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PREFACE

In 1931, S. R. Ranganathan, an unknown literary scholar and statistician from India, published a curious manifesto: The Five Laws of Library Science. The manifesto, written shortly after Ranganathan’s return to India from London—where he learned to despise, among other things, the Dewey decimal system and British bureaucracy—argues for reorganizing Indian libraries. Ranganathan believed that India’s libraries, many of which had been established by the British, could promote radically egalitarian ideals if they followed five fundamental laws. The five laws appear on the first page of the book: “Books Are for Use. Every Reader His Book. Every Book Its Reader. Save the Time of the Reader. Library Is a Growing Organism.” For Ranganathan, India’s dearth of public libraries prevents the country’s independence. A national library system, properly conceived, would be the catalyst for national sovereignty—but of an independent India that would fundamentally differ from the nations of Europe. Ranganathan was not simply a library scientist; he was a librarian-philosopher of democratic critique.

Of all the laws, the second law—“Every Reader His Book”—is the most important for a future egalitarian reading community. The second law is the only one to receive more than one chapter. Ranganathan devotes three chapters, including three didactic dialogues, to it.

As if to emphasize the radical egalitarianism the law creates, Ranganathan concludes the first chapter on the second law with a didactic dialogue in which several authorities come forward to suggest that the communities they oversee should be prevented from reading books. The “Psychologist” argues that the mentally ill in his care should not be given books; a man representing blind people argues that braille is too expensive and therefore should be eliminated; an expert on the illiterate suggests primers are useless; and the “Jailor” argues that books should be banned from prisons because they incite anticolonial passions—“no books for damned murderers!” he proclaims, perhaps with Bhagat Singh in mind.¹

The second law, emerging in human form as a woman, counters each of these claims individually and reiterates her claim that every reader should have access to books and to reading. Each authority figure first balks, then becomes curious, and then relinquishes his power to the second law. Having been collectively persuaded, they join hands:

All sing in a chorus:

There’s room for all

Let not the mean

Or learned dean

Restrict the books

T’ a favoured few

We’ve Books for all.

Books for the rich

And Books for the poor

Books for the man

And Books for the dame.

Books for the sick

And Books for the fit

Books for the blind

And Books for the dumb.

Books for the bungler

And Books for the wrangler

Books for the burgher

And Books for the cotter.

Books for the lettered

And Books for the fettered

We’ve Books for all

For one and all.²

The authorities, thus reconciled with the second law, leave with books and without their former authority: The second law has made them readers. Ranganathan proclaims this to be the first step in the digvijaya of library science, or what he calls “the world-conquering expedition” of readers, beginning first with India and the United States: the relinquishing of one’s authority to the collective exegesis of readership, “perpetual education,” and “unlimited democracy.”³

This is not exactly what the British Raj had in mind when they established anglophone libraries (and pedagogy) in British India in the mid-nineteenth century. In his “Minute on Indian Education” from 1835, T. B. Macaulay declared not only that “Western literature” was intrinsically superior, such that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,”⁴ but also that the British should teach English literature in order to create “a class of interpreters between us and the millions we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”⁵ The establishment of “good European librar[ies]” across British India became the means for the British to extend their imperial project. British authorship was the mechanism of British colonial authority.⁶

Of course, Indian readers were more unpredictable and less impressionable to colonial mimicry than Macaulay imagined or hoped them to be. Their reading habits ranged beyond the standard English canon.⁷ By the 1920s and 1930s, anticolonial thinkers were busy theorizing reading not merely as consumption but also as a properly anticolonial practice. Anti-imperial critique envisioned the reader not as a sociological figure or a consuming subject but rather as an ideal figure for ethical and political practices. This anticolonial theory of reading was not concerned with the consumption of literary texts per se; instead, it tried to envision the possibility that the act of reading might signify—that is, the possibility of egalitarian emancipation.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, many South Asian thinkers had made reading and critique a fundamental part of anticolonial self-cultivation in the pursuit of expertise and mastery. But there appear to be just as many anticolonial agitators who urged their readers to read simply for the sake of reading—that is, for its inconsequence.

A more vibrant form of anticolonial thought emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, and Ranganathan was its most pragmatic proponent. This form of anticolonial thought argued for reading and communal interpretation not to cultivate a form of mastery but to disavow mastery altogether. To remain a reader—and to remain a reader with others—were the goals of this anticolonial theory of reading. To put it another way, in the terms of the didactic poem of the second law: To relinquish one’s authority in order to become a reader was the ideal of this anticolonial theory of reading. To become or remain a reader, and thus purposefully to divest oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Raj, which claimed to prize self-mastery as the precondition for national independence.

