From banning books to banning readers

The American Library Association’s Banned Books Week comes to an end on October 3. This annual event celebrating the freedom to read was launched in 1982 to highlight the surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries.

Among the most challenged books of 2019 were the usual suspects: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the Harry Potter series, and Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson’s And Tango Makes Three. The concerns with these and other books? They were “designed to pollute the morals of readers”, they offered conflicting religious viewpoints and they were “sensitive, controversial, and politically charged”. No surprises there.

Such objections sound quaint at a time when many allegedly offensive texts are available online. As Tariq Ali, speaking of the British government’s recent educational guidelines prohibiting material from organisations with “an extreme political stance”, commented: “If you put things on a banned list, lots of young people can access them via the Internet and read them. Banning them from schools will not work at all, aside from the fact it’s a sign of moral and political bankruptcy.”

Evidently, bans and condemnations can have a contrary effect. Philip Pullman, whose own books have frequently been contested, also underlined this: “The inevitable result of trying to ban something – book, film, play, pop song, whatever – is that far more people want to get hold of it than would ever have done if it were left alone.” It’s a version of the so-called Streisand Effect, in which attempts to censor information have the unintended consequence of further publicising it.

This hasn’t stopped almost every government from trying. Bans apart, more extreme measures have often been undertaken over the centuries, with the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s being an especially egregious example.

In his recent Burning the Books, Richard Ovenden, senior librarian of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, asserts that bodies of knowledge are being confronted today as they have been throughout history. Ominously, this means that “the rule of law and open society are also under threat”.

His book emphasises how libraries and archives have become central to the support of democracy. “The repeated attacks on them over the centuries need to be examined as a worrying trend in human history,” writes Ovenden, also pointing out that the astonishing efforts made by people to protect such knowledge should be celebrated.

At the heart of this is the idea of preservation, because knowledge can be “vulnerable, fragile and unstable”. Over the years, libraries have been a vital part of such preservation and dissemination. They have developed catalogues, provided reading rooms, sponsored scholarships, staged exhibitions, and made digitised content accessible.

Burning the Books illustrates the many tragic ways in which knowledge has been lost: from the destruction of King Ashurbanipal’s library, to the blaze that destroyed the Library of Alexandria, to the ravaging of Caliph al-Mamun’s House of Wisdom to the more recent shelling of the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the burning of the Jaffna Public Library. It’s a grim catalogue of how ideas are seen as enemies to be vanquished.

However, with increasingly digital bodies of knowledge such as the Internet Archive, it’s become far easier to store and spread books and other information, whether permitted or verboten. The valiant publishers and distributors of Russian samizdat during the Soviet heyday would have looked upon the Internet with awe.

This is not to say that threats to digital storage and dissemination don’t exist. It hardly bears pointing out that many powerful digital organisations are in the private domain and can be swayed by pecuniary or political considerations. The Great Firewall of China is yet another example. Despite this, it’s undeniable that it takes much less effort to get one’s hands on a book, whatever its nature.

If book bans are seen as increasingly ineffective, one way around it is to start banning readers, so to speak. An example is to be found in the chargesheet against Sharjeel Imam, who was recently booked under India’s sedition law.

According to reports, the chargesheet mentions that the JNU scholar was “radicalised” by books on Partition which he read for his MPhil thesis, such as Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide in Modern India by Paul Brass. Similarly, books related to Lenin, Mao, Marx and others have been confiscated and used as evidence in cases against those such as K. Satyanarayana and Hany Babu.

Perhaps, after all, we aren’t that far away from the world of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in which resistance to totalitarianism takes the form of people committing entire volumes to memory.

Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.