Reading maketh a full man

The book fair season has just begun in Assam. While the North-east Children’s Book Fair has just concluded in Nagaon, the North-east Book Fair has just begun in Guwahati. While the concept of boo fair was pioneered in Assam by noted litterateur Chandra Prasad Saikia way back in 1983 when the Publication Board – of which he was the Secretary – held the first-ever Guwahati Book Fair, it must be however kept on record that Asam Sahitya Sabha is the original founder of book fairs in Assam, as every session of the Sabha also has a book fair component in it. Book fairs have over the decades become a popular event across Assam, and today there is hardly any town in the state that does not hold an annual book fair. Given the response of readers and buyers across the state, a couple of organisations have also devised a mobile book fair that goes from one educational institution to another, taking with it books particularly for children. There is no other state in the country – with the exception probably of West Bengal – where book fairs are held in almost every town, big and small.

The popularity of book fairs definitely leads to the fact that books continue to be enjoying an increasing popularity across Assam. Had books not been popular, had the reading habit been on the downslide, such a large number of book fairs would not have been held in the state. Publishers too would not have published so many books every year if popularity of books, or the purchase of books was going down. The problem however is that, nobody knows exactly how many books are published in the state every year. There is no system in the state through which one can find out the number of books published every year. Though there is the mechanism of registering each book with an International Standard Book Number (ISBN), many authors and publishers do not register their books because it has not been made legally compulsory or mandatory. But then, every newspaper in the state regularly publishes news items about new books released almost every day, especially during the two or three months preceding the major book fairs.

There is also no system through which one can assess the reading habit of the people. Newspaper and TV news channels occasionally carry news items about low turn-out of readers in the district libraries of the state. There was a time when most villages in Assam had a library, from where villagers, especially high school students, borrowed books to read. There were also reading clubs in some villages alongside youth clubs. Over the years, however, most such village libraries have disappeared. Generations of Assamese people have grown up reading a wide range of books which included translations of Shakespeare, Gorky, Bankim Chandra, Premchand and Tagore, as also immortal works of Lakshimanth Bezbaroa, Ananda Chandra Agarwala, and Jyotiprasad among others. There were also those extremely popular Golai series of Kumudeswar Borthakur, the Pa-Phu series of Prem Narayan Dutta and the Bhaskar series by Rangman, which together helped cultivating a reading habit among the younger generations. There are about 200 rural libraries in the state which receive some annual grant of books from the state government, which however is extremely inadequate. What the government needs to do is strengthen the rural libraries across the state by way of building grants, books and better remuneration for people who currently work as part-time librarians for peanuts. Libraries in government schools too should be given annual grants to purchase books as were given to colleges by the state government last year. Didn’t Francis Bacon once say – reading maketh a full man?