Farce of the Penguin

Earlier this week the publishing house Penguin agreed to pulp all Indian copies of Wendy Donigerrsquos book The Hindus An Alternative History after pressure from a conservative is there any other kind Hindu group This has sparked much outrage from all twelve Indians who read books Eleven of these people blame Penguin for buckling under pressure instead of standing up for freedom of speech Irsquod like to disagreePulp fiction Penguin agreed to pulp all Indian copies of Wendy Donigerrsquos book The Hindus An Alternative History after pressure from a conservative Hindu groupThe first argument against Penguin is that the book wasnrsquot officially banned which implies that Penguin blinked out of fear And while it is a publisherrsquos responsibility to fight the good fight even the staunchest have a point at which they go ldquoThis is not worth the troublerdquo And if the honchos at Penguin looked around their office and thought ldquoWersquove spent too much money on that new glass door to have a brick hurled through itrdquo I can respect that Because that actually says more about the environment in India right now than it does about Penguinrsquos commitment or lack thereof to idealsOn a normal day Penguinrsquos argument might seem paranoid But two months before a general election that looks like it may go the rightwing way Two weeks after the SC refused to review Section 377 And one week after the Shiv Sena ransacked a Mekaal Hassan Band press conference just because theyrsquore Pakistani The temperature in this room is MegaHindu degrees centigrade right now and Penguin just didnrsquot want to get burnedIndians have institutionalised the fear of alternative narratives in spectacular fashion I spent my entire school life learning rather simplistically that Mahatma Gandhi and Shivaji for example were great men And make no mistake they were Entire civilisations bent to their will But when I got to college their narratives became a little more layeredNot because the books we referred to were that way but because I was lucky to have teachers who could tease doubt and moral complexity out of them Even those questions were only hinted at and I had to go all the way to a leftleaning journalism postgraduate school to truly question these idols I had to wait until I was in my twenties just to acknowledge the thought that Gandhi may have been a less than ideal father to his children or that there may have been other routes to freedom or the idea that Shivaji had some pretty complicated politicsConservative groups operate under the assumption that acknowledging a different narrative or facet of their idols destroys them If anything Irsquom more in awe of Mahatma Gandhi and Shivaji when Irsquom allowed to contemplate them as people not onedimensional ubercaricatures And the same logic applies to any faith be it Islam or Hinduism or Christianity Irsquod engage with faith more if I were allowed to recognise it as something whose ideals were corrupted at various points in history by individuals who coopted itOf course the weird thing is Irsquom now more likely to read Donigerrsquos book I probably wouldnrsquot have earlier I mean the title is terrible The Hindus An Alternative History makes it sound like the second I close the book a teacher is going to kick my door in and fail me at something She could have at least made an effort with lsquoThe Brahminchi Codersquo or something But now Irsquom going to read it just because Look what you did conservative groups this is how the terrorists winRohan Joshi is a writer and standup comedian who likes reading films and people who do not use the SMS lingo You can contact him on wwwfacebookcomtherohanjoshi