Of mouse and man

With the proliferation of the world wide web and the inevitable shift in reading habits, the classic may still remain the great unread book. RUKUN ADVANI looks at browsing of a different kind. Starting a new column.

IN 1897, Mark Twain defined a "classic" as "a book which people praise and don't read". Another definition of this type which can be found in a now-forgotten classic Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary - has the same thrust. Classics are works that are revered, not read. One of the most memorable definitions in Bierce's dictionary is, incidentally, of a mouse. A mouse, says Bierce, is "an animal that strews its path with fainting women". Will the new generations who start their day not by brushing their teeth but by clicking their mouse chuckle equally at Bierce's definition? Would it now be defined as "a gadget which strews its path with fainting men whose salaries it has nibbled away"?

With the proliferation of the world wide web and the inevitable shift in reading habits within the new generations of the computer-literate, it also seems likely that Twain's wry definition of the classic as the great unread book will turn out true in unanticipated ways. Print versions of classics may, in time, become relics of the pre-Web era, replaced by "classic reading sites" wherein readers can "virtually inhabit", for example, Dickens' Bleak House, "virtually interact" with the characters who inhabit that house, and thereby experience or "live" that classic rather than read it.

With the large-volume reference book, this has already happened, and some of the books I was brought up to both revere and read are now museum pieces. The normal-print version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for instance, is no longer available in the massive 24-volume set which was a much displayed and caressed possession until five years ago. The convenience and multiple- variant possibilities of referring to the digital version of this sort of reference work so outweigh (metaphorically, of course) the bound version, and take up such little space, that the mouse is actually the only sensible source to now access this classic.

The same thing holds good for almost all multi-volume reference works. The Encyclopedia Britannica had, in my parents' generation, an iconic biblical status as the Mahabharata cum Ramayana cum Bhagavad Gita of the Modern West. It was in fact the secular version of the Bible for the middle-class Hindu and sharif Mussalman home.

If you were middle class and valued books, it was more or less obligatory to buy and then venerate the leather-bound living-room version that the publishers had cannily marketed all across India. The literate lower-middle classes, imbued with the impulses of "Sanskritisation" and status-improvement, would desperately save up in order to possess this decorous, decorative object d'art which radiated its aura of learning all over the house and across the street to excite neighbourly envy. In the end, the "Joneses" syndrome had its way. The neighbours would have to give in and buy the damn thing too and suffer the same drain to their pockets.

I never saw grown-ups actually poring over any of those tomes for any length of time. For one thing, you had to be a trained weight-lifter to pull one of those volumes off the shelf, which ruled out 50 per cent of the household, i.e. the women. If you were asthmatic or allergic, you kept clear of the volumes because before you could read it you had to dust it, and its size meant it accumulated a lot of dust.

The only people who actually read such books were children who had to do "projects" as part of their home work. If you wanted to find out what Napoleon or Rammohan Roy had been up to because your ears would be twisted if you did not, it seemed a good idea to take on the load of the relevant volume of the Britannica.

In retrospect, several deficiencies within the defunct print versions of such classic reference books seem so strikingly obvious that the wonder is they did not become defunct a lot earlier. The most glaring lack in such books was the absence of pictures. In order to know what Napoleon and Rammohan looked like, you had to ferret for a biography in a library. (I once found biographies of both with colour frontispieces that showed them both dressed in cloaks and hats and flying mufflers, looking sartorially similar.) A second problem was that there was reams of matter on Napoleon but only half a page on Rammohan. It was clear that invaders and conquerors were bigger and more important than social reformers, even if they sometimes looked similar. Then there was third, of course, the weight and sheer bulk that had to be accommodated upon an expensive wooden bookshelf. And most important, there was neither a hyperlink to related material nor a "find" option for instantaneous retrieval.

These gaps have been so wonderfully and comprehensively plugged by the new technology that it looks like we have reached a plateau which will allow only small-scale heights for publishers to scale in the future as far as the multi-volume reference book goes. Some years ago the publisher Dorling-Kindersley (D-K) bought rights to use and selectively reproduce the text of the most popular titles in the Oxford dictionary range and filled it full of amazing pictures, pointers and captions. The D-K version of the OED illustrates just about everything that has a physical form in the cosmos. The idea is to leave nothing to the imagination. This seems a jolly good idea for such a book.

If this is true of even the print version of the massively illustrated D-K version of the Oxford dictionary, the possibilities within its digitised version are worth thinking about. A digitised reference work of this kind minimises the possibility of a child accidentally thinking of Napoleon and Rammohan as part of the same world in which all bigwigs wore hats and cloaks and mufflers. Each hat, cloak and muffler will have an arrow leading out of it towards a caption that clarifies all. The guarded, conservative, older person's response to this may be to say: "How awful. Browsing in a library was so much nicer, so full of unexpected thrills and encouraged initiative and the imagination". There is truth in that response, but it is not a truth to which people thrill equally. It is certainly not how the new reader will look at the same digitised book. In her perspective, the distance to detailed information on mufflers is now just a mouse away, the world's picture library is at hand, and when quick, accurate information is required on tap, it is right there. What is more, the reader can undress Napoleon and Rammohan and make them wear each other's clothes. That done, she can give Napoleon a sex-change, dress him up as a Bharatiya nari, place him as a "suttee" upon a funeral pyre, and instruct Rammohan to rescue Nari Napoleon in the nick of time. Later, Nari Napoleon can go through a widow-remarriage ceremony presided over by Iswarchandra Vidyasagar. She can be married off, for example, to Khushwant Singh, who would love the idea of another woman in his life, even if she is only "virtual". The possibilities for imaginative frivolity are endless, as are the imaginative possibilities of annihilating colonial and other oppressive histories with clicks of the mouse. Hybridity is all.

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