Banned books due to Censorship

CREATIVITY & CENSORSHIP

People believe that writers and authors have the freedom to write and express their emotions and present to the world. But is it true? There are true examples of some banned books in the world which chained censorship and creativity together. 

One of the banned books is Lajja (Shame) by Taslima Nasrin.

She is an uncompromising critic of patriarchal religious traditions that she is seen as oppressive to women and an outspoken advocate of women’s social, political, and sexual liberation. In her crusading syndicated newspaper columns, collected and published in two books, she protested religious intolerance and increasing incidents of violence against women by local salish, or Islamic village councils in Bangladesh, also because the failure of the govt to require adequate measures to prevent them. consistent with Amnesty International, salish has sentenced women to death by stoning, burning, or flogging for violating the councils’ interpretation of shariah . Nasrin’s newspaper columns, her bold use of sexual imagery in her poetry, her self-declared atheism, and her iconoclastic lifestyle aroused the fury of fundamentalist clerics. By early 1992, angry mobs began attacking bookstores that sold her works. They also assaulted Nasrin at a book fair and destroyed a stall displaying her books. That year, on the way to a literary conference in India, her passport was confiscated by the Bangladeshi government, ostensibly because she listed her employment as a journalist instead of a doctor. 

Lajja (Shame) was published in Bangladesh within the Bengali language in February 1993, three months after the razing of the Babri mosque in India that touched off a wave of violence against Hindus in Bangladesh. Nasrin states during a preface to the English-language edition of the novel that she wrote the book seven days soon after the demolition of the mosque because “I detest fundamentalism and communalism. . . . The riots that happened in 1992 in Bangladesh is that the responsibility folks all, and that we are responsible . Lajja may be a document of our collective defeat.”

During the primary six months after its publication, the novel sold 60,000 copies in Bangladesh. Though panned by some critics as a didactic political tract, it had been a billboard success in both Bangladesh and neighboring Bengali speaking Calcutta, India. Pirated copies of the novel were widely circulated in India by militant Hindus. In 1994, the novel was published in English in New Delhi . (It was published within the US in October 1997.)

CENSORSHIP 

After protests by Muslim fundamentalists in Bangladesh, in July 1993 the Bangladeshi government banned Lajja on the grounds that it had “created misunderstanding among communities.” On September 24, 1993, Nasrin opened the daily newspaper and saw a prominently displayed notice calling for her death. A fatwa, or death decree, had been issued by a mullah, or Muslim cleric,of the Council of Soldiers of Islam, a militant group based in Sylhet, Bangladesh. It involved her execution for blasphemy and conspiracy against Islam.

The group offered a $1,250 bounty for her death. within the following weeks, additional bounties were promised. Thousands of Muslim fundamentalists attended mass rallies and marched through the streets of Dhaka, hanging and burning Nasrin in effigy. Nasrin was ready to obtain police protection only after suing the government , which, in response to international pressure, posted two cops outside her home.

The International PEN Women Writers’ Committee organized a campaign on Nasrin’s behalf, enlisting the support of human rights and women’s organizations round the world. It called on Bangladesh’s government to guard Nasrin, prosecute those that sought her death, lift the ban on her book, and restore her passport. The governments of Sweden, Norway, the US , France, and Germany lodged official protests. Sweden and Norway ultimately threatened to chop off all economic assistance.

Almost overnight, Nasrin, who was unknown outside Bangladesh and India, became a logo within the Western world of freedom of expression and women’s rights. The government of Bangladesh returned Nasrin’s passport, but no arrests were made, albeit making a death threat and offering a gift for it's criminal offense in Bangladesh.

At the time, Bangladesh was governed by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party under Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, the widow of President Ziaur Rahman, a military general assassinated in 1981. Prime Minister Zia was elected with the support of the Muslim party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which held 20 seats in Parliament. Critics of the govt contended that she capitulated to fundamentalist demands within the Nasrin case to preserve her electoral coalition.

In April 1994, after the return of her passport, Nasrin traveled to France, where she spoke at a gathering marking International Press Freedom Day. Returning to Bangladesh through India, she gave an interview to the English-language daily the Calcutta Statesman, which quoted her as saying, “The Koran should be revised thoroughly.” In a letter to the Bangladeshi and Indian press, Nasrin denied making the reported remarks, but in her denial she wrote that “the Koran, the Vedas, the Bible and every one such religious texts” were “out of place and out of your time .”

