DELICIOUS IRONIES - Self-confident cosmopolitanism in a literature festival

By Swapan Dasgupta

When I first attended the Jaipur Literature Festival six years ago as a speaker for their concluding public debate, the event was held in the Durbar Hall of the Diggi Palace Hotel which could, at best accommodate some 300 people. These days, the Durbar Hall counts as among the smaller meeting rooms for the Festival, an annual event which, this year, registered something like two lakh ‘footfalls’—up by an astounding 80,000 from 2012.

The complaint which I have often heard, that the Literature Festival has been transformed into a general tamasha where people turn up for no apparent reason, is probably legitimate. This year, I was astonished to see nearly 800 people crowd into the tent where the popular classicist Tom Holland delivered a fascinating lecture on how Persia emerged as the middle kingdom in the classical world. I am not sure how much of Holland’s erudition sank in but at least there was a sense of relief that no fringe group rushed to the dais to attack the author for his innovative interpretation of early Islam in his earlier work In The Shadow of the Sword.

Tom’s sibling James, nursing a black eye from a game of cricket the day before, may have had other fears. A military historian with nearly a dozen published works under his belt, he was understandably concerned whether anyone at all would show up for the session on his book Dam Busters, about the 1943 air raid that destroyed two iconic dams in western Germany. As the moderator for the session, I shared James Holland’s anxieties. There is, after all, nothing more dispiriting than addressing five drowsy individuals and 295 empty chairs.

We did succeed in attracting a modest gathering of some 60 people, including many whose initiation into World War II history was courtesy Combat comics that depicted all Germans as clumsy oafs whose vocabulary didn’t extend beyond “achtung” and, for some inexplicable reason, “donner und blitzen”.  They appreciated James’ potted history of the making of the bouncing bombs, the skills and hazards of low-flying precision bombing, and his spirited debunking of the belief that Britain won the War by clinging to the coat-tails of the Americans. There was even an awkward smirk on the faces of the handful of Britons when I made a fleeting mention of Squadron Leader Guy Gibson’s black Labrador—immortalised by the legendary 1955 film starring Michael Redgrave. Overall, it was a lovely, quirky session that appealed to the handful that appreciated the difference between the Lancaster and the Mosquito.

It is this appeal to minority tastes that distinguishes the Festival in Jaipur from other similar exercises in India. Yes, there is the ritual genuflection at the altar of ‘bhasha’ correctness, the mandatory sessions on Bollywood (where Javed Akhtar can hold any audience spellbound) and cricket (this year it was Rahul Dravid’s turn to be mobbed), and the invariable celebrations of spiritualism featuring the holiest of holies—the Dalai Lama, no less. But these, I would like to believe, is largely to attract the sponsors. If it wasn’t for the large numbers of youngsters who throng to Jaipur—“We never see young faces at similar events in Britain”, Howard Jacobson (author of The Finkler Question) told me happily—the likes of Coke, Google and Tata Steel wouldn’t have cared to sponsor a literature festival.

Two years ago, I even noticed the London Library on St James’s Square among the sponsors. It was a noble gesture based on hyperbolic assumptions. Amid all the hype and the needless controversies centred on Salman Rushdie’s threatened presence last year and Ashis Nandy’s off-the-cuff wisdom this year, there is a paradox that India needs to address. There has been an explosion of literary festivals that amount to a celebration of reading. At the same time, there has been no corresponding growth in either the sale of books or the reading habit.

Yes, there has been an exponential growth in the number of publishing houses setting up shop and the numbers of people convinced that they are the next best thing after Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh—for some odd reason, no one talks of Sir Vidia Naipaul any longer. Indeed, the Eton-educated British MP of Ghanian origin Kwasi Kwarteng, who possesses a wicked sense of humour, offended many literary groupies in Jaipur by suggesting that the Indian who parachuted into a God-forsaken African country in search of a disaster travelogue was guilty of the same presumptuousness that whites were once charged with by angry ‘post-colonial’ audiences. Fortunately, as I discovered in Jaipur with an enormous sense of relief and reassurance, earnest young women mouthing platitudes in a language that is both strident and incomprehensible may well be a thing of the past. Or, at least, the phenomenon hasn’t seriously infected the Pink City Circus.

In a land where, at least for a disproportionate number of English-reading people, the road to enlightenment runs through a Chetan Bhagat novel and an MBA degree, it is easy to intimidate people into looking for the Exit sign at the mention of literature. What used to be a pleasurable activity involving the human experience was successfully transformed by the high priests of ‘post-modernism’ and other lifestyle diseases into something utterly fearful or, worse still, boring. For me, a worrying feature of literary festivals in India was the nagging fear that the appreciation of books and writing would degenerate into a seminar on the inadequacies of the intellectual architecture of what we, bound up in reams of ‘false consciousness’, imagined was creative stuff.

