Kolkata: The placards on College Street in Kolkata on Saturday (October 31) were books. Thousands of people walked through Kolkata’s book district holding them up, in protest against the attacks on bookstalls across West Bengal during the Durga Puja.The call came in a leaflet titled Walk for Books, signed by more than 150 writers, artists, teachers, doctors and lawyers. It asked people to gather at the Vidyasagar statue in College Square and to bring one book of their choice. “Let the book itself become the banner of our protest,” it said. The leaflet called the attack on bookstalls at Jadavpur the most shameful episode of the Durga Puja. That night people of all ages who love books stood their ground, and the police and the bulldozer were forced to pull back. A banner urging people to read books rises above the crowd at the start of the march. Photo by arrangement.The attacks came after West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari announced that Left bookstalls would not be allowed during the festival, calling their books anti-national propaganda. Across the state, stalls were broken, burnt and torn down, and books were flung onto roads. Police cited a high court order on a single stall in Bongaon to clear Left stalls elsewhere. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state president Samik Bhattacharya has denied that his party directed any of the attacks.Also read: Police Clear Left Book Stalls Across West Bengal as 19 Die in Puja Stampede Amid Thin PolicingThe civic society has described this as a war by the state against books. People answered with every kind of book. Older marchers held up Karl Marx’s Capital, a book on B.R. Ambedkar, Premchand’s short stories and Manik Bandyopadhyay’s Padma Nadir Majhi. On the cover of one booklet on the workers’ movement was a bulldozer.An auto-rickshaw dressed in book posters, its driver wearing the march badge. Photo by arrangement.Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar was everywhere. His Barnaparichay, the primer from which generations of Bengali children learnt their letters, was held aloft beside a large poster of the original constitution of India. Barnaparichay also appeared on the front of an auto-rickshaw, alongside posters of The Communist Manifesto, Ambedkar and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Pather Dabi. Its driver stood beside it with a Walk for Books badge on his shirt.Young women in the march carried Tagore’s Gora, a copy of the constitution, a book on fascism and a life of the young revolutionary Khudiram Bose. Others held The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Bhagat Singh’s Jail Diary and The Communist Manifesto.A child holds up Upendra Kishore Roychowdhury’s ‘Tuntunir Boi’ as her father carries her through the march. Photo by arrangement.The youngest marchers carried what they could read. Perched on her father’s arm, a little girl in a green dress held up Tuntunir Boi, Upendrakishore Raychowdhury’s book of children’s tales, a staple of Bengali childhoods for more than a century.There were no slogans. People sang and recited poetry as they walked. The organisers said the march belonged to no party. Left leaders walked in it, but so did writers, academics and families with their children.Marchers hold books above their heads as the procession fills the lane between the bookshops of College Street. Photo by arrangement.The march ended where it began, at the garlanded statue of Vidyasagar, the reformer who spent his life putting books into the hands of ordinary Bengalis. There, the oldest marchers stood together with the books they had brought, from Maxim Gorky’s Mother to Pather Dabi to a Bhagat Singh’s Jail Diary.