7/31/2019 Artistic Freedom and Censorship- The Limits of Teh Multicultural Dream

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Artistic Freedom, Censorship and the Limits of Our

Multicultural Dream

In our multicultural paradise we regularly get proof that the old debate between a

yearning for homogenizing, undifferentiated modernity and identity

reaffirmations through the codes of inherited cultural structures are very much a

reality. One could cite a whole series of such events, the very mention of which

will make many uncomfortable. Granted it is only through freedom of expression

that art thrives. However, beyond the actual censorship of the song PAAL in

Shusheila Ramans concert what I personally find more worrying is the reactions

which this has given rise to- predictable, repetitive- on the one side we have

those who want to present themselves as the good ones- the champions ofabsolute freedom most of whom would I am sure react in exactly the opposite

way if any similar conflict between tolerance and censorship were to centre

around their own symbols of religious or cultural identification- and on the other

side we have the so-called villains- those who find all sorts of reason to justify the

censorship which they have brought about through lobbies and the power of

social politics.

We have to remind ourselves of a few things: the creation of ethnicity as a mode

of group identification started in colonial times through conditions of settlement,

access to land resources, to the privileges of the state and to the degrees of

freedom which was granted by the colonial state to the new inhabitants of the

nation. This was reinforced in pre-independence times by dominant discourses of

ethnic definition which determined the manner in which groups came to be

ideologically constituted, often internalizing the discourses of colonial ideology

about them. It is not that I want to exonerate politicians but the latter have only

used and reinforced the ground reality. We have all internalized the dominant

discourses about ourselves and the Other, the different. Where the dominant

narrative of acceptability is couched in apparent cultural neutrality- where often

we have to encounter the schizophrenic split between a neutralized cultural

identification and the fixation of a discourse of the different. We often find

ourselves co-existing in both spaces.

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Things have not gotten better in the last few decades where under the

homogenizing tendencies of globalization Cultural Otherness has struggled to

make itself visible, audible and politically present everywhere, here as elsewhere.

I think that in the present case of artistic censorship of Shusheila Raman, even assome official explanations would have thrived best in silence, similarly supposedly

enlightened reactions had better learn the virtues of humility rather than

continue pounding where their very insistence is crystallizing opposition to their

discourses.

And what all this goes to show is that we have failed pathetically to deal with the

postcolonial trauma of our multicultural condition- and it really does not seem as

though anyone is concerned with doing so!

We also have to remember that although the official discourse of equality in

citizenship is structurally there, the contradictory criss-crossing of Enlightenment

versus the Otherness debate, which at various times have different declinations

depending on events and causes for horrified public outrage, is itself the product

of the reinvention of narratives of identification through the fragility of diasporic

uneasiness. Some would say that this diasporic belonging has no reason to be

because it has been at least three to four generations of settlement by now for

the majority of our citizens. To this I would answer Yes it has been, temporally

speaking. But parallel to that the fixation of the Self versus Otherness discourse

which we have inherited from colonial ideology, the propensity to jump from one

side to the other of the border, according to what suits us and ignore the long

term implications of this heightened split reality which we are all called upon to

negotiate at various points in time is helping make matters worse.

To conclude I will say: We are all guilty- collectively. Let the mud-slinging stop,

please.

Nandini Bhautoo