GUEST POST: Wendy Scarfe's brush with book censorship

Wendy Scarfe is the author of A Mouthful of Petals, a nonfiction account of three years working in an Indian village in the early 1960s. Previously published, it became a classic among good samaritans, particularly in Britain, and was reviewed by The Times, New Statesman and such like.
In this guest post, Wendy reflects on a past brush with book censorship and her experiences writing and publishing a biography amidst political turmoil.

GUEST POST by Wendy Scarfe

A BRUSH WITH BOOK CENSORSHIP

From Federation until the Whitlam years, Australian readers, writers, publishers and booksellers suffered the insult of having the vice squad examine their reading material. Censorship of books – either imported or Australian – was defended as upholding the moral standards of our society: Lady Chatterley's Lover, Portnoy's Complaint, Catcher in the Rye were among those banned. As a result of draconian laws in the First World War All Quiet on the Western Front and A Farewell to Arms were excluded on the grounds of being politically undesirable. It was a long hard battle and eventually, in the early seventies, Australia celebrated the freedom to read books of their choice.
So it was with dismay that we found in 1975 that our biography of Jayaprakash Narayan, published in India by Orient Longman, was in danger of being banned.

The story of our brush with censorship begins with A Mouthful of Petals, re-published in 2020 by Wakefield Press. It is an account of the three years my late husband and I spent in a remote village in Bihar, eastern India.

In the early sixties we had been invited by the venerated political leader and social activist Jayaprakash Narayan to take charge of the educational activities of his ashram and to do what we could to improve the living standards of the desperately impoverished people of Sokhodeora village. This experience began our nearly twenty-year warm friendship with JP (as he is affectionately called throughout India).
After our three years in Bihar we returned to Australia but continued to exchange letters. I returned to India, at JP's invitation, to witness and record the dire Bihar Famine in 1967. In 1969, when JP and his wife Prabhavati visited Australia as guests of the Australian Government for the Gandhi birth celebrations, they stayed with us. When we asked him if he would agree to our writing his biography he demurred at first, but his wife urged him to accept. We showed him the 130-page draft we had compiled from secondary sources and he agreed.

In 1970, during our summer school vacation, we travelled back to India to complete our research.

In Delhi we spent days in Sapru House Library reading and photographing documents from the JP files. There were no photocopiers so we had brought a homemade wooden frame into which we could mount our small Agfa camera. To use it effectively we had to photograph documents outside in the sunlight. Nervous, protective librarians eventually agreed to our taking their precious documents outside.
We read letters between JP and Nehru, accounts of JP's struggles as a trade union leader, and his formation of the Indian Socialist Party after Independence. We interviewed colleagues and friends from their past battles against British rule. From Delhi we went to Varanasi to the Institute of Gandhian Studies where we photographed more documents on the flat roof, placing small stones on the corners of documents to keep them flat in the breeze. On our return to Delhi, we interviewed JP at length.

We returned to Australia where the enlarging of our hundreds of photographs, extracting details from records of interviews and composing the biography took some years. We sent the final manuscript to Longman in London and they forwarded it to Orient Longman in New Delhi who agreed to publish it.

During the years we were writing the book, India had been rocked by tumultuous events. In 1971 there was war with Pakistan. After that the split between east and west Pakistan resulted in a slaughter which drove thousands of refugees into India. JP urged Indira Gandhi to recognise Bangladesh as an independent country. India's economy was in the doldrums and JP asserted that sixty per cent of its people were living in semi starvation. Student protests ended in police shootings. State governments and Indira Gandhi's government were accused of financial corruption.
JP led massive demonstrations demanding acceptance of a People's Charter listing practical measures to boost the stagnant economy and a halt to state use of emergency measures passed during the Pakistan war and never rescinded. In Patna his peaceful demonstration was attacked by police who beat him and broke his arm. In 1974 JP warned Mrs Gandhi that 'repression led to revolt'.

Our editor at Orient Longman, Dr Sujit Mukherjee, urged us to return to India to record 'the clash of giants' between JP and Indira Gandhi.

But we could not do this and cobbled together what we could from newspaper cuttings he sent us. On 12 June 1975, the Allahabad High Court ruled that Indira Gandhi had been guilty of corrupt electoral practices. Her election of 1971 was set aside and she was debarred from contesting any election for six years. A stay of twenty days was allowed for the Congress Party to elect a new leader. JP led a massive non-violent demonstration in Delhi demanding her resignation.
That night at 11 pm, without consulting her party or parliament, Indira Gandhi persuaded the President of India to sign a Proclamation of Emergency. During the night she had police and intelligence officers pick up her victims, many from her parliamentary opposition. JP was arrested at 3 am.

