An Anticolonial Theory of Reading

In 1931, S.R. Ranganathan, an unknown literary scholar and statistician from India, published a curious manifesto: The Five Laws of Library Science. The manifesto, written shortly after Ranganathan's return to India from London—where he learned to despise, among other things, the Dewey decimal system and British bureaucracy—argues for reorganizing Indian libraries. Ranganathan believed that India's libraries, many of which had been established by the British, could promote radically egalitarian ideals if they followed five fundamental laws.