Last Tuesday, Perumal Murugan, an Indian author, faced a high court over some of the work that he’s published. Reactionary right-wing Hindus, supported by revenue and police officials, pursued censoring Murugan through a meeting held at the Namakkal Collectorate. As a result, Murugan has decided to stop writing, which he initially announced via his Facebook page with the response-inciting post “Perumal Murugan is dead.”
Murugan’s novel was questioned as a result of its content; he writes about an old and controversial Hindu practice. Content censorship itself is not uncommon; leaders fear that subversive ideas can cause political unrest that will change the current hierarchical order. It is especially dangerous if these ideas are presented to people in a way that they don’t even realize that there is a political message in the text, because then they might just take up the messaging without considering it critically.
Literature has a unique position in the field of social commentary; it enables authors to speak about particular social problems without necessarily talking about them directly and without transparently implicating any particular parties or factions in the problem’s cause. It is unlike any sort of news or historical media because, well, it’s just a story. The ideas behind the story, though, are what scare controlling political leaders. For example, in this case, the novel’s portrayal of Hinduism could be read in such a way that the entire social and political order of India would be compromised and questioned.
However, trying to censor the work of authors and artists is shortsighted and ineffective. The act of censoring in and of itself garners press around the author and her work, and so it is likely that the work will actually end up with a greater circulation than it otherwise would have. Even though Murugan has now pulled his works from bookstore shelves, the international media surrounding his case is quickly making him an international phenomenon. There has also been lots of collective action against the idea of censoring Muguran’s work; a collective of writers at the Jaipur Literature Festival paid homage to Muguran and others are mobilizing public interest litigation to fight for his case. All of these things will make people more interested in reading the work that the government is trying to stunt in the first place.
The other main reason that censorship frequently fails is that the censoring bodies approach the act of censorship from the wrong end. It aims to limit the spread of particular ideas by limiting and eradicating the spread of certain materials. However, the literal materials are not what the state fears, so it is an ineffective way of stunting them.
If the state really wanted to prevent ideas in literature from taking hold, it would be more prudent to address the ideas themselves. Instead of limiting the physical things as they circulate, actually engaging with and discussing ideas, even if they demonstrate weaknesses in an ideology would be more effective. Not only would it demonstrate the ruling party’s willingness to reflect critically on its weaknesses, but it would signal that the ruling body is reasonable enough to have conversations about topics of concern, which is arguably one of the more important roles of the government. This would enable the government to be more persuasive and gain more legitimacy with the people.
When the ideas go unaddressed, they are allowed to linger and be considered by the public, which actually does exactly what the censors do not want and fulfills the goal of the literature to make waves and start conversations in the first place.
This is a starkly different case from the ideas of censorship and free expression as they seem to have attached themselves to the Hebdo case in France. The key feature of difference is that in the Murugan case, the censorship and limit of freedom is placed not by an external, international source but is state-sponsored. While free expression ought to be protected in so far as it does not encroach upon the freedom of others in general, it is worse for any unnecessary expression limitation to be carried out by the very people who are tasked with protecting that expression. It could be argued that in Murugan’s case, the state was trying to protect the rights of those whose beliefs were question, but it seems more like they were acting out of self-interest in preserving the status quo of social order.
Contact Mina Shah at minashah ‘at’ stanford.edu.