Tag: free speech in India
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Speaking Volumes: Unequal Murders
“Those who killed, killed in the open. Thugs committed their thuggery in the public eye, with a spring in their step. .. A dark, frightening cloud of reality had descended, one that no one had expected.” Uday Prakash, ‘Mangosil’, The Walls of Delhi In the 1980s, Kulbir Natt and other journalists chronicled the period in…
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Free speech primer: a user’s guide
Prem Panicker and Nisha Susan asked me to do this for Yahoo! India; it’s a compilation of the work done by many other people, writers, lawyers and activists, on free speech issues in India over the years. Read the primer here: How to Fight Censorship and Remain Free One of the earliest references to the…
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Booklove: Freedom from the British ban
(Published in the Business Standard, August 20, 2013) The week after Independence is a good time to remember some of the less well-known achievements of the British, in the days when they ruled India. For instance, in 1910, the British government banned the wearing of a particular kind of dhoti. This dhoti, as Sisir Kar…
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Speaking Volumes: The unchaste page
(Published in the Business Standard, May 7, 2013) The reading was at a sedate mela; literature was tucked in sideways, between the food stalls and the sellers of heavy machinery. Jeet Thayil read a passage he had read often at literary festivals. It involved a rant from a character meditating on the endless varieties of…
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Speaking Volumes: Freedom For The Thought We Hate
(A shorter version of this was published in the Business Standard, 4th February, 2013. This is only a brief and partial look at some judgements on free speech and artistic expression in India, and does not claim to be comprehensive.) The problem with this country’s vast throngs of would-be censors, from the genuinely easily offended…
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Banned Books Week: “The State’s Duty”
“The State’s Duty” Samanth Subramanian (First published in the New York Times’ India Ink blog, February 2012) On several occasions already, in what is still a very new year, various arms of the Indian state have recused themselves from their duty of protecting free speech, citing the threat of violence as fair justification. The Rajasthan police have been…
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Banned Books Week: Arunava Sinha on many Ramayanas
By Arunava Sinha How about banning this? Here are two short passages from two famously funny plays written in Bengali several decades ago. For, they make fun of – without malice, in pure humour – one of the most revered figures of the Hindu pantheon, the mythically immortal Hanuman. One possible reason for there being…
nilanjana s roy 