Confronting Secularism in Europe and India: Legitimacy and Disenchantment in Contemporary Times 9781472552501, 9781780935065

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List of Contributors Rochana Bajpai is senior lecturer (associate professor) at the Department of Politics and International Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. She is the author of Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India (2011), and of several articles and chapters in edited volumes on minority representation, secularism, social justice and liberalism in India. Her most recent publication is ‘From Ideas to Hegemony: Ideational change and Affirmative action policy in Malaysia, 1955–2010’ (co-authored) in the Journal of Political Ideologies. Rajeev Bhargava is senior fellow and director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. His publications include Individualism in Social Science, Oxford, 1992, Secularism and Its Critics, Delhi (ed.) 1998, The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy, Delhi, 2010 and What Is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It, Delhi, 2010. Brian Black is lecturer in Religious Studies in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at the University of Lancaster. His research interests include Indian religions, comparative philosophy, the use of dialogue in Indian religious and philosophical texts, and Hindu and Buddhist ethics. He is author of the book The Character of the Self in Ancient India: Priests, Kings, and Women in the Early Upaniṣads (SUNY, 2007); he is co-editor (with Simon Brodbeck) of the book Gender and Narrative in the Mahābhārata (Routledge, 2007); and he is co-editor (with Laurie Patton) of the book series Dialogues in South Asian Traditions: Religion, Philosophy, Literature and History (Ashgate). Nandini Chatterjee is lecturer in History at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. She is the author of The Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830–1960 (Palgrave, 2011), and of articles related to family and property disputes, personal status laws and identity negotiations, which have been published in journals such as Modern Asian Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History and American Historical Review. She is currently working on projects related to Islamic law in colonial and pre-colonial India. Gavin Hyman is senior lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at the University of Lancaster. He is author of The Predicament of Postmodern Theology (2001), A Short History of Atheism (2010) and Traversing the Middle: Ethics, Politics, Religion (2013) and editor of New Directions in Philosophical Theology (2004). Vincent P. Pecora has taught at the University of Arkansas (1984–85), the University of California, Los Angeles (1985–2005), and has directed summer seminars for

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the School of Criticism and Theory (2002) and the Social Science Research Council (2010). He teaches currently at the University of Utah, where he holds the Gordon B. Hinckley Chair in British Literature and Culture. He works primarily in the areas of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, critical theory and intellectual history and most recently on the question of secularization in modernity. His work has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, Korean and Chinese. He is the author of Self and Form in Modern Narrative (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), Households of the Soul (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and he is the editor of Nations and Identities: Classic Readings (Blackwell Publishers, 2001). His current project is a book titled Secularization without End: Modernity and the Vicissitudes of Religion. The argument of the book, which is in many ways a sequel to his earlier 2006 volume, is that the ‘common sense’ secular ideal represented by the complete translation of religious truths into secular ones is in all likelihood an impossible and, perhaps, an undesirable goal. Graham M. Smith is lecturer in Political Theory in POLIS at the University of Leeds. His publications include Friendship and the Political: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schmitt (2011), ‘Through a Glass, Darkly: The Vision and Visions of Political Theory’ (2009) and ‘Reading Kafka’s Trial Politically: Justice-Law-Power’ (2008). Deborah Sutton is senior lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Lancaster. Her publications include Other Landscapes: Colonialism and the Predicament of Authority in Nineteenth-Century South India (Nordic Institute for Asian Studies Press, Copenhagen, 2009; Orient Blackswan, Delhi, 2011) and articles in Modern Asian Studies, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Contemporary South Asia and the Journal of Historical Sociology. Mark Wenman is a lecturer in Politics at the University of Nottingham, and currently a lead editor of Political Studies and editor-in-chief of Political Studies Review. He has published numerous articles on pluralism, post-structuralism and democratic theory, and has recently completed a monograph titled Agonistic Democracy: Constituent Power in the Era of Globalisation, which is published with Cambridge University Press in 2013. Evert van der Zweerde is professor of Political Philosophy at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. He studied philosophy and Russian language and culture at the universities of Nijmegen, Moscow [MGU] and Fribourg. He did his PhD in 1994 on philosophy in the former USSR. Since then, he has been doing research on Russian philosophy, civil society, community, European integration, religion and politics, and democracy, resulting in publications in (mostly) international journals. Some recent publications: ‘The Rise of the People: the Political Philosophy of the Vekhovtsy’, in Ruth Coates, Robin Aizlewood (eds), Landmarks Revisited: The Vekhi Symposium One Hundred Years On (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013)  [also appeared in German and Russian]; ‘Mix the Balance! Democracy as a Paradoxical Process’, in J. Gijsenbergh, Saskia Hollander, Tim Houwen, Wim de Jong (eds),

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Creative Crises of Democracy (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2012), pp.  23–46; ‘Permanente Asymmetrie; Kirche und Staat, Staat und Kirche’, Osteuropa 59 (2009), 6, pp. 47–62; ‘ “Plurality in Unity”: European Identity and European Citizenship’, Limes 2 (2009), pp. 5–25. He coordinated interdisciplinary and international research projects and was co-editor of, among others, Vladimir Solov’ëv: Reconciler and Polemicist (Leuven &c: Peeters, 2000), Civil Society, Religion, and the Nation (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), Dwarse interventies (Amsterdam: Parrèsia, 2011), Denkruimte (Nijmegen: Valkhof Pers, 2012) and Orthodox Christianity and Human Rights (Leuven &c: Peeters, 2012). Member of the (advisory) board of the following scholarly journals: Studies in East European Thought; Journal of Eastern Christian Studies; Religion, State & Society; Limes; Transcultural Studies; and Religija, Gosudarstvo, Cerkov’ v Rossii i za rubezhom [all in English, except the last (Russian)].

