The Crisis Of Secularism In India

In this timely, nuanced collection, twenty leading cultural theorists assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India.

While secularism has been integral to India’s democracy for more than fifty years, its uses and limits are now being debated anew. Signs of a crisis in the relations between state, society, and religion include the violence directed against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and the precarious situation of India’s minority religious groups more generally; the existence of personal laws that vary by religious community; the affiliation of political parties with fundamentalist religious organizations; and the rallying of a significant proportion of the diasporic Hindu community behind a resurgent nationalist Hinduism. There is a broad consensus that a crisis of secularism exists, but whether the state can resolve conflicts and ease tensions or is itself part of the problem is a matter of vigorous political and intellectual debate. In this timely, nuanced collection, twenty leading Indian cultural theorists assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India. Scholars of history, anthropology, religion, politics, law, philosophy, and media studies take on a broad range of concerns. Some consider the history of secularism in India; others explore theoretical issues such as the relationship between secularism and democracy or the shortcomings of the categories “majority” and “minority.” Contributors examine how the debates about secularism play out in schools, the media, and the popular cinema. And they address two of the most politically charged sites of crisis: personal law and the right to practice and encourage religious conversion. Together the essays inject insightful analysis into the fraught controversy about the shortcomings and uncertain future of secularism in the world today. Contributors. Flavia Agnes, Upendra Baxi, Shyam Benegal, Akeel Bilgrami, Partha Chatterjee, V. Geetha, Sunil Khilnani, Nivedita Menon, Ashis Nandy, Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, Gyanendra Pandey, Gyan Prakash, Arvind Rajagopal, Paula Richman, Sumit Sarkar, Dwaipayan Sen, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Shabnum Tejani, Romila Thapar, Ravi S. Vasudevan, Gauri Viswanathan

While secularism has been integral to India s democracy for more than fifty years, its uses and limits are being debated anew. Signs of a crisis in the relations between state, society, and religion include the violence against Muslims in Gujarat and the precarious situation of India s minorities more generally; personal laws that vary by religious community; the affiliation of political parties with fundamentalist religious organizations; and the rallying of sections of the diasporic Hindu community behind nationalist Hinduism. A crisis of secularism undoubtedly exists, but whether the state can resolve conflicts and ease tensions or is itself part of the problem are matters of vigorous debate. In this continuingly relevant book, twenty leading Indian intellectuals assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India. Scholars of history, anthropology, religion, politics, law, philosophy, and media studies here consider the history of secularism in India; the relationship between secularism and democracy; and shortcomings in the categories majority and minority. They examine how debates about secularism play out in schools, the media, and the popular cinema. And they address two of the most politically charged sites of crisis: personal law and the right to practice and encourage religious conversion. Together the essays inject insightful analysis into the fraught controversy about the shortcomings and uncertain future of secularism in the world today.

Many of the central issues in modern Indian politics have long been understood in terms of an opposition between ideologies of secularism and communalism. Observers have argued that recent Hindu nationalism is the symptom of a crisis of Indian secularism and have blamed this on a resurgence of religion or communalism. Shabnum Tejani unpacks prevailing assumptions about the meaning of secularism in contemporary politics, focusing on India but with many points of comparison elsewhere in the world. She questions the simple dichotomy between secularism and communalism that has been used in scholarly study and political discourse. Tracing the social, political, and intellectual genealogies of the concepts of secularism and communalism from the late nineteenth century until the ratification of the Indian constitution in 1950, she shows how secularism came to be bound up with ideas about nationalism and national identity.

Even though the crisis of secularism was declared decades ago, it remains unresolved. This book argues that its roots are internal to the liberal model of secularism, which emerged from the religious dynamics of the Protestant Reformation. In Europe and India, this model has gone hand in hand with an intolerant anticlerical theology that rejects certain traditions as evil political religion. Consequently, liberal secularism often harms local forms of coexistence rather than nourishing them.

Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature examines how writers from religious and ethnic minority communities (Anglo-Indians, Burghers, Dalits, Muslims, and Parsis) in India and Sri Lanka engage secularism through novels, short stories, and autobiographies. Given the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, it would seem obvious that minorities would rally around secularism (the separation of church and state). However, this bookargues that the relationship between minorities and secularism is extremely ambivalent. On the one hand, it shows how writers belonging to oppressed communities can deploy secularism as a mode of critique (secular criticism) to challenge the ideologies of dominant groups—the nation, upper-castes, and religious hierarchies. On the other hand, it examines how these writers reveal that other aspects of secularism (secularization and secular time) are responsible for creating essentialized identities that have not only exacerbated relationships between majorities and minorities and between minority groups, but have also created tension within minority groups themselves. Turing to aesthetics and religious faith, these writers attempt to undermine secular social and cultural structures that are responsible for this crisis of minority identity.

With a backdrop of religious violence and escalating regional tensions in South Asia, Priya Kumar’s Limiting Secularism probes the urgent topic of secularism and tolerance in Indian culture and life. Kumar explores Partition as the founding trauma of the Indian nation-state and traces the consequences of its marking off of “Indian” from “Pakistani” and the positioning of Indian Muslims as strangers within the nation. Kumar unpacks the implications of the Nehruvian doctrine of tolerance-with all of its resonances of condescension and inequality-and asks whether more ethical cohabitation can replace the “arrogant compulsive tolerance” of the state and the majority. Informed by Jacques Derrida’s recent work on hospitality and living together, Kumar argues for the emergence of an “ethics of coexistence” in Indian fiction and film. Considering narratives ranging from the cosmopolitan English novels of Rushdie and Ghosh to literature in South Asian languages as well as recent Hindi cinema, Kumar demonstrates that these fictions are important resources for reimagining tolerance and coexistence. Distinctive and timely in its investigation of secularism and communalism, Limiting Secularism works to envision the radical possibilities of going beyond tolerance to living well together. Priya Kumar is associate professor of English at the University of Iowa.

Presents a comparative study of two major attempts to build secular states - India and Turkey - in the non-Western world

Divorcing Traditions is an ethnography of Islamic legal expertise and practices in India, a secular state in which Muslims are a significant minority and where Islamic judgments are not legally binding. Katherine Lemons argues that an analysis of divorce in accordance with Islamic strictures is critical to the understanding of Indian secularism. Lemons analyzes four marital dispute adjudication forums run by Muslim jurists or lay Muslims to show that religious law does not muddle the categories of religion and law but generates them. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in these four institutions—NGO-run women's arbitration centers (mahila panchayats); sharia courts (dar ul-qazas); a Muslim jurist's authoritative legal opinions (fatwas); and the practice of what a Muslim legal expert (mufti) calls "spiritual healing"—Divorcing Traditions shows how secularism is an ongoing project that seeks to establish and maintain an appropriate relationship between religion and politics. A secular state is always secularizing. And yet, as Lemons demonstrates, the state is not the only arbiter of the relationship between religion and law: religious legal forums help to constitute the categories of private and public, religious and secular upon which secularism relies. In the end, because Muslim legal expertise and practice are central to the Indian legal system and because Muslim divorce's contested legal status marks a crisis of the secular distinction between religion and law, Muslim divorce, argues Lemons, is a key site for understanding Indian secularism.