The Sensualist

 

The Sensualist is the story, for which Ruskin Bond was charged with obscenity. Strange to hear. Ruskin Bond, and obscenity! Poles apart. He is known as a children's author, a nature lover, and a young-at-heart-old man. But it doesn't mean that he should not write for adults. He is a writer. He works wonders with his pen. And it is always a writer's choice what he wants to give to his readers. If someone doesn't want to read that then there's no need to. Let the writer do his job.

This time Ruskin Bond crossed the borderlands; wrote about a man enslaved by an overpowering sex drive that leads him to the path of self-destruction. And conveys the message that, in pursuit of carnal desires, one should not forget the limits. It is a dark tale that explores various aspects of the human psyche. And it's all about controlling the senses. This is all I got from the story. It was, no doubt, a story ahead of its time. But to mark an author and his work obscene is a kind of intolerance (that is fast prevailing in our country these days in the form of national intolerance, social intolerance, professional intolerance, religious intolerance, and here it is literary intolerance, though it happened a long time back, in the 1970s, during the time of emergency in India I think).

It is all about perception. People who marked his work obscene, and pushed him for two years of court trials, did not see the purpose behind the book. They could not get what he wants to convey. And the reward was in the form of a non-bailable warrant. But thanks to that time Mussoorie SDM, who helped him get bail after two months, and thanks to eminent writers like Vijay Tendulkar and Nissim Ezekiel, who spoke for him during the court trials, and thanks to the judge, who, in the end, found nothing obscene in the novel, and gave him an honorable acquittal. In my opinion, people should be more tolerant.

It is of course not a usual Ruskin Bond book, but still, he hasn't wandered away from his love of nature. More than half of the book is a description of surroundings-hills, a small town, river, railway platform, roads, and people- in his usual style. Not meant for children, of course.

-Ekta Kubba