Penguin India to destroy all copies of "The Hindus" due to religious pressure

[QuantumIguana]

Originally Posted by sirmaru

I just looked at Amazon and see this book has 55 one star reviews to only 22 five star reviews.

Maybe Penguin had low sales and that was their major reason to stop publishing it in India.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #331 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > History
#2 in Books > History > World > Religious > Hinduism
#2 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Hinduism

The book is selling quite well. It's highly likely that the 1-star reviewers haven't even read the book. Fraudulent 1-star reviews are common with controversial books.

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

The book is selling quite well. It's highly likely that the 1-star reviewers haven't even read the book. Fraudulent 1-star reviews are common with controversial books.

And indeed a quick scan through the 1-stars reveals nearly 100% Indian names and mostly digging hard to find something wrong with the book. If I had any interest at all in the subject, just that mass of 1-stars would very much convince to read the book.

[Connallmac]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

India is subject to communal violence killing large numbers of people. Their blasphemy law probably tamps down some of the dangerous anger while still being loose enough for ideas to get through. So, although, we should oppose such freedom restrictions everywhere, we also should avoid putting India in the same boat with dictatorships.

How about just enforcing laws against riots and mob violence? Pathetic that this sort of nonsense is allowed to happen anywhere in the 21st century.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

Here's what for me is the central passage in Arundhati Roy's open letter:

Yes, that's the central passage.

But Penguin did fight this legally. They put reasonable resources into standing up for a principle, more than a hard-hearted devotion to profit would have dictated. The problem is that, from a purely legal standpoint, Penguin appears to have been in the wrong.

Originally Posted by Connallmac

How about just enforcing laws against riots and mob violence?

It's in the nature of mob violence that it is too chaotic to use the one-offense-at-a-time careful methods of criminal justice. Arresting all rioters can't be done fairly and is something you might see done in authoritarian regimes.

I'm not saying they should care more about blasphemy than rioting. I am saying that no path is easy.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Connallmac

How about just enforcing laws against riots and mob violence? Pathetic that this sort of nonsense is allowed to happen anywhere in the 21st century.

The thing about riots and mob violence is that 1) it's very hard to predict when and where a riot will start up. Two sets of events may both seem to be a powder keg waiting to blow and one will go boom and the other one won't. 2) When such an event occurs it's very unlikely that someone is going to be standing round video taping who does what to who so that it's hard to say so and so did this and this person did that when things come to a court of law. I wonder how many people who took part in the L.A. riot some yrs ago (after Rodney King's attackers were let go) were actually caught for their crimes against others. Probably not many and it was national news. The point is that such a trial can possibly lead to another riot as well. Either someone thinks that someone got away with it or that someone was framed for the crime or something. I wonder how long before this thread is moved to politics/religion.

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by Connallmac

How about just enforcing laws against riots and mob violence? Pathetic that this sort of nonsense is allowed to happen anywhere in the 21st century.

Yes not like the UK and US where people wouldn't get arrested for posting stuff on Facebook, hang on, erm...

[Iskariot]

As always: a ban will be very good for spreading the book.
I would most likely never have heard of it otherwise.
Now it is on my 'to be read' list.

I always want to have books that others do not want me to read.
In my country The Netherlands it is forbidden to sell Hitler's Mein Kampf.
I was in my late teens when I realized that my so called progressive country banned this book for the general public. I immediately got myself a copy.
Nobody tells me what, or what not to read. Ever. It is a matter of principle.

So, Wendy Doniger might not sell more of her books per se, but I am sure more people will read it.

[sirmaru]

My question: has anyone posting to this thread actually read "The Hindus?" If so, what is your opinion?

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

It should be noted that the paper books aren't being destroyed world-wide, but just in India. The book isn't available in paper or e-book format in India, but it is available for sale outside of India in both formats.

I don't live in India, it's not my call what laws India has, and people in India will have access to the book, so I'm not going to get to disturbed by this. It's self-defeating, the author will lose sales, but gain a lot of publicity. Instead of suppressing the book, it unintentionally promotes it. I can't blame Penguin, I don't see that they had any real choice.

The problem is that the book is not a work of fiction that the Indian government finds criminally offensive, but a history book that (at least purports to) documents facts.

This would be like having a law in the US making it illegal to document slavery in the US, or a law in Germany prohibiting publishing any record of acts by the nazi party while out of or in power, or Italy making it a crime to document any cases of pedophilia by the clergy.

(Not that banning fiction that ruffles feathers isn't really really bad, but banning the publication of historical facts is much worse.)

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

This would be like having a law in the US making it illegal to document slavery in the US, or a law in Germany prohibiting publishing any record of acts by the nazi party while out of or in power

The law in India doesn't prohibit all books concerning Hinduism.

And the law in Germany doesn't allow all books concerning Nazism.

Is banning legitimate scholarship like the Hindus worse than banning books by mass murderers? Certainly.

One reason India isn't so bad is that I'm pretty sure there will be no problem ordering the book from abroad for shipping in. See:

http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac...ve%2520history

[crich70]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

The problem is that the book is not a work of fiction that the Indian government finds criminally offensive, but a history book that (at least purports to) documents facts.

This would be like having a law in the US making it illegal to document slavery in the US, or a law in Germany prohibiting publishing any record of acts by the nazi party while out of or in power, or Italy making it a crime to document any cases of pedophilia by the clergy.

(Not that banning fiction that ruffles feathers isn't really really bad, but banning the publication of historical facts is much worse.)

Governments have done illogical things in the past. There was a case where a man was charged with sending obscene material through the mail sometime in the last part of the 19th or the early 20th century. What he had in fact mailed was a copy of "The song of songs" which in fact is part of the Bible. But he was charged with obscenity anyway. Just goes to show that if someone can object to something on some sort of grounds that they will even if it doesn't make sense. There was a movie about the prophet Mohammed that people of the Islamic faith reacted very violently to because to them a visual image of their prophet is against their beliefs. Hostages were taken and held til the movie was stopped mid show and the film removed from distribution. The ironic thing was that the film is shown from Mohammed's viewpoint so that he was never even shown so they were objecting to something that didn't even happen.

[Quexos]

Ah good old censorship, what would we do without you ?
Probably think for ourselves, the headaches such thought processes entail would be awful...

[Bricorn]

This one surprised me. I've known a few Hindus and none of them have struck me as being that touchy - actually, I'd have expected them to have a good laugh about this.

[Iskariot]

Originally Posted by Bricorn

This one surprised me. I've known a few Hindus and none of them have struck me as being that touchy - actually, I'd have expected them to have a good laugh about this.

I know several Muslims and christians who are very relaxed too, nevertheless...

Hindus seem to be just as touchy (or not) as any other religion.
The list of Hindu<>Christian, Hindu<>Islam violence for example is long.

Take a bunch of religious people. Throw a few power hungry politicians in the mix and you are ready for a massacre. It has always been that way.


At least I was right about this:

At the very least, attention drawn to the controversy has been good for business. Doniger's 800-page book is climbing the best-seller chart on Amazon.com, reaching number 26 on the retailer's top 100 list by late Thursday afternoon. (Chicago Tribune)

[jgaiser]

To be honest, I finally purchased the book. A combination of distaste of blatantly false 1-star ratings and an interest in seeing what Ms. Doniger had to say. So thanks to all you 1-star raters. You've made the author a bit more money.