Acknowledgements This book and many of the chapters included in it emerged out of two conferences held by the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at the University of Lancaster. The first was titled ‘Confronting Secularism: Legitimacy and Disenchantment in Contemporary Times’ and took place in April 2011; the second was titled ‘Asian Religious Values and Social Justice’ and took place in September 2011. The editors would like to acknowledge the support of the Lancaster India Centre, the Lancaster Environment Centre and the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion for making these events possible. We would also like to thank our respective families, the staff at Bloomsbury and the following people who have supported and contributed to this project: Paul Devadoss, Bill Davies, Hiroko Kawanami, Amalendu Misra and Alison Stone.

Introduction: Confronting Secularism in Europe and India Brian Black

Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means. Mohandas Gandhi1

Introduction Since the early 1990s there have been a number of publications in both India and Europe which have, in one way or another, challenged contemporary conceptions about secularism, its history, its relationship with religion, its complicity in violence and its capacity to deal with increasingly pluralistic societies.2 While the various interrogations and defences of secularism have taken shape differently in India and in Europe – representing a range of different circumstances, motivations and assumptions – there are also a number of issues that are similar and, indeed, interrelated. This book adds to this debate by staging a creative encounter between European and Indian conceptions of secularism with a view to continuing new and distinctive trajectories of thought about the place and role of secularism in contemporary times. By looking at the conceptions and debates about secularism in India and Europe side by side, it is our aim to bring into sharper focus certain assumptions about, characteristics of, and possibilities for secularism in each context. The chapters in this book cover a range of different disciplines and fields of study, including religious studies, politics, history, philosophy and literature. This introduction will discuss the chapters that follow in relation to four sets of issues concerning secularism that have emerged among recent debates in both India and Europe: (1) political secularism; (2) the relationship between secularism and religion; (3) the relationship between secularism, religion and violence; and (4) some of the suggestions put forth recently to restore, refashion, or move beyond secularism.

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Political secularism According to many theorists, secularism in the West is in crises. William Connolly, for example, has proclaimed: ‘The historical modus vivendi called secularism is coming apart at the seams’ (1999, p.  19). While the motivations and analyses among critics of secularism vary considerably, in Europe one of the most significant challenges to the secular ideal is an increasing religious pluralism, particularly as more people from non-European origins engage in public life. As Jürgen Habermas has reflected: ‘In societies like ours which are still caught in the painful process of transformation into postcolonial immigrant societies, the issue of tolerant coexistence between different religious communities is made harder by the difficult problem of how to integrate immigrant cultures socially’ (2008b, p.  20). While Habermas has argued for a post-secular stance that allows for more participation from religious communities, critics such as Connolly point to an intolerance within secularism towards religion (1999, p. 4). Both defenders and critics seem to agree, however, that a crucial challenge to the secular ideal is how to accommodate an increasing religious plurality in Europe today. As with Europe and North America, there have been several recent announcements of the decline or failure of secularism in India. Stanley Tambiah notes that talk of a crisis appears ‘in academic and journalistic writing, and even more significantly in the speeches of politicians inside and outside parliament’ (1998, p. 418). One of the most persistent criticisms has been aimed at the Indian state’s perceived inability to contain religious conflict. As Peter van der Veer explains: ‘The violent events around the destruction of the Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 culminating in the horrendous anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat under the BJP government of Narendra Modi in 2002 in which thousands of Muslims lost their lives and property drew attention to the nature of the secular state’ (van der Veer, 2008, p. 384). Unlike in Europe, where secularism is seen as a product of its own cultural traditions and historical circumstances, in India many critics consider secularism to be a foreign political framework that is ill suited to an Indian context. Moreover, many critics understand recent violence episodes in India as emerging from secularism’s intolerance of religion. Partha Chatterjee, for example, argues that rather than protecting religious diversity, secularism and religious toleration ‘work at cross-purposes’ (1998, p. 348). Similarly, T. N. Madan argues that secularism is a specifically European ideal, which, in its original sense, is the ‘ideology of those committed to bringing about the decline of religion in human affairs’ (Madan, 2010, p. 87). Ashis Nandy adds that because of its anti-religious, Western roots, secularism is not appropriate for India, with its distinctively diverse religious landscape (1998). Looking at the secularism debates in Europe and India side by side, we see that in both contexts critics challenge secularism’s ability to cope with pronounced religious plurality. In Europe much of the concern is about to what extent an increasing plurality threatens liberal values, while in India a key issue is to what degree liberal values can be modified to fit into a more complexly diverse cultural landscape. In both contexts, then, we might see a dialectic between liberalism and

