The publisher has reportedly agreed to a settlement with the group that includes withdrawing and destroying all published copies of the book. In a Feb. 11 statement posted on the Facebook page of PEN Delhi, Doniger expressed concern for what that portends. “I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate,” Doniger wrote, referring to the recent surge of Hindu nationalist sentiment ahead of national elections this spring. Penguin India has yet to issue comment on the matter.
The development comes uncomfortably close on the heels of reports last month that Bloomsbury India was withdrawing another allegedly offending tome. According to local media, the publishing house withdrew The Descent of Air India, by Jitender Bhargava, after a defamation lawsuit was filed by former Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel, whom the book holds responsible for the airline’s financial losses. The publisher issued a public apology to Patel, who is currently Minister of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises. Bhargava stands by his book.
India’s tough libel laws are often exploited by interest groups eager to silence or censor unwanted voices. India was the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988; the country’s most famous artist, M.F. Husain, died in exile in 2011 after facing death threats from far-right Hindu groups angered by his paintings of Indian deities in the nude.
As Doniger pointed out in her statement, readers in and outside India are still free to download The Hindus on Kindle. But the buying a book online feels like something of a hollow victory if hard copies are being removed from the shelves of the local bookseller. The author wrote that Penguin India tried to defend her work, but was “finally defeated by the true villain of this piece—the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than civil offense to publish a book that offends any Hindu, a law that jeopardizes the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how ludicrous the accusation brought against a book.”
Penguin India to Recall and Destroy Wendy Doniger's Book 'The Hindus' | TIME.com
Doniger, a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, is no stranger to this kind of controversy. Her studies of Hinduism have sought to recover the buried, heterodox Tantric tradition from under the weight of the orientalist's favourite form of Hinduism – Vedanta. For European orientalists, Vedantism was the closest to their own monotheism – a set of faith practices bourgeois in their mood and conduct. Tantrism – with its impurities of sex and diet – seemed out of favour. Doniger and her collaborators sought to revive interest in Tantrism, for which they turned to new methods of interpretation, notably psychoanalysis.
The attack on books for being anti-Hindu began in the 1990s. Doniger's student Jeffrey Kripal was taken to task for his suggestive Kali's Child. In a foreword to that book, Doniger wrote that it would "delight many readers, infuriate others, and generate a great deal of creative controversy". What she had in mind was "creative controversy" amongst Indologists. She could not have foreseen the calls for censorship and death threats that Kripal received.
he party of the Hindu right, BJP, believes that it will win the national elections this year, with its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi leading it to victory. Alongside the court cases of people such as Batra has been a chilling breeze through the media as owners have begun to cull editors who have been critical of Modi, notably Open Magazine's Hartosh Singh Bal and television journalists Rajdeep Sardesai and Sagarika Ghosh. It is in this context that Penguin decided to withdraw and pulp Doniger's book. That Penguin did not fight the case says a great deal about the limitations of corporate commitment to freedom of speech.
Doniger has a real case here. Her book on other peoples' myths is not an insult to religion but a tribute to its complexity. If we are no longer able to breathe in all of our traditions in order to exhale the best of our capabilities, we will become a desiccated civilisation. As Gandhi wrote in 1925: "It is good to swim in the waters of tradition, but to sink in them is suicide."
