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India: Censorship by the BJP/RSS Batra Brigade:
Part Two

WENDY DONIGER

 

 

 

PART II



IT CAN HAPPEN HERE: THE TEXTBOOK CONTROVERSY

The fight in India has emigrated to the United States, for the Hindutva movement now dominates the political discourse in the American diaspora as well as in India.

Out of a mounting sense of political entitlement and a heightened consciousness of the American phenomenon of identity politics, a small but growing group of Hindus in the American diaspora is raising objections to the work of a number of American scholars writing and teaching about Hinduism.

The situation in the US is not the same as the situation in India, for many obvious reasons, nor are the American protesters simply responding directly to events in India. Still, there is a strong, if indirect, connection between the rise of the Hindutva movement in India and in America.

When books published by American scholars -- including Jeffrey Kripal, Paul Courtright, James Laine -- were attacked in India, and the Indian editions were suppressed, the books remained in print in America, but the offending scholars received death threats here.

America has also seen unsuccessful Hindu attempts to censor books in a manner alarmingly similar to the way that Batra has attacked books and censored textbooks in India. In 2000, two of the leading historians of ancient India, Romila Thapar and Michael Witzel, wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle about Hindu attempts to alter school textbooks in the US:

Initially, the goals of these pressure groups seem benign, and even righteous. They aim to rectify culturally biased and insensitive depictions of India and Hinduism, and they would like Hinduism to be treated with the same respect as Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
 
These concerns are entirely justified. Time and again, when I give a public lecture in the United States, no matter what I talk about, the first question from the American audience is: “What about the caste system?”

Most textbooks, too, dwell upon, and exaggerate, the human abuses in the caste system and pay insufficient attention to the rest of Hinduism. But some of the Hindu interest groups have demanded that textbooks not mention the caste system at all, which can be as bad a distortion as the overemphasis on it. And this is not all that is at stake, as Thapar and Witzel went on to point out:

If such reasonable changes comprised the full extent of the desired amendments, there would be no controversy. There are, however, other agendas being pushed that are oddly familiar: the first Indian civilization is 1,900 million years old, the Ramayana and Mahabharata are historical texts to be understood literally, and ancient Hindu scriptures contain precise calculations of the speed of light and exact distances between planets in the solar system.

In 2005, the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation met with an ad hoc committee that included a consortium of California Department of Education staff and persuaded them to approve a number of changes in the way that school textbooks presented Hinduism. The changes involved such matters as pushing back the dates of major milestones in Indian history and erasing or minimizing features of Hinduism that could be perceived as negative, such as the caste system, the social category of untouchables (dalits), and the status of women.

A great many prominent historians and scholars of South Asia protested against this, urging the board not to allow the religious chauvinism of some Hindus to become the policy of the state of California.

Eventually, the scholars won; most of the proposed changes were not made. In February 2009, the Federal District Court of California ruled resoundingly against the Hindu interest groups that had brought a subsequent suit.

Here I should also note that many Hindu Americans testified against the proposed changes, siding with the scholars; the range of opinions among Hindus in the American diaspora is as diverse as it is among Hindus in India.

But serious damage had been done. Charles Burress, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, commented:

Even though the board resisted many of the changes sought by activist groups this time, the conflict could still impact future textbooks with publishers being tempted to soften the content on their own initiative, said Stanford University professor of education Sam Wineburg.

“Publishers will tread on this territory ever more lightly,” Wineburg said … “The result,” said Gilbert Sewall, director of the
American Textbook Council, “is textbook editors censor themselves. They fall all over themselves to try to cater to one pressure group.”

This sort of bullying and the resultant self-censorship have indeed caused many scholars, especially young scholars still without the armor of tenure, not only to bite their tongues and hold back their true judgments on many sensitive issues, but even to refrain from tackling such topics at all -- until, they tell themselves, they get tenure. But the sad truth is that generally by the time they do get tenure they have forgotten what it was that they wanted to say.

And the brush fire is spreading.

