Freedom of Expression: Ridiculing Religion and (not) Facing the Music

     Lets start with an exercise of "freedom of expression": "The editorial team of the Calcutta based English daily The Telegraph constitutes of a bunch of severely incompetent idiots". They have actually managed to create a riot like situation in Kolkata just by trying to be funny and that takes an amount of idiocy that needs to be clinically addressed. In the eye of the storm is a twitter post by a model Poonam Pandey whose major, if not only, claim to fame is that she can strip at the drop of a hat. The photoshoped image that was apparently reproduced from her twitter account on to the pages of one of the largest read English dailies in Kolkata has her (unclad of course) holding a picture frame depicting Sachin Tendulkar, the "God" of Indian cricket, posed as Lord Vishnu, and a Pakistani cricketer bowing down before that image. The immediate context of this picture is the defeat of the Pakistani cricket team in the hands of the Indian team in one of the interminable cricket series' that keeps on going and going and going. However the reference to Vishnu and the specific way that the Pakistani cricketer bows down in front of the Hindu god shifts the context 'dangerously' to the realm of religion and to blasphemy.
   
     As anyone who has experienced watching a cricket match in the subcontinent will know, an India-Pakistan match is not just about two cricket teams playing, its also about two political arch enemies playing out a war-game. Moreover, since it was on the basis of religion that the two nations became arch enemies in the first place, these matches are also religious battles--kinds of mini Crusades or semi Jihads or low intensity dharma-yuddhas. In these cricket matches, the violence of an actual war is made 'non-virulent' but like any non-virulent strain of virus used for immunisation, this too can suddenly regain its virulence and hit back with lethal effects. Something like this happened when the photoshoped picture of Poonam Pandey was published by The Telegraph, and since then every 'sane-headed' person has gone on record to complain against it. So far so good, but one of the prominent sane-headed persons who complained against the picture most vociferously was the chief minister of West Bengal Mamata Bannerjee... and when the lady who thinks Pakistan is geographically situated next to Bangladesh starts representing sane headedness its time for the alarm bells to start ringing in your head.

      So let me be insane for once and actually come out in support of that photoshoped picture. The reason the picture is unpalatable is of course because it ridicules religion--ridicules not just Pakistanis but all Muslims. Let me put it in the form of an equation how the picture manages to do all this simultaneously:
1. Sachin Tendulkar = Lord Vishnu (with "quadruped arms" according to the ingenuous Ganesh mama of Satyajit Ray's Mahapurush)
2. The Pakistani cricketer bowing down and doing sajda = representative of the pious Muslim community
3. Therefore the defeated Pakistani cricketer bowing in front of Sachin = Islam bowing down defeated in the feet of the Hindu god Vishnu.

     The sharpness of the ridicule is enhanced by the presence of the naked model holding the picture frame and as we all know, the sight of a nude woman is an absolute anathema to all pious Muslims. However having written this piece of sweeping generalization I am reminded that even for us Hindus nudity and religion do not go well together--at least of late. Let me provide an example:

     For painting this picture of a nude Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of wisdom and learning, the painter M F Hussain was hounded out of India. Like the Poonam Pandey picture, this was a blasphemy too. Yet it posed a unique problem. We Hindus from time immemorial have depicted nude sculptures and paintings of our gods and goddesses, so how do you prove that Hussain was being blasphemous? Well the answer came in the form a well circulated email that placed this particular picture of Saraswati against another of Hussain's picture depicting a nude Hitler. The ingenious argument proposed that since in the Hitler picture Hussain has stripped the tyrant to expose him to ridicule, his stripping of Saraswati too must be an attempt by a Muslim to ridicule Hinduism. Therefore if we are in principle against the picture of a nude model holding up Sachin as lord Vishnu with a muslim doing sajda in front of him, we should also be in principle opposed to M F Hussain. For that matter we must also be opposed to that demon Salman Rushdie as well who ridiculed and blasphemed against Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) in his The Satanic Verses--a book that was promptly banned in India.

