Director: Kamal Haasan
Starring: Kamal Haasan, Andrea Jeremiah, Pooja Kumar, Rahul Bose
AT THE fateful session at Jaipur, minutes before Ashis Nandy’s unfortunately worded statement, fellow panelist Richard Sorabjee spoke about the limits of free speech and how hate speech is defined in India. “Deliberate malice” is the phrase he used, saying that only something that was deliberately intended to denigrate a person or community could justifiably be censored. Nandy’s comments clearly did not fall under this criterion, and if the same standard is applied to Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam (released in Hindi as Vishwaroop), the recent protests against its release seem decidedly unjustified, silly even.
In V for Vendetta, when Evey Hammond finds that Stephen Fry’s character owns a Quran, she asks him whether he is a Muslim. “No, I’m in television,” he replies. That would be a better reading of Haasan’s film: by no means a slicker version of Innocence of Muslims, but a very commercial film where religion is incidental to a plot that simply aims to entertain, rather than make a sociological point. Haasan has said that this film is a tribute to Muslims, that they will send him a “lot of biriyani for Eid next year”. That is unlikely, and one suspects that such statements were made more as hyperbole than anything else. The protesters claim that the film is regressive because the terrorists are Muslim, while Haasan claims it is progressive because the RAW agent chasing them is also one. Neither is particularly valid; both have occurred in cinema before to mixed results.
The plot is fairly simple. Vishwanath (Haasan) is a Kathak dancer who is actually a RAW agent working to thwart a terrorist plot by a group he had earlier infiltrated in Afghanistan. Said plot involves exploding a dirty bomb, for which they have been stealing cesium from radiotherapy machines made by a company for which Vishwanath’s wife Nirupama (Kumar) works. The wife, of course, is clueless about her husband’s secret life, which leads to some humour inspired by True Lies. Once everyone knows everything, the film is a fairly run-of-themill series of chase sequences, all of which rather cynically build up to a sequel, the horrendous trailer for which is shown at the end of the movie. Interspersed are flashbacks of Vishwanath’s years in Afghanistan, which by no means depict the terrorists as black-and-white bad guys, but people fighting for an ideal (with no judgement made on the validity of that ideal). Neither are they shown as overtly heroic. “First it was the British who came, then the Soviets, the Americans, and now the Taliban,” a woman tells them after an American raid on her village. “What are men but monkeys with tails in the front?”
On the contrary, if anyone comes out of this movie looking bad, it has to be the Americans. “We fight for Allah, but the Americans fight for petrol,” says one terrorist. “If you laid out barrels of petrol in front of them, they would bow down in namaaz.” Later, the FBI agents who arrest our heroes are shown to be typically racist, with much unfortunate humour drawn from their moronic statements. One interrogator, on finding out they worship Gods with four arms, comes up with this gem: “So, how do you crucify him?” The events of the film take place after the killing of Osama (the terror plot involved is revenge), and Haasan and his RAW colleagues rather maturely condemn the euphoria among the Americans after the event, while acknowledging that it might be justified after the pain of 9/11.
When judged shorn of political blinkers, Vishwaroop is a fairly entertaining – if rather illogical – action thriller that, if anything, errs on the side of caution when it comes to Muslim sentiments.
ajachi@tehelka.com
Not So Honest Abe
The New York Times began Disunion, a blog on their website telling the story of the Civil War as it unfolded 150 years ago. The title of its first entry, Will Lincoln Prevail?, is a question Oscar-watchers will be asking themselves, now that Argo has emerged the firm frontrunner with Best Picture victories at the Golden Globes, the Screen Actor Guild Awards and even — horror of horrors — the BAFTAs. The questions the blogpost asked, however, were more important than mere awards season punditry: could the Illinois lawyer take advantage of a fractured Democratic field and become the first ever Republican President? And how would the southern states react to a candidate from an anti-slavery party in the White House?
The answers, of course, are known. However, what the blog managed to do was dispell some of the notions about Abraham Lincoln being an unbridled idealist. His election victory, after all, was predicated on winning New York, where competing gangs of armed hoodlums assaulted and intimidated voters in scenes that would not be out of place in Indian elections today. Neither was he unambiguously against slavery: he constantly avoided taking a public position on the issue, repeatedly leaving the question to the states. The sense one gets from a deeper reading of the Civil War is that Lincoln — like that other Illinois lawyer elected to the White House 148 years later — was a committed pragmatist who couched his pragmatism in the high idealism of his speeches.
It is that pragmatism that Steven Spielberg taps into in his masterful biopic, which finally released in India last week. The film deals with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution that rendered slavery illegal, “the greatest measure of the 19th Century; passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America”, as abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Jones) puts it. The national myth about Lincoln says that he freed the slaves with a stroke of his pen, through the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Reading Disunion today, 150 years after the proclamation came into effect, shows that the proclamation, a wartime measure, did not effectively do much. “It’s hard to say,” writes James Oakes on its impact, “because the significance of that document has always been obscured by both myth and cynicism — either it freed all the slaves, or it didn’t free a single one — so much so that 150 years after it was issued we still cannot answer the simplest but most important question: what did the Emancipation Proclamation actually do?”