Hindu parents of children in American schools, supported by messages from India, have brought concerted action against several school districts, objecting to the treatment of Hinduism in textbooks and insisting that they be altered to include such patently incorrect statements as that Sati (suttee) -- the burning of women on their husbands’ funeral pyres -- is a Muslim practice imported into India, or that the caste system is just a suggestion without any real effect.

As one case is settled, another crops up somewhere else.

WHO SPEAKS FOR HINDUISM?

Members of the Hindu community in America have also made a concerted effort to limit the academic study and teaching of Hinduism to people who are themselves Hindus. This stems in part from their resentment of non-Hindu scholars who are seen as dominating the field inappropriately, shutting out Hindus. That claim is not true. Hindus are on the faculty of many religion departments all over the country; Hindus as well as non-Hindus teach Hinduism in American schools.

But the claim that only Hindus should teach about Hinduism betrays the same misunderstanding of the nature of secular education, of the academic discipline of religious studies, that colors Batra’s contentions.

Growing up in a tradition does not necessarily produce the knowledge and understanding required of a scholar of religion. There is an essential difference between preaching and teaching, between teaching religion (which the parents or, more often nowadays, grandparents of many American Hindus may do) and teaching about religion (which Hindu or non-Hindu instructors in school may do).

Comparative religion -- such as the study of Hinduism by someone who may not be Hindu, always an implicitly comparative enterprise -- is not the same thing as interreligious dialogue, in which only Hindus can publicly speak for Hinduism.

Both approaches -- comparative religion and interreligious dialogue -- are valuable, but they have very different goals and limitations. Of course there is always bias, from inside or outside the religion. But writing and teaching in the academic study of religion should never depend upon the faith of the writer or teacher. Otherwise it’s interreligious dialogue all the way down, and the equally valuable work of comparative religion is lost.

THE THREAT IN INDIA

Scholars in America must therefore deal with problems quite different from those that threaten scholars in India, but for that very reason they have a vital role to play in combating the threat to intellectual freedom posed by people like Batra. His lawsuit against my book also asks the court to

pass a decree of mandatory injunction directing the defendant no. 2 and 3 [the publishers] to issue appropriate instructions and guidelines ensuring that such objectionable books containing defamatory and derogatory passages should not be published in future.

Furthermore, he said, the court should act so that “she [me] may also be restrained from dissemanting [sic] misleading and fictitious facts.”

Presumably he wants me to show future drafts of my books to him to be vetted; the schoolmaster would have me hold out my hand to receive the blows of his ruler.

Dream on.

But Batra has also stated, in The New York Times, his intention in future to vet all of the books written for India’s children:

He dreams of creating a panel to review textbooks for the first 12 grades of India’s government schools. Asked how many he would like to replace, he waved a hand: All of them.

“Alternate books will come out,” he said. “We shall give them guidelines.”

He has done it before and would do it again. Wherever he finds literature that he perceives to be not in line with the “cultural and spiritual heritage” of India, literature that “is found to disrespect the sentiments or distort facts, we will agitate at the State level and pursue legal action.”

Indeed, he has already gone after another book of mine, “On Hinduism“, originally published by the Aleph Book Company in Delhi and available worldwide (except in India) from Oxford University Press.

Even if, as I hope, Batra’s attacks on books are ultimately stopped, and the books are restored to bookstores, the trouble that he has made may well discourage courageous publishing in India, for the very same reasons that, as the San Francisco Chronicle reporter feared, the thwarted Hindu attacks on American textbooks might discourage American publishers: to avoid a potentially depressing and expensive fuss.

WHAT WE CAN DO

Batra uses martial language: “We have won the battle, we will win the war.”

And indeed, scholars of Hinduism must now fight a war on two fronts.

In India, journalists, activists, novelists, historians, lawyers, writers, and scholars of all shapes and sizes are fighting against RSS leaders and the Hindutva rank and file; in America, it’s primarily scholars versus Hindu lobbyists.

In India, astonishingly, the media are staying on the story, in part to keep alive the issue of free speech. Literally thousands of people have written articles and signed petitions and blogged and tweeted and posted on Facebook about the broader problems exposed by the alleged banning of my books. Several lawyers have volunteered to carry on the fight pro bono, and several publishers have offered to publish my books in India; one brave soul among them even wants to translate “The Hindus“, all 779 pages of it, into Tamil.

