In 1932, a young woman named Rashid Jahan was
denounced by some clerics and threatened with
disfigurement and death. She and three others had
just published a collection of Urdu short stories
called Angarey in which they had robustly
criticized obscurantist customs in their own
community and the sexual hypocrisies of some
feudal landowners and men of religion. The
colonial state, always zealous in its support of
authoritarian religious chauvinists over
dissenting voices, promptly banned the book and
confiscated all copies under Section 295A of the
Indian Penal Code. Rashid Jahan, as a woman,
became a particular focus of ire. A doctor by
training like Taslima Nasreen, she too had
written about seclusion, sexual oppression and
female suffering in a patriarchal society.

What has changed in three quarters of a century?
Periodically, we witness zealots of all faiths
shouting hysterically about ’insults’ to
religious sentiments and being backed by the
state while little is done to address more
serious material injustices that affect members
of their community.

But in the light of the Taslima Nasreen
controversy, the Angarey story has particularly
ironic resonances. For Rashid Jahan and two of
her co-contributors, Mahmuduzzafar and Sajjad
Zaheer, were members of the Communist Party of
India who would go on to help found the
Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in 1936.
The PWA was to be a loose coalition of radical
litterateurs, both party members and ’fellow
travelers’, who would challenge all manner of
orthodoxies and put social transformation on the
literary map of India. Unsurprisingly, many
PWA-linked writers had run-ins with the law,
constantly fending off charges of obscenity,
blasphemy and disturbing the peace. Challenging
these attacks with brave eloquence, they defended
the task of the writer as one of pushing social
and imaginative boundaries. The then beleaguered
undivided CPI too faced constant attacks,
including censorship, trials and an outright ban.

Today, heirs of that same Communist party, the
CPI(M), find themselves on the same side with the
state and religious orthodoxies whose excesses
they once challenged. Their actions shore up
anti-democratic authoritarianism, whether this
takes the form of corporate land-grabbing, the
suppression of popular protest, or religious
chauvinism. In response to criticism from
progressive quarters, they invoke the subterfuge
of ’left unity’ which forbids criticism because
this will provide grist for the opposition’s
mills. A pro-CPI(M) statement signed by the likes
of Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali (with, one can only
presume, the airy historical carelessness that
even the best intellectuals in the West are
sometimes prone to) warns against ’splitting the
left’. With the unmistakable timbre of a Party
pamphlet, it goes on to suggest that all is now
well in Nandigram and ’reconciliation’ with the
dispossessed is fast being effected. (How do they
know?). Meanwhile, many CPI(M) leaders parrot the
conservative statist line that Taslima is free to
stay in India if she behaves herself and refrains
from ’hurting religious sentiments’. But those
oppressed by religious orthodoxies, like women
and Dalits, often have no choice but to speak of
how those very sentiments are used against them.

Although laden with irony, this sorry state of
affairs is not an altogether unexpected
development in the cultural history of the
official left in India even if it is less
shocking than the thuggish assistance provided to
big global corporations in Singur and Nandigram
by the leaders of the proletariat.

As the PWA gained strength and became one of the
most influential cultural movements of its day, a
rift developed between increasingly authoritarian
Party members like Sajjad Zaheer and writers like
the doughty Ismat Chughtai and maverick, Saadat
Hasan Manto, neither of whom would ever agree to
have their imagination and critique constrained
by a party line.

Both Chughtai and Manto insisted on intellectual
independence and the continuing need to address
gender and sexuality, subjects which the Party
began to frown upon. Accordingly, they found
themselves attacked not only by the state but
also by hardliners in the PWA who dutifully
denounced the ’perversions’ of writing about the
body and its desires as well as prostitution and
sexual violence. Justifiably annoyed, Manto (who
fought five cases on ’obscenity’ charges) wrote
an essay sharply titled ’Taraqqi-Pasand Socha
Nahin Karte’ [Progressives Don’t Think] in which
he deplored the unthinking adherence to prudish
literary categories which allowed him and others
to be denounced as ’individualists’ and
’pornographers.’

Of obscenity charges Chughtai asks: ’Don’t you
see that the writer himself is trembling
fearfully and is terrified of the world’s
obscenity? All he’s doing is converting events
that are taking place in the world into words.’

Today, this unwillingness to examine received
ideas emerges in party leader Sitaram Yechury’s
firm endorsement of ’certain conditions’ on
Taslima if she is to stay, including ’refraining
fromŠactivities and expressions that may hurt the
sentiments of our people’, whatever ’our’ means
in a remarkably heterogeneous society that can
take pride in allowing dissent. The obviously
opportunistic attack from the BJP allows more
relevant criticism of the CPI(M) from progressive
people and the broad, non-party left to be
ignored, all of it thrown into the same basket of
’belittling... the present-influence of the Left in
the country.’ Used in this self-exculpatory way,
’anti-communist prejudice’ is no more meaningful
a mantra than ’anti-American’ enabling all
criticism to be dismissed as malicious. This
denigrates not only those on the left who are
unwilling to countenance the CPI(M)’s recent
betrayals of humane values and social justice
goals, but also older communists like Rashid
Jahan who came under vicious attack precisely for
speaking their mind against injustices, including
those inflicted by religion. However much we may
deplore the BJP’s obvious hypocrisies in
denouncing ’pseudo-secularism’, the fact remains
that the actions of the CPI(M) serve to undermine
the credibility of those who have stood up more
consistently for pluralism and secularism.
Moreover, the depredations of the right-wing
should not serve as an alibi for misconduct by
those who rightly oppose them.

These are difficult times for progressive people
who are aware of the ways in which Islam and
Muslims are under siege both from Hindu
majoritarianism and Bush’s ’War on Terror’.
Confronted with a similar colonial situation and
accused of betraying their community, Rashid
Jahan and her comrades maintained that criticism
and self-criticism could not be shunted aside in
the name of battling a greater enemy; the two are
not mutually exclusive. Mahmuduzzafar, another
communist and contributor to Angarey, refused to
apologise for the book and wrote that he and his
co-authors, all Muslim, chose Islam ’not because
they bear it any ’special’ malice, but because,
being born into that particular society, they
felt themselves better qualified to speak for
that alone.’ Taslima Nasreen is exercising a
similar privilege.

There’s an odd kind of condescension in
maintaining that some sentiments are more fragile
than others and that some forms of belief are
less resilient and, therefore, beyond
questioning. Critique and dissent are essential,
particularly when they come from those most
affected by particular forms of religious and
political practice.

When CPI(M) leaders commend the withdrawal of
passages from Taslima’s book and insist on the
objectionable nature of some of her writing, they
would do well do remember that a good many people
in this world claim to find communism profoundly
objectionable, even deeply offensive to their
most cherished sentiments. The right of the left
more generally to articulate critique and
opposition has been hard won and remains under
siege in many parts of the world.

India needs nothing more than a genuine and
strong left. But this will not be forged by
dishonouring one’s own more radical past,
covering up mistakes and rewriting recent
history. In a second, modified statement, Chomsky
et al have qualified their support for the CPI(M)
and indicate that they were simply exhorting the
left in India to ’unite and focus on the more
fundamental issues that confront the Left as a
whole’. In theory, this is a goal devoutly to be
wished for. And yet, it is not one that can be
accomplished at the cost of self-criticism and
silence. We can do no better than to follow the
principle always advocated by the late Edward
Said, a left intellectual and activist of the
highest integrity in these matters: ’Never
solidarity before criticism.’ It is only in so
doing so that we honour the history of genuinely
oppositional movements in India and elsewhere.