Book excerpt: Pluralism and Democracy in India- Debating the Hindu Right

It takes more than a fundamentalist fatwa to keep a writer down. And Wendy Doniger is back with this volume edited by her and University of Chicago colleague Martha C Nussbaum, a distinguished professor of law and ethics there. This is the publication that bears her name on the cover since last year's controversies over her books, The Hindus: An Alternative History, and On Hinduism, which her publishers, Penguin India and Rupa, respectively, had agreed to withdraw from the market following protests by right-wing factions. The present publication, with essays by a pantheon of academic stars, explores precisely the issues that l'affaire Doniger brought to the fore – the increasingly aggressive posturing by the Hindu right and the danger it poses to Indian democracy. In her essay, Doniger draws from her experience to marvel at how ancient Hinduism and Sanskrit, which she'd chosen to study thinking how apolitical it was, had become a minefield of hotly contested 'versions'. An extract:


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In an article titled "India: The War Over History," the historian William Dalrymple reviewed a number of recent books about Indian history whose authors have been attacked – through words, threats, occasionally blows – by reactionary forces in India. He listed some of the most egregious examples of the rewriting of school history books in India and general misrepresentations of the history of Hinduism, a list to which, alas, many new examples have been added, or resurrected, since he wrote, in 2005. One of my favorites is PN Oak's argument (in Tajmahal: The True Story, first published in 1989) that the Taj Mahal is not an Islamic mausoleum but an ancient Shiva Temple, which the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan commandeered from the then Maharaja of Jaipur, that the term Taj Mahal is not a Persian (from Arabic) phrase meaning "crown of palaces," but a corrupt form of the Sanskrit term Tejo Mahalaya signifying a Shiva Temple, and that persons connected with the repair and the maintenance of the Taj have seen the Shiva Linga and other idols sealed in the thick walls and in chambers in the secret, sealed red stone stories below the marble basement.

To take another example: the only shocking thing about Dwijendra Narayan Jha's book The Myth of the Holy Cow is the news that anyone has been shocked by the argument that people used to eat beef in ancient India. (Whether they ate castrated steers, as most beef-eaters do, or cows in the particular sense of the female of the species, is the only ambiguous point, and Jha marshals Vedic texts that suggest that they sometimes ate cows, though generally just steers.) Yet the cover of the book proudly proclaims "A Book the Government of India Demands be Ritually Burned", and the flyleaf assures us that the book has been "banned by the Hyderabad Civil Court and the author's life has been threatened." The Observer likened the book's reception to that of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and even the more-PC-than-thou (and now defunct) Lingua Franca felt that the case was sexy/trendy enough to justify a notice that the book "was pulled from the country's shelves." Jha was so violently attacked, physically as well as in the press, that he had to have a police escort 24 hours a day for several years after his book was published in India. The shocked resistance to the idea that Hindus ever ate beef inheres, for some, in the fact that it contradicts the party line of the Hindutvavadis, who argue that We Hindus have always been here in India, and have Never Eaten Cows; Those Muslims have come in, and Kill and Eat Cows, and therefore must be banished or destroyed.

In 2010, six elderly gentlemen brought a criminal suit against Penguin India, and me, demanding that my book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, be withdrawn from publication and all extant issues destroyed. They argued that the book had offended them, thus violating an Indian law that makes it a criminal offense to offend any religious group. In February, 2014, Penguin India, decided not to go on defending the suit, and agreed to withdraw the book from publication and to pulp all remaining copies. In fact, not a single book was destroyed; Penguin had only a few copies in stock in house, and all the copies in the bookstores were quickly bought up. Outside of India, sales of the book soared astronomically; in India, many PDFs were downloaded from several Indian websites established for that purpose. Penguin India sold the New York edition on its website, and booksellers sold that edition in the Delhi airport and Khan Market. More important, there was an astonishing volume of international protest against Penguin's actions and against the censoring law; a number of academic institutions issued protests, and thousands of individuals signed petitions. There was terrific media coverage. The storm is still raging as I write this, on March 11, 2014, and I am hopeful that much good will come of it all in the long run. But it certainly was a low-water mark in the history of censorship in India. And it may well serve to make Indian publishers increasingly wary of publishing books that challenge Hindutva ideologies.

(Reproduced with permission from the publisher, Oxford University Press)