Abstract
Kaviraj Sudipta’s Languages of Secularity outlines two main concerns: recent debates about secularity in Indian social science, and the colonial side of modernity. The former focuses on the reexamination of Indian thinking, and analyzing the historical changes in politics, religion, and Indian society. Sudipta argues that this change in thought was a significant moment in political theory, as it shows how India began to move away from Western social theory, and how the nature of social theory depends on the extension and elaboration of ideas combined with academic thinking from the historical world. Sudipta’s second part of the paper concerns the differences between early modernization theory and more recent theories. Casanova, Jose.
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Notes
- 1.
Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Marx and postcolonial thinking’, Constellations, 2018.
- 2.
Habermas 1989.
- 3.
I outlined the structure of this diglossia in “Writing, Speaking, Being” (1989), in Kaviraj, 2010.
- 4.
Before independence, an Indian meant someone who would have to speak some vernacular language in order to be an Indian; several decades later, sociologically, a new “Indian” elite existed. This elite was spatially highly mobile, did not have exclusive roots in any particular region and normally did not speak or write a vernacular language. The meaning of “who was an Indian” had shifted decisively.
- 5.
This stance is normally associated with politicians like Mulayam Singh Yadav or Lallu Prasad Yadav because of their colorful expressions of that view, but they represented an increasingly large segment of India’s influential democratic politicians.
- 6.
For the Islamic side of this intellectual history, see Alam 2004.
- 7.
An excellent analysis of how even the language was disputed between Saivas and Vaisnavas in seventeenth-century South India can be found in Elaine Fisher 2017.
- 8.
An excellent compendium for premodern Hindu intellectual schools was the much-used compendium by Mādhavācārya, the Sarvadarśanasamgraha of the fourteenth century.
- 9.
Dabistan i-Mazahib 1843.
- 10.
Dabistan-i Mazahib offers a classic exposition of this view from debates in Akbar’s court.
- 11.
A conventional example of this attitude can be found in the work of P. V. Kane as an illustration of religious accommodation among the Hindu sects, but evidently, this text can also be read as a subtle presentation of a hierarchy (Fisher 2017, 32).
- 12.
The typical Indian uses of the word “secular” in two senses – first, to refer to a nonreligious world, or nonreligious parts of the world, and second, to refer to those who advocate accommodation between religious doctrines and communities – is confusing from that point of view. For the distinction between these two senses in the Indian language of political debates that he describes as political and ethical secularism, see Bhargava, 2006: 636–655.
- 13.
The remarkably forceful initial impact of those ideas could be seen through the immense influence of Derozio, the charismatic Anglo-Indian teacher at Hindu College whose pupils formed the first “secular” groups of Bengali intellectuals. See Chaudhuri 2008.
- 14.
As an illustration of both the nature of the arguments and the sparkle of the polemic, we can use Hay 1963.
- 15.
For a description of how this happened in Europe, see Taylor 2008.
- 16.
That it had the character of a crusade can be ascertained from the tone of the polemic which is grasped fully only in the vivacity of the vernacular. See, for instance, Hay 1963.
- 17.
Using the term made influential by Taylor 2008.
- 18.
Of course, his picture of Muslims as aristocracy could be faulted; they were not exclusively an aristocracy.
- 19.
It will be seen here and throughout this chapter that I use Rajeev Bhargava’s distinction between the two sides of secularity – the ethical and the political – because it gives us away of thinking clearly about the complex mass of issues involved in this field (Bhargava 1998).
- 20.
Vanya Vaidehi Bhargava, Between Hindu and Indian: the nationalist thought of Lala Lajpat Rai, Ph D Dissertation, University of Oxford, 2018.
- 21.
For an excellent exposition of the principles underlying the constitutional design, see Bhargava, 2011.
- 22.
That did not mean that the opposite point of view was not represented with force: Savarkar, Golwalkar, S. P. Mookerjee presented arguments that favored a radically different vision of freedom – based on a Hindu nation, a Hindu state and institutional dominance of the religious majority. It is also essential to remember that, on the Pakistan side, it was the opposite argument that won.
- 23.
I am indebted to my colleague Akeel Bilgrami for this insight – which he presented in cotaught courses. It is also important to remember that Gandhi’s thoughts on this question were inconsistent, complex and, at times, cryptic. It is hard to extract from his works an unambiguous blueprint for the future.
- 24.
To say Nehru was generally influenced by Bankim will be misleading, but there is no doubt that Bankim decisively broke with the ideological belief that colonialism created a replication of European modernity in the empires. To him, it undermined traditional cultures and established a caricatured, degraded form of the modern.
- 25.
Dadabhai Naoroji’s famous phrase. Bankinchandra would have said that to expect “British rule” from the British was itself a gratuitous self-deception.
- 26.
Many Indian thinkers used the concept “human” in expansive and interesting ways to support ideas of cosmopolitanism. One example is Tagore’s idea of a “religion of man”; see Tagore 1961These ideals were universal in two senses. First, they were universal in their presentation. Like some religious ideals – Christianity or Islam – their creators saw them as applicable to all human beings who accepted them, and agreed to live by them. Second, these were also universal in their potential realization. There was no reason why human beings in African or Asian societies could not adopt and realize them.
