Pluralism and Democracy in India

Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.

• Contributors ; Introduction: Wendy Doniger and Martha Nussbaum ; I.The Past and the Present ; The Politics of History - Amartya Sen ; Pluralism on Trial in Late Nineteenth-Century India - Mushirul Hasan ; Nehru, Religion, and the Humanities - Martha C. Nussbaum ; Gandhi, Newton, and the Enlightenment - Akeel Bilgrami ; II. Democratic Media ; Legitimating Majoritarian Chauvinism: The Indian Media and the Hindutva Campaign - Malini Parthasarathy ; Clarity Begins at Home - Antara Dev Sen, ; From a Compartmental Society to Growing Violence and Corruption: Surveying in the 1990s through Advertisements - Arvind Rajagopal ; III. Political Parties and Movements ; The Long March from Ayodhya: Democracy and Violence in India - Amrita Basu ; Tokenism or Empowerment? Policies and Institutions for Disadvantaged Communities - Zoya Hasan ; Neoliberalism and the Food Crisis - Prabhat Patnaik ; IV. Creating an Inclusive Public Culture Gurcharan Das, The Dilemma of a Liberal Hindu ; The Role of Poetry and Literature in Implementing a Pluralistic Democracy: Writing at the Time of Siege - Nabaneeta Dev Sen ; The Baby and the Bathwater: Secularism in the Work of a Conservative Writer - Pratik Kanjilal ; The BJP's Intellectual Agenda: Textbooks and Imagined History - Mushirul Hasan and Jamia Millia Islamia ; V. Gender and Democracy ; 'Shed No More Blood': Women's Peace Work in India - Ritu Menon ; Violent and Violated Women in Hindu Extremist Politics - Tanika Sarkar ; Fantasies of Purity and Domination: Rape and Torture in the Gujarat Riots - Martha C. Nussbaum ; VI. India's Politics on the U.S. Stage ; Speaking About, For, To, Against, and With Hindus: Scholars and Practitioners in the Diasporic Post-Colonial Moment - Paul Courtright ; The Fight for the History of Hinduism in the American Academy - Wendy Doniger ; Partisan Dreams, Fractured Homeland: Gujarati Diaspora Politics in America - Mona G. Mehta ; The Hindu Diaspora in the United States - Ved Nanda ; Notes ; Index

This is a timely conversation about the resilience of India's pluralist democracy in a variety of spheres, from education and the media to electoral politics, public institutions and the diaspora. The essays point to how challenges to a democratic public culture can be resisted by drawing upon India's long historical tradition of critical thinking, argument and dissent.