KOCHI: The Kerala High Court has stayed for two months further proceedings in the defamation case against Congress MP Shashi Tharoor pending in the additional chief judicial magistrate court, Thiruvananthapuram. The defamation case was filed by Sandhya Sreekumar of Petta, alleging that the senior Congress leader and writer portrayed women of the Nair community in bad light in his book ‘The Great Indian Novel’.
Justice Gopinath P issued the order on the petition filed by Shashi Tharoor seeking to quash the proceedings. The court issued the interim order to stay the proceedings for two months, "as prayed for", the order said.
The complainant stated that a sentence in the book had brought considerable shame to her and the Nair community to which she belongs especially its womenfolk.
Tharoor submitted that the complainant had taken a stray sentence out of context, quoted and interpreted it as defamatory. The complete reading of the part in which the sentences appear in the book would clearly establish that it was not used in a derogatory sense and with a malicious intent to malign the Nair community, to which the author himself belongs, or its womenfolk, as baselessly alleged by the complainant.
According to Tharoor, his mother is a Nair woman and he has two sisters both of whom are Nair women. Hence, it is unthinkable to even in the remotest degree that the intention of him was to malign, belittle and disrespect women of the Nair community, to which even his mother and sisters belong.
The petition stated that the author is clearly speaking of the times when the Indian women enjoyed a pre-eminent position in the social setup where they have even enjoyed the freedom to choose their preferred sexual partners other than their husbands. The author is describing it through the fictional conversation of the characters that in ancient India a woman enjoying sexual pleasures with any one of her choices outside the marriage, excluding the fertile period during which she was only supposed to have a sexual relationship with her husband, was not considered against dharma. The author emphasizes that the prevailing concept of morality is actually not the real Hindu concept. On the other hand, it is a legacy of both the Muslim invasion and the superimposition of Victorian prudery on the people who were already puritanized by purdah.
The case of the Nair women was cited as a thing of the past and he never portrayed them as leading an immoral life, stated the petition.