Books are not for banning or burning

Karthik Venkatesh

In 1981, the Jaffna library, a historic location that contained close to a 100,000 books and many rare Tamil manuscripts was burned down. It became one of the more unfortunate victims of the Sinhala-Tamil conflict that tore Sri Lanka apart over the next three decades. 

Burning a library down is perhaps the ultimate act of banning. Why ban when you can burn and destroy an entire array of cultural knowledge? In history, the only comparable such action was the burning of the Alexandria library, probably by Julius Caesar, perhaps inadvertently, in 48 BC. But through the centuries, monarchs, governments and religious powers have preferred banning to burning.  

Among the more versatile "banners" has been the Catholic Church. What the Vatican essentially does is that it forbids Catholics from reading or owning certain books, threatening excommunication. The Vatican issued a list of banned books called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum as early as 1559. Among the books it banned in that first list were works by the Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin. It also forbade the Bible in languages other than Latin and turned its ire on the Quran and the Talmud as well. 

As time passed, it was Catholic in its zest for banning books and banned a whole lot of other books too. It banned books by philosophers like Rene Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill. Among the novelists it shut its doors on were Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Alberto Moravia, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. It was none too happy with Casanova's memoirs either and chose to blacklist him too. Even Uncle Tom's Cabin wasn't spared. 

But when one comes to know that it didn't ban either Karl Marx or Charles Darwin, both of whose works didn't exactly help the Catholic faith, one wonders what the guys who did the banning were actually thinking. And surprise, surprise, they didn't ban Mein Kampf either. The Vatican abandoned the practice of listing prohibited books in 1966. In an unrelated matter, the number of church-goers has been dropping steadily ever since. But, it appears facile to suggest that these two events are even remotely related. 

While totalitarian regimes like Hitler's Germany, the former USSR, China and others have banned books in large numbers, the real surprise is that even supposedly democratic regimes haven't been too far behind in this respect either.  

The first book to be banned in the USA was Thomas Morton's New English Canaan, published in 1637. The book's crime: it portrayed the Native Americans in more than sympathetic terms and satirised the Puritans, who had begun to flock to the East Coast of the USA in large numbers since the Mayflower had brought the first batch of them from England in 1620. Among the other books that Americans have banned at various times are: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Voltaire's Candide, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and in the land of Playboy and Penthouse, D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Women in Love.  In the last 50 years, J D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye has got many-a-conservative god-fearing American's goat and has been ostracised by various school and public libraries. 

The UK government too has quite enjoyed itself when it came to clamping down on the printed word. Its banning of Lady Chatterley's Lover, of course, resulted in a landmark court case in 1960, a full 32 years after the book had first been banned in 1928. The case was a clash between the old world and the new, between the working class and the upper class, which clung to notions of Victorian morality even as the world was changing irrevocably. Lady Chatterley was "acquitted" and 3.3 million copies of the book were sold in the period that followed the lifting of the ban.

 Among the other books that the UK has banned at one time or the other were James Joyce's Ulysses and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. MI5spymaster Peter Wright's memoirs Spycatcher was banned by the Thatcher government in the late 1980s for ostensibly comprising covert operations. 

The most famous case of a book being banned in India was The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie in 1988. India was the first country to ban the book and soon, Rushdie was the target of a witch-hunt with a fatwa being issued against him by none other than Ayatollah Khomeini. Independent India has banned many other books too. The Ramayana by Aubrey Menen, the Irish-Indian writer was banned in 1956 because of its deviation from the original text. The clout of the Ambanis ensured that The Polyester Prince by Hamish McDonald which was an unofficial biography of Dhirubhai Ambani was banned in 1988. It still remains unavailable in India.

In the last two decades, the scene has shifted from banning books to organisations, political parties and business houses literally terrorising publishers, libraries and universities into ensuring that certain books became unavailable or were not published. A K Ramanujam's essay Three Hundred Ramayanas and Wendy Doniger's The Hindus are the most famous recent victims. Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry was removed from the syllabus of the Bombay University because of objections from the Shiv Sena. The Shiv Sena for some time did not allow the sale of Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh because a character in it resembled Bal Thackeray. Javier Moro's The Red Sari published in Spanish in 2008 remained unavailable in India till 2015, because its subject was Sonia Gandhi. Tamal Bandyopadyay's Sahara: The Untold Story was the target of a defamation suit till an out-of-court settlement was reached in April 2014. 

While bans are usually on grounds of obscenity, defamation or other equally "weighty" reasons, the stated reasons for banning some books is cause for amusement. Black Beauty was banned in apartheid South Africa because the authorities thought "black" and "beauty" did not go together. George Orwell's Animal Farm was banned in the UAE in 2002 because it's depiction of talking pigs was deemed offensive. Alice in Wonderland was banned in 1931 in China because the governor of Hunan province thought animals should never use the human language and animals and humans should not be put on the same level. 

The Jaffna story has something of a happy ending though. It has been re-established and has close to 30,000 books in its collection now. A far cry from what it lost in 1981, but still a source of some solace. 

When it comes to banning and burning, the German writer Heinrich Heine's words ring true: Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people. 

The writer, an educationist, is a Chennai-based Consulting Editor with Westland Books.