Report of the proceedings of MELOW (The Society for the Study of the
Multi-Ethnic Literature of the World) 14th International Conference
DAMN THE BOOK, GAG THE VOICE: LITERATURE AND CENSORSHIP, CHANDIGARH (20-22
February 2015).
The 14thMELOW
International Conference, "Damn the Book, Gag the Voice: Literature and
Censorship" began on 20 February 2015 at 10:30 am with the inaugural
session with Professor Manju Jaidka , the Secretary of MELOW
recapping how a bunch of members from Panjab University under the suggestion of
Professor Amritjit Singh formed the
association in 1998, which eventually matured into MELUS-India, and later into
MELOW. Professor Manju Jaidka introduced the Chief Guest, Mr Kanwar Sandhu a renowned Journalist,
and Ex-Editor of The Tribune,
and the Guest of Honor, Professor Amritjit Singh who is the Langston Hughes
Professor of English in Ohio University, presently a Fulbright Nehru Professor
of English at Delhi University.
Professor Anil Raina , Vice President of MELOW threw light on the theme of the conference, pointing
out how Censorship was an old phenomenon dating back to the Greeks.
The chief guest of the day, Mr. Kanwar Sandhu, gave the keynote speech.
In tune with the theme of the conference and sessions, Mr. Kanwar Sandhu spoke
about the intrinsic relationship between Censorship and Creativity, where the
two are like Siamese twins. Censorship fuels creativity and resistance to it
gives rise to great works of art. While talking about censorship, he emphasized
how people in power, be they in religion, politics or society, try to control
and silence the voices that speak the truth that does not suit those in power.
Artistic and cultural practices have always been under the surveillance of
censors. Sandhu referred to the musical band Junoon that was banned in Pakistan
during the reign of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif during 1990s. However,
according to him the censors’ dilemma has also to be taken into consideration,
in cases where the censor is not consciously aware of her/his being on the
devil’s side. Similarly, censorship was at work during the Emergency
in India in 1975, but ironically it was the most creative period in any field
during that time.
While talking about the
relationship between literature, art and journalism Sandhu emphasized the need of importing the concept of
embedded journalism to India. Embedded journalism was first used during the
invasion of Iraq in 2003. It came
into being as a response of the United States Military to the constant pressure
from the country's news media. Media was disappointed by the level of access
granted during the Gulf War 1991 and invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
The Guest of Honor Professor Amritjit Singh congratulated the
members of MELOW society for their dedication and work, and how their joint
efforts had made MELOW a success. He in particular appreciated the efforts of
Professor Manju Jaidka who has always been one of the strong pillars of the
society. Singh argued that censorship is also used as a tool to gain publicity
and readership by some authors and some agencies. Some authors gain readership
only after being censored, while in reality their work does not carry much
literary worth.
The vote of thanks was given by
Dr. Manpreet Kaur, joint secretary
of MELOW.
After the inauguration and
keynote address, a total of eighteen technical sessions were held over three
consecutive days, with each session being chaired by a Professor. The papers in
each session were grouped together based on common themes and issues. Each
paper presenter was given 15 minutes to present his/her paper and 10 minutes
were kept for discussion on each paper.
Day 1: 20 February 2015
Session A1: The session
was chaired by Professor Ashis Sengupta. Four papers were presented in
the session that addressed issues like female body, sexuality, desire, child
rape and racism. The papers highlighted how resistance and writing act as a
kind of weapon in the hands of women writers.
The papers analyzed the novels like Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Saratchandra’s Devdas, Alice Walker's Color Purple , Maya Angelou’s I
know why the Caged Bird Sings,
Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Ursula Kroeber Le Guin’s The Ones Who
Walks Away From Omelas .
Session A2: The session was chaired by ProfessorAnup
Beniwal. Four papers were presented
in the session that talked about theoretical aspects of censorship. Michael
Foucault was the binding force in almost all the papers. The papers analyzed the nature of Epistemic
violence and how Domination control theory was responsible for the Othering of
Nature.
