Abhinav Chandrachud’s Republic of Rhetoric is a compelling commentary on the mythical idea of free speech in the present day when comedians are censured for fear their talent may offend high power centres. Once battered by the colonial masters for speaking their minds, leaders of the freedom struggle turned around to retain the hybrids of the same gag laws of the Englishman against their own countrymen in independent India.
The Constitution of India, Chandrachud argues, has made “little or no substantive difference to the right to free speech in India.” Prior to India’s independence, there were four exceptions to the right to free speech. Sedition (and hate speech), obscenity, contempt of court and defamation. They remain virtually unchanged in the Constitution. As K.T. Shah pithily explained free speech and its exceptions in the Constituent Assembly, “what is given by one right hand seems to be taken away by three or four or five left hands.”
Chandrachud points out that prosecutions for sedition relentlessly launched against leaders of the freedom struggle like nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak continue to be used to silence students leaders and civil rights organisations.
The pages are replete with anecdotes. One of which is how the climax of the iconic Bollywood film Sholay was changed on the orders of a conscientious Censor Board. The board played scriptwriter to save the life of the villain Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan) in the climax. The original script had Thakur Baldev Singh (Sanjeev Kumar) kill Gabbar. But the board thought that this would have sent the ‘wrong message’ to the public about policemen taking the law into their own hands.
Like films, theatre too suffers from the sly official explanation that visual arts have greater impact on public minds and need to be closely watched. Actor Amol Palekar has challenged the constitutional validity of the Bombay Police Act of 1951 which shackles free expression in theatre.
What one man considers a work of art, another may consider it obscene. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita had Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Finance Minister Morarji Desai on opposite sides of the culture war. Desai said the book about an adult man’s relations with an 11-year-old girl was ‘sex perversion.’ But Nehru saw to it that the book was not banned in India. The book’s publisher sent Nehru a copy of the book in gratitude.
‘Republic of Rhetoric: Free Speech and the Constitution of India’ by Abhinav Chandrachud. Published by Penguin Random House and priced at ₹599
