An Anticolonial Theory of Reading

[ PMLA theories and methodologies

IN 1931, S. R. RANGANATHAN, AN UNKNOWN LITERARY SCHOLAR AND j. daniel elam STATISTICIAN FROM INDIA, PUBLISHED A CURIOUS MANIFESTO: THE

Five Laws of Library Science. he manifesto, written shortly ater 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. Rangana- than believed that India’s libraries, many of which had been established by the British, could promote radically egalitarian ideals if they followed ive fundamental laws. he ive laws appear on the irst 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 its eventual independence. A national library system, properly conceived, would be the catalyst for national sovereignty—but of an independent India that would fundamentally difer 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. he second law is the only one to receive more than one chapter. Rangana- than devotes three chapters, including three didactic dialogues, to it. As if to emphasize the radical egalitarianism the law creates, Ranganathan concludes the irst chapter on the second law with a didactic dialogue in which several authorities come forward to sug- gest that the communities they oversee should be prevented from J. DANIEL ELAM is an assistant professor reading books. he “Psychologist” argues that the mentally ill in his of comparative literature at the Univer- care should not be given books; a man representing blind people sity of Hong Kong and a 2018–19 fellow argues that braille is too expensive and therefore should be elimi- in the Society for the Humanities at Cor- nated; an expert on the illiterate suggests primers are useless; and nell University. His forthcoming mono- graph is entitled World Literature for the the “Jailor” argues that books should be banned from prisons be- Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aes- cause they incite anticolonial passions—“no books for damned mur- thetics, Postcolonial Democracy. derers!” he proclaims, perhaps with the recently infamous agitator

© 2019 j. daniel elam 172 PMLA 134.1 (2019), published by the Modern Language Association of America 134.1 ] J. Daniel Elam 173 and anticolonial martyr Bhagat Singh in his is not exactly what the British Raj had theories and methodologies mind (121). in mind when they established anglophone li- he second law, emerging in human form braries (and pedagogy) in British India in the as a woman, counters each of these claims mid–nineteenth century. In his “Minute on individually and reiterates her claim that ev- Indian Education” from 1835, T. B. Macaulay ery reader should have access to books and declared not only that “Western literature” was to reading. Each authority igure irst balks, intrinsically superior, such that “a single shelf of then becomes curious, and then relinquishes a good European library was worth the whole his power to the second law. Having been col- native literature of India and Arabia” (230), lectively persuaded, they join hands: but also that the British should teach En glish literature in order to create “a class of interpret- All sing in a chorus: ers between us and the millions we govern; a here’s room for all class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but Let not the mean En glish in tastes, in opinions, in morals and Or learned dean in intellect” (237). As Gauri Viswanathan has Restrict the books shown, the establishment of “good European T’ a favoured few librar[ies]” across British India became the We’ve Books for all. means for the British to extend their imperial Books for the rich project. British authorship was the mechanism And Books for the poor (“the mask”) of British colonial authority. Books for the man Of course, Indian readers were more And Books for the dame. unpredictable and less impressionable to co- Books for the sick lonial mimicry than Macaulay imagined or And Books for the it hoped them to be. Their reading habits, as Books for the blind Priya Joshi demonstrates, ranged beyond the And Books for the dumb. standard English canon that Viswanathan Books for the bungler suggests emerged from the pedagogical labo- And Books for the wrangler ratory that British India supposedly became. Books for the burgher Joshi’s archival work on records from colonial And Books for the cotter. library lending reveals a culture of literary Books for the lettered consumption through which Indian readers And Books for the fettered created the conditions for the emergence of We’ve Books for all the anglophone South Asian novel. For one and all. (126) On the other hand, by the 1920s and 1930s anticolonial thinkers were busy theo- he authorities, thus reconciled with the sec- rizing reading not merely as consumption but ond law, leave with books and without their also as a properly anticolonial practice. Anti- former authority: the second law has made imperial critique envisioned the reader not as them readers. Ranganathan proclaims this to a sociological igure or a consuming subject be the irst step in the digvijaya of library sci- but rather as an ideal igure for ethical and ence, or what he calls “the world- conquering political practices. his anticolonial theory expedition” of readers, beginning irst with of reading was not concerned with the con- India and the United States: the relinquishing sumption of literary texts per se; instead, it of one’s authority to the collective exegesis of tried to envision the possibility that the act of readership, “perpetual education,” and “un- reading might signify—that is, the possibility limited democracy” (132). of egalitarian emancipation. 174 An Anticolonial Theory of Reading [ PMLA

