LZ: You’ve repeatedly talked about being under “siege” as a writer in India today, and it is hardly – if at all – metaphorical.  Can you describe what you mean, and how would you define the cultural, literary and political climate that you and other Indian writers live in today? 
GH: I wish siege were more metaphorical. In fact, the metaphor is a shockingly real – or surreal – thing standing before us like a solid wall, and this is true of far too many places in the world. What does this siege look like in India?  I would not separate cultural and political. In India, the establishment loves it if culture can be reduced to what they can control, a soft, “feminine” sort of thing – a kind of on-going festival of incredible India with colourful costumes, entertaining exotica. We need to make it clear that culture is not just this sponsored exhibition of cultural practice; it is not just “high culture”; but a dynamic range of transacting, colluding, colliding ways of life. Such a view allows us to include multiple languages, multiple locations, choice of religion or no religion. What we eat, how we dress, the historical figures we admire or critique – everything is a part of the culture and sub-cultures we live. It may seem I am repeating the obvious. But we need to do this, because we cannot debate free speech in depth today in India without taking on questions about the conditions necessary in a diverse country, to live the various possibilities of free speech. This is why free speech gets reduced into fragments, such as bans on books and films. It’s actually much more.

The cultural climate in India at the moment: it’s bad news. And the list is very long, we are spoilt for choice, which is why I can only highlight a few aspects. First and most obvious is the violence that has become a part of “culture”. There’s the language of discourse – threats to beat up or gang-rape or kill anyone who you disagree with. There’s the lynching of someone who you suspect ate beef or someone who is transporting cows. (The most recent lynching, of a boy called Junaid travelling on a train, has not even had this alleged excuse.) There’s the violence against Dalits because they speak up against ongoing discrimination, and the dehumanising things they have always been forced to do, such as manual scavenging. There’s the increasing violence against women – it’s always been there, against women of certain castes and communities – but now the net has been spread to include even the relatively privileged. And, of course, there’s the violence against entire regions, peoples, in highly militarised places, Kashmir, the Northeast and Chhattisgarh for example, and this violence is given a semblance of the workings of law and order, the armed forces keeping peace and so on.

I list these which do not seem obviously like cultural territory, because they are. This is what provides the context for the practice of an ideology that is afraid of a writer, a book, a film, a painting. It’s not just “intolerance”; it’s a kind of cultural civil war. For the rightwing “cultural” organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its range of offspring, diversity is a problem. If you want to homogenise a place like India, where else would you begin your war but in the cultural space? So you divide tasks among government bodies, semi-autonomous bodies, the army and police, the media and, of course, multiple “armies” of real life and virtual hoodlums. Let’s take one small strand: writing. Writers are killed for their views (Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare), for their questions (M.M. Kalburgi). Writers have been hounded by rightwing goons for their imagination (Perumal Murugan), for their language (Urdu writers), or for their critique of the state (Arundhati Roy). Colleges and universities are regimented so that students and teachers cannot use these spaces as they must, if debate and speculation, education, reading and writing, culture itself, are to happen. And I am only citing the most obvious examples; many of us have written about and spoken about other examples; and still there must be any number we don’t even know about.

As for painting, making films or music: the censorship ranges from the official to the unofficial – that is, intimidation by a few goons. It ranges from the ban of a book, or the hounding of a writer, to some truly bizarre forms. An artist who was making a point about cows eating plastic got into trouble in the Jaipur Art Fair because he had a cow, made of fibreglass, I think, floating in the air. The chair of the Film Certification Board insisted that the word “balls” had to be replaced with the word “cats”, and that the kisses he found too long in a James Bond film should be shortened. A film on the effects of demonetisation on people’s lives got into trouble. The most recent instance is that a filmmaker who has made a film on Nobel Prizewinning economist Amartya Sen has been asked to beep out words such as “cow”, “Gujarat” and “Hindutva”. In addition to this censorship by official bodies, censorship increasingly happens on the street, in art galleries, in educational spaces, or on the film sets even before a film is made. Someone or the other, some group or the other, claims “hurt sentiment”. There’s intimidation, violence; and the current establishment either offers support, or looks the other way.
 
Read the full interview on Writers and Free Expression.

Published first in Writers and Free Expression .
 

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The masks came off soon after condoling writer Mahasweta Devi’s death. Unmasked, the right-wing pseudo-nationalists were on the prowl for their daily target. They found it in a play staged in the University of Haryana; the play was based on Mahasweta’s story, Draupadi. The ABVP attack was to convince us that a story, a story that exposes violence against a woman activist, a story by a writer you have just praised, can turn anti-national.

