Freedom's struggle

Book review of Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories from India's Best Writers

It’s transient. It’s hard to define. And its absence causes wounds too deep to fill. In today’s polarised times, freedom is one of the hardest concepts to comprehend, let alone an inalienable human right. This makes  Our Freedoms,  an anthology of recent writings on freedom edited by Nilanjana S Roy a timely and provocative read.

The questions different writers pose in the anthology are interesting. Can Dalits ever be free from the confines of caste? Is freedom a privilege or a right? Over time, philosophers have long pondered the meaning of freedom: The Romantics posited that every human is always free to create art, dream and imagine and the Stoics believed that regardless of external circumstances, the self is always free. For ancient Greeks, it represented the opposite of slavery. For lower castes in India even today, it is a privilege only an elite few dream of. Historically, however, freedom has always had political undertones, seen more as a great marker of boundaries than as a right.

Each essay, short story and poem in Our Freedoms approaches the concept of freedom differently but shares a common thread — how do we define the boundaries that take away our freedom? Annie Zaidi’s essay “Bread, Cement, Cactus” skilfully weaves a narrative around the different chains that ensnare individuals — class, community and tribe. Along with these ruminations, she ably weaves in a parallel narrative exploring the idea of home as the one place where one can truly be free. Raghu Karnad sees this unbounded freedom in Shaheen Bagh, the sort of freedom that our founding fathers envisaged in which caste and creed are subsumed by a common love for the country. Aanchal Malhotra’s essay on freedom fighter Dr Usha Mehta is interesting in this regard. As a 22-year-old, her head and heart full of the heady call for freedom from British rule, she broadcast an underground nationalist news programmes from, as the announcements said, “somewhere in India.” Evading the authorities that threatened to stifle her voice with the courage and decisiveness of a seasoned revolutionary, she ran the programme for three months. It didn’t matter that when they were eventually caught by the British, she spent most of her 20s in jail. To her it was a small price to pay for the ideals of liberty, equality and justice.

Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories from India’s Best Writers 

Author: Nilanjana S Roy

Publisher: Juggernaut

Pages: 328; Price: Rs 599

In other writings as well, and not entirely unexpectedly, Shaheen Bagh emerges as a metaphor for freedom, one that is being threatened by the increasing polarisation of Indian society. This is in fact a theme oft-repeated in the anthology. Suketu Mehta’s essay on Gandhi’s favourite  bhajan, Vaishnava jana to  deplores how the essence of Gujarati identity that it glorifies — its spirit of inclusion, empathy and respect has been significantly eroded by right-wing ideology. In his essay “Agendas”, Roshan Ali examines the fraught issue of polarisation from, for the want of a better word, the Other. It’s a fascinating account of a man who is himself somewhat of an outsider to his religion, watching members of his own family and community becoming increasingly polarised in the face of communal hatred.

Others deal with freedom’s rather annoying tendency to shift just as one is getting used to it. Salil Tripathi’s essay on the Emergency makes the reader wonder if perhaps people better understand the value of liberty only after they have lost it. In fact, this is what makes the inclusion of the essays of Perumal Murugan and Yashica Dutt so thought-provoking. They posit that freedom is a privilege that only the upper castes enjoy. The others, Mr Murugan says in his essay, can never cast off the yoke of caste. Ms Dutt writes about the price Dalits pay to simply survive, leading the reader to wonder whether they are being tone deaf by even thinking of freedom as an inalienable human right.

Read in its entirety, this brave anthology paints a picture of Liberty as a changeable creature; her erosion often so insidious that we do not realise it until it is too late. However, if freedom is a dynamic state of being that requires constant work and vigilance, so is anarchy. The emergent idea from this anthology, so admirably put together by Ms Roy, is that the two exist on a continuum. Few writers in this volume have examined if at all liberty and freedom need any rules or boundaries. Perhaps this is what makes TM Krishna’s essay “Raag Swaraj” possibly the most interesting one in the book. He writes about the conflict in music between form and freedom (creativity). The two are always seen as being at loggerheads, form being the rulebook that keeps freedom in check. A good musician, he says, finds the freedom within the form; he interprets the given notes of a single  raga in myriad creative ways. This is how in classical music, the puritans remain unfree their entire lives while creative artistes roam untethered, making their music breathe and pulsate with life. This, he writes, is his dream for India. Amen to that.