By: Aporvanand Published in: *Scroll* Date: February 13, 2026 Source: https://scroll.in/article/1090684/the-roots-of-indias-disinterest-in-reading A public that prefers to passively consume videos and reels is the natural outcome of an education system which devalues original thought and expression.
The outrage that followed a report in *The Guardian* this week about the absence of a reading culture <https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/feb/09/books-india-literature-festivals-readers> in India reminded me of a conversation with the editor of an online Hindi journal. With palpable sadness, he said the reports published on the portal often go unread. To labour over these pieces, to bring them to light amidst chronic financial distress, is an ordeal that only those embedded in the struggle can comprehend. Long before the writer’s fingers touch the keyboard, there is the gruelling labour of groundwork, meticulous research and the ethical burden of verification and investigation. For this exhausting toil, writers are not even paid adequately. Then comes the secondary labour of editing, managed by a skeletal team. Yet, they have persisted with a quiet defiance, publishing dispatches that the well-funded, corporate behemoths of the press would hesitate to touch. It is disheartening to analyse the digital metrics and realise these efforts remain largely ignored. However, a curious and painful irony emerges: when these same reports are translated into English, the readership multiplies manifold. This disparity only deepens the wound for those who commit their intellectual lives to the original language – in this instance, Hindi. According to my editor friend, the contemporary public prefers the passive consumption of video over the active engagement required by a report or an essay. This mirrors our own experience. In various settings, we encounter people who tell us, “I have seen you.” Rarely does one hear the affirmation, “I have read you.” Perhaps, one might argue, my own writing is not worth the reader’s time – that is a separate matter. This trend reflects a systemic erosion. While sharing this experience with a young journalist, he smiled, taking pity on me, and said that now even videos are past. This is the age of reels. I once met a young man in a library who recognised me from my videos. When he introduced himself, I found out that he was my student, rarely seen in the classroom. He spends his hours in the library, not for the love of books, but to prepare for competitive examinations. There is a specific industry of books manufactured for these exams and that he reads. He cannot afford to waste time on a classroom lecture or a nuanced dialogue. It offers no utility for the competitive market. This exodus from the classroom is a crisis engineered by universities and the regulators of higher education. Whether at the master’s or PhD level, entrance examinations have degenerated into exercises of factual recall: it has reached a point of absolute absurdity with students expected to memorise the colour of a character’s cap or the shade of their shoes. Literature, whether a novel or a poem, has been reduced to a warehouse of trivia. Because classroom discussions eschew these minute, sterile details in favour of critical inquiry, classes are rendered irrelevant to the student’s immediate survival. This pathology begins in school. The classroom functions under the crushing weight of the examination board. Most exams no longer require the student to compose a coherent thought, they need only provide a few isolated words. Even in secondary education, the fact-based query reigns supreme. Teachers, consequently, do not insist on reading the entire text but emphasise the “important” fragments. The result is a generation that reads only what is “compulsory”. The transformative experience of reading a short story in its entirety, or navigating the architecture of a whole book, is steadily vanishing. This crisis extends far beyond literature to science, history, and political science, each with their own unique linguistic registers. Yet, even in these disciplines, a chapter is rarely read from start to finish. The “objective” question has abolished the necessity of the sentence. I feel my editor friend’s sorrow acutely because, as a teacher, this is a battle I engage in every day. Each semester is a struggle just to persuade students to bring a physical book to class. They do not see the necessity of engaging with the text. Beyond the absence of reflective or critical writing, there is the refusal to finish a novel or an essay, even. I often tell them: what others pursue as a hobby is your chosen profession – what could be more fortunate? Yet, they lack the patience to journey from the first page to the last. Reading was never cultivated as a prized activity in their formative years. This has a symbiotic relationship with the degradation of writing. Students are not expected to articulate their own thoughts in their own language. The Central Board for Secondary Education, perhaps the most influential school board in the country, instructs examiners to evaluate students against “model answers”. Any deviation, any spark of original expression, results in less marks. This explains why students often admit, with a certain sadness, that they find original texts heavy or difficult. Every semester ends with the regret that teachers could not persuade students to engage with more than a couple of essays by Hindi authors such as Agyeya, Muktibodh or Premchand. This struggle repeats itself, year after academic year. A research scholar once told me that students now “understand” novels by watching summaries in the library. These videos provide a skeletal plot, stripped of its soul. Why endure the trouble of reading? Thus, the library has become a theatre for video consumption. Competitive exams for employment – and university entrances – have reduced literary work to a heap of information, from an encounter with the totality of language. Even the definition of the library has mutated. A foreign observer visiting the Hindi heartland might see boards announcing libraries at every corner and imagine a flourishing culture of reading. But these spaces are merely holding pens for exam preparation. The youth flock there for the Wi-Fi and desk space, rather than a love for reading. The erosion of reading is, fundamentally, an erosion of our democratic character. When we read, we do not merely consume content, but encounter a distinctive voice, a unique manner of expression. The idea is important, yes, but the gesture, the style and the linguistic texture are equally vital. The true struggle of a writer is to achieve a language that is more than a mere vehicle for information. One rarely reads the work of an author only because they find an alignment with their politics. A summary, lacking personality, can never substitute for the book. This understanding must be nurtured in school; by the time a student reaches their master’s level of education, the habits of the mind have already ossified into a lasting regret. There is another silence regarding Hindi that must be broken. In “Hindi” regions, Hindi is rarely the first language of the people. It coexists with Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili and others. It is a language that must be consciously acquired. For the majority, it is only a transactional tool. Census data is misleading too. In the rush to inflate the number of “Hindi speakers”, individuals register it as their mother tongue, erasing their true linguistic origins. The refusal to recognise this fact leads to a flawed pedagogy of language. Schools emphasise a sterile purity and correctness in Hindi, rather than its beauty or its pluralistic soul. This clinical approach fails to endear the language to the student. There is no bond of affection between the reader and the language. How can one learn to appreciate the craft and the care required in language? Only by reading the masters. Too often, in contemporary Hindi prose, one realises that writers do care for their ideology but are mostly indifferent to the language they inhabit and practise. There are precious few writers today whom one would read for the sheer grace of their sentences. What is the value of a story if it adds nothing to one’s experience of the world of language? But as I write this, the nagging doubt creeps in: who will read these words? And why should they? *Apoorvanand teaches Hindi in Delhi University.*