In the irst decades of the twentieth cen- law: to relinquish one’s authority in order tury, many South Asian thinkers had made to become a reader was the ideal of this an- reading a fundamental part of anticolonial ticolonial theory of reading. To become or self-cultivation—most notably M. K. Gan- remain a reader, and thus purposefully to dhi, whose “experiments in slow reading” in divest oneself of authorial claims, was to fun- Durban, South Africa, were the beginning damentally challenge the logic of the British steps toward the activist’s eventual popular- Raj, which claimed to prize self-mastery as ity.1 Gandhi’s proposals for political action in- the precondition for national independence. cluded reading, memorization, oral recitation, In Ranganathan’s four-hundred- page and cut- and- paste collaging, all of which were book about books and their readers, the word intended both to spread an anticolonial mes- “author” appears only once—in a footnote—

theories and methodologies and theories sage and to cultivate a practice of satyagraha and very few authors’ names are to be found (loosely, “soul force”). B. Venkat Mani has in the text, even as examples. Ranganathan provocatively dubbed this kind of vibrant cir- was uninterested in authors. As he explains culation of texts “bibliomigrancy” as a way of in his chapter on the third law (Every Book illuminating the global movement of books, Its Reader), readers are the sole purpose of library holdings, and readers themselves (10). a library, and books without readers, even As Isabel Hofmeyr argues, the Gandhian books by so- called important authors, should reader was the satyagrahi (a person who at- be discarded from a library. he Five L aws of tempts satyagraha). In Gandhi’s formulation, L ibrary Scien ce asserts the centrality of the reading was a teleological process of mastery, reader in an anticolonial library science. he a mastery that included both the Indian na- emergence of readers, Ranganathan notes, tion as well as (if not more important for marks the transition from despotic rule to Gandhi) the self. Gandhian reading made democracy and freedom. His book is a mani- it possible to envision self- mastery for a fu- festo fundamentally invested in the tyro ture Indian nation, which he imagined, in rather than the tyrant. the meantime, from his diasporic enclave in In the case of British India, where the South Africa. British author was the aesthetic extension of However, there appear to be just as many British authority, reconiguring the hierarchi- anticolonial agitators who urged their readers cal relation between the allegedly transcen- to read simply for the sake of reading—that dent author and the multitude of readers was is, for its inconsequence. A more vibrant form a form of imagining a postcolonial democ- of anticolonial thought emerged in the 1920s racy. To upend the colonial coniguration of and 1930s, and Ranganathan was its most authority, anticolonial writers disavowed ex- pragmatic proponent. This form of antico- pertise and self- mastery, instead asserting a lonial thought argued for reading and com- heteronomous collectivity formed through munal interpretation not to cultivate a form practices of reading. As an anticolonial prac- of mastery but to disavow mastery altogether. tice, reading could mark modes of refusal, Reading, in this formula, was a practice of nonproductivity, inconsequence, inexpertise, egalitarian antiauthoritarianism precisely and nonauthority. In direct contrast to the because it urged readers to refuse the calls of values of British liberalism, these recalcitrant authorship and, relatedly, authority. To re- ideals were perfect for envisioning a radical main a reader—and to remain a reader with egalitarianism rooted in communal reading others—were the goals of this anticolonial and collective textual criticism. theory of reading. To put it another way, in Ranganathan ofers Macaulay’s “Minute” the terms of the didactic poem of the second as the opposite of his