In Ranganathan’s four-hundred-page book about books and their readers, the word “author” appears only once—in a footnote—and very few authors’ names are to be found in the text, even as examples. Ranganathan was uninterested in authors. As he explains in his chapter on the third law (“Every Book Its Reader”), readers are the sole purpose of a library, and books without readers, even books by so-called important authors, should be discarded from a library. The Five Laws of Library Science asserts the centrality of the reader in an anticolonial library science. The emergence of readers, Ranganathan notes, marks the transition from despotic rule to democracy and freedom. His book is a manifesto fundamentally invested in the tyro rather than the tyrant.

In the case of British India, where the British author was the aesthetic extension of British authority, reconfiguring the hierarchical relation between the allegedly transcendent author and the multitude of readers was a form of imagining a postcolonial egalitarianism. To upend the colonial configuration of authority, anticolonial writers disavowed expertise and self-mastery, instead asserting a heteronomous collectivity formed through practices of reading. As an anticolonial practice, reading could mark modes of refusal, nonproductivity, inconsequence, inexpertise, and nonauthority. In direct contrast to the values of British liberalism, these recalcitrant ideals were perfect for envisioning a radical egalitarianism rooted in communal reading and collective textual criticism.

Instead, anticolonial thinkers took up reading to perpetually refuse the expertise, and therefore sovereignty, that the British Raj would ostensibly recognize as deserving of national independence. Rather than becoming the “mimic men” T. B. Macaulay had imagined in his famous “Minute on Indian Education” in 1835, antiauthoritarian anticolonialism became a different menace, revealing the hierarchical and anti-egalitarian norms at the heart of British liberalism and the European nation-state. Envisioned in this way, anticolonial thought becomes more radically about retaining the promise of postcolonial antiauthoritarianism rather than the mere attainment of national independence.

Ranganathan offers Macaulay’s “Minute” as the opposite of his readerly vision. Macaulay’s bookshelf of British authors, he argues, simply reproduces British authority in British India by way of “mimic men” in the absence of the British.⁸ According to Ranganathan, the class of elite Indian men the British Raj produced were “filters” (Macaulay’s word was “interpreters”), but who had failed to distribute the education, and therefore the power, that they had been allegedly granted.

What begins as a minor critique of Macaulay’s “Minute” becomes an anticolonial proclamation:

If Macaulay’s filter has proved a snare, ere long it will divert its course and keep clear of this clog in the “filter.” The Second Law will not take a defeat. It must win ultimately. That is our faith. With the world opinion backing it, it may win even at no distant date. If they are shrewd business men, the “English-educated” Indians should greet it with an olive branch and volunteer their services in its holy war on lingering ignorance. Then only, they will gain any respect in the eyes of the world and then only can they survive amidst the forces that will be set free on the day that the Second Law plants its flag on Indian soil and puts the BOOKS in the hands of ALL, even as it has done on other soils.⁹

Readers form the centerpiece of Ranganathan’s cosmopolitan anticolonial library science, and the cultivation of egalitarianism by way of readerly communities stands at the heart of Ranganathan’s project. The future flag of India is marked not by new authority but, using Russia and the United States as models, by the idea “books in the hands of all”: a truly egalitarian practice of reading and a radically antiauthorial and anti-author belief in readers.

Ranganathan’s philosophy of readerly egalitarianism borders on the absurd. Using a map of Tompkins County, New York, Ranganathan imagines a reading community designed around a set of concentric circles beginning at a centrally located library in the town of Ithaca and moving outward in increasingly larger circles; he imagines that outpost libraries would be located in each quadrant, and books would circulate among all the libraries.¹⁰ This geographic model, he demonstrates, aligns with the “internal repose” produced by the communal discussion of shared texts, which prepares readers for democratic society.¹¹ The psychical circles of “internal repose,” like Ithaca’s geographic ones, move constantly from “facts (nadir)” to “fundamental/universal laws (zenith)” and back.¹² Ranganathan’s point is not to dismiss facts—which are necessary for his proposed psychical process—but rather to insist on the importance of democratic and egalitarian institutions that create individuals who can resist authoritarianism. The circles, Ranganathan argues, foreground the nonteleology of a properly ethical library science: in the communities of upstate New York—as in the individual—mastery, expertise, and authority are never attained; books circulate and “fundamental and universal laws” shift under the weight of new “facts.”¹³

