India has witnessed many stories being silenced and narratives being suppressed. This is mostly a reaction to the complexities of people in receiving the stories. The reasons are many when it comes to why books are banned. Sometimes it is the themes and sometimes the notions attached to a specific plot line or character.
Banning books often puts the freedom of expression in question. The banned books of India are a testament to the clash between tradition and modernity.
Specifically in India and in parts of the country, religious and political clashes pave the path for book bans. Despite the challenges, there are voices advocating for change.
In this blog, we bring five popular books that have been banned in India and faced censorship issues in specific parts of the country.
(1988) The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Just before dawn one winter’s morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.
(2006) The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Banned in Nagaland
While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci — clues visible for all to see — yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.
Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion — an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others.
In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who seems to anticipate their every move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory’s ancient secret — and an explosive historical truth — will be lost forever.
(1997) The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevocably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie.
It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies, accidental and intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest.
The God of Small Things explores the themes of love, family, society, and class.
(1962) Nine Hours to Rama by Stanley Wolpert
Nine Hours to Rama is a historical novel by Stanley Wolpert, published in 1962. It portrays the events leading up to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse on January 30, 1948.
The title refers to the approximate duration of time between Godse’s arrival in Delhi and the actual assassination. The novel delves into the psyche of Godse and explores the political and social turmoil in India during that period.
(1995) The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
Moraes ‘Moor’ Zogoiby is a ‘high-born crossbreed’, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinise spice merchants and crime lords. He is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile.
As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a labyrinthine tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.
The Moor’s Last Sigh is a spectacularly ambitious, funny, satirical, and compassionate novel. It is a love song to a vanishing world, but also its last hurrah.
By supporting the freedom to read, we make our society an open and intellectual place to live in.
For more book recommendations, book reviews, and bookish blogs, visit The Indian Book Club’s Reader’s Point! Feel free to send your reviews, stories, and poems.
Happy Reading!
About The Indian Book Club
The Indian Book Club is a vibrant community where we believe in turning pages and turning frowns upside down! We’ve got book discussions, read-alongs, book club nights, and poem recitations. Best Part? It’s a virtual book club. We meet once a week on Google Meet and bond over books.
We hope to see you there someday!
This is a guest post.
April 26, 2024 @ 5:30 pm
What an amazing collection. Thank you so much. Didn’t know about Da Vinci Code, that’s surprising.