chapter is one of the highlights of the volume. Some essays that do pretend to be on point, however, such as Soumyabrata Choudhury on M K Gandhi, B R Ambedkar and the idea of "anathema", are so poorly argued and speculative in their reasoning that the editors should have said their dogs ate those particular manuscripts.
Disjointed and often contradictory approaches to free speech, as I said, aren't surprising. It's worth listening to all the various arguments, though it does become tiresome when essays contradict themselves. In a tribute to the confusions the subject engenders, the editors accomplish the feat of internal contradiction in their own introduction. A few pages of it are dedicated to an ill-judged and poorly argued screed against Penguin for abandoning Wendy Doniger; and those pages are swiftly followed by a discussion of the bad laws that Penguin had cited, providing a persuasive case for why Penguin was, in fact, helpless in the face of "the law's failure to safeguard the voice of reason."
In fact, one aspect of free-speech disputation that the volume largely fails to sufficiently address at the level of theory is the question of "platforming" - are rights infringed when certain arguments or individuals are denied platforms from which to speak? Does that infringement differ when the platform is provided by a private-sector publisher, a private university, a publicly-funded institution, or a state-authorised textbook? The controversy a few years ago over whether a cartoon by Shankar, that some read as showing Jawaharlal Nehru whipping Ambedkar, should have been included in a state textbook comes up repeatedly. The contours of understandable "hurt" in the Dalit response to that, and the arrogance of the academic dismissal of that hurt, are described well. But the larger question is: Do theories of free speech and legal prohibitions have a bearing on what was (and should indeed be) a political decision about what should be taught? This question is barely asked, let alone answered.
As I said, it is important to listen to various viewpoints on the issue; but it is equally important to do so purposefully. The purpose, surely, is to identify those constraints and insecurities which most clearly lead to the shrinking of the public sphere - a process the editors describe as a "definite tightening of spaces for possible articulation of dissent [that] has been steadily gaining a certain manufactured traction in public discourse". In fighting "the deep forces of the irrational that drive the daily force of democracy", as they elegantly put it, one must know also which arguments and concerns are to be ignored, which are irrelevant, and which are disengaged from concrete reality. As it happens, listening to everyone, and reading this book, can help you identify those, too.
SENTIMENT, POLITICS, CENSORSHIP
The State of Hurt
Rina Ramdev, Sandhya Devesan Nambiar, Debaditya Bhattacharya (editors)
Sage Publications
278 pages; Rs 895
