Indian literature is in the spotlight at the Paris Book Festival, which opens its doors to the general public this Friday, April 22. Thirty Indian authors will take part in this event. This is an opportunity to discover the richness of Indian letters, but perhaps also the difficulties encountered by writers from this country to write and publish freely in an India where the Hindu fundamentalists in power abuse freedom of expression and reviews.
Modern India has a long history of censorship of literary works. The practice dates back to the days of British colonization. Under the colonial regime, which lasted nearly two hundred years, books were withdrawn from sale, mainly for political reasons.
Ananda Math, a nationalist novel by the great Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, was one of India’s first literary works to be censored. Published in 1882, translated into French under the title Felicity Monasterythis book which made hear for the first time the cry Vande Mataram (“Hail to Mother India”), a patriotic song taken up by the Indian nationalist movement, was banned by the colonial regime. It was not until independence that this ban was finally lifted and Vande Mataram adopted as the national anthem.
Other books that fell under the sedition law introduced by the British include: Soz-e-watan, by the Urdu-speaking author, Premchand, a pioneer of modern Indian literature. One morning in 1909, on the orders of district commissioner, the police went to the author to recover the copies of the incriminated work. The 500 copies seized were burned and the author forbade the publication of new books without the authorization of the colonial administration. According to the story, the writer will circumvent the diktat by now calling himself by his pseudonym “Premchand”, in order to be able to continue writing.
After India’s independence in 1947, blacklisting of literary works continued, while Nehru spoke out publicly against the practice of censorship which, according to this Prime Minister, founding father of modern India, did no honor to a civilized society. Paradoxically, it was during the long reign of Nehru that the Indian Supreme Court prohibited the marketing in India of the famous English novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover, deemed obscene by the Indian courts. Remember that this “historic” judgment was pronounced in 1964, 31 years after the publication of the novel in England.
” The Republic of Hurt Feelings »
Coming into force in 1950, the Indian Constitution nevertheless enshrines the right to express oneself freely, to contest, to criticize. But this freedom of expression is conditioned by considerations of state security, public order, decency and morality, and other restrictions, including offense to religious feelings. These restrictions are specified in the second paragraph of article 19 of the Constitution devoted to freedom of expression.
“ The legislative apparatus of censorship, detailed in the Indian Penal Code, is in fact a direct legacy of the colonial era. “recalls Laetitia Zecchini, specialist in contemporary Indian literature and affiliated with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). The researcher describes India as ” Republic of Hurt Feelings referring to Amendments 295A and 298 of the Indian Penal Code which legalizes censorship of literary and artistic works on the basis of religious offense. ” These amendmentsexplains the university, make the offense to the religious sensibilities of the Indians the very basis of the criminal complaint. They warrant legal action against those who, in word or deed, “hurt” religious feelings in a way that both “deliberate” and “with bad intentions” “.
In 1988, a milestone in the history of literary censorship in India, it was in the name of outrage against religious sentiments that The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie was banned in Indian territory. India’s Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of Nehru, was the first country to ban Rushdie’s novel under pressure from the Muslim clergy on whom Congress depended to maintain its stranglehold on the electorate community. Even before Iran. Besides, The Satanic Verses is not his only work to be censored in India. In 1995, his novel The Moor’s Last Breath drew the wrath of the regionalist and far-right party, Shiv Sena, in power in the state of Maharashtra (capital Bombay), for its parody presentation of its leader Bal Thackeray.
In 2003, the Bangladeshi Taslima Nasreena refugee in India, will also bear the brunt of the electoral politics of the authorities when, in the name of the wounded feelings of the Muslim community, the Communist Party in power in the Indian state of West Bengal withdrew from the trade its books, including his novel Dwikhandito or “Tripped in two”.
