@DeepInThought4U

Is our intention to create a society that is intolerant of others' ideas or beliefs?  It certainly appears so, considering the trigger happy use of bans for every perceived problem.   Isn't bringing the issue out in the open and debating it a better way of dealing with the issue, rather than brushing it under the carpet?  

No, it seems we love banning things, and pretending that the thing does not exist.  Actually it will only be festering deep inside, only to explode one day.  Either that, or people will find a way to circumvent the ban, thus creating another illegal activity. 

So it will be with the latest ban - beef.  How is it that we can prevent one community from consuming what they want?  Isn't this against the very nature of a democratic society?  Do we want to create a fanatical society such as the one that bans pork and alcohol, for instance?  Although the banning of beef is for an entirely different reason to that of pork - cow is considered to be sacred, whereas pig is considered to be a 'dirty animal' - it still cannot be justified.  

In an open, secular, inter-dependent society, the tenets of one particular faith cannot be exclusively applied as a state policy.  Swami Vivekananda himself is quoted as saying that in the Vedic times, 'four to five Brahmins used to polish off one cow'.  Meat eating is recorded in our scriptures.  By suggesting what should be considered sacrosanct, we are not only overlooking these facts, but are also being judgmental about other faiths.  

The ban has resulted in tigers in zoo being denied their daily share of beef - reports have indicated that they are now being fed chicken!  Aren't we attempting to change the very nature of the beast by withholding its usual diet.  In doing so, aren't we going against nature?

The cow, no doubt, is considered a holy animal in Hinduism.  But what about other animals?  Are they unholy?  Does not Advaita suggest that the same life principle - the universal soul; the Brahman - exists in all living creatures in equal measure?  In that case we should be banning all non-vegetarian food; not just beef.

Besides, if we are so concerned about the welfare of the cow, how come there are so many stray cows on our roads?  Why are they abandoned by their masters once their usefulness in terms of milk production is exhausted?  Isn't every cow the representation of Kamadhenu?  Doesn't it have several thousand gods in it?  If yes, then why abandon it?  

By banning beef we have not really fulfilled any sacred duty.  Instead, why not build go-shalas in every area and town?  Indeed, shelter for all abandoned animals should be built; they should be taken off  the streets, where they constantly put themselves and others at risk. 

Take care of every living being - now that might just be a truly sacred undertaking.   

21 years after it was first banned, it seems that the theme on which Lajja is based will never go out of vogue.  Taslima Nasrin says as much in her introduction to this 2014 edition: 'Lajja will remain relevant as long as the incidents described in it continue to happen...Lajja waits for a time of equality, empathy and freedom'.  Both Lajja and its creator are still waiting.  And like the fate of the characters of the story, it appears that it is futile to wait.  As things stand now, one cannot quite see any end to fundamentalism, intolerance, or bans.  

In this context, it is worth noting that while Nasrin and Salman Rushdie were not so lucky, Bhyrappa did well to get away with his Aavarana without facing a backlash by the pseudosecular types. 

Speaking of which, there is something strangely alluring about all things that are banned.  A certain sense of curiosity compels you to look behind the screen to find out just what the government is trying to hide.  It is with this sentiment that I bought this book.  Having gone through it, one can understand why the Bangladesh government wanted it banned.  But what about the Indian government?  The West Bengal government of 1994 banned the book, and Nasrin was not even allowed to seek sanctuary in India - ironically - unlike the characters of her story.

Nasrin uses the backdrop of the 1992 felling of Babri Masjid to narrate a harrowing tale of violence, bigotry and intolerance.  A Hindu family of four is caught in the whirlwind that is unleashed when its own countrymen resort to looting, pillaging and killing in the name of seeking revenge for the demolition of the mosque.  The fact that the incident happened in another country, that the Hindus of their own country are not responsible for the destruction of the mosque, and that by killing them there cannot be any peace, is lost on the murderous mobs.  

Nasrin highlights the silence of the government and the denial of the well-off intellectuals with regards to the overwhelming display of religious intolerance.  Through her characters' narrations, Nasrin recounts the minute details of destruction of temples, houses being set alight and looted, kidnapping, and rape and murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children. As one of the characters puts it, there is no riot in the country; riot implies that two communities are fighting each other - something that is likely to occur in India when the majority and minority communities face off.  Instead, what is unleashed in Bangladesh is pure terror and subjugation, because Hindus are not allowed to retaliate even as their houses are plundered and women ravaged.