Lincoln’s solution was a Constitutional amendment that required a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives. To secure the votes necessary, he did not use, as one would expect, inspirational speeches, preferring instead to procure them in exchange for government posts in his upcoming second term. Lincoln’s antithesis in the film, the thundering idealist Stevens, despite his personal distaste for “Lincoln the inveterate dawdler, Lincoln the Southerner, Lincoln the capitulating compromiser, our adversary, and leader of the Godforsaken Republican Party, our party”, finds that he must compromise as well in order to get the amendment passed. The most powerful moment in the film is when he is forced to say that he is not in favour of equality in all things, but only in equality before the law. But even though he uses underhanded means (to great comedic effect), one never finds oneself bristling with self-righteous anger. Daniel Day Lewis’ brilliance in the role plays no little part, but the fact is that Lincoln’s corruption humanises him in the same way that reading about Nelson Mandela’s political machinations and acceptance to compromise in No Easy Walk to Freedom humanised Mandela.
Vishwaroopam: Erring on the side of caution
At the fateful session at Jaipur, minutes before Ashis Nandy’s unfortunately worded statement, fellow panelist Richard Sorabjee spoke about the limits of free speech and how hate speech is defined in India. “Deliberate malice” is the phrase he used, saying that only something that was deliberately intended to denigrate a person or community could justifiably be censored. Nandy’s comments clearly did not fall under this criterion, and if the same standard is applied to Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam (released in Hindi as Vishwaroop), the recent protests against its release seem decidedly unjustified, silly even.
In V for Vendetta, when Evey Hammond finds that Stephen Fry’s character owns a Quran, she asks him whether he is a Muslim. “No, I’m in television,” he replies. That would be a better reading of Haasan’s film: by no means a better version of Innocence of Muslims, but a very commercial film where religion is incidental to a plot that simply aims to entertain rather than make a sociological point. Haasan has said that this film is a tribute to Muslims, that they will send him a “lot of biriyani for Eid next year”. That is unlikely, and one suspects that such statements were made more for publicity reasons than anything else. The protestors claim that the film is regressive because the terrorists are Muslim, while he claims it is progressive because the RAW agent chasing them is also one. Neither is particularly valid; both have occurred in film before to mixed results.
The plot – for anybody who doesn’t know already – is fairly simple. Vishwanath (Haasan) is a Kathak dancer who is actually a RAW agent working to thwart a terrorist plot by Omar (Bose), the commander of a terrorist group he had earlier infiltrated in Afghanistan. The plot involves exploding a dirty bomb, for which Omar’s cohorts have been stealing cesium from radiotherapy machines made by a company for which Vishwanath’s wife Nirupama (Kumar) works. The wife, of course, is clueless about her husband’s secret life, which leads to some humour inspired by True Lies. Once everyone knows everything, it is a fairly run-of-the-mill chase sequence, all of which rather cynically builds up to a sequel, the horrendous trailer for which is shown at the end of the movie. Interspersed are flashbacks of his years in Afghanistan, which by no means depicts the terrorists as black-and-white bad guys, but people fighting for an ideal (with no judgement made on the validity of that ideal). Neither are they shown as overtly heroic. “First it was the British who came, then the Soviets, the Americans, and now the Taliban,” a woman tells Omar after an American raid on her village. “What are men but monkeys with tails in the front?”
On the contrary, if anyone comes out of this movie looking bad, it has to be the Americans. “We fight for Allah, but the Americans fight for petrol,” says one terrorist. “If you laid out barrels of petrol in front of them, they would bow down in namaaz.” Later, the FBI agents who arrest our heroes are shown to be typically racist, with much unfortunate humour drawn from their moronic statements. One interrogator, for instance, on finding out that that Ashmita’s God has four arms, comes up with this gem: “So how do you crucify him?” The events of the film take place after the killing of Osama (the terror plot involved is revenge), and Haasan and his RAW colleagues rather maturely condemn the euphoria among the Americans after the event, while acknowledging that it might be justified after the pain of 9/11.
Judged when shorn of religious blinkers, Vishwaroop is a fairly competent action thriller, with some cerebral plot twists, that, if anything, errs on the side of caution when it comes to Muslim sentiments.
Clinical Trials: Storm in the Medicine Chest
In 2005, Rajkumar Tiwari, a clerk at a transport company in Indore, had a son. The mother and child were doing well, and Tiwari was happy. At the end of the first month, his wife took the baby to Chacha Nehru Bal Chikitsalaya, a children’s hospital attached to Indore’s largest public hospital, for what they thought was a routine inoculation. She was made to sign a few papers, after which the baby was given two injections on his heel by paediatrician Dr Hemant Jain. Within 24 hours, their child was dead.
Ashish Jatav was luckier. A day after his son was born, the embroidery worker received a call from the same hospital asking him to bring the child. His wife and mother took the child there, where he was given what Jatav thinks was “some kind of polio vaccine” by Dr Jain. In all, the child received “either three or four” doses. That was in 2008.