Resurgence of complaints
With the rise of Hindu nationalism, from the 1990s, the Hindu majority has also become accustomed to asserting its “hurt feelings” to ban books that represent its religion in a light that it considers little favorable. ” The causal link between the consolidation of the Hindu nationalist right and the trivialization of its ideology (“hindutva”) and the multiplication of attacks on the freedom of expression of the other, is indisputable. », Writes Laetitia Zecchini in an article on « Censorship(s), vulnerable communities and culture wars (1). She speaks of a new hypersensitivity ” in the face of the alleged offenses and the ” recrudescence of complaints which insistently cultivate the repertoire of hurt feelings “.
In this context, the pounding in 2014 of The Hindus: an alternative history from the pen of the eminent American Indianist Wendy Doniger, is an emblematic case of censorship in India for religious reasons. Published in 2008, this book, which aims to tell a renewed history of Hinduism from alternative sources, quickly became a bestseller in India, until an activist of the Hindu movement, the RSS, filed a complaint against its publisher, the Penguin India, accusing the author of wanting to smear the image of the Hindu religion and of having hurt the feelings of ” million hindus “.
The affair deeply shook the Indian intelligentsia. When, after four years of legal battles, the publisher decided in February 2014, a few months before the election of Hindu leader Narendra Modi, to have the book withdrawn from the market, the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy published in The Times of India an open letter, particularly accusatory. She challenged the publisher to have yielded to pressure from the street. ” The elections have not yet taken place, she writes. The fascists are only campaigning. Admittedly, it already smells scorched, but they are not yet in power. Not yet. And you have already succumbed! »
The bitterness of Indian intellectuals, as shown by Roy’s column, grew after the triumphant election of Narendra Modi’s Hindu party to the federal parliament in April 2014. Since then, the multiplication of assassinations targeting writers, journalists have silenced number of writers or, more seriously still, to self-censorship. Authors are afraid to write, fearing they will be targeted by Hindu activists. Tamil novelist Perumal Murugan says no different when he proclaims that an inner censor now watches every word he writes.
In 2010, with his seminal novel Madhurobhagan, this author aroused the ire of Hindu fundamentalists by portraying the stigma of infertility that weighs on childless women in Indian society. Harassed, threatened, he had to give up his vocation, even announcing his death as a writer on Facebook. Simply to be left alone!
wishful thinking
Censorship in India today also affects the resume schools and universities. Recently, the University of Delhi withdrew from the curriculum of literary studies texts by great Indian authors depicting the brutalities of the caste system and the fate reserved for women in a patriarchal society. A short story from the pen of the great Bengali novelist, Mahasweta Devi, recounting the gang rape suffered by a young tribal woman in a police station, is among the censored texts, because they ” offend culture and ethical values ”, as explained by the spokesman of the university of Delhi.
” This censorship raises the question of what literature is “says Laetitia Zecchini for her part. And to wonder: Aren’t art and literature precisely intended to be offensive, even undesirable, insofar as they constantly thwart definitive assignments by questioning borders and hierarchies? »
The assault on democracy and its freedoms by the Modi government is now particularly aimed at the history books. The conservative right in power in India wants to rewrite history to instil in people’s minds a Hindu vision of the country, obscuring its pluralism, its multi-millennial and fruitful multiculturalism. The last time the government wanted to change the history books was in 1977 when, for the first time since independence, the right was in charge in New Delhi, eminent Indian historian Romila Thapar recently told a journalist. “ The debate continued in Parliament for three yearsrecalls Thapar. We were treated like “anti-nationals”of “academic terrorists”. Then the government fell, and we continued to teach with the old textbooks. »
With the Hindu fundamentalists firmly in power in New Delhi this time around, hoping today that history students can quickly find their old textbooks seems like wishful thinking. The Modi years are likely to last, undoubtedly leading to a profound change in political paradigm and imagination, observers fear.
(1) “ A “Republic of wounded feelings”? Censorship(s), vulnerable communities and culture wars in India », by Laetitia Zecchini. Communications2020/1 (issue 106)