The Oxford University Press (OUP) on Tuesday said that its decision to discontinue publishing and selling A.K. Ramanujan's essay, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas,' was based on “commercial considerations.” It denied acting under pressure from right-wing protesters who had claimed that the essay hurt Hindu sensitivities.
Nigel Portwood, chief executive of OUP UK, also denied that it had stopped printing altogether Ramanujan's Collected Essays , in which ‘300 Ramayanas' appears, but said the book was available only in its “short-run print programme because there was not a sufficient number of back orders to justify a normal reprint.”
Reply to letter
Replying to a letter from American Indologist Sheldon Pollock and several other leading academics, including Paula Richman in whose volume the essay appears, Mr. Portwood rejected allegations of censorship. He insisted that OUP took its “role as a disseminator of the best scholarship in India” seriously.
“The two Ramanujan books at the centre of the current debate — Many Ramayanas and The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan — have not been removed from the market in India through acts of censorship. Prior to 2008, both works had been showing minimal sales triggering the decision not to reprint either title. As I am sure you appreciate, commercial considerations are one of several factors in publishing decisions.”
About the “confusion” over the availability of The Collected Essays , Mr. Portwood said the book was out of stock from 2008 but OUP continued to collect a small number of back orders on its internal systems.
“In early September 2011, we put The Collected Essays into our short-run print programme because there was not a sufficient number of back orders to justify a normal reprint, and it has been listed as available on the OUP India website ever since — some weeks before the current controversy began,” he said.
In their letter, Prof. Pollock and co-signatories had conveyed their “shock and dismay” at OUP India's action which, they said, was compounded by its abject apology in court to a group which had claimed that the essay hurt Hindu sensitivities. They urged the OUP to withdraw its court apology, publicly state that it was committed to the right of scholars to publish their work without fear of suppression or censorship, and demonstrate this commitment by reprinting Ramanujan's The Collected Essays .
- OUP denies acting under pressure from right-wing protesters
- “ Collected Essays available only in its short-run print programme”
Published - November 30, 2011 12:00 am IST
