Book and theater banned in a living culture of fear

, And when they ask us what we are doing, you can say, we are missing.– Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

Jayant Kaikini speaking to reporters after winning the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2019 ( No Present Please: Mumbai Stories) said that he was influenced by many of his childhood experiences, not least yakshagana tradition Famous in the coastal region of Karnataka. A free art form that opened many windows, he said that Yakshagana “crafted the sensibility of every mind in coastal Karnataka with a reinterpretation of the classics through the use of music, dance and visual aesthetics.” For example, he was especially taken in by the transformation of ordinary citizens such as a teacher or vegetable seller into larger-than-life magical characters such as Arjuna.

Kaikini’s book of short stories in Kannada was translated into English by Tejaswini Niranjana; And having grown up with a sensibility to be open to the world, it is no surprise that Kaikini herself has translated many English stories and plays into Kannada. It must have come as a shock to them when Bajrang Dal workers disrupted their protest in Shimoga last fortnight. Fiddler on the RoofHe translated the music into Kannada ( jathegiruvanu chandira), the Jewish family in the story was replaced by Muslim characters, with one of the characters falling in love with a Hindu boy. But why should anyone bother with a drama celebrating interfaith friendship?

crowded timeline

Unfortunately, there has been a tendency in recent times to leave the ‘other’ behind, with the administration mostly looking away. Hindutva units ransacked churches, opposed to hijab, and called for a ban on books, films and plays criticizing its ideology. When Mira Nair adapted a Vikram Seth film a suitable boy For television, a kiss between protagonist Lata Mehra and her boyfriend Kabir created an uproar, another sign of growing intolerance towards equality and inclusion. Many stories dealing with “controversial” issues such as caste and rape have been dropped from undergraduate courses, including Mahasweta Devi’s short story, ‘Draupadi’, about a fearless Naxalite rebel leader, named after the famous ‘Dopadi’. ‘ Is placed. Mahabharata: Character. To be sure, India was the first country in the late 1980s to ban the import of copies of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses,

Liberal consciousness seems to be smoldering elsewhere as well. Over the years, several states in the US, the world’s oldest democracy, have seen increased censorship, and with it the banning of a broad spectrum of books from the Holocaust graphic novel. mouse (Art Spiegelman) from Harper Lee’s . until to kill a mockingbirdJohn Steinbeck’s of mice and Men and Toni Morrison the bluest eye,

The ban on books is also putting libraries in trouble. Growing up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Susan Orlean accompanied her mother to the library at least three times a week. In library bookIn , an account of the fire that destroyed millions of books in the Central Library of Los Angeles, she looks at the library’s role in promoting freedom of expression, one of democracy’s foremost ideals. “It is also a place,” she writes, “where we can see immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”

atticus finch warning

What happens when libraries – or books and their adaptations – are at risk? It is never a good idea to police or censor books, as it limits the reader’s access to diverse material, such as those on race, gender, caste, religion. If a child is prohibited from reading to kill a mockingbirdFor example, consider what she will miss. The book tells the story of Atticus Finch, a lawyer who shocks the people of his hometown in the American South when he defends a black man who is falsely accused of rape. In the utter darkness of the trial, he guides his children to face the ugliness. When six-year-old Scout Finch has a difficult first day at school, her father tells her, “You can’t really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…it.”

History shows that books that are banned often find their way to more readers. In Lenin’s TombDavid Remnik’s account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, he writes of a real moment on the Moscow subway in 1988/1989 in which people are reading sky-blue copies of Boris Pasternak Doctor Zhivago, until then only available in samizdat or underground versions. Philosopher Grigory Pomerants told him: “People read” nineteen Eighty Four For the first time, he found that Orwell, who received this education in Eton and on the streets of colonial Burma, understood the soul, or soullessness, of our society better than anyone else.

One of the most famous books to be banned is definitely James Joyce’s UlyssesCelebrating its 100th year in 2022. It was serialized in an American magazine on February 2, 1922, before being published as a book by Sylvia Beach, owner of the Paris bookshop, Shakespeare & Company. The stream-of-consciousness novel, which outlines a day in the lives of Stephen Daedalus, Leopold Bloom and their wife Molly Bloom, has escaped controversy, sanctions and legal action in what has been dubbed a “monument to the human condition”.

In a wonderful twist, however, the moment the ban is announced, one book is bound to garner the most attention. when bar mouse As it became known, sales rose rapidly, with one publisher even announcing that it was getting additional copies to be distributed to students for free.

the future is here

As tolerance for diversity wanes, fantasy is also becoming a reality. Suddenly, the dystopian novel by science fiction author Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451, Thinking about a time in the future when reading and thinking and books are banned, don’t think about the future anymore. In the novel, just as the books are ordered to be burned, Fireman Montag meets a community of people who are memorizing the books to keep them alive: “Everybody had a book he wanted to remember. , and he did.” Published in 1953, Bradbury said lewdly paris review In 2010: “Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and does not yet exist, but will soon change everything for everyone, and nothing will be the same again.”