IS there a practice more dismaying to citizens of a liberal persuasion, or more destructive to the idea of an open society, than censorship? There is: self-censorship, or the buckling down before fundamentalist groups of those very institutions — newspapers, publishing houses, universities — most closely associated with freedom of thought.

Thousands of Indians of a liberal mind-set were left speechless this week by Penguin Books India which made an abject out-of-court settlement with a Hindu group that sought the termination of one of its titles: the massive work The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger, the American scholar of Hinduism. Was Doniger really indefensible? What exactly was the case against her?

In the lawsuit filed in 2011, Doniger was accused of malicious and obscene misrepresentation of Hindu texts and traditions by Dina Nath Batra, an educationist who runs an organisation called the Shiksha Bachao Andolan that, in theory, promotes “value-based education”. In practice, it seeks to cull from all textbooks and academic works arguments that take a less-than-worshipful attitude toward Hinduism. Batra held in his lawsuit that The Hindus was “written with a Christian missionary zeal and hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus and show their religion in poor light.”

The recall of The Hindus made Penguin the second Indian publishing house and third liberal institution in recent times to capitulate to a Hindu group: in 2008, Oxford University Press agreed to cease publication of a scholarly essay on the Ramayana, and in 2011, Delhi University agreed to take the same essay off its syllabus. In giving in to the demands of Batra’s organisation, Penguin implicitly conceded that a book that offends someone’s religious sentiments cannot be made available to anybody, and that the study of religion can never entail saying things critical of religion.

This is a position that, taken to its logical conclusion, portends a society in which group-think and religious dogma can never be challenged, and every act of dissent to the status quo is interpreted as a deliberate breach of the peace. That a publisher with a tremendous roster of freethinking writers (who have written many books on Hinduism) and considerable financial resources could fail to see this was, to many, far more troubling than a right-wing group’s demands that a writer’s voice be silenced. Horrifyingly, Penguin not only agreed to withdraw Doniger’s book from the market, but it also agreed to have them “pulped” (destroyed) “at its own cost”.

Doniger herself was more sanguine than most about Penguin’s decision, writing in a statement that the publishers had agreed to publish the book even though they knew the book would “stir anger in the Hindutva ranks”. Penguin, she wrote, was “finally defeated by the true villain of this piece — the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than civil offence to publish a book that offends any Hindu.” (Actually, the relevant law, Section 295A in the Indian Penal Code, makes it an offence to insult the religious sentiments of members of any religion.)

True enough, but I disagree with Doniger on one count. The law makes it relatively easy, no doubt, for religious groups to attack scholars and writers for “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.”

But when a law is so worded, its use to punish or exculpate must rest (as with religious texts) on human interpretation of the words “deliberate,” “malicious” and “insult”. After all, if religious groups hold that the freedom of expression is subject to reasonable limits, whatever they are, then it must surely hold, too, that the right to take offence on religious grounds must also be subject to reasonable limits. It was up to the prosecution to prove that Doniger’s arguments and interpretations amounted to “deliberate and malicious acts”, but an out-of-court settlement actually amounted to Penguin, shockingly, admitting them to be so — or just admitting that it didn’t much care for controversy and would rather focus on making profits.

If anything, the real offence to Hinduism consists in one of the best recent books on Hindu myth, memory, narrative and practice being made unavailable in the very country where it would have the most power to affect the tradition it describes and interprets. It is a book for the 21st century: an attempt, in Doniger’s own words, “to bring in more actors, and more stories” upon the stage of Hinduism (especially women and lower castes).

In accusing Doniger of misrepresenting the Hindu tradition, Batra shows nothing but the extent of his own alienation from that tradition and his displacement onto an “outsider” of what he would most like to see eliminated from his own cultural history. Of course, he’s more than entitled to persist in this illusion, as well as try to jog the Indian law into endorsing it. But any victory for him and his ilk is not just the opposite for free speech in India. It also hollows out Hinduism in ways that even the so-called enemies of the faith could not manage.

—By arrangement with Bloomberg-Washington Post