- 27.
This is a necessarily crude way of putting it; for a concise statement of the interconnectedness of these ideals, see Taylor 2008. The concept of social imaginaries rather than theories has several advantages, but that is a separate discussion that cannot be taken up here.
- 28.
I use transfiguration in a literal meaning. From abstract general principles of liberal ideals Western societies evolved distinctive figures/figurations of political institutions. I want to stress that the framers of the constitution used identical principles but crafted a different figuration of institutions to match their circumstances.
- 29.
Rajeev Bhargava, The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2010, especially chapters 1 and 3.
- 30.
Kaviraj, 2005: 497–526.
- 31.
We should date the emergence of modern democracy unromantically after the 1930s and not accept confusing arguments that its origins lay in the Glorious Revolution.
- 32.
Though this is not the place to analyze that fascinating period of intellectual history, the Partition could be used in favor of arguments that were diametrically opposed: that with the Partition, state secularism in India became redundant or that state secularism became essential.
- 33.
Hindu nationalist writers like Golwalkar saw minority rights as illegitimate “privileges.” See Golwalkar 1939.
- 34.
Not surprisingly, after the Modi government got stable majorities in 2014 and 2019 elections, it has sought to modify juridical rules to disadvantage minorities, though it has not attempted to change the secular character of the constitution.
- 35.
For an excellent exposition of the innovativeness of Indian secularism and its structures of justification, see Bhargava, 2011.
- 36.
This showed that though the framers thought that philosophically a uniform code was justified, historical circumstances required that family laws of minority groups were not legally reformed. Some intellectuals believe that Nehru’s policies were misguided on this question; protection of traditional personal law militates against the interests of the more vulnerable sections inside the community and gives undue power to traditional intellectuals. On the other hand, Nehru should have taken a much stronger stand on the question of Urdu as a language of some of the Indian states.
- 37.
For a robust defense of the constitution and on the untenability of some of these charges, see Sen 1998: 454–485.
- 38.
Tractatus Philosophico-Politicus, and Locke, Letters on Toleration.
- 39.
This has been recognized clearly for a long time in the work of Rajeev Bhargava who distinguishes between ‘political’ and ‘ethical’ meanings of the term secular in India. I am providing a clarificatory historical exposition of the process through which this came to happen.
- 40.
This seems to me a crucial point, which has not been given due attention in Indian debates, even in the 1940s. For a fuller statement, see Ahmed and Kaviraj 2018.
- 41.
It is important to recognize the profound change in the language of our political universe: from the 1940s to the 1980s, the major trope in political discourse was exploitation/ oppression drawn from a socialist imaginary; since the 1980s, this has been replaced by the liberal sensitivity to discrimination.
- 42.
Unlike the debate about dominion status and complete independence before decolonization.
- 43.
It is interesting how often the Marxist-led government of West Bengal criticized the Centre for discrimination against their state.
- 44.
This does not mean however that the older language of revolution disappeared without trace. In the new politics of disadvantaged groups, echoes of the earlier revolutionary rhetoric are clearly heard. One interesting instance is the characterization of Ambedkar as an ‘insurgent’ figure, instead of the conventional appellation ‘revolutionary’- associated with Marxists.
- 45.
T. N. Madan delivered “Secularism in Its Place” as a keynote address to the Fulbright program of the American Association of Asian Studies in Boston in 1987. It was remarkably prescient, as it diagnosed a deep malaise in Indian politics many years before this manifested itself in the first government led by the BJP.
- 46.
Nandy 1995: 35–64.
- 47.
Between them, Nandy and Madan presented the transversal question to secularist theory with unprecedented clarity and urgency. What happened to Western ideals when they went across the boundaries of one historical universe into another? See also John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.
- 48.
Madan’s arguments are stated fully in his work, Locked Minds, but I am concerned here primarily with his widely noted essay, because of its immense impact. There are some similarities between Madan’s criticisms and later critiques of secularism by other scholars like Talal Asad: but these are limited to the point that Christianity has a distinction between two spheres internal to its vocabulary which was expanded by later developments of secularism.
- 49.
I have presented these two objections in my short introduction to the section on the sociology of religion in Kaviraj 1998. This is merely an expansion of those two points.
- 50.
For a discussion of this process, see Jones and Katznelson 2011.
- 51.
“Roughly,” because Bhargava’s distinction is primarily a conceptual one, not related to questions of historical sociology.
- 52.
Nandy, 1998: 321–344. For a paper with a more polemical title, see Nandy 1995: 35–64.
- 53.
Madan 1987.
- 54.
Partha Chatterjee, however, argues in his paper, “Secularism and Tolerance,” that there is a fundamental difference between the Soviet and Turkish cases and India. The Nehruvian state was, in fact, ratifying a prior agreement for reform among the Hindu elites. So the cases are not historically comparable. For reasons of space, I cannot expand on this aspect of the debate. See Chatterjee 1994: 1768–1777.