Tiwari put his son’s death down to fate. “I didn’t even try to contact the hospital,” he says. And Jatav didn’t make any further enquiries about the vaccine his son had received.
That’s where matters would have rested had it not been for a question on clinical trials that cropped up in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly in late 2010. In response, the health department submitted a list of 81 people who had been enrolled in clinical trials between 2006 and 2010. That, shockingly, is how Tiwari and Jatav realised that their children had been used as guinea pigs in clinical trials.
The papers their illiterate wives had been made to sign had been passed off as the ‘informed consent’ that is required from participants in clinical trials. They had been given no verbal explanations, nor were they given copies of the documents they had signed. They had trusted the doctors of Chacha Nehru Bal Chikitsalaya, the city’s largest public children’s hospital.
Investigations by the state government and RTI requests from activists revealed that Dr Jain was conducting these trials for Panacea Biotec, a large Delhi-based pharmaceutical company. Jatav’s son was given drops of an untested polio vaccine, and according to PD Karan of Panacea, Tiwari’s son got the Haemophilus influenzae type B conjugate vaccine.
In its defence, Panacea claims that all participants in their trials were given consent forms in Hindi, which were subsequently approved by the hospital’s ethics committee.
The company says that of the 640 children involved, three died during the trials. Panacea claims that none of the deaths was related directly to the trials.
However, Panacea was not the only company for which Dr Jain was running trials. According to a report by the Madhya Pradesh government’s Economic Offences Wing, he conducted clinical trials on 2,500 patients for a number of different companies between 2006 and 2010. There were 18 deaths during the course of these trials, none of which was investigated by any independent agency.
Dr Jain, a government doctor, was paid Rs 1.7 crore for the trials. Not a penny of that went to the hospital. Dr Jain says he is “not interested in answering any questions”.
“We might be poor,” says Tiwari angrily, “but even the poorest wouldn’t subject their children to a trial vaccine.”
India emerged as a global pharma destination in 2005 when it amended patent laws to recognise product patents. Also amended were the rules that required foreign companies to conduct clinical trials in India only after they had successfully completed trials abroad. Now, companies could conduct trials in India concurrently and use clinical trial data generated in India for their patent applications abroad.
The clinical trial market burgeoned, growing from almost non-existent to one that the Boston Consulting Group estimates is now worth $400 million a year.
However, India’s regulatory infrastructure and the laws governing the pharma sector had not changed significantly. They were completely inadequate to control an industry that had been growing at over 20 percent every year.
As new details emerged in Madhya Pradesh, the issue simmered. Anand Rai of Indore-based NGO Swasth Samarpan Seva Samiti tried to get in touch with all the 81 participants, and filed RTI requests to unearth more details about the trials.
Then, last January, Swasthya Adhikar Manch, another Indore-based NGO, filed a case in the Supreme Court alleging that the Madhya Pradesh government had allowed completely unregulated, large-scale clinical trials of a whole array of drugs. In a writ petition, it alleged that many other states had done the same. It wanted the Union health ministry to provide details about the number of people enrolled in clinical trials, the number of deaths and the compensation given.
And that cracked open the anarchic can of worms that the pharma establishment in India (both government and private) had become. It was going to be a year of more revelations and indictments. What happened in Madhya Pradesh had also happened in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and many other states.
The chaos in clinical trials, it emerged, was mirrored by regulatory laxity in drug control and the government’s tacit submission to various vested interests on intellectual property issues.
The blowback was swift. The furore on clinical trials was followed by a scathing Parliamentary Committee report on the functioning of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), the apex body for drug approval and the regulation of clinical trials in the country.
At the same time, the Indian Patent Office rejected a number of major patent applications of pharma MNCs, and issued the first compulsory licence for the manufacture of a drug in India. This lead to a drastic reduction in the prices of critical drugs used to treat diseases like cancer.
The government also took a conservative stand on FDI in pharma, unlike what it was doing in most other sectors. The Department of Pharmaceuticals introduced a new drug price control system, the first amendment since 1994.
In the meantime, the Planning Commission was working on a broader canvas, suggesting changes that would refocus India’s health policy in the 12th Five Year Plan period (2012-17) on public health. The individual regulatory processes had started earlier, but in 2012, the strands coalesced into what will hopefully become a comprehensive net.
Everyone in the pharma industry has been affected. In a departure from the norm, the three government departments that handle pharma issues — the ministries of health; chemicals and fertilisers; and commerce — have spurred into action.
Pressure from civil society and the SC’s intervention has set into motion a series of regulatory changes in the pharma establishment that will have far-reaching consequences, determining the path of the industry over the next decade.
“It was the year when drugs took centrestage,” says Dr Ranjit Roy Chaudhury, who has worked with the government, the WHO and a number of private research organisations on health policy. “Public consciousness has been raised, and today more than ever before, there is demand for better control and availability of medicines and the rational use of drugs.”
