The alarming trend in India today is censorship by the mob, or in other words, the true democratisation of censorship, where it has ceased to be a punitive measure wielded by the government. The trajectory of literary censorship from the days of the British Raj to the present shows that even as the courts have increasingly stood for free expression, the mob demands the suppression of material antithetical to its views. The public outcry over James Laine's book on Shivaji is a case in point.