India’s Epic Adventures in Peaceful Coexistence

From India’s most clear-headed political theorist Neera Chandhoke (a former Professor of Political Science at Delhi University), comes a new page turner—an extraordinarily accessible and yet tightly argued monograph on the nature and value of contemporary India’s plural democracy. Anyone familiar with Chandhoke’s earlier works such as Democracy and Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2015), or The Conceits of Civil Society (Oxford, 2003), would already be aware of her unique ability among social scientists to perfectly balance lofty theoretical reflection with grounded empirical information. In her most recent couple of books, she had also begun experimenting with more literary references as well as more elaborate philosophical explorations. Now, in her newest book, each of these talents and interests manifest in full bloom, with a social scientific, evidence-based thesis that is at the same time framed and articulated through numerous literary and philosophical excursions, through epics and ethics.

An excerpt from Mark Anthony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar would seem to set the tone for the text, serving as the book’s epigraph, but the opening pages reveal a deeper and more enduring concern with the Santi Parva of the Mahabharata. From the Mahabharata to Shakespeare’s Merchant of  Venice, or from John Locke to the Constitution of India, what we find resonating in literature, philosophy and basic law is anxiety about coexistence, and techniques for its just achievement. Pluralism is a fact, especially, but certainly not exclusively, in India. The question is, is it also of value?

This is Chandhoke’s focus in the first chapter, where she takes up a robust defence of normative pluralism, further strengthening a medley of convincing arguments that she had first begun to articulate toward the end of her earlier book, Contested Secessions (Oxford University Press, 2011). The first chapter also adumbrates salient features of secularism, beginning to clarify its true meaning and utility. Fuller treatment of secularism ensues in the third (on the secularism debates within political theory) and the fifth (on the historical evolution of secularism up to the era of the Constitution) chapters.