Salma is also well-known as a socially committed public figure who has served as chairperson of Tamil Nadu Social Welfare Board. Her novel was translated to English by the late Lakshmi Holmstrom in 2009 as The Hour Past Midnight, which was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Prize and long-listed for the Man Asian Prize.Her life story was documented by the British filmmaker Kim Longinotto, which had won multi-awards and had been screened worldwide. She has published two volumes of poetry Oru Malaiyum, Innoru Malaiyum (One Evening and Another Evening) (2000),Pachchai Devathai (Green Angel) (2003), one novel Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai (2004) and a collection of short storySapam (2013). To discern patterns in the contemporary governance of offense,īorn in 1968, Rajathi Rokkaiah Salma is a South Indian Muslim women writer, who writes primarily of the confined domestic lives of Muslim women, with a focus on the inner struggles, desires and sexuality of Indian women. In what follows I trace the regulation of what Indian legal language describes as ' hurt religious sentiments ' to its colonial origin, demonstrating that historically, the mandate of rulers has been to favor the powerful by reinforcing their capacity to silence the weak. After all, not all offensive speech is challenged, and not all challenges result in successful silencing of the putative offender, as was the case with Wendy Doniger's book, The Hindus: An Alternative History. But the abstraction comes at the price of bracketing out the specific economy of forces within which freedom of speech is regulated in India. There is a degree of valuable analytic abstraction to this discourse, which allows scholars and free speech advocates to compare the Doniger case with instances of the censorship of writing and art earlier in Indian history (for example, with the Rushdie affair Malik 2014), and with cases elsewhere in the world.

Commentary on the Doniger affair has focused overwhelmingly on the principle of freedom of speech and the illiberal character of censorship (Shainin 2014).

One part woman by perumal murugan