The return of the book
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The book has made an astonishing comeback, defying accepted wisdom in the age of 24-hour satellite TV. More people are reading, more publishers are publishing, more bookstores are opening their doors to an insatiable public. Not an evening passes without a book launch, a book-club meeting or a reading platform happening somewhere. Blogland is on fire with literary debate, and even the mainstream media have re-opened column space for literary matters. Does all this spell a renaissance for reading, a new lease of life for the book? We invite five observer-participants in India's vibrant literary scene to share their views.
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PHOTO: K. RAMESH BABU
Starting young: Varied entries at an open-air encyclopedia.
The fragrance of the page
Ranjit Hoskote
IN over two decades of walking around the Fort, Mumbai's colonial quarter, I had never once noticed the flagstones of the pavements outside the Central Telegraph Office. The CTO pavements were always a hubbub of books being bought, haggled over, and sold: a crazed, open-air encyclopaedia bursting with the most varied entries. You would find Kant's critiques in this democratic clearing house, dumped by a college library; but also a trove of Tintin comics outgrown by an emigrant lightening the burden of memory. You would find Adorno, Marcuse and Althusser here. And alongside these irreproachable New Left gurus, sometimes, pirate editions of genteel Victorian porn repackaged in lurid black-and-green covers.
The CTO pavements are desolate today. You can study the flagstones at leisure. The booksellers who used to arrange their eclectic wares along this stretch have been exiled to provinces unknown by the municipal authorities. In the same quarter, other species of hawkers thrive. Stuffed toys, export-reject hosiery and electronic goods of dubious provenance do not violate the pedestrian's freedom of movement or pose a security threat. Books, apparently, do.
The smell remains
Details remain, occupying your shelves and shedding the fragrance of glue, paper, ink. And dust from the street. However diligently you dust these books; that smell remains like the ground note in an olfactory composition. A book on the making of Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus. Eileen Simpson's moving, elegant memoir of her doom-haunted first husband, John Berryman, and his circle of friends, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwarz, Randall Jarrell and Allen Tate: Poets in Their Youth. A mid-century Catullus edition, signed by a student of King's College, Cambridge. Canetti's Auto da Fe. Babar's memoirs. The Voyages of Columbus. Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, printed on coarse, war-quality paper. Books sourced from a school in New England; a palatial villa on Napean Sea Road, since ousted by a post-modern tower; a collector whose one-room tenement in central Mumbai was a shrine to chronic bibliophilia. Each book shifts your perspective, signals the imagination towards new planets rising over the horizon.
Perhaps books displayed on pavements do violate the pedestrian's freedom of movement. They pique a curiosity benumbed by routine. They urge a pause in the headlong velocity of a day measured out in coffee spoons and beeping text messages. They slow down the city's perpetual-motion machine, prod minds whose pages have been gummed together to open themselves out again.
Perhaps books do pose a security threat. The Latin for `book' is liber, with a short `i'. It is not related to, but happily resembles the Latin for `free': liber with a long 'i'. Sense fails us; let sound be our guide. Surely the proximity of the two libers cannot be coincidental. Across polities, from Gutenberg's era to the present, the authorities view with suspicion those who can produce and distribute books. Some books, if found in your possession, could brand you a dissident. Some books are withdrawn summarily from circulation; often, by legislators who have never read them.
Tool of transformation
The authorities know that the book is no harmless, isolating handheld device. The book has always presumed a community: a transmission of thoughts, feelings, ideas among a lattice of individuals. The book is often an overture to a symphony of transformation. The world's first printed book, produced by the technology's Chinese pioneers, was the Buddha-avatamsaka Sutra: the `Garland Sutra', which celebrates the world as the net of Indra. Each knot in it is a node that acknowledges and reflects every other, a participant in a constant dialogue. The sort of paradise of extended communication that some writers, and many readers, dream of.
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The book-shaped heart
Jeet Thayil
FEEL OF THE BOOK: Nothing quite like it.
"My heart is in my/pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy."