In what I thought was a piece of delicious irony, the Festival organisers scheduled a discussion on Rudyard Kipling involving three of his biographers—Charles Allen, David Gilmour and Andrew Lycett—on the morning of Republic Day. As the moderator for the session, I had gently told the three Britons that should speak their mind and not be concerned with how Kipling is perceived in the corridors of political correctness. At the same time, I was a little concerned that some prickly soul in the audience wouldn’t find the ‘White Man’s Burden’ and the grudging tribute to the Fuzzy-Wuzzy in the Sudan terribly funny, and respond with the “unreasonable petulance of small children, always morbidly afraid that someone is laughing at them”—Kipling’s amusing caricature of the Bengali.

Belying expectations, I discovered something that restored my faith in Hindoostan: that decades of contrived anti-imperialist propoaganda hasn’t been able to kill India’s abiding love for Kipling. Gilmour explained the paternalist underpinnings of ‘White Man’s Burden’; Lycett read “We and They” which could well have been written by a professional multiculturalist; and Allen held forth on Kipling’s love affair with Buddhism in Kim. An intervention from the audience suggested that Stalky & Co hadn’t been bettered as boy’s boarding school tales; an IAS officer disputed that there were few Bengalis in late-Victorian Lahore for Kipling’s Bengali allergy to have been born of ignorance; and a woman journalist reminded everyone that politics be damned, Kipling remained the master of children’s stories.

For me, this Republic Day was really an Empire Day as I shuttled between Kipling, Lord Cromer, Lord Lugard and the legacy question. I was struck that the full-throated demands for the de-colonisation of the mind were swamped by the self-confident cosmopolitanism of a generation willing to discuss Empire, appreciate it and laugh at its many thousand absurdities. Jaipur facilitated that conversation because it was structured on the belief that Indians aren’t the narrow-minded, dreary, uptight bores the official custodians of taste make them out to be.

The Telegraph, February 1, 2013 

The age of intolerance

By Swapan Dasgupta

There are many in the Government who are absolutely chuffed at the ease with which Operation Stop Rushdie was played out. First, the Rajasthan Police (or was it the Central authorities?) informed the organizers of the Jaipur Literature Festival that sundry assassins financed by the Mumbai underworld were on the prowl. That ensured Salman Rushdie didn't check-in for his flight to India. Secondly, once it was known that the organizers would use technology to circumvent the unofficial Congress ban on Rushdie, the local hotelier and the organizers were deftly arm-twisted into cancelling the video linkup for fear of violence and police indifference.

Yes, there were voices of liberal outrage at the subversion of democratic freedom. However, since the indignation was confined to a class that rarely bothers to vote, has no worthwhile electoral influence and, if the chairman of the Press Council is to believed, still harbours a colonial mindset, it could be safely ignored in favour of the satisfaction among those who, apart from being more authentic, also control powerful Muslim vote-banks.

What was witnessed last week was cynicism perfected into a fine art by a government that has excelled in the art of subterfuge. Where the regime wants to offset protests against free speech, it does so unapologetically. In Punjab, crowds at a public meeting to be addressed by Rahul Gandhi were compelled to leave their shoes and any black apparel outside the venue for fear that these could become either missiles or black flags. In Jaipur, however, the authorities chose to be cowed down by the threat of small groups of demonstrators. The champions of intolerance won in Jaipur because their victory was facilitated by the might of the state.

Yet, many apologists argue that the events of last week don't necessarily imply any waning commitment to democratic freedoms. Rushdie, it is said, was the exception because his mere mention sends many Muslims into an apoplectic tizzy. And, say the apologists, the timing of the celebrated author's visit was all wrong. If there had been no elections in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress regimes at the Centre and in Rajasthan may well have been more inclined to showcase India as a place where the bar of intolerance is generously high.

Recent trends suggest otherwise. It is becoming increasingly clear that the kerfuffle over Rushdie was no unfortunate aberration but part of a bid to replace an argumentative society with a regulated democracy where freedom is circumscribed by constant reminders of the limits to freedom.

The attempts to muzzle free speech in the social media and the cyber world can no longer be wished away as obsessive concerns of individual ministers with particularly thin skins. Since September 5 last year, the department of information technology has held five meetings with organizations such as Facebook, Google, Blogspot and Yahoo to force a code of conduct governing their content. It is not that the government is concerned with lewd pictures and pornography. It has demanded that the social media sites "scan and screen/filter the content hosted on their websites for objectionable content about Constitutional authorities, council of ministers in Centre/states, political leadership, public authorities and disable them on their own or as and when brought to their knowledge in writing by an authorized representative of such authorities." A public interest litigation protesting the "damage (to) the secular fabric of India" is also before the Delhi High Court.

In plain language, the government is demanding the right of pre-censorship of all potentially "objectionable content" relating to public life and politics--a demand that has striking resemblance to the censorship practiced by the authorities in China.

