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| Ghati and the power of taboo words |
| Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi Jan 19, 2010, 00:48 IST |
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We’d become Jews, Japs, Niggers. We weren’t before. We fancied ourselves boulevardiers, raconteurs, renaissance men.” The word “niggers” has the explosive force of a bomb, in the opening lines of HM Naqvi’s Home Boy, a novel about the lives of three young Pakistanis in post 9/11 America.
“Nigger” acquired its present-day power to offend over a period of decades. Joseph Conrad could use it in The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) without pejorative emphasis, but by the 1920s, “nigger” had become a racially-loaded, offensive insult. Today, the black community might use it, and it appears regularly in hip-hop lyrics, but it carries the force of taboo.
No writer would use “nigger” casually as a synonym for African-American, black or coloured unless he or she meant to inflame passions, and Naqvi uses “nigger” deliberately to emphasise the degree to which his protagonists have become pariahs. (Pariah is another interesting word: Paraiyars were a caste of drummers in South India; the British began to use “pariah” as a synonym for all people considered low-or-outcaste.)
Readers might flinch when they encounter the word “nigger” in Naqvi’s Home Boy, but the Pakistani author is unlikely to have to defend his choice of words in the courts. The principle of free speech will triumph over any sense of social outrage. Murzban Shroff hasn’t been as lucky.
Shroff published a collection of short stories, Breathless in Bombay, in 2008. In This House of Mine, one character refers to another as a “ghati”, which is the derogatory term for Maharashtrians who come from the ghats, often used to signify someone who is uncultured, backward and crude. “Ghati” is used in context by Shroff in the way it’s used on the streets of Mumbai today — as a deliberate insult, placed in the mouth of an especially unpleasant character.
Like “habshi” (derived from Abyssinian, used to describe anyone of dark and therefore “African” complexion), “chinky” (derived from Chinese, used to describe anyone from the North-East with “Chinese” features) and a dozen other terms, “ghati” is taken from the Indian lexicon of fine-tuned racial abuse. It’s an unpleasant term, abusive in the same way that “chamar” is: “Chamar” technically describes someone who works with leather, “ghati” describes someone who comes from the ghat, but usage lends these terms their specific derogatoriness.
Vijay Mudras, the activist who filed the case against Shroff, argues that the use of the term is, under Section 153(B) of the Indian Penal Code, likely to spread communal disharmony.
Sections 153A and 153B of the Indian Penal Code cover, respectively, “acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony” and “imputations, assertions prejudicial to national integration”. They were not intended by their framers to act as curbs on free speech, or to limit the average citizen’s right to offence — they were meant to set curbs on writings and acts that might spread hatred, be seditious, or directly lead to violence. When it comes to literature, though, these specific sections of the IPC have been increasingly misused, as has the provision against obscenity — to the detriment of writers like Shroff.
The battle over “ghati” is as absurd as the battle, some years ago, over the late Habib Tanvir’s use of the term “ponga pundit”. Tanvir was taken to court on the grounds that he was insulting all pundits by describing some pundits as “ponga”, or corrupt. He won that specific case, but over the years, sections 153A and 153B have been used as a block on free speech, and perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate the legal worth and usage of these sections.
What Mudras might want is the eradication of the term “ghati” from common discourse — and what all of us might find desirable is a society where terms like “chinky”, “ghati”, “habshi” etc are found unacceptable in common conversation.
But writers and artists reflect the world they see around them, as Premchand did centuries ago when he — accurately — used “chamar” as a term of abuse in his stories, as Sharatchandra did when he had a high-caste Bengali use “mleccha” as an insult to those of a lower-caste. That’s exactly what Shroff does; his character uses the term “ghati” for what it is, a prejudiced insult. It has, and should have, the same force as the word “nigger” does in Naqvi’s Home Boy: It should make you, the reader, flinch, and it might make you think a little about taboo language and racial prejudice.
The difference lies in the penalties imposed on the writer. Naqvi won’t (and shouldn’t) face charges. Shroff faces threats and will spend his time and resources fighting a case in order to protect his right to accurately reflect the prejudices of the civil society he sees around him. Shroff may well win — historically, the Indian courts have been active in their protection of free speech. But for a country like India, where we claim to value free speech, there is nothing healthy about the fact that this author has to make his case in the first place.
nilanjanasroy@gmail.com
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