“Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner—people in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.” —Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat
Thomas Friedman’s admonition to his daughters shows how distant lands are being re-packaged to Americans in the 21st century. In The World is Flat, the New York Times columnist describes a leveling of the economic playing field, where members of previously poor or stagnant economies are gaining greater access to global wealth through the power of information. India factors prominently in the flattening process, not least because its growing middle class ranks high in math and computer skills and fluency in English. But outsourced jobs and call centers are not the only images tied to the new India. In The Clash Within, Chicago ethicist Martha Nussbaum details how hypermasculine Hindu militants raped Muslim women and destroyed Muslim shops in their genocidal fury in the western state of Gujarat in 2002, threatening India’s sixty-year-old democracy. The key to this democracy, according to Harvard economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, is its ancient tradition of argument and reasoned debate. In The Argumentative Indian, Sen claims that Westerners have failed to appreciate this Asian tradition of public reason due to a preoccupation with falsely exotic notions of the East.
Sen, Friedman, and Nussbaum all describe India’s progress in terms of classical liberal values of free trade, the marketplace of ideas, and religious toleration. Each stresses the importance of choices—by individuals and states—in opening doors to growth and prosperity. Each author also levels a trenchant critique of rigid boundaries—economic, national, gender, and religious. Such dividing lines, they contend, especially those based on romantic nationalisms or religion, are the enemy of peace and impede the growth of democracy. But are boundaries themselves the real source of conflict, or is it how people interpret their beliefs and demonize others within the context of bounded traditions? While sharing a commitment to classical liberal values, these authors also inadvertently reveal some limitations of those values, especially when accounting for the persistence of religious violence in the subcontinent.
According to Sen, India’s democracy is not the product of two hundred years of British rule but rather is anchored in India’s ancient skills in managing pluralism. Spanning more than two millennia, India’s argumentative tradition has expressed itself through epic literature, heterodox religious movements, and public debates between members of different communities.
With elegance and clarity, Sen guides readers through a collage of events and anecdotes to illustrate his claims. The great Buddhist councils of the 3rd century BC (under the reign of Ashoka) drew delegates from different regions and schools of thought to settle disputes of doctrine. Dialogue between religions was accompanied by the interrogation of religion itself by India’s agnostics and skeptics. During the 16th century, while Europeans were hunting down witches or launching wars of religion, the Mughal emperor Jalalludin Muhammed Akbar supported dialogues between members of different faiths. For both Sen and Nussbaum, Akbar epitomizes the tolerant, harmonizing impulses from which South Asians can draw inspiration as they face new and more extreme forms of sectarian conflict. Yes, caste oppression and female subordination are among the undemocratic features of Indian society; but even these, Sen observes, have been subject to constant interrogation.
Sen’s picture of “argumentative India” challenges the notion that India’s cultural heritage relates primarily to religion and spirituality and not to virtues more typically associated with Europe’s Enlightenment. Logic, astronomy, mathematics, linguistics, and scientific inquiry have been constant features of the subcontinent, but an imperialistic reading of India’s past crediting only Europe with such advances veiled them behind more “arcane and non-material” virtues. Yoga, transcendental meditation, and otherworldliness thus became the defining marks of “Hindu civilization.”
Sen sharply critiques the notion of “clashing civilizations” espoused in the work of Samuel Huntington. Huntington stresses how post–Cold War politics are largely defined by cultural and religious differences. For Sen, assigning a single identity to any people distorts who they are and lays foundations for enmity and conflict. Sen’s critique of the “clash of civilizations” (even more so in his recent book Identity and Violence) challenges the notion that India is a “Hindu” nation with a Hindu majority, as members of India’s Hindu Right would have us believe. Their ideology of Hindutva, which pursues a theocratic state based upon Hindu identity, thrives upon hatred of Muslim and Christian minorities and violates the toleration epitomized by Akbar. Sen’s critique also thwarts any suggestion that democracy is the West’s gift to the rest. Democracy for Sen is not only the best political system; it can be achieved elsewhere without cultural imperialism or mimicry.