It is, of course, possible to dismiss these moves as trivial concerns that will affect a minority of internet loonies who are unaware of the niceties of parliamentary decorum. The only problem is that when the right to determine what is objectionable is given to people who are unaffected by the charms of pluralism, the consequences can be very dangerous. The Rushdie affair last week has vividly demonstrated that for a section of the political class, the right to offend does not count as a permissible freedom. India is being forced into a mental straitjacket.

Sunday Times of India, January 27, 2012

A victory for intolerance

By Swapan Dasgupta

Those writers who indulged in a bout of needless grandstanding by reading out passages from Salman Rushdie’s contentious The Satanic Verses at the Jaipur Literature Festival last Friday did the cause they were ostensibly espousing very little good.

On the contrary, their symbolic defiance of the 1988 ban on the book merely served to confirm in the eyes of those baying for Rushdie’s blood that the main purpose behind the invitation to the British-Indian author was to resurrect a controversy that, mercifully, has passed its sell by date. The sundry clerics and ghetto politicians who clamoured for Rushdie’s permanent exclusion from India can now feel vindicated that they managed to contain a sinister assault on the fundamental tenets of Islam.

However, if there is one thing that is clear about last fortnight’s kerfuffle, it is that the fuss was only tangentially connected to the Satanic Verses — a book that is not openly sold in India. Since he re-established his right to visit India in 1998, courtesy the NDA Government, and then wisely procured a PIO card that assures him visa-less travel for life, Rushdie has been in India on more than six occasions and maybe more. He has delivered lectures, graced literary festivals and celebrity parties and even reclaimed his grandfather’s house in Solan. On each occasion some fringe group or other has issued statements opposing the visit and on each occasion the Government chose to ignore them. On his part, Rushdie has done nothing to either resurrect the Satanic Verses issue in India or trigger any new controversy. His behaviour in India has been careful and restrained. After all, he, more than anyone else, is aware of the huge personal costs of living undercover for at least a decade after Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his death sentence through a fatwa.

So, what was so different this time? The difference lies not so much in the fact that the Deoband seminary asked for his visa to be cancelled and that some shadowy organisation promised to reward anyone who threw a slipper at Rushdie with a prize of Rs 1 lakh. There are some bodies that exist to take sectarian positions on matters and routinely proclaim that Islam is in danger. They do it when a US President comes visiting, when Indo-Israeli ties improve, when Taslima Nasreen asks for the right of residence in India and they do it at the whiff of Rushdie. The best way for the Government to have reacted was by ignoring them. Indeed, it seemed that was precisely what was going to happen until Rushdie tweeted and the Rajasthan Government stepped into the fray.

It is difficult to accept the Rajasthan Government’s plea that it would have a hard time guaranteeing Rushdie’s safety. Equally, it is impossible to respond to the Centre’s plea that either the outlawed SIMI or a section of the Mumbai underworld was plotting to send an assassin to accomplish what Ayatollah Khomeini had desired 24 years earlier, with a straight face. What gave the game away was the fact that no one in the Government and the Congress (with the honourable exception of Manish Tewari) deemed it necessary to express a single word of condemnation for those who wanted the ban on Satanic Verses to be coupled with a ban on Rushdie the person.  Notables in India are fond of tirelessly repeating that “we will not be cowed down by terrorism”. But isn’t that what precisely happened in the case of Rushdie?

The forces of intolerance scored a famous victory last week. They won because the match was fixed in their favour by the UPA Government and the Congress. And the outcome was pre-determined because with the Uttar Pradesh election round the corner, the Congress wanted to show a gesture of goodwill towards those who claim to influence the vote-banks. Rushdie lost out because the Congress was loath to have any influential Muslim body point an accusing finger at it. Those who felt offended and let down by Rushdie’s absence from Jaipur were regarded as inconsequential members of the non-voting classes. Their protests could safely be disregarded.

The monotonous regularity with which the bar of artistic freedom is being lowered should alarm all Indians. Yet, under the guise of secularism and the principle of equal respect for all religions, it has become possible for all groups with an imaginary grievance to exercise a veto power. This is a travesty but what compounds the offence is the fact that retrograde decisions are being routinely taken by people who know better, are not personally narrow-minded and pay lip service to India as an argumentative society.

The argument that compromises with democracy have to be made for the larger interests of democracy is specious. Over the years, intolerance is fast turning into the new normal with every group and religious denomination jumping into the fray. From a historical work on Shivaji, the title of a film and the morality of women to theological disputations, the agenda is being set by those resourceful enough to command a mob.

The ‘sab chalta hai’ attitude is no answer. Nor does it do to shower the barbarians with disdain and feign a sense of superiority. What is required is for a plural culture and mindset to take deep roots in society. Moral relativism has become an excuse to relegate decency to the backburner. As a state, India has eschewed dharma.

Sunday Pioneer, January 22, 2012