Professor Joseph was treated badly by the police and his college at the time.
In 2010, the hand of a professor in India was cut off by extremists after he was accused of insulting Islam in an exam paper. Last month, the government banned the controversial Muslim group Popular Front of India (PFI), whose members had carried out the attack. The BBC travelled to Kerala to piece together the grisly incident and its aftermath.
Warning: This article contains details some readers may find distressing.
TJ Joseph remembers the attack from 12 years ago vividly.
It was a rainy July morning. Prof Joseph, then a 52-year-old teacher of Malayalam language at a local college, was driving home with his mother and sister after Sunday Mass in Muvattupuzha, an idyllic town in the southern state of Kerala set on the banks of a river by the same name.
Barely 100m from his house in a leafy, undulating lane, a Suzuki minivan barrelled down, took a sharp turn and blocked his hatchback.
The door of the minivan opened, and six men burst out. One of them ran up to Prof Joseph's car. He was carrying an axe.
As the man approached the driver's door and tried to yank it open, another man, brandishing a dagger, brought up the rear. Three others reached the passenger's side where his sister was sitting. Cowering at the wheel of his four-year-old Wagon R, his engine switched off and the driver's side window smashed into pieces by a blow of the axe, Prof Joseph realised he was trapped.
The axe-wielding man opened the door from inside, pulled him out, dragged him along the rain-slicked road and hacked away at his legs and hands.
"Don't kill me… please don't kill me," Prof Joseph pleaded with him.
The axe-wielding man kept stabbing and slashing, slicing his hand and legs like "chopping wood". The palm of his left hand had already severed and had been flung aside. The right arm was barely hanging from the rest of the body. ...
The offending question was a punctuation exercise in which Prof Joseph had borrowed a dialogue - an imaginary conversation between "God and a mad man" - from a book on screenplays written by filmmaker PT Kunju Muhammed.
He renamed the "mad man" Muhammed, he says, after the second name of the director.
"Muhammed is a common name among Muslims. It didn't cross my mind that anyone would misunderstand that as the Prophet Muhammad," Prof Joseph said.
Thirty-two students, including four Muslims, had taken the test. None of them had objected to it; and only one female student had "displayed some hesitancy". ...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-63141119Prp