Pro publishing tip: an illustration of Krishna riding a horse made of naked women on your jacket will earn you some press in India.

Incensed reaction is mounting in the wake of Penguin Books India‘s decision to recall and pulp copies of The Hindus: An Alternative History by University of Chicago Divinity School professor Wendy Doniger.

As we discussed here last Thursday, the book has been the subject of several suits in India brought by Dinanath Batra, President of the Hindu Nationalist group Shiksha Bachao Andolan. Batra claims the book will “hurt the feelings” of all Hindus, in part because it dares call the Ramayana “fiction.” Last week Penguin India decided to settle that suit, agreeing to pulp all existing copies of the book in India.

Doniger wrote of her disappointment at the decision, but blamed Indian law rather than the publisher. Others were not so kind to Penguin, including fellow Penguin author Arundhati Roy, who called out the publisher and wrote, “What you have done affects us all.”

Penguin India finally commented on the case late last week, and their emphasis on the law in question mirrors Doniger.

A publishing company has the same obligation as any other organisation to respect the laws of the land in which it operates, however intolerant and restrictive those laws may be. We also have a moral responsibility to protect our employees against threats and harassment where we can. The settlement reached this week brings to a close a four year legal process in which Penguin has defended the publication of the Indian edition of The Hindus by Wendy Doniger.

We believe, however, that the Indian Penal Code, and in particular section 295A of that code, will make it increasingly difficult for any Indian publisher to uphold international standards of free expression without deliberately placing itself outside the law.

Section 295A, enacted in 1927, criminalizes acts that “outrage religious feelings.” The law has been used extensively in recent years—most often by religious conservatives—and is now often leveled at tweets or other online postings deemed offensive.

Protest of Penguin’s decision has metastasized into a variety of forms. Authors Siddharth Varadarajan and Jyotirmaya Sharma have asked Penguin to pulp their books in sympathy with Doniger. In a letter to Penguin India Publisher Chiki Sarkar, Varadarajan wrote “While I appreciate Penguin’s concern for the safety of its staff in the event of goons who don’t like the book taking the law in their own hands, appeasing such elements in this manner will only make matters worse for you and other publishers.”

In the Daily Beast, Tunku Varadarajan writes,

For the house to have caved in at a district court—the very lowest rung of India’s long legal ladder—was astonishingly craven. Penguin India was confronting a blustering political activist who questioned its very raison d’être, who questioned the very values on which a liberal, cultured publishing house should stand. It sold out those values, and in doing so it sold out India.

Most wonderful for its mockery was the reaction from Lawrence Liang and his Bangalore-based group the Alternative Law Firm. Liang has himself sued the publisher. The text of that suit is colorful Indian legal writing at its best, and includes lines like

[W]hen publishers succumb to such pressures they perhaps need to rethink why they are in the book business at all. While they may both be birds, there is a world of difference between a Penguin and a chicken and the last time my clients checked, the penguin had not changed his feathers in the natural world.

Liang’s suit demands that Penguin India renege on their settlement with , or else license the book such that it might be freely copied and distributed among the public in any format.

Unless book contracts in India differ broadly form those in the U.S., Penguin India is under no obligation to pulp books at the behest of their authors. And it is unlikely that they could unilaterally relicense the book to be free to the Indian public. Doniger could, after a time, formally request a reversion of rights to the book in that territory only if Penguin indeed had no plans to reproduce the book there again.

A more practical and perhaps a more fruitful solution might simply be for Penguin to sell the rights to another Indian publisher willing to brave the courts in order to publish the book. While the book is four years old by now, the furor over its suppression could well lead to increased sales; not, I imagine, enough sales to offset the inevitable legal fees, but then as the protestors have been writing, that is hardly the point.