As much as Sen stresses the virtues of India’s argumentative tradition, the book could have been more forthright in identifying its limitations. Argument is most constructive when it leads to consensus that furthers the common good. Short of that, one is left with a sea of “conversations” that displace real action. India’s politicians are widely criticized for their corruption and inability to implement plans that secure basic needs such as public health, infrastructure, and education. The country’s legal system, presumably a venue for argument in the service of justice, is the most over-docketed system in the world. A woman who has been raped may wait as many as nine years to have her case heard. While argument is preferable to violence, Sen makes no compelling case that it ensures the rule of law, the sanctity of contracts, and administrative efficiency, qualities essential in today’s changing economic climate.
While Sen’s book focuses on Indian culture and identity, Friedman highlights the increasing skill, speed, and efficiency with which Indians and Chinese are competing for global wealth. Friedman is no stranger to questions about cultural roots. In his brilliant earlier book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he describes the challenge of going “glocal,” of staying rooted in cultural traditions (the “olive tree”) while participating in the global economy (the “lexus”). By and large, The World is Flat is Friedman’s discussion of the lexus without the olive tree.
Central to Friedman’s thesis is what he calls the “triple convergence” of forces that have been flattening the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first is the combined impact of ten “flatteners,” largely related to information technology, to facilitate unprecedented participation in the global economy. This has produced a “web-enabled platform” that enables collaboration by companies, universities, and individuals regardless of location. The next convergence is the historical shift from a world defined by vertical to horizontal relationships between people, nations, and businesses. Examples range from how companies create different departments worldwide that collaborate with each other to the sharing of security information by various national intelligence agencies. The third convergence is the dramatic surge in economic participation as economies opened up in places like China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.
Friedman’s book introduces new paradigms for understanding India. No longer associated primarily with images of “snake charmers, poor people and Mother Theresa,” as he says, Indians have “recalibrated” their identity as partakers of knowledge-based wealth. During the dot.com boom of the late ’80s, Indians were recruited in large numbers to places like Silicon Valley. Even after the bust, when many returned to India, their skills were employed (especially during the Y2K scare) because of the fiberoptic cable that was laid during the boom. This allowed them to work for U.S.-based companies for lower wages from places like Bangalore. As much as these developments are part of recent history, it is arguably the discipline and skills acquired under socialist scarcity that continue to equip Indians and Chinese to compete in the global economy. While they hammered away at math, science, and engineering in pursuit of limited opportunities at home, American students, steeped in a culture geared toward having fun, exhibited diminishing interest in those subjects.
The problems with Friedman’s thesis lie not so much in what he presents through Horatio Alger-like anecdote after anecdote, but in his omissions. As his critics correctly observe—and as Friedman himself eventually admits (more than 500 pages into the book)—the world is not flat. Most people benefit little if at all from fiberoptic cables or workflow software. Those benefiting from his “globalization 3.0” are those who are skilled enough to do so. Others stuck in the “unflat” world are, in his words, “too sick, too disempowered and too frustrated” to make choices to improve their condition. Their economic salvation, for Friedman, lies in waking up and building bridges to the triple convergence.
This vision of trickle out economics, while satisfying to those who have always believed in or benefited from the free market, carries with it some rough edges. It does not sit well with American workers who lose jobs to outsourced labor and are told by Friedman that to flourish in the flattening world, they will simply have to work harder and learn new skills. Neither does it sit well with members of underdeveloped countries—whether heads of state or citizens is unclear—likened to “alcoholics” who have not come to terms with their own addiction. Over the past decade, thousands of farmers in India’s cotton belt have committed suicide due to sheer hopelessness created by global competition. As the international market compelled them to drop the price of their own cotton, they grew dependent on expensive, genetically altered, drought-resistant seed. Growing debts and lack of government support continue to drive many to take their own lives, often by consuming pesticide. Finally, Friedman’s thesis does not sit well with opponents of globalization, such as scholar activist Vandana Shiva, who raise their voices on behalf of India’s cotton farmers and others adversely affected by globalization.
