The Tongue Set Free. To be honest, I fell in love with the title when I saw the book in a friend’s home. It reminded me of a Tamizh idiom I heard a school ayah tell another when I was about six. “Naakile elumbu ille… eppadi venanona avan pesavan…” I wasn’t interested in the gossip as much as the discovery that a tongue has no bone and hence it may speak what it wants. My friend who saw me look at it wistfully offered the book to me. Until then I had never heard of Elias Canetti.
I acquired the book in 2002 and there it stayed in my book shelf under the category of a book to be read soon. But in the last few weeks, the book has called out to me with a beacon-like intensity. Canetti, a Nobel Prize winner of literature, is one of the 20th century’s foremost writers and social critics. His Crowd and Power, a book that deals with the dynamics of crowds and how they acquire a pack behaviour and what drives them to obeying blindly the dictates of rulers and power, should be made essential reading in India. For Canetti draws a parallel between ruling and paranoia in very lyrical but angry prose.
The Tongue Set Free is actually the first part of his childhood reminiscences. While I have always been partial to memoirs especially of writers and painters, this is a memoir that shows us what made Canetti the writer and thinker he became. The title itself is drawn from Canetti’ s earliest memory. Of a young man who makes the two-year-old Canetti stick out his tongue everyday and then holds a jack knife out saying, “Now we’ll cut off his tongue.” Every day the child is more and more scared not knowing when the young man may actually slice his tongue. It was a threat to keep the baby Canetti from talking about his nurse meeting the young man. However, as Canetti writes: The threat with the knife worked; the child quite literally held his tongue for ten years.
We Indians are living in a strange time where writers whose life and breath are words are driven to shrug aside the accolades received for creating what they have with their blood and soul. It is the protest of the conscience keepers of the society against what is a demonic wave of intolerance. These are stalwart writers and their gesture is that of the clenched fist protesting against the establishment. While I do salute and applaud these writers for standing up and returning a national honour, I believe our protest against where our politics are leading us needs to percolate into little villages cut away from the goings-on in intellectual India. It is here that I think writers need to remember that our only ally and weapon are words.
So let us write more; let us write about what worries us. Let us write about what is going to turn this country into a hell hole if we don’t prevent it from happening. Let us write in languages people read in and not just English that is truly comprehended by a miniscule segment of us. Let us go down to the people who need to be told what is going on rather than just embarrass a set of bureaucrats and government appointees. Let us fill handbills, flex boards, newspaper columns; let us write stories, poems and essays that will make people listen and absorb. Let us set our tongue free.
Anita Nair can be reached at info@anitasattic.com