There is a girl who is reading.

She reads as the bucket overflows, her food gets cold, and the bus arrives at a halt. Its door opens like the mouth of a whale. She stays on the pavement, and the book shields her from the world.

Women and girls reading have made for interesting images historically because they often speak to the anxieties, fears, and cultural discourses of their times. The girl I am referring to here is a character from a picture book I have read many times inside and outside libraries, alone and aloud to others.

Whenever I read it, I think of my mother. She would tell me a story that started the same – about how she learnt to read like no one in her family had before, and read until she was so fully elsewhere that she didn’t hear her mother calling to her to help out in the kitchen. And then – departing from the book – her mother ended the stillness, took all her library books, and set them on fire.

*

I read the book, A Book for Puchku written by Deepanjana Pal and illustrated by Rajiv Eipe, again earlier this year at a consultation on children’s literature.

Each year such meetings are held by both private and public institutions. This year there were hundreds of books to be read, reviewed, and sorted. Most of my colleagues are professors and researchers in universities or government institutes. I am there mostly because I used to research reading resources with them, and partly because I shifted to working full-time with community libraries right after.

For a few days, we read books, posters, and poetry collections. We write summaries against the palimpsests of those who did this exercise before us, arguing with ghosts who left only traces to defend themselves.

We each get our bundles and, accordingly, our ghosts. One of the stories I have read before and gladly read again is the narrative of a young girl who feels freedom and joy when she dances without her clothes. Years ago, I described it to a friend as a book animated by ideas of childhood and freedom, and at the same time invested in questions of women’s relationships with their bodies.

Now, I read it cover to cover, open up my fist, and there it is: a small, sharp piece of shame, tired of festering, and finally declaring itself. Available now to be examined; maybe even licked away.

Nangu Nangu Naach (written by Richa Jha and illustrated by Ruchi Mhasane) had been labelled inappropriate when I got to it. The comments were terse. I turned to my colleague. Someone read it and thought, this book is teaching children to be naked, she said. I counter-argued, praised it carefully, considerately. We kept reading.

A rhyme that featured a versatile, amusing child with the same name as a hindu god has been struck off for “objectionable language”. Is it surprising that we have arrived at a place where a book about a woman paralympic champion (Wings to Fly, by Sowmya Rajendran and illustrated by Arun Kaushik) could be quickly celebrated, but one about a girl asserting her trans identity would be suspect (Guthli Has Wings by Kanak Shashi)? A place where the many children’s stories of Gandhi could be unanimous shoo-ins, but the singular one on Ambedkar (Bhimrao Ambedkar: The Boy Who Asked Why, written by Sowmya Rajendran and illustrated by Satwik Gade) deemed “age-inappropriate”, “problematic”?

This is not to say that there are no educators who are adamant that these remarks be overwritten. There are. They recognise that a review such as this can turn quickly into a practice of curation as control, by which I mean brahmanical, hetero-patriarchal control. They resolve to find stories dismissed for the same reason and advocate for them. Children will not be trained into machines, my co-reviewer, a teacher, says. The words stay in the air and colour our hours.

What was at stake here wasn’t a question of one theme, genre, or a specific kind of representation. It is bigger than the question of children’s literature in print, which is only a piece of the puzzle.

In the face of increasing censorship in curricula, the persecution of those raising their voices against myriad oppressions, and the undeniable reality of an ongoing genocide, what can it mean to read now?

What are the acts of reading that we allow young people, that we allow each other? And what does that say about the worlds we want and need?

*

What does it mean to read now? I bring this question to a group of young teachers and librarians. We start talking: Reading books, newspapers, situations, people, braille, gestures, videos, illustrations. Reading for information, for fun. Reading to know our rights, others, and ourselves. Reading to understand situations and to imagine otherwise. Reading to pass time, to structure time, and to share time. Reading to learn from others who struggled before us. Reading to write. The list is vast, brimming, and shows no signs of ending.

The way I know to approach this question is through a story about libraries – the story of one library which lived for a few long months.

This library knew precisely what was owed to her. She set herself up in a protest site and stayed. When they tried to remove her, calling her an inconvenience, she did not budge. She had no truck with keeping people out, doling out packets of sanctioned literature, parsing out platitudes; nor was her existence reliant merely on the world of print. She abhorred the imposition of silence.

This library was created during the Muslim women-and student-led agitation against the central government in 2019, and she was born of the shared imagination of education and stories as the groundwork for change. She existed at that moment as a provocation and alternative to the future laid down by the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act, which legitimised religious discrimination against Muslims on the matter of Indian citizenship.

She had more readers than books: groups of toddlers, teenagers, and elders moving around, reading together, drawing the Indian flag, the constitution, and portraits of Babasaheb Ambedkar, Fatima Sheikh, Rohith Vemula, and themselves. The hours were punctuated by putting down the books and pencils and rushing to the balcony to listen to voices reverberating from the stage. The banner said: Read for Revolution.

She was there when the man appeared and fired shots. She came back the next day.

She was built by those in resistance and had no idea how long she would be around. She was agile and agitating. I asked her if I could come see her again.

I did come back.

For weeks I took a bag of picture books – all borrowed – and rehearsed them in the metro after work. I walked down the road, took a left, then a right, walked through the people, climbed the stairs up to the locked showrooms, and there she was.

