When Reading Becomes Risky: The Rise Of Self-Censorship

Reading is usually a solitary act, even when it happens in a crowded place. A person sitting in a café, on a train or in a park with a book is rarely expected to explain why they chose it. But that assumption of privacy changes when the book itself becomes a reason for confrontation.

A recent incident involving a fringe group attacking a silent reading session and assaulting some readers who were reading Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl and a book by Malala Yousafzai has brought this question into focus: are readers still free to read whatever they want in public?

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For Rahul Saini, actor, host and founder of Paperbacktalks BookClub, freedom to read is closely tied to curiosity. It does not require agreement with what is on the page. “To me, freedom to read simply means the freedom to be curious. It doesn’t mean that I have to agree with everything I read or that the book that I pick up represents my beliefs,” he says.

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That distinction is important. Reading a political book does not necessarily make someone political. Reading a religious text does not automatically indicate faith. And reading something controversial does not mean endorsing it. “You can absolutely read something and say that you don’t agree with it, which is a much better situation to be in than not being able to read it at all,” Saini says.

Quiet choices

There is, however, a difference between being legally free to read and feeling free to read.

Riddhi Rajesh Rasam, an avid reader, says she has found herself second-guessing what she reads in public spaces. “Since there are no book bans in my area, we are free to read anything on paper. However, I do see myself second-guessing what I bring out in a café or on the metro, not because I've been ordered not to, but rather because it's a subtle tendency,” she says.

That subtlety may be what makes self-censorship difficult to recognise. There is no official order, no notice and no book being pulled from a shelf. Instead, a reader makes a small decision: perhaps a different book, perhaps an e-reader instead of a physical copy, perhaps reading something at home rather than in public.

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Rasam has experienced this herself. “I simply selected the edition of the book that wouldn't initiate a conversation that I wasn't in the mood for, even though it was right there on the store shelf, fully available, and entirely legal,” she explains.

Divya Sonigra, a content writer, describes this as a problem that can be harder to identify than formal censorship. “The quieter decision to leave a book untouched because of anticipated social cost is harder to measure and harder to reverse,” she says.

What fear takes away

Saini has spent five years running his book club, with active communities in four major cities in India. In his experience, some of the most useful conversations can come from books that readers do not agree with. “The whole point of reading is that you don’t have to enter a book already knowing what you think,” he says. “Sometimes you read precisely to find out what you think!”

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For Sonigra, this is the larger danger of fear-driven self-censorship. “A society that abandons certain books out of fear rather than judgement loses the everyday practice of encountering difficult ideas,” she says.

Ban or fear

A formal ban is clear. It can be challenged, debated and protested. Fear works differently. It can influence people without anyone explicitly telling them what not to read.

Rasam sees this as one of the biggest problems with self-censorship. “Strangely, a ban seems simpler to live with since you can organise, protest, take it to court, and get it overturned. You also know exactly what you're up against,” she says. “Fear is more difficult as it is individualised, unseen, and manifests differently in each person.”

That does not make formal censorship harmless. Saini puts it more simply: “Every book can be criticised. But the reader shouldn’t be punished simply for choosing to read it.”

When reading goes online

The possibility of being photographed and having that image circulate online adds another dimension to public reading. A month ago, a girl was trolled online for reading Katy Brent’s How to Kill Men and Get Away With It on an Indian metro.

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Saini says social media has changed the relationship between reading and being seen reading. “Before social media, anyone could sit anywhere reading a book and have a private moment. Today, someone can take a picture of that person, post it online and have thousands of people involved in something without context. I personally feel a bookshelf is not a manifesto.”

Yet social media is not only a source of anxiety. Rasam says she has also benefited from it. “I found my favourite book club, where I get recommendations from others who share my interests, and where half of my reading list originates. Yes, it has made me feel a little more awkward in public, but it has also made reading feel much less isolated and much more communal than it did before,” she shares.

Dr Manjiri Prabhu, author, festival curator and director of PILF & ISFI, also sees social media as both a boon and a source of pressure. “It subtly and subconsciously influences a person in many ways, and that includes their choice of being seen or being associated with a book, having a certain thought, group, dogma or issue, including when there could be a physical threat. A person with definitive thinking and firm choices, on the other hand, would not be conscious of such things,” she explains.

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For readers, this creates an interesting contradiction. The same platforms that help people discover books and find communities can also make them more conscious of what they are reading in public.

What about writers and publishers?

The larger concern, though, lies with what happens after a book has been published and made available. A book needs readers willing to engage with it, including readers willing to disagree with it.

For Prabhu, that is connected to freedom of expression itself. “No medium of communication, especially mass communication including press, media, TV and online media as well as books (both fiction and non-fiction) can genuinely claim to remain free if their audiences or readers are afraid to engage with them publicly.”

This raises another question: when readers face threats or harassment, where does the responsibility lie? Prabhu sees reading and writing as independent and personal choices.

“Writing and reading are both independent and very personal choices and activities. An author cannot guarantee a readership or feedback for a book that she has written based on her own choices. Similarly, what publishers publish is entirely their choice and they too have no control over who reads what. These are three streams independent of each other, despite sharing the literary space. Hence, fixing any kind of responsibility on either of these is stretching an already fragile and uncertain relationship and connection,” Prabhu opines.

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End note

But the question ultimately comes back to the reader. A reader does not have to agree with every book they open. Reading can be a way of questioning an idea, understanding an unfamiliar point of view or simply finding out what one thinks.

If people begin avoiding books because they fear being seen with them, censorship may not need to come from an official order. And perhaps that is why the question raised by a disrupted reading session extends far beyond that one gathering: if readers are free to read a book, but afraid to be seen reading it, how free are they really?

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