[Reader-list] Free Speech Essay - Again!

[Sanjay Kak]

Dear All

Enjoyed reading this, and it would be great to talk around some of its
excellent provocations (and briefly dwell on some of its simplifications?)

Best

Sanjay Kak


http://www.openspaceindia.org/essays_31.htm

Free Speech & Fearless Listening

The encounter with censorship in South Asia
By Raghu Karnad

That week, Max Mueller Bhavan was hosting an exhibit of original German
promotional posters from between the Weimar era and the Third Reich. This
was a period of unequalled social transformation: Weimar Berlin was a
habitat for true libertines that accommodated every sexual taste or
curiousity, not excluding those with a taste for mother-daughter
prostitution teams, third-trimester streetwalkers or for nudist magazines
devoted entirely to children. The film posters from the middle-20s do at
least capture that cabaret aesthetic and the rush of a society slipping into
decadence. Flappers parade for dandies, everyone counts ice cubes into their
schnapps while outside the Nazis were consolidating power, not least because
of their promise of a restored moral order. In the poster art of the late
twenties, there is a movement away from lush art nouveau and Viennese
watercolours towards the geometric forms of Constructivism and the darkly
jagged Futurist motifs that we associate with fascist art. The Nazi-era
posters were not mounted, as the Director explained to me, because they
didn't want visitors to the German cultural embassy to find themselves
surrounded by images of supremacist nationalism. The posters only spoke of
wild freedom, and were silent about the hell into which that wild freedom
led.

So the walls carried an ironic narrative while Max Mueller Bhavan hosted the
conference of the Delhi Film Archive and Vikalp (Films for Freedom) entitled
"Free Speech and Fearless Listening: the encounter with censorship in South
India." The event lent itself easily to conspiracy theories: it could look
like a European government patronizing a group of local patricians (at great
expense) to create a counter-clamour for Free Speech while the commoners
went berserk on the streets demanding European censorship and punishment.
But this is unfair. The folks behind Films for Freedom are among the most
upright of Indian citizens, sincerely committed to the honest (and
well-shot) reportage of India's many stories.

It seems like everybody in the world is writing an Op-Ed about free speech
these days. More surprisingly, it seems like just about everybody, with the
exception of Yaqoob Qureishi, is saying the same thing, which is the
rational but somewhat banal middle route between racist excess and religious
hysteria. It was terrific to hear a set of truly sophisticated and
well-informed opinions about free speech and censorship coming from panels
of lawyers, filmmakers, artists and journalists of whom one could say,
without reservation, that they knew what they were talking about.
In the South Asian context, Indian media has a comparatively liberal regime,
and artists and media persons from our neighbouring countries testified to
the diverse processes that constrain artistic and journalistic freedom.
Jitman Basnet, an exiled Nepali journalist, told the now familiarly chilling
story about media censorship under the Royal government. But if there was
one salient message to retain from the conference, it was that censorship
originates in many places apart from the Central Board for Film
Certification (or the Royal Nepal Army).

Hassan Zaidi, journalist and filmmaker from Karachi, surprised the audience
with his explanation that, notwithstanding the recent decision to ban 35
Indian cable channels, the official censorship regime in Pakistan is relaxed
when compared to previous administrations. A newer mode of censorship is
emerging in Pakistan, one that functions within the competitive programming
of the private sector, where socially responsible journalism has to really
fight for its column inches. It's a systemic restraint that has less to do
with what you cannot say, and more to do with what you cannot persuade
people to listen to. "There are no critical or investigatory stories on
MNCs," Mr Zaidi said, as an example, "because revenue streams are directly
linked to how well [media firms] do by these companies." His opinion was
that there are three direly important issues in Pakistan: Baluchistan, the
harbouring of Taliban in the Pashtun self-ruled provinces, and the issue of
water and big dams in Punjab. With the government mostly targeting
electronic media, all three are issues that should be discussed in the print
media. "But you can write whatever you want," Mr Zaidi concludes, "And
nobody will read it."

This is something Indians can't afford to be patronizing about. The nexus of
commerce and journalism ­ and art, and protest, and other acts of witness -
is more insidious than just the Times of India's unmarked "advertorial"
policy (look out for the MediaNet logo), and may run even deeper than the
evident sea-change towards Page Three journalism.

Geremie Barme, in The Revolution of Resistance , wrote about the Chinese
intelligentsia's response to intellectual life post-Tiananmen. My point is
not to compare socio-political freedom in China and India . Barme's analysis
is analogous to India because it describes a complicated relationship with
consumerism that is characteristic of society just emerged from socialist
planning and the restricted options of a protectionist third world economy.

It is best explained in his own words:
"For a time after 1989, consumerism was viewed popularly, and among many
segments of the political and intellectual elite, as possessing a near
revolutionary significance. The romance of resistance included a belief that
quotidian activities were the site of struggle and cloaked socio-political
retail therapy ­ that is, shopping for new lifestyles and accessorizing the
self in contradistinction to the nation-state inculcated guise of identityŠ
it was a development acceptable to economic reformers, the business elite,
crony cadres, wannabe rebels, kids with 'tude, and the displaced literati
alikeŠ While ballot-box democracy might be deferred until a sizable middle
class existed, the free-range republic of shopping could be realized
immediately."

