The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  Some of the women were nodding. But the man said, and two of the women said, you do not represent Hindustan.

  Another friend, tired of the arguments, said flatly, neither do you. The women and I shook hands. Thank you for trying to explain, I said, and I meant it. Some more of them held out their hands. The man looked upset—stop shaking hands, he said to them. I shook his hand and said thank you, and he seemed even more upset.

  The policewoman told us again to step back. She and I chatted for a while. There would be no violence, she said, not from this lot. They were melting away already because there were no television cameras. There was no point trying to talk, she said briskly, their world and mine—she took in my jeans, my dark glasses, and even though some of the women were similarly clad, in kurtas and trousers, our accents marked us out as different—had nothing in common.

  Inside the gallery, it was quiet and calm. Groups of artists, including Ram Rahman and Kanchan Chunder, a few visitors to Hauz Khas who had come in before the barricades closed, and some who’d showed up in support when they heard about the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) protest, were taking in the show. Two policewomen walked around the gallery as well. They liked Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings of Krishna and the naked gopis, exclaimed at the beauty of the blues in a Husain abstract, but frowned at the Souzas.

  ‘What a dirty fellow,’ one said.

  Why, I asked?

  ‘Look at how closely he’s looking at the women he’s painted,’ she said. ‘Everything he’s looking at, and she doesn’t mind.’

  How did she know that the woman in the painting didn’t mind? I asked, fascinated.

  ‘See her face,’ the policewoman said. ‘She’s enjoying him looking, no?’

  The policewoman, I thought, had missed her calling. She would have made a fine art critic.

  When we left, the TV cameras and trucks had gone. And so had the protesters. The gallery, one of the very few in recent times that had not caved, where Ashish Anand, Kishore Singh and the rest at Delhi Art Gallery had gently defended the integrity of the work on the walls, the right of the show to exist, was still open for business.

  People would walk in and out for the rest of the day. Some would love the Brootas and the Akbar Padamsees, argue about the sculptures and the (low) ratio of male to female nudes. Some would do the simple thing of looking at these bodies, in all their vulnerability, their sensuality, their beauty and their slow ageing. No one who walked in came in looking for offence, looking for reasons to get angry, and perhaps because of that, no one left the exhibition offended, or angered. Those who had taken offence were staying outside the barricades, and though the distance between the barricades and the open doors of the gallery was small, I could not see a way to bridge that gap.

  2

  Empty Chairs

  Like many others in the country, I have chronicled the relentless assault on writers, journalists and free speech in my journalism, and those columns can be found elsewhere. The list of writers who have been silenced, threatened or exiled since Independence by political violence, long and punitive lawsuits or the indifference and cowardice of publishing houses is dismaying in its length: Perumal Murugan, Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasreen, Rohinton Mistry, Jitendra Bhargava, Mridula Garg, Arundhati Roy, Durai Guna, Wendy Doniger, James Laine, the lecturer T.J. Joseph, A.K. Ramanujan, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Habib Tanvir, D.N. Jha, M.M. Kalburgi, B.R. Ambedkar, P.M. Antony, Vijay Tendulkar, Aubrey Menen, Stanley Wolpert and many more.

  These losses were felt deeply, mostly in the narrowing of consensus on what writers should be free to write. Every political party or group was implicated, from the right-wing, to Left and Communist parties across states in south India, while the Congress Party had a shameful track record in attempting to muzzle speech on the Internet. In this, politicians had much in common with religious bigots and fundamentalists: the one idea that united all of them, from the Hindu right-wing to powerful Islamic or Christian fundamentalist pressure groups, was the belief that they had a right to choke off and suppress anything that offended them.

  One year, at the Jaipur Literature Festival, four authors—Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzru, Jeet Thayil and Ruchir Joshi—read from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in protest that some fundamentalist groups were threatening violence if he attended the festival. The contrast between the readings and the reaction was illuminating. In both sets of readings, the audience listened with mild interest, a slight frisson going through the crowd when they realized what the book was; but there were no indignant protests, no angry walk-outs. Some laughed at Salman Rushdie’s humour, and smiled at Jeet and Ruchir’s performative skills.

  Outside, the atmosphere was thunderous. The organizers swooped on the authors before the media could get their cameras rolling, and sequestered them in the author’s lounge. Over the next few days, the festival would be threatened by vociferous protestors from Islamic fundamentalist groups in Jaipur. The conspiracy theories would blossom and grow, ignoring the fact that all four authors had chosen to read from Rushdie’s book in a gesture of solidarity, and anger at the rising intolerance in the country that clamped down like a giant muzzle on anyone in the creative professions. None of the four had done it in order to be controversial, or anticipated that their readings would set off a chain of anger and swirling liberal angst over whether they had stepped across a line or not.

  The policeman who came in from the local Jaipur thana was an old hand at defusing volatile situations. He cut through the learned and thoroughly useless debates over whether reading from the Satanic Verses was a crime or not with a set of simple questions.

  Were the authors reading from a book or from printed sheets of paper?

  Printed sheets of paper?

