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"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.
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