BackPOLITICAL ANIMALS | Wendy Doniger joins a growing Indian Book Club
The author's 'The Hindus: An Alternative History' is recalled after publisher Penguin settles out of court
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The Hindus: An Alternative History, a comprehensive and scholarly reinterpretation of Hinduism by Wendy Doniger, has just joined a growing list of books that have been withdrawn or banned from India.
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd has agreed to an out-of-court settlement with six Delhi residents who filed a case for its withdrawal from bookstores at the Saket district court on the grounds that it offends their religious sentiments.
The book has been withdrawn from bookstores and is unavailable to buy on Kindle, Flipkart and other online sites from India. In an SMS, a Penguin spokesperson said, “We won’t be commenting on this." A bookstore owner in Bangalore said the book has been unavailable for the past couple of weeks.
Among the names that appear as plaintiffs in a Penguin notice on the agreement that it signed is that of Dina Nath Batra, head of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti. Batra, an educationist, works to promote “value-based education". He won the 1978 national “Best Teacher" award, presented by the President, and has contributed to text books of the Haryana Education Board.
Penguin has agreed to “recall, withdraw and pulp" the book.
Batra is part of a Hindu nationalist wave currently on the upsurge, directly in line with 19th century champions of Hinduism who sought to revive a purist form of the religion. This brand of nationalism validates the image of India as an “international power" built on militarism and majoritarian values.
Doniger’s books reiterate the philosophical and social aspects of Hinduism, dispelling the myth that Hinduism is a uniformly tolerant religion, which Batra and his ideological league consider an attempt to weaken or dilute the religion and, therefore, offensive.
Hindu nationalist hostility towards freedom of expression is famously vicious. The rise of this poisonous force gains more momentum with the withdrawal of Doniger’s book, and is strictly against the syncretic and democratic values of the Constitution that protects free speech under Article 19 (1) (A). Doniger is only the latest author to face this mob. Read Salil Tripathi’s column on the fatwa of Salman Rushdie (A remembered day) and the banning of Rohinton Mistry’s book: (Free speech: a long journey)
Doniger, Indophile and a leading world scholar of Hindusim, has written several books, and in this astoundingly comprehensive book she discusses, among other things, the Bhakti tradition, the ritual of Tantra that has found a pop reinvention in the West, the dynamics of caste and gender underlined by the Vedas and the Upanishads, and the Bhagvad Gita’s philosophy of war. The book was published in 2009.
Her books on Hindusim have received flak from Hindu nationalists over many years. In an interview with Outlook magazine in 2009, Doniger said, of religious right-wing reaction to The Hindus: An Alternative History: “It doesn’t seem to me to have much to do with the book. They don’t say, ‘Look here, you said this on page 200, and that’s a terrible thing to say.’ Instead, they say things not related to the book: ‘you hate Hindus, you are sex-obsessed, you don’t know anything about the Hindus, you got it all wrong’. The objections seem to be a) I presume to know things about Hindus that they didn’t know; and b) I was saying things about the Ramayana which they didn’t like."
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