Readings of Makai ko Arkai Kheti (A Different Cultivation of Maize) is currently being staged in Theatre Village. As the author of the play who is also performing in it, I am engrossed in the dual issues of authorial freedom and responsibility these days, issues that the play raises in the context of a post-earthquake, contemporary Nepal. The play revisits Krishna Lal Adhikari’s late 19th century agricultural manual Makai Ko Kheti, which raised similar topics concerning freedom of speech in the modern Nepali context.  While it is not clear whether Adhikari’s controversial book Makai ko Kheti was intended as a simple agricultural manual, or as a political satire, Rana officials decided that it was obviously the latter, and that red and white pests described by Adhikari in the manual were symbols of Rana rulers themselves.

Following this, Adhikari was arrested and put into prison, where he died after five years. A Different Cultivation of Maize revisits the earlier text to raise questions concerning authorial freedom, the technique of rewriting, and political freedom in the modern context. For example, just like the Rana rulers of the late 19th and early twentieth century, the post-Rana rulers of Nepal have not shied away from censoring the authors who dissent from prevailing orthodoxies. Even if the censorship of authors by the state has declined considerably in the post-1990 era, the repressive tendency has shifted from state’s tutelage to what Professor Bed Giri has described, in his introduction to the upcoming print version of the play, as “the self-proclaimed guardians of many ideologies and identities.” 

There have been attempts to limit the freedom of writers and artists at various historical times and places. From Italian painter Caravaggio who had to keep on running to save his life in the sixteenth century to the recent attack at the offices of French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, are but only two example of the continuing contest between cultural producers and socio-religious intolerance. Despite such persecution, writers, artists, photographers, filmmakers and other cultural producers, including poets such as Dunya Mikhail of Iraq and Maria Petreu of Romania, 

writers Mikel Azurmendi of Spain and Taslima Nasrin of Bangladesh, Italian filmmaker Paolo Pasolini, American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and Chad journalist Daniel Bekoutou among many others have fought long and hard battles against intolerances of various sorts. Such battles are important because artistic and literary freedom is linked to the ideals of both democracy and freedom of speech. The punishment that Krishna Lal Adhikari had to suffer during the Rana regime was a consequence of the state’s repression of the right to free speech. In the era of contemporary democracy, new ideological traps have arisen, limiting the freedom of cultural producers. Due to the fact that contemporary writers, artists and academicians often work under the societal pressures exerted by political parties, entrenched belief systems, social organisations and prize-awarding institutions, their freedom is being increasingly circumscribed. With the state intervening in people’s lives in order to fight terrorism as well as new technologies of internet surveillance coming to the fore, individual freedom is becoming increasingly compromised in the modern world. New ideological traps are impinging upon human freedom, limiting its expanse and scope.

In A Different Cultivation of Maize, I have tried to challenge those ideological snares through the experimental use of language. Just as laws, clauses, legal codes and constitutions are expressed through language, writers and artists use verbal and visual language to deconstruct and destabilise those laws in order to imagine new politico-cultural and legal horizons. When “earthquakes” happen in 

the world of words, meanings of specific words, too, get transformed. Even words such as civil freedom, democracy and freedom of speech can inspire new meanings. In 

A Different Cultivation of Maize, tremors happen in the world of words, just as in the external world. The earth shakes beneath one’s feet!The play also raises some difficult questions concerning authorial responsibility. Are writers and artists free to write or paint anything by evoking the notions relating to democratic freedom and freedom of speech? It is a given that all humans, including cultural producers, think, write and paint within the ideological horizon of the times in which they live. If this is true, how free can they be from the cultural limits of those horizons? And doesn’t the notion of authorial responsibility automatically limit the freedom of writers, artists, filmmakers and cartoonists, among other cultural producers?

Even while revisiting older history, the play tries to raise new questions concerning contemporary politics, literature and culture.  Here are some of the many questions raised by the play—is one justified in rewriting a literary text after it is published? Is such rewriting akin to the manner in which legal codes and constitutions are revised after they are promulgated? How free is an author in the age of political correctness? Should an author be allowed to speak or write about his or her own text after it is published? Can one live as a free citizen in a highly polarised society characterised by warring political parties, factions, communities and creeds? 

Just as the world is changing every single day, becoming new and old and then new again, the dialectic between authorial freedom and responsibility is manifesting in new forms. As a writer, I have not tried to impose my personal views concerning what may be right and what may be wrong. A writer, in my view, is not a judge; nor can he or she pronounce judgment concerning matters relating to acts of writing and reading. He or she can only appear as a convict in the courtroom of readers and viewers. 

We are living through critical times in Nepal. The ongoing, undeclared Indian blockade has multiplied the problems in a nation that is still trying to recover from the devastating effects of the earthquakes. While trying to imagine the shape of the future from the shores of the troubled present, I am disturbed by some uneasy premonitions. I sincerely hope that the future will usher in a kinder world, a more democratic world, a world with social justice, and finally a world where the freedom of both common citizens and cultural producers will be respected. At the same time, however, I am agitated by the thought that maybe global futures will be threatened by new orthodoxies, by the spread of new forms of religious and social intolerances, and by attempts made by state and non-state actors to curtail freedom of expression. I am hoping that A Different Cultivation of Maize will prompt the viewers to ponder upon some of these very issues.

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