And how will the books be destroyed?
Touchy celebrities, professional objection-takers, vigilante groups and political parties have filed cases, vandalized book stores and burnt copies,
says GEETA SESHU
“There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there.”
- Guy Montag, fireman, employed to burn books
One is reminded of Ray Bradbury’s book, Fahrenheit 451, as the full details emerge of the settlement reached between Penguin India and the ‘plaintiffs’ in a civil suit: Dinanath Batra, O P Gupta, Sravan Kumar, Shamley Prasad, Mahesh Chander Sharma and Dr Satish Chand Mittal, to destroy all copies of Wendy Doniger’s book ‘The Hindus: An Alternative History’ within six months. In return for which the plaintiffs will withdraw the criminal cases they fled in several courts.
The settlement, arrived at on Jan 22, 2014, marks the end of a protracted battle between Penguin India and the plaintiffs, members of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan. The book was published in 2009 and received good reviews, even being on Penguin’s best-seller list for non-fiction in 2009.
Doniger, an American, is an Indologist of repute and has written extensively on Hindu mythology using gender studies and sexuality, along with Freudian psychoanalysis, in her work. Along with Dr Sudhir Kakar, she did a translation of the Kamasutra.
The complaints against the book were lodged in 2011 against the book for ‘insulting’ Indians, especially Hindus. The legal notice sent to the publishers said that the book was a ‘shallow distorted, non-serious presentation of Hinduism’ and Doniger was attacked for writing with Christian missionary zeal.
While the book publishers received a lot of flak on social media sites for the settlement (and the Internet stepped in to save the day as aficionados quickly shared downloads of the book), it is a chilling commentary on free speech in our times.
Touchy celebrities, extraordinarily sensitive to any independent review of their persona or their work, professional objection-takers, vigilante groups and political parties with their considerable muscle, have succeeded in filing cases, vandalizing book stores, burning copies and even using their considerable economic power to mop up copies of books that may be unfavourable to them before the populi get to see it.
Penguin India is facing a number of cases across the country for different books. On January 10, 2014, the Orissa High Court sought the state government’s response on a plea to lift the ban on Peter Heehs book ‘The lives of Sri Aurobindo’.
The book publisher is already embroiled in other cases relating to the publication of Siddharth Siddharth Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned, because of a chapter on the controversial head of the IIPM, Arindam Chaudhuri and on a biography of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalitha, against which an injunction exists.
In a blog-post to commemorate ‘Banned books week’ last year, Penguin India head Chiki Sarkar, wrote of the difficulties of dealing with the cases and whether publishers give up too easily. Sarkar frankly admits: ‘Often I think in
 matters of free speech, the daily pragmatism of money, effort and time
 wins out over the big idea’.
Sarkar, who said publishers really didn’t have the time and money to wage a constant war, added, rather wistfully, that “perhaps we should take the next injunction 
we are faced with and really fight it out”.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to have happened. And even when it did and publishers resisted censorship and responsible members of civil society refused to allow book bans, here’s what happened:
The Nationalist Congress Party, part of the ruling alliance in Maharashtra, forbade Oxford India from stocking copies of James Laine’s book on Shivaji in any of its book-stores in Maharashtra, despite the Supreme Court’s lift of a ban on the book. Laine’s book is available in other states and cities of India.
Given the growing pressures on them, publishers will be forced to stick to feel-good books, dispensing advice on marketing, diets, health and other such safe subjects. But this still leaves us with the big question -
How exactly will the problem books be destroyed? Will they be burnt, shredded or soaked to a pulp at the bottom of the ocean, the words dissolving into Bradbury’s vision of a future that seems to have arrived right here…
Touchy celebrities, extraordinarily sensitive to any independent review of their persona or their work, professional objection-takers, vigilante groups and political parties with their considerable muscle, have succeeded in filing cases, vandalizing book stores, burning copies and even using their considerable economic power to mop up copies of books that may be unfavourable to them before the populi get to see it.
Penguin India is facing a number of cases across the country for different books. On January 10, 2014, the Orissa High Court sought the state government’s response on a plea to lift the ban on Peter Heehs book ‘The lives of Sri Aurobindo’.
The book publisher is already embroiled in other cases relating to the publication of Siddharth Siddharth Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned, because of a chapter on the controversial head of the IIPM, Arindam Chaudhuri and on a biography of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalitha, against which an injunction exists.
In a blog-post to commemorate ‘Banned books week’ last year, Penguin India head Chiki Sarkar, wrote of the difficulties of dealing with the cases and whether publishers give up too easily. Sarkar frankly admits: ‘Often I think in
 matters of free speech, the daily pragmatism of money, effort and time
 wins out over the big idea’.
Sarkar, who said publishers really didn’t have the time and money to wage a constant war, added, rather wistfully, that “perhaps we should take the next injunction 
we are faced with and really fight it out”.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to have happened. And even when it did and publishers resisted censorship and responsible members of civil society refused to allow book bans, here’s what happened:
The Nationalist Congress Party, part of the ruling alliance in Maharashtra, forbade Oxford India from stocking copies of James Laine’s book on Shivaji in any of its book-stores in Maharashtra, despite the Supreme Court’s lift of a ban on the book. Laine’s book is available in other states and cities of India.
Given the growing pressures on them, publishers will be forced to stick to feel-good books, dispensing advice on marketing, diets, health and other such safe subjects. But this still leaves us with the big question -
How exactly will the problem books be destroyed? Will they be burnt, shredded or soaked to a pulp at the bottom of the ocean, the words dissolving into Bradbury’s vision of a future that seems to have arrived right here…