WHILE Kerala can be proud of the large number of functioning public libraries in India, Kannur district located in the north of the state has the distinction of ranking first in the state with more than a thousand libraries.  Kannur has thus become the logical place of choice for holding this first Indian Library Congress from January 1-3, 2023.

Kerala has pioneered the growth of the public library through popular participation for more than a century, taking this institution beyond the confines of universities, state repositories and privately held book collections. Evidence for this can be found in the very large number of libraries spread across towns and rural areas set up by civic groups, trade unions and political organisations. 

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the public library has become an important site for larger movements for social and political change. The public library and reading rooms contributed crucially to the reform movements for empowering the socially disprivileged in the early decades of the twentieth century – the spread of nationalism, the anti-colonial struggle for India’s independence and the struggle of the working people for a more equitable society and government.

Today, with the tremendous growth of online digital publishing and easy access (for some) to such media, many people are skeptical of the continued relevance of the library. I am firmly of the opinion that the library, albeit in a transformed form, will and should continue to play an important role both in intellectual and social intercourse. 

THE NEED TO CHANGE

For this, the library will necessarily have to change itself. The libraries of today and the future will have to enthusiastically embrace the new opportunities and tools of information technology if they are to remain relevant in a digital world. With the exponential expansion of information technology, the amount of information available digitally is unprecedented. The library of the twenty-first century will have to function as a centre for – information collation, filtering, verification and dissemination. 

Since we live in a world that is still based on the sanctity of private property and profit, we find that despite the explosion of digital information, much of the scholarly scientific literature and peer reviewed monographs continue to be highly priced and beyond the reach of most individual Indian readers and libraries. 

NETWORKING

This brings us to the immediate need to network libraries. Library networks permitting borrowing from participating libraries is not new. This networking has become both easier as well as imperative in the digital age. In Kerala today, the universities in the state are part of KALNET, permitting them access to large scholarly databases without individual universities having to subscribe to all these expensive databases and e-resources. Networking will also have to be resorted if the digital divide between the rich and the poor and between the town and the country has to be bridged.  Networked sharing of e-resources of university libraries can easily be shared with public libraries located far away from urban centres. 

ADVANCING DIGITISATION

The library, whether located in a university or in the countryside in India will have to step in to provide digital access to students who are increasingly being herded into digital learning and evaluation, even when they have no access to individual computers, data buying capabilities and in some parts of India even to electricity. In this sharply divided digital society, the public library with its IT resources is well placed to facilitate both greater digital literacy as well as access.

THE LIBRARY AS A SITE OF DEMOCRATISATION

In Kerala, it was the library that provided one of the main sites for the introduction and propagation of new ideas, ideologies and democratic mobilisation for caste and religious reform, nationalism, anti-colonial movements and the powerful democratic movements led by the working classes against landlordism and capitalist exploitation. 

The reading room and literally the act of reading by the few literate members of the library to their illiterate fellow citizens made it possible to disseminate ideas communicated via print to a largely illiterate public who were enthusiastic users of these libraries. This, it may be remembered, was not the much-celebrated Habermasian bourgeois public sphere where the hoi polloi were excluded. It was created in opposition to the order that the rulers wanted to perpetuate. This possibly explains the continued significance of the public library in the northern part of erstwhile Malabar district in particular, and in Kerala as a whole.

THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF EXPANDING LIBRARY ACCESS

The library was initially the possession of rulers, the Church, and the rich. It was after the French Revolution that these were nationalised and made public for the first time in history. Again, after the October Revolution in Russia, private collections of books in libraries were confiscated and housed in public libraries. In the history of libraries, the role of Vladimir Lenin is seldom discussed these days. One must not forget Lenin and his wife Krupskaya played a great role in the designing of the public library incorporating the best features of the American-Swiss model with their attempts to socialise the collection and dissemination of knowledge by means of the public library. Lenin, interestingly, went into small details concerning the acquisition, retrieval and circulation of books.

Finally, I think it is important to comment on the role of the library during periods of political transformations and authoritarian governments. Democratic movements created and enriched the public library as evidenced during the French and Russian revolutions of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Mid and late nineteenth century Europe saw a move towards the setting up of libraries for the workers and the poor as part of a larger programme of social reform and containment. In early Soviet Russia, leaders such as Lenin even at the height of the Civil War insisted that White Guard literature should not be excluded from public libraries. In contrast we find that in Nazi Germany, librarians quickly capitulated to the purging of libraries by the National Socialists as part of their national program of training or Bildung.

While libraries have been destroyed or their collections selectively purged and added at different times in the past for various reasons, the library as a repository of extant ideas and information has to be preserved if society is to advance. For this very reason, the independence of the library has to be defended against narrow ideological prejudices as well as the equally narrow economic parsimony of the neoliberal state. A library that encourages and invites readers to engage with a variety of ideas is the best way to ensure that society is both familiarised with difference and learns to empathically engage with discordant views and advance intellectually.

THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF THE LIBRARY

Though the brick and mortar library today can and should provide the latest information technology tools to its users, it also needs to offer a secular space for people to interact with each other, understand differences, reflect on contemporary problems and discuss alternative paths of future development. The architecture, design and the functions of the new libraries need to change to make the library a welcoming public place to draw in larger numbers of people and encourage them to read and think. 

In the present context of shrinking secular, public places accessible to the citizenry at large, the continued support for a networked and carefully imagined library becomes an urgent imperative for us. The forthcoming Indian Library Congress will deliberate in detail both on the history of libraries in India and novel ways to transform this vital resource for the future.