At the London Book Fair’s first official event, Amartya Sen, academic, author and Nobel Laureate, spoke to delegates gathered for the Chairman's Breakfast about the value of browsing and wondered aloud to what extent Calcutta's low crime rate -- including a very low homicide rate -- might be attributable to India's interest in books and reading. "Does the love of books and culture have a role here? More research is needed to test the hypothesis." India is the focus country for this year’s Fair.
Sen recalled his student days in Oxford when, short of money, he spent many fulfilling hours in Blackwells, just browsing. In India, a profound love of the written word means that those who can't afford to buy books also browse. Frankfurt, he noted, may lay claim to being the world's largest book fair, but "the love of real books" means that more people come to the Calcutta event, which is of course a different kind of fair. He mentioned that while India has "a bad record of being trigger-happy in banning books", the nation's healthy streak of rebelliousness meant that few books were actually banned.
Sen talked about India's long and proud history of books and publishing, about the early development of printing in the seventh and ninth centuries - when, even then, there were concerns about "the barriers of technology and distribution" - and about what India had given to the world, including much of the language of trigonometry. Today, the barriers are social and economic, and Sen talked about the need for an expansion of elementary school education. With more of the country's vast population educationally enfranchised, many more browsers would become book buyers, whether of books in English or in any of India's 23 languages. As to newspapers, at a time when many in the west are taking their daily serving of news online, in India - despite the fact that the affluent are as techie as those in London or New York - newspaper sales are on the increase. Explained Sen, India's is "a newspaper culture" and news print is "perversely important" for a population that needs to satisfy its curiosity with a daily fix of news.
Asked by a journalist how he felt about the increasing dominance of the English language, Sen replied that it was important to distinguish between the upsides and the downsides of colonial rule. Global language and local identity can happily co-exist, he suggested.
