Faramerz Dabhoiwala: “We can’t seem to agree on free speech at all”

The historian and author of What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea on censorship, giving voice to the powerless, and how getting sidetracked into fighting about free speech is a distraction from real political problems

Your new book’s subtitle is provocative. Were you interested in centralising the general acceptability of ‘free speech’ without considering its potential dangers?

Historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala teaches at Princeton University (Jaipur Literature Festival)

I became interested in this idea [free speech] because of a fundamental, underlying notion that prevails globally today: that we all value free speech. But that’s only one side of the story. The other side is that we can’t seem to agree on it at all. We’re all fighting all the time on what it is, which is why I say it’s chaotic, because we can’t even define it properly. Through this book, I wanted to find a way to define this idea.

The other importance of looking at this idea historically is you can’t figure this out — or pursue it — just as a legal or philosophical question, it just doesn’t work. You need to understand how we got here and why we are living in this state of confusion, which is what my book tries to show -- that its roots are many, in different places; that free speech isn’t a coherent idea. There’s a great tension here between the idea of free speech as a simple right and the way that communication really works in the world, which is that it’s an action. And like all actions, it can be good or bad, depending on the outcome, depending on your intentions, and so on.

496pp, ₹1999; Allen Lane

The book begins with several proverbs on the danger of the idea.

It comes through in texts of Christianity and other religions as well. Yes, absolutely.

How have you juxtaposed the exercising of this right to free speech as found in documented history vis-à-vis the orality you note at the beginning of the book?

First, for most of history, people didn’t have much in the way of writing technology, let alone print. So, speech, verbal communication, has been the most important for most of history. Until very recently.

But the second important point is that when other technologies came along, like writing, with printing especially, that transformed the question of ‘free speech’, and how ideas circulate and the dangers and the benefits of free communication. So, we see that in the 18th century, with print, we see it with the invention of radio, mass media, and television. And now, we’re living in a new communications revolution. We have been in it for the last 10-20 years, being informed by the Internet and social media as the main forms of discourse, including political. And that has created all sorts of new, different difficulties that I try to explain are part of our confusion in defining free speech and why it’s dangerous.

It’s dangerous in two different ways. It’s dangerous in a good way, which is that it can give voice to the powerless, it can advance good causes. And throughout history, as I show, it has been used that way by women, by oppressed peoples, by abolitionists against slavery, by campaigners for all sorts of fantastic causes, including Indian nationalists throughout the colonial period. That’s a good reason it’s dangerous. Because it can change things for the better.

But there has always been the problem that it is a slogan that can be weaponised to harm. And that’s less well understood. We all want to be for free speech, which becomes a problem or what seems like a problem, because you don’t know where to draw the line, and if you want to draw lines, how do you do it? That’s where it’s all inconsistent. But I must add that in the last decade or so, free speech has been attacked, destroyed, and abused in all sorts of terrible ways in autocracies around the world, which is why it’s a serious political issue across the world today.

Would you say that part of its dangerousness can be attributed to (a) when it comes under attack, no one gets to say or do anything, and (b) it can further be curtailed by an attack on dissident figures? Say, Charlie Hebdo or Salman Rushdie. Also, in the age of social media, people don’t look inwards before exercising their right to free speech, endangering others who may be doing it for the better, ‘good’.

There are different kinds of free speech relating to different kinds of expression. Free speech for artists — and for literature — is different from freedom of speech for political discussion. And they’re different in many ways. One is simply the rules of speech. For example, in a political discourse, above all, you shouldn’t be allowed to spread lies, that you should be arguing based on evidence and indulge in a reasonable debate, and not demonise other people, declaring them less patriotic or anything like that. That’s dangerous demagoguery. And we find that a lot in Indian political discourse.

On the other hand, in art and literature, the literal truth is not really the main point. Lies are not a concept when it comes to freedom of speech in artistic discussion. You’re supposed to play with the literal truth. That’s what makes art provocative, inspiring, and interesting in different ways. The boundaries and the rules are completely different in this part of the world because the purpose of this kind of speech — and expression — is different altogether. Having differentiated that, no one should be censoring works of literature and the arts. Rushdie’s case is an infamous one. It’s a horrible injustice done to an artist. And, more than that, violence against this poor man, who’s a great writer; he deserved none of that.

One can sense that in the book that you’re dealing with free speech so sensitively that your submission could’ve been taken the other way: that you’re not for free speech. Was that a dilemma you faced while working on this book?

I think part of the aim that I had was simply to bring out that free speech is a rich subject, that it’s one such subject that everyone thinks they automatically understand without really thinking about it. That’s terrible, though. So, in the book, I show that we don’t need to leave this idea just at these simple slogans and misunderstandings; we can go deeper into thinking about it.

Do you think that this sloganeering comes down so heavily with this implicit understanding that you suggest, making us forget the wholeness of this idea?

Yes, because it’s a great slogan. That’s why it has been so easily weaponised throughout history.

Everyone wants to be free. And the other really interesting thing is the psychology of it. For example, if you tell someone to shut up because they’ve said something very offensive to you, that’s one. But what hurts people is that the trampling on their freedoms isn’t the same as free speech. So, being censored is a powerful thing. Ironically, it can also inspire people to push back and feel they’re martyrs to free speech. So, the difficulties of policing speech are many.

Let’s then talk about how we push this idea, knowing fully how far the limits can be tested.

You know, the point I’m making is really this: often we get sidetracked into fighting about free speech and censorship and so on. But that’s a distraction.

Oftentimes, it’s a wilful distraction from the actual political problems we should be engaging with. Shouldn’t we instead be talking about book bans? Shouldn’t people be allowed to talk about Gaza? Is it legitimate to use the word ‘genocide’?

Let’s rather talk about these issues than being sidetracked into shouting about censorship, the limits of free speech, because the underlying problems are the political problems that we need to address — the censorship discussion, thus, is often a distraction from this main issue.

Saurabh Sharma (they) is a nonbinary, queer writer, essayist, and culture critic. On X: @writerly_life; Instagram: @writerlylife.