But greater government regulation has meant reduced profits for the pharma industry, and that has not gone down well. So rattled is the industry that Tapan Ray, the head of the Organisation of Pharmaceutical Producers of India, hopes that “what happened in 2012 will not be a general trend in the future”.
Unfortunately for him, the ball has already been set rolling. What started last year is gathering pace, and will be refined by a series of reports and court orders that are expected. It’s leading to greater transparency and accountability in the government’s health regulation and in the private medical and pharma industry.
When Rai filed an RTI request with the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) asking for data on clinical trials, he was first stonewalled. Then emerged a smorgasbord of conflicting data. All of it seemed to point in one direction.
Not only did the apex drug control body (of which the DCGI is the head) not maintain a central database of clinical trial deaths, but there was little monitoring of trials or the compensation paid to victims who suffered serious adverse drug reactions. This was despite the fact that all clinical trials post 2009 are required to be registered on the Clinical Trials Registry.
That the monitoring of clinical trials had been almost non-existent became obvious by the end of 2012, as the government pulled out different, often conflicting data.
According to the DCGI, there had been 2,031 deaths during clinical trials between 2008 and 2011. 668 of these had taken place in 2010, of which 22 were directly related to clinical trials. In these cases, the companies conducting the trials had paid varying compensations, but the DCGI was not aware of the amounts.
The ethics committees overseeing clinical trials were responsible for deciding whether a death was related directly to it. In a clear conflict of interest, these committees were, according to Rai, “composed of members from the institutions where the trials were being held”.
The DCGI did not furnish data for the other years. “The data of respective trial sites and their respective states is not maintained by this directorate,” it averred. No action has been taken against the drug companies, clinical trial research organisations or the hospitals involved.
In the meantime, other data emerged in an answer given by Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad in response to a question in Parliament. According to him, there were 16 deaths each in 2009 and 2011. Compensation had been paid in all cases that occurred in 2011.
The government had no rules on compensation to the victims of clinical trails, therefore the money doled out by the companies in all these cases had been at their discretion.
Yet more data emerged from the case filed by Swasthya Adhikar Manch in the SC. In an affidavit filed on 3 January by R Chandarashekar of CDSCO, the government claimed that between 1 January 2005 and 30 June 2012, there had been 2,644 deaths during clinical trials. Of these, 80 were directly due to the trials. Compensation had been paid in the 40 cases that occurred in 2008-11; and the agency was “now ascertaining the status of such cases pertaining to the year 2005 onwards”.
The figures from all the sources above were at variance. Azad’s reply in Parliament put the deaths in 2009-11 at 54, whereas the CDSCO affidavit put it at 40 for a longer period!
A similar state of confusion prevailed when it came to the number of patients enrolled in clinical trials across India.
Those who had suffered serious adverse reactions were completely ignored. The CDSCO affidavit put their numbers at 11,972 (for the same period), of which it stated that 506 were related to clinical trials. The CDSCO was not aware if any compensation had been paid in these cases.
Matters only got murkier.
Not only did the drug controller not have any reliable data on clinical trials, Azad’s reply revealed that it had conducted only 23 inspections of trial sites and companies in 2008-12. Shockingly, during this period, the same agency had allowed the clinical trials of 1,544 drugs.
All this had worked in favour of the growing clinical trial industry with clinical trials of drugs that Mira Shiva of the All India Drug Action Network says are “largely irrelevant to India”.
India was a cheap destination for pharma MNCs to conduct clinical trials (for drugs to be marketed abroad), and there was a huge pool of people to be used.
Ironically, while on the one hand these clinical trials were growing, the drug control agency was increasingly letting pharma firms introduce new drugs in India without conducting mandatory clinical trials.
In a May 2012 report, which Dr Chaudhury calls “remarkable” and “unprecedented” for its brutal honesty, a Parliamentary Standing Committee pointed out these glaring violations.
Randomly scrutinising the approval of 42 new drugs given by CDSCO, the committee found that files for three controversial drugs were untraceable.
Of the remaining 39 for which the files did exist, 11 drugs were not put through mandatory phase III trials. Thirteen drugs were not approved for sale in any major developed country (including Buclizine, a controversial appetite stimulant for children) and had no “special relevance to India”. For 25 drugs, approval had not been taken from medical experts.
In all, the regulator had waived the mandatory clinical trial requirement for 31 drugs between January 2008 and October 2010. This included Ambrisentan, a hypertension medication manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, and Colistimethate, an antibiotic made by Cipla, which were likely to be used widely.
More worryingly, it pointed out that most of “expert opinions” justifying the waivers were “written by the invisible hands of drug manufacturers and experts merely obliged by putting their signatures”.
“The clinical trial system was a complete mess,” says Sakthivel Selvaraj, a health economist at the New Delhi-based Public Health Foundation of India.
AS THESE revelations emerged, the government was forced to act. The CDSCO put out guidelines regulating the ethics committees overseeing clinical trials. The guidelines stipulate that the committees should have at least seven members, including some who are independent of the institution conducting the trial, besides one layperson (not from the medical establishment). It also required the committees to be registered with the state or central licensing authority.