THIS is the last line of Frank O'Hara's, "A Step Away From Them", from his best-known book, Lunch Poems, which consists of short free verse pieces in which the narrator strolls around Manhattan on his lunch hour. In this poem, he has a quick cheeseburger; looks at bullfight posters, at nudes on a magazine cover, at a lady and her poodle getting into a cab; and enjoys "neon in daylight," and Puerto Ricans who make the avenue "beautiful and warm".
Confronted by the city's hum and life, he thinks of dead friends, three in particular, and knows he is only "A Step Away From Them." It is already 12:40; soon it will be time to go back to work. And then comes that last line, so casually dropped: in the midst of mid-town Manhattan's surfeit of light and sound, of life and death intertwined, his heart is a book of poems. What kind of book is it? We can guess that it is small enough to fit in a pocket. It is poetry, so the paper, the typeface, and the design will be elegant and simple. He is carrying it around with him, on a lunch hour stroll, so it may not be entirely pristine. Most likely there are mustard or wine stains. It will, at the very least, be well thumbed.
We can say this much with certainty: to O'Hara, it is an object of no small beauty and function, its pages filled with tactile pleasure, with texture to rival that of a great city. And that is the point about books. You can carry them around with you, flip the pages, smell them, own them in a way you cannot own words on a screen, or digital information processed into sound and image.
You can also write, if you are so inclined, in the margins. I was recently reunited with books that had been in storage in Bangalore for almost a decade, and others that had been in storage for two years in New York. To have them all finally in one or two rooms was to feel at home at last. I found books I had bought new or second hand in various places, and I found in the margins of some of them notations I or some other reader had made. On page 24 of Henry Miller's unprofound Black Spring, in my hand, the letters `WOW' with an asterisk, and, at the bottom of the page, another asterisk with the acronym unpacked: "Words of wisdom." I can only hope it was a tongue-in-cheek comment. Though I doubt it, I was not an ironic young person.
Marks in the margin
On a second-hand copy of A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound, someone had marked a paragraph with these words, "Silly Piggy Boy!" Another page, in the same hand, had this sentence running down its side: "You are a pissant & pedant & not nice!!" I wonder what he or she was thinking, this reader, and what brought on such emotion. Then there are the fans. Who was it who wrote, "You go, girl", "Rock it", and "Yes!" (18 times) in a copy of The God of Small Things?
As for my heart, it changes shape often, but at the moment it is On this Island, a first edition printed in 1937, when its author W.H. Auden was all of 20. I bought it for $24.50 at a second-hand bookstore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On the flyleaf is this inscription, "Ralph & Magdalena, Feb. 14 — `37 T." I know they won't be reading this, who bought a book of poems together on a Valentine's Day some seven decades ago, but, Ralph and Magdalena, I hope the book brought you joy.
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Discovering the reader's voice
Nilanjana S. Roy
THIS was about four years ago. We were ghostly presences on the Net then, lonely lighthouse beacons doing something strange called "weblogging" about, and this was the weird part, the bit that should be in apostrophes, "books".
There was that woman in Chicago who was a manic reader, and some guys in London who really knew publishing; there was a passionate reader from Egypt, and a formidable Irishman, and in a minor way, there was me. There were others, but this is representative of the United Nations feel of early litblogging. We were connected by two things — a love of reading, and the embarrassed knowledge that this made us dinosaurs.
War on books
The book was beyond dead. TV drove a stake through its heart, the movies shoved it into the cheapest coffin available, the Playstation read the burial service over the grave, and just for fun, the Internet ran the corpse through the crematorium.
Sometimes it was just the novel that was dead — the New York Times and the New York Review of Books had less space for fiction than ever before, Naipaul insisted the novel was over before writing two that proved his point, and writers of literary fiction spoke in besieged, despairing sentences.
Sometimes it was the demise of the physical book that was announced — e-paper was here, people, we'd be reading Faust and Proust on our laptops or nifty handheld readers soon.
But these were minor targets in the real war on books. The age of reading was so over. We'd like to thank the book for the wonderful job it did when Homer and Willie and Kalidas were writing their bestsellers, and of course Mr. Tagore and Ms. Atwood and Mr. Mahfouz have done a great job recently, but all good things must come to an end, and we hope the book will enjoy its hard-earned retirement.
