The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future [Hardcover]

Martha C. Nussbaum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2007

While America is focused on religious militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege from religious extremism in another critical part of the world. As Martha Nussbaum reveals in this penetrating look at India today, the forces of the Hindu right pose a disturbing threat to its democratic traditions and secular state.

Since long before the 2002 Gujarat riots--in which nearly two thousand Muslims were killed by Hindu extremists--the power of the Hindu right has been growing, threatening India's hard-won constitutional practices of democracy, tolerance, and religious pluralism. Led politically by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu right has sought the subordination of other religious groups and has directed particular vitriol against Muslims, who are cast as devils in need of purging. The Hindu right seeks to return to a "pure" India, unsullied by alien polluters of other faiths, yet the BJP's defeat in recent elections demonstrates the power that India's pluralism continues to wield. The future, however, is far from secure, and Hindu extremism and exclusivity remain a troubling obstacle to harmony in South Asia.

Nussbaum's long-standing professional relationship with India makes her an excellent guide to its recent history. Ultimately she argues that the greatest threat comes not from a clash between civilizations, as some believe, but from a clash within each of us, as we oscillate between self-protective aggression and the ability to live in the world with others. India's story is a cautionary political tale for all democratic states striving to act responsibly in an increasingly dangerous world.

(20070628)

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is an extraordinarily interesting book on a very difficult subject. Martha Nussbaum's commanding familiarity with culturally related political issues across the world, past and present, combines immensely fruitfully here with her involvement and understanding of India.
--Amartya Sen, Harvard University (20070629)

This impressive and important book grapples with the problems and consequences of religious extremism. Nussbaum's brilliant analysis of the controversy over religion and democracy in India effortlessly moves between political history, philosophy, and law, to give us a powerful and compelling narrative of the political world of the Hindu Right. It is a must read for all those interested in understanding the dangers of religious extremism and of what preserves democracy and pluralism in the face of tensions and conflicts within.
--Zoya Hasan, Jawaharlal Nehru University (20070806)

Preoccupation with the purported clash between civilizations has masked the clash within democracies. This passionate, engaged book has much to teach an American audience about the vulnerability and resilience of Indian democracy. Perhaps it will also stimulate reflections about similar clashes within American democracy.
--Amrita Basu, Amherst College (20070824)

Once more, Martha Nussbaum has applied her profound philosophical intelligence to a challenging question in the practical world. In thinking through the dangers raised by the Hindu right, she teaches us a great deal about the dangers of dogmatism everywhere.
--K. Anthony Appiah, Princeton University (20070901)

Few contemporary philosophers in the West have reckoned with India's complex experience of democracy; and even fewer have engaged with it as vigorously as [Nussbaum] does in The Clash Within...[A] strongly felt and stimulating book.
--Pankaj Mishra (New York Review of Books 20071119)

Martha Nussbaum's The Clash Within presents a powerful analysis of the Hindu Right in contemporary India that is insightful and penetrating...She weaves a rich tapestry of how Hindu thought has been reshaped and distorted...She is correct to say "the clash within" that we find in India lies everywhere...The Clash Within is another remarkable achievement from the most exciting political philosopher of our age. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
--Thom Brooks (Times Higher Education Supplement 20071001)

Nussbaum is an informed outsider looking in...Nussbaum takes one incident--the 2002 Gujarat riots that followed the burning of a train carrying Hindu activists in Godhra--and builds a grand narrative of Hindu nationalism...Nussbaum sees lessons in India's democratic achievements for the rest of the world, particularly America. Her thesis supports Ghandi's claim that "the real struggle that democracy must wage is the struggle within the individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other, and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality."
--Salil Tripathi (New Statesman 20070716)

Nussbaum sounds a wake-up call to those who may have been unaware of the ugly nature of events in India in recent times, and the hate-filled ideology that informs them...As further evidence of the undemocratic danger that India now faces, Nussbaum turns to the attempt of the Hindu Right to hijack history and rewrite the Indian past to demonize Muslims and glorify Hindus.
--David Arnold (Times Literary Supplement 20080101)

At a time when India is claiming more of the world's attention, the philosopher Nussbaum offers an informatively rich and sophisticated analysis of democracy and religious extremism there.
--Lucian W. Pye (Foreign Affairs 20080816)