There were also guidelines for the compensation for injuries and deaths related to clinical trials. These took into account the patient’s age, earning capacity and the extent of injury.
The onus of proving that an injury or death was not due to the clinical trial was transferred to the sponsor, and a time frame stipulated within which the victim was to be compensated. Ethics committees were now required to report all adverse reactions to the regulator.
A whole slew of New Drug Advisory Committees were also constituted to advise the CDSCO on the approval of clinical trials and new drugs. Clinical trials of new drugs would now have to be approved by a separate committee controlled by the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR).
In its order on 3 January, the SC was even more restrictive, directing that all clinical trial applications be temporarily approved by the health ministry secretary.
A government panel set up to look into the Parliamentary Standing Committee’s allegations on the approval of new drugs has submitted its report, which is yet to be made public. VM Katoch, head of this committee and director-general of ICMR, did not respond to emails and phone calls.
Predictably, the pharma and clinical trial industry is worried. Anil Raghavan, head of the Indian operations of Quintiles, a large MNC contract research and clinical trial company, finds these changes disturbing. “These are knee-jerk solutions to societal concerns,” he says. “They have caused confusion and concern in the industry about the intent and direction of government policy.”
A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Confederation of Indian Industries reiterates this stating that as a result of these changes and the consequent delays in clinical trial approvals “some contract research organisations are looking to increase focus on other geographies”.
That wouldn’t be cause for concern in the case of clinical trials of drugs that are not relevant to India, but it could lead to significant delays in the introduction of important drugs manufactured by MNCs.
In the long run, this regulatory churn seems inevitable, almost overdue. It’s the first step to a more radical and comprehensive overhaul. “Making these changes in our system is very difficult,” says Chaudhury, “this is the start of a process that will play out across the next decade.”
akshai@tehelka.com
‘Secular historians have to see religious texts in human terms’
Photo: Shailendra Pandey
As a historian, how much scope is there for treating religious texts as ancient documents, rather than the word of God?
It goes without saying that if you are a historian, you are going to presume that religious texts are of human origin and products of human civilisation, and you are obliged to treat them that way. I think that there is a problem, because the tradition of looking at scripture as an ancient text like any other rather than as imbued with the language of God, is ultimately a Christian one, because there are four versions of Jesus’ life. So, right from the early church fathers, they have looked at the Bible in a textual way, trying to make sense of it as a text that has originated from different people at different times. That goes all the way through into the Enlightenment. Essentially, what happens in the Enlightenment and the 19th century is that in most traditions of scholarly investigation of the text, God is bled away from it. It becomes a purely secular activity. That is then applied to the fabric of the Bible. The image that has been used to describe this process is always that of termites (destroying the house of Christianity), and there was a German scholar in the 19th century who said that if we carry on with it, then essentially all that will be left of the traditions about Moses would be “airy nothings”. Now, obviously, that was and continues to be very upsetting for Jews and Christians, to have their scriptures taken to pieces like that. It is even more upsetting for people of other faiths when Western scholars start applying that methodology to their texts. So, there is an inherent degree of offense there. But I think, ultimately, the secular historian just has to say, “Well, you believe it. As someone who is not a believer, I have no choice but to explain it in human terms.” I think that is perfectly acceptable.
Is there a motivation to free the text from the self-appointed authorities of the scripture?
It is an attempt to place the text in the context of the culture in which it emerged. What all religions do is that they reach a point of canonisation, where the scholars who are controlling what becomes orthodox rewrite the back story. The rabbis recalibrate the Bible as a record of rabbis, so Moses becomes a rabbi, Adam becomes a rabbi, God becomes a rabbi. This is very ahistorical, but that is what they do. When the Christian canon is solidified in the fourth century, the church fathers write out all the gospels that didn’t make it into the canon, and they make it seem as though there has been a seamless progression from the time of St Paul up to the Council of Nicaea (325 AD). Likewise, with Muslims, we have no records of the life of Mohammed, no textual analysis of the Quran for about 200 years after the death of Mohammed. And the reason for that simply is that the explanation for how the Quran came into being is only arrived at that late. So, it constructs a model which basically rewrites how it was created. What’s required of the historian, as opposed to the believer, is to attempt to work out what actually happened. The irony is, of course, that this is exactly what the Salafists are trying to do. It’s just that they arrive at radically different conclusions.
I suppose that it’s also very important to be respectful in reading these texts.
I think that what is disrespectful is to presume that if you look at someone’s religion sceptically, the adherents of that religion are so intolerant that they will come and kill you. I think that that is the really intolerant attitude. You should rely on the good sense and tolerance of the people you are studying. But that doesn’t mean you go around sneering and mocking the religion.
Someone like Richard Dawkins, for example…
I think he overdoes it. I can see why he overdoes it. I suppose as an evolutionary biologist, I can absolutely understand that it must be infuriating to have people tell him that it’s nonsense. He really does have a dog in the fight. But I’m not as confident about my conclusions as Dawkins is about his. I think, by their nature, the origins of religion are puzzling, because, as I said, the back stories have been rewritten. And who knows? Maybe God does exist.