So why were people still reading — and reading about reading, at that? We had no idea. But over time, Bookslut, Galleycat, MobyLives, the Complete Review, Arts & Letters Daily, Elegant Variation, Moorish Girl — to name just a handful of urls — became powerhouses.
These litblogs did everything; some filtered the best of mainstream media writing on books, some did snarky one-paragraph posts that spared no author, publisher or critic, some did long interviews, some specialized in publishing industry news. The medium was infinitely flexible. Book discussions on punctuation or post-modernism, reviewing or Rumi, could run for months in the comments section; an accomplished blogger could link to an author's entire publication history and writings in the course of a six-line post. The readers came in droves. They wanted poetry and translations and out-of-print authors. They wanted big fat histories and slender short stories. Readers asked for sharper reviews, more intense interviews, more books, more and more and more books.
On the Net
By 2005, those lonely islands tethered in the Internet had grown into landmasses, continents where readers — and often, writers — could have the kind of conversation that TV, Hollywood and Page 3 had no time for any more. Most authors under a certain age had their own websites (Vikram Chandra, Abha Dawesar, Rana Dasgupta, Samit Basu and Sonia Faleiro use websites and blogs extensively, to name just a few Indian writers).
By 2006, though I had virtually stopped blogging myself, I was glad to see that lit bloggers weren't speaking from the sidelines any more; they were the mainstream. The readers whom everyone agreed didn't exist had helped them find their voices.
And they had discovered the reader's voice. It was a quiet voice, so quiet that it had nearly been drowned out by white noise, but given space, it turned out to be a surprisingly strong one. What it had to say on the subject of books was simple: "Please, sir, could I have some more?"
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Making up for lost time?
Sampurna Chattarji
PHOTO: SHAJU JOHN
Here to stay: Willing to engage with books.
BOOKSTORES do it. Coffee shops do it. Libraries and list-serves, e-clubs and literary circles do it. Reading has never been such a group activity as it is now. Kids are reading, their parents are reading, their parents' parents are reading and all is well with the world.
Is it? In my dual (and often schizophrenic) avatar as poet and children's writer, I get to meet some of the people reading groups are targeted at — the non-reader, the would-be reader, and heavens behold, the avid reader. And one of the things I notice is the mushrooming of writing groups along with the preponderance of reading groups. Naturally, the two are related, a voice in my brain says. Yes, but...
But something is amiss in wonderland.
After every writing workshop I conduct, eager and anxious parents come up and say, "What should she read? She doesn't read enough!" Doesn't read enough? What about the hundreds of children I see borrowing books on a Saturday from the British Council library? What about the thousands I see in those comfy sofas the new bookstores come equipped with? Surely they're reading more than ever! What about the 23 kids who attended my five-day poetry workshop at this year's `Summertime at Prithvi'? What about the one 15-year-old (never mind that he was an American kid) I met recently who had read Mishima's The Sound of Waves? Thousands? Twenty-three? One?
Well, forget the numbers. We're concerned with words. Open the latest TimeOut Mumbai and under poetry readings alone there are multiple listings. So many people reading poetry! Warms the cockles of this poet's heart. And I haven't even mentioned the neighbourhood book club, the online book club, the ladies' book club and the bookstore book club... What? How? Am I dreaming? Nein.
Glamorous and gladdening
Reading seems to have suddenly become an activity at once glamorous and gladdening. Oh frabjous day, calloo, callay, as the Jabberwock would say. Why then the worm of disquiet, nibbling quietly at the core of this goodly apple? What is it that troubles me, when all seems wondrously well?
I am suspicious of the frenzy, the column-space, the hubbub. One part of me, one very old-fashioned, dyed-in-the-wool, crabby part of me insists that this is not for real. This shiny-bright return-of-the-Jedi-esque Book Age is all too good to be true. So, more people are reading. Great. What are they reading? And don't give me Da Vinci Code.
Behind the numbers, between the lines, I am wondering where the quietude went. I am wondering — as I hear parents and teachers publicly lauding the `Harry Potter phenomenon' for making recalcitrant kids read — what next? How long will this last, this fury of reading, this frenzy of interest in that strange "Basic Orderly Organised Knowledge device, known as [the] BOOK", that revolutionary piece of hardwire with "no wires, no electrical circuits, no batteries" predicted as "the medium [that] will still be readable in several centuries... "? Why does this very laudable enthusiasm for the book smack of the hysteria of the short-lived? Where is the time for what a book really demands — attentiveness? Attentiveness to language, texture, context. Attentiveness to worlds that cannot be zapped without a sense of cheating oneself.