The Clash Within has a salutary message for crusading secularists as well as for lovers of India.
--David Goodall (The Tablet )

In The Clash Within, a passionate look at the crisis of democracy and religious violence in India, Martha Nussbaum provides a detailed reconstruction of the genocide she says occurred in Gujarat. She shows that the violence had been planned well in advance, and she chronicles the failures of the state to prosecute the accused Hindu-right activists or their mentors in the Bharatiya Janata Party...Nussbaum says the main purpose of her book is to inform European and American readers about a "complex and chilling case of religious violence that does not fit some common stereotypes about the sources of religious violence in today's world." She does that well.
--Basharat Peer (The Nation )

This is a humanistic and psychological study that traces the [Hindu] Right's rage to reaction against both the Muslim and British conquests of India, which humiliated and shamed Hindus...Instead of the "clash of civilizations," Nussbaum sees a clash within each culture, but her book could serve as a Huntington case study of the roots and rise of Hindutva (Hinduness).
--M. G. Roskin (Choice )

Martha Nussbaum is a distinguished American philosopher, whose formidable corpus of academic work is the more remarkable for her enlisting of philosophy in the service of her commitment to a more just and rights-respecting world. Nussbaum is also a passionate Indophile who has collaborated, with Amartya Sen, on the capabilities approach to human, and especially women’s, development. This book—written chiefly for an American audience—is an expression of her deep personal engagement with the challenges of pluralism in Indian democracy.
--Niraja Gopal Jayal (Outlook India )

The Clash Within is a book of and for our time. It will profoundly change the way we think about religio-national violence and about pluralism and democracy. Nussbaum’s persuasive tour de force makes clear that cultural diversity is a source of innovation and creativity and that a national identity that is layered and multiple, rather than exclusive or exclusionary, leads to cosmopolitan thinking and cultural innovation. Her command of the ethical, legal and sociopolitical problems that a political reading of religion poses for a multicultural plural democracy makes this work essential reading for anyone interested in the role of religion and the future of the nation-state.
--Tulasi Srinivas (Harvard Divinity Bulletin )

In an age of academic specialization, [Nussbaum] is one of the few modern renaissance scholars...The Clash Within should be read not only by those interested in India's present and future, but by anyone seeking to understand the processes by which even the most complex and sophisticated societies can navigate their way into a morass of violent intolerance.
--Irfan Yusuf (Weekend Australian )

About the Author

Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (May 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674024826
• ISBN-13: 978-0674024823
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,020,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in Law, Philosophy, and Divinity.

Author photo by Robin Holland

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars a badly written book with no redeeming value, September 25, 2007

By 

Mark bennett "Mark" (portland, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future (Hardcover)

This is a difficult book to review because it is very bad in so many different ways. Its a book full of ignorance. Its a book where the author plays favorites based on her politics and her romantic daydreams about a place. Its a book where emotion and political biases take the place of fact. Finally the writing style of the book is so self-indulgant and amaturish that no editor should have accepted it and no publisher should have published it.

First, I am no particular fan of the BJP or their ideology. I'm not interested in defending India either. India has good and bad in it like every country. And it has problems like every country.

The problems in the book start in the introduction which is a useful window into the self-loathing of many in the American elite. She explains her hatred for herself and how through identifying with the cause of the downtrodden in America, she is somehow liberated from what she is. America was not a big enough stage for self-hate and so she decided to extend her ideas into another culture (India). But in the end for all her talk, she comes across in the book as a reborn Victorian Imperial woman come to India to wag her finger in displeasure and to set its injustices right.

She claims to have written this for Americans to show them the supposed voice of the "real india" that is being suppressed. Strange thing is, the only real voice in the book is her own. Its more her telling her friends in America what to think about India than telling them about India.

The second problem with her book is that she an absurd romantic attachment to all things she considers Bengali. She incessentaly promotes Tagore over and over in the pages of the book. She tells us how much India needs a Tagore. But her attraction and promotion of him seem tied up in her belief of the superiority of Bengali underdogs within India. She tries to transform him into something he never was in life. She seems in the end to want to teach Hindu India to hate itself in the same way she admits she hates her own American WASP background.