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pluralism, which Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad describes as the relationship between ‘the normative conception of the citizen as individual and the pluralistic fact of individuals deriving identity from belonging to different groups’ (2012, p. 676). The first two chapters of this book offer defences of secularism against the criticism that it cannot accommodate religious diversity. Rochana Bajpai specifically addresses the criticisms of Chatterjee, Madan and Nandy, arguing that the differences between European and Indian secularisms are exaggerated and that Indian secularism is more flexible and accommodative to religious diversity than is usually acknowledged. Rajeev Bhargava also explores Indian secularism’s ability to accommodate vast religious diversity  – which he sees as a distinctive characteristic  – maintaining that the best practices of Indian secularism offer valuable resources for refashioning secularism in Europe. Both Bajpai and Bhargava challenge the assumption that secularism should be seen as a uniquely European political framework, as they highlight ways in which secularism has been adapted to an Indian context. In Chapter  1, Rochana Bajpai argues that Indian secularism offers important resources for a multi-cultural society, particularly in its potential to protect the rights of minority communities. Taking her evidence from the Constituent Assembly debates of the 1940s and parliamentary discussions after the Shah Bano case in the 1980s, Bajpai maintains that Indian secularism is not necessarily hostile to religion, that the separation of the state and religion can take multiple forms, and that secularism and other Western liberal concepts are both intelligible and relevant in an Indian context. In her discussion, Bajpai also brings to attention one of the most distinctive features of Indian secularism: the state’s recognition of the rights of groups. Rather than interpreting community-based rights as contradicting secular principles, however, Bajpai argues that such rights are an extension of European secularist ideals, such as the ‘values of liberal citizenship, of non-discrimination and equality for all individuals’ (p. 26). Indeed, in response to critics, such as Chatterjee, Madan and Nandy, Bajpai sees the recognition of community-based rights as an example of where proponents of Indian secularism were motivated by a genuine commitment to providing protection for vulnerable minorities, not by an anti-religious agenda. As Bajpai explains: ‘secularism was seen to entail substantial individual and group religious freedoms and allow for the expression of religious difference. Secularism was also invoked by minority representatives in support of group-differentiated rights such as quotas and religious personal laws’ (p. 32). While Bajpai agrees that there are distinctive features of Indian secularism, she also argues that the contrasts between Western and Indian secularism are ‘overstated’ (p. 22). In particular, she challenges the claim that the separation model is unique to Europe and North America, highlighting a number of facets of Indian secularism that assume some form of separation. Bajpai notes that a conception of separation held strongly by members of the Constituent Assembly was one that was defined in opposition to the establishment of religion or to a theocracy. Here Bajpai brings to attention that while the independent Indian state inherited some policies from the British colonial government, contributors to drafting India’s constitution often

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defined secularism in opposition to British colonial policies, rather than as an extension of them. Secularism was thus defined against what was considered the mixing of religion and politics by the British (p.  25), particularly the practice of religion-based separate electorates, which was regarded as a direct cause of Partition. Defined in opposition to British colonialism, Indian secularism was seen as the glue for a post-Independence nationalism. As Bajpai explains, the secular state ‘was to be the agency for welding together diverse and conflicting religious groups into a nation’ (p. 29). Bajpai concludes her chapter by taking issue with Nandy’s suggestion that the best alternative to secularism is a return to India’s indigenous cultural traditions (for further discussion of Nandy’s ‘critical traditionalism’, see Chapter  8). While Bajpai recognizes that ‘religious traditions found in everyday ways of living’ offer ‘resources for accommodation’ (p.  33), she also points out that such ‘resources are unlikely to suffice on their own for the protection of minority rights’ (p.  38). As such, with its special provisions for minority groups, secularism offers ‘more normative resources for multiculturalism than have hitherto been tapped in state practice in India and beyond’ (p. 38). Throughout her discussion, Bajpai addresses the question of whether Indian secularism is distinct from European models, claiming that ‘the influential contrast between a “Western” model of separation between state and religion and a distinctively “Indian” model of equal respect for all religions, is overstated’ (p.  37). As we have seen, however, a recurring criticism of secularism in India is that it is a European political ideal that is not appropriate to other cultural contexts.3 In the context of this debate, we might ask what secularism looked like in Europe before it was imposed upon India through colonization. Political secularism in Europe is often traced back to the Peace of Augsberg and the Treaty of Westphalia, two settlements that attempted to address the sectarian violence of the Wars of Religion. Others have traced some of the foundational ideals of secularism  – such as the separation of the public and private sphere, religious toleration and universal human rights – to the Enlightenment, particularly to philosophers such as John Locke, David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Yet it was not for another century, as Vincent Pecora has pointed out, until states would adopt more secular political arrangements. As Pecora reflects, ‘the rise of secularism has in fact been a relatively slow and uneven story in Christianity’ (Pecora, 2006, p. 13). It was only after the American and French Revolutions when states began to adopt a ‘political tolerance’ that ‘granted equal rights to Catholics and to the range of Protestant sects’ (ibid.). The ‘slow and uneven’ development of secular policies in Europe is important to keep in mind when looking at the relationship between Indian and European secularism, particularly in light of arguments that the colonial encounter was crucial in developing Europe’s self-understanding. While the influence of colonialism in shaping Indian conceptions of secularism might seem obvious, the influence of the colonial encounter on European, particularly British, ideals of secularism has only recently been recognized. As we have seen, critics of secularism in India have presented it as a uniquely Western concept that emerged out of the Protestant Reformation, later to be imposed upon or exported to other places in the world. Similarly, Western scholars,

