When the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014, the apprehension in academic publishers' minds that sales of liberal and Left books might suffer was offset by the assumption that the economy would flourish and keep them happy. Also, since no one in the new regime was likely to be interested in looking at anything written too long after the Vedas and the Golden Age of Sanskrit, there did not seem much cause for worry. In any case, the Congress had never failed to cave in when the crunch came to choosing between freedom of expression and mob violence, so the general situation seemed well described by the French cynicism of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose . But what did create chaos for publishers, as much as for everyone else, was demonetization. Once people decide against buying everything seen as inessential, roughly the first thing they stop buying in India is books. With sales plummeting, most publishers and booksellers in the business ...