The history of the written word has long been intertwined with that of censorship. Whenever authors have chosen an idea which seems even slightly provocative for the times, they have faced a backlash from religious, political and legal authorities. It is to emphasise the kind of censorship authors and books face these days that Goa-based photographer Rohit Chawla has recreated covers of banned books for his recent project.
The subject of banned books is a layered one. First, there is the content of the book in itself, and added to that is the layer of censorship, which makes the book even more significant as a symbol of resistance. For Chawla, books and publications have been central to his practice. “I have done about 400 covers for important news magazines and books. The subject of banned books is particularly relevant today, given the ‘cancel culture’ that threatens our daily social discourse,” says Chawla, who debuted the series at a recent art exposition at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi, after which the series moved to the Stir Gallery in Chhattarpur Farms. The recreated book covers will travel to numerous literature festivals in the coming months.
For the project, which started six months ago, he has chosen 30 books such as J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, which was banned in the US between 1961 and 1982, Alice In Wonderland, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Aldous Huxley’s 1931-dystopian novel Brave New World, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and many more.
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For Chawla, recreating or reimagining these book covers offers a sense of abstraction that stems from his first memory of having read them. “I have tried to stay true to that while hopefully creating an image that could draw a reader to revisit that book again. A cover image needs to have that pull factor besides trying to distill the essence of the writing itself,” he says.
In his recreations, one can see a mix of existing images, which he has shot over the years, and some new photographs taken especially for the series. “I particularly find the recreation of the Persepolis cover powerful, which is essentially a graphic novel. By using a photo as the cover was a contradiction of sorts to its very content. The image that I have created is a tribute to Mahsa Amini, who died in 2022 in Iranian police custody,” he elaborates. “And since Salman Rushdie has become a symbol for all things banned, I chose my portrait of him in an oblique way to show the price he has paid for his literary freedom.”
The subject of censorship of the written word has been a matter of concern to individuals and organisations across the world. And each has been doing its bit to nudge people to commit to freedom of expression. The website of Freedom to Read Week, an annual event in Canada which prompts people to think about intellectual freedom, shares a list of book bannings and burnings throughout history. The earliest such instance of intellectual violence dates back to 259-210 BC when the Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti is said to have buried alive 460 Confucian scholars to control the writing of history in his time, and in 212 BC he burned all the books in his kingdom, retaining only a single copy each for the Royal Library. Since then, one has seen books being routinely censored around the world—be it the original version of William Shakespeare’s Richard II in 1597, George Eliot’s Adam Bede in 1859, or Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, which was banned in 1931 by the governor of Hunan province in China as “animals should not be using human language”.
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This unfortunate trend has only strengthened in the past few decades, with Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses banned by select governments around the world. In 2010, students, in the name of nationalism, burned copies of Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey at the gates of University of Mumbai. Such has been the spate of book bans in recent times that the Banned Books Week—an event launched in the US in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in resistance to books in libraries and bookstores—has had to keep adding to the list of most challenged books year after year.
For Chawla, the 30 books he has chosen and their censorship continue to be relevant today. For him, Animal Farm stands as a contemporary metaphor for political practices of the times; and the death of Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny has shades of The Gulag Archipelago, one of the banned books in this series. He believes that literature has the uncanny ability to both record and predict societal mores, and some of these banned books do that even now.
“The sense of outrage over the inconsequential and the personal is the prevailing public comedy of our times. To resurrect these banned books is an attempt to hold a mirror to society, and hopefully have people reflect on how ludicrous some of these bans were in retrospect, and how even innocuous literature could be vilified for little or no reason,” he says.