When Penguin Books announced on February 11 that it would withdraw from India and pulp The Hindus: An Alternative History in response to a lawsuit claiming the book “has hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus,” it was only the latest in a series of surrenders by distinguished publishers in the face of militant Hindu fundamentalism. The book, by Wendy Doniger, a distinguished professor of religion at the University of Chicago, had been described by Pankaj Mishra, writing in The New York Times, as “a salutary antidote to the fanatics" who seek "a culturally homogenous and militant nation-state.”

Debates about alternative views of Indian history, William Dalrymple wrote in The New York Review in 2005, “have in India become the subject of political rallies and mob riots.” The most disturbing precursor to Penguin’s decision came in 2005, when Oxford University Press withdrew a scholarly book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, by James W. Laine, a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul. Oxford acted after an attack on one of India’s leading centers of historical research, the Bhandarkar Oriental Institute in the town of Pune, southeast of Bombay. As Dalrymple describes the incident, “Just after 10 AM, as the staff were opening up the library, a cavalcade of more than twenty jeeps drew up. Armed with crowbars, around two hundred Hindu militants poured into the institute, cutting the telephone lines. Then they began to tear the place apart. The militants overturned the library shelves, and for the next few hours they kicked around the books and danced on them, damaging an estimated 18,000 volumes before the police arrived.”

The Institute’s crime? Laine had thanked the Institute in the acknowledgements to his book, which offended Hindu nationalists because, as Dalrymple explains it, Laine wrote that the parents of the 17th century Hindu leader Shivaji “lived apart for most if not all of Shivaji’s life,” adding that some Indians “tell jokes naughtily suggesting that his guardian Dadaji Konddev was his biological father.” That was taken as a suggestion that the Hindu hero was illigitimate. In respose to protests, Oxford quickly withdrew the book from the Indian market, and was promptly criticized by many leading Indian newspapers for succumbing to what one described as the “Talibanization” of India....