In Bangladesh, fundamentalists took to the streets by the tens of thousands in daily demonstrations calling for her death. Mobs attacked the offices of newspapers that showed sympathy for her and ransacked bookstores carrying her books. Religious groups pressed the government for her arrest. On June 4, 1994, the Bangladeshi government brought charges against her under a rarely used 19th-century statute dating from the age of British colonialism that proscribes statements or writings “intended to outrage the religious feeling of any class by insulting its religion or religious believers.” The crime carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison.When a warrant was issued for her arrest, Nasrin left her apartment and went underground.

In an interview given just before going into hiding, Nasrin explained, “So many injustices are administered here within the name of Allah. I cannot stop writing against these simply to save lots of my very own skin. The Koran can not function with the idea of our law. It stands within the way of progress and within the way of women’s emancipation. The matter is the intolerance of the fundamentalists. I fight with my pen, and that they want to fight with a sword. I say what I feel and that they want to kill me. I will never allow them to intimidate me.”

On August 3, after protracted negotiations among her legal advisers, Western ambassadors, and therefore the government of Bangladesh, Nasrin was granted bail and ordered to appear for trial at a later, unspecified date. She fled to Stockholm, Sweden, and remained in exile in Europe and therefore the us . (In 1998, she returned to Bangladesh to worry for her critically ill mother and was again forced to travel into hiding due to threats and demonstrations against her.) In 2005, Nasrin moved to Kolkata, India, where she hoped to get permanent residency. The Indian government, instead, granted her a series of temporary visas. After violent protests by Muslim groups in Kolkata in 2007, the govt moved her to Jaipur, then to a secure house in Delhi, and restricted her movements. In March 2008, Nasrin, protesting her confinement in Delhi, left India for Europe and therefore the US .

“The mullahs who would murder me will kill everything progressive in Bangladesh if they're allowed to prevail,” Nasrin wrote in her preface to 

Lajja. “It is my duty to undertake to guard my beautiful country from them, and I turn all those that share my values to assist me defend my rights. I am convinced that the sole way the fundamentalist forces are often stopped is that if all folks who are secular and humanistic join together and fight their malignant influence. I, for one, won't be silenced.” More than 16 years after the primary efforts to censor Nasrin, she still faced bans of her writing and threats against her life.

All four volumes of her autobiography published in 1999–2004, including Meyebela: My Bengali Girl-hood (1999), were banned in Bangladesh.

Summary Of Lajja Novel by Taslima Nasrin

 LAJJA (SHAME)

Author: Taslima Nasrin

Original dates and places of publication: 1993, Bangladesh; 1994, India

Publishers: Ananda Publishers; Penguin Books

Literary form: Novel

SUMMARY

Taslima Nasrin, a former physician from Bangladesh, is a poet, novelist, and journalist and an outspoken feminist. 

Lajja (Shame) 

may be a documentary novel about the plight of a Hindu family in Bangladesh persecuted by Muslim fundamentalists during an epidemic of anti-Hindu violence in 1992. On December 6, 1992, Hindu extremists demolished the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya, India. The incident began weeks of mob violence in India during which quite 1,200 people were killed. In Bangladesh, Muslims terrorized Hindus and ransacked and burned Hindu temples, shops, and houses in retaliation. Hindus are a minority in Bangladesh, which has an Islamic constitution.

The novel traces the events of 13 days within the lifetime of a fictional family, the Duttas—Sudhamoy Dutta, a physician, his wife Kironmoyee and their grown children Suranjan and Maya—in the aftermath of the razing of the Babri mosque. It also reflects Hindu complaints of persistent violation of their rights.

Many Hindu friends of the Dutta family crossed the border into India to settle with relatives, particularly after a 1990 wave of anti-Hindu violence. 

But Sudhamoy, an invalid, had to move back from the countryside to the capital, Dhaka, after being forced from his house and land. He chooses to remain , though his wife wants to escape to India.

Sudhamoy, an atheist who fought for the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan, believes with a naive mixture of optimism and idealism that his country won't let him down. His son, Suranjan, rebels against the prospect of getting to escape his home as that they had in 1990, when the family took shelter within the home of Muslim friends.

“After independence the reactionaries who had been against the very spirit of independence had gained power,” Suranjan thinks, “changed the face of the constitution and revived the evils of communalism and unbending fundamentalism that had been rejected during the war of independence.” Unlawfully and unconstitutionally, Suranjan recalls, Islam became the national religion of Bangladesh.

