Books without Borders

The Hindu

16-07-2025

Published : Jul 16, 2025 19:45 IST - 6 MINS READ
Dear reader,
Mayyil in Kerala's Kannur district is my favourite place for many reasons—and if you're expecting beaches or backwaters, you will be gently disappointed. It's my favourite because this tiny local panchayat has 35 public libraries. It's startling to see a community with around 20 schools and 20 temples have almost double the number of libraries: which is either a testament to Kerala's commitment to literacy or proof that the people have collectively decided that books are more reliable than Gods when it comes to life advice.
My first visit in 2019 felt like coming home to a memory I hadn't known I had—a biblio-sojourn in the truest sense, where on every bend of the dusty road there stood a library, not a café, not a mall, not another temple. I wondered how many communities could claim such a density of literary sanctuary, then discovered that Kerala—with about 8,500 public libraries—is second only to Maharashtra in raw numbers, but leads the nation at approximately 23.4 libraries per 1,00,000 people. The unseen hand behind this proliferation is the Kerala State Library Council, which has apparently been more successful at empire-building than most actual empires.
I visited Mayyil's Velam Vayanashala (library in Malayalam) a few years later. The library had invited me to speak on an oddly beautiful occasion. Pusthaka-kani, as they called it, is modelled on the traditional Vishukani (an arrangement of auspicious items such as an idol of Krishna, a mirror, golden shower flowers, cucumber, and viewed at dawn on Vishu, the Malayalam New Year, to ensure prosperity.) But in this library, the kani (or view) was that of books, neatly arranged. That's how they welcomed the New Year.
Standing that morning in the gentle hush that only libraries can create, I told them of a book I had just read: Susan Orlean's 2018 work The Library Book, which is about the devastating fire that gutted the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986. 'I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way…The library might have been the first place I was ever given autonomy,' writes Susan Orlean in the book, which is an elegy doubling as an ode to belonging—the kind of belonging that asks for no passport, no ideology, only the willingness to get lost in another's words. And that sense of belonging is something that, as Velam's library members showed me, goes beyond religion, caste, or class.
I don't know if any institution has such powers in our world. Libraries act like wayward trains, delivering travellers to destinations they didn't know they were seeking. The sheer feeling of serendipity is thrilling. In those small village libraries, whether it was the Kuzhikkattussery Grameena Vayanasala or the Aloor Grama Panchayat Library, the two libraries that powered my childhood, I had discovered in them, by accident or divine intervention, books I never imagined existed. I'd come expecting comfort; I found astonishment. The kind that makes you believe in benevolent universe conspiracies—the way a random book falls off a shelf just when you need its particular brand of wisdom, or how you stumble upon exactly the right metaphor for your existential crisis hiding between cookbooks and poetry collections.
In those early pages of our library addiction, didn't we all feel we had unearthed old therapy salons? Places where readers arrived seeking only knowledge or a pastime, but found something more therapeutic than actual therapy and at a cheaper rate. We like-minded souls drunk on words and stories sat close, mostly silent, connected by grief or laughter at the trials of Raskolnikov (who really needed better life coaches), Tess (who deserved better than Hardy's relentless doom), Quentin Compson (whose stream-of-consciousness was more coherent than most Reddit feeds), Meursault (the original emotionally unavailable protagonist), and Okonkwo (whose story hits differently when you're navigating your own cultural dislocations).
There were times when a turning page carried the weight of collective tears, and we would emerge, replenished, ready to meet the mundane again with something approaching grace. We didn't need a psychologist—just a shelf, a chair, and that unspoken fellowship of readers who understood that sometimes the best conversations happen in complete silence.
Eric Klinenberg wrote in Palaces for the People that libraries are a social infrastructure, the connective tissue of resilient democracies. In their soft light, strangers become neighbours not through forced small talk but through the gentle recognition that we are all just trying to figure out the business of being human. Immigrants find voices; the unemployed find career choices; senior citizens grasp at companionship; teenagers meet alter egos who mirror their confusion, and realise they're not uniquely broken.
The history of libraries is a saga that stretches from clay tablets in Mesopotamia to dusty scrolls in Alexandria (history's greatest literary tragedy), from fluorescent-lit reading rooms in 20th-century Carnegie libraries to today's digital archives. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen chronicle this in The Library: A Fragile History, asking us to see libraries not as static institutions but living organisms: moulded by power, censorship, and the changing media of their times.
Libraries today teeter under pressures we once thought unimaginable. Across the globe, funding for public libraries is waning. In the US, a Trump administration order to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services—responsible for about $300 million in grants for libraries and museums. In India, Maharashtra alone has seen at least 1,000 public libraries shut down in the past three years.
Community libraries need a continuous feed of resources, community trust, and institutional goodwill. If the funding fails, the aisles will go dark, the story hours will cease, the teenagers will drift elsewhere, and those shared moments will vanish like clouds, leaving behind only the hollow echo of what democracy sounds like when it's dying.
But a current of human determination and gentle rebellion makes you believe that some people will always refuse to let good things die. This example, too, comes from Trump's America. In New York City, when Mayor Eric Adams proposed a $58 million budget cut to the public library in 2024, authors, celebrities, neighbours, and strangers organised campaigns that restored many services.
Similar to what civil society participation and the Library Council's support still do for the many libraries in Mayyil. If ever you find yourself there—or in any other town or village you visit—pay attention to the hush. Follow it like a curious cat. Turn the corner. There, under a low canopy of books, you may discover what I found: home. And with it, an entire world waiting for you, page by page, question by question, revelation by revelation, in the most democratic spaces that humanity has ever created.
I was reminded of Mayyil and those many other libraries I have visited when I read this lovely photo essay by Nabeel Ahmad about how three community libraries are making a difference in Delhi, a city where I worked for nearly a decade but missed the libraries of my Kerala childhood. Delhi's libraries were all elite, access dictated by privilege and metal detectors, and I hated them, yearning for the little open spaces of the community library. Which is why I felt so happy and at home when I saw this photo essay. Do read the piece, and if you are in Delhi, pay a visit. If you are not in Delhi, check out your local libraries and tell us about them.
Wishing you a lovely week ahead,
Jinoy Jose P.
Digital Editor, Frontline
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