These days, I go to bed convinced that I will wake up to bad news. It is a feeling that follows me around like a pesky puppy, and not just because I am prone to worry and anxiety. This dread has solid, irrefutable causes. I don’t want a repeat. I don’t want an unpleasant déjà vu. But that is what I know I will get. I will be forced to remember. We will be forced to remember. To witness moments that repeat themselves in an endless, nightmarish loop.
Recently, the world woke up to writer S Hareesh’s decision to withdraw his novel Meesha, following threats from right-wing Hindu groups in Kerala. After the publication of only three chapters of the novel in the Malayalam weekly Mathrubhumi , Hareesh and his family were threatened by the groups, which said they were hurt and offended by the conversation between two characters in Meesha . The conversation had to do with the ban on women’s entry in temples.
Following these threats, Hareesh did what any sensible person in his circumstances would have done — withdraw the novel (which has now been published by DC Books and is available in bookstores across Kerala). This moment is a near-identical twin of another terrible moment that we were witness to not so long ago. In 2015, Tamil writer Perumal Murugan had been similarly hounded. He too had taken the decision to stop writing. These incidents, a Buddhist might argue, merely reflect the isness of things. Perhaps one ought to be more accepting of it all, think of it as part of the flow of life, ditch the anxiety. But it isn’t easy. For the isness of things today, I suspect, both as a writer and as a citizen of this country, is a nightmare beyond the imagination of the Buddha himself. And this isness seems to pervade just about everything today.
And that, of course, is the bigger problem, quite apart from the tragedy of individual writers. “Little” and “not so little” fears stalk us every day. So many of the freedoms one had come to take for granted are currently under threat. Freedoms that were hard-won. And that, really, is the writing on the wall we must not ignore.
Hareesh’s decision to withdraw his writing is a form of self-censorship. In itself, self-censorship is not a new phenomenon. Writers and artists practise it at various levels all the time. They may not always be conscious of doing so. Some forms of self-censorship tend to disappear when circumstances change — as, for instance, when writers move to another country or when they grow older. This is often the case with women writers who may have been hesitant to write about their bodies or about sexuality when they were younger or when they were bound by the strictures of their communities but find their hesitancy disappears as they grow older or move away from home.
Memoir writers often have no way but to self-censor. It is the only decent thing to do when the things they wish to write about involve people who are still living and who might be hurt by what they reveal. In short, self-censorship comes in all shapes and sizes and sometimes it may be necessary.
But what has happened to Hareesh is the worst form of self-censorship. For he was forced, under the threat of violence, to take the extreme step of withdrawing his novel. Keep in mind that this was a novel he had worked on for five long years, even while holding a day job at the state revenue department. Keep in mind that an enormously popular and influential Malayalam weekly was publishing it serially.
Explaining his decision to withdraw his novel, Hareesh said that he was “too weak” to take on the country. And yet, his decision is not the decision of a coward. It is a decision born of a terrible non-choice — an argument that one finds oneself making also of Murugan’s similar decision some years ago.
To think that this has become our new normal — a world structured like a panopticon, with us as inmates. Just as with the inmates of a prison designed like a panopticon, who are observed by a single watchman not visible to them, writers too can never be sure if they are being watched. Like the former, writers are compelled to act as though they are. They become careful. They watch their words. They censor themselves. And if, despite their best intentions, they make a mistake, if the characters in the fictional worlds they create end up saying something they ought not to have, they are reminded of who we are — mere inmates in a prison-like dystopia designed to leave them paralysed, unable to create new worlds.
K Srilata is a poet, fiction writer and Professor of English at IIT-Madras