  Then no crime had been committed. Technically, it was the import of the book that was banned. Reading from printouts was fine, though under the labyrinthine laws of the land, the cases in minor courts trundled on for another year or two.

  On the final day, the festival had acquired the air of a besieged Mughal court, with protestors breaking through the security lines to raise slogans on the lawns. The organizers hoped to bring Rushdie in for an interview through an Internet hook-up, but a meeting with the protestors who were massed in two corners of the lawns brought back bad news. They were not prepared to listen to Rushdie, or let the audience listen to him. In fact, they said, they would consider even the screening of an image of the author’s face offensive, and would see that as provocation sufficient to invite violence.

  There were thousands of people on the lawns, writers, schoolchildren, locals from Jaipur, visitors from Delhi who came down every year for the festival. Namita Gokhale, Sanjoy Roy, William Dalrymple and Sheuli Sethi, the team who had successfully built the JLF up from a tiny city festival to one of the largest cultural tamashas in the world, came up on stage to announce that they were not able to continue with the planned conversation between Rushdie and the television anchor Barkha Dutt, given the threats. It was an emotional moment and we were all relieved that they stepped off the stage unharmed. It might have been a much uglier story if they had gone ahead with the broadcast; the fear of violence sparking an uncontrollable stampede was very real.

  Over the next few years, the JLF’s organizers would have to cope with copycat protesters, many of them eager to use the massive media coverage that the festival received to make whatever political points were on their individual agendas. The JLF team had sent an inadvertently weak message across by not defending the authors who read from Rushdie with sufficient strength or clarity. It would take a year or two of frivolous controversies, many of them patently manufactured by groups panting for the cameras to be turned on them, before would-be limelight stealers realized that the festival was not going to give ground to bullies.

  There were two things I learned from the incidents of Jaipur in 2012. One was that the gap between what happens in a reader’s head and a protestor’s mind is vast, and impossible to bridge. One is willing to listen to a s
tory with open curiosity, understanding that books are not meant to be security blankets—anyone who turns to reading solely for comfort, believing that they have a right not to have their core beliefs unsettled, disturbed or challenged is deluded. Protestors scan books (or plays or poems or films or art) the way an MRI goes through a patient’s body—looking for signs of deadly disease that must be uprooted with scalpel and chemo if necessary.

  The other was a sad lesson: censorship works best not through bans or even through the removal of books from public space, but by placing authors in a circle of isolation and subjecting them to transferred resentment. At the Kolkata Literary Festival a year on, the filmmaker Rahul Bose and I had a conversation with an empty chair: Salman Rushdie had been prevented from attending because of protests from the usual suspects.

  Over time, as more and more artists, writers, filmmakers, activists were attacked, the anger and blame shifted from the protestors, because there was nothing that could be done about them—they acted with the blessings of powerful political or religious groups, and they acted with total impunity, aware that authors and artists would not retaliate with violence or censorship attempts in kind.

  It was relatively easy to isolate and ultimately exile writers like Taslima Nasreen, or Rushdie, or later, Perumal Murugan. If one side raised the stakes for organizers of events by threatening and sometimes enacting violence, the free speech arguments were soon turned upside down. It would be irresponsible for organizers to invite such incendiary writers and thereby call violence down on the innocent audience. It was even argued—monstrously—by ostensibly liberal voices, that it was irresponsible of writers who had been targeted in such a fashion to want to participate in these events, given the situation in the country. Everyone was held accountable for the violence they had not committed; the authors who read or spoke up in support of their fellowship, the authors who had been unfairly pilloried in the first place, the organizers who risked inviting either of the above. Everyone was held accountable, except for those who threatened violence in the first place.

  The vast number of writers available to speak at festivals masks the rising number of empty chairs, the invitations not sent out to authors who are too much trouble or too outspoken, the books not written by a generation that has read the signs clearly: Do Not Commit Nuisance.

  But every time an incident like this happened, I went back to the books. Many of us did and continue to do so. When I went back to Midnight’s Children and Shame, I wondered when Indian writers would once again be free to fictionalize and criticize their history the way Rushdie had been back in the 1980s. Every time someone sniped about Rushdie’s ‘celebrity status’, I thought also of the many years that he had put in as the head of PEN, the international body that fought for the rights of writers, and of his sharp, clear, uncompromising arguments in favour of stepping across all kinds of lines.

  I read Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman and bought everything I could find of his works that were available in translation, marvelling at the way in which the landscape he knew so well became the red earth of fiction. The Times of India literary festival invited Rohinton Mistry to come back, four years after the Shiv Sena had burned copies of Such a Long Journey in public, and the writer said to an appreciative audience: ‘My first thought [on hearing about the ban on Such a Long Journey] was, did it take them nineteen years to come across it? I’ve heard of slow cooking, but slow reading? I heard that the sales of the book went up after that.’

  Empty chairs don’t stay empty forever. I re-read Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and it was a relief to see that the land of Gup triumphed over the land of Chup, that all the Khattamshuds in the world could not silence a Batcheat or a Bolo. What could happen in fiction could happen in reality; the two worlds had a way of leaking into one another.