Suranjan catalogs the many violent incidents representing the heavy toll that communalism—chauvinism and prejudice supported religious identity—and religious fundamentalism have taken in Bangladesh over the years. He remembers the looting and burning by Muslims in Hindu communities in October 1990. Women were abducted and raped, people were beaten and thrown out of their houses, and property was confiscated. 

Suranjan is critical of the failure of the government to guard Hindus. “Why don’t we work to free all State policies, social norms and education policies from the infiltration of religion?” he asks. “If we would like the introduction of secularism, it doesn't necessarily mean that the Gita must be recited as often because the Quran is on radio and television . What we must enforce is that the banning of faith from all State activities. In schools, colleges and universities all religious functions, prayers, the teachings of spiritual texts and therefore the glory dying of lives of spiritual personae, should be banned.”

The terror finally reaches the Dutta family when a gaggle of seven young men invade the house and abduct 21-year-old Maya. Suranjan and his Muslim friend, Haider, search the streets of Dhaka for Maya but can find no sign of her. Maya isn't found and is presumed dead. Within the end Suranjan and his family plan to flee to India, their lives and their hopes for his or her country in ruins. “There was absolutely nobody to depend on,” 

Nasrin writes, “He was an alien in his own country.”

William Wordsworth’s Poetic Mind 

William Wordsworth is the father of English Romanticism. Named as Lake poet because of his magnificent love for nature and collection of poetic ideas while walking aside a lake. Wordsworth defines poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and emotions, recollected in tranquility. He believes poetry as a collection of memories, emotional expression and observation which should be recollected in a calm state. One essential idea according to him is that emotions have to overflow in an uncontrollable manner but should be recollected in tranquility, that is, in a calm state.

Like other Romantics, Wordsworth was also driven by Pathetic Fallacy which means human sentiments towards non-human things, here it is to the nature.

In Wordsworth’s poems, there are emotions of romanticism. In his two poems, "Ode- Intimations of immortality and Few miles above the Tintern abbey”, he picturized his poetic ideas. The major ideas are.

 Idea of Loss of spirituality-

 Wordsworth finds himself a mile away from the sense of spirituality, which is removed like clothes from this materialistic world. He is stuck in a civilized industrial world which chained him in social norms and conventions. As per his poetic mind, he is talking about the loss of spirituality in nature. With reference to both poems, he is talking about the loss of his childhood when he was near natural world. With adulthood and industrialization, nature has been wiped out from his life. It’s his reminiscence of past or the best days of his memory. In ‘Tintern abbey’, Wordsworth is talking about nature at rural area and not in city, among the woods which he revisits after a gap of five years, symbolically reminiscence of the past loss of spirituality.

 Nature which is now missing in cities, is still present in rural areas. Though attainment of nature is available to him yet the innocence, spirituality; childhood, when he was aware of the supernatural beings around him has been lost after getting adulthood in this modern chained materialistic civilization where he can’t observe nature around him.

Idea of Memory –

Mind being the collection storage of memories enhances poetic ideas of Wordsworth. The most important use of memory is to make connections between the past and the present. In both of his poems, Wordsworth is memorizing his past. For instance, in poem ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ is in nature, rural area or his favorite place to exist on earth. But what will he do after leaving this Tintern Abbey? He visited this place five years ago too before shifting in the city. So, what kept him near nature there?

Memory. Once he has returned to the daily gloom of the city, he will be capable to remember the best time of his life and can get a feeling of heart fulfilment again. Memory of Tintern Abbey will elevate his tiredness of civilization.

Philosopher John Locke in his words, ‘we are born with a Blank State of mind. Whatever experiences we go through, they imprint in our brains’, so memory with always keep him connected with everything he passes by.

While in ‘Intimations of immortality ode’, memory keeps an infant (innocence) connected with celestial lights, that is, knowledge of our pre-existence. In fifth stanza of poem, “Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness”, his idea is that taking a birth is escaping from something (reality). Its not an idea of forgetting but coming with idea of another existence, we still have the memories of pre-existence as an infant. In stanza 6 of this poem, he meets six years old who seems to him as an ‘endless intimation’ that is, he reminisces his childhood through him somewhere. He remembers his childhood and glory of nature in his memories.

