This paper examines the paradoxical nature of literary censorship in modern India, arguing that state-imposed bans often amplify rather than suppress a text's communicative power. Through close textual analysis and discourse analysis of three seminal cases - Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988), A. K. Ramanujan's "Three Hundred Ramayanas" (1991), and Taslima Nasrin's Lajja (1993) - the study demonstrates how banned books generate alternative spheres of public discourse. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere, Stanley Fish's reader-response theory, and Gayatri Spivak's postcolonial framework, the paper reveals how censorship transforms literary works into sites of political resistance and cultural memory. The findings suggest that banning attempts frequently backfire, embedding contested texts more deeply into India's intellectual landscape through underground circulation, academic discourse, and digital resistance movements.

Keywords: literary censorship, Indian literature, public sphere, postcolonial studies, freedom of expression