The burning of bookstalls in Kolkata, where I grew up and which, after nearly half a century away, still feels most like home, is personal.
Kolkata has a long tradition of bringing books into its festivities. During Durgotsav, the Bengalis’ biggest annual religious festival, temporary bookstalls spring up around the venues where communities gather to worship the Goddess. It was at one such bookshop that, as a teenager, I bought my first collection of Pablo Neruda’s poetry: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
This year, on the first day of the festival, in what appears to have been an unprecedented assault, right-wing thugs burnt bookstalls across metropolitan Kolkata. One newspaper described how the trouble began:
“On Saturday evening, a large police team and officials of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) arrived at a Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) book stall in Jadavpur and ordered it to be removed. The organisers produced their permissions.”
To no avail. A few metres away, a similar stall displaying posters calling for a boycott of Marxism and Leninism continued to sell its merchandise.
Later that evening, the police returned and ordered several other bookstalls associated with left-wing and centre-left organisations to close. Elsewhere in the city, right-wing thugs took matters into their own hands, setting fire to stalls associated with left-wing organisations.
We do not know the full extent of the financial damage. But that is not the point. Kolkata is arguably India’s most bookish city, with an extraordinary density of bookshops. To me and many like me, the burning of books is an alien assault on the very core of Kolkata’s cultural identity.
Srijato, one of Kolkata’s best-loved poets, reflected on the tragedy. He was in Fremantle to join a Totally Lit Festival panel with poet Robert Wood and Hungerford Award-winning writer Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes.
Srijato’s Facebook post, which I read alongside his thousands of followers, deserves to be quoted at some length, for the message of hope it contains.
Srijato writes (my translation):
“Although the destruction of books is unfortunate, I was not particularly disturbed by it. History is full of such examples. Here in our own country, the library of Nalanda University [established in the fifth century] was burnt to ashes [in 1193]. But its legacy lives on.
“Such incidents merely expose the destroyers’ fear of knowledge and awareness, and their lack of confidence in themselves. In a way, that is a good thing.… Books are, in essence, like the phoenix. From the very fire that consumes them, they spread their wings and take flight once again. For philosophies, ideas and ideologies cannot die; they are indelible.”
It is critical to have poets shine a light through such darkness.
Events such as book burning in a city of booklovers also remind us why PEN International matters: as a global movement building solidarity among readers and writers across borders, especially when the freedom to read, write and think comes under attack. And they remind us that this work depends on your support.
I hope you can join us on 12 November for our event commemorating the Day of the Imprisoned Writer, featuring Louise Adler and Sisonke Msimang.
In solidarity.
Krishna Sen, Chair PEN Perth
Image by Rafael Juárez from Pixabay