Publisher says it was forced to withdraw Wendy Doniger's book The Hindus because of law threatening jail for insults to religion

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Penguin India has said "intolerant and restrictive" Indian laws forced it to remove a book from sale after it tried to defend an American author's religious history against objections from a conservative Hindu group.

The publisher's decision this week to withdraw and pulp all copies of the historian Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History shocked writers and intellectuals in India, with some worrying it was a sign of rising intolerance against dissent in the country.

Doniger defended Penguin India in a statement, saying the publisher had battled for four years against a lawsuit filed by the Hindu group Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti (Save Education Movement).

The group objected to the book's description of mythological texts as fictional and said it hurt "the religious feelings of millions of Hindus", according to the lawsuit, which also named Doniger and the New-York-based arm of the publisher Penguin Group Inc as defendants.

Penguin India said it "believes, and has always believed, in every individual's right to freedom of thought and expression, a right explicitly codified in the Indian constitution", according to a statement from the company released on Friday.

It warned, however, that India's penal code would "make it increasingly difficult for any Indian publisher to uphold international standards of free expression".

The code, specifically section 295A, threatens up to three years' imprisonment for those who "with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of citizens in India, by words, either spoken or written … insults or attempts to insult the religion or the religious beliefs of that class".

Penguin India said that in settling the four-year lawsuit it was obliged "to respect the laws of the land in which it operates, however intolerant and restrictive those laws may be".

Penguin India said international editions of the book would remain available.

Doniger is not the first author to be silenced by religious or political conservatives in India. In 2011, the state of Gujarat banned Joseph Lelyveld's biography on the pacifist freedom fighter Mohandas K Gandhi, after reviews suggested Gandhi had a homosexual relationship.

The India-born writer Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses has been banned in the country since 1998, as many Muslims consider it to be blasphemous. In 2012, Rushdie was forced to cancel an appearance at the Jaipur literary festival in the northern state of Rajasthan amid protests and threats by prominent Muslim clerics.