When the Supreme Court of India recently dismissed a petition to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, it sent out a powerful message: book banning is a relic of the past. In an age where information travels faster than ever before, censorship of literature is both futile and regressive. What once may have been enforced by governments with confiscations and customs checks is now undone by a simple download link, a digital library, or a shared PDF file. The attempt to control the spread of ideas by banning books is like trying to stop a flood with bare hands.

It is a battle already lost. The case of The Satanic Verses epitomizes the futility of book banning. Published in 1988, Rushdie’s novel sparked a global firestorm. It was accused of blasphemy, banned in several Muslim-majority countries, and outlawed in India within days of release. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the author, making Rushdie a target for decades. Translators and publishers faced violent reprisals, and Rushdie himself survived an assassination attempt as recently as 2022. Yet despite the bans and threats, the book has remained in circulation worldwide. This pattern repeats itself across history. In South Asia, Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja (1993) was banned in Bangladesh for allegedly insulting religious sentiments.

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The ban, far from silencing her, propelled the book to international fame. It was translated into more than 20 languages and became a symbol of the struggle for free expression in the face of authoritarian control. Readers who might never have heard of Nasrin rushed to find her work precisely because the government tried to erase it. The lesson is simple: the forbidden fruit is often the sweetest. The history of banned books is long and diverse. D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was prohibited in Britain, the United States, and India for its explicit portrayal of sexuality. The infamous British obscenity trial in 1960, where the prosecution asked whether it was a book one would “wish your wife or servants to read,” ended with an acquittal that reshaped the cultural landscape. Today, Lawrence’s novel is part of the canon, studied in classrooms and celebrated as literature.

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