Let’s face it, we have always been a little intolerant of the “other”. Anyone who doesn’t conform to what we think is the “right” way to eat/look/think is guaranteed a difficult time. So it is that a painter is forced to live and die in exile; a writer has to declare himself “dead” in literary terms before a court grants him a fresh lease of life; cricket pitches are dug up to keep a team out; a face smeared with tar for daring to speak up and so forth.
The explicit reality
When Jharkhand writer Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar finds himself being pilloried by people who may not have actually read what he has written, he is not alone, but it will be a lonely battle. To those saying he has slighted Adivasi culture in a story included in a collection of erotic stories, they must turn to his fiction tuned to reality. One of the most powerful stories in his The Adivasi Will Not Dance (2015) is the eponymously titled one, the last in the collection. A group of Santhal dancers with their “tamak and tumdak” are gathered to perform for the visiting President of India. When the troupe master Mangal Murmu refuses, he is harassed, gagged and feels “helpless and so foolish”. All he wanted to do was protest against his people being used as “toys”. As Murmu rages: “Someone presses our ‘ON’ button... and we Santhals start beating rhythms on our tamak... while someone snatches away our dancing grounds. Tell me, am I wrong?”
Today, Shekhar, who won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Purashkar in 2015 for The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey , must be feeling a little “helpless and foolish” for the manner in which self-appointed Adivasi groups have lashed out against him for “objectifying Santhal women”, his writing branded as pure “porn”. Yes, he writes about sex, explicitly, but it’s a distressing read — about girls selling their bodies, for ₹50 and two bread pakoras ( November is the Month of Migrations ), for instance. Then again, isn’t that a reflection of reality? Just turn to the newspapers; haven’t we read about girls from Jharkhand being rescued from the brothel or from a house where they had been abused?
In 2015, award-winning Tamil writer Perumal Murugan declared himself literary “dead” after conservative caste groups harassed him and sought a ban against his novel Maadhorubaagan (One Part Woman), written in 2010, saying it was prurient. A year later, the Madras High Court rejected the demand for banning the book, advising those who were hurt by it to stay away from it. Murugan’s One Part Woman is about a couple’s efforts to conceive a child and the taunts they face from the community; and why they pin their hopes on an age-old temple festival when rules on sex are relaxed for one night. In his Treatise on Tolerance , French philosopher Voltaire argued that while “tolerance has never provoked a civil war; intolerance has covered the Earth in carnage.” We are unfortunately seeing a lot of it around us.
