Oxford Pulls Geographical Dictionary After Outcry in India

Oxford University Press has suspended sales of a gazetteer published in 2005 after an outcry over errors that was led by historians and government officials in the southern state of Karnataka, the Khaleej Times reports. Among other errors, the book, the Concise Dictionary of World Place Names, says that the local language in Bangalore, Karnataka’s capital, is Bengali. Actually the language is Kannada. Bengali is spoken in Bangladesh and neighboring regions of northeastern India.

The episode, in which simple factual errors occasion an international dispute, points up the extraordinary sensitivity in India to anything that might be perceived as a slight on the country’s history, its cultures and religions, or other elements of its rich traditions.