From 2002 to 2015, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar gathered stories about his people, the Santhals of Jharkhand, for his collection The Adivasi will not Dance. It was published in 2015 to critical acclaim; just as his novel The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey, which won him the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Purashkar the same year. Last Friday, August 11, the Jharkhand government banned The Adivasi will not Dance saying it had shown Santhal women “in a bad light.” The next day, it suspended the 34-year-old writer, a medical officer at a district health centre 400 km from the capital Ranchi, and asked him to explain his actions.

Why the drastic move?

The drastic move by the government two years after the book’s publication comes as a surprise. Protests against portrayal of Adivasis in the book coincidentally began to build up after Mr. Shekhar posted on his Facebook account an article about Ol-Chiki, the standard script accepted by the government of India to write Santhali. However, several Santhali groups, mostly the Christians, want the old language to be written in the Roman script. A tussle has been going on for the wider acceptance of Ol-Chiki, and Mr. Shekhar seems to be caught in the crossfire. Incidentally, the article he posted on his social media page was a year old, but the impact is being felt now. The trial against Mr. Shekhar first started on social media, with a group of Adivasis calling his writing about Adivasi women nothing but “porn.” They soon called for his ouster from Jharkhand, organised protest marches and burnt his effigy, prompting the government — after the Opposition too rallied against the writer — to ban the book.