My buddy talked me out of defending that 'Satanic Verses' book ban

I used to think banning 'The Satanic Verses' in India made sense because it was causing riots and hurting people's feelings. My friend Priya from Mumbai sat me down last summer and walked me through how the ban actually gave extremists more power by validating their threats. She pointed out that the book had been legally published in India for months before the protests, so it was the reaction that caused the harm, not the book itself. Then she showed me interviews with Indian writers who said the ban made them scared to write anything critical of religion. I ended up reading the book myself and honestly it's mostly boring literary fiction, not the insult I expected. Now I figure if a book can be discussed openly without the government stepping in, it robs the loudest voices of their platform. Has anyone else changed their mind about a ban after talking to someone from the country involved?

2 comments

2 Comments

shanel1314d ago

Priya sounds like she actually reads things before forming an opinion, which is already more than most people in any country can claim. Next thing you know she'll tell me that the "controversial" part of the book is just a dream sequence about peasants arguing over whether whores are pure, not some coded call to violence. Did she at least buy you a drink before dropping all that common sense on you?

barbara_taylor8314d ago

Wait, did I miss something? Peasants arguing over whether whores are pure? That doesn't sound like the book I read at all. I think you might be mixing up a couple different parts of the story. The controversial section everyone talks about is actually this long conversation between two monks, and they're going back and forth about free will and sin, not really about peasants or whores. There's a dream sequence later on but it's about a guy trying to build a tower to heaven, not any of that other stuff. So Priya might have the right idea about reading it carefully, but maybe she read a different translation or something because what you're describing sounds off to me. Not trying to be that person who corrects everything, but I just wanted to point out that the details don't match up with what I remember.