nilanjana s roy

Category: banned books

  • Banned Books Week, 26 September-1 October 2011

    Every year around this time, I dust off two old pieces I’d written on banned and censored books in India, here and here. I read through these lists with a sense of failure: for all of our pride in India’s democracy, the rise of Indian writing in English and this country’s openness to argument and…

  • Free speech: "Cannot you hold your tongue?"

    (Published in Forbes India, January/ February 2011, for its Curators of Interestingness series.) BOOKS: FREE SPEECH “Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you?” From Plato’s Apology, concerning the trial of Socrates. In 399 BC, the…

  • Speaking Volumes: Bans and Banana Republics

    (Published in the Business Standard, April 5, 2011. Also read Salil Tripathi in The Daily Beast on India’s troubled history of limiting free speech.) At the height of the uproar over Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography of Gandhi, one question deserved to be asked: what would we do with a negative, critical biography of a revered…

  • The BS Column: The marketplace of outrage

    (I’m running behind on blog updates–my apologies. This was published on 26th October in the Business Standard. This is part of a series of articles and columns I’ve been writing over the last ten years on censorship and free speech issues–I wish the politics of this country hadn’t made that archive necessary.) “What we have…

  • PEN India statement on Rohinton Mistry and Such a Long Journey

    (My apologies, this should have been posted earlier; I’m travelling at present.) PEN Statement on Rohinton Mistry Ban THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE 20 October 2010 Dear Friends and Colleagues, The PEN All-India Centre strongly condemns the removal of Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Such A Long Journey, from the SYBA syllabus of the University of Mumbai’s Literature…

  • India: The Rushdie effect–bans, burnings and other acts of censorship since 1988

    (Thought I’d put this together for the record; this is incomplete and lacks several citations, for the Saleem Kidwai case, attacks on art galleries and any other book bans that have escaped my notice. I’d welcome additions and corrections. Thanks.)Sept. 26, 1988: Viking Penguin publishes Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in London. Oct. 5, 1988: India…

  • The BS Column: Unban the Satanic Verses

    (Published in the Business Standard, September 7, 2009) In less than a month, my country will observe an unusual, and shameful, anniversary: the 21st year of the ban in India on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. In these 21 years, the author has experienced exile, had a fatwa pronounced on him, gone into hiding, had…

  • The BS Column: The care and feeding of book bans

    (This is a longer version of the piece published in the Business Standard, August 25, 2009) In Delhi’s Coronation Park, you’ll find a circle of empty plinths. These pedestals were intended for the statues of viceroys past, and a few, like Willingdon and Hardinge, have found their perches. But by and large, the crumbling figure…

  • The BS Column: Will you take offence? One cup or two?

    (Published in the Business Standard, June 22nd, 2009; this is the longer, uncut version of the piece that appeared in print) A few years after the ban on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in India, I happened to be browsing in a London bookshop. (*Corrected thanks to Rahul Siddharthan–the original line mentioned incorrectly that Khomeini’s fatwa…