Friedman’s flattening world creates opportunities not only for constructive interdependence but also for new forms of violence. Central to his discussion of terrorism are feelings of humiliation or hope tied to the ability to realize one’s dreams of economic prosperity. India has the second-largest Muslim population in the world. Why is it, then, that “there are no Indian Muslims that we know of in al-Qaeda and there are no Indian Muslims in America’s Guantanamo Bay, post-9/11 prison camp … . [or that] no Indian Muslims have been found fighting alongside the jihadists in Iraq?” India’s secular democracy and free market, Friedman contends, have enabled Muslims such as Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro and the richest man in India, to rise to positions of economic and political prominence. The capacity of some to reach such heights instills hope in the many and steers them away from despair driven terror.
The simplicity of Friedman’s formula allures, but misleads. It fails to locate the rise of militant Hinduism within his story of a flattening India. Hindu militancy has accompanied globalization without being displaced by it. If what he says is true of Indian Muslims (who tend to be among India’s most economically backward groups), we must ask why significant sections of the Hindu middle class have become radicalized, even as they partake of the economic opportunities of the flattening world. At best, Friedman’s analysis of globalization and terrorism confuses correlation and causation; more likely, it requires a stronger value base for explaining what leads people toward or away from hatred and violence.
Martha Nussbaum’s analysis fills some of these gaps. She would be the first to tell Friedman that those Gujarati entrepreneurs he raves about did nothing to prevent the slaughter of their Muslim neighbors in the 2002 riots. In The Clash Within, she applies insights from the social sciences, literature, ethics, and psychology to the complex forces that are shaping India. Nussbaum shares Sen’s appreciation for Indian pluralism and recognizes the advances in science and technology highlighted by Friedman. What distinguishes her book are the links she draws between cultural trends and educational philosophy.
Nussbaum claims that India’s advancements in math and science, hallmarks of Nehru’s legacy, while facilitating the current economic boom, do little to nurture vital skills of democratic citizenship. Critical thinking, debate, reasoned analysis, empathetic imagination and the arts (hallmarks of Sen’s argumentative India) are under siege because of the “disease of rote learning” in public schools: “Numbed by repetitive learning” from dated textbooks and uninspiring instructors, students leave India’s public schools ill-equipped to relate to a culturally complex and changing society. This leaves them particularly susceptible to simplistic solutions to India’s problems, such as those offered by advocates of Hindu nationalist ideology.
Nussbaum’s contention that a commitment to liberal learning can thwart fascist leanings in India needs to be scrutinized at many levels. Humanistic traditions in Germany and Italy clearly did not steer those cultures away from xenophobia or fascism in the 20th century. Neither has American education steered people toward the politics of empahty rather than fear. Furthermore, many of India’s so-called victims of rote learning are also capable of speaking three or more languages, an asset to civic dialogue not found within many Western democracies.
The greatest threat to democracy in India, Nussbaum argues, comes not from any clash with the West but from a clash between two incompatible views of nationhood. The Hindu nationalist view, ironically, is anchored in a “romantic European conception of nationalism, based on ideas of blood, soil, purity and the Voltgeist.” It stands at odds with a more civic concept of nationalism, which values secularism and respects differences of regional culture, religion and ethnicity. Deftly, Nussbaum traces the lineage of these opposing visions through an exploration of key people, novels, and debates within modern India’s politics and culture.
In contrast to Friedman, whose analysis ignores Hindu militancy, Nussbaum zooms in from many angles. In her chapter “The Human Face of the Hindu Right,” she discusses in depth her interviews of four prominent Hindus. Her analysis engages their life experiences and represents a range of views on the Indian political spectrum. But in the end, she blurs the line between scholarship and moral evaluation by distinguishing the good Hindus from the bad ones. “Somehow,” she observes of the latter, “life in a pluralistic democracy, and the education they received in that democracy, failed to cultivate their imaginative capacities and their capacities for sympathy.” While some have accused Nussbaum of reenacting the “civilizing mission” through such kinds of evaluation, others maintain that such incisive critiques of religious extremism are needed.
