Professor Jim Laine's 'obscure academic book' about a Hindu king set off a firestorm in India. The book has been banned, a colleague assaulted and Laine himself threatened with arrest.

But as he explains, the opposition to his book is not exactly what it appears.

Jim Laine has built his academic career around research in India. He first went to India in the late '70s, and from 1985 to 2003 he spent months at a time in Pune, the "Oxford of the East," studying Marathi and Sanskrit texts.

But the Macalester professor of religious studies will not be returning to India any time soon. His third book, about a 17th century Hindu king named Shivaji, published in India in June 2003 by Oxford University Press, set off a firestorm. Even after Oxford Press withdrew the book and Laine apologized for any offense his book had given, a mob ransacked the research institute in Pune that had given him assistance and assaulted an Indian colleague simply because Laine had thanked the man in the book's acknowledgements. The prime minister of India even called for Laine's arrest.

But the "Laine affair," as it's been called, is much more complex than it appears. Laine talked about the controversy in an interview in late June with Jon Halvorsen.

What is the current status of your book in India?

The book continues to be unavailable in India. The state government banned it. Some of the people who originally contacted me about what they considered the offensive portions of the book way back in November 2003, and who led the initial charges against me, have been in touch with another publisher in India of a previous book I published. That book is mostly a translation of an epic account of Shivaji's life. They found in my introduction a reference I made to the "Oedipal structure" of the story and they took offense. They said Oedipus had sex with his mother and this could not possibly apply to their hero. I wrote back and said that since Freud most people think of "Oedipal conflict" between father and son and that's part of normal psychological development. It's also a term that refers to certain patterns of literature. Their objections are a little absurd.

But given the climate in India today, the Indian publisher has stopped making the book available out of fear they will suffer retribution. So this group has gained power as a kind of thought police.

Of course, those references do relate to some of my ideas that they found most objectionable in the other book [Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India]--that Shivaji had some conflict with his own father. His father didn't live with him and was employed by a Muslim sultan that his son was fighting militarily. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to explore the possibility that they had conflicts. All those ideas are absolutely unthinkable. In my third book, I actually use that term--"unthinkable thoughts." I feel terrible about everything that happened, but on the other hand, if by saying a thought is "unthinkable," and that indeed turns out to be the case, then maybe I had something.

But your case is different from that of other Western scholars who have been targeted by Hindu nationalists?

Yes. By and large, the problem is framed in terms of conservative Hindu nationalists trying to preserve a particular view of Hinduism vs. secular or liberal people who challenge that view. There's been a little of that in my case.

But the real controversy in my case relates to the struggle between two caste groups in Maharashtra in southwestern India, where I've done my work. Those groups are the Brahmins--the intellectuals and insiders to the world of publishing and writing in English--and the Marathas, the caste group from which Shivaji came. Marathas have felt themselves oppressed by Brahmins in many ways and are now trying to claim their place in that society. Their suspicion always is that if something is written about Shivaji that they consider demeaning to his heritage or name, it must be a Brahmin plot to continue to oppress their group.

If you read my book in a balanced way, there are some places where it seems I support a Brahmin position, but there are other places where I'm quite critical of the presuppositions of traditional Brahmin scholarship. But it's that Brahmin-Maratha battle that I've become caught up in. The Maratha group attacking me see themselves as secular, rationalist, progressive and feminist--not as supporters of some traditional religion. So they make an odd opponent for me. In their view, Brahmins have duped me--the Western scholar with access to international resources and Oxford University Press--into spreading a message denigrating their heritage. Some of the e-mail I got from them was sort of sympathetic--"you just didn't realize that you were being used and manipulated."

The fact is I was assisted in my research by a number of Brahmin scholars because it is true that they dominate scholarship in that part of India. But a chunk of my book was a careful critique of the biases that I thought some of these scholars had. That got overlooked in the heat of the debate over this one issue.

Shivaji

The then-Indian prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, said in March 2004 he was "prepared to take action against the foreign author" and threatened to have you arrested.

This became an issue during the national election. Whenever politicians were speaking in Maharashtra, they didn't want to get outflanked on this issue. There had to be some competition as to who was more incensed at the foreign scholar. The prime minister actually reversed his initial position. He first said he was opposed to the banning of books. But then he later felt he was losing traction, so he called for my arrest.

Was it frightening to be threatened in that way?

I never received any kind of official communication from the government or police. I don't have any real worry about that. I continue to be worried about people I mentioned in my book who were targeted.

Did you know that some of the things in your book would be controversial?

I couldn't have predicted this political effect. There were a few people who reviewed it and were shocked or whatever by some of the things I said. But once it became a political issue the only thing that got discussed was three pages in the fifth chapter. I thought the book was about how narratives get shaped and how people tell stories and why stories are important and reflect those people's values. I was more interested in how the stories are told then whether or not they are, strictly speaking, historically accurate.

You issued an apology to those who felt offended by the book. Was that intended to help your colleagues in India who were targeted?

Yes. Several of these people had a police guard for several months. Oxford pulled the book very early, so people were offended who had never seen the book. I certainly wanted to apologize for offending people who felt that I had somehow tried to disparage a national hero. That wasn't my intent.

What do you think would happen if you returned to Pune in the near future?

Many people say nothing would happen but others say I need to be more careful. I wouldn't take the risk of going anywhere in Maharashtra State at this point. I was very comfortable and settled into a particular niche and I had a whole group of colleagues and friends in Pune. Now I'm saddened by the idea of not going back to a place where I had such deep ties. But from a scholarly point of view, it may be time in my career to do something a little different. I'm on leave [in 2005-06] and hope to do some work on a book that won't be as location-specific as the work I did in the past. It will involve India but in a much broader way and won't require field work since I figure I'm not going back to India for a while.

Are there "lessons" to be drawn from this whole experience?

I thought I was writing a pretty obscure academic book that few people would read. The usual run on a book like this is 750 to 3,000 copies, worldwide. I have no idea how many were published in India, but not very many. I thought within scholarly circles there might be a little debate. I couldn't have predicted this. The events that unfolded showed me that I had underestimated the degree to which Brahmin-Maratha conflict continued to inform the imaginations of people as they thought of Shivaji.

But I really don't think there's a "lesson to be learned." Except that if you want to stay out of trouble, you should stay within the framework of what is acceptable thought. If we do that, it seems to me we're not academics any more, in the usual definition of what an academic does to push back the frontiers of knowledge.