By Om Prakash Dwivedi
“Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature… but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself,” wrote John Milton in his famous book, Areopagitica (1644). Milton was right in so many aspects, but then reason and freedom have been invariably considered fanatical by all ideologies.
No one likes a reasoning mind, which is also tantamount to the fact that the presence of other ideas, other person, other religions, other cultures, other races, and other nations have been perennially licensed to be erased or decimated. Put simply, as a human race we have remarkably failed to accept alternative perspectives, inclined heavily towards homogenising everyone and everything around us. Such an inflated homogenising approach to life has rendered creativity and rationality a calamitous comeuppance. This also sums up the core problem of fundamentalism we are subjected to in our quotidian lives, wherein to think differently, write differently, and speak differently makes one eligible to be seen as a threat to xenophobic societies and controlling authorities.
What a world we live in that even a book could be a source of perpetual fear and aversion. Are we so weak as a human race or is it a case that we suffer from intellectual impoverishment? Apparently, our moral fabric has become fragile and the religious sentiments intensely dogmatic, which is also demonstrated in the way we seek affirmation from and in others. It is like buying a second copy of the same daily newspaper just to enjoy the intoxication of sameness, reinforcing what George W. Bush bluntly pointed out in context to the US invasion of Iraq, “When we act, we create our own reality.”
The phlegmatic wisdom demonstrated by human civilization reeks of communal prejudices and eccentric nature, or how can one justify the banning and burning of books and subsequent condemnation of writers across civilizations. It is a pity that creative freedom has been a source of perennial rebuke and hatred in human history. From Socrates to Salman Rushdie, the world has failed to accept creative minds and their works, which leads one to claim that the cancel culture is a matter of how we organize the world keeping our own views and desires at the centre.
History demonstrates an acute sense of brutalism towards writers. For example, in 213 BCE, Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty in China, not only decided to burn books, but also killed several scholars. It is claimed that in 210 BCE, he was responsible for the premature burial of 460 Confucian scholars in order to continue the unchecked villainy of his regime. In 1497, Savonarola burned all of Ovid’s works in Florence after Ovid was exiled from Rome for his book, Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). In 1614, King James I of England, banned Sir Walter Raleigh’s book, The History of the World, was banned for “being too saucy in censuring princes. During the Holocaust, the Nazis burned an estimated 100 million books. In yet another incident, the Jaffna Public Library of Sri Lanka —which had around 100,000 rare books on Tamil history and literature – was burnt by Sinhalese Buddhists since they felt offended by the Hinduism of Tamils, believing that religion was under threat even though they outnumbered the Tamils. Even Milan University in Italy cancelled an entire course on the famous Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, simply because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The juvenile lunacy also triggered the banning of Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses. It is a strange paradox that the book was banned by a regime that robustly promotes liberalism and secularism, which should be enough to make us understand that ideologies act the same way as horse blinders work. It is another paradox, that the ban on The Satanic Verses was revoked by a regime that is dubbed as an authoritarian one. The novel, inspired by the life of the prophet Muhammad, generated a fierce global debate about freedom of speech. It was at this moment that then Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, placed a bounty on Salman Rushdie’s head due to its assumed blasphemy, resulting in its ban in India by Rajiv Gandhi’s government in 1988.
This revoking of ban on Rushdie’s novel is highly welcome news for readers. As Tabish Khair asserts, “Creative work, like creative writing, is not “for” anything. That “for” indicates an end towards which the work is dedicated, but it is in the nature of all creative labour that it is not directed towards an end. Its end is the activity itself.” Creativity has an issue with order and closure, and rightly so. As T.S. Eliot puts it, “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” Imagination is an act of creation of creation after all. In the absence of creativity, we will be doomed to face the toxicity of homogeneity and authoritarians. One needs to remember that life is not a homogenous process. It can never be, for inhalation is always followed by exhalation, and it is the exercise of balance that creates new spaces for thinking and living.
Contributing Author: Dr Om Prakash Dwivedi is a literary critic and columnist.
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