When Delhi University announced last August that it was dropping Mahasweta Devi’s short story, ‘Draupadi’, from the undergraduate English syllabus, students around the country began to share it online. Set around the Naxalite movement, ‘Draupadi’ is a retelling of the powerful eponymous character from the Mahabharata. Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi or Dopdi as she is called, is a rebel who is cornered by the police trying to put down forces she represents, and some of the reasons given for the story being dropped were that it was explicit, mentioned rape and showed the armed forces in poor light. In the U.S., school boards of various States have voted to keep out notable works of literature including John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and most recently Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel, Maus, on the holocaust.

Often, a ban is likely to put a book in the hands of more readers. As soon as a Tennessee school board announced that it was dropping Maus, just before the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, sales began to soar on Amazon even as bookstores in the U.S. handed out free copies. The book tells the story of Spiegelman’s ties with his father, Vladek, who survived a concentration camp, and moved to New York. Jews are presented as mice (‘maus’ is German for mouse) and the Germans as cats. Vladek and Art have an uneasy relationship but soon his father narrates to him how the noose began to tighten for Jews in Poland and the inevitable journey to a concentration camp. Vladek ends up in Auschwitz, and shows his son the number that was etched on his hand, 175113. The school board was apparently upset with the use of curse words and some nude imagery; the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum criticised the ban, pointing out that Maus plays a critical role in teaching students about the Holocaust when millions of Jews were killed.

One of the most famous books to have been banned is of course James Joyce’s Ulysses, first serialised in an American journal, then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach, owner of the Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, on February 2, 1922. To mark 100 years of its publication, Shakespeare and Company has created an ensemble recording of the text read by writers including Margaret Atwood, Ben Okri and Jeanette Winterson, and other artists, musicians and comedians from across the world. The stream-of-consciousness novel, which profiles a day in the life of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly Bloom, has survived controversy, bans and legal action to be hailed as a “monument to the human condition.” India and other countries banned Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa against the writer in 1989 for the book, considered blasphemous of Islam. Rushdie was provided police protection in the U.K. where he lived then, and he chose an alias— Joseph Anton (later the title of his memoir) —and went into hiding before emerging years later to live in the U.S. George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was banned in Russia till 1990.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s office for intellectual freedom, told The New York Times, that aggressively policing books for inappropriate content and banning titles could limit students’ exposure to great literature, including towering canonical works. Among the most frequent targets are books about race, gender and sexuality, NYT reported. Writer Laurie Halse Anderson, whose young adult books have frequently been challenged, said “pulling titles that deal with difficult subjects can make it harder for students to discuss issues like racism and sexual assault. By attacking these books, by attacking the authors, by attacking the subject matter, what they are doing is removing the possibility for conversation.” In his 2021 book, Dangerous Ideas, Eric Berkowitz chronicles the cultural history of censorship and thought suppression through the ages, raising a pertinent question: Will the compulsion to silence the other ever be resolved?