Holland is a novelist and popular historian, whose controversial book In the Shadow of the Sword was made into the documentary Islam: An Untold Story
‘Elements in each religion nourish violence’
Photo: Shailendra Pandey
What would someone who is decidedly atheistic gain from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata?
The epics have been religious texts, but their essence and narrative capacities lie not in invoking religious sentiments. They are aimed at making you understand what life is all about and raising questions about modern conduct, what the human world is impacted by. I think the two great epics tell you how to live. I have been very fond of saying that we not only live in Bharat but also, simultaneously, live in the Mahabharata. It is full of violence and betrayals, what we have in human life today. Ultimately, the lesson of the Mahabharata is that war not only defeats the vanquished, but also the victor; that war cannot achieve anything, even if it is a dharmayuddha. So, these epics are full of insight, wisdom, questions and doubt, which, I think, makes them very modern. This is unlike the epics in the West, which now exist only in textbooks, libraries, academic circles, but not in life. Homer is no longer relevant in people’s lives, The Iliad is not talked about today. But there will be 5,000 performances taking place all over India related to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These are living epics, which is a very unusual phenomenon.
You say that the Mahabharata is more relevant today than Homer’s works. How much of this is because of the divinity we assign to it, which is, after all, not attached to The Iliad?
I am a non-believer; I don’t have the gift of belief. But I read the two epics as great literary epics. I am not concerned with the divinity of it, and there are many others who aren’t either. The element of divinity that is assigned to them has not prevented them from being used for secular purposes. The Ramayana, for instance, was translated by Akbar into Persian, and he called painters from Gwalior, Kashmir and parts of Rajasthan to come and illustrate it. Rahim Khan-e-Khana, who was his senapati as well as a great Urdu poet, commissioned another translation. Now surely, these people did not do so for religious reasons; they wanted to find out what India was all about, what India thinks. This has happened over centuries. So, the epics have a quality of abiding, a quality of assistance, a quality of permeating. There are any number of things in them that are objectionable today, but they survive all that. A classic is one that survives. You do not have to keep or remove the divinity: just read them. These are texts which can be read with a very secular mind and without any ritualistic apparatus. They speak to both the religious and the secular.
In a number of the sessions here, religions have been criticised for flaws in their founding texts. For instance, we had a session on sharia law, and another where Kancha Ilaiah and Ajay Navaria got into a debate on the Buddha’s misogyny. There was also a recent controversy over misogyny in the Mahabharata, which Bibek Debroy addressed in an essay for TEHELKA. How do you reconcile these readings, many of them stemming from changes in attitudes after these texts were written?
I think the problem is different. No religion is perfect, and no religion is without problems and infirmities. While all religions aspire to the condition of the absolute, none of them in fact is, nor could be, in the first place. Now, there have been things in all religions, without exception, that one can find fault with. Recently, when the Delhi rape took place, some of the religious leaders made atrocious comments. I wrote a piece in which I said that what should have happened is that all religions in a democracy can be allowed to exist and grow only if they accept the basic concept of democracy, that is equality between man and woman. And I would have imagined, ideally, that all religious leaders should have come out in support of this equality.
Also, all religions today, without exception, are violent. And a lot of the violence today is because of religious strife. But the violence of religions does not necessarily emanate from misinterpretation. There are elements within each religion that nourish some kind of violence. That’s what they must be held accountable for. They cannot get away by saying this is misinterpretation. This is like saying that Marx had nothing to do with the atrocities associated with communism, that this was a misinterpretation of Marx by Lenin and Stalin, which is absurd. There is something in Marxism which allows such homicide. So religions cannot be absolved; they are not the havens of peace that each one of them would like to believe. Religion must allow doubt, must allow questions, enquiry and knowledge. But, by that same token, they must also be allowed to have the notion that their existence itself is sacred.
Vajpeyi is a poet and cultural commentator
‘We have to learn from each other, or we are doomed’
Photo: Shailendra Pandey
As a human rights lawyer, you have studied sharia law. What is your reading of sharia?
There’s a very important distinction between certain concepts, which needs to be understood from the outset. The word ‘sharia’ in Arabic means ‘path’, and, more specifically, a path towards water. In the seventh century, that was understood to be the best path that you would take. To a desert people, it was very important to find a way to water, and metaphorically, it means the route you will take towards salvation. The English equivalent, I would say, is the straight and narrow. So, it’s a general notion of the right thing to do. Justice, if you will. And that’s how most Muslims understand the sharia. Even many liberal Muslims. I was listening to an Egyptian opposition figure, who was talking about “our sharia”, and how it must not involve compulsion, must not involve violence. So, the word ‘sharia’ to a Muslim is the right thing to do by God, and that is inviolable. You don’t argue against the sharia, no matter what your beliefs are about liberalism or conservatism.
