Conversation

So I have censored both of my books in Indian editions. In both of them, the Indian editions are slightly different than the worldwide editions. And I know a lot of academics who choose their research projects differently, we openly advise students to do this actually in the United States, right? There are certain topics that it is just not worth it to work on, because you won’t get a visa to come to India, if you have family here, there could be problems. You know, you have to make these decisions in the real world with your eyes wide open.

Many of my colleagues are declining to publish their books in India, for those of us that live and work in the United States or elsewhere in the Western world, we need the publications there for career reasons, we don’t need them here for career reasons. And so, they’re choosing to simply shrink the market of interested readers rather than risk problems. And I think that all of this is a problem, because it means that the Indian people are not getting the full story, they don’t have access to the same scholarship that we do in the United States or the United Kingdom. This is contributing to the sort of constriction of space in the air all around us, and the list of topics that we can talk about seems to grow shorter every day.