Roald Dahl, the celebrated children’s author has suddenly become problematic for the self-proclaimed guardians of 21st century sensitivities. Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to replace ‘problematic’ words such as fat, black, Kipling etc and bring in a gender-neutral tone to his writings, even if it means changing the meaning and tone of his works.
The Twitter thread below has a series of passages comparing the sections that have been bowdlerized. (Trivia: Thomas Bowdler, in 1818 published a censored version of William Shakespeare that was expected to be palatable to families)
Dahl was a complex character. He was a fighter pilot, spy, playboy, a child who lost his father and sister at a young age, a father who lost a child, a millionaire and much more. To reduce such a complex life and his writings to cater to modern-day notions of political correctness is nothing short of being ridiculous. In a celebrated profile of Dahl, published last year, Merve Emre, captured the troubled legacy of some of his writings in a memorable passage:
There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with cruelty in art; in children’s literature, it has its place, particularly when it responds to the physical and emotional cruelties inflicted upon children, among the most powerless and casually brutalized creatures in the world. Yet the sadism of Dahl’s plots and the grotesquerie of his characters contain not a single germ of critical self-reflection, not one gesture of liberation, not a drop of pity or compassion, no matter how begrudgingly they may be tendered, in life as in fiction. The cruelty of his villains begets a reciprocal cruelty in their victims. He makes his children small then big; he makes his adults big then small; and he traps his shape-shifters and his young readers in a fun house of dirty, depthless mirrors.
I’ve always been skeptical of the evangelic zeal displayed by the prophets of the cancel culture. Pronouns are no longer what we learnt them to be. If its Dahl today, tomorrow it may be Vyasa and Moses. Using words like manpower, watchman and soldier immediately makes you gender-insensitive, violent and nasty. I wonder what it would be to live in such a sanitized world, where every uttering is politically correct and hurts no-one. That would be my definition of hell. If you think I’m over-reacting, check out the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative of Stanford University which brought out a list of problematic words in December which included American, immigrant, white paper, brown bag, master sheet…..
The real tragedy of this vacuum-cleaning of literature and language is that the genuine crusaders who have fought valiantly against sexism, gender violence, racism and other obnoxious practices are now seeing their life’s work being reduced to semantics! For instance, last week, the activist Kavya Mukhija, in an op-ed in the Indian Express had a thoughtful piece which explained the subtle shifts experienced with the word ‘differently-abled’ and ‘persons with disabilities’. I hope voices such as hers wont get ridiculed and lost in this cacophony.
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