Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry on creativity under censorship

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

Athol Fugard, the South African playwright, described “censorship as hesitation”. For him, censorship was not necessarily the proximity of government inspectors or the police or the threat of imprisonment, but rather the physical hesitations of his hand while writing.
This self-censorship, which Fugard mentioned, is a self-imposed silence that a lot of artists impose on themselves, sometimes unknowingly. This can be sometimes considered worse than state censorship. Like a secretive prowler, it resides in some dark corner, making the pen tremble and the image wobble. In a situation like this, the imagination becomes comatose and the free flow of ideas gets stemmed. Some artists feel that censorship is required so that boats are not rocked.

If every artist thought that way, then we would’ve had no Federica Garcia Lorca and his classic trilogy — ‘Blood Wedding’, ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’ and ‘Yerma’. Lorca was murdered in Spain by General Franco’s goons, but his poetry has outlived the fascist Falange. Art always survives longer than the censors.
The 20th century Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s work was experimental and innovative and his friends had premonitions about his terrible end. But Meyerhold carried a revolution in his soul and forged ahead undeterred. His unorthodox ways resulted in a brutal end by the state machinery.
Stories of artists being hounded, killed, incarcerated and exiled are endless and their pain and persecution can fill reams of paper.
In 2020, I directed a play titled ‘Gumm Hai’, about a missing girl. While processing the play, we tried various improvisations, and one of them was based on protest. I was surprised when an actor entered the rehearsal space wearing a three-piece suit, carrying a small briefcase-sized trunk, giving the impression of a man going to office. Slowly and deliberately, he removed his clothes and packed them in the trunk. The trunk was positioned to cover his nakedness, which also became a tin drum, creating a persistent unchanging sound akin to a village crier or heralder. Immediately, my memory went to the image of the 12 mothers who waged a ‘bare body’ protest against the gangrape of 32-year-old Manorama in Manipur 20 years ago.
It was a powerful moment, but I was in a dilemma, wondering if it might be perceived as obscenity and sensationalism. I was loath to change it or sanitise it. I took the bull by its horn and kept the scene.
Fear to express, fear to believe, fear to dream and fear to protest is a real bummer. It starts as a conversation between you and yourself, with your inner voice whispering, “Be cautious.” Sometimes, censorship is one’s own private ambivalences between expressing something vital and being silent. It’s a choice you make, a hard choice. But where does this fear and self-censorship come from? Is it in the air that we breathe, the environment that we live in… or is the fear residing within?
Nobody wants to talk about censorship as it seems to suggest something opposite to creativity, a negative energy, a suppression of individuality and since the ages, it has existed in various forms and shapes. Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright and director, said: “Don’t expect the theatre to satisfy the habits of its audience, but to change them.”
When the word ‘change’ comes into the creative vocabulary, it reconfigures the status quo and confronts old, tired habits by rejigging it. Art is never created within the boundaries of safe spaces. It starts from the edge and dizzyingly moves like a lightning rod into dark areas and shines a torch on them. Art is necessary, it’s the oxygen of life and even the gods acknowledged its significance. When the Satyug commenced after the Tretayug, Indra went to Brahma the creator and said that the gods needed to be entertained in a way that was both audio and visual. Following this submission, a new ‘Veda’ was created, taking its essence from the previous ‘Vedas’. The storytelling skills were taken from ‘Rigveda’, music from ‘Samveda’, emoting from ‘Yajurveda’ and ragas from ‘Atharvaveda’ and this freshly minted fifth ‘Veda’ was called the ‘Natyashastra’.
The first performance was showcased in an amphitheatre and was violently disrupted. The performance depicted the defeat of the asurs (demons) and victory of the gods. This made the asurs angry and they revolted.
Dissent, debate, revolt and criticism followed the first performance and the necessity was felt by the gods to remove the asurs by force and shift the performance into an indoor theatre, Natyamandal. From this story, it is evident that even the gods had to fight a battle to assert their artistic aspiration.
Censorship brings to mind the draconian colonial diktat that exists till date; it is called the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876. It was flagrantly ambiguous but it empowered the government to prohibit plays that they considered scandalous, defamatory, seditious or obscene. It was laughable to have such a law in a country where most of the folk performers sing and dance and narrate stories that have salacious storylines and are replete with double meanings and overt sexuality. It is unbelievable that this law still exists despite numerous protests and petitions by various theatre groups.
The artist does not only need freedom, but also must feel free. He has to feel confident and to know that the choices he makes emanate from free will and not under a fear syndrome. A censor can label a work blasphemous, as Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’. Or immoral, like Deepa Mehta’s film ‘Fire’. Despite the film getting a clearance from the censor board, the dissenters put forth an argument that was more hyperbole then real. ‘Lesbianism,’ they announced, ‘was not part of Indian culture’, a ridiculous statement that requires no elaboration. This constant refrain of a film, a book or performance due to its content makes it seem as if we are a society sitting on a pin, fragile and bleeding with fictional hurts.
Artists and their art have to be protected as they are vulnerable. Once an artist is tagged as controversial, the term hangs like an albatross around their necks and becomes the adjective that defines them rather than their work.
We do know that despite restrictions and bans, exile and imprisonment, work of immense significance has emerged from the underground movement that dodges the censor’s knife. Artists needs to be protected not only by the State, but also by other artists. Protecting the artist is not a choice but a necessity.