- 55.
Though this is Madan’s phrase (Madan 1987).
- 56.
Taylor views this as crucial to the processes of secularization in Europe.
- 57.
Nandy, 1998: 321–344.
- 58.
Strictly, Nandy’s use is justified because it saves us from calling Gandhi a ‘secular’ thinker.
- 59.
I have tried to develop an argument on thick and thin religion that draws on Nandy’s initial insight. See Kaviraj, 2013.
- 60.
This point is constantly stressed in histories of Western secularism: the success of the new Protestant elites in remaking the people in their own image. In India, by contrast, the modernist elite comes to adopt secularist ideas, but they fail to convert ordinary people to their irreligiosity. Consequently, Western societies become generally secularized; Indian society becomes catastrophically divided between the elites and the masses.
- 61.
There is a long and varied tradition of this argument in Western thought from Locke (ordinary people cannot reason, they must believe), to Rousseau (they must be forced to be free) to Marx (false consciousness).
- 62.
The fact that such ideas can be found in Locke, Rousseau and Marx – i.e., liberal, antiliberal and socialist thinkers – actually shows how widely these ideas are held in the tradition of modernist thought.
- 63.
In medieval India, for instance, opposed to tendencies represented by Abul Fazl and Akbar, there are less accommodative trends offered by the historian Badayuni and more hostile strands like Sirhindi. Similarly, Bhakti devotional forms were not the only form of Hindu religious practice; conventional Brahminical sects practiced a form of Hindu faith that was not tolerant towards other religious paths.
- 64.
Interestingly, this makes secularism appear very similar to the ‘dream’ of communalism.
- 65.
In some ways, the most profound influence that can be detected in Nandy’s reflections come from The Dialectic of the Enlightenment.
- 66.
It is perverse, therefore, to think of his argument as giving solace to Hindu nationalists. Sensitive to this point, Hindu nationalists have treated Nandy with hostility.
- 67.
On this matter, there is an obvious disconnect between the persistent presentism of social science research and the demand for historical analysis of religious traditions. Claims about both intolerance and tolerance of traditional thinking tend to be abstract and general – with little attention to sects, texts, thinkers or specific propositions. Social scientists usually trade in generalities – like the belief that Hinduism is a tolerant religion or the contrary one that it is oppressive or that Sufi and Bhakti devotion encourages universal brotherhood.
- 68.
I called these, following him, two clusters of questions.
- 69.
The decision of the Indian political elites to seriously reform Hindu family law while leaving Muslim personal law untouched is a complex analytical case. Bhargava calls their stance “principled” distance clearly to differentiate it from the equidistance demanded by American practice of a wall of separation. Both supporters and critics of the Nehruvian regime noted the asymmetry in treating the religious communities separately and noted that they were not treated equally. Bhargava’s argument is that the state intervene in religious practices when it believed such action was required in the interest of nonsubjection. That creates a difficulty. It is clear that the political leaders treated castes in that fashion and saw it as central to Hindu religion; abolishing untouchability, therefore, applied only to Hinduism, not other religious groups. Sociologically, however, caste segregation and caste-based discrimination are fairly widely practiced phenomena, which led to complaints from Muslim and Christian groups that their disadvantage was not addressed due to this restriction. On the status of women, it is hard to argue that changes in Hindu law and noninterference in Muslim practices were based on this criterion unless it is claimed that Hindu codes are discriminatory and Islamic codes are not. However, there was a principle involved, though it was a different one. It was based on a historical circumstantial judgment that, given the sensitivity of Muslims after Partition, their personal laws should not be reformed until later.
- 70.
I am indebted to conversations with my colleagues, Alfred Stepan and Karen Barkey, about the Indian and Turkish cases of secularism. Some of these differences were not clear to me earlier. Some of these comparisons are pursued in the book from a conference on democracy and religious pluralism (Columbia University, Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, February 2016).
- 71.
Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Series 2, Volume 16, i, pp. 603–12.
- 72.
In fact, some of their correspondence gives credence to this construction.
- 73.
In that novel, two entirely antipodal characters, a highly educated professional Brahmo man and an uneducated traditional Hindu woman, are able to take a calm and accommodationist view in the middle of all the hostile excitement of religious conflict. Tagore’s narrative shows – of course, diegetically – that it is possible for individuals who inhabit and think through traditional and modernist “languages” to craft decisional positions that are nearly identical, though working in quite different alphabets. Implicitly, Tagore stresses what I have called the alphabetic or “structural” quality of these languages. His story shows that neither Hinduism nor Brahmo religion constituted solidly homogeneous doctrines but structures of thinking that could be inflected in different directions by individual intellectual proclivity and experience. It seems to me that this is a narrative instantiation of Tagore’s larger philosophical views about an underlying connection between all religions, which he called in one of his works, manusher dharma, “the religion of man” (Tagore 1961).
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Kaviraj, S. (2023). Languages of Secularity. In: Laurence, J. (eds) Secularism in Comparative Perspective. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13310-7_3
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