When Nehru read “Lolita”…
Tuesday, June 7th, 2022
Should an “obscene” book be allowed in India? Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had to make the call on Vladimir Nabokov‘s notorious novel when it arrived on the shores of the Arabian Sea.
On April 6, 1959, Customs in Bombay had detained the imported copies of the bombshell book. The can was kicked to the police, the Ministry of Law, and the Ministry of Finance.
Although the book was widely touted in the West, it had been banned in France, England, Argentina, and New Zealand.
The police commissioner of Bombay (now Mumbai) and the local branch of the law ministry maintained that the book did not fall under the category of “obscene literature.” The verdict: free Lolita. However, although the collector of Customs also concluded that the book could not be considered “grossly indecent or obscene,” he nevertheless refused to release the consignment.
The complicated matter of Lolita was then turned over to the straitlaced Finance Minister Moraji Desai, who did not conceal his distaste. In a short note on Lolita, he wrote, “I do not know what book can be called obscene if this cannot be. It is sex perversion.”
Finally, the buck passed to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who opposed censorship in a book that could claim any literary merit. Here’s what he wrote after he had a chance to review the book:
“Reading this book Lolita, I felt that it was a serious book and in its own line rather outstanding. It is hardly a book which can give light reading to anyone. The language is often difficult. It is true that some parts in it rather shocked me. The shock was more due to the description of certain conditions than to the writing itself. The book is certainly not pornographic in the normal sense of the word. It is, as I have said, a serious book, seriously written. If there had been no fuss about it, no question need have arisen at all of banning it or preventing its entry. It is this fuss that sometimes makes a difference because people are attracted specially to reading books which are talked about in this way.”
In a June 10, 1959 letter, the poet R.V. Pandit wrote Nehru that “larger issues than merely a commercial transaction were involved in this matter and we are glad to have acquainted you with the artificially contrived situation that locked up Lolita for two months.”
Read Shubhneet Kaushik‘s article on the kerfuffle in India’s Scroll here. Read my own article about the book, and it’s curious links to Stanford, here.