One has to get used to Nasrin's use of the Bengali names, with their generous dose of 'o's; the principal characters are called Sudhamoy, Suronjon, Kironmoyee and Maya.  Anchita Ghatak, who has translated from Bengali, has retained the Bengali spelling and pronunciation of names of people and places.  However, the translation on the whole is excellent.  

Both the father and son, Sudhamoy and Suronjon are idealistic and leftist to begin with.  While the father takes an active part in the 1971 liberation war, the son is into helping people and atheism.  So much so that they disallow the mother, Kironmoyee from keeping her gods in the home.  They nurse a hope that one day Bangladesh will shed its communal politics and adopt a policy of equality and secularism.  This hope is shattered as the communal segregation and Hindu persecution sets in.  

Suronjon is unemployed (he doesn't like to be at others' beck and call, as he puts it), buys cigarettes with the money he gets from his parents, has no real aim in life other than to wander and chat with friends, and does not attend to the needs of his parents or his younger sister, Maya.  For me, he is the most unlikeable character, and, by the time he realises the folly of his ways and the futility of his dream of a secular country, the unthinkable has already occurred - Maya is kidnapped by a group of fundamentalists and never returns.  

His father's denial of the fact that the state and the society are communal, and that there are good people willing to help them, even after suffering so much of religious intolerance throughout his life, and losing his daughter, irks not only Suronjon, but also us.  In all this, the most pitiful character is the mother, Kironmoyee, as she sacrifices her every wish and serves her husband and children till the bitter end.  In the end, the decision that should have been made much before they lost everything, is reached, as Sudhamoy agrees to migrate to India.  

Nasrin exposes what it is like to be an outsider living in a land that has based its constitution on the teachings of one particular faith, at the cost of secularism.  So you find that the characters have always had bitter experiences with the neighbours, friends and society, much before the precipitating event.  Maya is made to recite hymns of the state religion and excluded from school if she does not.  Suronjon is tricked by his friend into eating beef, and is addressed as 'son of infidel' at school.  Sudhamoy is forcibly circumcised, after which he is incapable of union with his wife forever, his land is usurped by a neighbour, and he is frequently overlooked when it comes to promotions at work.

The title, Lajja, probably pertains to the shame that a nation has to bear as it fails to safeguard its own children due to its partial state policies.  

Of late, several activists and writers have been silenced or killed; mostly in Asian countries.  Perumal Murugan, a writer in Tamil Nadu was forced to tender an apology for a book he had written, which apparently 'hurt the religious sentiments' of a group.  He went on to announce his own death as a writer in the social media.  Another writer, Murugesan was attacked by a mob in the same state as he had written an 'obscene story'.  Washiqur Rahman and Avijit Roy, both lost their lives within a span of a month for blogging on secularism and against religious fundamentalism in Bangladesh.  Both were hacked to death with crude weapons.  The police, in a manner that animates Lajja's content, initially refused to reveal whether fundamentalists belonging to the state religion were behind the attacks.

Truly, freedom of speech, although guaranteed by most states, appears to be confined to the papers that the words are written on.  Its detractors might suggest that there is a limit to what one can express, and that it should not needlessly malign a person or a community.  This may be so, but if one wants to retaliate, one can do so by coming up with a counter-point that challenges the original notion.  Having said that, to me, freedom of speech also means to uphold truth and dharma at all times, instead of taking one side over the other, driven by either dogmatic beliefs or pseudosecularism.  

Instead, the bigots try to suppress free speech through violence, intimidation, banning and killing; and in theocratic and fundamental societies they are allowed a free run.  

That is the real lajja.




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1932 was the year in which Angarey was first published by a group of liberal Muslim intellectuals.  Even though they did anticipate some trouble before they published the book, they were probably unprepared for the furore this book generated.  It was banned by the then British government, at the behest of a few individuals who took deep offence at the contents of the book.  Some, it seems, did not even bother to go through the contents of the book, as most often happens when any piece of art is proscribed, ostensibly for hurting the religious sentiments of a few.  However, the banning of the book did pave the way for the formation of the Progressive Writers' Movement.

It was only in the 1980s, after much water had flowed under the bridge, that the collection was put together again with great difficulty; so much so that they writers had to get the microfilm of the stories from that repository of colonialists' souvenir collections - the British Museum.  This Urdu version was utilised by Chauhan and Alvi, professors of English and Urdu respectively at the Zakir Husain Delhi College, to translate it into English. 

