Wendy Doniger has written this article for the New York Times about her book. Read this blog if you're not acquainted with the issue, and then her article. Read her article and skip my blog if you don't need the background. (My fellow Americans may find the background useful.)
A number of articles that have made The New York Times (including the "front page" of the online edition) about a lawsuit here in India that led publisher Penguin Books of India to agree to pulp copies of University of Chicago Hindu scholar Wendy Doniger's book The Hindus: An Alternative History. I've been following this story with some interest. I was shocked last year when an Indian scholar at the Jaipur Literature Festival made a comment that I thought innocuous and likely true (that lower caste members were now involved in more corruption and this was a sign of upward mobility). I thought it sounded like the Boston Irish politicians of late 19th and early 20th century, the forbearers of John F. Kennedy. However, the scholar, Ashish Nandy, had a criminal prosecution filed against him, and we exited JLF that night to meet an ongoing demonstration against him. The matter was resolved with a scolding of Nandy by the Indian Supreme Court and nothing more. But very different from the U.S.!
Last year I learned that the U.S. and Indian legal systems share a great deal, owing to in large measure to the common British legal heritage. The primary drafter of the Indian Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar, received law and economics degrees from Columbia University (which I hear is a good school and that I know is quite expensive) and LSE. (Gandhi and Nehru were British-trained barristers.) However, when it comes to free speech, we see quite a divergence between India and the US.. Once the British cleared out of Indian and the old principalities were folded into the new nation, a number of centrifical forces still pulled at the fragile nation: religion and caste foremost among them. It appears that in order to try to engender a peaceful co-existence, no ill words were to be spoken about matters of religion or caste.
While free speech can be--and regularly is--abused by some, in the U.S. we see it as the price we pay for free discourse (although that doesn't deter groups, often of the Christian Right, from attempting to suppress speech). The Indian law comes to a different conclusion, even criminalizing speech in certain instances, and thus l'affaire Doniger.
Read Doniger about how this has played out. India does have an important liberal element that has spoken loudly and clearly, although this was not enough to turn the tide in this instance, it gives hope for freer discourse in the future.
Last year I learned that the U.S. and Indian legal systems share a great deal, owing to in large measure to the common British legal heritage. The primary drafter of the Indian Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar, received law and economics degrees from Columbia University (which I hear is a good school and that I know is quite expensive) and LSE. (Gandhi and Nehru were British-trained barristers.) However, when it comes to free speech, we see quite a divergence between India and the US.. Once the British cleared out of Indian and the old principalities were folded into the new nation, a number of centrifical forces still pulled at the fragile nation: religion and caste foremost among them. It appears that in order to try to engender a peaceful co-existence, no ill words were to be spoken about matters of religion or caste.
While free speech can be--and regularly is--abused by some, in the U.S. we see it as the price we pay for free discourse (although that doesn't deter groups, often of the Christian Right, from attempting to suppress speech). The Indian law comes to a different conclusion, even criminalizing speech in certain instances, and thus l'affaire Doniger.
Read Doniger about how this has played out. India does have an important liberal element that has spoken loudly and clearly, although this was not enough to turn the tide in this instance, it gives hope for freer discourse in the future.
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