In a landmark judgment upholding the right to freedom of expression, a bench of the Madras high court encouraged the Tamil writer Perumal Murugan to expand on his canvas of words. The author, whose novel Madhorubhagan ran into opposition from caste groups after its English translation, One Part Woman, was published, had said he was dead as a writer — “As he is no God, he is not going to resurrect himself.” The bench, which included Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul who had also famously ruled in favour of M.F. Husain when the painter was being hounded out of the country for taking artistic licence in painting goddesses, has come out now with the clearest verdict in terms of dealing with cultural vigilantism. If indeed the shell-shocked writer emerges from self-imposed exile, the judges would have rendered signal service to an open society.
As a nation, we are getting too prone to taking offence at the least instance of sentiments being hurt by speeches, words, pictures, images and art. As the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses we set such a bad precedent that too many fringe groups have been encouraged to believe that a bit of concerted protest is sufficient to stoke an uproar leading to the imposition of a ban. A silence of convenience among political parties on freedom of speech for fear of taking on vocal groups of any religion or caste has done the most damage. The judges summed it up most appropriately in Murugan’s case — that people are free not to read the book, which logic could be extended to films, theatre, art works and, in fact, to any field of creativity.