Idea of Transcendentalism-

Transcendence simply supremacy or world without boundaries. In both of Wordsworth’s poems, its emphasis a strong connection of oneself to the nature. In Tintern Abbey, “Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms” depicts a rural area where small plants seem to run in a line, running wild(unrestricted). Nature can’t be restricted in rural areas. 

Romanticism is not only about beauty but its sublimity or aesthetic ugliness, a sense of supernatural. Poet dreams of sublimity thinking of nature that is elevated to a higher level of our reaches, that is, presence of spirituality around surroundings to transport into a divine(transcendental)place.

Thus, Wordsworth in his collection of poems fragmented the nature with his expressions of emotions, glory and joy, loss of innocence and a divinity for a transcendental world where nature is at the supremacy, that is, beyond normal. 

The Way of the World, Prologue Analysis as satire

The Way of the World

"The Way Of The World" is a comedy play written and performed by William Congreve during the end of the Restoration period, probably between 1699-1700. Congreve wrote five plays in his life and this mock comedy is considered to be his masterpiece because it mocks on the social issues of love and marriage at that time. 

Prologue Analysis 

The way of the world can be interpreted as the expression of people's behaviour. However, because it was the Restoration period, where people flirt and adultery was common, it reflects the social norms of that period. The play is a comedy, a satire about the lives of the wealthy and powerful people of the Restoration time. 

The prologue anticipates the narratives in the play as a whole as it predicts the themes and presence of fools in the play which can be subjected to the real people of London,for example fools mentioned in the prologue. 

The prologue is prior to the dramatis persona, introducing the audience about the play. It was spoken by Mr. Betterton as told from the first line, "Spoken by Mr. Betterton" in the prologue. The Prologue also acts as both a tongue-in-cheek apology (in advance) and a taunt or challenge to the audience to find fault. Mr.Betterton's role was played by the same actor who performed the role of Fainall, the antagonist of the play. Congreve didn't assign Fainall as the introducer but rather Mr. Betterton And Fainall, the antagonist represent two different personalities though played by the same actor. 

The challenges facing the author are reflected in prologue which express the difficulties of pleasing the audience. Betterton received these lines to speak on Congreve's behalf. 

"To please, this time, has been his sole Pretense". 

Betterton opens the prologue with a comparison of two different types of fools. Poets are one kind of fool, because they depend on the tastes and whims of a variety of audience in entertaining them to earn their livings. These tastes are determined by fortune, and are completely random, meaning writers are in a sense gambling that the audience will like what they write. "Natural" fools (stupid people) on the other hand are blessed, favoured and protected fools. 

The prologue goes on to state that poets are often fooled by the success of one play or work into believing the next one will be successful. Fame and fortune are said to be fleeting, and one bad play can cost a poet degradation of success. 

Like surrogate mothers are to the offsprings of the cuckoo birds, fortune is quite similar to born fools. 

Fortune favours the fools like any other bird in her own nest broods to hatch the cuckoo eggs. 

His statement about what is in his play has more value: "some plot," "some new thought," "some humor too," but "no farce," the absence of which, he adds, ironically, would presumably be a fault. 

The statements that there is no satire because the town is so reformed and that there are surely no knaves or fools in his audience are, of course, ironic as he used it to defend himself though the entire play is a satire. 

Prologue as direct satire on theatres

Satire seeks to improve us by having us recognize our faults and laugh at ourselves. So laugh at the artifice of this world, its extravagance, the blindness of its characters to their own hypocrisies. However, the prologue is a direct satire on theatre itself. At the end of the Restoration period, the theatre was under the court because of the monarchy. It was believed that the theatre can corrupt the minds of the people so every writing was done in the favour of the court. 

Moreover, at that time the middle class were involved too in participating the theatre as the audience so different mindsets of people, that is, both rich and middle class people were there whom the actors had to impress. Congreve with his writing had already told in his prologue that there are many difficulties in impressing or pleasing the audience. In 1696, under the artistic expression a bill was passed which censored on stage production. In 1692, society for reformation of manners was founded. 

From 1688-1689, the period is known as  bloodless revolution or Glorious revolution, that resulted in the deposition of James II and the accession of his daughter Mary II and her husband, William III, prince of Orange and stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands.This situation was the result of the events of the previous century, when King Charles I was executed. 

Thus, "The Way of the world" comments on the socio-political atmosphere in the 1700s of that Restoration period which is a mock(satire) comedy about the lives of the wealthy and powerful people of the Restoration period.