Hurt and Censorship in India Today: On Communities of Sentiments, Competing Vulnerabilities and Cultural Wars

Résumé En

What does it mean, in the Indian context, to say that words can wound or that works of art hurt feelings and offend sensibilities? This chapter examines the specificity of the entanglement of the rhetoric of censorship with the language and performance of emotions in India today, by looking closely at the discourses mobilised around the M. F. Husain controversy, and at the Delhi-based collective of artists, SAHMAT. It aims to understand how agency can be derived from injury, and to analyse how 'hurt' (both the term itself and the emotion that is claimed) is used, strategised and distributed both by groups who mobilise for and against censorship. Indeed, if the work of artists and writers are increasingly targeted in the name of the ‘hurt sentiments’ of certain publics and communities, artists and writers can also stage their struggle against intimidation and censorship in those terms, and construct themselves as a ‘community of sentiment’, an injured minority. Cultural wars are discursive wars, and emotional wars as well.