Burn Without Reading

Censorship  | 14 October 2010  | print

The illiterate and unthinking actions of Aditya Thackeray and the Vice Chancellor in banning Rohinton Mistry’s book from the university syllabus remind us of the importance of one of our most important freedoms

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

In the dystopian future envisioned in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, it is illegal to think; to think, you have to read. Therefore, “… the pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house.” This is not vandalism. This is what the principal character in the book, Guy Montag, does for a living. He burns books.

While critics and scholars have read the book to be an attack on state-sponsored censorship, Bradbury insists that that was not his meaning. The culprits are the people. They inhabit an entirely lawless world, one which is driven only by media. With curious prescience—the book was published in 1953—Bradbury foretells the Walkman and the iPod: people walk around with ‘seashells’ in their ears, plugged into media, unplugged from books and reading matter.

Biblioclasm—the deliberate and premeditated destruction of books—is nothing new. Books have always been feared by those in power, and so they burn libraries, Alexandria and Baghdad being the best known. The latter, known as the House of Wisdom, and all the other libraries in the city, were destroyed in 1258 by the invading Mongols and, it is said, the Tigris ran black for six months from all the ink. The Qin Dynasty burned books and buried scholars alive. Mayan codices were destroyed by Spaniards. The list is endless.

The 20th century was especially good to book-burners: China wiped out Buddhist texts when it overran Tibet in the 1960s; Pol Pot did his bit in Cambodia in the 1970s; and on 25 August 1992, 1.5 million books and manuscripts went up in flames in a single night in the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing of Sarajevo. The most iconic images of book burning are from 10 May 1933 when the Nazis burnt some 20,000 volumes in Berlin.

India has its own fine traditions: the great nine-storeyed libraries of Nalanda, repository of hundreds of thousands of texts, were attacked more than once: first, some claim, by Brahmanical sects in the 10th century, and then entirely gutted in 1193 by Bakhtiyar Khilji, an invading fanatic. The library burned for months. More recently, in January 2004, the right-wing Sambhaji Brigade ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, destroying invaluable and irreplaceable manuscripts and texts.

Why are books feared? One answer comes from George Orwell’s 1984, when the Ministry of Truth says: “Who controls the present controls the past; who controls the past controls the future.” Alberto Manguel, as gifted a reader as he is a writer, and a close friend of Borges, suggests another in his marvellous A History of Reading. Borges told Manguel that, during one of the populist demonstrations organized by Peron in 1950, demonstrators chanted, “Shoes, yes, books no.” Manguel writes:

“… the artificial dichotomy between life and reading is actively encouraged by those in power. Demotic regimes demand that we forget, and therefore they brand books as superfluous luxuries; totalitarian regimes demand that we not think, and therefore they band and threaten and censor; both, by and large, require that we become stupid … and therefore they encourage the consumption of pap. In such circumstances, readers cannot but be subversive.”

The consequences are self-evident. A hundred years before the Nazi book burning, Heinrich Heine wrote in his play Almansor: That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn human beings.

It is not coincidence that Manguel and Bradbury have collaborated on a book called Logotopia: The Library in Architecture, Art and the Imagination, in which they look at libraries through the ages and show how, perhaps more than any other single factor, the state of a culture is gauged by the state of its public libraries.

Along with Bradbury, Manguel and the redoubtable Nicholson Baker, another deity in the pantheon of bibliophiles and bibliophages—devourers of books—is Nicholas Basbanes. He writes books about books. “Literature is fundamental to our cultural heritage and our shared patrimony,” he says in Every Book Its Reader, and a sharper criticism of modern Indian cultural consciousness is hard to imagine. In this book, Basbanes narrates the story of a remarkable man named S. R. Ranganathan who, in 1923, applied for a job as the chief librarian at the University of Madras. Ranganathan, later awarded the Padma Shri, was to author over 50 monographs in library science and in one, from 1931, he outlined a set of five principles that have since become a code for librarians everywhere. Three of these are meant for the technicians. Two speak to us all, and they are: every reader his book and every book its reader. Reading is a personal, solitary, unsociable, selfish, exclusionary activity, and that makes books doubly dangerous. They take you to places where no one follows and where there are no rules but those you make yourself.

“I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your silent, noble comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland.”

These sentiments, by Arthur Conan Doyle in Through the Magic Door, are shared by bibliophiles everywhere, to whom every book is sacred. Here is a startling illustration: In February 1998, three thousand volumes owned by Mohammed al-Fayed (the man who bought Harrods, and whose son died in Paris with Princess Diana) were auctioned by Sotheby’s in New York. The books were once part of the estate of Wallis Warfield Simpson, later the Duchess of Windsor. She inherited them from her husband, the man who was once King Edward VIII. For the woman he loved, the King gave up crown and country—but not his books.

The terrors of Fahrenheit 451 returned when, in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the library and archives of Baghdad was destroyed by the invading allied forces. (The library was said to have held several hundreds of thousands of books, periodicals from the late Ottoman era, and over 4000 rare books and manuscripts). Four years later, dedicating a new library at the US airbase in Baghdad, Basbanes tells the officer responsible for the initiative that he’s being Quixotic, bringing books to the desert. But both agree that “where there are books, there is always hope.”

Book-banning is a minor form of book-burning in that it does not actually destroy the physical artefact itself. In another sense, it is far more invidious, for book burning destroys a single copy, or a few copies, in one location, while a ban makes it entirely unavailable. Both are acts of hatred and intolerance, and a form of terrorism for they impose the will of a few on many. The Vice-Chancellor’s decision to ban Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey from the syllabus is thus not only entirely wrong and illegal, it is plainly silly. Aditya Thackeray, an upstart pup with half an education, has not even read the book (though it makes his sensitive skin crawl) or perhaps anything at all by Mistry, who is an exceptionally fine writer. He has no idea what the book is about, or of its literary merit, and is certainly not equipped to assess the book in any rational or meaningful manner. Thackeray is offended because he believes, or is told, that some passages in it are critical of the Shiv Sena, and this offends the infamously prickly Thackeray family pride. Invoking seldom-used emergency powers, the Vice-Chancellor caves in. Never mind that the reasoning of the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the state-sponsored ban on James Laine’s book on Shivaji applies to the University too; and forget for a moment that this is a university, supposedly a place of learning, of discourse, of civility, where dissent and critical thinking are to be encouraged, where the politics of parochialism are supposedly to be kept at bay. ‘Supposedly’ being the operative word. Imagine this world, where the illiterati determine what we can and cannot read.

This is not merely an act of expedience. It is an assault on knowledge, and on learning. Two thousand years ago, Cicero, holding that the very first thing man needs after the supply of physical wants is knowledge, wrote:

“This pertains most of all to human nature, for we are all drawn to the pursuit of Knowledge, in which to excel we consider excellent, whereas to mistake, to err, to be ignorant, to be deceived, is both an evil and a disgrace.”

The actions of Thackeray the Youngest and our worthy Vice-Chancellor encourage ignorance, stupidity and mediocrity among faculty and students. Both actions are united by these denominators: both are unilateral, without consensus or any form of democratic discourse. Both are acts of bullying. Bullying is not bravery; quite the opposite. Aditya Thackeray’s demand for a ban on a book he has not read makes us ask: what is it that Thackeray fears?

Yet, unwittingly, Aditya Thackeray and the Vice-Chancellor have done us a good turn: they remind us, by their unthinking and illiterate actions, of the importance of one of our most fundamental freedoms.