The New York Review of Books

• The book, which had been praised by scholars when it appeared in the spring of 2003, was a study of Shivaji Bhonsle (16271680), the Hindu guerrilla leader from western India who successfully challenged the Mughal Empire and eventually had himself crowned as Chatrapati (Lord of the Umbrella) of an independent Maratha state.

• Leaders of the normally moderate Congress Party, which was in power in Maharashtra, not wishing to be outflanked on the issue, took an even harder line, and announced that they had instructed the CBI (the Indian equivalent of the FBI) to arrest Laine through Interpol, adding: Do you think the government will tolerate insults to national figures like Shivaji?

• Jha, who wrote The Myth of the Holy Cow, which pointed out the considerable historical and archaeological evidence that beef was routinely eaten during the Vedic period in the first millennium BC, received many death threats; his book was withdrawn in India.

• People have been frightened into silenceand politicians seem to encourage it. Romila Thapar, the most celebrated historian of early India, who has also received death threats for her historical work, was equally incensed: The scope for a dispassionate look at history and scholarship is growing less in the country, she said.

• In reaction to this British view, the Congress Party tended to emphasize that Hindus and Muslims were one people, ethnically indistinguishable from each other, whose culture had come to fuse over centuries of coexistence; any differences between the two were said to be the result of colonial policies of divide and rule.

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