Session A3: The session
was chaired by Professor Tejnath
Dhar. Four papers were presented that discussed how religion becomes
a censoring agency to silence the voice of the writers. The voices were tagged
as blasphemous and this lead to the exile of the author or the banning of the
book. Religion is used by several interest groups in the society as a tool to
maintain status quo. The texts that were
discussed were Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Haroun,m D.N.mJha’s The Myth of the Holy Cow, Ramanujan’s
essay 300 Ramayanas and Wendy
Doniger’s The Hindu: An Alternative
History. Banning on account of religious beliefs has often made the author
and the work famous.
Session B1: The session
was chaired by Dr. Roshanlal Sharma.
In this session five papers were presented that focused on American
novels like The Color Purple, The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Slaughter
House Five, British novels like Animal
Farm and Brave New World, and the work of the Nigerian writer Wole
Soyinka.
Session B2: The session
was chaired by Professor Amritjit Singh. In this session the four papers
presented addressed issues that covered a wide range of genres from fiction to
nonfiction, from theatre to film media, and translated works. The papers
highlighted the way censorship is perceived by artists and intellectuals across
the globe. The resistance inheres in
power itself, and the ‘politics of performance ‘can be a bulwark against the
‘performance of politics.’
Session B3: The session was chaired by Professor
Anup Beniwal. The session highlighted the politics of
female body, the deviant body, and the forbidden body. Sexuality is a
differentiating function of human beings that informs one's being and is innate
to one's identity. It is part of the search for identity in a world that is
proliferated by images and stereotypes that implicitly or explicitly force you
to conform and limit the possibility of being. There is strong need to confront
these images and stereotypes in the search for personal and artistic freedom.
Day2: 21 February 2015
The parallel sessions resumed on
Day 2 of the conference beginning at 9.15 am on 21 February, 2015.
Session C1: The session
was chaired by Professor Krishnan Unni. It included five papers. The
papers raised the issues of freedom of speech and its indispensability for
creative writing. Censorship is an outcome of a complex dialectics between the
State and the Author. The written word connotes power and makes the people in
power uneasy when it is challenges their hegemony. The writer raises pertinent
questions and articulates the truth; no matter how uneasy and embarrassing the
truth is. The writers tell the
alternative tale, the alternative truth that is not permissible.
Session C2: The session
was chaired by Professor Ashis Sengupta. It included five papers which
analyzed the roots of censorship that go deep to the socio-economic core, and
to the very structure of family, where family becomes one of the subtle
agencies of censorship. Production is linked directly to reproduction and
anything that is not productive is deemed to be rejected and censored.
Conformity and homogeneity is allowed, so that it is easy to control and rule
the people in question. The journey of the word to the world is rife with
censors. The editor, publisher, and anthologiser consciously or unconsciously
can act as censors.
Session C3: The session
was chaired by Professor Rajeshwari Pandharipande. This session included
five papers that discussed children’s literature and the difficulty of deciding
what to include and what to exclude in it. Parenting has become a difficult job
in this postmodern, posthuman and techno savvy world where it is difficult to
control the flow of information or the implosion of images. From Barbie dolls
to Sherlock Holmes, the subtlety involved in choosing the right kind of
literature and reading for children has become a debatable issue.
ISM Session: This session continued the practice of remembering
the late Prof Isaac Sequeira, a patron of the organization, who was a mentor
to several generations of scholars. The session for the Isaac Sequeira Memorial
Award was chaired by Professor Amritjit Singh. The session included
three papers that were shortlisted out of 27 submissions. Each presenter was given 20 minutes to
present the paper. The judges selected Anupam Vatsyayan’s ‘The Bard and the
Bawdiness: Profanity and Censorship in the Shakespearean Canon’ as the best.
