India’s Free Library Movement Counters Caste Discrimination and Authoritarianism

Outside the Khirki branch of Delhi’s Community Library Project, a signboard details the day’s programs, including scheduled story times and art activities. Children bounce and buzz as they wait in line to check out their books. Patrons take advantage of clean public bathrooms, drinking water (in short supply in many of Delhi’s unplanned communities) and internet-connected laptops. This library feels more like my home Windsor Terrace branch of the Brooklyn Public Library than it does the Delhi Public Library a few kilometers away. The biggest difference? Anyone can join the Khirki library for free, while the Delhi Public Library charges 100 rupees a year. It’s a number too small to make a meaningful difference to the library budget, and too large for the poor and working class who make up much of the city — a nominal figure that serves only to exclude.

Changing this system is the singular priority of India’s Free Libraries Network (FLN). “The mandate to be free is one of the most important demands we are making,” Prachi Grover told Truthout. Grover is part of a network of grassroots activists and practitioners pushing for changes to the country’s public library system under the banner of the FLN, a consortium of more than 100 community libraries and individuals founded in 2019. Group members are committed to the development of free public libraries open to all Indians, regardless of gender, class or caste. In December, the group launched its People’s National Library Policy at an event held at Delhi’s India International Centre. Community organizers, legislators, librarians, booksellers, authors and the interested public gathered to learn more about the network and its legislative priorities. Speakers included Grace Banu, director of the country’s Trans Rights Now Collective; V. Sivadasan, a Marxist member of parliament from Kerala; and a panel of speakers from community libraries across the country. (This author also spoke at the event.) The gathering marked a turn toward organizing for government support for libraries, a recognition that the kind and scale of transformation FLN members seek requires action from the state.

The demand for a free public library goes well beyond the rupee. “Free for us is also the freedom to be in that space, to use it without fear, to have the support to learn how to use the space or read the books, to be a space where everyone moves with respect and dignity,” said Grover.

This means the library must be explicitly anti-caste and feminist, says Purnima Rao, a member of FLN’s board. “We must release the Indian public library from the chokehold of patriarchal and Brahminical systems, which have long gone unchallenged,” she told Truthout. In Khirki, those commitments are listed clearly in colorful signage that reminds members that all are welcome in the space, including women and those whose caste position has long excluded them from these institutions.

Such restrictions are rarely listed in the rules. For example, the Delhi Public Library states that it provides service “irrespective of any distinction of sex, caste, creed, and religion.” For FLN activists, such statements are insufficient, given deepening inequality in Indian society more broadly. To join, charging fees effectively exclude the poor from libraries, embedding a class-based hierarchy into an ostensibly public institution. By contrast, FLN libraries must be explicitly anti-caste and gender-inclusive, and programs must reflect this priority. “One of my first jobs at the Community Library Project was managing the line at circulation,” Rao told Truthout. “I was told not to allow anyone to cut the line, no adult could skip ahead of any child.” For Rao, it was among the first times she had experienced a line that nobody could cut, regardless of class or caste status. The community library is a space where everyone is equal.

As they advocate for a free public library system with politicians and policy makers, FLN organizers continue to build community libraries on the ground as examples of the world they want. In Dibrugarh, a city of just over 150,000 in the northeast corner of Assam, trans rights activist and storyteller Rituparna Neog established the Chandraprabha Saikiani Feminist Library & Resource Centre as a library and community space. The brightly lit space features walls festooned with rainbow flags and shelves of books for patrons of all ages in a mix of languages including Hindi, English and Assamese. Library leaders also support Project Kitape Katha Koi, a community library that serves children in nearby Chenijan, Jorhat, among the region’s industrial tea plantations. “Within a free community library, we can sit together, we can exercise democratic values, have discussion and conversation, sharing of information, knowledge,” Rituparna told Truthout. “The free community library is a site of resistance.”

Grover sees free libraries in Assam and across India as part of a history of public library organizing in the country. “For the longest time, we have seen waves of library movements and individual and collective efforts to build a public library system in India,” says Grover. “Each time it gains momentum the ideas are filtered down, diluted and eventually buried, perhaps barring in Kerala, till they are unearthed again with a fresh set of demands for public libraries for the people. No matter the number of blows to the movements, the demand keeps resurfacing.”

For now, FLN activists and organizers are leaning into the library as a crucial institution in broader movements for social and political change, especially urgent as the extreme right continues to consolidate state power in the country. “Libraries are the people’s tools to educate, organize and agitate,” says Rao. “FLN recognizes the critical role of the library in listening and responding to the people’s struggles. The library must employ its resources, infrastructure and services to empower all.”