Moreover, e-books and PDFs of “banned” books circulate widely in India. There’s irony in the fact that the same Internet that exacerbated the original problem, by broadcasting the words of people like Batra who would never have met the standards of academia or responsible journalism, now -- like the brown paper wrappers that modestly veiled “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” before 1960 -- allows academic books to slip past the self-appointed moral police.

But what if India follows China into that dark place where the Internet, too, is blocked?

As the editor Sandip Roy has remarked, you can’t download freedom of speech.

Well, we still have those low-tech brown paper wrappers.

On March 24, I received this delightful message from a colleague in a major city in India:

You’ll be happy to hear about an interesting transaction I witnessed today: my friend walked into one of the larger bookstores and asked for a copy of your book. Within a minute the paperback edition of “The Hindus: An Alternative History“, discreetly packed away in a paper bag, was produced from some back area of the store and handed over to her. So the book is still being sold right here. This is India.

Readers, God bless them. You can’t stop them.

Still, there is much work to be done. Last week, Vishakha Desai posted this thoughtful paragraph on the Asia Society website:

It’s heartening to see that all major newspapers, especially those in English, are full of major stories and editorials by well-known writers and thinkers, all condemning the decision by Penguin. Initially, I felt a sense of relief reading these articles. Aha, the debate is alive, I thought. But that sense of mild satisfaction quickly turned into a greater concern. Clearly, the intellectual urban elite was ready to criticize such acts. But where was the organized effort to ensure that the climate of fear and intimidation would not continue to allow the destruction of more books deemed to have a view of Indian culture different from the right-wing Hindu zealots?

There are, however, a number of initiatives gathering force in India right now to combat the laws that enable the Batra Brigade to bully Indian publishers. Batra may have held up Penguin with a toy gun. It seems that Article 295a may not actually be applicable to this case at all, and that Article 153a of the code is more relevant; or, indeed, that the book might not have been liable under any extant Indian law.

Penguin was badly advised by its lawyers. But it has now joined forces with both the Indian chapter of PEN and PEN International to form a network to help authors and publishers in dealing with legal problems in India.

After the elections coming in May, there will be a high-profile conference to discuss the limits of free expression in India, and the PEN network will undertake to be in contact with whatever government has come to power.

The Supreme Court of India has asked the Law Commission to look into the issue of hate speeches made by leaders of political, social, and religious organizations.

It’s not enough, but it is, at least, a start in the move to end the tyranny of the blasphemy laws.

Meanwhile, we must do our part in the US, where, despite the alarming rise of American reactionary and repressive tendencies (for India has no monopoly on the incursions of religious conservatives into public life), blasphemy is not -- yet --  a criminal offense. While continuing to support those who are fighting the good fight in India, we must speak out here.

It is the particular responsibility of scholars with tenure -- an increasingly rare luxury, nowadays -- to write about topics that might “outrage religious feelings” in India. We can’t expect our students to take such chances, to risk their own possible tenure, probably to jeopardize their chances of getting Indian visas, or simply to be prevented from carrying out their research in India.

For my part, even before “The Hindus” was published, I had begun selecting and annotating Hindu texts for a large anthology that will be published in the US this coming autumn. As I became more and more aware of the need to make widely available substantial textual evidence for the alternative Hinduism that I continue to document, I realized that an anthology -- a collection of texts, not a grandstand from which I might express my idiosyncratic opinions -- would provide the ideal ammunition for the Hindu voices of reason that continue to speak out against the Hindutva shrinkage of their religion.

And so, after rounding up the usual suspects, the texts usually presented as representative of Hinduism -- passages from the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the works of Tulsidas and Gandhi -- I balanced that literature with lesser-known texts from Hindu writers, including many from Dalits and tribals, from ancient women poets and modern women novelists, the sorts of texts that Batra would call “distortions and deviations.”

It is another big book -- over six hundred pages -- and I do not expect it to be published in India at this time.

Still, you never know; life is short, but the fight for freedom of speech is long.

CONCLUDED

[Courtesy: The New York Review of Books]
April 23, 2014

 

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Part Two"









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