Wendy Doniger (Editor) - Pluralism and Democracy in India: Debating the Hindu Right

Debating the Hindu Right

Edited by Wendy Doniger

Martha C. Nussbaum

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pluralism and democracy in India : debating the Hindu right / Edited by Wendy Doniger and Martha C. Nussbaum.

pages cm

Based on presentations at a conference at the University of Chicago Law School in November 2005.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9780195395532 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN 9780195394825 (hardcover : alk. paper)ISBN 9780199380923 (ebook)ISBN 9780199380930 (ebook)

1. Hinduism and politicsCongresses.2. DemocracyReligious aspectsHinduismCongresses.3. HindutvaCongresses.4. IndiaCivilizationCongresses.5. PluralismCongresses.I. Doniger, Wendy, editor of compilation.II. Nussbaum, Martha Craven, 1947 editor of compilation.

BL1215.P65P63 2014

322.10954dc23

2013043629

WENDY DONIGER AND MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM

AMARTYA SEN

MUSHIRUL HASAN

MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM

AKEEL BILGRAMI

MALINI PARTHASARATHY

ANTARA DEV SEN

ARVIND RAJAGOPAL

AMRITA BASU

ZOYA HASAN

PRABHAT PATNAIK

GURCHARAN DAS

NABANEETA DEV SEN

PRATIK KANJILAL

MUSHIRUL HASAN

RITU MENON

TANIKA SARKAR

PAUL B. COURTRIGHT

WENDY DONIGER

MONA G. MEHTA

VED P. NANDA

Amrita Basu is the Paino Professor of Political Science and Womens and Gender Studies at Amherst College. Her main research interests are in social movements, religious nationalism and political violence in South Asia. She is the author of Two Faces of Protest: Contrasting Modes of Womens Activism in India (1994) and Violent Conjunctures: Hindu Nationalism in Democratic India (forthcoming), and has edited several books.

Akeel Bilgrami holds the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair in Philosophy at Columbia University and is the author of the books Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), and Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (2014). He is currently working on a long project on the nature and scope of practical reason, and two short books, both forthcoming: What is a Muslim? and Gandhi, The Philosopher.

Paul B. Courtright is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Religion and the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. He is the author of Gaea: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings, and coeditor of From the Margins of Hindu Marriage. His current research focuses on historical study of representations of and controversies around religion in early colonial India.

Gurcharan Das is the author of India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State, as well as two other nonfiction works, The Difficulty of Being Good and India Unbound. He has also written a novel, A Fine Family, and an anthology, Three Plays. He studied philosophy at Harvard and was CEO of Procter & Gamble India before he became a full-time writer. He writes a regular column for Times of India and four Indian-language papers, and periodically for the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Delhi.

Antara Dev Sen was senior editor with the Hindustan Times, New Delhi, when she went to Oxford as a fellow with the Reuter Foundation. She founded the Little Magazine when she returned to India and is its editor. She has worked with the Anand Bazaar Patrika Group in Calcutta and with the Indian Express in Delhi, where she was senior assistant editor. She is a columnist for the newspapers Asian Age, the Deccan Chronicle, and DNA, and earlier wrote columns for The Week and Sify.com, among other publications.

Nabaneeta Dev Sen is a creative writer in India, and an academic. While her academic work is in English, her creative writing is in Bangla. Retired as professor of comparative literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Dev Sen has more than eighty publications in a variety of genres, consisting of poetry, novels, short stories, travelogues, plays, belles lettres, memoirs, literary criticism, translations, and childrens literature. She has received national and international acclaim, including the Padmashri from the President of India, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Bangla Akademi Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Publishers and Booksellers Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. She represented Indian writing at the India Festival in the United States, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Munich Book Festival, the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Moscow Book Fair, and the NSW Poetry Festival, Sydney. She was the Radhakrishnan Memorial Lecturer at the University of Oxford and held the Maytag Chair of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at Colorado College. She is the president of Soi Women Writers, Association of West Bengal.

Wendy Doniger [OFlaherty] (PhD, Harvard University; DPhil, Oxford University) is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago and the author of forty books, most recently The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), On Hinduism (2014), and Hinduism in the Norton Anthology of World Religions.

Mushirul Hasan is a Padmashree awardee, former vice chancellor of Jamia Millia University, and director general, National Archives of India. He was awarded Officer of the Order of Academic Palms by the Prime Minister of the French Republic in 2009. He has authored Legacy of a Divided Nation: Indias Muslims Since Independence (1997), From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh (2004), and recently Faith and Freedom: Gandhi in History (2013). He has edited Exploring the West: Three Travel Narratives (2009).

Zoya Hasan is professor of political science and former dean of the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her recent books include