After 25-Year Court Case, Indian Show Can Go On

New Delhi:

In most cases, "temporary" can mean days, weeks, even months. But for one district of Kerala, a state in southern India, it meant a quarter-century.

Now, 25 years after the authorities in the Kottayam district of Kerala issued a temporary order prohibiting the staging of the rock opera "Jesus Christ Superstar," which was upheld by the state government, India's Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the show can go on.

An adaptation of the enormously successful Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical was to have been performed twice in two days in 1990 by students at Corpus Christi High School of Kottayam. But the second performance was halted - minutes before the curtain was to go up, according to a lawyer handling the case - under a temporary ban ordered by the district administration on the grounds that allowing it could hurt religious feelings and lead to a breach of peace.

The school's founder, the Indian educator Mary Roy, filed an appeal at the time, and the Supreme Court eventually allowed the play to be performed one more time, in 1991, despite the ban. After that, Roy and a friend, the Rev. Abraham Vellamthadathil, a college principal, took up the case.
On Wednesday, Vellamthadathil, now 79, was subdued in the aftermath of his hard-fought victory. He and Roy, 81, the mother of the novelist Arundhati Roy, are both retired. The possibility of an imminent school production of the play appears dim, though Roy said that she hoped the school would perform it this year.

"This is the tragedy of our legal system," Vellamthadathil said. "There is unimaginable delay in a getting a case disposed of here."

The case shuttled between the government and the Kerala courts for a decade before it went to the Supreme Court. Shridhar Chitale, the lawyer in the case, argued that the ban was only temporary under the law used by the Kottayam authorities, and said that much had changed in India, including the availability of the Internet, since then.

"The play has been shown in other parts of India, in other parts of the world, including the Vatican," Chitale said. "Why should it be banned in one district? You could sit in Kottayam district and access the play online."

The original order reflected a tendency in India to suppress performances and other works that could offend religious or minority sensibilities or are deemed controversial. Last month, a court blocked the broadcast of "India's Daughter," a BBC documentary about the 2012 gang rape in Delhi. Last year, Penguin Books India pulled a book on Hinduism by the scholar Wendy Doniger from shelves after protests and a lawsuit from a Hindu group. And "The Satanic Verses," Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel, which was deeply offensive to some Muslims, was banned in India.
Roy said that she did not think that the Christian community was deeply offended by "Jesus Christ Superstar." She pointed out that only about 20 people came out in 1990 to peacefully protest the school's sole performance.

"Very few people in Kottayam speak English, let alone sing rock," Roy said. "So it is just out of the question that the rock opera had in any way agitated or moved them."

Twenty-five years later, she said, there was even less chance that people were paying attention.
"It was so long ago," Roy said, "it's all been put to rest."

© 2015, The New York Times News Service