BOOK REVIEW
Censorship through the Ages
Suhrith Parthasarathy
L
“ et the author be resurrected to
what he is best at. Write.” This
was how the Madras High Court
concluded its landmark ruling in July
2016, in S Tamilselvan v The Government
of Tamil Nadu, where, in question, was a
ban on Perumal Murugan’s Tamil book,
Madhorubagan, and its English transla-
tion, One Part Woman. Now, just over a
year later, it is difficult not to view the
court’s verdict as anything but an aber-
ration. Censorship continues to be ram-
pant, and the judiciary still sees the
right to free speech, not as a trump, but
as a liberty exercisable at the sole com-
mand of the state. After all, scarcely a
year had passed since the Madras High
Court’s ruling in Murugan’s case, when
the Supreme Court, which sits at the
apex of India’s judiciary, refused
to overturn a ban enforced by the Gov-
ernment of Karnataka on the spiritual
leader Maate Mahadevi’s book, Basava
Vachana Deepthi. Mahadevi’s book
was banned because the government
argued that she had changed the pen
name of Lord Basaveshwara from “Ku-
dalasangamadeva” to “Lingadeva,” which
was, according to it, likely to hurt
the feelings and sentiments of the
“Veerashaiva” community in the state.
When Mahadevi petitioned the Karna-
taka High Court, it told her that she had
no right to “impose her philosophy on
others.” Of what use then, we might
Economic & Political Weekly EPW MARCH 31, 2018
The Writer, the Reader and the State: Literary
Censorship in India by Mini Chandran, New Delhi,
California, London and Singapore: Sage Publications, 2017;
pp xxxv + 191, `695.
wonder, is a right to free speech?
“[Mahadevi] can certainly publish a
book containing her own philosophy,
but certainly she cannot speak her phi-
losophy through some other person who
is held in high esteem by a particular
class of society,” the high court added,
somewhat paradoxically.
[She] knows full well that if she were to
preach that philosophy, it may not be ac-
ceptable to all and obviously for that rea-
son, she wants to advocate or propagate her
philosophy through the mouth of Lord Bas-
aveshwara by effecting certain changes in
the Vachanas … which support her philosophy.
(Poojya Sri Jagadguru Maate v Government
of Karnataka 2003: 16)
One would have thought that a judg-
ment such as this, which placed a com-
munity’s supposed right not to be ridi-
culed or offended on a higher pedestal
than any general liberty to speak freely,
would draw the Supreme Court’s ire.
However, such is the nature of the cul-
tural emergency we are in the midst of
today, that the Court saw little wrong
with this finding. Indeed, it upheld the
judgment, without adding any written
reasoning of its own, telling us, in the
process, that an assumed threat to
public order is always an adequately
vol lIiI no 13
justifiable ground for restricting a per-
son’s right to free expression.
A Culture of Censorship
How did we get here? What caused this
withering of freedom? Were we ever a
society that promoted democratic val-
ues? These are the central questions that
Mini Chandran, a professor of English
Literature at IIT Kanpur, asks in her
book, The Writer, the Reader and the
State: Literary Censorship in India. In
striving to provide answers, Chandran
takes us on a fascinating journey, ex-
pounding the history of the Indian liter-
ary tradition, from the origins of art,
from instances of Indian poetry through
Vedic hymns and the Arthashastra, to
the relationship between the state and
writing. “Far from state persecution,
what we find is the royal patronage of
art and artists; Kalidasa himself was a
beneficiary of the patronage of Vikram-
aditya’s court, being one of the navarat-
nas,” she writes. Chandran further states,
Royal patronage of artists was a common
practice across the world and might have
been a way of co-opting the artist into the
system. The state thus ensured the artist’s
voluntary renunciation of the task of saying
unpleasant truths against the ruler through
a systemic commercial censorship, whereby
the writer was “bought” by the state. (p 20)
Although there was an absence of,
perhaps, restrictive censorship, Chan-
dran points out that what was prevalent
was not the “suppression of free speech,”
as we understand it today, but rather, a
case of “regulation of speech even be-
fore it was articulated.” This is what
Sue Curry Jansen has described as
29
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“constituent censorship,” a means for the
powerful to “create, secure and maintain
their control over the power to name,” a
feature that is prevalent even today in
democratic, Western societies (p 25).
In Chandran’s estimation, therefore—
and her arguments certainly evince this
conclusion—censorship as we see in
modern-day India is essentially a vestige
of the country’s colonial regime. India
might have become independent in 1947,
but this autonomy did not see it severe
its ties with Britain and its system of a
rule of law entirely. Here, Chandran
quotes from Rajeev Dhavan’s Publish
and Be Damned: Censorship and Intoler-
ance in India:
[T]he British censorship package entailed
three complementary policies. In the
first place, a vast censorship and prohibi-
tion system was statutorily put in place,
based on the common law, which was both
invidious and divisive. Second, a system
of media control was devised as an emer-
gency system which could go into overdrive
whenever the government wanted to use
or misuse it. Third, the government main-
tained its own propaganda machinery. An
imperial response that gathered intensity
and momentum during the two World Wars
in order to deter the freedom movement.