Anupam was awarded the ISM Certificate and a cash prize of Rs. 5,000. The
judges for the competition were Profs. Mohan Ramanan (Hyderabad), Tejnath Dhar
(Faridabad) and Ashis Sengupta (Darjeeling).
This was followed by a special ISM
lecture in honour of the late Prof Sequeira by Professor Amritjit Singh. The spoke
at length about Prof Sequeira and then touched upon the varied hues and shades
of censorship. Professor Amritjit Singh said that censorship is a pervasive
phenomenon and is not only confined to literature; it affects and impedes
Journalism and scholars alike. Censorship has its roots in fear and the desire
to control, regulate and suppress. It is also important to consider the pattern
of self- censorship in which writers, journalists and scholars surrender
themselves to a variety of circumstances. Attention must also to be paid to the
specters of ‘political correctness’ of the Left and the Right attempting to ban
books completely or at least to throw them from out of schools and libraries.
Session D1: The session was chaired by Dr. Nandini
Bhadra. The papers highlighted
contested spaces like the street theater/folk theater, and the censoring of
these spaces. These spaces provide what Bakhtin calls a Dialogic space, where
many voices are in constant dialogue. The space becomes polyphonic in nature,
voicing varied voices simultaneously.
Session D2: The session
was chaired by Professor Tejnath
Dhar. The papers focused on
the censoring of Films and media. According to Matthew Arnold, Journalism is
literature in hurry, and in the present times journalism has taken many forms
and has a wide reach. Journalists are under constant threats from various
sources. Similarly, films have always been under the constant scrutiny of the
censor board; they have been banned on the grounds of sexuality, nudity,
violence, or of threatening the integrity of the nation. The censor board has
functioned as one of the control systems of the government to silence the
voices that challenge the societal norms or that provide new models for the
society to follow. Life is affected by films and media; it is also the other
way around.
Session D3: The session
was chaired by Professor Krishnan Unni.
Five papers were presented in the session. The session discussed the
politics of Religion, specifically targeting the Hindutva Right Wing Politics.
Censorship has become an oppressive weapon in the hands of Hindutva zealots. Moral
policing has done so much harm to creative ventures that question the
totalizing and homogenizing projects of the Hindutva Right Wing politics. The
texts that were analyzed during the session were Ramanujan’s Three hundred
Ramayanas, Wendy Doniger’s
The Hindus: An Alternative History , and
Lindsey Collen’s The Rape Of
Sita.
Day 3: 22 February, 2015.
The parallel sessions resumed on
the third and last day of the conference. However, the day began with a special
lecture by Professor Anil Raina, on Academic Writing at 9:15 am.
Academic Writing: Special
lecture by Professor Anil Raina.
Professor Anil Riana talked about the importance of keeping in mind
various aspects of writing a research paper. According to him, a research paper
is meant for and addressed to a special audience. The audience belongs to what
he calls Academia or discourse community and a researcher always has to enter
in a kind of dialogue with the audience and other discourses. Anil Raina talked
about the practical, ethical and moral issues involved in writing a research
paper.
Session E1: The session, chaired
by Dr. Vivek Sachdeva, included three papers that discussed the reasons
behind the censoring of two controversial texts from Muslim women writers from
Iran and Pakistan respectively. The
papers analyzed the reasons behind the banning of texts like Azar Nafisi’s Reading
Lolita in Tehran, and the most recent Malala’s I am Malala.
Session E2: The session
was chaired by Dr. Ismael Saeed. The session included three papers. The papers
highlighted the effects of censorship and how censorship only aids in
reinforcing ideas and ideals that are curbed. Censorship has paradoxically
played a very important role in the dissemination of the radical ideas in the
society. The role of the intellectual becomes very crucial in this regard.
Session E3: The session
was chaired by Professor Krishnan Unni. Three papers were presented that
talked about Dalit writers and literature in India and the racial/ tribal
divide in Afghanistan. The stigma of untouchability has made the life of Dalits
insufferable .The caste system not only divides the society, it also questions
human values and dignity. The binary of pollution and purity marginalizes a
major section of the society.