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such as Charles Taylor, have portrayed secularism as emerging out of reformist tendencies within Christianity. While such accounts bring to attention the complex relationship between Christianity and the emergence of European secularism, they often only address a particular thread of its development. Moreover, such accounts tend not to confront the significant ways the colonial encounter has shaped Western notions of the secular. Along these lines, Saba Mahmood criticizes Taylor’s account of the emergence of the secular age in the West on the grounds that it treats the ‘north Atlantic’ world as if it had been hermetically sealed from the rest of the globe when its concepts of religion and secularism were emerging (2010). As she points out, through the colonial encounter Europeans became aware of cultural traditions, beliefs, practices and institutions that they had never experienced before. This encounter with difference, Mahmood maintains, made significant contributions to the way ideas of the religious and the secular would be imagined and articulated. In other words, the emergence of the secular age in the ‘North Atlantic’ cannot be explained merely in terms of some logical trajectory within Christianity itself, but needs to take into account the colonial encounter as an influential factor in shaping European and North American notions of religion and the secular. Moreover some of the most enduring aspects of European secularism emerged in a colonial setting before they took full effect back in Europe. In the first several decades of colonial rule, the British East India Company became entangled with Indian religious groups and institutions in a variety of ways. But, as van der Veer notes, partly because of pressure from Evangelical groups in Britain, the colonial government in India not only ended its previous practice of interfering with local religious groups and institutions, ‘but also did much to disavow any connection to the missionary project as such’ (2001, p.  22). The colonial government, thus, distanced itself from religious institutions in both India and in Britain, considering ‘a sharp separation of church and state essential to their ability to govern India’ (ibid.). Ironically, then, by the end of the nineteenth century, one ‘can speak of a definite secularity of the British state in India that was much stronger than in Britain itself ’ (ibid.). Another excellent example of secular practices being developed in the colonies, as demonstrated by Gauri Viswanathan (1989), is the British colonial policy of a ‘secular’ education in India. As Mahmood explains, a secular religious education was originally meant to be ‘for the ideological pacification and reformation of a potentially rebellious Indian population’, but would later be imported back to England and would ‘set the standard for secular education in British public schools’ (2010, p. 288). Taken together, the arguments of van der Veer, Mahmood and Viswanathan, as well as others, indicate that many ideas and practices related to secularism emerged in India and Britain at the same time and as a result of the colonial encounter. When seen in this way, secularism no longer appears as a political framework that had already been developed in Europe and was then imposed on India – as well as on other colonies – but rather can be understood as being forged out of a shared colonial experience. The interrelated histories of European and India secularism are worth keeping in mind when we turn to Rajeev Bhargava’s provocative chapter, where he proposes that India offers a model of secularism that could be a helpful resource for Europeans as

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they rethink their own modes of secularism in response to increasingly pluralistic societies. Bhargava begins his chapter with a critique of both the French and American versions of secularism, neither of which, he maintains, can cope with the ‘everdeepening diversity’ (p. 39) found in Western societies today. Bhargava attributes what he sees as Europe’s lack of appreciation for deep religious and cultural diversity to the fact that European secularism ‘developed in the context of a single religion society and to solve the problems of one religion, namely Christianity’ (p. 43).4 In contrast, Indian secularism emerged in the context of a profound religious and cultural diversity, meaning that the relationship between religion and the state had to be conceived more complexly from the start. As with Bajpai, Bhargava sees Indian secularism as particularly capable of addressing religious diversity through its recognition of community-based rights. As Bhargava explains, Indian secularism ‘has a place not only for the rights of individuals to profess their religious beliefs but also for the right of religious communities to establish and maintain educational institutions crucial for the survival and sustenance of their distinctive religious traditions’ (p.  50). With the recognition of both individual and community-based rights, Indian secularism incorporates a certain flexibility which Bhargava sees as lacking in Western variants: ‘by not fixing its commitment from the start exclusively to individual or community values or marking rigid boundaries between the public and private, India’s constitutional secularism allows decisions on these matters to be taken either within the open dynamics of democratic politics or by contextual reasoning in the courts’ (p. 51). In his chapter in this book, and throughout his work, Bhargava not only defends Indian secularism, but also offers a quite radical refashioning of secularism itself. Bhargava characterizes his proposed model, which he calls ‘contextual secularism’, as a multi-value doctrine. Such a model, Bhargava maintains, confronts the challenge of diversity because it does not always favour the values of individuals over communities, or the values of one community over those of another. Whereas single-value doctrines always dictate an outcome to a specific conflict in favour of a specific value, a multivalue doctrine, according to Bhargava, admits no a priori rule of resolving conflicts: ‘no easy lexical order, no pre-existing hierarchy among values or laws that enable us to decide that, no matter what the context, a particular value must override everything else’ (p. 56). As Bhargava elaborates: ‘Almost everything then is a matter of situational thinking and contextual reasoning . . . If this is true, then the practice of secularism requires a different model of moral reasoning than the one that straightjackets our moral understanding in the form of well delineated, explicitly stated rules’ (p.  56). Such an Indian model of secularism, Bhargava concludes, ‘offers the most peaceful, freedom-sensitive, and democratic way forward’ (p. 53).

Secularism and religion As we can see in the development of political secularism, a crucial point in understanding the connotations of the secular is examining how it has been defined

