Martha Nussbaum on Disputes over Hinduism and Indian History

The Religious War Against American Scholars of India

Elizabeth Redden
April 12, 2016 Inside Higher Ed

Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago and a leading figure in the humanities, is the author of the book-length study The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future (Harvard University Press, 2009) and co-editor, with Doniger, of Pluralism and Democracy in India: Debating the Hindu Right (Oxford University Press, 2015). Nussbaum said via email that the disputes over Hinduism and Indian history are not new.Cover of Wendy Doniger and Martha C. Nussbaum's book Pluralism and Democracy in India: Debating the Hindu Right.

“It is a very old story,” she said. “For about 20 years at least, members of the Hindu community in the U.S. have been carrying on a well-funded campaign to substitute an ideological Hindu-right version of Indian history for serious historical scholarship.” Nussbaum said that this version of history, propagated by the Hindu right since the 1920s, overstates the age of the Vedas by at least 1,500 years and makes false claims for Hindu indigeneity to the Indian subcontinent (where, as Nussbaum summarized the narrative, they lived “peacefully, with no conflict or strife, until Muslims arrived to create strife and try to dominate Hindus” -- and until the British Christians arrived to participate in the oppression of Hindus after that). This version of history also holds -- again falsely, Nussbaum said -- that “traditional Hinduism was highly puritanical about sexual matters, and the sexual element has been introduced by leftist and Western scholars.”

“India is one battleground for such ideas, since textbooks were massively rewritten during the first domination of the Hindu right, and they are now being rewritten again,” Nussbaum said. “But the U.S. is a particularly fertile ground for the struggle, since most Americans don’t know anything about India, and even second-generation Indians are often ready to believe what they are told. Forty percent of Americans of Indian origin are Gujarati, where the Hindu right has immense strength.”