India's tryst with controversial books
Not something new
The ongoing controversy over BJP leader and former external affair minister Jaswant Singh's book on Jinnah has only brought back to focus the disturbing obsession, or call it culture if you may, for banning books that does not toe the government line. For, India started banning books even before we won independence from the British - the earliest being Rangila Rasul of Pundit Chamupati (banned in 1929) and The Face of Mother India (1936).
While according to Stanley Wolpert, author of Nine Hours to Rama, he has still not been given a reason for the ban even after almost half a century of the ban, the entry of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses into India was blocked by -- of all departments -- the Union Finance Ministry (1988), following objections to the book by a few MPs.
Some of the other books that found themselves in mired in controversy include Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Dominique Lapierre's Freedom at Midnight, Confessions of an Indian Woman Eater by Sasthi Brata and more recently Amen - an Autobiography of a Nun by Sister Jesme.
Text: Sify News Desk
Images: AFP/ Getty Images
Image: Salman Rushdie
