India’s literary icons face persecution

Even as the Kenyan literary critics’ world seems to have closed up into a cycle of cannibalism, half the world away, on the sub-continent of India, literary splits seem eminently more serious.

It took a nocturnal intervention by State actors in India four Sundays ago to get Bollywood movie and television script writers back to writing, with promises of 15 per cent royalties, after these creatives threatened to bring the world’s largest movie-making machine to a grinding halt in a country that loves its local films.

Hollywood released 560 films last year compared to Bollywood’s near thrice the number at 1,602 movies. Bollywood also outsold Hollywood in tickets — 2.7 billion to Hollywood’s 1.3 billion stubs.

The fact that Hollywood made $10.5 billion from ticket sales compared to Bollywood’s $ 1.5 billion shows that the average price of watching an American movie on big screen is Sh 800 compared to about Sh 65 for the Indian one.

Away from the movies, Indian poets, novelists and playwrights have been returning their awards to the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters, to protest rising extreme Hinduism, threats to their peers, book burnings, and the narrowing of freedom of speech and expression in the public sphere, which as one Indian writer said, “is the oxygen of creativity, and I refuse to be put on the artificial air of the (Sahitya Akademi) awards ...”

The problem with the Indian writers began one morning last month when an academic and renown critic called Dr Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburg opened the door to two strangers. They shot him in the face. He was murdered because he had criticised idol worship in Hinduism.

Dr Kalburgi was a scholar of Vachana sahitya and served as the vice-chancellor of Kannada University.

Another author, Perumal Murugan, who writes in Tamil, posted on his Facebook account that “Murugan the writer is dead; please leave him alone,” then when into hiding. This was after copies of his book, Madhorubhagan, that depicted a Hindu chariot festival were burnt.

When the Akademi issued no formal protest at the assassination of Kalburgi, many Indian writers saw this as a subtle endorsement of Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindu-centric ideological position. That is when the flood to return prestigious literary awards by poets, playwrights and novelists began — over forty of them now.

The pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party, whose members are a majority in the ruling National Democratic Alliance, is a big sponsor of the Sahitya Akademi.

Salman Rushdie, himself a victim of a 1989 fatwa by the Ayatollah of Iran for The Satanic Verses was among the first to speak against the growing Hindu extremism in sections of the sub-continent.

But the response by Dr Mahesh Sharma, a medical doctor and the Minister for Culture who is from the BJP wing of the ruling coalition, was dismissive of the writers.

“If they cannot write, let them stop writing,” he told reporters.

Nayantara Sahgal, the writer niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first premier, Kashmiri language writer Ghulam Nabi Khayal and playwright and thespian Maya Krishna Rao are among the writers who returned their hard-won awards to protest the intolerance and stand in solidarity with strait-jacketed writers.

India has risen to a top notch second nation country since the time, almost four decades ago, when it was a “wounded civilisation” according to Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul who said even Indian trade-names were modest — as if to pre-empt any suspicion of excellence — with store signs and hotels pre-fixed with Standard, General and Decent so that one almost expected to see Mediocre or Not So Bad.

Naipaul also wrote that Indian cows roam all over the place, looking like they are thinking “what luck, all this thing about us being sacred” and that “nearly everyone seems to be in terrible trouble, and not to mind about it that much.”

Well, writers on the sub-continent are in trouble now. And they seem to mind it. Terribly so.