A novel about a married, aristocratic, Christian woman falling in love with a working-class man in post-World War I England, was once put through various kinds of censorship – moral, legal, spiritual, and political– in many countries including India. After English author DH Lawrence’s last novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was first published in Italy in 1928, there ensued a series of legal trials that prosecuted publishers on charges of obscenity. A cinematic adaptation of the novel by director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre is now streaming on Netflix, reviving the discourse on the novel’s long history of censorship.
Right from its first publication, Lady Chatterley’s Lover has been put through multiple rounds of censorship in various countries including India, for charges of obscenity, making it somewhat synonymous with the legal and social interpretations of what constitutes obscenity.
Lady Constance Chatterley, Sir Clifford Chatterley, and their gamekeeper Oliver Mellors are the central protagonists of the novel. Constance gets into a torrid affair with Mellors, her partially paralysed, war-veteran husband’s gamekeeper, setting in motion the central conflict of the plot. Why was a story about a woman’s pursuit of pleasure and companionship hunted down and vehemently censored, time and again?
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, from the time of its first publication in Italy in 1928, and France in 1929, was considered unfit for public consumption. In England, the uncensored version of the text was not even available until the 1960s. The major allegation against the novel was that it was scandalous, morally corrupt, and abrasive in its use of sexually explicit terms, and depiction of sex between a married, upper-class woman and a working-class man.
In 1960, Penguin Books went ahead and published the unabridged version of the novel in England, DH Lawrence’s own country, and was sued for it. England already had in place the Obscene Publications Act 1959 introduced by politician Roy Jenkins, which said that publishers can be excused from punishment if they are able to prove that the alleged work they have published has literary merit. Many eminent critics and literary experts were summoned by the court in the landmark R v. Penguin Books to testify that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a work of literary and aesthetic merit.
At the end of the trial, the court declared Penguin not guilty, and in 1961, Penguin Books published another edition of the novel with a dedication that read – ‘For having published this book, Penguin Books was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1959 at the Old Bailey in London from 20 October to 2 November 1960. This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of 'not guilty' and thus made DH Lawrence's last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom.’
In India also, the book was put to thorough legal scrutiny, which led to a watershed moment in the interpretation of our obscenity laws.
In Ranjit D Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra (1964), Ranjit Udeshi, one of the four partners of Happy Book Stall in Mumbai, was sued along with his partners for selling uncensored copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover under Section 292 (punishment for selling obscene materials) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The accused argued that Section 292 is violative of the right to freedom of speech and expression as enshrined in the Indian Constitution. It was also cited that when evaluating the merit of a literary work, it has to be seen in totality, and not only with respect to a few portions that may seem obscene when read in isolation.
The Supreme Court of India relied on the famous ‘Hicklin Test’ to differentiate between obscenity and artistry. The Hicklin Test was established by the English court in 1868 in Regina v Hicklin. The court examined how to lay down a test for obscenity and said, “All material tending to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences was obscene, regardless of its artistic or literary merit.” The Indian Supreme Court followed the same reasoning and held that the accused were guilty in the Ranjit Udeshi case.
The right to freedom of speech and expression is not absolute in India. It can be reasonably restricted in the interest of public decency or morality among other reasons as mentioned in Article 19(2) of the Constitution. Using this, the Supreme Court held in the Ranjit Udeshi case that the Hicklin Test is not violative of freedom of speech and that when art and obscenity are trying to coexist, the obscenity must be trivial enough to be overlooked.
In 2014, the Supreme Court overruled the Ranjit Udeshi judgement in Aveek Sarkar v State of West Bengal. The case was about a charge of obscenity regarding a bare-bodied photograph of tennis player Boris Becker and his fiancee.
Doing away with the Hicklin Test, the Supreme Court said, ‘We do not censor to protect the pervert’, quoting from Bobby Arts International v Om Pal Singh, where Shekhar Kapur’s famous film Bandit Queen, a 1994 Hindi-language biopic on ‘Bandit Queen’ Phoolan Devi with Seema Biswas in the lead was sued for obscenity and display of nudity. This was a landmark win for freedom of speech and expression and artistic representation in India.
Looking back now, the journey of the obscenity trials that began with Lady Chatterley’s lover has been one that also documents the changing nature of our social morality and laws. Similar trials were also undergone by many writers including the prolific Ismat Chugtaai and Saadat Hassan Manto.
The outrage against obscenity in works of art, literature, and cinema has its roots in the political, religious, social, and moral fabric of society. The fact that words describing the female genitalia, and the depiction of sexual desire by a married woman towards a working-class man in Lady Chatterley's Lover is what enraged the socio-legal systems of those times is very telling of how neither religion nor society approves of any desire that is not endogamous or approved by our collective morality. The idea of obscenity in itself has become more parochial and polarised in recent times if one could say so. Besides, the term is in itself subjective, and embraces all the presiding biases a society harbours at any given point in time.
The laws may very well have changed, and Lady Chatterley is now available for HD viewing on our hand-held devices, but have we really come that far in terms of how free expression is?
The attack against the Nobel-winning author Salman Rushdie which led him to lose sight in one eye and suffer multiple injuries, as well as the fiasco with S Hareesh’s Malayalam novel Meesha (Moustache), leading him to withdraw it from the magazine after threats from the right-wing are all remnants of the Hicklin conscience that is still fertile in our polity.