     But the problem is that when recently Salman Rushdie was cleverly debarred from joining the Jaipur Literary Festival all the 'sane-headed' people who are now protesting against the image in The Telegraph were also protesting against the gagging of Rushdie. Rushdie however being the cheeky fellow that he is managed to sneak in later and address a gathering in Delhi exercising "freedom of speech" to its full and/or 'unacceptable' limit, which included calling Imran Khan 'Im the Dim' and disparagingly using the epithet "Mullah" several times over. According to me this irreverence is precious. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression should also mean freedom to ridicule and freedom to be irreverent. Through out history most of the critical literature has also been irreverent literature...literatures of ridicule that made fun cruelly and in earnest, and not in a provisional, half-joking, manner so that the criticism can be retracted whenever there is any hue and cry. The Telegraph however did just the latter. The very next day after publishing the controversial image they issued this meek apology: “A tweet by @iPoonampandey was reproduced in t2 on March 19 because of a technical error. The Telegraph had no intention to hurt the sentiments of any community. We apologise for publishing the tweet”. What is disgusting to me is not that The Telegraph had shown the courage to be irreverent but this lily livered retraction to appease the "Mullahs" and to hide behind the preposterous excuse of "technical error". It exposes yet again the hypocrisy of a strangely 'secular' country that is ever apologetic of its religious irreverence yet that is desperate to prove itself 'liberal' enough by printing pictures of nude women in the pages of its morning dailies.
   

Indians don't have history

Dates terrified me in school, and though I loved history then and still do, you can never get me to answer when exactly was the second battle of Panipat fought (though I know it was fought between Akbar and Hemu) or when did Queen Victoria ascend the throne (though as student of English literature I have been studying "Victorian age" for years). I don't know about people in other parts of the globe but for Indians I think this is a common symptom. We all hate dates!

To say however that Indians are a date-less people whose histories are recorded in timeless myths rather than in precisely dated chronicles is not to be original. One curious Muslim traveller who visited us some one thousand years ago had said something to the same effect. More recently Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay had spent essays lamenting over the fact that Indians/Bengalis (as a true blue Bengali he used the two terms interchangeably) do not have a history--a history with verifiable dates that is. He had even urged us to start writing our histories but we, more truly blue in our Bengaliness/Indianness have refused to enter the chronological prison-house.

Now I don't want you to get me wrong here. I am not suggesting that we haven't produced any historians. In fact there has been a surfeit of them in the recent years. But still on the whole we Indians have largely stuck to our aversion of precise dates and accurate timings. It is not for nothing that we have the acronym of our time zone IST often interpreted as Indian Stretchable Time. We have believed all through that dates and times are always negotiable. Nothing is fixed...nothing should be fixed!

Take the example of my mother...she has two birthdates! One official and one unofficial. The unofficial birthdate is of course her "real" birthdate, whereas the official birthdate is most definitely "unreal". The explanation behind her being twice-born is a bit intriguing to me though I guess it can make perfect common sense to others. When she was born, one of her uncles in his wisdom concluded that the baby girl was sure to fail in her school or in her college. To avoid her the calamity of one wasted year  her date of birth was shifted to the next year just in case she proved to be a late bloomer. Though quite considerate of her uncle, she did not benefit much from the decision as she kept on passing her classes with monotonous regularity. Now she grumbles for having to work for one more year before she could retire--one year after she was actually supposed to retire. It is however not only my mother...even the chief of our Army has two birthdays--one real/unofficial and another official/unreal and I can sympathise with the poor guy for getting it all mixed up. Thus with almost the whole of our previous generation having at least two birthdates it is no wonder that we as a people have developed an aversion to dates in our history books. We cannot trust them you see. If I am not sure about my own mother's birthday is it ever possible for me to remember the birthday of Babur!

As for me, though I have an officially recorded birthday which is also putatively my original birthday I have come to suspect the connection. One of my maternal grandmothers who brought me up has told me that I am the reincarnation of her son whom she lost quite early. This son was in turn the reincarnation of my grandma's grandfather (or was it great-grandfather) who was a veritable saint...a true sadhu... and we all know that every Hindu holy-man worth his salt is a reincarnation of someone. Thus you see, fixing my birthdate is a rather delicate matter. The whole science of transmigration of human soul should have been taken into calculation before my father rushed to the birth registration office to fix forever my date of birth!

Moving out from the egocentric domain of me and my family into the big bad world, I notice that even our national heroes are dateless. Try and convince us Bengalis that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose actually died on a particular date and you would be fought tooth and nail. He might have been born but he can never die. He is in fact our only remaining hope...the grand old patriot who is forever on the verge of returning and beating to a pulp all those incorrigible politicians who we have had to suffer since independence. Long live Netaji and murdabad to all those conspirators who would have us remember dates!