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.
Source | http://www.thestatesman.com/news/opinion/a-library-at-home/148828.html
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
Best Paper Award | Received the Best Paper
Award at TIFR-BOSLA National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for
Excellence (NCFL 2016) on April 23, 2016. The title of the paper is “Removing Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP
Treaty”
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