Rajat Kanti Satpati
Who gets to decide what we should read? The question arose sharply in Ahmedabad this August, when two books were removed from a school reading list, and a silent reading session was later disrupted.
In August, an Ahmedabad school removed Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala and Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl from its reading list after objections from some parents and protests involving right-wing organisations. Later that month, a silent reading session organised in Vastrapur was reportedly disrupted by a group claiming affiliation with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal. The gathering included students, lawyers, media professionals and others. The reading itself became the object of confrontation.
I Am Malala is the memoir of a girl who survived an assassination attempt after publicly advocating girls’ right to education. The Diary of a Young Girl records the experiences of a Jewish teenager hiding from Nazi persecution before Anne Frank died during the Holocaust. Whatever one thinks of Malala’s political views, or of the ways her story is interpreted, reading her memoir does not require accepting every view she holds. Anne Frank’s diary similarly allows readers to encounter the testimony of a young person caught inside one of history’s greatest crimes.
A book is not a political membership card.
Reading allows a person to encounter an argument without accepting it. A reader can examine its evidence, question its assumptions and reject its conclusions. The point is that judgement becomes possible through encounter.
Education is often described as the transmission of knowledge. But knowledge without the capacity to question it can become another form of conformity.
This question of who may read and what they may encounter carries a specific weight in the Indian context. For much of India’s history, access to formal education was deeply shaped by caste hierarchy. Ambedkar wrote that under the Chaturvarna system, the right to education was assigned to the Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, while Shudras were denied it. He also discussed the denial of education to women. The control of education was therefore connected to the wider system of graded inequality that Ambedkar analysed.
This was one of the structures challenged by Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule. Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule opened a school for girls in Pune in 1848, and Phule later set up schools for the Mahars and Mangs. In his 1882 testimony before the Education Commission, Phule criticised the concentration of education among the higher classes and called for a wider spread of primary and female education. His educational work treated access to knowledge as a social question rather than a privilege confined to a small section of society.
Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s conception of democracy makes this problem especially important. In Annihilation of Caste, he imagined an ideal society with “varied and free points of contact with other modes of association” and described democracy as “a mode of associated living.” For Ambedkar, fraternity was not sameness. It required people to participate in a common social world despite their differences. His writings on the Depressed Classes emerged from a context in which these communities faced restrictions on access to public wells and schools, and were subjected to social segregation and prescribed occupations. The “associated living” he imagined presupposes that those who were once excluded from classrooms are now full participants in the world of ideas.
A democratic society cannot expect citizens to form independent judgements while continually narrowing the range of ideas they are permitted to encounter. The democratic reader needs the freedom to examine an argument before deciding whether it deserves acceptance, rejection or further examination.
John Dewey understood education as inseparable from democratic life. For Dewey, democracy depended on communication, inquiry and shared experience. He saw education as a way of preparing people to participate intelligently in common life.
Not every book belongs in every classroom. Parents can question reading lists, teachers can challenge texts, and schools can make decisions about age, pedagogy and context. Citizens can protest. A democratic society must leave room for disagreement over education. The important distinction is between arguing that a book should not be taught and intimidating people who choose to read it. The first concerns the content and place of a text in education. The second makes the act of reading itself a political offence.
Contemporary concerns about caste discrimination in higher education, including its relationship to student distress and suicides, remain serious enough to have been examined by the Supreme Court-appointed National Task Force on student mental health and suicides.
The harder democratic principle is to defend the reader’s freedom even when we dislike the book being read. Otherwise, “intellectual freedom” simply becomes another name for allowing ideas with which we already agree.
This is why the Ahmedabad episode matters beyond the two books involved. The deeper question is who gets to decide what a citizen may encounter before that citizen has had the opportunity to form a judgement.
Once reading itself becomes evidence of political allegiance, we begin judging the person who has chosen to read a book rather than only the ideas within it. “What does this book say?” becomes “What does reading this book say about you?” The reader is then placed on trial alongside the ideas in the book.
A society that makes the second question more important than the first risks producing citizens who know which ideas belong to their side but have little opportunity to examine ideas outside that boundary.
The people who gathered for the silent reading session in Vastrapur had come to read. They were exercising their judgement through the simple act of sitting with books.
A democratic citizen should be free to encounter an idea, question it, and decide what to make of it. In India, defending that freedom is inseparable from defending the right of readers from the Depressed Classes and other communities historically excluded from education to full and equal access to the world of texts.
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Rajat Kanti Satpati is an author of several books. His writing has appeared in SteinbeckNow, People’s Daily, and other publications.