We sat in circles, reading stories of girls who loved animals, girls who asked questions relentlessly, and girls who knew they were girls even when society refused to recognise them as girls. We read Bhimrao Ambedkar: The Boy Who Asked Why with the very age group that was thought too young for it. We read stories about conflict and violence and friendship amid Partition and the group pointed out the parallels between what happened in history that was also happening around us. We read stories about lions, elephants, and dolphins which were more than stories about lions, elephants, and dolphins. Sometimes, one of the children chose a book and told me they would take over. More than once the books waited while we curated collections from memory.

Soon a photograph of us made its way around. Online, people raged, accusing us, bundling our reading with potential punishments. Reading here, now, was an act of assertion, defiance. An act understood as a threat, a crime, one that elicited harm and hostility.

People also saw the photograph and sent wishes, strength, and more books. The library was built by friends out of whose neighbourhood and community the protests emerged, who gave their labour to sustain acts of reading every day for months. From them I learned that revolutionary work is not always standing in the crowd, raising your fist – which is important and indispensable – sometimes it is showing up day after day, chipping away at the oppressive while gathering all the resources you have to do it. It’s this long-drawn reframing of the question: what work is political and transformative, and under which circumstances?

A sizeable amount of library work is, after all, about curating, weeding out, and interrogating the worn catalogues of love, behaviour, and vocabulary handed down over the years.

So much of library work is about order. So much of it is about rules, codes, and neat categories of meanings made for us by others. And yet, as Emily Drabinski writes, this is precisely why librarians are positioned to intervene: “We work every day to make and remake the structures that produce the terrain of the present and, therefore, the future. We could make things differently.”

To be angry, to read, and to find meaning with each other in the face of systems that seek to isolate us anchored reading in the protest library. We could make things differently.

Shortly after the country went on lockdown, the library was wrapped up. One day the dhurries were rolled up and they were not unfurled again. The Citizenship Amendment Act was passed in 2019 and came into effect five years later, even with over 200 petitions pending against it.

Reading, then, is one of the ways through which we understand how power produces and suppresses us. Reading is an act through which we confront harm. Through acts of reading, we resist the idea of the library as a place of quiet solitude, of immovable structures and regulations, or where existing knowledge is merely accessed rather than simultaneously also challenged and changed.

*

Time lapses. At a children’s book event, online, I asked the panel of writers and festival organisers about the need for books more representative of the world around us. What challenges do you face in making this happen? I was told that I am entirely mistaken: The children do not want such books. Children, in fact, don’t know what they want at all. I am putting ideas in the heads of young people. Those in the business of children’s literature do not look at things like caste, gender, queerness, citizenship, religion, migration…their focus is just good stories. Why am I trying to take away good stories?

What I want are not less stories, but more. I know that reading is understood frequently as a type of theft. We steal time when we read, the time we could use instead in ways understood as both productive and proper. Eve Sedgwick said that many of us, in teaching and writing, are trying “to keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in childhood: promises to make invisible possibilities and desires visible; to make the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled.” I think of this smuggling, this reading, as a perpetual, and necessary, exercise, as Myles Horton of the Highlander Folk School put it, “You have to find a way to bootleg education. It’s illegal, really, because it’s not proper, but you do it anyway.”

Reading as bootlegging education, then. Reading as threat, as deviance. Reading as pleasure, as protest, as sustenance. Reading as doing what you must to make this life uncircumscribed. Reading as risking what you know and what you hold true, but turning the page regardless.

*

At one of the free libraries I worked at, I met R. All of six years old, for days he would see me outside the library, scream takli ma’am, and disappear. Over time he came around to stepping inside, sitting, talking, reading.

Takli Ma’am. The translation doesn’t capture the music of the word; a rattle and a drop of rain. My hair is longer now, but back then, I added takli ma’am to my Hinge profile. It got some laughs. A few such laughs turned to dates with women with hair that just about reached the lobes of their ears. (The rest collapsed like unlit rockets tucked into a bed box, cold, forgotten.)

The day I remember is a regular day, except the people who own the building are in. Their Trust allows the library to run from a small part of the land. They look around. The older readers look up, shift in their seats, and return to themselves. R seeks me out.

“Why have they come here?” R asks. I don’t know. He has the answer. “They have come to check if the library is clean,” he tells me, before walking away.

When I think of reading and power, I think of moments like these. To recognise from visible markers that this arrival into the library was different from the daily influx of readers, and to go on to read a situation for how power operated in that moment. To confront something we often must name it first. In R’s naming, I find an indictment of the distribution of material capital and the forms of ownership it enables, of discourses of cleanliness as not neutral but fundamentally tied to power, of caste surveillance and control, and that the institutions we deem to be progressive or even revolutionary are still in need of being asked hard questions.

The educator Paulo Freire once said: “Reading the world precedes reading the word, and the subsequent reading of the word cannot dispense with continually reading the world.” I am hopeful to believe in reading as reading the world, as bootlegging, as moving across print and screen and skin and sound, as making good on the trust of others. Reading as slicing into the hard skin of the world and – as the husk comes apart – making a decision.

Cover Image: Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash