Ink, Irony and Insecurity
Sreejayaa Rajguru | 10 August 2025 | The Leaflet
In the delicate scenario of a democracy, literature bears witness but also wields a sword. If one is an observer of Indian politics, the Jammu & Kashmir Home Department's announcement in August 2025 of a ban on 25 books that it classified as "seditious" was hardly shocking. It felt less spontaneous than a psychological act of governance: a panicked retreat into a shroud of national integrity. Yet the more we peered inside this literary purge, we understood that it was not just the ink the state feared on the page but the imagination, the inquiry, the unforgetting histories it mobilised.
Many of the most respected names in Indian and global scholarship on this banned list are Arundhati Roy, A.G. Noorani, Sumantra Bose, and Victoria Schofield. These works are not incendiary pamphlets or flights of fancy calling for insurrection; they are scholarly texts, journalistic investigations, and political essays chronicling the long, tortuous, and too often tragic tale of Kashmir's contemporary political identity. The overarching authority's decision to ban their circulation and reader access was garbed in the usual threats to sovereignty and assertions that they promote terrorism. Yet, just the faintest breath of scrutiny reveals how predictable and uniform such proclamations are, and crumbles them effortlessly…