Speech bubbles

There is a poster on the notice board of my classroom in New York that reads, ‘Lives are at stake’. It’s a poster calling for volunteer doctors to help out with the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. But it oddly always reminds me of Safdar Hashmi. A playwright and director, Hashmi was fatally wounded by Congress party workers during the performance of his play Halla Bol! in Sahibabad in 1989. I haven’t seen Rajkumar Santoshi’s film made based on the event but I imagine a lanky Hashmi being beaten or even stabbed mid-dialogue. On January 7, when news about the killing of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists erupted on the screens that surround me, I was reminded of the same line: ‘Lives are at stake.’

One of the most significant outcomes of the killings was the renewed confusion over what we mean by freedom of speech and expression. At the Museum of Modern Art, New York, when journalist Sir Harold Evans during a panel on ‘Charlie Hebdo and Freedom of Speech’ asked — “Should there be any limits to artistic expression?” it was met with stutters and stammers. Suddenly, the panellists — artists Kader Attia and Sharon Hayes, Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi, Vice news editor-in-chief Jason Mojica, historian Simon Schama and satirist Karl Sharro — who are all generally articulate and critical of repressive machinery in their work, weren’t quite sure. They agreed that the violence was barbaric but at the same time did not want to belittle the offence the cartoons might have caused.

Commenting on this renewed debate EP Unny, who is the chief political cartoonist for The Indian Express , and graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee both think that the killing of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists shouldn’t be confused as being about cartoons. Meditated acts of violence are not reducible to a handful of cartoons and the cartoons are not reducible to what just a handful of cartoonists think or want to express. “ Charlie Hebdo is about Europe’s growing inability to live with other people. Europe’s, especially France’s, ethos is becoming Judeo-Christian. What they achieved through rigorous scholarly thought is being eaten up by their Euro-centricity,” says Banerjee, who has so far remained silent about the events and its implications. The Judeo-Christian ethos that Banerjee is referring to is not limited to religion but encompasses an ethnic and nationalist view of what it means to be French or European. An example would be France’s decision to ban children from wearing veils or any other religious symbols in school. While the French legislature upheld this ban stating that it was meant to separate state and public activities from religion, it is also a symptom of the legislature’s discomfort with someone being a Sikh, Jew, Muslim or Christian more than being French.

This brings us back to the confusion regarding freedom of speech and expression. If we believe that cartoonists had the right to portray religious figures in the way they wanted, then we also need to believe that people have the right to flaunt their religion on their bodies. “Free speech is no longer for people who need it, it’s for people with bigger microphones,” says Banerjee.

But what about back home where we repeatedly fail to protect our Hashmis, MF Husains, Salman Rushdies and Perumal Murugans? Both Unny and Banerjee are surprisingly not too worried about religious fundamentalism and consider it to be a self-destructive strategy by political parties. Unlike in Paris, fundamentalist acts of violence in India are often committed by the majority religion. It’s both easy and hard to be a Hindu fundamentalist. Easy because violence is an easy option and difficult because Hinduism as a religion isn’t focused on the human sphere: you can go to war using the name of god and to uphold justice but not in the name of god or to uphold his/her sanctity. These dynamics allow us to acknowledge fundamentalist acts of violence as being assertions of power and to think about them critically. It becomes more problematic when the repression comes from the State. Unny, for instance, is rightly more concerned about events such as the arrest of cartoonist Aseem Trivedi for his work in an activist campaign.

Trivedi launched the Cartoons Against Corruption in 2011 as part of Anna Hazare’s campaign for the Jan Lokpal Bill and later started the Save Your Voice campaign when the Mumbai Crime Branch shut down his website. Trivedi was charged with sedition and insulting national symbols. Fortunately, he was released on bail and the charges were soon dropped. While the judiciary may have rightfully protected Trivedi and his work, it hasn’t shown the same sensitivity to many other artistic creations. Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and VS Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness are notable examples. The problem of suppression, however, becomes a more serious matter when it happens at a molecular level. Such as Mumbai University’s decision to remove Rohinton Mistry’s Booker-nominated Such a Long Journey from the syllabus following Aditya Thackeray’s (Bal Thackeray’s grandson) complaint that the book portrays Shiv Sena in bad light. Surely, it is more alarming when institutions start practicing self-censorship in fear of imagined consequences.

Banerjee adds, “I’m beginning to get more concerned by the middle class’ blind faith in corporates. We’ll crush out voices and mediums not by acts of violence but by relegating them to the periphery. Soon we’ll reach a stage where if you want to be heard you will need to speak through a celebrity or a corporate’s marketing campaign.” In a bleak situation such as this, young illustrator Harshad Marathe, whose most recent work includes cartoons on Darwin’s expeditions for National Geographic Traveller India, says such times make for more nuanced art. “It’s important to criticise authority including religious authority figures. I obviously don’t want to be lynched for it and so I illustrate in a way that is non-specific or vaguely associative.” Marathe’s illustrations shape shift in a manner that mimics the debate.

(Blessy Augustine is an art critic currently based in New York)

COMMENT NOW