readerly vision. Macau- 134.1 ] J. Daniel Elam 175 lay’s bookshelf of British authors, he argues, beginning at a centrally located library in theories and methodologies simply reproduces British authority in Brit- the town of Ithaca and moving outward in ish India by way of what V. S. Naipaul termed increasingly larger circles; he imagines that “mimic men” in the absence of the British.2 outpost libraries would be located in each According to Ranganathan, the elite Indian quadrant, and books would circulate among men the British Raj produced were “ilters” all the libraries (323).3 his geographic model, (Macaulay’s word was “interpreters”) who he demonstrates, aligns with the “internal had failed to distribute the education, and repose” produced by the communal discus- therefore the power, that they had been alleg- sion of shared texts, which prepares readers edly granted. for democratic society. he psychical circles What begins as a minor critique of Ma- of “internal repose,” like Ithaca’s theoretically caulay’s “Minute” becomes an anticolonial geographic ones, move constantly from “facts proclamation: (nadir)” to “fundamental/ universal laws (ze- nith)” and back. Ranganathan’s point is not If Macaulay’s filter has proved a snare, ere to dismiss facts—which are necessary for his long it will divert its course and keep clear of proposed psychical process—but rather to this clog in the “ilter.” he Second Law will insist on the importance of democratic and not take a defeat. It must win ultimately. hat egalitarian institutions that create individuals is our faith. With the world opinion back- who can resist authoritarianism. he circles, ing it, it may win even at no distant date. If Ranganathan argues, foreground the nonte- they are shrewd business men, the “English- leology of a properly ethical library science: educated” Indians should greet it with an ol- in the communities of upstate New York—as ive branch and volunteer their services in its holy war on lingering ignorance. hen only, in the individual—mastery, expertise, and they will gain any respect in the eyes of the authority are never attained; books circulate world and then only can they survive amidst and “fundamental and universal laws” shit the forces that will be set free on the day that under the weight of new “facts” (360). the Second Law plants its lag on Indian soil and puts the BOOKS in the hands of ALL, Taken out of its historical context, a even as it has done on other soils. (92) lengthy treatise on the ethico-political possi- bilities of library science might seem strange. Readers form the centerpiece of Rangana- But British India in the 1920s and 1930s was than’s cosmopolitan anticolonial library sci- hectic with radical utopian proposals, anti- ence, and the cultivation of egalitarianism colonial manifestos, and radical democratic by way of readerly communities stands at the critiques—not unlike other countries in the heart of Ranganathan’s project. The future years just after World War I. Ranganathan flag of India is marked not by new author- was in good company. He was not alone in ity but, using Russia and the United States as bringing home, after the war, a pastiche of models, by the idea “BOOKS in the hands of Victorian optimism and shell- shocked pessi- ALL”: a truly egalitarian practice of reading mism. With adjustments and additions appro- and a radically antiauthorial and antiauthor priate for the pessimistic utopianism of the belief in readers. moment, manuals of nineteenth-century lib- Ranganathan’s philosophy of readerly eral self- cultivation and self- care reappeared egalitarianism borders on the absurd. Us- (like Herbert Spencer’s, John Stuart Blackie’s, ing a map of Tompkins County, New York, and Giu seppe Mazzini’s), as did radical pro- Ranganathan imagines a reading community posals for the reorganization of society, which designed around a set of concentric circles were circulated heavily in the literary centers 176 An Anticolonial Theory of Reading [ PMLA