All through the reading, I was monitoring the content to spot anything that might have been objectionable to religious leaders of the 1930s India.  I could hardly find any.  Perhaps what was objectionable then, has with time, become more acceptable to pubic and pundits alike.  The original authors make use of the 'stream of consciousness' technique - a type of literary style that reveals the character's free-flowing thoughts, and jumps from one theme to another with scant regard for appropriate punctuation.  This is combined, in these short stores, with the prevailing social, religious (mostly Islamic), cultural and class issues of the time. 

The first five stories are by Sajjad Zahir, father of Nadira Z Babbar who has written the preface for the book.  The author's Left-leaning is obvious in these stories of class struggle, femininity, sarcasm poverty, agnosticism, and religious cynicism.  Perhaps the one story that might have ruffled quite a few religious feathers is that of the Maulvi who, unable to keep up his holy night vigil, falls asleep and dreams of his entry to heaven where he is greeted by naked houris.  Dripping with tongue-in-cheek humour and sarcasm, passages from Heaven Assured! might have been quoted quite a few times by those who sought a ban on the book.  

The two stories by Ahmed Ali are an exercise in free-wheeling outpouring of thoughts - the stream of consciousness in action - but there is hardly any blasphemous content in either of the stories.  The only female author of the group, Rashid Jahan provides a story and a play that highlight women's issues - their status in a patriarchal society, their woes, their coping mechanisms, and the manipulations that they resort to, in a hope of leading a better life.  Perhaps for this reason, and the fact that she was a woman, Jahan was targeted the most by the Puritans of 1930s India.  Her husband, Mahmuduzzafar, provides the sole story of self-deprecating Masculinity, which once again throws light on the plight of women vis-a-vis the male ego.

The translators provide a lengthy introduction to the book, which while it enlightens one on the making of Angarey and the controversy it generated, keeps one away from the actual content; the stories that one is itching to read, and from finding out why they were deemed 'objectionable' by some.  One wishes that the actual points and opinions raised in protest against the book were revealed explicitly, along with the reactions from the individual authors.

Nevertheless, one has to applaud the original authors, and the efforts of Chauhan, Alvi and their publishers, for undertaking the onerous task of upholding free speech in today's world.  A world, which even after 83 years of Angarey, is still marred by religious hypersensitivity, intolerance, protests in the form of vandalism, and unjustified proscriptions.        

S L Bhyrappa's reputation as one of the luminaries of Kannada literature was enough enticement for me to pick this one up.  And I wasn't disappointed.

Combining facts, research, history, religion and drama, Bhyrappa weaves a complex story of a husband and wife coming to terms with the differences between them.

The title, Aavarana, which means 'to conceal', pertains not only to the main protagonist's travails as a censored wife and writer, but also to the uncomfortable historical truth that is often curtailed by pseudo-secularists and vote-bank politicians.

At one level this is also a woman's tale of a search for identity and self-fulfilment, in an environment of fundamentalism and intolerance.  At the same time, Bhyrappa manages to include a crash course in history of Hindu-Muslim interactions, going back to the period when temples all across India were desecrated and vandalised by bigoted rulers.

The story starts in Hampi, where amongst the ruins, the husband and wife team of historical journalists ponder upon the glory and the subsequent devastation that befell Hampi.  The husband, a Muslim, tends to attribute the reason to bickering local kings of differing sects within Hinduism - a view that is shared by an intrepid professor and founder of a neo-liberal movement that proposes that all notions of fundamentalist actions of Muslim kings of yore are a figment of the right wing's imagination.

Our heroine, Lakshmi, is not so sure about this.  Although she is part of the same movement, she has her own doubts, which are fully confirmed when she stumbles upon her deceased father's collection of literature.  After being estranged from his daughter as she had married a Muslim man, he would have engaged himself in a deep study of local history; in particular that pertaining to the oppression and tyranny of Muslim rule in India - so much so that his accumulated knowledge and evidence puts even scholars to shame.

Lakshmi then starts her own reading of her father's evidence and finds horrifying details confirming his and her own suspicions.  In particular, she is drawn to the destruction of the Kashi Vishwanatha Temple at Varanasi by Aurangzeb and even visits the site to find that a large mosque has been built in the place of the original temple, using the same stones that were once part of the temple.

As more and more evidence is unearthed, she becomes more and more convinced about her father's conclusions and even confronts the liberal professor in one the conferences organised by him to drive home the point that fundamentalism was not the cause for temple destruction.