The launching point for her analysis is a series of events that took place in February 2002 at the Godhra train station in the western state of Gujarat. When Hindu pilgrims returning from the north Indian city of Ayodhya (another huge flashpoint of Hindu-Muslim conflict) stepped off the train at Godhra, fighting erupted with Muslim residents of a nearby ghetto. In the course of this skirmish, one of the train’s compartments—carrying more than 150 people—burst into flames. Fifty-two men, women, and children, nearly all Hindus, were burned to death. Hindus responded with a rampage that left more than 2,000 Muslims dead. The Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, and the local police are widely held to have been complicit in the violence.
In a speech shortly following these incidents, the then-Prime Minister, Atal Biharee Vajpayee, insisted that it was Muslims who had initiated the conflict by conspiring to burn alive the Hindu passengers. To this he added, “where ever Muslims live, they don’t like to live in co-existence with others, they don’t like to mingle with others … they want to spread their faith by resorting to terror and threats. The world has become alert to this danger.” A good portion of Nussbaum’s book challenges this perception of Indian Muslims.
Islamic fundamentalism, she argues, “has no grip in India,” and this is evident even in the events that unfolded in Gujarat. Most likely, she states, it was not Muslims who set the coach on fire. Forensic evidence, autopsies, and data from police reports have led experts to conclude that the fire was a tragic accident caused by other factors. Contrary to Vajpayee’s suggestion of a Muslim conspiracy, Nussbaum argues that the retaliatory rampage had been carefully premeditated, backed by local officials, and inspired by an ideology of hate that had taken root among Hindus. How such an ideology could fester within a nation that prizes tolerance is a question she addresses extensively.
Nussbaum’s psychoanalysis of the Hindu Right (in what she admits is the most speculative chapter of her book) stresses, as Friedman’s account does, the role of shame and humiliation in motivating violence, especially toward women. When militant Hindus stigmatize Muslim minorities, they are actually insulating themselves from qualities in which they take shame. The outcry over centuries of domination by foreigners has led Hindus to despise passive, feminine qualities that have led to their subjection. What results is a hypermasculine Hindu self expressed through sexualized violence toward Muslim women, all the while preserving its own sense of purity.
Yet neither Friedman nor Nussbaum adequately links the feeling of humiliation to the fact of being humiliated. In what ways have British or U.S. imperialism in Islamic or Hindu societies resulted in enduring feelings of humiliation or rage? What factors determine which groups will retain this rage or how and against whom they will direct it? India’s Muslims also were subject to British imperialism, that too as India’s former rulers. Why do they not respond like Al-Qaeda terrorists or Hindu extremists?[1] Addressing such questions requires greater attention to the role of history. It also requires attention to the hermeneutics of religion, more so than what these authors have afforded.
Both Sen and Nussbaum ignore the place of Christianity within India’s pluralist heritage. Their silence betrays a tendency, prevalent in South Asian studies, to view Christians as enemies, not partakers, of Indian pluralism. While Christianity often was accompanied by racism and imperialism, it was in other instances profoundly engaged with local knowledge systems in the spirit of Sen’s argumentative tradition (Jesuits too visited the courts of Akbar). Nussbaum’s book would have been well served by comparisons with Christians who also suffered at the hands of Hindu nationalists in the state of Gujarat and more recently in Orissa. Finally, both authors do everything they can to avoid the academic sin of essentializing another culture. And yet, by turning pluralism from a fact to a virtue that defines the “real India,” they come close to doing the same thing.
Chandra Mallampalli is associate professor of history at Westmont College. He is the author most recently of Christians and Public Life in Colonial South India, 1863-1937 (Routledge).
1. Bombings in Mumbai in 1993, Hyderabad in 2007, and growing concerns about terrorist networks among it and medical students suggest that a new trend may be developing.
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