of British India, especially in Lahore, Delhi, Anticolonial thinkers relied on anglo- Lucknow, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. he phone colonial pedagogy to perpetually re- library became the locus of anticolonial ac- fuse the expertise, and therefore the kind of tivity (and, not unrelatedly, colonial surveil- sovereignty founded on self-mastery, that lance) not simply because Indian anticolonial the British Raj would ostensibly recognize as agitators were studying to become the future deserving of national independence. Instead authorities of a postcolonial nation. Rather, of becoming the mimic men Macaulay had for many anticolonial thinkers, the library imagined, antiauthoritarian anticolonial- became the location of a global egalitarian ism became a different menace, revealing culture because it promoted a revolutionary the hierarchical, antiegalitarian norms at inconsequentialism in the face of the imperial the heart of British liberalism and the Eu-

theories and methodologies and theories demand for practical knowledge. ropean nation-state. Envisioned in this way, The radical importance of this antico- anticolonial thought becomes about retain- lonial theory of reading is not that it places ing the promise of postcolonial, radically education, literacy, and the inculcation of democratic antiauthoritarianism rather than “loving literature” (Lynch) at the center of the merely attaining national independence. An moral and political ideals of an independent anticolonial theory of reading, along with the Indian nation. Instead, its importance is that concomitant refusal of liberal self-mastery, it uses practices of inexpert, communal, and supported the emergence of radical demo- egalitarian critique—a celebration of colonial cratic theory outside Europe in response to unknowingness ad ininitum—as the model the horrors Europe created around the world. for a truly antiauthoritarian anticolonial poli- Ranganathan’s lengthy manifesto is one of tics. In this sense, although Ranganathan and many such manifestos in South Asian political his colleagues openly advocated Indian inde- writing in the 1920s and 1930s that on the one pendence from British rule, they endeavored hand imagine the relation between authorship to imagine, quite seriously, a nation founded and authority and on the other imagine anti- less on authoritative national sovereignty and colonialism as antiauthoritarianism. Antico- more on egalitarian readerly international- lonial thinkers across the political spectrum ism—a lag of books, in the hands of all. not only argued for the importance of com- Intellectual historians of anticolonialism munal criticism against individual authorship have not ignored anti-imperial reading, but but also went to great lengths to refuse their they have tended to view it as a form of au- own authority and expertise. Gandhi, most todidactic and scholarly (and oten, therefore, famously, attempted to “reduce [himself] to political) mastery and success. In their analy- zero” (268) only to be challenged by the revo- ses, reading is consequential in the sense that lutionary activist Bhagat Singh for being too eventually it leads to expertise and author- much of an author to properly act on behalf of ity—for both the individual and the Indian the masses. As I’ve argued elsewhere, Bhagat nation for which the individual was the met- Singh’s jail notebook attests to his own experi- onym. hese ideals, however, were not those of ments to reduce himself to a reader, even as many radical South Asian anticolonial igures. postcolonial hagiographers have declared both Reading was revolutionarily anticolonial pre- men masters and fathers of modern India. cisely because it was inconsequential—leaving Anticolonial theories of reading are the no traces, it could not demand recognition or unacknowledged precursors of postcolonial seek teleological authority. An anticolonial theory, but the radicalism of the worldwide culture of reading refused and therefore un- interwar period was quickly overshadowed dermined the logic of British colonial rule. not only by the new horrors of fascism but also 134.1 ] J. Daniel Elam 177 by the dull pragmatism required to transform NOTES theories and methodologies newly independent colonies into postcolonial 1. his phrase is taken from the subtitle of Hofmeyr’s nation-states . By the 1940s, and certainly in Gandhi’s Printing Press. the wake of the horriic partition of 1947, in- 2. Here Ranganathan preigures part of Bhabha’s cri- terwar antiauthoritarian ideals dwindled into tique in Location of Culture, as well as Viswanathan’s in the joylessness of establishing India and Paki- Masks of Conquest. stan as nations and aligning them with the 3. Ranganathan’s vision of Tompkins County is solely a product of his own imagination. Ranganathan norms encouraged by the United Nations. In likely chose Ithaca because, although the United States the course of becoming properly sovereign, the had established central public libraries in cities in the radical aesthetics that had undergirded South eighteenth century, the first nonurban association of Asian anticolonialism were ignored in favor networked libraries was established by Ezra Cornell in Tompkins County in 1864. of state building. Ater Indian independence in 1947, Ranganathan played a central role in establishing India’s national library system; he WORKS CITED was the primary igure behind the Public Li- braries Act of 1948. Although the act required Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, Indian libraries to be free and open to the pub- 1994. lic (in accordance with the second law), the act Elam, J. Daniel. “Commonplace Anticolonialism: Bhagat Singh’s Jail Notebook and the Politics of Reading.” also created gatekeepers and library masters— South Asia, vol. 39, no. 3, Sept. 2016, pp. 592–607. those same authorities that the second law Gandhi, M. K. An Autobiography: he Story of My Experi- had once converted into readers. Lost was that ments with Truth. Beacon Press, 1993. original anticolonial recalcitrance. Hofmeyr, Isabel. Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in But to return to Ranganathan’s utopian Slow Reading. Harvard UP, 2013. Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, library is to imagine a vibrantly “biblio- and the En glish Novel in India. Columbia UP, 2002. migrant” world in which the circulation of Lynch, Deidre Shauna. Loving Literature: A Cultural His- aesthetic ideas could be made common and tory. U of Chicago P, 2014. egalitarian. he library, with its endless col- Macaulay, T. B. “Minute on Indian Education.” Archives lection of books—an infinitely “growing of Empire, Volume I: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal, edited by Barbara Harlow and Mia organism,” as per Ranganathan’s ith law— Carter, Duke UP, 2003, pp. 227–39. instigated a culture of anticolonial reading Mani, B. Venkat. Recoding World Literature: Libraries, and communal discussion that was perpetu- Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books. Ford- ally incomplete. It represents an anticolonial ham UP, 2017. politics that does not seek dominance and Naipaul, V. S. he Mimic Men. Macmillan, 1967. Ranganathan, S. R. The Five Laws of Library Science. mastery but rather attempts to remain a per- 1931. Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library petual novice, for a postcolonial democracy. Science, 1988. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India. Columbia UP, 1989.