REACTIONS
Why we spoke up
PRIYAMVADA GOPAL
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A self-confident and strong society does not fear its own diversity.
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Photo: AFP
In the eye of a storm: M.F. Husain
LAST week, several scholars based in the U.K., Europe and the U.S. added their voices to the chorus in India protesting the arrest of an arts student and the related suspension of a senior academic at MS University in Baroda. We were particularly con
cerned about the entry of police into a university campus, which suggested state collusion with goons for whom physical assault and vandalism seems to be the preferred form of spiritual practice.
Though many of us are Indian citizens and others, distinguished scholars of South Asia, we were aware that the kind of statement we issued usually elicits that charge that we were outsiders interfering in affairs that don’t concern us in a country we don’t live in. Or worse, that we ourselves were complicit with those hypocritical and patronising Western denunciations of violations of human rights, democracy and free speech in the Third World.
Under attack
On the contrary. We support our suspended colleague, Professor Panikkar, not because such attacks on academic freedom are only happening in India but precisely because he stood up so courageously to those forces which seek to undermine it everywhere. Scholarly and artistic freedom and integrity are under attack globally. There are accounts everyday of suspensions and denials of tenure at universities from New York and Colorado to Haifa and Durban. The ‘War on Terror’ has justified intensified attacks on freedom of speech in Britain and the U.S. Campus monitoring groups have been set up to blacklist professors for teaching ‘anti-American’ course content. Plays and exhibitions are shut down in Britain, while the state looks on passively, even approvingly. There are attempts to pass draconian legislation which would make it the interrogation of religious orthodoxies an offence called ‘incitement to religious hatred’. This is an atmosphere of constraint that academics across the world have every reason to be concerned about and challenge.
Our own solidarity necessarily extends across continents and contexts because forces like the Hindutvawadis in Gujarat (who, in fact, violate the heterodox and diverse nature of actual Hindu practices) are also working in concerted kinship across the globe. Despite the superficial rhetoric of difference, chauvinists of all stripes are brethren-in-arms who fully understand and endorse each others’ projects. Last year, during a heated discussion on the forcible shutting down of the M.F. Husain exhibition in London by vandals calling themselves Hindus, one of the loudest voices was that of a bearded man who declared himself a maulvi. Claiming that he visited temples and satsang, he shouted for Husain to be excommunicated for offending his ‘Hindu brothers and sisters’. It was necessary to remind him then that there are others who, in their turn, would have him excommunicated for fraternising with kafirs. If offence becomes a crime, there will be no one left to lock the jails. The religion that Islamists, Hindutvawadis, Zionists, Christian zealots and other such factions share is a devotion to narrow-mindedness, divisions, hate and bigotry. Nothing could be less spiritual or more ungodly.
Why does academic and artistic freedom matter? Is it because we think anything and everything goes? Again, the opposite is true. We defend the right of writers, artists and scholars to express their views precisely so that these can be held up to scrutiny, debate and judgement. MSU Vice-Chancellor Manoj Soni may not allow his own students and colleagues to express their views but we would support his right to publish his book, In Search of Third Space, with its explicit (and to man
y, offensive) Hindutva bias. It is only when such work is in the public domain that it can be subject to rigorous analysis. Work driven underground will not die but simply poison the groundwater. Suppression, censorship and banning will not transform ways of thinking and seeing; open discussion will.
Colonial legacy
India is rightly proud of the democratic rights, including freedom of expression, guaranteed by a Constitution that draws on indigenous traditions of intellectual enquiry, scepticism, and disputation. We are admired for this. These rights, however, cannot be taken for granted; they need to be nourished at all times. When we allow divisive forces to undermine our intellectual traditions and democratic rights, we are, in practice, giving up an integral part of what it means to be Indian.
Ironically, censorship as we know it is a colonial legacy, not an intrinsic way of life for us. In an era when democracy and freedom are falsely proclaimed to be Western values, we are in a position to illustrate how a nation can truly let these values flourish. Banning, suppression, and vandalism are signs of fragility; a strong and self-confident society does not fear its own diversity.
Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University and is the author of Literary Radicalism in India).
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