A Many-Stringed Instrument

The springboard for Nussbaum’s reflections on citizenship, religion, education, history-writing and public culture are the events of Gujarat in 2002, whose implications for democracy she explores by interviewing people representing different shades of Hindu nationalist opinion, studying its approach to women and sexuality, and its attempts to rewrite Indian history even in the US.

The book’s title throws a subtle challenge to Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilisations thesis. The real clash is present in every modern plural society. In India, it is illustrated by the clash between, on the one hand, those Indians (Hindus, in Nussbaum’s words) who believe in democracy as the best framework for members of a diverse society to co-exist on terms of mutual respect, and, on the other, those who fear cultural difference and subscribe to a homogenising and majoritarian vision of Indian society, even if this entails violence.

There is another clash—one that Gandhi recognised—between the forces of fear which generate the desire to dominate, and compassion and respect for the equality of others. This struggle in the inner world of the individual, Nussbaum argues, can be mediated by a robust public culture born out of an educational system that privileges the cultivation of the arts, the humanities, poetry and critical thinking rather than science and mathematics. She attributes to Tagore the creative impulse and to Nehru the excessive emphasis on science and mathematics. This is debatable both because of Nehru’s own humanist vision and because the quality of critical thinking is closely related to reason, which Nehru counterposed to traditional dogma.

Nussbaum also blames Nehru’s "disdain for religion" for the vicissitudes of the secular project in India. The denial of religion in official secularism may have been at odds with a deeply religious society, but the practice of official secularism was equally often at odds with its doctrine, fostering a whole range of spaces (from temple trusts to sponsored pilgrimages) where state and faith have intersected. There is merit in Nussbaum’s suggestion that, in a multi-religious society, a robust secularism must recognise the importance of faith. Nevertheless, she endorses the enactment of the uniform civil code, while acknowledging the reasons for the feminist retreat on this issue.

Compared to her firm grasp of the complexities of the secular project in India, Nussbaum is on less sure ground on the subject of caste. She provocatively questions caste-based quotas, not—as one would expect—because they strike at the root of equal citizenship, but because such measures block off more jobs for ‘Hindus’. This particular unintended benefit of quotas has not occurred to theBJP, which has the biggest stake in the consolidation of the Hindu vote.

To Indian readers familiar with these events and debates, it is the last chapter of this book—on diaspora Hindutva in the US and its funding of hate and violence in India—that may be of particular interest. Nussbaum discusses the organisations and individuals involved in such campaigns and funding, and provides a detailed narrative of how the Hindu Right has targeted American scholars of India and Indian historians in the US. One wishes that she had supplemented her story of the Indian battle over history textbooks with that of the Hindu Right’s battle over Indian history in American textbooks.

This book is a sympathetic and gendered account of the challenges to the creation of a liberal public culture as the only sustainable foundation of a plural democracy. But there is now another ‘clash within’ to which a liberal public culture is unlikely to provide answers. This is the painfully obvious and daily widening gap between the affluent globalised sections of Indian society and the poor. That clash is spawning new forms of violence, unrelated to religious pluralism, but equally crucial for the future of Indian democracy.

(Jayal is a professor at JNU, New Delhi.)