The Hindu : Maharashtra bans book on Shivaji

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 15, 2004

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National

Maharashtra bans book on Shivaji

By Mahesh Vijapurkar

MUMBAI, JAN. 14. The Maharashtra Government tonight banned the controversial book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India by James W. Laine. Announcing the decisions after the weekly Cabiner meeting, the Chief Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, said he had signed the proposal to this effect. It comes several weeks after its publisher, Oxford University Press, withdrew it, but the proposal appears to be aimed at containing any further controversies after the recent ransacking of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune by zealots of a little known organisation.

Mr. Laine, author of the 144-page book, in a signed piece in the Los Angeles Times on Monday, he wrote that though the book's distribution was stopped by the publishers in November, 2003 "no one has stepped forward to defend my book and no one has called for it to be distributed again."

Just before the move for the ban became known, he wrote: "with the book unavailable, rumours piled on rumours. Misreadings lapped the globe by e-mail."Few, he pointed out, "will read it for themselves. Instead, many will live with the knowledge that India is a country where many thoughts are unthinkable or, if thought, best kept quiet." Mr. Laine said that he had "received many letters of support and read many condemnations of these acts."

According to what Mr. Laine, Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College in Minneapolis, wrote in the newspaper, the provocation comes in the last chapter, where he entertained "what I call `unthinkable thoughts' — questioning `cracks' in the Shivaji narrative.

After protests by some scholars in Pune on the content of the book, the publishers withdrew it. Subsequently, the face of a scholar, Shrikant Bahulkar, was blackened by some Shiv Sainiks merely because he was mentioned in the book's preface. Reacting to this, another historian, who specialises in Shivaji, Gajanan Mehendale, expressed his protest, tearing up 400 pages of his manuscript on Shivaji. The Sena leader, Raj Thackeray, visited the octogenarian scholar to apologise but soon after, a little-known group, Shambaji Brigade, vandalised the Bhandarkar Institute in the belief that the place had stocked up the controversial book. Substantial damage was caused to the prized possession of the hoary institution. But the Shambaji Brigade's stance perhaps led the Maharashtra Home Ministry to step in with the proposal to ban it.

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