''Holy Cow: Beef in Indian Dietary Traditions,'' is a dry work of historiography buttressed by a 24-page bibliography and hundreds of footnotes citing ancient Sanskrit texts. It's the sort of book, in other words, that typically is read by a handful of specialists and winds up forgotten on a library shelf.

But when its author, Dwijendra Narayan Jha, a historian at the University of Delhi, tried to publish the book in India a year ago, he unleashed a furor of a kind not seen there since 1989, when the release of ''Satanic Verses,'' Salman Rushdie's novel satirizing Islam, provoked rioting and earned him a fatwa from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

As Mr. Jha's book was going to press last August, excerpts were posted on the Internet and picked up by newspapers. Within days the book had been canceled by Mr. Jha's academic publisher, burned outside his home by religious activists and -- after a second publisher tried to print it -- banned by a Hyderabad civil court. A spokesman for the World Hindu Council called it ''sheer blasphemy.'' A former member of Parliament petitioned the government for Mr. Jha's arrest. Anonymous callers made death threats. And for 10 months Mr. Jha was obliged to travel to and from campus under police escort.

After months of legal wrangling, Mr. Jha's lawyers succeeded in having the ban lifted this spring. And now his book has been published in Britain and the United States by Verso, with a new preface and a more provocative title: ''The Myth of the Holy Cow.'' But though copies have been shipped to India, few bookstores there are likely to stock it.