I am not saying Karnad should have remembered his manners and not attacked Naipaul at the literary festival. What else could he have done? Naipaul is an enemy of Indian secularism. In saying this, I am not automatically saying that Naipaul is an enemy of India, or the Indian state, or Indians. It is simply that he holds some views, consistently and cogently, that are irreconcilable with the ideas that underpin the Indian version of secularism. How could Karnad have countenanced this old enemy being honoured in his, Karnad’s, own backyard? It is not for me to rule on whether Naipaul’s disinterested intellectual formulations will win or whether the secular project will prevail, only history can rule on that. For me, I found it touching, and sad, to see that Karnad fell back on music to make his argument, that he still believes that the cultural argument will carry the day. I took some time to re-read Tughlaq before I sat down to write this and I found that it begins with a well-meaning king being duped by a trickster who realises that this king’s love of a quixotic notion of communal impartiality is a weakness. A Muslim poses as a dispossessed Brahmin, realising that if a Hindu sues the king then the king will happily lose the case to prove that he rules all his subjects fairly. This is a beautifully multi-layered fictional construction. It grows in depth and texture as one messy chapter after another of our history is written. The Girish Karnad who wrote this in 1962, 50 years ago, is better placed to critique the lazy formulations of our team, rather than reiterating a tired argument about the contributions of Islamic rulers to our shared culture. My heart hears his argument and my body feels it, but my mind bears witness that it has not helped us realise our secular ideal. We need to accept this now. Karnad’s erudition is immense, his contribution is unquestioned, but maybe he has forgotten what he clearly knew back in the ’60s: if language does not grow, it dies.