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Ask anyone about censorship and whether there's any in India, and they'll say, no, not really. We're not like Bangladesh or Pakistan, we have freedom of speech, it's a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution. If you remind them about Fire and Water or M.F. Husain and the Gufa in Ahmedabad, or the attack on Ajeet Cour's Academy in Delhi or on Sahmat in Ayodhya or even, long ago, on Mushirul Hasan, they'll say: those are exceptions, it was the work of hoodlums. And anyway, all these people went too far; they should have been more careful.
- In a way they're right. There's very little formal censorship, that is, censorship by the State in India, but if this is so, why are we increasingly having to be 'careful', to be mindful of what we say? Is it because street censorship has usurped the power of the State and taken it upon itself to police people's expression? Or because, as writer Mridula Garg says, pithily, 'the more regressive the State, the more aggressive the mob'.
- Perhaps as Nabaneeta Dev Sen puts it, free speech belongs to the mainstream, and if you're on the margins or if yours is the voice of dissent, your speech is censored. Could it be that a range of other constraints operate in culture and society, inhibiting not only one's freedom of speech, but of association and mobility as well? Constraints that obviate the State's need to censor because they're so effective anyway? Could it be that we need to redefine censorship so that it encompasses these other myriad forms of silencing, and enables us to unravel their complex workings?
- In late July, over 65 women writers from 11 languages met in Hyderabad, India, at a most unusual gathering, to discuss not only the many faces of censorship in India, but its peculiarly and particularly gendered dimensions as well. This national colloquium was the culmination of a unique process: a series of workshops over the last two years with approximately 200 women, from Urdu, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bangla, English and Tamil. It dwelt, not on their writing, per se, but on the circumstances in which they write, and are read and written about.
- Across age and language, caste, creed and community, urban and rural women who write prose and poetry, songs and serials, short stories and novels, essays and autobiographies, talked at length about how and why they write; what they write, and the form they write it in; why they can't write what they'd like to or why they don't; where and how they publish, and how they relate to the literary establishment and the market in their particular language or regional context. And how almost anything or everything they write is filtered through the family, community, society, culture and politics.
- 'A women's writing is her gesture', said Nabaneeta Dev Sen, 'and like all women's gestures it is subject to all sorts of social codes'. Not everyone agreed. Shashi Deshpande says she's a feminist but not a feminist writer: one must be gender-conscious, not gender-bound. Others said they were not subjugated to any kind of censorship or curbs on our expression as women. We are writers, and like other writers, are free to choose what we write about and how we write about it. We are preoccupied with form and content; with language; with meaning and metaphor; with being read and critically appraised.
- And yet, when one of them said. 'a woman's life is censored from start to finish, and if not censored then severely edited', no one thought it either incorrect or exaggerated.
- Hindi writer Anamika's comment goes to the heart of the matter: 'scissors to cut with, a needle and thread to sew my lips with. If I write my subconscious, the earth will be covered with paper'. Many, many women censor themselves in what must be the most powerful and pervasive form of silencing we know. What is it they fear? Loss of respectability? Of social acceptance? Ridicule? Or rejection by family and friends, loved ones, a peer group?
- The household or familial dimension impinges on women's writing in ways that are deeply gendered and internalised. Although, as Telugu writer Satyavathi says, 'we avenge the censorship we face in reality through our writing', any number of women censor themselves through fear of how their families or communities will react. Censorship often takes place within the home, where manuscripts may be destroyed, suppressed or altered by husbands, parents, or siblings because of what they reveal about 'family secrets'.
- Fathers or husbands may also appropriate the work of their daughters or wives because they do not wish them to have an independent identity and feel that the work of women in their family belongs to them. The objection is often very violent. One Tamil writer told us that her ex-husband broke her right wrist for daring to write a poem about their divorce, and many others spoke about the physical abuse they suffered in their marital home, because of their writing.
- One wonders: would a meeting of 70 male writers have spoken about censorship in the home by mothers, wives, sisters or daughters in quite the same way? Would their poetry have been dismissed as Volga says Telugu feminist poetry was, for being 'full of body-consciousness but lacking in social consciousness'? Would their persons and personalities become an inextricable part of their texts? Would they be promised publication by powerful editors in return for sexual favours?
- Nice girls shouldn't say such things. But the market and literary establishments have their own subtle and unremarked forms of censorship, and equally subtle manipulations that sometimes barely conceal outright bias. More than one writer said she had been advised by literary 'well-wishers' to avoid certain subjects (feminist poetry, sex, politics, religion) if she wanted to be published - but if she was arrogant enough to persist the attacks could be vicious.
- But the opposite was also true. Writers in Kannada and Malayalam, for example, said it was fine for women to write about sex, but when it came to exposing sexual politics, the battlelines were clearly drawn!
- Does subject-matter determine form? Is poetry preferred because it allows concealment? The Urdu writers certainly thought so. But Malayalam poet Sugatha Kumari thinks it may be tolerated in women because, 'society considers poetry a harmless activity, like buying a silk sari'. Are novels more difficult because they need extended periods of time, a luxury few of the writers present enjoyed? Could humour mask pain and so, protect? If short stories are easier to write, they're harder to publish.
- And so the thread that ran through most of the discussions was disconnection: the disconnection between what women said and what they wrote; between their spoken words and their silences; between their husbands' and fathers', apparent encouragement and support, and their explicit, disapproving silence when a norm was violated. Between women as the subject matter of writing, and women as subjects and writers. Between language, literature and social movements, and the emergence of women's voices. Between language and gender, and gender and genre.
- But it's not all gloom and doom, or, as some would say, whine and whinge. The fact that so many women persist with their writing in the face of so much resistance, means something. It means, principally, that the dissenting voice will not be easily crushed. That women recognise that writing is a subversive activity in patriarchal cultures, especially when it is gender conscious, but refuses to be gender-bound.
- And that censorship emanates from many sources, and is chameleon-like: what was proscribed yesterday may be prescribed today, but equally, what is permitted today may be silenced tomorrow. In this time of Internet and electronic communication, the point of censorship - by the State, street, family, community or society - is not to keep people from accessing a particular work, it is to keep them from expressing or creating it in the first place. And this is why we need to redefine it, the better to be able to resist it.
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