But it seems that even if English elocution is still taught to desi Eliza Doolittles, chances that they still use ‘How now brown cow’ are not just skimmed, but also downright slim. Because someone, somewhere is likely to get offended – or, more likely, think that someone else, somewhere will be offended – by ‘brown cow,’ a phrase that could be construed as being both racist and sexist. Now that I’ve spelt it out like that, I can’t unracisise or unsexisise it.
I bring this up because a bunch of woke folks had apparently found something offensive enough to censor it. No, not an inflammatory BBC documentary showing a white, old man by the name of David Attenborough decrying the fate of the planet and non-human life on it while staying absolutely mum about the horrors wrought by communism. It was the books of children’s writer Roald Dahl.
True, reading Dahl is a different experience from watching Dahl. His 1964 novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, originally depicted the Oompa Loompas – workers in the factory – as African pygmies. In the 2005 movie version, of course, they are depicted by 4 ft 4 in Kenyan-British actor of Indian descent Deep Roy. Dahl himself changed the description in 1970 when he saw possible linkages being made to ‘African slaves’.
But the latest changes sought by Dahl’s publishers were of the fruitcake variety that can see red flags even in orange bikinis. A character described as ‘enormously fat’ in Charlie… was trimmed to ‘enormous,’ ‘fat’ apparently being a four-lettered word. A witch working as a supermarket cashier or ‘typing letters for a businessman’ was being ‘promoted’ to ‘top scientist or running a business’. Dahl’s description of two earth-wrecking tractors in his 1970 book, The Fantastic Mr Fox – ‘The machines were both black. They were murderous, brutal-looking monsters.’ – were going to be de-blacked. Through hundreds of other changes, the plan was to ‘decolonise’, ‘desexisise’, ‘deracisise,’ ‘declassise’, ‘debodyshamise’ and dehumidify.
Thankfully, backlash still delivers results in some societies. While the literary world was livid – and I, confused as to how black tractors can be racist while enormous characters can’t be fat – I do find such PC-driven drivel possibly providing an alternative to outright bans so much in demand in our part of town. Sure, it’s a cop-out. But if The Satanic Verses changed its title and references to the actual satanic verses to, say, The Penthouse Letters, willing readers would have got the in-joke, while those who hunt high and low for offensive bits (like ardent readers of The Penthouse Letters) would have found nothing worth a flying fatwa.
In fact, everything that prickly hypersensitive people find offensive here can be changed ‘Dahl’ makhni-style. Take the 1927 book, Mother India, by American writer Katherine Mayo. A reviewer by the name of Mohandas Gandhi wrote, ‘If Miss Mayo had confessed that she had come to India merely to open out and examine the drains of India, there would perhaps be little to complain about her compilation. But she declared her abominable and patently wrong conclusion with a certain amount of triumph: ‘the drains are India’.’ Gandhi hadn’t demanded Mayo’s book be banned. He wasn’t that kind of guy. But as with liquor on Gandhi Jayanti, India thought it best to ban it anyway, a book that would have certainly been forgotten were it not for the ban. Someone should just replace Mayo’s offending words and get the book out of the ground for a proper interment. Any book like Mayo’s or Hamish McDonald’s The Polyester Prince, song like Neha Singh Rathore’s ‘UP Mein Ka Ba‘, or documentary like Nanook of the North the offended may find offensive in these times of mid-name crises can just be tweaked. (Did someone say using AI?)
That way, all of us won’t seem so Willie bonkers as those PC-washy brigade who have been held at bay for the time being, and we can be seen as being able to take it manfully on the chin.