But there’s another word — fiqh — which means understanding, and that has been understood for centuries by Muslims to be the human attempt to understand God’s purpose and to understand how to achieve this ‘justice’ that is the sharia. Muslims have always understood that fiqh is open to discussion, and it took the collection of the hadiths, the statements about what the Prophet said and did, 250 years to be written down, and there are a number of versions, both Sunni and Shia, which all led to different schools of law coalescing. They all approach the question of how to interpret the sharia in different ways. I don’t think it’s very controversial to say that this is my interpretation. This is actually how it has operated for more than a thousand years. If you look around the world today, I think you would be crazy to believe that there is one understanding of sharia. There are many, and it is that chaos that’s part of the problem. But another way of looking at it is the diversity and richness of the tradition. And this richness of tradition is also a great source of strength; it’s the reason why sharia is still so important 1,400 years after the death of the Prophet.
In the session on sharia, Asghar Ali Engineer talked about there being two types of verses in the Quran: normative and contextual. Could you explain the distinction?
What he’s argued is effectively a similar thing to what I’m saying, that there are certain verses in the Quran, which must be understood as being absolute for all time. There’s a word in Arabic for that called nas, which means that they are inviolable obligations. Then there are certain verses which are clearly revealed in the seventh century for a specific aspect of the Prophet’s life. For example, there are verses which relate to his relations with his wives. Engineer referred to the permission that is given to men to marry up to four times, but the Quran does say that you have to be in a position to keep them, and if you can’t, then you shouldn’t marry more than once. If one wants to look at them in a contextual way, this was a time when everyone was going to war very often, and the number of war widows and orphans was very large. So, polygamy performed a valuable social function. But that valuable social function doesn’t apply in the same way in advanced industrial societies, and it does hold a potential for being greatly abused. So, if one puts that into the historical context, the verses supporting polygamy may have had relevance then, but do not have relevance today.
But who decides whether a verse is normative or contextual?
Well, this is the huge problem. It’s a strength and a weakness of Islam, because Islam obviously does not have a Pope. It doesn’t have a central figure who decides that this is the way that it is. Obviously, some hardliners will say that of course it’s got a central figure — God — and that God has told us what is what. But then, they’re the people who are interpreting what God is saying, and they’re making that decision by cloaking themselves with the authority of God. The reality is that there isn’t a central figure, and I think in this context one has to fall back on the notion of humility. One can’t simply state that one knows what is best for all of humanity. So there isn’t an answer to your question. There’s no point in claiming that Asghar Ali Engineer knows the answer and that his interpretation is absolutely correct. I happen to agree, obviously, with his interpretation about polygamy, and a large number of Muslims would. But when you’re talking about who has the ultimate spiritual authority to decide that, there isn’t anyone.
Is the prescriptive nature of Islam a weakness?
No, I don’t think it is a weakness at all. I think there are certain prescriptions which no longer should be applied. I’m a human rights lawyer; I’m not going to justify amputations of hands for the act of theft. And I’m not alone. The number of Muslim countries which actually carry out these penalties is minimal. That is precisely because people are contextualising this and recognising that one has to take account of economic and social factors as well as the fact that we have moved 1,400 years, and certain standards and expectations of justice have changed in that time.
How important is it to read the texts of other religions in order to enrich your own?
There are many people who would say that it isn’t important at all, because the Quran is entire in itself. My personal view is that it is very important, in fact, to read other texts, because texts don’t exist in isolation, just as human beings don’t. A text only has meaning because of what you bring to it and the society you come from. That is precisely why the interpretations of the Quran will differ from place to place. Because these interpretations differ, I think it is important to recognise that one is a product of one’s influences. There is a famous hadith where the Prophet said, “Seek knowledge even unto China.” One has to be open to experiences. We are living in a world where there are huge amounts of dangers, and there are also huge amounts of opportunities. We have to learn from each other, and if we don’t, we’re doomed. There are people in all other religions who are open to dialogue, and so are Muslims. Anybody who says that Muslims uniquely are not or should not be open to dialogue is wrong in my opinion.
Kadri is a human rights lawyer and author of Heaven on Earth, an examination of sharia law
‘You have to translate religious language into ‘secularese’
Photo: Shailendra Pandey
How would you suggest someone read religious texts in a secular manner?
I would not dream of prescribing to anyone how they read a religious text. I think they should read it however they want to. What I would insist upon, about the nature of every religious text known to me, is that they have multiple interpretations, and the person I distrust is a person, be they a devout believer or total atheist, who says this is the one true interpretation of a holy text. The other point, which is very important, particularly for us in Europe, is to have a way of understanding the message of a religious text in a secular society. In a way, you have to translate this religious transcendental language into what I would call ‘secularese’, into a language that others can understand.
Someone once quite rightly said that the Quran, or indeed the Bible or the Torah, is not an automobile instruction manual. It’s not a precise set of instructions. The Quran, like many holy texts, has multiple, not obviously consistent, messages. Let me give you an example. We have on our Oxford University website an interpretation by a very learned Iranian scholar, Mohsen Kadivar, who says on a very scholarly reading of Islamic law that the Quran prescribes no earthly punishment for apostasy. In the afterlife, yes, you’re going to have a tough time, but no earthly punishment. I think that’s an important statement, and to be quite frank, I have a slightly pragmatic attitude to this. Since I’m in no position to judge what is a correct reading, I favour the interpretation which makes being a Muslim more compatible with a free and open society.