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in relation to religion. In India and Europe this relationship has been theorized differently, yet in both contexts recent discussions suggest that religious ideals have been more integral to a secular worldview than had previously been recognized. In Europe secularism has tended to be defined in contrast with religion. As José Casanova observes: ‘The secular is often assumed to be simply the other of the religious, that which is nonreligious’ (2011, p. 55). Recently, however, scholars have challenged the notion of an oppositional relationship, with Taylor, for example, arguing that the secular is not in contrast to religion, or the absence of religion, but a worldview that in many ways has been shaped by post-Reformation Christianity. This secular worldview, according to Taylor, is a comprehensive way of organizing the world that cannot be reduced to a ‘subtraction story’ (2007, pp. 26–29). As such, the secular worldview is not a natural way of thinking about the world once the superstitions and irrationalities of religion have been stripped away. By implication, Taylor’s analysis challenges the assumption that secularism can be seen as a neutral or objective position. Taylor calls his portrayal of the secular worldview the ‘immanent frame’, which refers to making sense out of the world in terms of human temporality and a ‘this-worldly causality’ (Calhoun, Juergensmeyer and van Antwerpen, 2011, p.  10). As with any religious perspective, the secular worldview is also based on transcendental assumptions, even if they remain implicit. In addition to bringing attention to the similar conceptual structures of secularism and religion, Taylor traces the long process through which European secularity emerged out of a specifically Christian worldview. Beginning with the late medieval period, Taylor shows how a tendency within the Christian tradition towards reform eventually led to the secular worldview characteristic of the modern period (2007, pp.  61–88). Taylor has perhaps described this process in more depth than others, but similar arguments – that the secular emerges out of an ascetic tendency within Christianity – have been made much earlier by critics of modernity, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber. As Pecora observes: for Nietzsche and Weber secular modernity is ‘the last phase of a Judeo-Christian but especially Protestant ascetic ideal’ (2006, p. 12). In Chapter  3, Gavin Hyman makes a different argument, but one related and complementary to Taylor’s. Through an exploration of the Elizabethan reformation settlement of 1558, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute, and the adoption of a more secular political arrangement in Britain in the nineteenth century, Hyman argues that secularism in Anglo-America did not emerge out of an opposition to religion, but rather out of an attempt to find a common ground in contexts marked by what he calls ‘a pluralisation of legitimacy’. By tracing a genealogy of secularism through these three contexts, Hyman observes a process in which a common ground is stretched as society becomes more pluralistic. Hyman characterizes the emergence of modern secularism, not as an initial move towards separation, but rather as a gradual thinning down of a common ground, until no substantive values remain. Seen in this way, modern secularism has a closer relationship with early modern states which had an established religion, than is usually acknowledged. ‘Secularism, then, far from being juxtaposed to these earlier religious polities is, in fact, in direct continuity with them’ (p.  70). Hyman

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suggests that by recognizing this continuity, we gain a perspective into secularism’s inherent fragility – a fragility implying that ‘secularism is likely to fragment when it is no longer able to contain the multiplicity within it’ (p. 70). Hyman concludes that if ‘secularism will no longer be able to serve as the transcendental regulator of differences, it will have to accept a new status as a partisan participant in the encounter of differences’ (p. 72). Here Hyman’s observations are similar to those of Connolly, who also sees secularism’s role being reduced to being just one voice among others, as it has lost its claim ‘to embody the authoritative source of public reason’ (1998, pp. 6–7). Connolly imagines a ‘pluralistic political culture’ in which ‘partisans of several types might negotiate a public ethos of engagement drawn from several moral sources’, where ‘no constituency would be allowed to represent authoritatively the single source from which all others must draw in public life’ (1999, p.  5). Along these lines Hyman describes a public landscape, where the ‘attempt to mediate unity and difference will therefore now have to be negotiated from the ground upwards; the sought unity will now have to emerge from within and out of the multiplicity rather than from some transcendental regulating structure outside it’ (pp. 72–3). Whereas in Europe secularism has often been understood in terms of a dichotomy with religion, in India this has not been as much the case, as secularism tends to be defined more in contrast with communalism. In an Indian context, communalism refers to the privileging of religious, caste, and/or regional identities over and above a national identity. Keeping in mind Bajpai’s discussion about the relationship between secularism and nationalism, it is not surprising that in political discourse secularism is often seen as representing the unity of independent India itself, in contrast with communalism, in which pronounced religious, regional and/or caste identities are seen as threatening to tear the nation apart. Since independence, the Indian state  – and in particular the Congress Party – has professed a commitment to taking a neutral stance towards religion, meaning that secularism has been articulated largely in terms of the state’s explicit commitment to avoid favouring one religion over another. Despite such claims to neutrality, some scholars have argued that Indian secularism is pervaded with values specific to Hinduism. Ainslee Embree, for example, has proposed that Indian secularism has been shaped by neo-Hindu portrayals of India as uniquely religious and tolerant, and in particular Mohandas Gandhi’s theological assertion that ‘all religions are true’. According to Embree, Indian secularism ‘is derived not from Western political practice but from Gandhi’s translation of nationalist ideals into the vocabulary of neo-Hinduism’ (1990, p. 44). What Embree refers to as ‘neo-Hinduism’ is a particular construction of Hinduism that developed during the colonial period in the writings of Rammohan Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Sarvapelli Radhakrishnan, among others.5 Gandhi’s formulation that ‘all religions are true’ builds on this portrayal of Hinduism as a tolerant and universal religion. Moreover, Gandhi shared the views of Vivekananda and Aurobindo that ‘only religion would provide the necessary revitalization for both social and political change’ (Copley, 1993, p. 48). In his formulation of his political ideas, such as satyagraha (truth-force) and svaraj