Session F1: The session
was chaired by Professor Pratibha
Nagpal. Three papers
presented in the session deliberated on the binary of Violence and Silence.
Rape is always seen as an articulation of sex rather than violence. It is
always shrouded in secrecy and nobody talks about this act of violence in
public. The representation of sexual
violence sometimes occurs as a minor narrative and the author sometimes keeps
silent. But there are writers who have voiced and portrayed points of view from
the margins and periphery.
Session F2: The session
was chaired by Dr. Roshanlal Sharma. Three papers were presented in this
session. The papers discussed the revolutionary nature of Beat writers of the
1960s who celebrated an escapist euphoric existence against the backdrop of the
US militarism, the appropriation of Shakespeare’s work by Thomas Bowdler to
make it suitable for Victorian reading, the gendered nature of films and other
forms of media on children, the advent of hypersexuality in the Films like The Dirty Picture and
its effects on the psyche of children.
In the concluding
session of the conference a comprehensive report of the three-day event was
read out by Naheed Shah. The participants were then asked to give their
impressions of the conference. Ishmael Saeed, from war-torn Iraq, was effusive
in his remarks: he said it was a very fruitful experience and he would make it
a point to attend MELOW Conferences in future, too. Poonkulaly, from
London, appreciated the efforts of the organizers and the friendly atmosphere
that prevailed at the conference. Several other delegates expressed their
satisfaction with the high standards being maintained by MELOW.
The Valedictory
session continued into a General
Body Meeting of all members, as is the practice at every conference. A
detailed, audited statement of expenses incurred over the last financial year
was presented by the Treasurer, Meenu Gupta, and the Vice-President, Anil
Raina. This statement was passed unanimously by the GBM. The issues of the
theme and venue of the next conference, the various deadlines for notification,
abstracts, acceptances, were kept pending as It was decided that the
possibility of holding the conference in another city would be explored first
and only then would the deadlines be fixed.
Regarding the theme
for the next conference, a suggestion that seemed to find favour was the
main theme of “Literature and Social Change” which would explore the
relationship between literature and society, how the one impacts the other. The
members present were asked to apply their minds to the suggestion and revert
with some ideas that could be pursued.
Further, it was unanimously agreed that the present Office Bearers would continue till the
next conference. At the next conference a fresh election would be heldand
changes made accordingly. Further
information would be disseminated through the Google group, Facebook and Blog.
Members were asked to remain updated.
The conference ended on a buoyant note with everyone feeling
satisfied on having spent three fruitful days in intellectually stimulating
discussion.
CURRENT OFFICE BEARERS:
President: Prof Sushila Singh, BHU, Varanasi.
Vice-President: Prof Anil Raina, PU, Chandigarh.
Secretary: Prof Manju Jaidka, PU, Chandigarh.
Jt. Secy: Dr Manpreet Kaur, IPU, Delhi.
Treasurer: Dr Meenu Gupta, PU, Chandigarh.
Executive Members:
·
Prof Ashis Sengupta
(Darjeeling
·
Dr Vijay Sharma (Delhi)
·
Dr Roshan Sharma (Solan, HP)
·
Dr A. Hari Prasad (Hyderabad)
·
Dr Pranav Joshipura (Gujrat)
·
Dr Seema Bhupendra (Rajasthan)
·
Dr RG Kulkarni (Sangli)
·
Dr Neela Sarkar (WB)
·
Dr Ravinder Singh (Jammu)
·
Dr Jyoti Mishra (CG)
Advisory Board:
• Prof Paul Giles,
Oxford University
• Prof Mukesh
Williams, Soka University, Japan
• Prof Sushi
Dutta-Sandhu, U Mich, Kalamazoo, USA
• Prof E. Nageswara
Rao, Hyderabad
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