Censorship: Author Resigned to Ill Fate of Book in India
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By John Williams
PUBLISHING---After Penguin Books India recently decided to recall and pulp all copies of “The Hindus: An Alternative History” in the face of legal action, the book’s author, Wendy Doniger, was not surprised. “I kept hoping we might win the lawsuit, but it was looking bad,” she said on Friday. Ms. Doniger, a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, expected the book to meet trouble in India. For the edition published there in 2010, she said, she and her editors worked “to take out things we thought might be particularly offensive to Hindus, to not thumb our nose at them.” The changes to the book, which came out in the United States in 2009, weren’t substantive, she said in an interview, “but we changed some of the wording and softened some things that would be like waving a red flag in front of a bull.” [link]
By John Williams
PUBLISHING---After Penguin Books India recently decided to recall and pulp all copies of “The Hindus: An Alternative History” in the face of legal action, the book’s author, Wendy Doniger, was not surprised. “I kept hoping we might win the lawsuit, but it was looking bad,” she said on Friday. Ms. Doniger, a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, expected the book to meet trouble in India. For the edition published there in 2010, she said, she and her editors worked “to take out things we thought might be particularly offensive to Hindus, to not thumb our nose at them.” The changes to the book, which came out in the United States in 2009, weren’t substantive, she said in an interview, “but we changed some of the wording and softened some things that would be like waving a red flag in front of a bull.” [link]
