Striking out the need for erasure

Among the more pointless things one could do in this woke century is to attempt to sanitise the literary works of dead writers, to rid them of racist references, caste slurs, politically incorrect phrases, perhaps even inconvenient truths. Last week, a storm broke out in the teacup of children’s literature after the estate and publishers of late British author Roald Dahl announced that his books would be republished after redacting the un-woke words he was wont to use — such as ‘ugly’ and ‘fat’, to name just the least debatable ones. The publishers hastily backtracked the move after it was roundly criticised by writers and celebrities including Salman Rushdie, who called it ‘stupid censorship’.

Considering that Dahl invented words like ‘scrumdiddlyumptious’, ‘humplecrimp’ and ‘snozzcumber’, it was nothing short of courageous for the editors to have volunteered to find alternatives. For, throughout his writing life, Dahl was relentlessly racist, anti-semitic and misogynistic. He created an uproarious world of feral kids, monstrous mothers and despicable uncles with insensitive allusions to transport black folks in boxes with holes to breathe.

Dahl is not the first dead writer whose estate has tried to clean up his or her works to make them politically correct for the new century. Dahl’s family apologised for him two years ago on account of his perspectives on Jews. The estate of Enid Blyton, another popular name in children’s literature, revised her work to rid it of xenophobic references to ‘golliwogs’ and ‘ugly black faces’. The publishers of Agatha Christie’s most popular novel And then there were None was originally published as Ten Little N*******.

Why, Shakespeare himself was subjected to erasure as long ago as 1807. The man who attempted that task was Thomas Bowdler. He set out to rewrite the Bard without the words that “cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” Not only words, Bowdler also removed entire plot points that were deemed to be unsuitable for the early 19th century. So there were no blasphemous exclamations or references to concubines. Where race-related plot elements could not be removed, such as in Othello, Bowdler put instructions in the text that the episode be read aloud not in the “parlour but the cabinet”! It was for doing this to Shakespeare that Bowdler’s name became the source of the word ‘bowdlerise’.

Bowdlerising a dead writer’s works has nothing to do with literature. Politics or marketing is almost always the driver. Sometimes such an endeavour can alter the basic character of the work to subvert the meaning intended by the writer, as it happened in the case of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Both were deeply political works in their original form but were turned into harmless children’s fiction by abridgement. The present controversy in Uttar Pradesh over caste slurs in Tulsidas’s 16th century work Ramcharitmanas fits exactly into such a template.

Often, the desire to revise is motivated by a need to keep the franchise going, as in the case of Blyton and Dahl. Both continue to be popular long after their death and the publishers would want to milk it for all its worth. Sometimes, however, a writer just does not lend himself to revision. For his words are his alone. Could you, for instance, revise the comedic outbursts of the legendary Robin Williams and still make him funny?