Crowded Readings: The Children’s Magazine in Colonial North India
Wherever people habitually congregate, that is a potential site for a library.
- S R Ranganathan, The Five Laws of Library Science (1931)
Illustration: Alia Sinha
In anti-intellectual cultures, or cultures that prioritise the so-called everyday business of living over reading—more particularly life in the survival mode—reading is often seen as taking time off from life, and thus a luxury. Historically, reading has been seen as a proxy form of living, sort of like today’s social media. Marcel Proust tried to break apart this polarised view of living versus reading by calling attention to the relationship between childhood reading and its many interruptions — a friend coming to play, dinnertime, sun glinting in your eye, etc. These interruptions might have seemed annoying at t...