‘Me too. That was my story, too.’
Many of those who wrote in were already friends; many more became friends, and that was a gift I had not expected.
It was almost a year down the line when I noticed that some things had become imperceptibly easier: speaking in public, speaking to friends, keeping a diary, even writing, as though sharing my experiences had freed me to find the right words in other ways. And slowly, memory unlocked as well: it was finally possible to remember the truly happy parts of my childhood—the long drives with family, the years of reading in trees, the non-stop flow of friends through the house—without the stains of the sadness, guilt and incomprehension that were attached to the assaults. These memories came to the surface quietly, returning my childhood to me in small pieces: a summer afternoon suddenly vivid with the memories of picking mulberries, learning to steer boats in the slender deltas of the Sunderbans, writing straggly stories as an eleven-year-old in imitation of my sister. Predators take a great deal, but over months and years, I claimed more and more territory back.
There’s a word I stumbled across when I was reading an old medical dictionary: eschar. It’s the term for the thick, dead tissue—often black, necrotic—that forms over wounds. In most cases, eschar sloughs off eventually once fresh skin has grown under the burn or the pressure wound; in some cases, the eschar covers a larger wound, making it dangerously difficult to treat.
As I heard more and more stories, I felt a sense of grace mingled with sadness. So many of us had been fortunate to find support, and we had eventually healed. And every so often, we heard about those who hadn’t made it, whose wounds had gone too deep under the skin to heal. If you are trapped in a family, a culture or a community where you cannot speak the truth about your life, you cannot heal from the hurt, the violation, cannot fully ask for the things you will need in order to leave the past behind: memory can go gangrenous. This is true for everyone, not just for those who survived a certain kind of childhood.
*
I have begun to see free speech differently. The writer’s responsibility is not to hold up a mirror to society; it is to honour his or her deepest and most true self. Free speech is not an academic abstraction that concerns only intellectuals and artists. At its core, free speech is about how honest we can be with ourselves, how fearless we can be when expressing our most strongly held beliefs and our most deeply felt intuitions about the world we live in. Sometimes, free expression is unpleasant, unsettling, even shocking; some forms of free expression will be abhorrent to many. The agreement we make, by and large, is to tolerate repugnant and disagreeable views—anything that is not directly harmful or untruthful—in exchange for the right to have our own freedom of expression respected.
And this needs to be acknowledged: freedom of expression is always subversive, just as asking questions is always subversive. One of the arguments many free-speech activists, including myself, have made against book bans is logically impeccable: why ban a book when you have the option to refrain from reading it, and to tell your friends (or followers) not to read it as well? The truth is that ideas are dangerously contagious. They travel as rapidly as viruses, and are almost as infectious—and even if they cannot articulate this thought completely, advocates of censorship understand this instinctively.
Free expression assumes that, in the strictest sense of the phrase, nothing is sacred—there is no line, or sanctum, that cannot be crossed, entered. The family, caste and class, social clans and tribes and religions are all seen to be man-made constructs, open to examination and question. The limits of free expression are always under construction, not at all easy to define or police, but the foundation of free expression is the belief that everything is up for scrutiny.
In essence, censorship and the impulse to ban books are acts of fear. Sometimes they are also acts of violence, but more often, people want to suppress ideas that they find uncomfortable or intolerable. These are almost always ideas and arguments that challenge established beliefs or hierarchies, or that draw our attention to the deep cracks beneath the surface of our lives that we’d rather not look at.
The repercussions of suppressing challenging art, books and ideas are major; but I can empathize with the impulse to shut down what makes you uncomfortable or what you disagree with. Freedom is often uncomfortable. Change is even more disquieting. We all have reasons to resist change, and those of us who argue in favour of free speech would probably make more persuasive arguments if we kept this in mind.
The argument for free speech is seldom made as often or as strongly as the argument against censorship. For most people, even most readers and some writers, free speech remains an abstraction, a high-minded principle that has little application to their own lives. If you can prevent a riot by banning a book or shutting down an art exhibition, most Indians would rather ban the book or the art.
The problem with the argument that books (or art, or films) cause riots is that there hasn’t been a single case of spontaneous indignation from the masses over the last six decades—not a single instance where crowds have gathered on their own to denounce erring artists and writers. Every instance of violence, threatened or actual, has been orchestrated by political parties or religious groups. If we were more given to applying logic, we might well conclude that a more effective way of preventing riots would be to ban political parties and religious groups, instead of banning books.
This is usually the point at which public debate on censorship stops, with both sides accusing the other of intolerance and rigid thinking. But there is a seldom-asked question that may be of some use. Who has the freedom to speak or express themselves with complete confidence and ease in contemporary India? Which groups, if any, had these freedoms in the past?
Fifty per cent of your population is eliminated at the starting gate: women in India, told so often to hold their tongues, to speak softly, to silence themselves and to know their places, do not have freedom of expression, and barring a very few exceptions, never did. Many Dalits and most members of the scheduled castes and tribes still run the risk of punishment, ostracism, torture and death if they dare to unlock their tongues. Many members of minority—read non-Hindu—religions remain painfully aware that they can say nothing without being judged as representatives of the Muslim or the Christian or Sikh community.
Perhaps the wealthy and the powerful have an untrammelled right to free speech? Not so; even the richest of Indians, the most feared of politicians, would hesitate before they ventured to criticize religion, even if they were free to speak their minds about politics and business. Even the most devout of Indians would hesitate to criticize the towering, and sometimes stifling, institution of the family. It is possible, theoretically, that wealthy and powerful male Brahmin priests might be able to exercise their free expression rights with complete impunity, but I have yet to meet someone who fits this description.
The great Indian epics are ambiguous on the subject of free speech. They include subtle cautions and warnings: the rakshashi Surpanakha’s crime is chiefly that she expresses her desire for Rama and Lakshman freely, in a manner that goes against the norms of behaviour they are used to from women. The price she pays for her desire, and her openness, is disfigurement: Lakshman cuts off her nose, and she runs weeping to her brother Ravana. The power of speech is ferocious, not to be taken lightly: Kunti’s careless words bring Draupadi four more husbands than she had bargained for, a half-lie—Ashwatthama (the elephant) is dead—kills a mighty warrior, grief-stricken because he thinks that Ashwatthama (the person) has been slaughtered on the field of battle.
Vac, the goddess of speech, is often represented as a benign, womanly deity, her gifts abundantly and freely given, her connection with creation itself stronger than any of the Vedic gods. Vac is rarely worshipped today, but of all the gods and goddesses, her power seems to tower above the rest. ‘From this holy sound flow the oceans, by her the four regions of space live, and from her proceeds the ultimate ground in which the enti
re universe is rooted.’
The earliest myths about Vac tell a cautionary tale, worth repeating. The gods and the asuras were both the children of Prajapati. Claiming their inheritance, the gods chose mind, the asuras speech. At the site of ritual sacrifice, the gods swoop down on Vac, cutting her off from the asuras. They gain possession of the goddess, and offer up to the fire, making her their own. Yajna himself lusts after Vac, seeking union with the goddess of speech—fearful of what might come of this yoking of the goddess with the god of sacrifice, Indra turns himself into a foetus so that no monster may be born of that union.
In one of our inherited ideas of Vac, this is what emerges from the stark telling of the myth. Sacred speech is coveted and desirable, but it is not for everyone—in fact, it will be snatched back from those who may have a just claim to it, but who cannot defend their claim. Speech, sacred as it may be, can be taken into custody and sent up into flames; Vac herself is tamed, forcibly possessed and impregnated, before she regains herself. After all of this, Vac is worshipped, honoured and prayed to. In this version, while the scriptures tell us of Yajna’s lust and Indra’s quick retrieval of the situation, they remain silent on one subject. Nothing in the sacred texts tells us, in this story about speech, what Vac thinks of all of this.
