Hindutva vs caste - The Hindu

Hindutva vs caste - The Hindu

The battle begins - The Hindu

The battle begins - The Hindu

The non-stop march of bigotry and intolerance

Sukumaran C. V.

In 1811, Shelley was expelled from the Oxford University for publishing The Necessity of Atheism in which he wrote: “…all the religions of the world forbid examination and do not want one to reason; authority wants one to believe in god; this god is himself founded only on the authority of a few men who pretend to know him, and come in his name and announce him on earth. A god made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.”

Shelley was undermining the very structure of power and authority that oppresses people and denies them freedom of body and of spirit. And the authorities expelled him.

In 1798, Thomas Paine published The Age of Reason in which he wrote: “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit…the church has set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears. It has set up a religion of pomp and of revenue, in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.”

For publishing The Age of Reason, Thomas Williams was sentenced to one year’s hard labour and the British government confiscated all the copies of the book. The British authorities could not imprison Paine as he was already in prison in Paris for participating in the French Revolution.

In 1910, Gandhi published Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule in which he wrote that the western ‘civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed.’ The British banned Hind Swaraj. While all other Indian leaders tried to ‘reform’ the poor Indians according to the Western standards, Gandhi approached them not to reform them, not to tell them their ways of living and their means of production are inferior to that of the West. He wanted to tell his people that the western civilization will be self-destroyed. The book was undermining the very basis of colonial rule and the colonial masters banned it.

The manifold destructive instincts and ways of the humans, especially of the English, inspired Jonathan Swift to write Gulliver’s Travels in 1729. The world has yet to produce such a scathing and wonderful satire on the politics, colonization and military expeditions of the human race. In the second book of Gulliver’s Travels —A Voyage to Brobdingnag— Swift’s bitter contempt of mankind finds its most articulate expression in the remark made by the emperor of Brobdingnag to Gulliver: “But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives, to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

Great Britain banned Gulliver’s Travels for its attack on the British ways of governance and subjugation.

When The Satanic Verses was published, a fatwa was issued on Salman Rushdie and the largest secular democracy in the world banned the book! In July 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese professor of literature who translated The Satanic Verses, was stabbed to death. (It is ironic that a  ‘secular’ media house in Kerala that kept and keeps mum on the ban of The Satanic Verses is now yelling in full throat in defence of free speech!)

In the preface of the English translation of Lajja, Taslima Nasrin writes: “I detest fundamentalism and communalism. This was the reason I wrote Lajja soon after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodya on 6 December 1992. The book, which took me seven days to write, deals with the persecution of Hindus, a religious minority in Bangladesh, by the Muslims who are in the majority. Lajja was published in February 1993 in Bangladesh…banned by the government five months later….a fatwa was issued against me by a fundamentalist organization and a reward was offered for my death.”

Of course, those who are responsible for the demolition of the Babri Masjid would feel sympathy towards Taslima Nasrin and the Hindus of Bangladesh and anger against the Muslim fundamentalists. But let me quote the newspaper report Suranjan, the protagonist of Lajja, reads in the first chapter (Day One) of the novel:

“Needless to say, in Bangladesh too, the reaction to this event is bound to create frantic waves of religious hysteria. Temples will be smashed and leveled to the ground, Hindu homes will be burnt and their shops will be looted. Did the BJP, VHP and their associates, harbour the notion that their insane actions in Ayodhya would cause a reaction only in the geographical boundaries of India? In India the entire ordeal has already given birth to widespread communal riots. Five hundred people have died. Six hundred, may be even a thousand. The number of deaths increases by the hour. Did the devout Hindus, who were intending to look after the interests of their religion and their community, realize that there were almost twenty-five million Hindus living in Bangladesh too?”

                                              Taslima Nasrin

Now Penguin Books India, afraid of a fringe Hindu right wing group—Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, has agreed to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History and to pulp it! Having secured an easy victory over their bigoted fight against the expression of alternative views, the intolerant SBAS is now after On Hinduism, another book written by Wendy Doniger. I am really shocked to read that the SBAS ‘gave an ultimatum’ to the publisher (Aleph Book Company) to withdraw the book and pulp it by March 8, 2014! Are we living in a secular democracy or theocracy? By banning The Satanic Verses, our secular democracy genuflected in front of the theocratic elements and the secular fabric of the nation is being weakened by each day while the theocratic elements are strengthened by the omissions and commissions of the polity. 

What we are witnessing is quite dangerous for our pluralism and secularism. If the obscurantist and fanatic elements are not strictly curtailed, they will undermine the very foundation of our secular democracy which has already been emaciated.

If democracy has to be vibrant, there should be as many alternative histories and narratives as possible. If you want to destroy the alternative narratives that may be entirely different from your ‘authoritative’ narrative, you are killing democracy. I have not read An Alternative History, but now I strongly feel to read it. Let there be a thousand alternative histories and narratives of everything to shatter the centralization of power and knowledge.

As Howard Zinn says, ‘there is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged.’ Let's search for the records left by the underprivileged and try to have alternative histories to understand the undersides of every age.