This is my first visit to Bangladesh, though I have felt an emotional connection with your country ever since its creation. And no occasion could be a happier one for my first visit than for a celebration of literature. So, I want to thank you for your kind invitation to me to be here at this festival.
We need to celebrate literature, and it is especially important to celebrate it in these troubled times when it is under attack in so many parts of the world, certainly in India. Yet, thinking of what I should say to you today, I knew I could not make a pretty speech about literature. Instead, I would like to acquaint you with the situation that we in India are facing, because what happens to writers in India -- or anywhere else in the world -- concerns writers everywhere.
We may belong to different nationalities, but we all belong to the country of imagination, and when an iron curtain comes down on our imagination, then it is time to act, and to act as writers, not as separate nationalities. It is in recognition of this truth that writers from 150 countries have declared their support for us, and that 200 British writers marched in support of us recently in London.
We in India have been waging a battle against an assault on our freedom of speech, and the freedom to think and write as we choose. But since literature cannot be sealed into a compartment shut-off from the rest of life, our battle for freedom of speech has become a larger one, to defend and preserve the very idea of India as a plural, secular, democratic republic in which our Constitution guarantees every Indian the right to live, eat, and worship as he or she chooses. This is the effort we are now engaged in.
I want to explain that the most remarkable fact about this protest is that it is not planned or organised. It is not a movement. It is something much more impressive, because it is a spontaneous upsurge of response, coming from individuals and from different disciplines. It has brought writers together with artists, actors, and film-makers, historians, sociologists, and scientists.
Historians and sociologists are protesting against the substitution of mythology for history, which is taking us back to the Vedas when we are living in the 21st century. Scientists are protesting against the destruction of the scientific temper and the spirit of enquiry, without which no nation can call itself modern.
In the general context of these protests we can call this upsurge a fight for reason against unreason, a demand that the doors to knowledge and creativity remain open, and that the fresh air of different ideas, different viewpoints, and different ways of life and thought will continue to invigorate us as they have invigorated and enriched India for centuries past.
Many of us have returned our literary awards to the Sahitya Akademi, some have resigned from their positions in the Akademi. A few days ago, a renowned scientist returned his high civilian award called the Padma Bhushan to the president, saying: “The direction in which today’s government is driving my beloved country will make the country a Hindu religious autocracy.” He says he finds the Hindutva ideology to be “divisive, unreasonable, and unscientific.” This scientist is a Hindu himself.
Another passionate protest has come from an unusual source, a member of the armed forces, a retired admiral of the Indian Navy, who is also a Hindu, who has rejected the ideology of Hindutva -- which wants to turn India into a Hindu state -- and has asserted his faith in a plural India.
All of us are united in the belief that a country has no religion. It is people who have religions, and who have the right to practice their different religions as equal citizens of India.
India has been home to several, and we are richer by the influences that all these religions and cultures have exerted on our lives, our languages, our literature, our architecture, our music, song and dance, our food, our outlook, and our manners.
Coming from North India, as I do, I consider myself half-Muslim by culture. Ultimately, what we are all fighting for is the very meaning of India. Actor Saif Ali Khan, son of the Nawab of Pataudi, has said: “We are a blend, this great country of ours. It is our differences that make us who we are.
I have prayed in church and attended mass with my wife, Kareena while she has bowed her head at dargahs and prayed in mosques. When we purified our home we had a havan and a Koran-reading and a priest sprinkling holy water. The fabric of India is woven from many threads.”
It is that fabric woven from many threads that our dissident voices are determined to preserve. We will not compromise on India’s historic, multi-religious, multi-cultural identity, and we will not submit to the attempts of Hindu fundamentalists to wipe out our differences, and shrink us into a single Hindu identity.
The president himself has raised his voice against the rising tide of hatred, violence, and intolerance of dissent that is threatening to destroy the very meaning of India.
What, you might ask, has all this political-sounding activity to do with literature? Writing is a political activity in the sense that imagination reacts and responds to -- for or against -- the atmosphere of its time. Plays and poems and novels are not about politics, but they are the products of their times, and often of politically conscious imaginations.
Maybe this was not so in earlier times. The Napoleonic Wars, for instance, did not bother the characters in Jane Austen’s novels, but in the 20th century, and now this one, politics has invaded private lives as never before, and the most powerful fiction worldwide has been written as the result of it. It is the engagement of writers with their times that has made for unforgettable fiction.
I have spoken to you as an Indian, but like you I am also an Asian, and I share with all Asians the triumphs and anxieties that we of this region are going through. I rejoice that Nepal now has a secular democratic constitution, and that a woman is the head of state. I rejoice that Aung San Suu Kyi, who has fought a lonely battle so courageously for democracy, has won her election.
I share the fears we all face in our region, and indeed in the world, from those who will not settle for tolerance and democracy. And above all, I hope that we of Asia will do all we can to ensure that the written word and the creative arts will have the freedom to flourish in our region.
How can there be any celebration of literature unless the freedom to think and write and create lives, thrives? I also hope that our writers will become familiar through translations with each others’ work, and come to know each other through festivals such as this one.
I am an Indian, and like you I am an Asian, but like us all, I am a citizen of the world. Let me end by illustrating the oneness of our world by a story about my father. He was a Sanskrit scholar and a patriot who gave his entire life to the fight for independence from British rule led by Mahatma Gandhi.
He was imprisoned four times during that liberation struggle, and he died of his last imprisonment in 1944. Yet he had wept when Hitler’s bombs fell on the British people, and when Hitler’s armies marched into Paris. If anyone had asked him: “What race do you belong to?” His answer would have been: “I belong to the human race.”
So, we need to remind ourselves, now more than ever, that we sink or swim together, whether it is a question of environment, or climate change, or freedom of speech, or human rights, or human suffering anywhere on Earth.