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print versionIndia’s tendency for self-censorship is saddening. But even the most liberal minds sometimes see the need for holding back
by Jeet Thayil
The opera Babur in London has already been shown in Europe, but will not play in India due to fears of causing offence
Like everyone else, I’ve heard of the Christian right, though mostly in connection with the US. In India, Christians are painfully aware of their minority status and, as a result, they are low-key, if not subterranean, at least when compared to other religious groups. The idea of militant Christianity here is as odd as the idea of militant Buddhism, or militant Zoroastrianism, or militant Animism, though why this should be the case I have no idea. Historically, Christians and Buddhists have been as enamoured of bloodshed as anyone else.
I was reminded of all this in January, when a group calling itself the Catholic-Christian Secular Forum threatened to take to court the makers of the Hindi movie, Ekk Deewana Tha [working translation: There Was This Crazy Dude]. The group objected to a single word used in the movie: hosanna. According to the Forum’s general secretary, the use of the word had hurt the religious sentiments of Christians and Jews around the world. Never mind that it had occurred in a song that was a hit in India and nowhere else. Credited to the composer AR Rahman, it was part of a song and dance sequence that was innocuous and forgettable – but clearly romantic. That was enough for the Catholic-Christians. According to the Forum’s general secretary, if you would not use Islamic or Hindu prayer words in popular music, why use the word hosanna "in a carnal love song"? In other words, if the Muslims and Hindus will object to perceived offences against their religious sentiments, as they frequently do, why couldn’t the Christians?
Nothing came of the threat to take the film-makers to court, but it was a ripe moment in the continuing story of censorship in the name of religion in India. The only notable point was that a Christian group no one had heard of had instigated the proceedings; other than that, it was business as usual in a nation where the fear of offending religious sentiments has become a familiar way of disappearing books, movies, songs and visual art. It is a highly evolved, highly specialised form, a kind of science-fiction censorship that aims to prevent future offences before they occur; to me, it is reminiscent, in a back-to-the-future kind of way, of PreCrime, a police unit formed to prevent crimes before they occur, a (Philip) Dickian notion brought to life in the movie Minority Report.
I bring this up because it bears on a recent experience of my own. For the past several years I have been working on the libretto for an opera, Babur in London, with the composer Edward Rushton. Babur in London opened in Switzerland and went to various cities in the UK, including Oxford, London and Hull, after two years of rehearsals and workshops in India, Switzerland (where Rushton is based) and the UK. The project was to culminate in a six-city Indian tour in November and December, for which the halls had been booked, singers and musicians rehearsed, publicity material readied, and a thousand tiny tweaks carried out; for many of us, the Indian leg was the emotional climax of the entire enterprise. Last week, the organisers announced that the Indian tour was cancelled, because the sponsors felt they would be unable to deal with a possible future threat to the performers of Babur in London in India or, in other words, because they were wary of offending Muslim religious sentiments.
The opera played Switzerland and the UK without problems, and it may have done so in India, though at this point none of us will know if that might have been the case. In the opera, Babur, India’s first Mughal emperor, returns as a ghost to confront his jihadi descendants. The heart of the libretto is its middle scene, an ideological argument that pits Babur’s profound understanding of the holy book against his interlocutors’ profound ignorance of it. The opera is never anything less than respectful, but you don’t need to take my word for it. You can download the libretto in its entirety here.
Of the various types of censorship, I’ve always thought that the most insidious was self-censorship, because it usually happens without the knowledge of the censor in question. It is the reason why there is no underground art movement worthy of the name in India. The edge does not exist; it never has. There are no radical writers or film-makers or playwrights or painters, because Indian artists are so concerned with what their Mummyjis, Daddyjis, Auntiejis and Unclejis think that they will choke themselves before they make the impertinent noise. It has led to a fetishisation of the twee and the precious, and it is why there is little profit in waiting for the appearance of the Indian Pasolini or Burroughs or Basquiat.
That said, it may be useful to append a moderate qualification. When Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was banned in India, the poet Nissim Ezekiel came out in support of the government’s action. It was unexpected to say the least, for Ezekiel was a Marathi-speaking Bene Israeli Jew, a descendent of oil-pressers from Galilee who were shipwrecked off the Maharashtrian coast around 150BC; he was arguably India’s most famous poet, as well as an art critic, lecturer and Anglophone; he was a world traveller who had experimented with LSD, among other things; in short, he was nothing if not a liberal. His argument is worth repeating here. He said that the publication of The Satanic Verses was an incendiary act in the Indian context, for it could lead to rioting and murder, and no book was worth that.
If no book is worth dying for, no opera is either.
Jeet Thayil’s novel Narcopolis is longlisted for the 2012 Man Booker prize.
• This article was amended on 11 August 2012. It originally said India banned Salman Rushdie’s book Midnight’s Children, when it was his book The Satanic Verses that was banned. This has been corrected.
