[Reader-list] 'Free Speech and Fearless Listening': seminar report

[smriti at sarai.net]

Dear friends,

Here is the link to the conference narrative of the seminar ‘Free Speech
and Fearless Listening: The Encounter with Censorship in South Asia’,
held at Max Muller Bhavan, Delhi, from 21-24 February 2006. The seminar was
organised by the Delhi Film Archive and Films for Freedom, in association
with Max Muller Bhavan and the Sarai Programme of the Centre for the Study
of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi.

http://www.sarai.net/resources/event-proceedings/2006/censorship

This detailed report documents perspectives on the censorship, i.e., the
simultaneous repression/production, of ideas, images, beliefs, actions,
bodies and modes of being...

Recently the Reader-list offered a (brutal) opportunity to observe ongoing
mechanisms of censorship and self-censorship, through the 5 April post by
Swadhin Sen on the torture-murder of Choles Ritchil, a prominent leader of
the indigenous Garo community in Bangladesh.

Led by Ritchil, the community was protesting eviction from their forest
habitat that the state wanted to convert into an 'Eco-Park'; there were
violent clashes between protestors and state forces. Ritchil was arrested
on 10 February and killed five weeks later.

Ritchil was buried at Beribald village on 20 March 2007. Before the burial,
as per religious customs, the body was given a bath. Those who performed
the ritual bath (names withheld for safety reasons) reported the following
evidence of torture:

Both eyes plucked out, testicles removed, anus mutilated, palms smashed,
nails of three fingers of the right hand removed, left thumbnail removed,
holes in the palms, severely wounded upper right hand, two deep holes in
the middle of both thighs, deep wounds on the lower legs, nail of the right
big toe removed, charred back and feet, all fingers broken.

Choles Ritchil is survived by his wife, son and three daughters. 

On 20 March his wife had filed a complaint at the Modhupur Police Station
but as of 2 April the police station had not registered any case.

The description of atrocity and extremity bludgeoned me into a state of
paralysis (I found I could not even flinch as I read) and amnesia (for the
next few hours I struggled to mentally erase the information).

But I cannot forget Choles Ritchil -- whatever of him remained to be handed
over to his family for the last rites.

The kinsfolk and community who received this monstrous testimonial of state
force -- how did they grieve?

Were they able to? 

Or did a saving censor emerge within the mourners, to protect them from
themselves?

Emily Dickinson's musings on the crucifixion assure us that "After great
pain a formal feeling comes/ the nerves stand ceremonious as tombs..."

Could this, or any other mechanism, have protected Choles Ritchil during
his slow, systematic, sadistic destruction by the agents of the law?

Michel Foucault, cited in an introductory epigraph to the censorship
report, tells us that censorship "links the inexistent, the illicit and the
inexpressible in such a way that each is at the same time the principle and
  effect of the other... This logic of power exerted upon free expression
is the paradoxical logic of a law that might be expressed as an injunction
of non-existence, non-manifestation and silence."

Sigmund Freud, also cited in an introductory epigraph,tells us "...It is a
mistake to emphasise only the repulsion that operates from the direction of
the conscious upon what is to be repressed. Quite as important is the
attraction exercised by what was primarily repressed upon everything with
which it can establish a connection."

However different -- or similar -- their arguments, the archaeologist of
knowledge and the astute doctor would surely have agreed that we don’t
need theorists to remind us of what we should protect, always and
absolutely, from internal and external censors: the conscience and the
heart that keep us human.

Regards,
Smriti