Books and constroversies

Zafri Mudasser Nofil
Penguin Books India’s decision to pull and destroy all copies of American scholar Wendy Doniger’s book on Hinduism published in 2009 puts “The Hindus: An Alternative History” in a growing list of books banned or withdrawn from circulation and distribution in India. Over the years, a number of books have courted controversies leading to their ban or withdrawal.
India banned Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” which is viewed by some Muslims as blasphemous. In 2009, the Narendra Modi government banned senior BJP leader Jaswant Singh’s book “Jinnah- India, Partition, Independence” in Gujarat because “it contains defamatory references regarding Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who is considered as the architect of the modern India”.
But a few days later, the Gujarat High Court overturned the state government’s ban. In 2010, the University of Mumbai dropped Rohinton Mistry’s Booker-nominated novel “Such a Long Journey” from its BA syllabus following objections by Shiv Sena which alleged that the book “poorly represented” the saffron party. The novel was part of the Bachelor of Arts (English) second year syllabus since 2007.
In the same year, Sonia Gandhi’s lawyers served Spanish writer Javier Moro with a legal notice for his book “The Red Saree”, a fictionalised account of the life of the Congress chief, describing it as containing “untruths, half truths, falsehoods Zafri Mudasser Nofil is Senior News Coordinator with PTI and defamatory statements”. The book, first published in Spanish with the title ‘El Sari Rojo’ in 2008, is yet to be released in India.
Last year, the Indian unit of Bloomsbury agreed to withdraw “The Descent of Air India”, authored by a former executive of the national carrier, after a complaint from former aviation minister Praful Patel.
Penguin’s decision to recall Wendy’s book followed an out-of-court settlement with the petitioners who had claimed that it “intentionally hurt religious sentiments of millions of Hindus”.
The publisher informed a Delhi court, which was hearing a case filed against it, that it would recall and destroy all copies of “The Hindus: An Alternative History”.
The publisher also agreed to ensure that the book is “completely withdrawn or cleared from the country at the earliest, within a period nor exceeding six months starting from the date on which this agreement is signed (February 4)”.
Members of civil society and various others had moved the court seeking permanent injunction restraining the publishers from sale and circulation of the book with objectionable passages. The petition said the book is “a shallow, distorted false and non-serious presentation of Hinduism which contains highly objectionable passages regarding father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi, youth icon Swami Vivekananda, hero of the first war of independence Mangal Pandey and freedom fighter Rani Laxmi Bai of Jhansi”.
The move has angered and disappointed Wendy so says she is “deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India”.
But, according to her, in the age of the Internet, it is no longer possible to suppress a book.
“The Hindus is available on Kindle; and if legal means of publication fail, the Internet has other ways of keeping books in circulation. People in India will always be able to read books of all sorts, including some that may offend some Hindus,” she said in a statement.
Wendy supported the publishers Penguin Books India saying “they were finally defeated by the true villain of this piece – the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than civil offence to publish a book that offends any Hindu, a law that jeopardises the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how ludicrous the accusation brought against a book”.
She said she does not “blame Penguin Books, India. Other publishers have just quietly withdrawn other books without making the effort that Penguin made to save this book. Penguin, India, took this book on knowing that it would stir anger in the Hindutva ranks, and they defended it in the courts for four years, both as a civil and as a criminal suit”.
Wendy said she “was thrilled and moved by the great number of messages of support that I received, not merely from friends and colleagues but from people in India that I have never met, who had read and loved ‘The Hindus’….
“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.”
Historian Ramachandra Guha tweeted, “This is deeply disappointing. Penguin should have appealed in a higher court.”
Wendy is regarded as one of the foremost scholars of Hinduism. In her unique and authoritative account, she debates about Hindu traditions become platforms from which to consider the ironies, and overlooked epiphanies, of history.
In the book’s preface, Wendy writes, “This book is not a brief survey (you noticed that already; I had intended it to be, but it got the bit between its teeth and ran away from me), nor, on the other hand, is it a reference book that covers all the facts and dates about Hinduism or a book about Hinduism as it is lived today. Several books of each of those sorts exist, some of them quite good, which you might read alongside this one.”
She says “The Hindus: An Alternative History” differs from those books in several ways.
“It highlights a narrative alternative to the one constituted by the most famous texts in Sanskrit and represented in most surveys in English. It tells a story that incorporates the narratives of and about alternative people – people who, from the standpoint of most high-caste Hindu males, are alternative in the sense of otherness, people of other religions, or cultures, or castes, or species (animals), or gender (women).
Second, in addition to focusing on a special group of actors, I have concentrated on a few important actions, several of which are also important to us today: nonviolence toward humans (particularly religious tolerance) and toward animals (particularly vegetarianism and objections to animal sacrifice) and the tensions between the householder life and renunciation, and between addiction and the control of sensuality.
“Third, this book attempts to set the narrative of religion within the narrative of history, as a linga (an emblem of the god Shiva, often representing his erect phallus) is set in a yoni (the symbol of Shiva’s consort, or the female sexual organ), or any statue of a Hindu god in its base or plinth (pitha).
I have organized the topics historically in order to show not only how each idea is a reaction to ideas that came before (as any good old-fashioned philological approach would do) but also, wherever possible, how those ideas were inspired or configured by the events of the times, how Hinduism, always context sensitive, responds to what is happening, at roughly the same moment, not only on the political and economic scene but within Buddhism or Islam in India or among people from other cultures entering India.”
She says her book “will not serve as a conventional history (my training is as a philologist, not a historian) but as a book about the evolution of several important themes in the lives of Hindus caught up in the flow of historical change. It tells the story of the Hindus primarily through a string of narratives”.

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