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.

The incident resembles in some ways what happened a few years ago to a book about a revered 17th-century Hindu king by a professor at Macalester College. The book’s findings drew harsh criticism from Hindu activists, who in 2004 attacked a research center that had helped the American professor with the book. An Indian court ruled only last month that the scholar could not be prosecuted for stirring up sectarian strife with the book.

Like the gazetteer, the professor’s book was published by Oxford University Press. And like the gazetteer, the book was swiftly yanked from the Indian market by its publisher. —Andrew Mytelka