All these strategies were inherited by Inde-
pendent India, which adopted this imperial
legacy. This is best symbolised by the fact
that India has a Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting. Which dictator could ask for
more? (p 34)
But what about the Constitution?
What about the fundamental rights that
it guarantees? Should these not be
sufficient to put in place a check on state
censorship? The answer, as Chandran
shows us, is that the Constitution, in
fact, aids and abets this form of control.
It allows those colonial-era laws to
stand. These include sections 124A,
153A, 292, and 295 of the Indian Penal
Code (IPC), among others, which respec-
tively criminalise sedition; speech that
provokes rioting; speech that is obscene;
and speech that outrages the religious
feelings of any class of citizens. Section
153A, for example, has been invoked to
ban a wide array of literature, from
Gopal Godse’s book on Mohandas Gan-
dhi’s assassination, to James Laine’s
Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. Just
Economic & Political Weekly EPW MARCH 31, 2018
as egregious as these provisions, are the
contents of the Code of Criminal Proce-
dure (CrPC), which was re-enacted in
1973, albeit with its colonial mores kept
intact. For instance, through Section
95, the CrPC permits state governments
to notify and direct the police to
seize any published material which in
its view offends the substantive law
contained in, among other provisions,
sections 124A, 153A, 292 and 295 of
the IPC.
Constitutional Inconsistency
We would think that in a country that
guarantees a fundamental right to free-
dom of speech, this carte blanche given
to the government to seize books almost
at will, would be considered anathema.
But here again, as Chandran highlights,
the anomaly lies within the Constitu-
tion’s borders. For the document, on the
one hand, provides citizens a right to
freedom of speech, but, on the other,
permits the state the power to make
laws that reasonably restrict this free-
dom on a list of enumerated grounds.
These include laws made in the inter-
ests of the sovereignty and integrity of
India, the security of the state, friendly
relations with foreign states, public
order, decency or morality, or, in rela-
tion to contempt of court, defamation
or incitement to an offence. Therefore,
Chandran says, at the heart of the gen-
eral promise that the Constitution pro-
vides is an inherent inconsistency,
which we again drew from the colonialists.
She writes
The ambiguity in the phrasing of Article
19, is at the root of all censorship debates in
India and is also indicative of the ambivalent
attitude that we maintain towards freedom
of expression—we would like to be seen as a
free country where there is a constitutional
guarantee of free speech, but that speech
can be free only within limits. (p 36)
But we should be careful in ascribing
excessive stress to the bare wordings of
the Constitution. After all, the American
First Amendment—which is today seen
as an exemplary model—was also origi-
nally thought to have established only a
very limited right to free speech. As the
legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin has
pointed out, in common law the right of
vol lIiI no 13
BOOK REVIEW
free speech was seen only as a right
against what William Blackstone, the
18th century English jurist, described as
“previous restraint.” That is, the state
was not permitted to proscribe speech
before it was expressed, but if the speech
made was offensive or dangerous, then
it would be free to prosecute such ex-
pressions under the penal law. “That
was the traditional English view of free
speech,” Dworkin wrote.
Even John Milton, who had campaigned
ferociously against prior restraint in his
famous essay Areopagitica, insisted that
speech disrespectful to the Church, once
published, could be punished by “fire and
the executioner.” (Dworkin 1996: 197)
The American federalists also thought
of the First Amendment in similar terms,
prompting them in 1798 to enact the
Sedition Act, under which it was a crime
to publish “false, scandalous and mali-
cious” reports about the President or the
members of Congress.
Current Challenges
The ultimate expansion of the First
Amendment was therefore a product of
a larger institutional liberalism, of a de-
velopment of a culture that placed civil
liberties at the heart of the democratic
discourse. Unless political debate in
India is subsumed by a similar focus on
the philosophy of rights, unless we see a
change in culture, the Constitution, or
the various provisions of the IPC might
matter little. We will continue to see
the right to free speech not as a liberty,
but as a gift that the government be-
stows upon us, at its will. In animating
this state of affairs, in telling us
how censorship takes different forms,
Chandran’s book performs a hugely
significant role.
Suhrith Parthasarathy (suhrith@gmail.com)
is an advocate practising in the Madras High
Court.
References
Dworkin, Ronald (1996): Freedom’s Law: The Moral
Reading of the American Constitution, 2005,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Poojya Sri Jagadguru Maate v Government of Kar-
nataka (2003): Criminal Petition No 2554 of
98, Karnataka High Court Judgment dated
27 June.
31