Our nerves are raw

A Bollywood film touted for its unprecedented release strategy — a reported 1,500 screens across 26 countries — cannot be released in Rajasthan. The film was duly cleared by the Censor Board, not the most liberal of institutions anyway, which let it go, without any cuts, with only an additional disclaimer. The controversy worked up around Jodhaa Akbar is not about history. Those who are conscious of and sensitive to history also acknowledge that it has many versions, and among them the Bollywood-ised one. This is about plain intolerance. There is little to distinguish the marching Rajputs against Jodhaa Akbar from the moral police who disrupted the screening of Fire many years ago, or those who vandalised Pune’s Bhandarkar institute swearing undying devotion to Shivaji, or those who so hounded young Sania Mirza that she was forced to temporarily cut her home country out of her playing itinerary, or those who still stalk the much-cornered Taslima Nasreen, or those who lashed out at north Indian migrants in Mumbai recently. The settings may be varied and they may be responding to different cues but the protagonists all belong to a growing tribe of Indians who have a thin skin and flaunt it too.

Why are we so quick off the block to take offence? Why is it that the idea of diversity in India has come to appear to be mutually suspicious groups, each nursing a raw nerve? Why is it that the public sphere has not become the place for an overarching conversation that can take the edge off these several vulnerabilities? There could be many answers. It can be said that India is a vivacious democracy, but not liberal enough. The freedom of speech and expression is not privileged and protected as it must be, especially in the unspectacular and quotidian ways. What seems like a creeping takeover of the mainstream by the fringe could also be said to reflect on the steady dwindling of ideas in the mainstream, or the absence of politicians willing to do the hard work of politics to mobilise people around them. It is when politics most ceases to be about ideas and programmes that it becomes mostly about hypersensitive vote banks.

We need to think about this increasing intolerance and the noise that it makes. We need to reflect on why the writer, the painter, the filmmaker or just the daily wage-earner, can touch off ostensible battles over identity. It’s absurd that before we talk about how good or bad a film Ashutosh Gowarikar has made, we must first assert his right to make it and show it too.