I had missed this when it happened in late March; a column in Sunday’s The Hindu has more details:
Great Soul, the Mahatma’s new biography by Joseph Lelyveld, happens to be the latest entrant in the Indian hall of ‘shame’ following a whole series of other books, the recent ones including Jaishree Mishra’s Rani, and Rohinston Mistry’s Such a Long Journey. A little earlier, OUP had to face the music for Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (2003); and Penguin’s publication of Mitrokhin archive II saw huge demands for bans from outraged political parties as well as anonymous phoned-in threats (2005).
Yes, this list doesn’t feature several other ‘confusibles’, objectionables, and unmentionables that suffered the same fate in the land of free speech. The most controversial was, of course, Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (hammered for sacrilege); and Nabokov’s Lolita is still on the barred-books list.
Some of the bans were lifted later. Great Soul, however, has been banned in Gujarat, labelled as ‘insulting’, since it talks about Gandhi’s possible liaison with a part-German part-Jewish man. The ban has been met with severe criticism by general readers (and non-readers), authors, and academics all over India and abroad.