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Literary Review
ENDPAPER
The librarian
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
NETRA SHYAM
IT was gratifying to have several readers respond to my piece on public libraries. The letters ranged from those who acknowledged their debt to our public libraries to those wondering what could be done to revive them. There were also those who wrote asking how they could begin something like a public library — on a modest scale — for children, and then there were others — writers of regional literature — who wrote to say that their discovery of literature and writing began with the hours spent at the local public library in their respective small towns.
Places of discovery
The essential thing in attempting to revitalise our libraries — public or private — is to transform them into places where an individual can discover (or rediscover) the pleasures of reading, and to make it a centre for scholarship, discussion and debate for a community. The responsibility and joy for such a task lies with both, the library staff and patrons of the library. The first suggestion that occurs to me is to urge you to raise a group from your local community — town, district or city — to support the neighbourhood library. It might be a good idea to call this group "Friends of the Library" — a band of book lovers willing to volunteer at the library to create activities, raise funds, urge library patrons (who could vary from children to housewives to professionals) to become more involved with the library, and to get writers, celebrities, and even politicians to endorse the library; to endorse reading.
The librarian must be the least acknowledged, the least celebrated professional in India. How many young people do you actually hear saying (or should it be confessing?) they want to be librarians? Is this because our libraries don't inspire it, or is it just our philistine attitude to books and culture?
Skill, patience and passion
It is high time we celebrated our librarians (beginning with school librarians) for their patience, commitment, and, in some cases, their love and care of books. And all of this, remember, on their small salary. The bigger institutions probably now pay their librarians well but I'd wager that our school, college and public librarians are still toiling away on next to nothing salaries. What has probably been more galling for them is how our largely unappreciative, philistine public has looked on the job as something without actual skills and real knowledge, while the opposite is true. It is, first of all, a science, and few jobs require as much passion and such absolute knowledge as being a true librarian. I admit that I too, like many of you, have come across bitter, half hearted librarians with no real care for books — and I think this happened precisely because people thought the job only required one to stamp a due date or return a book to the shelf, and so anyone was employed. In my old college they had clerks filling in as librarians, and my school librarian never read herself — that was your job, you who borrowed the book. The job, of course, has never seemed glamorous, unless you were a librarian at some prestigious archive or the Chief Librarian at the Library of Congress.
Our school teachers, even though underpaid, have at least been revered. But I also know several people who will swear that their school librarians gave them an equal education, and sometimes, the gift of reading and thinking for themselves. I was amazed to discover how many American writers (no doubt because of their long tradition of fabulous public libraries with generous endowments) have actually celebrated libraries and librarians, and acknowledged them as inspiration. Reading Rooms (Doubleday) edited by Susan Allen Toth and John Coughlan, is an anthology of essays, stories, poems and memoirs that brings several writers (E.B. White, Sinclair Lewis, Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Eudora Welty, Edith Wharton, Henry Miller, Elizabeth Hardwick, Stephen King, Annie Dillard, Grace Paley, John.D. McDonald, Howard Nemerov, Steven Millhauser, Amy Tan, Richard Wright, John Cheever, Archibald MacLeish) to celebrate the library. And then there's the blind Argentinean Jorge Borges, who imagined paradise to be a labyrinth of libraries. Only libraries and librarians can make reading a congenital habit. I say this slightly tongue in cheek because books we've borrowed are easier to read than books we've bought. Isn't that true? There's no due date, and hence no pressure to read the books we own (and they languish on our shelves), while we always seem to get a library book read, if not returned.
pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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