Earlier this week, the first bench of the Madras High Court, while hearing a public interest litigation by S Tamilselvan, president of the Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers and Artists Association, on behalf of beleaguered writer Perumal Murugan, made an observation that threw fresh light on a conflict that was sowed in the very first amendment of the Constitution of India.Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice MM Sundresh observed: “Our largest concern is extra-judicial groups wielding power to decide what is right and what is not right, and asking authors what to write and what not to write.”To that soaring testimony to creative freedom, the court added that it would not go by media reports, choosing to hear directly from the author of One Part Woman.The novel, about a childless couple set in pre-Independence India, alludes to a ritual connected with the Sri Arthanareeswarar temple at Tiruchengode in Namakkal district, the author’s home. When originally published in Tamil in 2010, it hardly made any trouble for the author who is held in high esteem for his body of work. Its English translation seems to have proved more febrile.Incidentally, Independent India’s earliest “national crisis” sprang from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, each exercising its right to free expression. One was the left wing monthly magazine, Crossroads, edited by Romesh Thapar, and the other the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser.India’s first amendment that came into force incorporated the conflict by placing restrictions on free speech in June 1951. The first amendment of the American constitution, adopted in December 1791, was the exact opposite.It read: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”In an excellent assessment of the first amendment to India’s Constitution published in Sarai Reader in 2004, Lawrence Liang, the Bengaluru-based open source advocate, dissects the effect. “…in many ways it also signalled the kinds of battles that would take place between the project of nation-building and the sphere of the media” and promoted national security and sovereignty over the promotion of democratic institutions.“Very often the assumption of desirable forms of speech presumes a pre-tailored relationship between media and the properly constituted public sphere (much like the imagination of the seamless web), and a plea to the state to rule out undesirable forms of speech abandons the site of politics and converts it into a site of regulation that will merely heighten the crisis rather than resolve it,” is how Liang concludes, telescoping the primary conflict in the heart of the amendment.Crises of contentious viewpoints and their dissemination in contemporary India, boosted by a liberalized economy, the telecom revolution and the internet since the 1991 economic liberalisation programme, has only made the regulation testier. India’s 1.2 billion strong population makes it easy to pump prime a sizeable army for every contentious viewpoint.A relatively more credible body of persons comprising the Central Board of Film Certification trooped out of their official positions following the resignation of its chief Leela Samson. At the heart of the controversy was a contention that has been causing a lot of vacuous sound and fury.Samson’s team certified the mega Amir Khan grosser PK for public viewing. PK is a facile comedy that takes equal-opportunity potshots at the blind faith of several people belonging to various religions. However, the censor board under Samson refused to give similar clearance to MSG: The Messenger of God, a clumsily made hagiographic film that exalts a controversial spiritual guru as a super hero.Samson, the daughter of India’s Jewish vice-admiral (Retd) Benjamin Abraham Samson, is perceived to be close to the Gandhi family of the Congress party. The political pull and thrust is evident in the new team that replaced the old at the board. A majority of them are affiliated or close to the Bharatiya Janata Party of prime minister Narendra Modi.After the censor board rejected a public viewing certification for MSG, an arbitration committee quickly cleared it for public release on February 6. This was what hastened Samson and her team’s resignation en masse. It can be reasonably assumed to be a case of the current political dispensation purging a body set up by the earlier party in power.However, “reasonably” is a questionable word; a word that was added to the first amendment in India that restricted free speech with several restrictions in 1951. It is good to recollect that Nehru’s cabinet was as fearful of the extreme Left as of the extreme Right even then, when the country was still limping from Partition and caught in the thick of nation building. Nehru feared that the unreasonably vague idea that “reasonable” suggests might be interpreted differently by different judges; as in the celebrated American case of 1988 that pitched pornography publisher Larry Flynt against Jerry Falwell, an evangelical Southern Baptist priest, whom Flynt’s Hustler crucified in a tasteless parody.Falwell sought damages for “intentional infliction of emotional distress” and sued Flynt for $40 million. The Supreme Court ruled that despite the patently outrageous parody against Falwell, Flynt had the right to print it. Right to offend was thus firmly established.When Milos Forman made The People vs Larry Flynt, the Chicago Sun-Times famed film critic Robert Ebert noted the far-ranging effect the ruling made for free press and the freedom of expression in America, in his review of the film.“The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hustler case came under attack at the time, but consider this: If Falwell had won his suit against Flynt, this newspaper would be fundamentally different. The editorial cartoons could not make fun of public officials. The op-ed columns could not risk offending. The lawyers might have questioned a recent review in which I said a film should be cut up into ukulele picks; after all, that might have hurt the director’s feelings. And Falwell himself might not have been able to broadcast his sermons, because they might have offended atheists (or you, or me).”Tell that to Perumal Murugan. Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasreen and several other acclaimed writers who were exiled from former eastern bloc countries and the Soviet Union benefitted from universal and global support of free speech advocates and other writers. But, despite the support of writers within India, Murugan is unlikely to prefer exile to guard his writer’s right.In fact his deeply affecting statement on Facebook said it all. “Writer Perumal Murugan is dead … He will continue to live as a teacher.”But that initial reaction underlines the levels of privilege and vulnerability a writer faces when he practices his trade in a small corner of India, writes in his native language and is not otherwise connected to a wider world. Murugan wrote about the world he has known forever. It is telling that he chooses to abandon writing than stay hounded in his home in Tiruchengode. The professor of Tamil at the Government College hopes to at least teach and make a living and keep his family together.Murugan’s reluctance to be a cultural hero for the world at the cost of abandoning his home and hearth, the heart of his works, tells you of the less flamboyant and more existential troubles of the less privileged writer writing in an Indian language. This is the fear that Nehru recognised when he relented to water down the right to free expression in the first amendment.It is a reasonable fear that all the years of Independent India’s nation building has not surmounted.“I will stand by him and I am prepared to take all legal consequences, but he has been deeply hurt and humiliated. He has said he wants all his books to go out of print. I have been his publisher for 20 years and he is my friend, so I respect that, but we will see what he decides,” Kannan Sundaram, the writer’s Tamil publisher told Guardian.The shy writer and his brave publisher are equally to be feted for their embrace of decency as much as to be honoured for their fear for life and love. That is why the Madras High Court’s concern about extra-judicial groups wielding power to decide what is right and what is not right and asking authors what to write and what not to write holds out hope. After all, the first amendment too started its journey when the State of Madras banned Crossroads. Flynt and his lawyer were shot at by a sniper, leaving Flynt in a wheelchair for life.In The People vs Larry Flynt, Flynt tells his lawyer that he is a dream client for the latter because he is “fun, rich and always in trouble.” After the landmark verdict, Flynt said: “If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, it will protect all of you.” Indian state must similarly protect precious writers like Murugan. They are not fun, rich or famous to be sure. But they are not scumbags either.(The writer, a former journalist, now travels and writes)