The urban 'republic of shopping' can come into existence either as the only
permissible avenue of self-ex-pression or as merely the path of least
resistance. Shopper-as-rebel and promoter-as-revolutionary: are these
elitist norms or subaltern strategies? It's a dilemma that is recognizable
in many aspects of Indian metropolitan life. This includes cultural
producers riding safely on the tails of more flagrant resistance;
appropriating the romantic (and saleable) postures of failed resistance. Do
the current tactics of protest among the elite truly obtain fellowship with
oppressed communities that have been led to rebel? Or is the intellectuals'
mission being reconstituted into something that encourages circumspection
and inactivity?

There is a reason this article has travelled so far from the exact subject
of censorship to a consideration of the nature of the discourse we're
interested in holding. "Free Speech and Fearless Listening" does not need my
approval nor my support for its aims, both are implicit. But in the course
of its three days, the conference often stopped looking like an activist or
educative project and began instead to look like a hermetic conclave of
academic co-sympathy where everyone already knew the agenda and each others'
old jokes. In the conspicuous absence of anyone who was middle-class or
conservative, the only people listening were those who were already free
speech activists or, like me, eager Delhi scene-sters content to be sitting
next to Arundathi Roy. That, in itself, is an old problem of social
activism, but it is especially problematic when the subject is free speech.
Your correspondent is no fan of censorship - in fact, he was a volunteer at
the Films for Freedom festival in Bangalore . Still, it eludes me what this
conference accomplished other than spectacularly revealing a mode of
censorship of its own, by conducting a dialogue ­ such as it was ­ within a
community of like minds. This was awkwardly highlighted during the lecture
of PA Sebastian, the Mumbai advocate who represents the director of the
banned film Black Friday. He pointed out that most everyone in the audience
has something that they would like to see censored. That was all. "If you
say you have no ideology," he said, "You are either ignorant or you are
insane!"

Mr Sebastian spoke in clunky, rhetorical terms but his critique ran deep,
probably deeper than he intended: it was a critique directed at, and
deflected by, the barriers we allowed to shoot up in our minds the moment it
was indicated by his accent and his tone of voice that he would not
participate in the monologic consensus with which the rest of the group was
content. The barriers became visible in suppressed giggling and eye-rolling,
"Oh dear, someone should have given this fellow the memo ." Nevertheless, he
was right that most people in the audience would concede some kind of
censorship ­ which is precisely what made it so remiss that there was no one
to represent the people who support the current kind of censorship. Not
because all opinions are equal, but because if you fail to engage other
opinions you'll never know how robust or facile your own are. And because
they'll never allow you to settle into a position where political protest, a
la the republic of shopping, is just hip.

Apropos , the cartoons of the Prophet got surprisingly little airtime,
considering that you could practically smell the burning effigies all week.
All we got was Jawed Naqvi describing his own Koranic exegesis that it
wasn't anything to get mad about at all. Then Sudhabhratha Sengupta (of
Sarai CSDS) announced, but then with mock-concern declined to display, his
collection of representations of the Prophet from classical Islamic
tradition. No one in the room would be likely to support censoring the
cartoons, but I assume everyone agreed that the cartoons problematized free
speech more clearly than anything has done in a while. The mode of
censorship at work in the conference was, again, audible as we left Dilip
Simeon shouting at the backs of the crowd, who were already more interested
in lunch, about the silence of Left when Muslims were bullying the media.

Finally, this mode of censorship was most evident in the fact that no one
had invited any members of the CBFC. The assumption seemed to be that the
CBFC members are all archaic moralists who would be incapable of
participating in a sophisticated dialogue. This is plausible but
complacent ­ after all, the alternative, which was ultimately chosen, was to
have no dialogue at all. There were extensive quotes of censor board
officials from all the countries in the region, which quotes were
undoubtedly selected to have the most asinine and illiterate quality. The
officials are not, however, illiterate, and since they have the powers they
do, we should be attempting to expose them to as much sophisticated
discussion of censorship as is possible. Even if their intellectual
stubbornness or insincerity is a foregone conclusion, it isn't clear to me
why we should spare them the challenge.

Tanvir Mokammel, a filmmaker from Dhaka, quoted Sufi poet Alem Mouri Sufian
to us:
"They are the best kings that mingle with artists,
And they are the worst artists who mingle with kings."
He was talking about art's collusion with state power; but when he said it,
it sounded like he was talking about protest's captivity within comfortable
upper-class consensus.

I hope its obvious that I've been playing devil's advocate. It couldn't be
more urgent that we defend free speech ­ and free speech couldn't ask for
more sincere or articulate defenders. But it hardly bears repeating that we
need to be vigilant of our own protest becoming a solipsism, as circular and
cosmetic and cute as a Live Strong wristband. A censored silence is created
when ideas cannot be spoken ­ but another kind of silence is created when
only one idea speaks. The conference established that free speech entails
fearless listening, but I'm not sure it demonstrated both.

Notes:
1) "Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic world of Weimar Berlin," by Mel Gordon.
Feral House, 2000.
2) The Revolution of Resistance , by Geremie Barme, in "Chinese Society:
Change, Conflict and Resistance," ed. Elizabeth J Perry and Mark Selden.