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(self-rule), Gandhi explicitly drew from Indian religious values such as ahimsa (nonviolence) and asceticism, as well as religious sources such as the Bhagavad Gita. Nandini Chatterjee’s discussion in Chapter 4 both extends and complicates the picture of Indian secularism being infused with religious values. Chatterjee rejects the notion that Indian secularism can be traced to the ideas of a single Indian intellectual, such as Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru. Moreover, rather than focusing on Hinduism, Chatterjee traces the contributions of leaders of the Indian Christian community during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in shaping the ideals of Indian secularism. Chatterjee shows how the Indian Christian support of a secular Indian nationalism emerged from what she calls their ‘theological liberalism’, a significant component of which was its ‘active toleration, respect and incorporation of key concepts and some doctrines from other religions, especially Sanskritic Hinduism’ (p.  83). Chatterjee sees this engagement with Sanskritic traditions as part of a protest against racial hierarchies within the Church community, where there was ‘a pervasive assumption that Europeans and “natives” were different and ought to be treated as such’ (p.  81). While pointing out that not all Christians who held this liberal theology were nationalists, Chatterjee claims that for many of the leaders of the Christian community between the 1920s and 1940s, theological liberalism ‘formed a coherent intellectual basis for their non-sectarian approach to religious identity’ (p. 87). But while Chatterjee highlights the ideals of sacrifice articulated and enacted by Indian Christian leaders, she also points to how the ‘virtuous political selves’ (p. 91) constructed by the elite ‘failed to address the needs and aspirations of the vast majority of dalit Christians’. The newly independent secular government of India implemented community-specific electorates for dalits, yet Christian leaders rejected ‘safeguards intended for vulnerable minority communities’ (p. 91). As a result, dalit Christians, ‘unlike all other dalits, remain excluded from the benefits of the affirmative action policies of the Indian government’ (p. 91). Chatterjee concludes her chapter by proposing that Indian Christians can be seen as a case study for a religious engagement in political life. Invoking Taylor’s notion of an immanent frame, Chatterjee suggests that Indian Christian leaders of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be seen as examples of what ‘transcendental politics might look like’ (p. 92).6

Secularism, religion and violence In Chapters  5 and 6 we turn to the complex web of relations between secularism, religion and violence. As we will see, both Mark Wenman and Deborah Sutton address ‘religious’ violence in their discussions of secularism, but they approach this issue in different ways. For Wenman violence associated with religion, particularly in the form of terrorism, informs his critique of modern secularism. He puts forward his ‘politics of conviction’ as a way of addressing one of the major weaknesses in liberal secularism, which he sees as a latent fear of or anxiety towards religion based on its perceived tendency towards violence. Meanwhile, Sutton’s discussion of

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violence engages with recent studies that have criticized the secular state in India, pointing out that even as the state was defining itself as a protector and arbitrator amidst India’s diverse religious communities, it was complicit in violence directed at specific religious groups. The different types of violence addressed by each chapter to a certain extent reflects how ‘religious’ violence is enacted differently in Europe and North America from how it is enacted in India. As Sutton comments: ‘Violence, in the Anglo-American world has come to be defined as something with its origins, if not its terminus, outside of the nation state; as terrorism. In contrast, civic violence in India – whether taking the form of the sporadic riot or the everyday violence of caste prejudice – is a violence founded within the intimacies of national diversity’ (p. 2). One of the core assumptions of modern secularism in both India and Europe is that it is a panacea for sectarian violence, with the secular state depicted as a neutral arbitrator capable of addressing conflict between religious groups. In Europe the so-called Wars of Religion are often considered to be, as Taylor puts it, the ‘origin point of modern Western secularism’ (1998, p. 32). Defenders of secularism continue to invoke the Wars of Religion, not only as the historical roots of the separation of church and state, but as an illustrative reminder of the lurking potential for conflict when religious communities are left to their own devices. William Cavanaugh has recently challenged this narrative, which he calls ‘a creation myth for modernity’ (2009, p. 122). Cavanaugh describes the explanatory power of this narrative in terms of legitimating secularism in the West: ‘The wars of religion, which encompassed over a century of chaos and bloodletting, demonstrated to the West the inherent danger of public religion. The solution to the problem lay in the rise of the modern state, in which religious loyalties were marginalized and the state secured a monopoly on the means of violence. Henceforth, religious passions would be tamed, and Protestants and Catholics could unite on the basis of loyalty to the religiously neutral sovereign state’ (ibid.). In calling this portrayal of the wars of religion an origin ‘myth’, Cavanaugh is not claiming that the wars raging through Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not related to religion, but were really about something else, such as politics, economics or culture. Rather, his point is that ‘these wars were themselves part of the process of creating those very distinctions between religion and politics’ (ibid., 124). As such, the modern state was not merely the solution to violence, but was complicit in the violence as well. Similarly, Talal Asad has questioned both the degree to which religion can be associated with violence and the degree to which secular states can claim to prevent violence. Asad asserts that rather than curbing violence, secular states in Europe and America have shifted ‘the violence of religious wars into the violence of national and colonial wars’ (Asad, 2003, pp.  6–7). Asad links this violence with an intolerance within secularism, which through its very insistence that religion has no active role in the political arena effectively pushes religion to the margins. As Asad elaborates: ‘No movement that aspires to more than mere belief or inconsequential talk in public can remain indifferent to state power in a secular world’ (ibid., p.  200). For Asad, as well as for Nandy, religious violence emerges out of a sense of powerlessness and insecurity. As Nandy argues: ‘Much of the fanaticism and violence associated with religion comes today from the sense of defeat of the believers, from their feelings of