  *

  After what felt like a string of columns on the subject of book bans, censorship and why the apparently reasonable right to take offence can become a terrifying bludgeon in the hands of the wrong people, I began to ask groups of people questions about what free speech meant to them. Even in my quiet backwater, the censorship debates had become relentless, exhausting and pointless: it felt as though we were all repeating the same arguments over and over again, to little purpose. What I wanted to know was simple: what would people talk about if they were free to talk about anything? How would this freedom change their lives, if at all? What did they feel they couldn’t speak freely about?

  The answers came from groups of schoolchildren and a few college students, from festival-goers and occasionally from writers and artists. This was not in any way a scientific study, but over two years of sporadic interviews and conversations, a pattern emerged. It wasn’t startling, but it was heart-wrenching.

  The memories and experiences people shared when we talked about censorship in those few workshops sometimes had little to do with trauma—often, people just wanted to talk about silences in their closest relationships. The men often wished they could speak to their partners, parents or friends more freely about their insecurities and anxieties, their dreams of pursuing more fulfilling careers, their desire to spend more time with their kids and less time at the office.

  The women often wished they could speak more freely about their deepest desires and their frustrations, about the rampant fear that they would lose their identities and become merely someone’s mother, wife, daughter, about their lost goals and dreams. That covered only the narrow if mainstream preoccupations of heterosexuals: for anyone who was part of the increasingly visible and vocal Indian LGBT community, the pressures, and the silences, were of a different and often far more oppressive nature.

  As a group, we felt least free to speak in our own homes. We didn’t feel free to talk to our families about our deepest wants and needs, about our sexual preferences, about our choices of partner or career. We felt most censored about childhood violence or other abuse, about caste-based violence or taunting, about experiencing or witnessing violence in the family, about cycles of addiction and damage, about the anger and pain that arose out of many of these silenced experiences.

  As strangers and friends shared their stories, I felt them resonate: each stumbling sharing loosened some of my own bonds.

  I had spent some years grappling with my own ghosts; when the nightmares reached a certain stage, I found that my voice would fade, growing softer and softer against my will, sometimes drying up in mid-conversation.

  When I finally broke my own silence, about a much older predatory relative, not a grandfather but of that generation, whose ugly and secretive assaults had ripped apart the fabric of my childhood, I was luckier than many: my father and mother supported my decision to speak out. An hour after the New York Times posted the article online, the emails started to come in, first just one or two, and then a steady stream of them—thirty-seven by the end of the first day, and people continued to write in all through the week.

  And for weeks afterwards, letters and emails came in responding to the article I’d written, from strangers but also from close friends, chiefly from women but also from a few men. The letters said in essence, as an old and valued friend wrote: ‘Me too. This happened to me too.’ She and I had known each other for years, and never talked about these experiences, never known that we had this, too, in common. And with each email, each phone call, I felt a sense of kinship grow, and I felt many of the tight knots in my own life loosen.

  I learned that all of us had healed after we had spoken up and shared our stories; it was not necessary to go public with one’s experiences, but it was crucial to share them with someone, a healer, a sibling, friends, support groups. Often these sharings happened over many months and years; you rarely tell your story just once.

  Sometimes you don’t even have to tell it. My father made a point of calling every day for months after the article came out. We didn’t discuss the past, but every time I saw his number on my phone, I understood that he was letting me know he was there,
just in case. We discussed books, and swapped stories of the writers we mutually loved; our positions had reversed, and I was now the one recommending great fiction he absolutely had to read, instead of the other way around.

  I learned that there is a big difference between knowing the statistics that say you are not alone, and knowing for sure that there are so many others who share something of your past and your memories. I am no longer in the least apologetic about the times when I’ve reached out for help; those who seek and can get help from either families or professionals heal faster and have a better chance at creating stable lives.

  I learned, as we all had, that there was a time to declare your anger and a time to put it behind you; that the scars run deep and might never fade, but that healing is always a possibility. A wise friend and mentor told me once: ‘Suffering is not necessary’, by which he meant that terrible things happen, but it is not required that we contribute to the weight of the world’s sadness. Joy, he hinted, was compulsory, even if it sometimes felt like a country for which you had no visa.

  So many of us had encountered unexpected grace along the way: the support of partners, friends, family, but perhaps also other things, a little more empathy, sometimes a little more of an understanding of other injustices, greater than our own troubles.

  For months, the letters came in from all across India, a few from elsewhere:

  ‘Me too.’ ‘Me too.’ ‘Me too.’

  ‘I was nine.’ ‘I was seven.’ ‘I was fourteen.’

  ‘He was my neighbour.’ ‘My father.’ ‘My great uncle.’

  ‘I trusted him.’ ‘He terrified me.’ ‘I thought I was the bad one, that there was something wrong with me, not him.’ ‘His wife knew but she said nothing.’

  ‘I’m still on anti-depressants, but life’s better now.’ ‘It’s my sixth year in recovery from x addiction.’ ‘I used to cut myself, but it’s been years since I did that.’