Finally, the book itself is terribly written. Its written in a rambling amaturish style with the author looking down from the judge's seat at the people of India. The many errors and misunderstandings about India in the book are easily attributable to the fact that she is less writing what she knows than writing what people are her are telling her. Aside from her romanic daydream superficial fasicnation with Bengal, I really wonder what she knows about India.

And then there are the interviews. The style of writing used for the interviews is absolutely despicable. If she likes the person, they are a radiant almost superhuman entity bringing the reader wisdom. But if she doesn't like the person, she is sure to tell you how sinister they look, how they are obviously troubled persons in need of a course of mental therapy. She almost wants us to feel sorry for them in the same way that a nurse or a teacher feels sorry for a child that fails.

In the end this book has nothing useful to say about India. It amounts to the disorganized ramblings of an American with almost no self knowledge of India. What it does have to say is fatally flawed by bias and the author's theories/biases. In the last few years there have been many decent books published on India. Find one of them and don't bother with this one.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An unpleasant read, October 25, 2010

By 

Wayne A. (Belfast, Northern Ireland) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future (Paperback)

Given the credentials of the author I expected something a bit more professional, objective, and informative--scholarly, if you will--especially since there is not much material on the subject of disturbing social and political reactionary trends in the Indian/Hindu world. I also expected much better writing.

Instead, this is an extremely subjective and overly personalized account characterized by inadequately worked out ideas and unconvincing psychological and anthropological speculations. This leads me to believe the author was frequently working outside of her areas of expertise. In an earlier attempt at a review of this book (it's hard to review something that has too many problems)I expressed the belief that she was viewing the non-Western world through the fog of the American Culture War, which is a peculiar and modern form of Eurocentrism. Her repeated attempts to suggest links between what is happening in India and what is happening in the United States are forced and, incredibly, even naive. They are also one-sided.

My sense is that the author is trapped in the cognitively dissonant political/intellectual world where the Progressive agenda is constantly battling with Multiculturalist program. She doesn't seem to understand that the Progressive agenda is often seen as the true Western Cultural Imperialism in socially conservative developing nations. She tries to resolve this by replacing the idea of Clash of Civilizations with, effectively internal Culture Wars. However, if the internal Culture War--the Clash Within--is between Progressives working largely with Western ideas of rights, and traditionalists of various extremes, then we're right back to a Clash of Civilizations. This is so obvious it's amazing the author didn't catch it. But the author's thinking is probably so compartmentalized and, again, Eurocentric, she probably has a very large blind spot.

All in all an extremely unsatisfying book. I learned more about the current problems with American academia than I did about modern India.

27 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Very biased book, July 26, 2007

By 

Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future (Hardcover)

This extremely biased book has one message: THe Hindu BJP party of India is a threat to democracy, to women, to history, to Islam and to everything and it alone is responsible for all the ills of India today, for all the communal violence and even for causing Muslim terrorism.

It is interesting that the author does not include Pakistan in this study in a comparison, given the fact that Pakistan have historically so much in common and their partition was artificial in some ways. If Pakistan had been included the authors claim that Hindutva wishes to 'erase' the Muslim history of India would have an interesting parrellel in Pakistan where all history of its pre-Islamic past, its Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist past, have disappeared.

The 'Hindu nationalists' are blamed for causing many more deaths in communal violence than ever took place and in every case where Hindus have been murdered en masse in India, such as a train carrying Hindus to Ayodha that was burned by Muslim mobs, these crimes are ignored by the author and the book claims that these are 'Hindu propoganda' and that the 'fire was most likely caused by accident'. It is interesting this extreme bias, that when thousands of people die in riots, the Hindus die by 'accident' and the Muslims are killed by 'Hindu fascists'.

The claim that democracy is under 'threat' in India does not hold water at all. It was a Congress party leader, Indira Gandhi, who suspended democracy in the 1980s and slaughtered Sikhs, the Hindu party, when it was in power in the 1990s, always relinquished power democratically.

The truth is that this book is based on a western perception of India that has no understanding of Indian history of the 1000 year Mughal-Islamic colonialism that suppressed and enslaved Hinduism in India, and by ignoring this past it is easy to claim the BJP has 'erased' the Muslim history of India, simply because it refuses to glorify the enslavement and colonialism visited on India by outsiders. Oddly Pakistan is simply ignored.

Seth J. Frantzman