Is this hypocrisy? Ignorance? Habitual hate-mongering? Or all this and something more, a choice between culture that includes people and culture that excludes people? The other day, inaugurating a conference organised by the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) in Indore, filmmaker M.S. Sathyu criticised the shrill calls to keep Pakistani artistes out of India. What has now become the standard of “debate” followed: The IPTA conference was disrupted. This attack, by the right-wing Bharat Swabhiman Manch, was to convince us that IPTA is anti-national. Either the Manch “nationalists” don’t know of IPTA’s role in the independence movement, or its attempts to strengthen people’s culture; or of the conspicuous absence of the RSS in the freedom struggle. Or the pseudo-nationalists want militarised culture, so that the practice of people’s culture — inclusive, with no borders within India or across the world — becomes “anti-national”.

Consider the project of shrinking culture by drawing borders within India. There’s a fear lurking in the strident accusation of “anti-national” that so much of our cultural work, and so many of our cultural events, is now charged with. It’s the fear of what happened last year. The powerful chorus of voices raised by writers, artists, performers, academics and scientists across caste, gender, community, language and region, insisted that Indian culture is a living system of multiple voices, multiple narratives and counter-narratives.

It’s the fear of what continues to happen: The re-energised Dalit movements, the revulsion caused by atrocities against tribals, the murder of rationalists and Muslims such as Akhlaq, the suppressing of youth in campuses, and, of course, the insistence that educational and cultural institutions are spaces for discussion and debate. The pseudo-nationalist opponents of culture are afraid of the insistence on democratic rights, freedom of speech, dissent, reason, a scientific temper. They are afraid of all those who speak for an inclusive culture, rather than a militarised culture that excludes more and more people.

A militarised culture finds new ways to exclude people every day; whether it is actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui kept out of the Ramlila or Muslims out of garba events, or whether it is asking Urdu writers to sign an undertaking that they will not write anything “anti-national”. This is the context for the call to ban actors with Pakistani citizenship in Indian cultural projects. The target here is not Pakistani “artistes”. It’s our own citizens, whether writers, filmmakers or artists, and their commitment to practising culture that does not follow an officially sanctioned script. With all the jingoism in the air (and on air), the time is ripe to extend militarising the nation to militarising cultural practice. The right-wing dreams of India in uniform, preferably khaki.

If we let this happen, there will be no Indian culture left. Indeed, we will lose any kind of culture, because cultural practice does not recognise borders within or outside India. We can condemn the terror, or the wars states and state-backed groups inflict on people, ours and theirs, wounding people, jawans and civilians, killing them, taking them away from the real business of life. But do we condemn people? Men, women and children who have nothing to do with the power games states play, people who are not hate-mongers, who only want peace so they can farm their fields, earn for their families, study, pray, and make their music and film and poetry?

People’s culture shows us the way out of the jingoist, militarised nightmare of borders within India, and borders between Indians and other nationalities. People have practised their own borderless culture in the past, during times more tumultuous than ours. Only a decade after Partition, there was an example of collaboration between Indian and Pakistani artists; the kind of inclusion that can and must happen in people’s culture.

A 1958 Urdu film, Jago Hua Savera, was not about rulers, borders or patriotism. It was about the hard lives of common people — the fishing community in a village near Dhaka, suffering in the clutch of moneylenders. The script, lyrics and dialogue was by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Faiz’s script was inspired by a Bengali story by Manik Bandopadhyay. The music was by Timir Baran of Calcutta.

Closer in time, in 1997, six of us Indian writers were invited to talk to six Pakistani writers on the fiftieth anniversary of independence. The grand old man of letters, Intizar Husain, spoke for the cultural community on both sides of the border. He said, “So much that is important to me as a writer is on the other side of the border. The Jataka Tales, Meerabai’s bhajans, the Delhi I knew. How do I remain a writer if I pretend all these are no longer mine?”

So what kind of culture should we strengthen? History has examples of the choice we have, both as a nation and as people. In 1935, one of the best known propaganda films was made. Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will was commissioned by Hitler. The theme Hitler had in mind was Germany’s glory under his leadership. But even as the film glorifies the official narrative of the Nazis, we can see how the nation’s “glory” involves excluding people, whether Jewish, Communist, or Germans with a more inclusive, humane view of the world. In stark contrast, Mahmoud Darwish, often referred to as the Palestinian national poet, wrote the Palestinian declaration of independence in 1988 and many poems of resistance that are an integral part of every Arab’s consciousness. But he also wrote, just after the 1967 war, a tender poem about an Israeli soldier, A Soldier Who Dreams of White Lilies. Darwish responded to criticism with what could be the motto of every practitioner of an inclusive people’s culture: He would, he said, “continue to humanise even the enemy”.

Who do we want to emulate, we who own culture, we who make culture to express our strongest hopes, dreams and fears? Riefenstahl or Darwish? ABVP or Mahasweta Devi? Bharat Swabhiman Manch or IPTA? Only a culture in touch with people’s lives, open to dissenting voices, this side of the border or that, can keep culture, its myriad voices, from being reduced to a single dangerous voice.

(The writer is a founder member of the Indian Writers’ Forum. This article was published in The Indian Express and has been reproduced with the permission of the author)
 

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