Banned Books that I have read

 Banned Books that I have read……….

The write up last time about Joseph Anton, led me to think about other books which have been banned at different times in the history of writing. These can be grouped together mainly under two major headings. To do with religion and secondly with sex particularly when associated with the feminine. The Bible and the Quran are two major religious texts which have been scrutinized and debated upon regressively. And yet they are the leading religions of the world. Reflecting thus, I went on to think about the controversial ones that I have read and ruminated about. ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was the first book of D H Lawrence that I chose to read , maybe because it was banned in Europe when it was published on the pretext of its immoral content and erotic sex sequences. The book is a paradox for it assimilates the Victorian and the Modernist spirit together. It chronicles the life of a group of characters in a place over a long period of time. The characters are portrayed through a third person narrative and and the reader has no access to their interiority, an innovative technique which became prevalent with ‘Ulysses’ written at the same time,  the 1920’s,  the period of literary experimentation and breakthroughs. In an age of machines and dehumanization of humanity represented by the coal mining industry, the class system and the emasculated Clifford Chatterley, Lawrence seeks to amalgamate the body and the mind of human beings.  Lady Chatterley‘s affair with the gamekeeper of the estate is a move to escape the dry, heartless intellectual world of aristocracy to a life of sensuality and love in accord with nature and natural instincts of the body and mind. 

‘Madame Bovary ‘ is a criticism of the values of the middle class society. Emma the wife of a doctor dreams of balls, riches and a passionate lifestyle and sets out to to recreate her provincial life with color. She borrows money heavily and makes excessive demands of her lovers, in the process degrading herself in the eyes of the middle class neighbors bound by moral conservatism.    The writer makes the reader sympathize with the desires and travails of Emma. The bindings and perspectives of her society, which make it impossible for her to attain her desires. He is satirical of the bourgeoisie mentality to acquire sophistication, which he thought to be rough with unpolished mannerism. He was tried for violation of public morals when the book was published and he came to abhor the rising middle class even more thereafter.

Boris Pasternak’s, Dr. Zhivago exposes the starvation, cannibalism, murder, reprisals, legitimized slaughters in Russia during an extended period of the world wars, revolutions, civil war and famines. To be precise and accurate, the writer expounded on Stalin’s reign of terror and received a midnight call from Stalin himself, but his garbled explanation did not interest Stalin and he cut the call. An explosive dynamic novel, that blew up in his face, simply impossible to translate and further complicated by his incomprehensible public speeches. A man who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, but he denied it and refused to be exiled to the West. He spent his entire life translating Shakespeare into Russian. 

‘Lolita’ has always been news in the world of books. It is the story of a middle-aged professor’s lust for his preteen stepdaughter; an inflammatory subject for writing and publication. The narrator Humbert is a pedophiliac, or a case study of the psychology of a compulsive mind is left to the reader.  The themes of sexual love and infidelity had been explored by authors like James Joyce and D H Lawrence at the turn of the century, the so called modernist writing. Studies on psychology had brought out taboo topics of sex and erotic dreams to dining table conversations; but no author had explored and attempted the writing of darker sexual urges and desires. The book is classified as postmodernist literature which delineates the fragmentary nature of experience and the complexity of language.

In lighter vein ‘How Opal Mehta got Kissed, Got wild and Got a Life’ is a racy read about an engaging teenage girl whose parents want her to get into Harvard. Opal’s journey from the superbly academic serious girl to fashion makeovers and a party teenager is a reader’s delight. Indicted for plagiarism the book was withdrawn but is indeed a pleasurable read. ‘Alice in Wonderland’ too was banned in China. They found it deplorable that animals should speak the language of humans – it was the ultimate degradation of humans a supreme race, the Chinese more so. ‘Diary of a Young Girl’ revealed the horrors of the holocaust.  What a shattering effect it had on my psyche about the makeup of human beings, of what we are capable of ; extreme cruelty and profound compassion and resourcefulness. 

‘Grapes of Wrath ‘is a realistic novel of the days of the depression, the harsh landscape and  social values in regions in California. It was banned for its stark portrayal of reality. In our own times we have witnessed the censorship of ‘Da Vinci Code’ - which angered Christian sentiment and the Satanic Verses that of the Muslim world. Indeed the controversy surrounding the latter, sowed a wish in me to read it regardless of the fact that I am not a great admirer of Rushdie’s prose. At the time, internet had not revolutionized our lives and things were inaccessible. But as and when I was able to lay my hands on the book , I read it back to back . A pattern shared by most of us ; that which is denied assumes disproportionate dimensions of intrigue, curiosity and desire in us. A human thought process which has been hugely tapped by the marketing industry to promote sales of  undesirable products too. Irrespective of the above strategy it is desirable to debate, discuss and call in opinions for a healthy thriving world.

I have set you all thinking and though I have not been able to tabulate many more here , I can leave the readers to reflect and ruminate or go in search of that they had wanted to read when a section of the world did not want them to.