In 2014, Penguin Random House India (hereafter, Penguin for convenience) settled out of court with Dinanath Batra, the ageing general secretary of RSS school network Vidya Bharati and founder of an organisation committed to purging Indian education of foreign influences. It was unconditional surrender—Penguin agreed to withdraw and pulp all copies of Chicago scholar Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. It capitulated in the face of the familiar charges of hurting religious feelings, besides safety concerns.
There was dismay. Someone had waved a stick at the most powerful Indian publisher and it had surrendered. How would smaller publishers fare after this? Now, under the same leadership in India, Penguin has reprised its dubious triumph. It has dropped plans to distribute in India graphic reporter Joe Sacco’s 2025 book, The Once and Future Riot, which cuts through the fog around the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013.
Once more, it is a rout—apparently, Penguin wanted Sacco to remove “red flags” and update a map to risk-proof the distributor, and he wouldn’t. Once more, there is dismay. Ram Guha calls the drawdown “pusillanimous”. Arundhati Roy hopes Sacco finds “a braver distributor”.
The dismay over Doniger’s book was in context. It was February 2014, a prelapsarian time—the last days of Manmohan Singh’s government, when people were still confident that they had freedom of expression and the ability to defend it. Why is there dismay now, when some of us actually have even more freedom of expression? As the rupee inches towards the 100 mark against the dollar, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the PM says that it’s “just a number”. Much earlier, the finance minister said that her family does not eat onions, so they have no experience of inflation.
There is celebration of Narendra Modi’s victory over Jawaharlal Nehru in an endurance contest that was unheard of until he became ‘India’s longest-serving PM’. The claim is true with this technical qualifier: “continuously elected”. But who remembers these details? Salient facts are being ignored—that Nehru’s tenure was terminated by Death, who does not contest elections, and that if Nehru were alive, he would have laughed at this childish contest.
But it’s 2026, and we must not let facts interfere with a good narrative. Now, we have complete freedom of expression because fact and fiction are no longer exclusive categories. Being able to say anything at all, even to freely lie and be lied to, represents untrammelled freedom of expression. Even Voltaire failed to soar this high. Enjoy responsibly, as the liquor ads overseas say.
When people overseas think unapproved thoughts about us, their freedom of expression is endangered. Doniger was rubbished as a bad scholar with a dirty mind. The first charge is for other scholars to decide. The second, fortunately, is selectively applied. Popular mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik, who often ponders sexuality in Indian myth, has escaped unpleasant attention. Bhagwan Rajneesh drew on sexual narratives in Indian mythology and Tantra, and conflated them with European psychology. But he was Osho, and the public culture wasn’t so grumpy then.
Returning to Sacco’s book, Penguin was horripilated by a little map of the subcontinent at the time of Partition, no bigger than 2x2 inches, which depicts Pakistan Occupied Kashmir as Pakistani territory. That falls foul of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1961, which criminalised a certain kind of mapmaking. But this is India, so there’s jugaad—customs officials cover the map with a black patch, often seen in imported copies of The Economist, a serial offender.
Earlier, a government-issue rubber stamp was used, which hectored: “The external boundaries of India as depicted are neither correct nor authentic.” The 1994 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica went undistributed for months because in every copy, a map of India had to be stamped by customs officials who could have been gainfully employed catching smugglers instead. Like so many Indian solutions, the stamp is an ugly jugaad, but it works. It could have worked for Penguin.
The Once and Future Riot is a graphic book. The communal violence it depicts is, by default, graphic. But it depicts reality, so it is not more graphic than videos on social media, YouTube channels and TV. And the ‘red flags’ that Penguin balked at are criticisms of public figures, the ruling party and society which are routinely expressed across media.
What’s the problem, then? “We are trying to reach a riot… The riot happened more than a year ago,” writes Joe Sacco in the first chapter, ‘The Great Untruth’. “But what we seek isn’t just the fading memory of an actual event: we want the fiction, the myth, the imposter that is taking its place.” In a post-truth world, that’s a dangerous manifesto.
Publishing has a public function. It can light the flarepath to a brighter, more humane future. Publishers who matter think like incubators of culture, not like risk managers who got confused on the way to a rewarding but obscure career in merchant banking.
After being pulped by Penguin, Doniger’s book was published in India by Speaking Tiger, a discerning publisher with only a fraction of Penguin’s resources. Perhaps Sacco will find a “braver distributor”, and in hindsight, our only takeaway will be that Penguin India has a native talent for bad publicity. There is such a thing, if you’re talented enough to seek it out.
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)