3 days ago
Kashmir book ban: Why is authority scared of the printed word?
Last week, when the Home Department of the Jammu & Kashmir government declared a list of 25 books 'forfeited', an X user posted a simple and seemingly rhetorical question: 'Why did they go against books?' Everybody, including that user, would know or can guess the usual answer. Historically, censorship has worn many masks, be it nationalism, morality or law and order. But what does it mean to declare books 'forfeited' or banned when soft copies of them are freely available online, slipping past restrictions and borders?
On November 1, 2003, Umberto Eco, Italian novelist, philosopher and cultural critic, stood before an audience in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Library in Egypt and spoke about the destiny of books. In his lecture titledVegetal and Mineral Memory: The Future of Books, he described printed books as a form of 'vegetal memory,' made from the bodies of plants (meaning paper), shaped into repositories of human thought, distinguishing it from mineral memory (clay tablets or electronic memory) and organic memory (our own minds).
He made a simple yet subversive point: unlike electronic memory, which can vanish at the flick of a switch, or the fragile storage of our own minds, the book is a durable embodiment of memory which remains resistant to time, censorship and power.
So, why is authority always after books? Perhaps it is not the ideas themselves. Ideas, after all, are already loose in the world. But it may be thephysicalityof the book. While ideas are elusive, books as instruments are tangible and susceptible to the blows of power. In this digital age, you cannot really ban a book; it would be nearly impossible. One would need an Orwellian structure (hoping that it doesn't already exist) and tools to erase a piece of literature in its totality. But one can assault its embodiment.
And, by doing so, it scares future writers.
What's at stake?
The state or any authority that be has always known that it cannot silence everyone. It doesn't need to. If it frightens a bit of the population, a chunk which could have told their own stories, a percentage which could have become writers, it wins. Fear is a slow, contagious thing. But fear is not the only goal. There is something more fragile and more material at stake for them. The bookas objectis under attack. Not its words which have long floated online as zeroes and ones. But its form, its spine, its paper and its physicality.
A physical book is a 'thingness' something rooted inbeing; it stands in the world, and the world stands around it.
It resists deletion and takes up space and stares back. It can be hidden in pits and behind walls, or found years later in a forgotten trunk while a PDF, an e-book disappears in a keystroke. Philosopher Walter Benjamin, or maybe Gen Z, might say the book carries an 'aura' of itself. Physical books invite serendipity. How many times have you gone to a bookstore just to skim through shelves and shelves and stumbled upon a book which explores something you have been thinking about earlier? The bookstores which Eco may call 'temples of vegetal memory', were raided across Kashmir by the police to enforce the order, and their videos were posted online. People on social media became thesamizdatand started to share soft copies of the said books, perhaps rendering the whole action counter-productive for the government. But soft copies, in their solitary convenience, cannot replicate the culture of exchange and community which physical books foster. You can't discover a soft copy in your friend's bookshelf and borrow it, much to their apprehension that you will never return it.
Pieces of the world
Kashmiris have seen everything at the hands of the authority. Curfews, communication blackoutsand internet gags so total that the virtual world ceases to exist for them. In those long, suspended hours and days and months when the phones don't ring and the screens go dark, the books stay. I keep a stack of books on my desk. Another stack rests on a table in front of it. Among them is a copy of Ray Bradbury'sFahrenheit 451.(In Bradbury's world, the destruction of books is the destruction of complexity, and without the challenging contradictions books contain, society collapses into shallow entertainment and unthinking conformity.) Their presence gives me a sense of security and belonging. So, if tomorrow the authorities decide, once again, to switch off the world for Kashmir, like they did in 2019, people know, like me, they will still have something left of the world.
Some part of feudal Russia inAnna Karenina, some ancient street in Damascus from Mahfouz'sThe Harafish, some dim-lit Dublin morning fromUlysses, some windswept Yorkshire moor fromWuthering Heights, some Harlem night from Baldwin'sAnother Country orsome bleak English factory town fromHard maybe that's what is scary to the power, that in the end, after everything, the books remain for us as memory. In its flesh and blood.
The writer is a journalist with experience in publishing.
