Thou shalt not speak
By Manohar Malgonkar

I HAVE now been in this writing business for a very long time more than 40 years — but I’ve had only one brush with censorship. Predictably, it came during Indira Gandhi’s infamous emergency.

I had just completed a non-fiction book on something that had happened nearly 30 years earlier, the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, which I had called The Men who killed Gandhi. I had sent off the completed manuscript to Macmillan of London, with whom I had a contract to bring it out. As is the practice of such transactions, Macmillan’s editor had gone over the manuscript and sent it back with his own suggestions and marginal comments, for my reactions on the proposed changes. It was this corrected and edited copy that was intercepted by the postal censors at Mumbai and, as it were, ‘impounded’, but, in the style of the Emergency when every government functionary was expected to adopt a cavalier stance towards the members of the public, without any intimation either to its addressee or sender.

It was only ‘when Macmillan began to send me increasingly frantic letters asking’ me why I had not sent back the manuscript to them with my comments and complaining that the hold-up was likely to play havoc with the publishing schedule that I realised what had happened. Luckily, trips to England were not banned, so I had to go to London to help sort out the contretemps.

In the event, the book got published on the due date. More surprisingly, it was also simultaneously released in India because by then, Mrs Gandhi herself had gone to see President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad, to request him to make a declaration that the Emergency had ended.

So what had it all been about? What calamity that threatened the nation 19 months earlier had been averted by its declaration — or was it all a barefaced attempt at seizing dictatorial power? And again, if the failure of Mrs Gandhi and her followers to win the election was thought to be sufficient cause for ending the Emergency, did that not also mean that she herself and her cohorts had constituted that imminent threat to the nation?

But then logic has little to do with the dark deeds of political leaders. Anyhow, one consequence of the ending of the ordeal was that its other ranks and foot soldiers who had stood on their heads to show how committed and disciplined they were in carrying out their duties, made the turnaround into normalcy without missing a step. Who? — me? — I, had nothing to do with the Emergency — thank you!

So one morning the post brought my edited manuscript sent by air mail. It had taken all of six months to arrive and, already edited by a well-known publisher, it had been edited again by the minions of bureaucracy. Many of the passages were heavily underlined in blue or red pencil and a few pages bore pinned flags, presumably because they contained the most offensive exhibits.

So what was it that some alert watchdog of the postal censors had discovered in my book which threatened the ‘Maintenance of Internal Security’ of the nation, and for which a citizen — any citizen — could be locked up in jail for a period of one year without the formality of a judicial trial — for that was the power that virtually any government servant could exercise under the Emergency? Here is a passage that the censor obviously thought especially horrifying:

Gandhi belonged to the bania, or trader caste, a people known for their shrewd business sense.

I read that innocuous sentence several times over. What could even the most ‘committed’ of public servants have found in it that could be construed as constituting a threat to the nation’s security?

There just was no explanation, and I dismissed the whole thing by resorting to my favourite version of Johann Schiller’s observation that, "Against a warped mind, even the Gods struggle in vain."

It was just one of those aberrations of the time: Officials overreacting in order to show how ‘committed’ they were to the dynamics of the Emergency, something akin to what the British used to do to their political prisoners held in the dreaded Cellular Jail in the Andamans. There is an account in Vinayakrao Savarkar’s book on his years as an inmate of the jail which touches on the prison’s censorship of books. What books the prisoners could be allowed to read in their spare time was decided by the prison’s officials who were themselves neither book lovers nor even literate. So their superior officials had devised a formula. Any book that contained words such as ‘country’ or ‘nation’ was to be banned.

If the Raj’s particular phobia was ‘sedition’, Indira Gandhi’s was ‘disloyalty’ to herself: She found any criticism of her methods or deeds indefensible and those in her inner circle made sure that the growing resentment against the excesses of the Emergency did not reach her ears. Barely literate officials sat in the offices of national newspapers and told the editors what they could print and what they must leave out.

The same logic applied to books. Any book that voiced criticism against Mrs Gandhi was to be banned and its author marched off to prison. But since here too, as in the Andaman jail, the decision-making was left to officials who seldom read books, a formula had been devised to help them to do their jobs efficiently.

They made sure that any book that contained the word Gandhi did not enter the country. That was the rule that had been applied to my book. After all the word Gandhi came in its title itself. It was dynamite!

I know, I know. It sounds quite fatuous, doesn’t it? But then such are the ground realities of all censorship, if only because you cannot have college professors manning post offices and acting as censors. All books have to be let in or banned by a few simple tests which can be applied by run-of-the-mill public servants.

It has always been so, ever since books began to be published and indeed before they began to be printed and when what were called books were loose leaf volumes written with needle-like instruments on palm leaves.

Even those books were thought to be dynamite — or, because dynamite was not even invented, capable of causing immense harm.

For instance in September 1548, the Vicar General of Goa, complained to the Bishop of Goa, Jaun de Albuquerque, that a certain Hindu gentleman living in the island of Divar was known to possess quite a lot of books. Whereupon the Bishop ordered the house to be raided. Right enough, they found a whole basketful of books. They were confiscated and taken to the Bishop’s Palace in Velha Goa.

This house that was raided belonged to a certain Dadaji, a rich man who also weilded a lot of influence because he happened to be the Viceroy’s private secretary.

When Dadaji heard that his house had been raided and his books taken away, he was furious. He rushed to the Viceroy and secured from him an order that the confiscated books should be returned to their owner without delay. Triumphantly, Dadaji accompanied the Viceroy’s messenger who was to serve the order on the Bishop. What actually transpired when the two were admitted into the Bishop’s presence is described by Bishop Albuquerque himself in a letter he dashed off to the King of Portugal, Dom Joao III.

"I could not in my heart brook the affront. I rose from my chair without a word, seized a stick which lay by my side and, in spite of my age, ran after (Dadaji) the whole length of the room and the hall. Since he was young, he ran faster, I thought to hit him in the ribs with the stick as he was slipping through the entrance door, but the stick hit the lintel and broke in two."

That is the composite portrait of censorship — whether of the Portuguese clergy against the Hindus of the land in sixteenth century Goa, or of the British towards the prisoners in their colony, or of our own administrators riding roughshod over civil rights under the pretext of maintaining internal security.

Use stick — not words!