Introduction

11

impotency, and from their free-floating anger and self-hatred while facing a world which is increasingly secular and desacralized’ (1998, p. 332). In Chapter  5, Mark Wenman sees recent violence associated with religion as contributing to what he considers to be a secular ‘anxiety about the politics of conviction’ (p. 96). Following Slavoj Žižek, Wenman argues that ‘the current rise of religiously motivated violence does not follow from confident self-belief but is also a form of passive nihilism’ (p. 96). As Wenman clarifies: ‘In other words, the various modes of religious fanaticism that have emerged in the present context are actually a displacement for an underlying lack of belief ’ (p. 104). In the context of recurring acts of terrorism, Wenman argues that this anxiety or fear of religion has lead to a situation where any political conviction is distrusted because of the lurking threat of a violent eruption. Wenman sees ‘the initial desire to ward off religiously motivated violence’ as eventually leading to ‘a widespread paralysis in the order of political belief or conviction’ (p. 104). Drawing from Connolly – and similar to some of Hyman’s arguments – Wenman observes that in the modern West, there is no longer any common ground, ‘no general comprehensive doctrine’, which ‘can assume the role of a publicly accountable basis of political justice’ (p. 97). As a consequence, the ‘principle objective of the exercise of public reason . . . is therefore to remove from the political agenda the most divisive issues in the hope that convergence on a basic conception of justice (as procedural impartiality) may be achieved’ (p. 97). This inability to address anything meaningful in politics is, as Wenman sees it, why modern secularism is descending into nihilism. Wenman’s response is a ‘post-secular democratic politics’ based on ‘diverse forms of conviction’: a political ethics according to which ‘protagonists seek to persuade one another of the wider significance of their beliefs by becoming a living embodiment of their own convictions’ (p. 96). Here Wenman engages closely with Foucault’s adaption of the Roman ideal of parrhesia, which refers to speaking freely and candidly. As Wenman glosses: ‘the term refers to a form of self-artistry, that was practised by public officials, and designed to cultivate a capacity to speak candidly . . . The virtue at the heart of the pratice of parrhesia is for the actor to establish a kind of congruence between her speech and her conduct’ (p. 109, referring to Foucault, 2005, p. 402). Wenman reflects that such practices of self-cultivation can be the basis of ‘an ethics of confident self-assertion’, so that ‘I become a living example of my own convictions’ (p. 109). Wenman mentions Mohandas Gandhi as a possible exemplar of the politics of conviction in practice. Similarly Akeel Bilgrami has discussed Gandhi’s practice of non-violence (ahimsa) in terms of an ‘integrity’ in which Gandhi’s convictions ‘had a practical urgency in the political and cultural circumstances in which he found himself ’ (2002, p. 85). According to Bilgrami, Gandhi engaged in his political circumstances with the purpose of leading an exemplary life (ibid., p. 86). Bilgrami links Gandhi’s ethical political engagement specifically with his views on nonviolence, which not only included not acting violently, but also demanded no violent thoughts towards others.7 But while Gandhi’s political movement of non-violence is often considered to be a major factor in leading to India’s independence, the violence of partition is cast as

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Confronting Secularism in Europe and India

the legitimation of the secular state. Similar to how Cavanaugh describes the wars of religion, the partition of British India could be seen as ‘the creation myth’ for Indian secularism, ‘explaining the origin of its way of life and system of governance’, as well as telling a ‘story of the overcoming of primordial chaos by the forces of order’ (2009, p. 124). In Chapter  6, Deborah Sutton discusses recent work which has argued that, far from being neutral or protective of minority groups, the Indian state has been complicit in India’s most violent episodes since Independence. Sutton begins by observing that national histories have contributed to a narrative which depicts Indian secularism as ‘an historical corrective on the forces of communal violence which had immediately preceded Independence’ (p.  116). As a consequence, the ideal of secularism has been shielded from any inquiry into the role of the state in such violence. Sutton engages closely with the work of Ashis Nandy, one of the first critics to highlight the Indian state’s complicity in communal violence. Nandy’s ‘Anti-secular manifesto’, published shortly after the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, brings attention the Congress Party’s tacit endorsement and involvement in what he described as ‘secular riots’ (p. 118). In subsequent work, Nandy has continued to reject the state’s claim to be a neutral arbitrator, arguing that the state imposes its authority for the sake of ‘nation-building, scientific growth, security, modernization, and development’ (1998, p. 333). In order to achieve these goals, ‘with the help of modern communications and the secular coercive power at its command, the state frequently uses its ideology to silence its non-conforming citizens’ (ibid.). In a rhetorical reversal of Karl Marx, Nandy argues that it is not religion, but secularism that is the ideology which is manipulated to benefit the ruling class: ‘The positivist, science-centred ideologies of nationality and the conservative and radical theories of progress have come under attack there [the West] as the new opiates of the masses which allow the ruling classes to hand over the State to the technocrats and the controllers of the mass media’ (1995a, p. 43). In this way, as Sutton describes, Nandy sees secularism as a continuation of colonization, as ‘synonymous with the modernity and the violence of the colonial intervention through which the pretences of modernity were inflicted’ (p. 119). Sutton concludes her chapter with a discussion of secularism in the everyday life of India. Looking to the wider culture in which secularism ‘has acquired an extraordinarily idiomatic flexibility’, Sutton observes: ‘The sheer variety of social, cultural and political realms upon which the secular principle has purchase has no equivalent in any other nation. People, spaces, things and processes can be deemed secular, non-secular or insufficiently secular’ (p.  125). Sutton reads this everyday notion of the secular as ‘analogous to the oft enacted concept of “adjustment”’, which ‘requires the recognition of incessant and necessary negotiations and recognizes the real possibility of increments of unanticipated modification’ (p. 126). As Sutton concludes: the ‘idiomatic traditions’ of secularism in India ‘represent a popular ownership. The state is neither enshrined, nor even entrusted, with the sole rights of the term’ (p. 127).

