Free Speech & Fearless Listening New
The encounter with censorship in South Asia

By Raghu Karnad

That week, Max Mueller Bhavan was hosting an exhibit of original German promotional posters from between the Weimar era and the Third Reich. This was a period of unequalled social transformation: Weimar Berlin was a habitat for true libertines that accommodated every sexual taste or curiousity, not excluding those with a taste for mother-daughter prostitution teams, third-trimester streetwalkers or for nudist magazines devoted entirely to children. The film posters from the middle-20s do at least capture that cabaret aesthetic and the rush of a society slipping into decadence. Flappers parade for dandies, everyone counts ice cubes into their schnapps while outside the Nazis were consolidating power, not least because of their promise of a restored moral order. In the poster art of the late twenties, there is a movement away from lush art nouveau and Viennese watercolours towards the geometric forms of Constructivism and the darkly jagged Futurist motifs that we associate with fascist art. The Nazi-era posters were not mounted, as the Director explained to me, because they didn't want visitors to the German cultural embassy to find themselves surrounded by images of supremacist nationalism. The posters only spoke of wild freedom, and were silent about the hell into which that wild freedom led.

So the walls carried an ironic narrative while Max Mueller Bhavan hosted the conference of the Delhi Film Archive and Vikalp (Films for Freedom) entitled "Free Speech and Fearless Listening: the encounter with censorship in South India." The event lent itself easily to conspiracy theories: it could look like a European government patronizing a group of local patricians (at great expense) to create a counter-clamour for Free Speech while the commoners went berserk on the streets demanding European censorship and punishment. But this is unfair. The folks behind Films for Freedom are among the most upright of Indian citizens, sincerely committed to the honest (and well-shot) reportage of India's many stories.

It seems like everybody in the world is writing an Op-Ed about free speech these days. More surprisingly, it seems like just about everybody, with the exception of Yaqoob Qureishi, is saying the same thing, which is the rational but somewhat banal middle route between racist excess and religious hysteria. It was terrific to hear a set of truly sophisticated and well-informed opinions about free speech and censorship coming from panels of lawyers, filmmakers, artists and journalists of whom one could say, without reservation, that they knew what they were talking about.

In the South Asian context, Indian media has a comparatively liberal regime, and artists and media persons from our neighbouring countries testified to the diverse processes that constrain artistic and journalistic freedom. Jitman Basnet, an exiled Nepali journalist, told the now familiarly chilling story about media censorship under the Royal government. But if there was one salient message to retain from the conference, it was that censorship originates in many places apart from the Central Board for Film Certification (or the Royal Nepal Army).

Hassan Zaidi, journalist and filmmaker from Karachi, surprised the audience with his explanation that, notwithstanding the recent decision to ban 35 Indian cable channels, the official censorship regime in Pakistan is relaxed when compared to previous administrations. A newer mode of censorship is emerging in Pakistan, one that functions within the competitive programming of the private sector, where socially responsible journalism has to really fight for its column inches. It's a systemic restraint that has less to do with what you cannot say, and more to do with what you cannot persuade people to listen to. "There are no critical or investigatory stories on MNCs," Mr Zaidi said, as an example, "because revenue streams are directly linked to how well [media firms] do by these companies." His opinion was that there are three direly important issues in Pakistan: Baluchistan, the harbouring of Taliban in the Pashtun self-ruled provinces, and the issue of water and big dams in Punjab. With the government mostly targeting electronic media, all three are issues that should be discussed in the print media. "But you can write whatever you want," Mr Zaidi concludes, "And nobody will read it."

This is something Indians can't afford to be patronizing about. The nexus of commerce and journalism – and art, and protest, and other acts of witness - is more insidious than just the Times of India's unmarked "advertorial" policy (look out for the MediaNet logo), and may run even deeper than the evident sea-change towards Page Three journalism.

Geremie Barme, in The Revolution of Resistance , wrote about the Chinese intelligentsia's response to intellectual life post-Tiananmen. My point is not to compare socio-political freedom in China and India . Barme's analysis is analogous to India because it describes a complicated relationship with consumerism that is characteristic of society just emerged from socialist planning and the restricted options of a protectionist third world economy. It is best explained in his own words:

"For a time after 1989, consumerism was viewed popularly, and among many segments of the political and intellectual elite, as possessing a near revolutionary significance. The romance of resistance included a belief that quotidian activities were the site of struggle and cloaked socio-political retail therapy – that is, shopping for new lifestyles and accessorizing the self in contradistinction to the nation-state inculcated guise of identity… it was a development acceptable to economic reformers, the business elite, crony cadres, wannabe rebels, kids with 'tude, and the displaced literati alike… While ballot-box democracy might be deferred until a sizable middle class existed, the free-range republic of shopping could be realized immediately."

