Freedom of expression in India, as in most other places, has hardly ever been absolute. To speak historically, debate over free speech, whether political, legal or philosophical, has been accompanied with and contingent upon its regulation. The mighty but perpetually anxious state has regulated the Press by various formal and informal modes of censorship. The (paternalist) state has censored in the name of the public which has been conceived as ever infantile, ignorant and vulnerable masses to be misled by the proponents of mischievous ideologies and their dangerous ideas. Recurrently these censorial acts of the state have been preceded by proactive public demand from the leaders of various communities or citizen’s collectives. Indeed, such state acts have been fructified often in collaboration with various other stakeholders like journalists and political activists, who have otherwise been vocal against censorship per se and have been located outside but not far away from the state arena. The story of censorship, in this sense, has not been a story of state-repression alone. Cooption and cooperation of the Press and the resultant instances of „voluntary“ or „informalised censorship“ has been as much part of the story as the web of laws, ordinances and regulations crafted by the state to curb them. Such has been the characteristic of print censorship in the last hundred years, or to be more precise, during the crucial 30 years of late colonial and early post-colonial state in India, according to the book under review which claims to approach the question of direct forms of institutionalized and regulatory censorship by the state without overlooking the active and constitutive roles played by of „mob and market“ (p. 5).

Through a meticulous study of acts of state censorship before and after 1947 when the Indian leaders were at the helm of state institutions (either in Provincial Assemblies purportedly as apprentices learning the grammar of governance before or as new masters in government after), the book re-enacts a familiar historical argument on the nature of state in colonial and post-colonial India. Be it colonial or national, it insinuates without explicit moral charge, no substantive change (for the better) can be noticed in the attitude towards free press and freedom of expression. The fundamental character of censorship regimes controlling the Indian Press and dictating what words to be printed or not to be, what to be expressed or not to be, what to be read or not to be, remains unchanged. The author assertively concludes that there was nothing essentially colonial about censorship; hence, there is no special affinity between an authoritarian rule and a penchant for censorship. This conclusion is predicated on the fact that the national democratic government that dethroned the colonial authoritarian regime showed the same, if not identical, proclivity for censorship. The post-colonial state ruled by erstwhile anti-colonial nationalist elites, continued with the inherited legal-political culture of censorship and, quite evidently, refurbished it in the very First Amendment of the Constitution adopted on behalf of the people of India to choke voices which it found (often reasonably so) unpleasant and disturbing peace and order. What did change after 1947, however, was „the way the press was perceived by the state“ (p. 254). Arguably, the unelected alien colonial state which clearly lacked cultural hegemony and remained perpetually unsure about its legitimacy, also needed the Press, the purveyor and influencer of public opinion, to manage its own public image. The post-colonial state obviously was not dependent on the Press in the same way for its legitimacy. By virtue of the fact that the latter abhorred being seen as no different from the former in its censorial appetite, the post-1947 state discouraged the formal practice of censorship. But, it intensified the colonial regime’s practice of informalization or what can be now called „democratization of censorship“ (p. 260) in which the state is not the sole but, at best, only a co-author of censorship along with pressure groups and mobs often raising the bogey of hurting „community-sentiment“ and thereby inviting the state to act against the threat to „public order and peace“. Written in elegantly simple prose, themes of each chapter in this monograph are carefully selected and persuasively argued to reach at the broader picture summarized above.

The book begins by weighing the power of printed words. Examining the transcripts of oral testimonies and memoirs of the participants in the anti-colonial movement, chapter one illuminatingly assesses which publication attracted and moved them, how they procured them and how they resisted or subverted censorship. Taking the cases of „Congress Pledge of Independence“ and Bhai Paramanand’s fiery speeches, Chapter two assesses the rhetoric and record of Congress governments in protecting or prosecuting the free speech during the brief but important period of provincial autonomy (1937–1939) on the one hand, and highlights the relative importance of content and context in determining precise cases of censorship on the other. The next two chapters focus on little known publications (1920s–1940s) by Anglo-American writers which were banned or demanded to be banned for criticizing Indian social practices and religious icons and beliefs, especially of Muslims. The following two chapters look at the governments’ policy of censorship during the World War II years and explain the mechanics of news censorship by taking the Indian Press on board, or what was called „voluntary censorship“. The next three chapters deal with post-1947 India: censorship of report and rumor in the press pertaining to Partition violence; the First Amendment (1951) to the Indian Constitution which enlarged the scope of state censorship on three new grounds („public order“, „incitement to offence“ and, „friendly relation with foreign states“); and, finally, a case study of public controversy in 1956 over a book reprinted by Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan – a charitable trust supported by the Indian government, which touched upon the life of Prophet Muhammad.

Well organized chapters and cogently formulated arguments read perfectly convincing till one goes along the authorial decision to bypass, or alternatively, privilege one set of sources over the other. Undoubtedly rich in its archival depth, the book, in order to show continuity in the regimes of censorship between pre- and post-1947, effectively depends on those English publications which were primarily related to instigating „communal“ or „social“ tension and thereby potentially causing public disturbance. It ignores voluminous „seditious“ or anti-colonial political publications, which included almost all genres, from poem, story, essay and news to photograph and cartoon, especially in various Indian language newspapers and periodicals. One may wonder, would a comparison of the operations of colonial and post-colonial censorship regimes with a focus on „seditious“ and the „vernacular“, had they been included in the book, have no bearing on the author’s analysis and judgment, say on non-coloniality of censorship? Was censorship experience the same for English and Indian language publications and journalists? Did the fact of linguistic hierarchy make no difference in the Indian history of censorship? Can a conclusion derived on the basis of the English press, be generalized for all? As the only reference to bhasha or the Indian language press is through Raghuvendra Tanwar’s monograph dealing with Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi newspapers1 and all memoirs of journalists are about English journalism, the only exception being ex-revolutionary and Hindi writer Yashpal’s English interview about nationalist youths’ enchantment with censored literature, a book excavating an exceedingly wide range of English sources but immaculately avoiding non-English language sources on the same subject should have been titled War Over (English) Words.

Note:
1 Raghuvendra Tanwar, Reporting the Partition of Punjab. Press, Public and Other Opinions, Delhi 2006.