Lakshmi also puts these ideas across in the form of a novel, the story of which runs parallel to the main story.  Not only that, it has parallels with her own story - the way she was made to convert to Islam after marriage, change her name, wear burkha, asked to stop working by her in-laws, and finally when she realised that her husband was not so liberal minded after all.  The Hindu prince in her story, who is captured by the invading Muslim army, is sold as a slave, raped, castrated, made to serve as a eunuch in the zenana.  He finally discovers that his wife has been made a prostitute in another zenana.

Inevitably, Lakshmi drifts apart from her husband and son, who are naturally unable to accept her theory of fundamentalism.  She also faces arrest for publishing a blasphemous book that would flare up communal tensions.

There are many font types throughout the book, which change each time Lakshmi goes into the flashback mode, or when her fictional story is narrated.  Translating from any regional language is a challenge, and Balakrishna has risen well to it.  He manages to convey the angst and the complexity of the original story in Kannada very well.

The book ends with an exhaustive list of evidence, ostensibly collected by her father, but in actuality that which the author himself would have perused before writing this book.  One has to marvel at the depth and extent of research that Bhyrappa has undertaken to get the historical facts accurate - even though this has been contested by his critics.

With a story that may be construed as 'blasphemous' by some, one wonders as to how the author, unlike his protagonist Lakshmi, managed to escape from a communal backlash at the time the original Kannada version was published.  But one has to admire Bhyrappa for the guts and gumption shown by him in telling the truth as it is and not cowering in the face of 'political correctness'.

Now is there any equally gutsy producer who can take up the challenge and come up with a film adaptation of Aavarana?  Given the extent of pseudosecularism, I won't be holding my breath.

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The name is enough: Salman Rushdie.  I picked this one up just because of this, and also because I had not read any of his books earlier.  Not even Midnight's Children, which apparently was adjudged the 'Best of Booker'.  

And certainly not that one, which we all think of when we hear his name. 

This is a scathing, no-holds-barred, literary criticism of some of the best works by some of the best known authors world-wide.  Rushdie finds, in between praise for worthy contenders, errors in form, content and characterisation in just about every work that he peruses - and he does read a lot, it seems.

His ability to read between the lines and get behind the story to determine what the author was trying to say, has said, or did not say, is extraordinary.  His language, of course, is first-rate and exemplary, as you would imagine. 

He considers a long series of literary works - mostly fiction, and mostly from his contemporaries during the period of a decade - 1981 to 1991.  If you are not into South American or mainland European authors - like I am not - you can safely bypass a large segment of the book, and concentrate instead on the bits that matter - at least to me, which occur in the beginning and the end of the book.

These are to do with his take on religion, literature, English language, politics, and films.  There is a delightful essay about Indian words appropriated into English during the Raj, and later published as Hobson Jobson, which, believe it or not, is said to be a corruption of the 'Ya Hussain, Ali Hussain' cries heard during Moharram!  

He saves the best for the last.  The last major chapter of the book is about the controversy surrounding his banned book, The Satanic Verses.  I always wondered if he was affected by this controversy.  Hell, yes, it seems he was!  And you get to know just how much in this last segment of the book.  I was struck by the strangeness of the whole situation: he was a born Muslim, but he openly declared, at the age of 15 that he was not a Muslim; on the other hand he decided he was an atheist.  He demonstrated this by consuming a pork sandwich, after which, he discovered to his joy and relief, that he was not struck down by thunder or lightning.

However he had a soft corner for this born-into religion, especially towards that aspect of his faith which allowed for a liberated world-view and free speech, which he sadly realised later was never going to be a part of Already Existing Islam, as he puts it.  Finally, he was hounded by the followers of that very faith, and imprisoned in a cocoon of non-existence for several years.

There is a touching description of how he went through hell during the mass demonstrations and fatwas that called for his killing the world over, especially in the UK, where he lived in his 'bubble', as he puts it.  Here he puts forth his view, his justification for the contents of the book, and the fact that a metaphorical and fictional re-interpretation of Islam was vilified by those who never understood it, or even so much as read the book.

There is a terrific piece about how 'literalism' in interpreting the religious books is contributing to fundamentalist thought and action, and about the tussle between the mundane and the magnificent, the good and the bad, and religion and literature.

He also describes certain passages from the book, which were considered to be blasphemous at the time - this is the closest that we could get to actually reading the book as it is still banned in India.

Go for it for the language, critical views, and opinions of a master thinker and writer.


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