by WENDY DONIGER
Dina Nath Batra, the retired headmaster whose lawsuit against Penguin India led the company to agree to destroy copies of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, in his office beneath portraits of right-wing Hindu nationalists K.B. Hedgewar and M.S. Golwakar, Delhi, February 2014 SOURCE/Kuni Takahashi/The New York Times/Redux
In February of this year, after a long career of relative obscurity in the ivory tower, I suddenly became notorious.1 In 2010, Penguin India had published a book of mine, The Hindus: An Alternative History, which won two awards in India: in 2012, the Ramnath Goenka Award,2 and in 2013, the Colonel James Tod Award.3 But within months of its publication in India, a then-eighty-one-year-old retired headmaster named Dina Nath Batra, a proud member of the far-right organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), had brought the first of a series of civil and criminal actions against the book, arguing that it violated Article 295a of the Indian Penal Code, which forbids “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class” of citizens.
After fighting the case for four years, Penguin India, which had recently merged with Bertelsmann, abandoned the lawsuit, agreeing to cease publishing the book. (It also agreed to pulp all remaining copies, but—as it turned out—not a single book was destroyed; all extant copies were quickly bought up from the bookstores.) When Penguin told me it was all over, I thought it was all over, and was grateful for the long run we’d had.
…
In 1999, the Bharatiya Janata Party–Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (BJP-RSS) government put Batra in charge of a project to “Saffronize” all the history textbooks in Indian schools (i.e., to make them confirm with Hindutva ideology). They deleted passages dealing with the caste system and beef-eating in India, and added arguments that ancient India had both airplanes and the nuclear bomb.5 Now Batra is trying to do it again.
Another passage in my book “outraged” Batra’s “religious feelings” for a different reason. I wrote, “Placing the Ramayana in its historical contexts demonstrates that it is a work of fiction, created by human authors, who lived at various times….” And this was his complaint:
That in this book at Page No. 662 the author has hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus by declaring that Ramayan is a fiction. This act of the author breaches various sections of IPC [Indian Penal Code].
The New York Review of Books for more