India’s artist fraternity is uniting to devise meaningful responses to growing censorship

India's artists unite against rising censorship, advocating for creative freedom and support for marginalized voices in the arts.

In February this year, Prayog, a children’s library based in Gopalganj, Bihar, organised a children’s literature festival, Udaan, at the Bihar Museum in Patna. Over two days, hundreds of school and college students, educators and parents attended the festival, which was largely considered a success, except for one unsavoury incident. 

On the very first day of the festival, a visitor going through the books at a stall put up by Mumbai-based independent publishing platform Blue Jackal, which specialises in comics and visual narratives, started arguing about the content of several of their children’s books. His attention first landed on the comic book Chudail by Lokesh Khodke from Blue Jackal, which depicts a Brahmin woman being possessed by a demon that shows her how unfair her life is.

“He asked me what the book was about and I explained it in brief. Then suddenly, he said, ‘Oh, so this chudail can only enter a Brahmin woman’s body and not any other?’ I told him that this was a creative writing technique and the writer was using the chudail (witch) as a metaphor, that it’s a conversation between these two characters,” says Shefalee Jain, one of the other members of Blue Jackal who was managing their stall that day. 

A panel from comic book ‘Chudail’ by Lokesh Khodke.

“But he was not there to listen. He started saying our books were anti-Brahmin, anti-national. He started picking up one book after another, rifling through them, and taking panels and dialogues out of context,” says Jain. Soon, the man started threatening to summon other people to shut down the stall and file an FIR. When the Blue Jackal team returned to the festival the next day, their stall had been dismantled. 

The incident spurred the publishing house to look at the landscape of artistic freedom in the country, and the way narratives and voices from the margins are being suppressed because they are deemed “anti-Brahminical” or “anti-national”. There have been several such incidents in the recent past.