Perhaps that's what the rise of the reading group is about. A search for attentiveness, a return to absorption. Absorption in the now, an immediate and absolute readiness to exist in the word, syllable by savoured syllable. It would sound fanciful if I didn't know there are others who feel the same. As a co-organiser of and participant in a series called PEN@Prithvi in Bombay, I am amazed and enthused by the levels of readiness our audiences bring with them. At these monthly sessions, what seems (and is) extraordinary is the possibility of two long unfuelled-by-caffeine, unaided-by-hype hours of intense engagement with `difficult' books and `challenging' themes. I would think it was fiction if I didn't know it to be fact. Here are people willing to suspend the frenzies of city living for the pleasures of the word. Here is reason to believe that what went out of fashion was never the book, but the willingness to devote time to its myriad demands. And if this craziness is about making up for lost time, then calloo callay. The reading group is here to stay.
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Call for a readers' uprising
Shuddhabrata Sengupta
I OWE more or less the origins of everything I have cared to know to the hours spent as an awkwardly solitary child and teenager in the womb of a few libraries in Delhi. The Delhi Transport Corporation's 40 paise tickets would take me on long bus rides every week to the lost libraries of Nalanda and Alexandria, as I hopped from one Delhi library to another, running away from the purgatories of school and the playground, reliving the history of the written word through hot summer afternoons. In my childhood, my guardian saints were bus conductors and librarians. One took me to the other. My world, composed almost entirely of books, lay in their special custody.
`Bookish' was almost an expletive when I was growing up, an expression usually marked by a snarl, at best by the condescending sneer of inverted snobbery and muscular athleticism. It is therefore with some pleasure that I now witness the return of the book and of reading, of `bookishness' even, into public life. There is even a perverse pleasure to be had in knowing that the non-reading chattering class has to endure the fact of a `reading' in order to access the social smarm of a book launch.
But elsewhere, away from page three, a quiet revolution is under way. Each day a new independent publisher seems to be announcing an imprint. Cafes open book corners to ensure that customers stay for more than one cup of coffee. The `reader' is a demanding, gregarious, desirous creature and she is to be found everywhere. On the Delhi metro with a book between stops, on the streets, aided and abetted by the honourable book pirate and the second-hand book seller, sharing what she reads by handing out nicely bound xerox copies of expensive books to friends. Reading and writing circles proliferate online and in physical spaces. Meanwhile publishers and intellectual property sharks hike the prices of books, libraries deteriorate, conspiring to quell the readers' silent uprising.
Urgent need
There is an urgent need for a greater public space that can accommodate the expanding culture of reading. Most importantly, what this means is libraries, millions of more libraries. It is a crying shame that no major city in India has a hospitable public library system, with an accessible, well-funded, capacious public library. Delhi has the Delhi Public Library (which is no longer very public, and hardly a library) hidden away and overshadowed by the Old Delhi Railway Station, where books are kept in a kind of charming old-world purdah, as far away from readers as possible. Budgets for the acquisition of new books are next to non-existent, and the books themselves languish, uncared for, in various stages of decay in darkened corners of a cramped space. The satellite libraries of the Delhi Public Library system in different neighbourhoods of the city have died unmourned deaths, or are in a terminal state.
What is doubly unfortunate is that the tradition of private collections forming the nucleus of public libraries, which resulted in the treasure houses that are the Rampur Raza Library, the Khuda Baksh Library in Patna, the Sarasvati Mahal Library in Thanjavur or the David Sassooon Library in Mumbai seems to have gone completely un-emulated. I am not aware of any significant act of philanthropy in the decades following independence that has resulted in the formation of a viable contemporary public library building effort anywhere in India. The nation has failed its readers. Now it is the turn of readers to form their own mobile republic of libraries with a shareable, photocopiable, downloadable, easy-to-pirate constitution.
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