RANDOM MUSINGS

Madabhushi Sridhar has written a relevant and thought-provoking article (THI, 16^th November, 2021) regarding the right to read books. Book banning has a long and illustrious career in India and it is ironically one of the best ways to increase the readership of a book. In the present times, book banning is, in fact, extremely irrelevant too. A book is easily available online in most cases. Access to the readers is never a problem and banning increases only the publicity. Beyond that, it does not make sense. Anyway, reading habits also appear to have gone down considerably with attention spans of the upcoming generations fit only to read social media messages and reflect on them. Few have the time and energy to read books of some length. Most book bans concern hurting of religions, but it is the maturity of the society to allow books to come into the market without resistance. India has a great tradition of ‘vada’ or debate and the best way to counter intellectual violence is by intellectual responses. Wendy Doniger wrote a (in)famous book Hindus: An Alternative History which was a classic example. She applied discredited Freudian theories to many Indian stories, legends, and gods. Vishal Agrawal wrote a book countering Wendy’s book page to page and paragraph to paragraph showing that her book was more of an alternative for history. The Freudian theories were perhaps more applicable to the author herself as Vishal shows. That is indeed the proper way to address intellectual violence instead of indulging in physical attacks. Taslima Nasreen is a famous example of this. Whatever be the intentions or the level of scholarship of the authors, banning a book is never a solution and neither is physical violence of any kind.     

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