The urban 'republic of shopping' can come into existence either as the only permissible avenue of self-ex-pression or as merely the path of least resistance. Shopper-as-rebel and promoter-as-revolutionary: are these elitist norms or subaltern strategies? It's a dilemma that is recognizable in many aspects of Indian metropolitan life. This includes cultural producers riding safely on the tails of more flagrant resistance; appropriating the romantic (and saleable) postures of failed resistance. Do the current tactics of protest among the elite truly obtain fellowship with oppressed communities that have been led to rebel? Or is the intellectuals' mission being reconstituted into something that encourages circumspection and inactivity?

There is a reason this article has travelled so far from the exact subject of censorship to a consideration of the nature of the discourse we're interested in holding. "Free Speech and Fearless Listening" does not need my approval nor my support for its aims, both are implicit. But in the course of its three days, the conference often stopped looking like an activist or educative project and began instead to look like a hermetic conclave of academic co-sympathy where everyone already knew the agenda and each others' old jokes. In the conspicuous absence of anyone who was middle-class or conservative, the only people listening were those who were already free speech activists or, like me, eager Delhi scene-sters content to be sitting next to Arundathi Roy. That, in itself, is an old problem of social activism, but it is especially problematic when the subject is free speech.

Your correspondent is no fan of censorship - in fact, he was a volunteer at the Films for Freedom festival in Bangalore . Still, it eludes me what this conference accomplished other than spectacularly revealing a mode of censorship of its own, by conducting a dialogue – such as it was – within a community of like minds. This was awkwardly highlighted during the lecture of PA Sebastian, the Mumbai advocate who represents the director of the banned film Black Friday. He pointed out that most everyone in the audience has something that they would like to see censored. That was all. "If you say you have no ideology," he said, "You are either ignorant or you are insane!"

Mr Sebastian spoke in clunky, rhetorical terms but his critique ran deep, probably deeper than he intended: it was a critique directed at, and deflected by, the barriers we allowed to shoot up in our minds the moment it was indicated by his accent and his tone of voice that he would not participate in the monologic consensus with which the rest of the group was content. The barriers became visible in suppressed giggling and eye-rolling, "Oh dear, someone should have given this fellow the memo ." Nevertheless, he was right that most people in the audience would concede some kind of censorship – which is precisely what made it so remiss that there was no one to represent the people who support the current kind of censorship. Not because all opinions are equal, but because if you fail to engage other opinions you'll never know how robust or facile your own are. And because they'll never allow you to settle into a position where political protest, a la the republic of shopping, is just hip.

Apropos , the cartoons of the Prophet got surprisingly little airtime, considering that you could practically smell the burning effigies all week. All we got was Jawed Naqvi describing his own Koranic exegesis that it wasn't anything to get mad about at all. Then Sudhabhratha Sengupta (of Sarai CSDS) announced, but then with mock-concern declined to display, his collection of representations of the Prophet from classical Islamic tradition. No one in the room would be likely to support censoring the cartoons, but I assume everyone agreed that the cartoons problematized free speech more clearly than anything has done in a while. The mode of censorship at work in the conference was, again, audible as we left Dilip Simeon shouting at the backs of the crowd, who were already more interested in lunch, about the silence of Left when Muslims were bullying the media.

Finally, this mode of censorship was most evident in the fact that no one had invited any members of the CBFC. The assumption seemed to be that the CBFC members are all archaic moralists who would be incapable of participating in a sophisticated dialogue. This is plausible but complacent – after all, the alternative, which was ultimately chosen, was to have no dialogue at all. There were extensive quotes of censor board officials from all the countries in the region, which quotes were undoubtedly selected to have the most asinine and illiterate quality. The officials are not, however, illiterate, and since they have the powers they do, we should be attempting to expose them to as much sophisticated discussion of censorship as is possible. Even if their intellectual stubbornness or insincerity is a foregone conclusion, it isn't clear to me why we should spare them the challenge.

Tanvir Mokammel, a filmmaker from Dhaka, quoted Sufi poet Alem Mouri Sufian to us:

"They are the best kings that mingle with artists,
And they are the worst artists who mingle with kings."

He was talking about art's collusion with state power; but when he said it, it sounded like he was talking about protest's captivity within comfortable upper-class consensus.

I hope its obvious that I've been playing devil's advocate. It couldn't be more urgent that we defend free speech – and free speech couldn't ask for more sincere or articulate defenders. But it hardly bears repeating that we need to be vigilant of our own protest becoming a solipsism, as circular and cosmetic and cute as a Live Strong wristband. A censored silence is created when ideas cannot be spoken – but another kind of silence is created when only one idea speaks. The conference established that free speech entails fearless listening, but I'm not sure it demonstrated both.

Notes:

1) "Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic world of Weimar Berlin," by Mel Gordon. Feral House, 2000.

2) The Revolution of Resistance , by Geremie Barme, in "Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance," ed. Elizabeth J Perry and Mark Selden.