Last month, an event with the International Booker winner Geetanjali Shree was cancelled in Agra after a Hathras resident registered a police complaint against her for hurting his “religious sentiments”. Sandeep Kumar Pathak found her award-winning novel Ret Samadhi “extremely obscene”.
The complainant was unaware that ancient Sanskrit texts describe the union of Shiva and Parvati in far more vivid details. Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhavam has a sensual description of Parvati, Shiva and their erotic love. In fact, while translating his masterpiece Abhijnanashakuntalam into English, Sir William Jones deleted the passages that he thought could be unacceptable for European readers. If someone argues that Kalidasa was a mere court poet and his works don’t rank among the scriptures, consider a sequence from the holy Shiva Purana. Lord Brahma, the creator of the universe, is the officiating priest for the wedding of Shiva and Parvati. The sacred text describes in extraordinary detail how Brahma gets attracted by her beauty.
It’s one of the numerous instances in Sanskrit texts that can easily be termed blasphemous today. The author of Shiva Purana might have to leave the country today to save persecution. Few Indian writers of the modern era can match the boldness of ancient authors.
The idea of blasphemy didn’t exist in scriptures as Hindu gods were treated with extreme irreverence. There was no one god; no singular description of Shiva or Rama or Shakti. One could form a variety of relationships with the divinity. Even devotion arrived with an insistence on Navdha Bhakti, one could worship gods in nine forms. Gods could be your friend or lover, as poets wrote vivid erotic poems for them and Hindu gods were seen performing tricks and treacheries. Marked by imperfections and inconsistencies, they were never infallible.
“The ancient, polytheistic Hindus had no concept of blasphemy,” Wendy Doniger wrote in an article titled, Prelude to Censorship: The Toleration of Blasphemy in Ancient India. “With so many gods, one could not help preferring one over another, inevitably slighting some god or other. It did not matter if you insulted gods who made no claim to omnipotence or omniscience, and certainly not to benevolence,” she wrote.
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The idea of a text being obscene or hurtful to people’s religious sentiments gets firmly established in the modern era. To be sure, if one has a right to be irreverent, the other also has a right to feel offended and express their hurt. A free society must give space to express offence and criticise writers. It becomes complex when laws are codified to prosecute and punish an author whose writings one finds hurtful or obscene.
The British government inserted Section 295A in the IPC in 1927 that punished “deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings” in a case that led to the first blasphemy murder in modern India. The provision was inserted after a controversy over the publication of a booklet named Rangila Rasul about Prophet Muhammad in 1924. While its author was anonymous, the publisher Mahashe Rajpal was arrested and convicted by a lower court for promoting enmity among religions, before he was acquitted by the Lahore high court.
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He was murdered on April 6, 1929, by a 19-year-old Muslim named Ilam-ud Din, who was later sentenced to death and executed. Consider the applause Din’s offence had received from his community—the lawyer who fought Din’s case was none other than Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Today, a special mausoleum to Din stands in Lahore.
While Section 295A was inserted following increasing religious fanaticism, Section 292, also on obscenity, always existed in the IPC. If the former provision hurts someone’s religious sentiments, finding a book obscene is a secular hurt, and hence can be more lethal. Section 292 says that any “book, pamphlet, paper, writing, drawing, painting, representation, figure or any other object, shall be deemed to be obscene if it is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest”.
The Hindi novelist Mridula Garg was arrested under this provision in 1980 for her novel Chittacobra, which depicts the life of a woman in an unfulfilled marriage. Now in her 80s, Garg still recalls the abuses she had faced. “It seemed that the entire Hindi literary establishment had turned indifferent towards a vulgar campaign against me by the literary journal Sarika, which gave space to a range of abusive letters against me,” she tells Outlook.
One of the earliest controversies about obscenity in Hindi literature pertains to Pandey Bechan Sharma Ugra’s short story collection titled Chocolate (1927), which depicts homoerotic love.
Banarasidas Chaturvedi, editor of the influential Hindi journal Vishal Bharat, immediately termed it ghasleti sahitya (third-grade literature). Chaturvedi even expressed his displeasure to M.K. Gandhi and sent him an article, which was published in the latter’s weekly, Young India. Gandhi was never fond of fiction, but he read it and soon he seemed to regret his decision of publishing Chaturvedi’s article. In an October 10, 1928 letter to Chaturvedi, Gandhi wrote: “I thought it was not right to make comments in this way; a book ought to be read. I finished it today. The impression I formed is not the same as yours. The purpose of the book, I think, is pure.”
It embodied an era when Indian politicians upheld a writer’s freedom. An era that we seem to have lost. Decades later, the inheritors of Gandhi’s legacy, the Congress party under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, banned The Satanic Verses.
Continuing with the fall, another Congress government surrendered before a nondescript party member over a ridiculous accusation of obscenity. In February 2009, the Delhi Hindi Academy unanimously selected veteran writer Krishna Baldev Vaid for its topmost honour, Shalaka Samman. Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, who was also the Academy president, had approved the award.
But she later withdrew it after a party member Purushottam Goyal wrote to her, accusing Vaid of “writing porn and sub-standard literature”. A large number of Indian writers came to Vaid’s support, with Krishna Sobti terming it ‘cultural terrorism’. “If his writings are obscene, so are mine,” said U.R. Ananthamurthy.
A great book is expected to assault your senses, forcing you to upend your existing notions. One has a right to feel offended and censure the writer, but a mature civilisation must ensure that writers are not prosecuted or hounded for their words. Sadly, the modern era—ironically the era of freedom and enlightenment—is replete with instances of writers being targeted for what someone believed was hurtful to one’s sentiments.
(This appeared in the print edition as "The Age of Sacrilege")
