It was the fourth year of Jehoiakim, king of Judah—the year God chose to speak to Jeremiah, a Jewish prophet: “Take a scroll and write on it all the words I have spoken to you concerning Israel, Judah, and all the other nations from the time I began speaking to you in the reign of Josiah till now” (Jeremiah 36). The Lord reckoned that when the people of Judah got to hear about every disaster that He had planned to inflict on them, they would each turn from their wicked ways and return to His fold. Jeremiah immediately called Baruch, his disciple, and dictated all the words that the Lord had spoken to him, which Baruch faithfully recorded on a scroll. Then Jeremiah asked Baruch to take the scroll to the temple and read aloud its content to the people, which Baruch did. News spread like wildfire and reached the king’s officials. They seized the scroll from Baruch and took it to the king. The king, who was sitting in the winter apartment with a fire burning in a firepot in front of him, asked Jehudi, one of the officials, to read it. Every time, Jehudi finished reading three or four columns of the scroll, the king cut that part off with a scribe’s knife and threw it into the firepot, until the entire scroll containing the Lord’s words was thus consigned to flames in what could be one of the earliest instances of book burning in recorded history.

Book burning—the ritual destruction of books and other written materials by fire—has no doubt a dark, hoary past and is as old as the written word itself. Books that took a different line from the officially ordained one and seen as opposed to the religious or political status quo have been from time to time branded heretic or anarchistic and ordered burned and the authors persecuted. Instances abound. Books and whole libraries were consigned to the flames of intolerance during the reign of Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE) in China, at the height of the power and influence of Western Christendom in medieval Europe, in the 1930s’ Nazi Germany, during the Great Purge (1936-1938) in the erstwhile Soviet Union and the anti-communist McCarthy era (1950-1956) in the US, and more recently (2015) in the ISIS-occupied regions of Syria and Iraq.

Book burning, in essence, is an attempt to squelch the written word. While book burning literally ensures that copies of the contentious material are obliterated and made unavailable to people and posterity, it is also a symbolic act intended to voice contempt for the author’s views and serve as a warning to those who unwittingly or otherwise instigate trouble with their incendiary rhetoric.

Many literary works have tackled the theme of book burning and biblioclasm. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts a totalitarian regime that sends down all the books and documents found inconvenient to the regime via a network of orifices and pipes, aptly named “memory holes,” to be burned in enormous furnaces that lie hidden underground. In Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (London: Definitions, 2012, 119), the protagonist, Liesel, witnesses a Nazi book burning ceremony, where the mound of books, before being set afire, was “prodded and splashed, even spat on.” In Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (London: Penguin Books, 2007, 286-287), when the master tells Woland (Satan), that he had burned the novel he was writing, Woland refuses to believe it saying, “I don’t believe you . . . that cannot be: manuscripts don’t burn,”—an expression that would go on to become a rallying cry for artistic freedom among intellectuals in Russia and elsewhere. Incidentally, Bulgakov himself had burned an early draft of the said book, fearing persecution from the Stalin regime, then managed to resurrect it from his memory, and worked on it in secret. The novel is thus seen as a living proof that books refuse to stay burned and of the triumph of the free word over oppression.

Abdol Hossein Joodaki, in his paper, examines one such work, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which depicts a dystopian and dysfunctional society where books are burned to prevent proliferation of independent thinking and technology is used as a tool of subjugation, in the light of the Foucauldian elements of surveillance, exemplified by Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon—the ultimate realization of a system of social control that enables constant observation and thus control of the subjects.

Situating Jeanette Winterson’s works in the context of postmodern narrative negotiations, Sonia Kotiah shows how Winterson’s works are infused with postmodern characteristics, such as fragmentation, hyperreality, intertextuality, participation, and self-reflexivity, and how the postmodern stance of her storyteller, with its attendant antithesis, challenges the formulaic narrative systems, single meaning, and stability.

To have roots is to have a shared cultural history; to have a shared cultural history is to belong to a community; and to belong to a community is to have an identity of one’s own. Roots, community, and identity have been the leitmotif of Toni Morrison’s novels.

C L Shilaja takes a close look at how Toni Morrison presents community and shared historical and cultural past as a source of enrichment and healing in her novels Beloved and A Mercy.

What makes a novel appeal to a cross section of the entire reading public? Rajeshwar Mittapalli seeks to answer this question by showing how Arundhati Roy cleverly uses, in her novel The God of Small Things, several thematic and linguistic devices and intercultural experiences to ensure that the novel appeals to international readers, incidentally making it easy to teach the novel in a variety of cultural contexts.

The Tiv are an ethno-linguistic community in West Africa and are mainly concentrated in Nigeria and Cameroon. They are a traditional society and have their own rich oral traditions and art forms. Godwin Aondofa Ikyer assesses the influence of the advancements in the field of science and technology and the western standards on the traditional Tiv comedy and comic forms and the considerations for and against such an influence.

According to Bharata’s Natya Œâstra, prakarana, a type of Indian play, involves a plot invented by the playwright and fictional situations chosen from ordinary life.
G R K Murty discusses such a play, Œûdraka’s Mrichchhakatika, and shows how the said play stands out from the rest of Sanskrit plays with its unusual choice of plot, depiction of principal characters, and presentation, while at the same time serving as a mirror to the prevailing sociocultural conditions.

Duni Chand Chambial highlights the imaginative, informative, and enlightening aspects of V V B Rama Rao’s poetry—the universality of his themes, his erudition, and his nativist sensibility.

Finally, I Murali Krishna presents a contemplative and highly engaging review of the book Cosmic Rhythm, a collection of poems, by B R Aneja.

-- R Venkatesan Iyengar
Consulting Editor