Grace Banu was in a mental hospital, kept there by her parents and injected several times a day to ‘change’ her gender when BR Ambedkar discovered her. It happened one afternoon in the middle of agonizing sessions with the doctor when she walked into the lounging room and noticed the old books on the shelves. She took out the blue spine and saw a photograph of Ambedkar with ‘Speeches and Writings’ written on the cover. She started reading and her life was never the same.
Banu is not the only one whose path was changed by words. Most of the people who gathered at the India International Center (IIC) in Delhi on Saturday were part of that group, where the government discussed the need to set up libraries in a country where there is a severe lack of space to access knowledge free of charge. the police The event was organized by the Free Library Network (FLN), a collective of over 200 libraries across the country, which works to provide free libraries and recently released a policy report advocating for it. Among the discussions were stalwarts like Banu; Emily Drobinsky, past president of the American Library Association; Rituparna, transgender activist and library educator; and V Shivdasan, Rajya Sabha MP. Also present were IIC President KN Srivastava and IIC Chief Librarian Usha Muzu Munshi.
Drabinsky discussed attacks on freedom of speech by right-wing movements around the world, including “a double-digit increase, a percentage point increase” in the seizure of books by library boards, “every year for the last four years.” America. “The South knows that libraries are where the fight for political action takes place,” she said, noting how movements like Occupy Wall Street, ACT UP (in response to the AIDS crisis), and the civil rights movements of the 1960s “always made libraries central to reading and disseminating information about people’s rights. He describes how public libraries in the US have been used to temporarily house homeless people in the winter, use free restrooms, spread awareness of government programs, provide Internet access, and more. mentioned.
Drabinski recently traveled to Dibrugarh to see the libraries established by Rituparna, which have become a site for queer people to gather, read and celebrate each other. “People ask us how to get money for these operations but setting up good libraries is not just the job of NGOs like us. Libraries are places where we discuss rights that are ultimately the government’s job, for which we pay taxes,” she said. She added that it is difficult for transgender people to access scholarships for higher education because they are “pushed” out of the regular school system due to discrimination in the classroom and lack of access to books and reading. “It’s not the same as quitting,” she pointed out.
Sivadasan tells the story of C. Kannan, one of Kerala’s leading trade union leaders, who was born in a poor family and failed in the fourth standard and dropped out of school to work in a bidi factory. But the factories he joined were hubs of the country’s most cohesive and organized collectives, beedy workers sitting around each other reading newspapers, an activity that “informed them better about their rights than more formal. educated people.”
Sumit, a trustee of the Community Library Project (TCLP), said that as a poor Dalit student enrolled in a private school under the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) quota, he often faced harassment and doubted his abilities. “It was only when I joined TCLP that I learned that using the facility for free is nothing to be ashamed of. No one asked me if I could read. They thought I could and so I showed. The word ‘free’ needs to be stripped of its negative connotations,” he said. Regarding the fear that books housed in public libraries would be influenced by state ideology, he said, “It is true that libraries are a very effective organizational tool, so they can be used as a place of propaganda or resistance. But we have to make sure we take these places and use them for good.