By IPS Correspondents
SINGAPORE, Nov 7 2000 (IPS)

Singapore’s newfound commitment to artistic freedom is being tested in a battle between a Singaporean playwright and the government over the staging of a play on Muslim women and divorce.

This debate over creative license and social responsibility is raging in a country whose history makes it very sensitive to issues of race and religion.

The row also comes at a particularly embarrassing time for the Singapore government, which has invested millions of dollars in the last two years to portray itself as Asia’s Renaissance arts city.

While Singapore has had a long tradition of tight control and censorship of the arts, in recent years government authorities have been gradually loosening the grip to encourage artistic creativity.

The subject of the row is ‘Talaq’, a play based on the true story of a Singaporean Indian Muslim woman. It questions rape within marriage, a socially taboo subject especially among the Muslim community here.

When the play was originally staged in 1998 in Tamil, it received wide acclaim for artistic expression. In that version, the woman whose life it portrays played her own role.

But the play was also severely criticised by Muslim religious bodies here, and its playwright, Elangovan, claims he received many death threats.

Now he wants to stage Talaq in English and Malay to reach a wider audience here, but the Public Entertainment Licensing Unit (PELU) has refused to grant a performing license due to protests over the play.

Elangovan, however, is unbending. “An artist must understand the politics of existence, learn to walk in the inferno first, get prepared to have stones thrown at you,” he says.

“I think of myself as walking in a minefield, with stones being thrown at me,” he adds.

But among those who protested vehemently against the play’s Tamil performance was Muslim religious group South Indian Jamiathul Ulama (SIJU), whose secretary Haji Ebrahim Marican says ‘Talaq’ did not give an accurate depiction of Islamic law.

Under Islamic law, a husband need not ask for the permission of his wife to have sexual intercourse, Marican adds. “Even if she is angry or not in a mood, he has the right to it,” he says. “In any event, a husband can have sex with his wife without her consent and that will not be rape.”

S Thenmoli, president of the theatre group Agni Kootthu which is presenting ‘Talaq’, says the play has attracted interest here from women of all races. “They believe the play is not about religious issues. It’s a woman’s issue. I’m sad it is not going on,” she says.

The play was to have been staged over two days in late October, but PELU did not grant a performing license after Agni Kootthu refused to stage a preview for the National Arts Council (NAC).

The NAC, the government’s arts funding and administration body, had demanded the review to judge the play’s social sensitivities.

Thenmoli refused to stage the play because the review panel included two members of SIJU, a group that does not have female members.

The National Arts Council said the panel members were chosen “as their sensitivities were relevant to the evaluation process,” but Thenmoli insisted that SIJU “has nothing to do with theatre”.

Thenmoli was arrested later when she tried to stage a public “dress rehearsal” at the NAC’s Drama Centre, which the police judged was a public performance without a permit.

While the media coverage of this arrest here and overseas embarrassed the government, it also triggered debate about artistic freedom and social responsibility.

“It is regrettable that ill temper and bad handling have overtaken an artistic effort at a time when Singapore wants to make a go of mass culture and the performing arts,” said the ‘Straits Times’ in an editorial last week.

“This little drama is not without instructive value for the arts community. It is a timely reminder that artistic experimentation ends where race and religious sensitivities begin,” it added, arguing that this setback should not discourage playwrights from exploring serious social issues.

“Otherwise homegrown drama can never develop an audience base, and that would be a shame,” it added.

Most Singaporeans in this country of 4 million people are either Buddhist or Christian. Muslims, mainly of Malay descent, make up only a small segment of the population that is three- quarters of Chinese descent.

Religion is a very sensitive issue, due to a bitter experience in the 1960s when irresponsible media coverage of a religious conversion triggered tragic racial riots in the island. Since then, discussion of religious issues in the media has been a taboo subject.

In a speech last month, Singapore’s Arts Minister David Lim argued that the measure of great art is not how much attention it gets, but how well it captures the spirit of the society.

“If we accept that an artist’s responsibility is also to serve society, then how well he does this becomes one measure of his integrity,” he said. “In which case, social responsibility and artistic integrity are merely two sides of the same coin.”

But Elangovan’s fellow artist J.P. Nathan says: “The function of the artist is to criticise, evaluate, question social norms.”

Alvin Tan, artistic director of the local drama company The Necessary Stage, agrees that sometimes artistic integrity demands that an artist undermines social responsibility. “Sometimes you need to transgress. Otherwise, how do you think outside the box?” he asks.

What Elangovan’s play tries to do is both question social norms and get audiences to think outside the box.

Sociologist Kwok Kian-Woon cautions against “privileging either the artist as the custodian of social conscience or the authorities as the custodian of social responsibility.”

This, he adds, “suggests that the artist is answerable only to his or her own individual conscience and can have total disregard for social responsibility.”

“By the same token, the authorities are automatically granted the unquestioned right to ride roughshod over individual conscience in the name of protecting societal interests,” he explains.

The debate will go on for a while more, as Elangovan and Thenmoli have vowed to continue the battle to get a permit to stage the play in Malay and English.

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