BENGALURU:Around 25 Bengalureans thought it was a good idea to spend a sultry Sunday afternoon reading books. Not just any book but the ones that were once banned. This silent reading party meets every month through Gathr and, this time, they came together at Goobe bookstore on Church Street.
The controversial books included Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang and Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.
Most of the 25 present were strangers to each other. One girl selected a banned Russian book and remarked how the thickness of the book could actually save a life, by being a barrier between you and a bullet. This reporter picked Alice in Wonderland, mainly because it had always been a childhood favourite. Why was it obscene?
Sexual Imagery
Written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, the book published in 1865 was banned in the 1900s. The story follows a simple story line. A young girl falls down the rabbit hole and explores a world of fantasy and imagination. What is wrong with that? Is it the part where the caterpillar, smoking a hookah, advises Alice to have mushrooms to grow or shrink as she pleases? Maybe it was a wink at substance abuse.
After a two-hour silent reading session, some who had read the book talked about the depiction of sexual imageries. One man explained the background to the story: Charles Dodgson’s own sexual desires for a real 10-year-old girl named Alice, who was the daughter of the dean of Christ Church, the Oxford College where Dodgson was a mathematics teacher.
Michael Foucault, the French philosopher, too has talked about sexuality in the Alice in Wonderland. In his book The History of Sexuality, he talks about sexualization of children in the eighteenth century. “One can have the impression that sex was hardly spoken of at all in these institutions…..the question of sex was a constant preoccupation”. There have been other symbolic observations made, such as the caterpillar representing a phallus and the episode where her neck elongates, an erection.
But one major reason for this book’s ban in China was that the animal characters used human language. “Animals should not use human language, and that it was disastrous to put animals and human beings on the same level,” said the governor of the Hunan Province in China in 1931.
Most in the audience could not really grasp why a ban on any of these books was necessary. Abhayraj Naik, a professor at Azim Premji University, guided a discussion about this for over an hour.
“Unlike other form of art, there is no point in banning books. If I don’t like what I am reading, I have the option to shut the book and stop reading. That I may not be able to do with music or an art on public display,” said Abhayraj.