There is another, far more complex version that I read in a paper on Vac by Asko Parpola, the Finnish Indologist. In this Puranic version, Vac is not captured by the gods—she goes over to the side of the gods on condition, says Parpola, that the ritual offering be made to her before it reaches the sacrificial fire. Behind all of this is a dark tale of incest: Prajapati, overcome by Vac’s beauty, unites with his own daughter.
She goes over to the gods, and out of her union with Yajna, bears Rudra, the god of wrath, who will ultimately take revenge on Prajapati with a three-joined arrow. Rudra can only be born through the combined powers of the gods; and Vac’s sacrifice and impregnation is revealed to have quite a different meaning. After the sacrifice, after the gods unite and offer their powers to Vac, after Indra allows himself to be reborn as Rudra, after Rudra takes revenge on the father who committed incest with his beautiful daughter, Vac continues, serenely, letting the shared mantle of Durga the warrior goddess slip from her shoulders, and allowing her story to flow into learned Saraswati’s story.
Of all the goddess myths I grew up with, Vac’s story was rarely told to us. When I finally read enough to uncover it, the lessons were searing. Speech is an act of creation. Speech may be coveted, even dominated or possessed by force, as Prajapati does; but speech has its own ability to win allies, endure the fire, demand nourishment and call up power. Speech will even create its own instruments of justice; but once justice has been served, speech will settle back into the more important and ever-present business of creation.
And perhaps just as important in times of grave censorship: speech does not have to battle in order to be set free. It will create its own salvation. It will eat the offerings meant for the fire, in order to nourish the warrior growing inside its own womb; it will endure and thrive on sacrifice, taking what it needs from the lust of others and turning that to good account. It will settle its own accounts, and find its own freedom, even if it is slightly singed, a little scorched, along the way.
(Based on assorted writings from 2002–2014.)
Postscript
In January 2015, the Tamil novelist Perumal Murugan posted a short note on his Facebook page: ‘Perumal Murugan, the writer is dead . . . Leave him alone.’ He took this decision after facing escalating protests from local caste-based groups and the RSS over his 2010 novel Madhorubhagan.
On 20 February the same year, the Marathi rationalist and politician Govind Pansare died of gunshot wounds he had sustained on the 16th, when two gunmen shot him and his wife when the two were out on their morning walk. The most popular of his twenty-one books remains Shivaji Kon Hota (Who Was Shivaji), first published in 1988.
On the morning of 30 August, Kannada scholar and former vice-chancellor M.M. Kalburgi was shot dead when he answered the door to two unknown assailants. Dr Kalburgi’s research and his firmly expressed views on the subject of religious orthodoxy and superstition had made him many enemies among Lingayat communities; the VHP and the Bajrang Dal had also burned his effigies.
A week later, the Hindi writer Uday Prakash announced that he was returning his Sahitya Akademi award in protest at the Akademi’s silence over the threats to writers. In interviews, he spoke of the many incidents that had preceded the murders of Pansare and Kalburgi: the withdrawal of A.K. Ramanujan’s essay from a university syllabus, the trouble over James Laine’s biography of Shivaji, the pulping of Wendy Doniger’s book, the harassment of the late U.R. Ananthamurthy, among other assaults on writers in India.
Nayantara Sahgal followed Uday Prakash, giving up her award and issuing a powerful statement, ‘The Unmaking of India’, in memory of the Indians who had been murdered and in support of the right to dissent. Over the next few weeks, about forty-five writers across the country, from Surjit Pattar and Krishna Sobti to G.N. Devy and Chandrashekhar Patil, returned their Akademi (and other) awards; some 300 writers, academics, editors and intellectuals spoke up supporting the protest. As this book goes to press, writers—K.S. Bhagawan, the young Dalit author Huchangi Prasad —continue to be threatened.
