The author is an assistant professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. She directed the collective work Feminist Perspectives in International Relations (PUM) and wrote lose the south (Ecosociety).
A few weeks ago, Hindu nationalists entered a Muslim library in eastern India, leaving only ashes and broken glass. When words disappear, stories are destroyed, lives are ruined.
Burnings, from Latin news fidei (act of faith), aim to destroy books by fire, often in a public demonstration. They result most of the time from censorship linked to political or religious opposition to the ideas that the said books address. Some also call them libricides, bibliocausts or bibliocasties. In the vernacular, and at least since the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition, the term “auto-da-fé” has become synonymous with the burning of books, but also of human beings deemed heretics.
Destroy by fire
In China, in the IIIe century before Christ, Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, already used this technique to destroy writings related to Confucius. This is one of the oldest recorded book burnings. According to accounts, he also buried alive 460 Confucian scholars.
Preaching against moral corruption, the Italian preacher Jerome Savonarola organized in 1497 a “pyre of vanities” in Florence. He invited anyone to throw jewellery, make-up, mirrors, immoral books and provocative clothes into a collective pyre to get rid of the weight of vanity.
During the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 15the and XVIe centuries, Spanish clerics periodically destroyed the writings of the Maya and Aztec civilizations. The goal was to destroy thoughts they associated with demons. In 1530, the then Bishop of Mexico City, Juan de Zumárraga, initiated the burning of all writings and idols found in Aztec royal houses.
During the French Revolution of 1789, peasants also took advantage of the uprisings to destroy feudal registers (or terrier books) in the seigneurial castles. During this period, the revolutionaries also destroyed some 8,000 books in Paris, and up to four million in France. One of the victims of this auto-da-fé was the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, whose library contained nearly 50,000 printed books and 7,000 manuscripts.
Nazi students did the same thing in several university towns on May 10, 1933, burning about 25,000 books they considered “un-German” (mostly written by Jews or liberals). Their censorship list included works by Bertold Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Ernst Gläser, Erich Kästner and Ernest Hemingway, among others.
Young people followed the leadership of the Nazi regime, which itself confiscated the collections of many libraries and bookstores and many publishers’ warehouses. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda and Public Instruction, then declared in front of a crowd of 40,000 people in Berlin, in May 1933, slogans such as “No to decadence and moral corruption!” and “Yes to decency and morality in the family and in the state!” “.
A modern book burning
Last month, Hindu nationalists burned down the library of the Madrassa Azizia Muslim school in the Indian village of Bihar Sharif. They thus celebrated in an incendiary way the Ram Navami festival, a Hindu pious festival emphasizing devotion to the figure of Rama.
Part of the history of this community has been burned with the books of the library, founded over a hundred years ago. The instigators of this auto-da-fé destroyed a library comprising nearly 5,000 books, including copies of the Koran, but also precious hand-written manuscripts and books dating from the past century. A Madrassa security guard reportedly heard them chanting “Jai Shri Ram” (“Greetings to Lord Ram”). Arming themselves with weapons rather than pious chants, processions of Hindus have also attacked Muslim shops, homes and religious structures across the country.
This looting represents yet another blow for this ostracized minority, which nevertheless lives in a country that ranks third in terms of the concentration of Muslim people. The election of Hindu ultranationalist Narendra Modi in 2014 sparked a wave of xenophobic violence in the country, especially in the Muslim-majority state of Gujarat, which he ruled from 2001 to 2014. By the way, this is the state my family left over a century ago to escape poverty and oppression and settle in Madagascar. The Muslims who remained on the Indian side after the partition between India and Pakistan have always been marginalized by the Hindu majority.
Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), recognizes less and less all religions in the country, a fundamental principle of the Indian Constitution. Hinduism becomes de facto the religion not only majority, but dominant, persecuting Muslims, but also Christians.
Burnings are often a precursor to more violence. A few years after a fire of books during the nationalist festival of the Wartburg in 1817, the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine will write, like a prophecy: “Where books are burned, people end up burning. His books were, like thousands of others, destroyed 100 years later by the Nazi regime.