Last week, Urdu author, Abdul Rahman Abbas emerged victorious in a decade-long court case. Two paragraphs of his novel, Nakhlistan Ki Talash was found obscene by a girl student in 2005 and a case was lodged against it. In the decade of the struggle, Abbas even spent a night in jail. After he emerged victorious, he decided to fight on. Because the fight, he points out, is a larger one. “It is a strange law to have where anyone can find something obscene and a writer is dragged to court,” the Mumbai-based author says. He points out that books charged under this law almost form a hall of fame, with Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai leading from the front. “This is a British law, which emerged from a morality that doesn’t originate in India but imposed on us. Why should we continue to use it?” Abbas finds echo in Jadavpur University professor, Abhijit Gupta, who teaches a course on censorship in literature. Gupta says that this law, that came from the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 of the colonial United Kingdom has been done away with there.

Abdul Rahman Abbas and Kiran Nagarkar