From the Instagram account  of Pramod Kumar KG

Burning a library is called Cultural Cleaning. In 1933 Nazi dominated student groups burned the “un-German” writings of Jewish, liberal, and leftist writers. A hint of what was to come is what the world saw during World War II. The Jewish people bore the brunt of this persecution. Books were a precursor to what would happen to humans subsequently.

My fellow Muslim citizens, friends, and colleagues are going through unimaginable horror and humiliations every day. As per reports, armed mobs vandalized a madrasa in Bihar Sharif’s Murapur locality and set fire to a 110-year-old library, reducing nearly 4500 books to ashes, allegedly in the aftermath of a Ram Navmi procession.

No culture anywhere in the world, past or present is immune to this kind of violence against literature and learning. From 5th century BCE Greece, where the works of Protagoras were burnt to Mosul’s (Iraq) central library’s where nearly one hundred thousand books were burnt in 2014 by ISIS – burning books is emblematic of the bigoted, the angry and the misguided.

But Odantupur Vihar now called Bihar Sharif, the site of the latest act of book burning is no stranger to its libraries being destroyed. Bakhtiyar Khalji by most (not all) accounts destroyed its libraries and the university of Nalanda Mahavihara around c.1200. Have we not really learnt anything in the ensuing 8 hundred years? What is it about books that alarms people? For a culture that purports to celebrate the worship of Saraswati the goddess of knowledge – when did burning books become acceptable?

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