A library at home
Setting up a library at home in India
is not a new phenomenon. For millennia, the religious scribes of all faiths
preserved scrolls, scriptures, and folios. Those custodians of faith were
mostly men who chanted from selected passages of holy texts. On sacred days,
they commented on selected verses to family members, and occasionally to
invited guests as well. Even today, this religious custom continues. However,
as early as the late 16th century, when the Portuguese Jesuits introduced the
printing press to India, literacy grew in three critical ways.
First, the social structure of the
private domain of readers and collectors crossed over from old canonical texts
to modern critical literature. In the beginning, domestic scholars bought books
to be read. Over generations, some of the educated households built formidable
home libraries, which were stocked with folk classics and modern publications.
Second, at the beginning of the 19th century, India crossed over from religious
to secular guardianship of knowledge when many educated families loaned out
books from their home libraries to their neighbors, on a strictly voluntary
basis. However, unlike the persecution of intellectuals in the aftermath of the
French Revolution, colonial India did not abandon its emerging indigenous intellectuals
and artists. Instead, the new elites integrated tradition with modernity.
Third, the printing press
universalized the cultural capital of local knowledge in a significant way when
Indian universities began to teach in foreign languages, especially English,
French, German, and Greek. For example, Saibal Datta has recently referred to
Nakur Chandra Biswas’s biography of one of Bengal’s earliest science educators
and reformers, Akshay Kumar Datta. Datta cites Biswas in documenting that
under the tutorship of the Oriental Seminary, Akshay Kumar learnt ancient Greek
in order to read Homer’s epic poems in the original. Also, the globalization of
learning enriched vernacular knowledge and challenged the existing norms by
other means. For example, in the western city of Pune, as early as the 1890s,
local playwrights translated and staged Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which
advocated women’s equality. Not surprisingly, foreign-language books were
translated into regional dialects.
Literature holds the key to open the
master lock of life and beyond. Literature has long been a powerful
institutional force in liberalizing minds, attitudes, and mores. For thousands
of years, India has believed that words and concepts allow individuals to reach
truth through the complexity of symbols and meanings. By the middle of the
nineteenth century, printed words were playing a decisive civic role in India.
That the cultural patrons of home libraries did not idolize a particular
theology or ideology ensured that books
affirmed the inclusive language of
knowledge.
If language is the essence of
intellectual life, then we must ask how best to organize the books on our
shelves at home in ways that represent our life experience. Generally speaking,
philosophers cite two functional methods of organization -- empirical and
rational.
The empirical method is elementary.
For example, arranging and stacking books alphabetically or by height. In fact,
Jean Piaget, the Swiss clinical psychologist, demonstrated that children
between the ages of 7 and 12 invariably arrange books by height. John Locke,
the British empirical philosopher, described the mind of a newborn as a blank
slate (tabula rasa), on which thoughts and concepts are literally
imprinted.
The alternate method of arranging
books is rational. The French philosopher René Descartes and his fellow
rationalists believed that we have pre-programmed knowledge at birth. Unlike
the empirical school, the rationalists view the human mind as inborn. Today, in
laboratory settings, neuroscientists are testing Descartes’s line of conjecture
that human brains are preordered. Instead of Locke’s blank blackboard, the
rationalists declare that biology is destiny. The eminent psycholinguist Noam
Chomsky follows this mode of reasoning by proposing that syntax, language, and
grammar are prefigured in the human brain. Given this rational scheme, home
libraries should be arranged according to our inborn disposition to order.
Nonetheless, home libraries go beyond
cognition and predisposition. They represent the arts of human imagination,
like brush strokes on a canvas. Both the empirical and the rational approach
pay short shrift to the manner in which libraries, and their keepers, can
organize and disseminate the beauty of words and knowledge. In today’s fetish
for political correctness, we seem to be forgetting that human acts can create
cultural systems of thought. Essentially, books on a shelf refine our moral
thinking about the transcendental aesthetics of pure reason. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
cautioned us that there is a limit to following functional (Lockean) or
rational (Cartesian) systems because, in the long run, core reality can seldom
be objectively demonstrated. Ludwig von Wittgenstein took Dostoyevsky’s
argument one step further by noting that human reason can never be formalized
because words are only the starting point in capturing human experience -- a
bit like capturing one firefly on a summer night. In addressing an audience in
Calcutta on the occasion of Sri Ramakrishna’s birth centenary in 1936,
Rabindranath Tagore observed that the sage saw limits to human experience
because it tends to be external and temporary. For Ramakrishna, temporal
knowledge is insufficient unless it expresses the inner truth.
Our home libraries mirror our souls
by evoking aesthetic and moral attitudes that are intimately linked to our
feelings, emotions, and memories. Altogether, those libraries are personal
collections of joy, creativity, and beauty. Immanuel Kant, the German
philosopher, in his Critique of Judgment, stated that ‘judgments of beauty are
possible when they are incapable of proof [Locke’s logic] or any reduction to
rules [Descartes’s innatism] and are intimately connected to the pleasure of
the subject’.
By the last quarter of the 19th
century, home libraries in India had become neighbourhood manifestos of
sentiment and solidarity. Civic elders, educators, and other professionals
became the guardians of knowledge in three critical ways. First, they installed
a voluntary scheme of lending books from their own home collections, so that
private collections reflected and supported civic trust and virtue. Second,
neighbours were invited to public readings on a weekly basis, which over time
significantly emboldened communities’ moral visions. Third, as readers and
listeners grew in number, especially in the three Presidencies -- namely,
Bengal, Bombay, and Madras -- local educators and leaders built public
libraries for common use. With volunteer support, many of these libraries are
still thriving today.
The Bally Sadharani Sabha (‘Bally
Common Association’) is one such example of a public library. At first,
families in Bally organized a youth group, the Juvenile Club, which sponsored
literary and other cultural activities. Then, starting around 1869, the club
sponsored a monthly magazine, Subhakari. Toward the end of the 19th century,
the Bally educators and reformers combined all the small libraries in the town
into one unit, the Bally Public Library (‘Bally Sadharan Granthagar’). To this
day, a framed picture of Hariprasad Mukherjee, who served as the
secretary of the library for 36 years, is keepint a “watch” over the present
generation of karmis (‘volunteers.’)
India owes a great deal to the early
keepers of truth, who shared their home libraries for the common good. In
today’s rapacious material culture, let us always remember how these reformers
enshrined the everyday life of books and words, which continue to convey
feelings, thoughts, and sentiments. Libraries are the temples of our souls.
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