IT is not about stifling contemporary voices alone — from artists to cinema to literature and cartoon makers, no one feels confident of exercising creative freedom. The reason is that anything and everything turns out to be a cause for hurt to someone’s fragile class-based identity. Now some segments of society want even the literary inheritance of the past to be reinterpreted because of a few facts that they feel are inconvenient to the present social reality. Even if we boarded H G Wells’ “Time Machine”, the fact is historical facts will remain as they were, grounded firmly in the past.
When A K Ramanujan’s much-talked-about essay, “Three Hundred Ramayans”, was dropped by Delhi University’s Academic Council from its BA (Honours) course last year, it had raised a few pertinent questions: Should freedom to choose and access bodies of knowledge and learning be regulated? And who should regulate these choices? What should be the ground for such regulation and to what extent historical facts can be tweaked to suit idiosyncrasies of the present? Now when the publisher of Punjabi folk poet Rajab Ali’s text is arrested for printing the original text that mirrored the reality of a caste-based society of his times, these questions have once again come to the fore. Was there any justification for this arrest?
These are some of the emerging issues that eventually society will have to address. Can we erode all voices of our very rich literary traditions because a few facts about them are inconvenient to us now? Can history be a field of contest where Kabeer, Tulsi and Bulle Shah need approval of the present to exist? What should we then do to our history of Partition because stating the facts of those times will hurt the sentiments of some people? Or, should we negotiate history creatively to draw lessons from it? We must keep our cultural heritage — literature, music, theatre, sculptures, art. etc — free from the taint of confused intents of the present.
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