There is something about books; they show possibilities. Books dare the brave to venture out on mysterious intellectual horizons. To an author, books offer pure creative joy or a cathartic purge. Some authors write for an audience. Writers are sometimes chaffed for their narcissism, their unflinching yearning for acknowledgement. Some write for their conscience because keeping quiet is cowardly.
An insight into the lives of Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Nietzsche, Premchand, Manto, Ghalib, - to name a few - proves that writing is lonely, painstaking and seeks sacrifice. In spite of this, history hasn’t stopped producing writers. Writers are a stubborn tribe. Imagine, then, under what extreme conditions a writer would return an award. Unfortunately for India, the protests of authors Nayantara Sahgal and Ashoke Vajpayee met with cynicism at best and accusations of pseudo secularism at worst.
On October 6, Nayantara Sahgal (88) returned the Sahitya Akademi Award she had received for her 1985 English novel Rich Like Us to support “all dissenters who now live in fear” and to protest against the Modi government’s failure to protect the country’s cultural diversity. On October 7, Vajpayee (73) returned the Sahitya Akademi Award he won in 1994 for his Hindi poetry collection, Kahin Nahin Wahin to support the right to dissent. Hindi writer Uday Shankar and six Kannada writers have also returned their respective awards to protest against the delay in the murder investigation of M M Kalburgi.
When I had interacted with Ashoke Vajpayee in Goa around two years ago, he had expressed his concerns about the right-wing wave at the Centre and across the country and what it meant for freedom of expression. He had written a series of poems apprehending the dark days ahead after the BJP victory. A stanza from a poem, which he had written in a question-answer format, stuck in my mind. He had recited this excerpt in a mischievous, jovial manner:
Q- ‘Kya tumhein chhote moonh badi baat karne ka shauk hai?
A “ ‘Ye to kavita ka swabhav hai;
Kavita chhote moonh badi baat karke hi kavita hoti hai.’
Roughly translated, it goes something like this:
Q- “Do you have the habit of speaking big from your small mouth?”
A - “It is but the nature of poetry. A poem becomes a poem when a big thing is said out of a small mouth.”
I talked with Vajpayee on the telephone again on Thursday to ask about his decision to return the award. He said he is deeply depressed about the barbarian behavior that is on open display. He was talking in the context of the Dadri lynching on September 28 in Uttar Pradesh. (Personally, this is the most disturbing, shameful and unforgiveable attack on secular existence in recent times when a man was butchered on the suspicion that a cow was killed.) “The spirit of accommodation, dialogue, inclusion is under assault and things are getting worse by the day. It is so blatant,” Vajpayee said. He clarified that he knows the award was not given to him by the government, but the Sahitya Akademi. “But when the Akademi is not speaking up when it should, what do we do?”
Forget free speech, the right to dissent is being systematically stifled. The current government might be hobnobbing with social media moguls around the world and clinching splendid business deals. But what good will Digital India serve if Facebook, Twitter or Gmail become servile agents of the Big Brother? The ground reality is that men and women in India feel threatened even before they say what they feel; they are not free to choose what they eat and when.
Like Vajpayee observed in his poem, freethinkers often face accusations of biting more than they can chew, saying more than they can think and doing less than they can do. But, I assume that most of the people who make such accusations cannot even croak to get a waiter’s attention or clear their throat to refuse a boring dinner invitation. I believe that cynicism, inertia and a vicarious jealousy of not having the guts to do the right thing in the right way are the biggest enemies of freedom of expression. Violence, lynching, seeking camouflage in vicious mob mentality and creating an atmosphere of terror is a result of immense insecurity and cowardice because it is unsettling when someone has the ability to revolt with nothing but honest articulation.
In his essay The Prevention of Literature George Orwell observes that poems are most adapted to survive a totalitarian regime. Orwell says: “The destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic and the poet, in that order.” True, in a blatantly conniving regime that promotes hate and intolerance, returning one award or six might not make a difference. But still, returning the Sahitya Akademi award is a smart gesture of protest irrespective of what the cynics say. Awards don’t make poetry, poetry makes itself. And you gotta do what you gotta do!
