In February this year, Prayog, a children’s library based in Gopalganj, Bihar, organised a children’s literature festival, Udaan, at the Bihar Museum in Patna. Over two days, hundreds of school and college students, educators and parents attended the festival, which was largely considered a success, except for one unsavoury incident.

On the very first day of the festival, a visitor going through the books at a stall put up by Mumbai-based independent publishing platform Blue Jackal, which specialises in comics and visual narratives, started arguing about the content of several of their children’s books. His attention first landed on the comic book Chudail by Lokesh Khodke from Blue Jackal, which depicts a Brahmin woman being possessed by a demon that shows her how unfair her life is.

“He asked me what the book was about and I explained it in brief. Then suddenly, he said, ‘Oh, so this chudail can only enter a Brahmin woman’s body and not any other?’ I told him that this was a creative writing technique and the writer was using the chudail (witch) as a metaphor, that it’s a conversation between these two characters,” says Shefalee Jain, one of the other members of Blue Jackal who was managing their stall that day.

“But he was not there to listen. He started saying our books were anti-Brahmin, anti-national. He started picking up one book after another, rifling through them, and taking panels and dialogues out of context,” says Jain. Soon, the man started threatening to summon other people to shut down the stall and file an FIR. When the Blue Jackal team returned to the festival the next day, their stall had been dismantled.

The incident spurred the publishing house to look at the landscape of artistic freedom in the country, and the way narratives and voices from the margins are being suppressed because they are deemed “anti-Brahminical” or “anti-national”. There have been several such incidents in the recent past.

A book discussion on The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir, featuring activist and academic Anand Teltumbde at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai, was cancelled last month. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), under the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, denied permission to screen Da’lit Kids, a Malayalam animated short by film students Appu Soman and Tony Joppan, at the Animela Animation Festival in Mumbai last month.

All these incidents — by no means an exhaustive list — are noted in a statement drafted by Blue Jackal in consultation with several members of the comic-book community, including independent publishers, children’s book publishers, individual artists and illustrators and several organisations that work in the children’s literary space. Titled ‘Collective Statement Against Recurring Stifling of Creative and Critical Voices Across the Country’, the statement has been signed by around 300 members of the artistic fraternity in India, and calls out the “rising culture of intolerance and suppression”.

“We position these incidents within the rising suppression and censorship of the work of artists, authors and educators — especially our rights and freedoms to dissent against power and injustice. We then strongly assert that these disruptions set a dangerous precedent if left unaddressed in the current political climate and ponder about the permitted limits of inclusivity that institutional spaces allow,” the statement reads.

The intent is also to go beyond recording these incidents and formally protesting them to find ways in which people and organisations working with marginalised communities can formulate standard ways of responding and safeguarding themselves against threats of violence and disruption. “I am supporting the statement and want to see if there is a way a process can be set up to respond in meaningful ways when something like this happens — a protocol of sorts with best practices, legal advice, how to push back and how much,” says artist Rohan Chakravarty.

There is also the question of how much institutional support they can expect, says Jain. When the incident in Patna happened last month, the Blue Jackal team was disappointed in the way the festival organisers and even other attendees failed to stand by them or present solutions in a unified way (Prayog, which organised the Udaan festival, declined to comment).

“We don’t want to let it go in silence, because there is an endless number of such incidents that happen in university spaces and outside of them, which are hushed up because of fear. And so such elements get more and more emboldened. So we want to push back,” says Jain.

Institutions are constantly treading a thin line between protecting themselves and the idea of artistic freedom, says V. Ravichandar, the Bengaluru-based founder of cultural spaces like the Bangalore International Centre and Sabha BLR, and a key organiser of festivals like the Bangalore Literature Festival and BLR Hubba. “This is a continuous challenge, and a lot of us are self-censoring and playing it safe. ‘Will this event cause problems? Do we have all the representative voices? Is this a contentious issue?’ This is something that crops up in our minds and conversations again and again,” says Ravichandar, who believes institutions should not be blindsided by people taking offence or making threats of disruption.

“At BIC, we adopt a pragmatic stance, prioritising the institution’s interests and its role as a balanced platform for diverse voices. The goal is to live to fight another day,” he adds.

One of the ways some members of civil society are pushing back is by simply relocating and rescheduling events that are cancelled without any explanation by organisers. Recently, the Mumbai-based citizen group Mumbai For Peace started a series of lectures called ‘Lectures that Needed to Happen’ after a talk and reading by actor Naseeruddin Shah was suddenly cancelled by University of Mumbai. The group quietly rescheduled the event and held it at a different venue. Just last week, feminist historian Uma Chakaravarti’s lecture at SNDT university was cancelled and later held by Mumbai For Peace at another location.

“We had a workshop a few days ago on being a response team when something like this happens, and also as an act of solidarity with those who belong to marginalised communities and are feeling threatened and vulnerable,” says Sujata Gothoskar, a Mumbai-based activist who is a member of Mumbai For Peace. “There has to be some kind of pushback and assertion of love and solidarity and understanding rather than the hate that’s happening all around us.”

The writer is an independent journalist based in Bengaluru.