I was encouraged in school to read textbooks using highlighters. Several of my classmates had an array of pens to mark out different portions of text to signify their relative importance. Underlining with a pencil suggested that something wasn’t important.
In a culture that celebrates rote learning, grades depend on how faithfully certain portions of text are reproduced in an examination. The darker fluorescent passages were sure-shot shoo-ins for the examinations. In highlighting, I inferred that ‘important’ meant ‘this is the stuff that you don’t mess around with’.
Jacob Koshy Sacred and inviolate Books — in a country that is one-fourth illiterate and where half of the fifth-graders can’t read passages meant for second-graders — are sacred and inviolate. There is a day set apart in the Hindu calendar for the worship of books. If, as a child, a book were to fall from my hand or if I accidentally stepped on one, I would unconsciously make the sign of the cross as an act of seeking forgiveness. It’s a strange act because the Bible, as far as I know, doesn’t contain any ‘fragile, handle with care’ warnings, and newspapers, also repositories of text and wisdom, are never accorded the same respect. It’s perfectly acceptable to defile, especially wrap shoes in, yesterday’s editorial pages. But the idea that books are sacred is widely prevalent, and is evidenced in the threats of violence around book bans, the pulping of books, and the clashes that ensue when pages from religious books are torn or desecrated.
However, marginalia — notes that swing, perch and trip into the orderly text in different codes of shorthand and smileys — is the antithesis of highlighting. Even in schoolwork, it is the red marks and comments in drafts that shape a text rather than the three or four stars that are occasionally doodled by teachers to convey to students that they have been wonderfully compliant.
Showing dissent These handwritten notes that desecrate the margins have, since the Middle Ages, been the first sites of a challenge to the authority of the book. There are now digitisation projects that preserve books across centuries. Here you can find the heavily annotated, 400-year-old Latin copy of the New Testament that belonged to Martin Luther and formed the basis of his own German translation, as well as his criticism of the Catholic Church that was instrumental in the birth of the Protestant reform movement.
Before social media made public dissent the norm, commentary in the margins was the highest compliment you could pay an author. Your pencil, or highlighter, was the sword with which you teased out chinks in someone’s armour, complimented, lacerated, and passed on your impressions — by lending or gifting your copies — to the world beyond. It showed that beyond being just a conduit for new ideas to seep through, you actively chose to engage with the text, and what you are passing on is an enhanced uniquely value-added version of the original.
Scribbles can spawn frontier research. French polymath Pierre de Fermat jotted down in the margin of his copy of the Greek text Arithmetica that “it is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain…” That “marvellous proof” ended up traversing entire careers of several mathematicians and gorging megabytes of computer space until Andrew Wiles, in 1994, solved it using an approach that would have been bizarrely alien to Fermat.
The world’s most popular wizard, Harry Potter, has also been a beneficiary of marginalia. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , Potter chances upon a much-scribbled copy of “Advanced Potion-Making”, a mandatory text. He finds that the marginalia frequently contained modifications to the prescribed recipes that made them more potent than their textbook versions. It turns out that the book belonged to the one whom he shared the most uneasy relationship with: Severus Snape, his teacher, detractor and guardian.
The word ‘marginal’ actually conveys little of the actual power of the margin. Dissent and critique always creep up in unexpected white spaces and together they can grow to challenge what has been highlighted many times over.
E-margins The Kindle and other e-book readers appear to have solved the problem of defilement while ensuring that marginalia gets its own rightful space. A simple long-press of a striking passage allows you to highlight it, make notes, and instantly share it on your timeline. There is a danger that this has already spawned a new kind of highlighting: headlines that are faithfully shared and pasted on walls. Several studies suggest that most such links have been passed on without being read. Whether one engages with text using a pencil, highlighter, or a long-press, it is the spirit of critical engagement that can’t be compromised at any cost.
jacob.koshy@thehindu.co.in