Taken out of its historical context, a lengthy treatise on the ethico-political possibilities of library science might seem strange. But British India in the 1920s and 1930s was hectic with radical utopian proposals, anticolonial manifestos, and radical democratic critiques—not unlike other countries in the years just after World War I. Ranganathan was in good company. He was not alone in bringing home, after the war, a pastiche of Victorian optimism and shell-shocked pessimism. With adjustments and additions appropriate for the pessimistic utopianism of the moment, manuals of nineteenth-century liberal self-cultivation and self-care reappeared (like Herbert Spencer’s and John Stuart Blackie’s, but also, and more popular, Giuseppe Mazzini’s proto-fascist Duties of Man), as did radical proposals for the reorganization of society, which were circulated heavily in the literary centers of British India, especially in Lahore, Delhi, Lucknow, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. The library became the locus of anticolonial activity (and, not unrelatedly, colonial surveillance) not simply because Indian anticolonial agitators were studying to become the future authorities of a postcolonial nation. Rather, for many anticolonial thinkers, the library became the location of a global egalitarian culture because it promoted a revolutionary inconsequentialism in the face of the imperial demand for practical knowledge.

Reading or critique, in this formula, was a practice of egalitarian anti-authoritarianism precisely because it urged readers to refuse the calls of authorship, and, relatedly, authority. To remain a reader—and to remain a reader with others—was precisely the goal of this anticolonial theory of reading. To become or remain a reader, and thus purposefully divest oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Raj, which claimed to prize self-mastery as the alleged proof necessary for national independence. To become or to remain a reader, and thus perpetually abjure self-mastery, also challenged the logic of European fascism (not far removed from the logic of British imperialism), which prized purity as the assurance of national homogeneity.

The radical importance of this anticolonial theory of reading and criticism, in my interpretation, is that it prizes practices of communal and egalitarian critique—a celebration of unknowingness ad infinitum—as the model by which a truly antiauthoritarian anticolonial politics might be attained. In this sense, although Ranganathan and his colleagues openly advocated Indian independence from British rule, they endeavored to imagine, quite seriously, a nation founded less on authoritative national sovereignty and more on egalitarian readerly internationalism—a flag of books, in the hands of all.

Anticolonial thinkers theorized practices of reading that perpetually refuse the self-mastery, and therefore sovereignty, that the British Raj would ostensibly recognize as deserving of national independence. Envisioned in this way, anticolonial thought becomes about retaining the promise of postcolonial, radically egalitarian antiauthoritarianism rather than merely attaining national independence. An anticolonial theory of reading, along with the concomitant refusal of liberal self-mastery, was a fitting response to the horrors European liberalism created around the world.

Ranganathan’s lengthy manifesto is one of many such manifestos in South Asian political writing in the 1920s and 1930s that, on the one hand, imagine the relation between authorship and authority and, on the other, imagine anticolonialism as antiauthoritarianism. Anticolonial thinkers across the political spectrum not only argued for the importance of communal criticism against individual authorship but also went to great lengths to refuse their own authority and expertise. M. K. Gandhi, most famously, attempted to “reduce [himself] to zero” only to be challenged by the revolutionary activist Bhagat Singh for being too much of an author to properly act on behalf of the masses. Bhagat Singh’s jail notebook attests to his own experiments to reduce himself to a “reader,” even as postcolonial hagiographers have declared both men “masters” and “fathers” of modern India.¹⁴

The radicalism of the worldwide interwar period was quickly overshadowed not only by the horrors of fascism but also by the dull pragmatism required to transform newly independent colonies into postcolonial nation-states. By the 1940s, and certainly in the wake of the horrific partition of 1947, interwar antiauthoritarian ideals dwindled into the joylessness of establishing India and Pakistan as nations and aligning them with the norms introduced by the United Nations. In the course of becoming properly sovereign, the radical aesthetics that had undergirded South Asian anticolonialism were ignored in favor of state building. After Indian independence in 1947, Ranganathan played a central role in establishing India’s national library system; he was the primary figure behind the Public Libraries Act of 1948. Although the act required Indian libraries to be free and open to the public (in accordance with the second law), the act also created gatekeepers and library masters—those same authorities that the second law had once converted into readers. Lost was that original anticolonial recalcitrance.

But to return to Ranganathan’s utopian library is to imagine a vibrantly “bibliomigrant” world in which the circulation of aesthetic ideas could be made common and egalitarian: reading was revolutionary.¹⁵ The library, with its endless collection of books—an infinitely “growing organism,” as per Ranganathan’s fifth law—was one way of theorizing anticolonial reading and communal discussion, acts that remained perpetually incomplete. It represents an anticolonial politics that does not seek dominance and mastery but rather attempts to remain a perpetual novice, in the service of a world after colonial rule.