What are some of the pitfalls you guard against?
I think there are two equal and opposite pitfalls. One is the essentialist fallacy, where you make a superficial reading of the holy texts and say, “So the essential message of Hinduism is this…” The opposite danger is what I called raisin picking, where you just take out a few choice quotations that fit comfortably with your liberal convictions. That won’t do either. In other words, we have to have a real interpretation, which sets up some proper historical and literary context on which to build.
In the Anglican church, for instance, there is a General Synod that decides the extent to which the church adapts to modern times. In Buddhism, the decision to allow women into the clergy was made through democratic means when the Buddha’s resistance was overruled by the members of the sangha. How important is the exercise of the followers of a religion democratically deciding the interpretation of its foundational texts, rather than one man — and it generally is a man — making pronouncements?
This, I think, is a question of authority or representation. Who speaks for Catholicism or Islam? It is a complicated question, because people like to say Islam needs its reformation. And Islam can’t have its reformation because it has no central authority. So that makes the matter actually more difficult, paradoxically. It’s easier if you have a clear structure of authority, even if it is undemocratic, to make the reformation. On the other hand, in Shia Islam, it’s fascinating to see the marketplace of ideas between competing Grand Ayatollahs, which is not a democracy, but it’s certainly pluralism. So, I would say that a centralised authority and a decentralised free-for- all each have their advantages and disadvantages. By the way, even in the Catholic church, which clearly is the largest single centralised authority in religious history and is certainly not democratic, many people will disagree with what Pope Benedict XVI says as the last word on their religion.
Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University and a regular columnist with The Guardian
Killing the novel – Review of Midnight's Children
Director Deepa Mehta
Starring Satya Bhabha,
Siddharth Narayan,
Shriya Saran,
Shabana Azmi
WHILE THE commonest observation — to the extent that repeating it is slightly intellectually lazy — on watching a film based on a book is that it is not as good as the original, there are some films that make one re-examine why they liked the book in the first place. Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children, based as it is on a book that was adjudged the greatest to come out of the Commonwealth in 40 years, is one such film.
Rushdie has said that the film is not an adaptation, but a “first cousin” to his masterpiece. If so, it is the dolled-up but incredibly shallow first cousin you smile at in family reunions, may even have a slight crush on, but with whom you cannot sustain a conversation beyond a few pleasantries. When it came out in 1981, Midnight’s Children was unlike anything that had been written before, indulgently playing around with language, narration and the nature of truth and breaking almost every rule of narrative fiction. Although it dealt with a weighty theme — the intertwined histories of its protagonist and postcolonial India — there was a refreshing, almost necessary, lightness that allowed the reader room to breathe and take it all in, and a complete lack of sentimentality. Mehta’s treatment is almost diametrically opposite. It discards almost all of Rushdie’s subtlety and replaces it with a badly written “love letter to India”, finishing with the cringeinducing spectacle of the end credits being played against a backdrop of the Indian map in sepia. Moreover, deprived of Rushdie’s biting social commentary, it becomes a series of events that occur to no particular end, quite like Les Misérables was hamstrung as a musical and film.
Last week, TEHELKA’s literary editor Shougat Dasgupta wrote in his piece on Deepa Mehta that it would be unfair not to acknowledge the “artistic risk Rushdie is taking to reduce a novel that is iconic, without question the great Indian novel (in English), to a screenplay… It is also unfair to Mehta, a considerable filmmaker who infuses the film with her own teeming, emotional style.” True, the fact that an attempt has been made to adapt a novel of this scale into a film is commendable, as is Rushdie’s gumption to roll up his sleeves and help with the unenviable task. But it is baffling that the dynamic duo refused to take the artistic risks that Rushdie took in writing the book.
“What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same,” Rushdie wrote in the novel, which is told through a notoriously unreliable narrator, whose version of the story is repeatedly challenged by his wife-to-be, Padma (who, sadly, is missing from the film). Mehta, however, presents the story as unimpeachably true, narrated not by a 30-year-old fearing the imminent disintegration of his body, but by an eminent Rushdie narrating his life story for no particular reason (it is telling that Rushdie’s narration is the best part of the film, allowing him to use some of his most memorable lines from the novel). This, of course, has its inevitable pitfalls: the question of Saleem’s nose, for instance. We know he was switched at birth, so cannot possibly be related to Aadam Aziz, whose exceptionally large nose he is said to have inherited. By not acknowledging, like Rushdie did, that the story has imperfections, Mehta leaves the question unanswered for viewers who notice the flaw.
This abandonment of imperfection is, with no little irony, possibly the most glaring flaw in the film. Mehta infuses every frame with a forced lyricism, attempting to get the perfect lighting, camera angles and background music. This works at places; the darkness of the Emergency, with the image of Shiva watching over the destruction of the magicians’ ghetto is, if not entirely subtle, beautiful. But it makes the film a typical Deepa Mehta work, robbing this most unique of books of its very personality.
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
