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296 Kenneth Keniston

threatening to marginalize all local cultures (see <http://lpe.iss.u-
tokyo.ac.jp/>). He notes that a Japanese businessman who is fluent
in Chinese and wishes to communicate with a Chinese partner must,
today, first translate his thoughts into English, communicate them
in English via Internet to his Chinese partner, who must in turn re-
translate them into Chinese. Equally emblematic of the power of
American culture is the power of American technology. Given the low
cost and effectiveness of American communication technologies, it
often proves less costly and more efficient to send a message from
Bombay to Calcutta via satellite through the United States than di-
rectly across India.
At the opposite pole from McWorld, Barber sees the ugly side of
fundamentalism, which he terms “Jihad.” He persuasively claims
that one reaction against the cosmopolitan, internationalist, multi-
national- and consumer-driven culture of McWorld is a return to the
allegedly fundamental truths and varieties of an ancient culture.
War is justified as an emblem of identity, an expression of commu-
nity, an end in itself. “Even when there is no shooting war, there is
fractiousness, secession, and the quest for ever smaller communi-
ties” (Barber 1992, 60). At worst, this return is exclusionary and
even, as in the case of Jihad, may require holy wars against the im-
pure. Jihad imagines a world of cultural and/or ethnic purity from
which foreign, cosmopolitan, and alien influences have been elimi-
nated, and in which an imagined ancient culture thrives, isolated
from the rest of the corrupt and corrupting world. It is the world of
“ethnic cleansing.”
What Barber discusses as Jihad, however, also in his view has
a different and friendlier face, namely that of cultural diversity. And
in no part of the world is cultural diversity more manifest than in
South Asia, and especially in India. Communal, religious, and ethnic
tensions indeed exist and led, at the moment of Independence, to the
tragedies of Partition and to repeated episodes of communal vio-
lence. Yet the fact is that India is the second largest Islamic nation
in the world, with more than 170 million Muslims living—99.99% of
the time—in relative harmony with their Hindu neighbors. India is
also the most multilingual and multicultural major nation on earth.
Linguistic and cultural divides have torn apart or threatened to dis-
member nations like the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czecho-
slovakia and Canada, but in India they have by and large been
managed harmoniously. No subcontinent in the world possesses so
rich and diverse a set of cultures as South Asia.