Screening Jashn-e-Azadi at Presidency University, Kolkata

It can be said that 86/1 College Street, Calcutta, has seen a microcosm of the history of modern India unfold within its walls. Since 1874 when the already fifty-nine year old Presidency College shifted to its current address, future Presidents and Prime Ministers of  India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; Nobel Laureates, freedom fighters, an Academy Award winner, Bharat Ratnas; the leadership of the Naxalite movement of the 60s and 70s; and eminent judges, writers, journalists, scientists and actors, have spent their student days at 86/1.

Two years ago, soon after I joined the institution, the Left Front government upgraded Presidency College to the status of a state University in a last-gasp bid to hold on to the votes of the bhadralok intellectuals. 2012 dawned with no Student Union elections having been held the previous year, and it is in this backdrop that the following events unfold.

Salman Rushdie’s well-publicised ostracism from the Jaipur Literature Festival was met not with outrage in Presi’s canteen addas, but with the absence of even a poster put up in protest. News filtered in of a seminar in Symbiosis University being “threatened.” But little awareness existed among students who were more inclined to read tabloid-like, unputdownable newspapers than their relatively austere counterparts, including The Hindu which broke the story.

The cancellation of the launch of Taslima Nasreen’s book ‘Nirbasan (Exile)’  was almost a non-event for Presi and the earlier cultural censorship meted out to the writings of AK Ramanujan andRohinton Mistry in university syllabi went ignored in a campus that prides itself in upholding liberal values. Bong-haters reading this would smirk and point this out to indignant Bengalis, but pray refrain, because the rest of India has done worse, earning the Indian liberal the unenviable tag of a wimp restricted to fighting its battles on cyberspace alone.

Which is when Sourav Roy Barman, Pratim Ghosal (both second year Political Science students) and I, as good followers of modern subversion created an event page on Facebook on 5^th February 2012 inviting all interested to a screening of ‘Jashn-e-Azadi’ somewhere on the Presidency campus, tentatively on 8^th February.