In her new book, Martha C. Nussbaum takes yet another intellectual turn away from her long record of scholarship in ancient Greek political thought. This time, the turn takes her squarely toward an exploration of South Asian history, religion and politics, a topic that seems far removed from the ancient Greeks. This is a turn that not many scholars could make gracefully, but Nussbaum's latest effort shows that she is remarkably well-equipped to pull it off. Attempting to explain the rise of religious fundamentalism in India to an American audience, Nussbaum has produced a book that is part journalism, part historical account, part anthropological investigation and part political commentary. The central problematic that drives the book is the religious violence in the Western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002, when Hindu mobs lynched, raped and murdered over two thousand Muslims, displacing and leaving homeless thousands more. More troubling was the complicity of the state government and law enforcement authorities in what seemed like a premeditated genocide, as many turned a blind eye or, in some cases, openly cooperated with the Hindu mobs. Many of the leading figures implicated in the violence remain free, and little has been done to prosecute them.

The case of Gujarat, Nussbaum says, is symptomatic not only of India's recent turn toward the embrace of right-wing Hindu nationalism, but also of the resulting challenges faced by India's pluralistic and tolerant multireligious democracy. In telling the larger story of these challenges, Nussbaum not only uses a variety of methodological tools, but also explores a wide range of sociocultural and historical factors at work, investigating each of them in depth and with extraordinary fluency: the rise of the Hindu right and its steady homogenization of Hinduism's self-understanding, the history of India's constitutional struggles with religious pluralism, the successes and failures of India's major political and philosophical “heroes” (Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru), struggles for control over the public education system and representative authority over the nation's history, an analysis of erotic myths in Hinduism and the related right-wing Hindu fantasies of masculinity that explain sexual violence against Muslim women in Gujarat, and the role of the Indian diaspora within the phenomenon of Hindu fundamentalism.

At the core of this story is Nussbaum's sophisticated treatment of the ways in which the Hindu right has steadily sought to create an essentialist version of Hinduism that denies the “chaotic and colorful many-sidedness” of the religion and its traditions of pluralism, polytheism and heterogeneity. Instead, the Hindu right attempts to “monotheize” and “semiticize” Hinduism, constructing and disseminating the myth of a Hindutva — “Hindu-ness” or “essence of being Hindu” — that revolves around the unitary values of sexual purity, asceticism and an aggressive warlike masculinity that seeks revenge against the rapacious and invasive Muslims, who are depicted as defilers of Hindu tradition. Nussbaum rightly identifies the success of this discourse as responsible for the intolerant, exclusivist and violent version of Hinduism that now challenges Indian democracy.

Nussbaum pitches the thesis of her book as ultimately a Gandhian one: that the clash between the force of ethnoreligious homogeneity and those of pluralism maps on to the real struggle that democracy must wage within the individual self; that is, a struggle between the urge to dominate and defile the other and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality (ix). It is unclear to what extent scholars of Gandhi would endorse this interpretation of his writings (Nussbaum's treatment of Gandhi, in fourteen pages, is all too short, and one wishes for more substantiation of this claim), but the book's thesis is one that will seem familiar to followers of Nussbaum's previous scholarly work. Nussbaum's philosophical writings have long been animated by ethical questions of social justice, pluralism and cultural confrontation. Her later work on economics and distributive justice is particularly concerned with the case of India. In this sense, the book represents the logical culmination of many of Nussbaum's diverse intellectual interests.

In its more anthropological moments, Nussbaum's narrative relies on complex personal portraits of the key figures who dominate the two sides — Hindu nationalist and pluralist — of the story she wishes to tell. She conducts detailed face-to-face interviews with politicians, scholars, religious leaders, journalists, and activists, remarking on obscure but important details such as their clothing, demeanor, educational background, and class affiliation (a particularly important detail in a society highly stratified along class lines, but not one that a stranger to India would know to look for). Her portraits of her interlocutors seem sensitive and well-balanced, ably capturing the often conflicting drives that seem to motivate the characters in her story. She seeks out complexity, and often reminds us that even the most committed Hindu nationalist has redeeming, even sympathetic qualities. Arun Shourie, a former Cabinet minister of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is presented as a “man of genuine gifts with a passion for truth” (70); while Meenakshi Jain, one of the Hindu right's in-house historians is readily acknowledged as a “highly intelligent and articulate young woman…curious, lively, interested in historical complexity.” (236).

In telling this story, Nussbaum has taken on a task with which Western scholars have long struggled: that of the relative cultural outsider attempting to “explain” India to the West. But, like the best cultural anthropologists, she displays a remarkable self-consciousness of her own positionality, acknowledging that the book is clearly motivated by her own very particular concerns, as well as her own very specific relationship to India. She seeks neither to cast her own experience of India as definitive, nor to claim a representative authority that is uncontentious. She readily admits that her own particular orientations toward and involvements with India color her analysis, and that her experience is limited to certain groups of Indians and not others. In the final analysis, however, these acknowledgments, combined with a voracious appetite for and understanding of Indian history, appear to enrich rather than limit her ability to tell a complicated and nuanced story.

Nussbaum's ultimate conclusion appears to be that the terrifying story of Gujarat contains a silver lining: in defeating the BJP in the 2004 national elections, Indians, Nussbaum contends, resoundingly repudiated the Hindu right agenda, giving rise to hope that India's long-cherished traditions of pluralism, dissent and debate will in the end prevail over exclusivism and intolerance. This may seem like a naïve hope, given the relative power of the Hindu right's exclusivist myth; Nussbaum gives us no reason to think that its political ascendancy is at a permanent end. Nonetheless, her book represents a long-overdue attempt to provide a nuanced account of India to the American public, and should be required reading for any introductory course on South Asian studies at an American university.