Book Review

CASTE:  A Global Journal on Social Exclusion
Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 244–246

February 2020
ISSN 2639-4928

brandeis.edu/j-caste

DOI: 10.26812/caste.v1i1.13

© 2020 Sampath. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons 
Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, 
provided the original author(s) and source are credited

Title: The Empire of Disgust: 
Prejudice, Discrimination, and 
Policy in India and the US

Author:  Z. Hasan,  A. Huq, M. Nussbaum, &  V.  Verma, 
(Eds.) (2018)

Pubishers: Oxford University Press: Delhi

Reviewer: Rajesh Sampath 
Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Justice, Rights and Social Change, 
Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, 
Waltham, Massachusetts, USA 
E-mail: rsampath@brandeis.edu

This timely anthology of essays edited by Hasan, Huq, Nussbaum, and 
Verma breaks new ground for several reasons. For one, the rise of right-wing, 
authoritarian, majoritarian politics in Western and Eastern ‘secular, constitutional, 
legal’, democracies necessitates sensitive, nuanced multidisciplinary and 
multidimensional approaches in comparative studies. Understanding one social 
and national context could be helpful in illuminating unseen gaps or blind spots 
in another system. As the volume states from the outset all societies in one way 
or another ‘exclude and stigmatize’ minorities. Given this enduring dynamic in 
modern democratic societies, it behoves researchers, who examine questions 
of discrimination, marginalization, exclusion, stigmatization, and prejudice to 
create analytic and theoretical spaces whereby humanists, for example ethicists 
and philosophers of justice and rights, can collaborate with social scientists, legal 
scholars, and applied social policy analysts. The book achieves this great feat.

The current historical and political present in the U.S. and India reveals that 
over the last few years right-wing political parties’ ascendance to power has meant 
the erosion of certain basic, liberal, democratic values such as equality and equal 
protection under the law. Minority groups of different intersectional identities 
have faced great repression and violence in everyday life; but this is compounded 
by subtle changes in law and policy that seem to justify their exclusion and 



Book Review 245

stigmatization. Having stated the obvious, for some the matter goes beyond current 
politics and the nature of authoritarian, right-wing populist appeal in electoral systems. 

The text by illustrious scholars in India and the U.S. tries to introduce a novel 
and philosophically rich framework of analysis that reveals a ‘rhetoric of disgust’ 
to understand how in fact current social realities of exclusion and degradation of 
minorities operate. Some groups are castigated as ‘animal-like’ in which their ‘full 
human’ dignity is deprived. This critical addition of the category of ‘disgust’ sheds 
new light on traditional research in law and social policy to examine modalities of 
social exclusion and therefore, ways to craft sound recommendations to mitigate or 
eliminate them. In some senses we must go beyond the twentieth century theories of 
ideology and hegemony, which operate by traditional dichotomies of the ideal and 
material realms, or theory vs. practice. We need deeper investigations into the reasons 
why social dynamics result in material practices perpetuated by real mechanics of 
violence against minorities based on social-psychological bodily manifestations of the 
pure and the impure. Caste in India and race in the United States are two examples 
of this non-dialectical, synthetically complex phenomenon encapsulated in the term 
‘disgust.’

Great predecessors that examined this dominion of ‘disgust’ can open doors for 
future research, another great virtue of this collaborative, anthologized endeavour. The 
work as a whole is inspired by the legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the great Dalit (formerly 
known as ‘untouchable’) visionary leader who examined one of the most horrendous 
forms of exclusion, stigmatization, marginalization, oppression and therefore ‘disgust,’ 
namely the Hindu caste system in India and South Asia more broadly. One can say 
his unique achievement in the twentieth century context (compared to other national 
contexts of his time) was the attempt to inspire a social movement to eradicate such an 
internal, cultural, and civilizational system of tyrannical majoritarian ‘disgust.’ What 
makes Ambedkar stand out in his time was the fact that he pioneered his efforts during 
decolonization from an external imperial oppressor, in this case the British Empire. 
All the while, he chaired the drafting of a secular, legal, democratic constitution of a 
newly liberated Eastern society in the Global South, namely India, that attempted to 
take on its seemingly indestructible system of caste. In other words he was fighting 
two oppressions as the same time—one internal, the other external. The volume takes 
up his cause by venturing into realms he was not able to traverse. 

Taking it one step further, a comparative analysis is needed to see how differing 
dynamics of stigma, exclusion, and ‘disgust’ occur in different contemporary and 
historical contexts. Therefore, we must see how differing remedies in law and policy 
recommendation will be required, perhaps experimentally, to tackle the complexity 
of minority control and degradation. The volume states from the beginning itself 
that it does not intend to be ‘reductionist’ whereby all phenomena of ‘prejudice and 
discrimination’ can be explained by an epiphenomenal category or meta-concept 
known as ‘disgust.’ In comparative studies, other factors such as ‘imagined violence, 
competitive envy, and unconscious group bias’ also have to be explored and from 
myriad perspectives to avoid the fallacy of attempting to discover one ‘determinate 
emotional origin.’ Different disciplines have to be marshalled, not just one, say 



246 CASTE:  A Global Journal on Social Exclusion Vol. 1, No. 1

sociology on structures and actions, humanistic, critical, or post-modern theories on 
‘discourse’ analysis, or social psychologists on group behaviours and mindsets. One 
gets the sense that new ground is being broken in trying to understand ‘disgust’ with 
empirical data with the aim of eradicating it, at least in the US and Indian contexts.

Martha Nussbaum, who is renowned for her pioneering works on justice, rights, 
and the capabilities approach, offers a framing orientation for the anthology. Drawing 
from the psychologist Rozin, Nussbaum starts off with the idea of ‘primary disgust’ 
in which all humans across societies and time are rooted not so much in outright 
fear of real danger but inherent discomfort that all humans have about other human 
body’s excretions, smells, and ultimate decay. This seems obvious enough but then she 
takes it one step further with her own powerful notion of ‘projective disgust.’ Given 
this ‘cultural universality’ of human discomfort with human ‘animality’ in general 
and natural functions, say excretion and death, humans, unlike animals, go further. 
Majorities in societies create distinctions between themselves and some minority 
group which they have to characterize as ‘quasi-animals,’ minorities that are often 
‘powerless,’ because those majorities cannot deal with the ‘primary disgust’ of their 
own ‘animality.’ And this happens in the heart of the allegedly most peaceful, secular, 
and liberally sound democracies. 

Nussbaum’s brilliant insight provides explanatory power to complement how 
others research and analyze various forms of marginalization, exclusion, discrimination, 
and prejudice when they occur in societies with majorities and minorities, such as the 
US and India. When majorities institute this distinction by ‘projecting, irrationally, 
smelliness, hyper-animality, and hyper-sexuality’ onto other minority groups, the 
majority creates an illusory distance from its own ‘animality’ and ‘mortality.’

From this incredibly profound insight, comparative contexts begin to open up, 
such as antisemitism in twentieth century Europe, the plight of African-Americans 
from slavery to the present in the US, the millennial-long struggle of Dalits/outsiders 
in the Hindu caste system, and Muslims where they are minorities, for example in 
Europe, the US, and India. Every aspect of law and social policy, including voting, 
education, housing, and health access, is infected so to speak by the way majorities 
treat their minorities. Without going into further details about the conclusions of 
each contributor’s chapter, this critical and timely volume is highly recommended 
for academics, practitioners, policymakers, activists, leaders of social movements, 
and elected officials. We must translate theory into practice to reform democracies 
with majoritarian systems that continue to demonize and therefore prejudicially 
discriminate against minority groups given the underlying phenomenon of ‘disgust.’