In these decades of battles over book bans, censorship and attacks on writers, this marks the first time that so many writers have spontaneously come forward to mark their anger and fear at these changing times. As Anita Desai wrote, ‘I was born in an India that enshrined democracy, pluralism and the freedom of speech in its Constitution . . . In an atmosphere where there is no security or support for those who voice dissent, criticism or rational thought, there can be no intellectual or artistic work of any worth.’
Those who write, create and live in India hope for a better ending, and better days ahead, a time when we have as much freedom in the outside world as we do in the lively addas where we meet our fellow writers, in the quiet rooms of our own minds. Earlier versions of ‘Hold Your Tongue’ and ‘Empty Chairs’ were subject to constant revisions, each one marking another assault, another dismaying development. This chapter has no closing sentence.
3
Crossing Over
The first home I rented in Goa, for five months’ worth of writing time, was in the village of Calvim. It was a large, spacious white-and-blue house in which I rattled around like a ridiculously happy pea in a very big pod, working on my first novel. I lived mostly upstairs, visited by two anxious swifts who had a nest in the broad balcony. The chapters flowed easily here; the writing had gone sluggishly in Delhi, where our friendly home in Jangpura had been overwhelmed by the roar of traffic, of new constructions, of the competing, loud and sadly tuneless late-night bhajan evenings from the nearby gurudwara and temple.
In the Calvim house, I had a rickety, thin-legged table set up near a window. The white egrets would rise up from the river nearby every evening, startling and then beguiling me by soaring so close that their visits felt like benedictions. The house belonged to the writer, poet and artist Margaret Mascarenhas, who lived across the river and lent this out as a residency for people who could handle the peace and quiet of the village. ‘It’s like going back in time,’ said Margaret, taking a long drag from her cigarette, her mischievous Madonna face reflective for a change, ‘to Goa the way it was fifteen years ago. And it’ll all change when the bridge between Calvim and Aldona comes up.’
The only way to cross over to Aldona was by ferry. I liked the walk down from my house past the Sevros Bakery and the church, down to a concrete jetty frequented by cats and the occasional secretive mongoose; sometimes you had to pause to let a brown snake go by, crossing like a careful old grandmother, it’s head anxiously raised, as it slithered from one red-soil covered bank to the other side, where the paddy fields started. The Calvim River was broad, opening out into mysterious, green islands at one end, its black-and-silver waters home
to frogs, reedy water snakes and the collective grief of the village.
The buses in Goa had names, a distinguishing characteristic that made me partial to them over other forms of transport. I had a particular fondness for Victor, who rattled down the road from the Aldona side of the ferry halfway up to Mapusa. When I boarded Victor for the first time, I smiled absently at a lady in her fifties who surprised me by giving me a sticky mango, fresh from her tree, after which I found I’d been adopted.
We often took the bus together after that and Wilhelmina told me the best ways to cook bangda—Indian mackerel—and her mother’s generations-old recipe for rechad masala and where to get the most superior palm vinegar in Aldona market.
And she told me about the day in February 2012 when a bus called Lucy came down the road on the Aldona side. The driver was going too fast, or perhaps he had handed the steering wheel over to a seventeen-year-old apprentice, this was uncertain. Instead of halting at the bus stand, where we sat as Wilhelmina talked, listening to the peacocks and watching the rain pelt down on the mangrove roots, Lucy had rolled into the river.
The bus went in deep; it took time to find ropes, winches, machinery of the sort that was seldom needed in either Calvim or Aldona. Six people died in the accident. Four of them were children—all schoolgirls who had walked from their homes in Calvim every day down to the ferry to take the bus to the St. Thomas Girls High School in Aldona. On both sides of the bank, families grieved. Both villages were still in deep mourning when I visited Calvim.
It took time for me to understand what this tragedy had meant. I had lived for over twenty years in Delhi, where the city’s massive sprawl, the aggression and jostling and busy lives of sixteen million people left no room for individual adversity to be noticed, let alone mourned.
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