As the day dawned censorship of the media was imposed. She informed the nation that aState of Internal Emergency had been declared and the ‘traitors and fascists’ had been arrested under the Internal Security Act. The nation was in shock.

It was on that morning, in this super-charged atmosphere, that our biography of JP arrived on the desk of the Times of India to be followed, hot on its heels, by the publishers urging that the review euphemistically ‘be held over for the present’.
The Indian press fought back. They continued to publish but with ‘Censored’ written in large black print across empty columns. Various organisations banded together to help JP who, now in solitary confinement, had begun a hunger strike. There were grim stories of the treatment of detainees.
In Australia we worried about his health and his distress. We did what we could. We wrote human rights letters to newspapers and received personal support from Stuart Sayers, editor of the Melbourne Age. We wrote to Indira Gandhi reminding her of her family's long friendship with JP and his wife and pressing her to release information about the wellbeing of her prisoners for ‘without openness the world can only assume that the conditions of imprisonment are an unmentionable offence to all humanity’.

We tried to put aside our frantic concern for our book. But as we continued to hear nothing we asked our Foreign Affairs Department in New Delhi if someone could go to Orient Longman and discover what had become of it.

At first they were alarmed, fearing their diplomatic telexes were being interfered with, but they did as we asked and informed us that to prevent the imposition of book censorship the publishers were secreting the copies of our biography in a godown (warehouse).
We were in despair. We had no faith that our book would survive the mould, rats and white ants we envisaged in an Indian warehouse. Then we received a strange letter from our Foreign Affairs Department informing us that our book would arrive by ‘special messenger’. To our surprise one copy arrived with the postmark of the Delhi Post Office. It simply had the black binding but no dust jacket with JP's name. We were resigned to the fact that it might be the only printed copy we received.

Subsequently we had a tragically whimsical correspondence with our editor at Longman, who filled his air letters with Dickensian references to 'our mutual friend'. Neither of us ever referred to JP by name, as censors frequently opened letters coming in to India. We knew that our personal letters had not reached JP and we protested fruitlessly to the Indian High Commission in Canberra. In early December JP's health collapsed and, on parole, he was taken to hospital for kidney failure. Emergency powers were maintained until 1976 and other detainees remained in gaol.

Our book had been cautiously dribbled out to a few reviewers and the Indian Express wrote: ‘Nobody can hope for better biographers of him than the present authors’.

We were able to read at last in a long review the actual words of the editor of the Times of India – ‘in this surcharged atmosphere … full of passion and controversy … by a piece of consummate bad luck … the present biography of JP arrived at this reviewer’s desk … Quick on the heels of the book came a frantic note from the publishers “that the book be held over for the present”. The advice could not have been more superfluous’. More reviews followed, lauding it as a 'first-class biography' and 'a labour of love'.
JP and a group of colleagues secretly cobbled together the Janata Party. Indira Gandhi was forced to hold an election and was defeated. Our book was quickly published as a paperback and translated into Hindi. Rohan Rivett reviewed it in the Melbourne Age under the heading 'The Socialist Conscience of India'.
JP died in 1979. People honoured him as they had Gandhi. Periods of mourning were declared. Flags flew at half-mast. Condolences were sent from numerous world leaders.

The Indian Express wrote of him ‘Not since Mahatma Gandhi has a single individual without power exerted as much influence in India’.

People wept as his body was cremated on the banks of the Ganges. In Australia, with great sadness, we also remembered him and the years of our friendship.
In 1997 for the celebration of fifty years of Indian Independence, Orient Longman re-published a new abridged JP: His Biography.
Wendy and Allan Scarfe graduated from Melbourne University, gained qualifications as teachers, and taught in Australia, England and India before settling with a young family in Warrnambool. Together they wrote nonfiction books revealing their interest in history, political conflict and social injustice. Separately they wrote poetry, novels and short stories. Allan died in 2016 but Wendy still lives in Warrnambool and continues to write. Her novel Hunger Town was long-listed for the prestigious Nita B. Kibble award for women writers. She has a son and three daughters, and four grandchildren.
Discover more about A Mouthful of Petals via our website or contact us on 08 8352 4455 to purchase a book (or three!). We can post your purchase to your doorstep!