Customer Reviews

this highly passionate study - By: The Gandhi Way, 01 Dec 2008
Martha C. Nussbaum is Professor of Law & Ethics at the University of Chicago. She worked for eight years (1985-93) with the Research Project of the UN World Institute for Developmentin Helsinki, focusing on the economic & cultural problems of India. She chose India when she wanted to write on human rights norms for women's development worldwide. She was a consultant with the UN Development Programme's New Delhi Office &in 2004 was a visiting Professor at the Centre for Political Science at Jawaharlal Nehru Universityin New Delhi. She lecturedin various parts of India & wrote extensively on India's legal & constitutional traditions. She travelled so many times to India that it now feels like her second home.

Her relationship with India is intensely political, focussed on issues of social justice, & she has had close contacts with Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economicsin 1988. Three personalitiesin particular feature, namely, Nehru, Tagore & Gandhi. In her Preface she states: "This is a book about India for an American & European audience". But it is not only about India but also about the present clash between Islam & the West.

She writes: "... that the real clash is not a civilisational one between `Islam & the West', but instead a clash within virtually all modern nations - between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, & those who seek the protection of homogeneity, achieved through the domination of a single religious & ethnic tradition".

At a deeper level the thesis of this book is the Gandhian claim that the real struggle that democracy must wage is a struggle within the individual between the urge to dominate & defile the other, & to live respectfully on terms of compassion & equality, with all the vulnerability that such a life entails.

Nussbaum deals extensively with the ethnic/religious pogromin Gujaratin February-March 2002 when approximately 2,000 Muslims were killed by Hindus. She analyses the Hindu nationalistic personality & finds sufficient hatred within to explain the Gujarat events. Her conclusion - based to a great extent on Gandhi's thinking - is worth quoting:

"The ability to accept differences - differences of religion, of ethnicity, of race, of sexuality - requires first, the ability to accept something about oneself: that one is not lord of the world, that one is both adult & child, that no all-embracing collectivity will keep one safe from the vicissitudes of life, that others outside oneself have reality. This ability requires,in turn, the cultivation of a moral imagination that sees realityin other human beings, that does not see other human beings as mere instruments of one's own power or threats to that power."

She argues,in this highly passionate study, that ultimately the greatest threat comes not from a clash between civilisations, but from a clash within each of us.

Piet Dijkstra