Introduction

13

Beyond secularism? As we have seen, a number of the chapters of this book address the question of whether there is a viable alternative to secularism. Bajpai argues that secularism has more resources to address plurality than has often been recognized; Bhargava has proposed that Western secularism needs to take the lead from India in not privileging one particular religion over others; Hyman, following Connolly, has proposed a political landscape in which secularism is one of several voices among others, with no stake to the claim of neutrality; Chatterjee has proposed that some pre-Independence Indian Christians leaders could be seen as exemplars of an engaged liberal theology; Wenman, as we will see, offers an ethics of the politics of conviction; while Sutton gestures towards an idiomatic secularism of adjustment. The final two chapters of this book engage with two thinkers who propose opposing models for moving beyond secularism. Evert van der Zweerde focuses his discussion closely around the thought of Jürgen Habermas, whose discussions about a postsecular society could be seen as attempts to preserve the basic tenets of secularism, but in a modified way, particularly adjusted in a manner that is more aware of, more sensitive to and more conceptually sophisticated about religion. Whereas Habermas might be considered one of the more conservative theorists in terms of attempting to defend and preserve the secular ideal, Vincent Pecora critically engages with the work of Ashis Nandy, who ‘elaborates an alternative history of secularization that most Western scholarship has been reluctant to embrace’ (p. 149). Through a close reading of Nandy, refracted through a critical dialogue with a range of European thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and Antonio Gramsci, Pecora discusses the theoretical framework through which Nandy launches his critique of secularism and through which he puts forward his alternative notion of a ‘critical traditionalism’. One of the strongest supporters of preserving a secular political arrangement is Jürgen Habermas, who van der Zweerde calls ‘a major European thinker and Europeanist’ (p. 142). Van der Zweerde builds upon Habermas’s work as he presents his own version of a ‘post-secular stance’ that can address the changing political and religious landscape in Europe today. Van der Zweerde frames his discussion within the context of recent controversies across Europe, such as the Danish cartoon affair and burqa legislation in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, among others, reflecting that many current debates entail a conflict between religious and secular values. Echoing Hyman’s characterization of the ‘thinning’ conceptual framework and Wenman’s remarks about the lack of a general comprehensive doctrine, van der Zweerde sees secularism losing the ‘credibility’ of its grand narrative (p. 135). As he suggests, the parameters of the political and social landscape have changed recently throughout Europe with a number of assumptions of a shared secular worldview no longer tenable. Here van der Zweerde is thinking of recent challenges to the secularization thesis which indicate that the secularization process has stabilized, that new groups such as Muslims and Orthodox Christians ‘have become numerically stronger and publicly more visible’, and the emergence of a political and social vacuum

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Confronting Secularism in Europe and India

with the disappearance of Europe’s ‘constitutive other’ in the ‘scientific atheism’ of the former Soviet block. In light of these changes, van der Zweerde advises that European politics ‘must address or readdress religious issues, they have to reengage in “religion politics” and they have to reinvent the overall relationship between religion, society, and polity’ (p. 140). As van der Zweerde observes, Habermas has recently developed his notion of a post-secular stance as an attempt to allow for greater political engagement among religious communities. However, van der Zweerde points out, Habermas ‘shows no signs of wanting to negotiate the secularity of the state or to stop giving it that name’ (p.  143). Moreover, Habermas makes quite high demands for members of religious groups in his outline of a post-secular citizenship. Quoting Habermas, van der Zweerde explains: ‘“Religious” citizens must relate “to competing religions in a reasonable way”, leave “decisions concerning mundane knowledge to the institutional science”, and make “the egalitarian premise of the morality of human rights compatible” with their “own articles of faith”’ (p.  143; from Habermas, 2011, p. 26f.). While Habermas also makes demands on the ‘secular portion of the population’, these requirements, as van der Zweerde observes, ‘are asymmetrical: religious citizens are politically necessitated to transform their religious worldview, while secular citizens face the moral obligation to overcome the limitations of their secularist consciousness’ (p. 144). Recognizing that secularism has lost its claim of neutrality, van der Zweerde  modifies  Habermas’s position in terms of a post-secular stance that ‘is the active refusal to engage in “secularism” (or any other X-ism), and, more generally, of holding back when it comes to the ultimate question of life and human existence. The only viable political theology is, therefore, an active agnosticism’ (p. 148). Such a stance, van der Zweerde maintains, needs to ‘avoid an implicitly secularist position’, while at the same time ‘must learn to cope with difference’ (p. 148). Throughout his discussion, van der Zweerde addresses some very uncomfortable issues about Europe’s track record in dealing with diversity, asking if there is any truth to Jean-Claude Milner’s claim that Europe was born out of genocide (p.  132). As Europe increasingly addresses issues related to ‘dealing with difference’, van der Zweerde warns: ‘The conflict between inclusion and exclusion is as old as human history, and expulsion has always been an option, both for political regimes and for populations that want to get rid of “foreigners”. The large-scale killing of European Jews was a combination of official state policies and popular rage, and anti-Semitism was far from limited to German Nazis. Similarly, anti-Islamism is not limited to the extreme Right, and there is no a priori reason why history should not repeat itself ’ (p.  142). Here we might recall Bhargava’s claim that ‘not appreciating deep religious and cultural diversity is one of the central failures of modern Europe’ (p. 49), which is based on his observation that the emergence of confessional states in Europe was ‘accompanied by massive expulsion of subject-communities whose faith differed from the religion of the ruler’ (p. 45). As we will see in Pecora’s chapter, Nandy also connects the history of Western secularism with brutality, not only

Introduction

15

in terms of Europe’s repeated expulsions on its own continent, but through the colonization of other parts of the globe. As opposed to those who have sought to modify or refashion it, Nandy has outright rejected secularism. Vincent Pecora explores in detail Nandy’s critique of secularism and his proposal of drawing from India’s premodern traditions. As we have seen in the previous section, Nandy views secularism as producing religious violence, rather than acting as an arbitrator. Pecora relates this argument to Nandy’s conviction that secularism imposes a Western, Christian subjectivity that is inappropriate in an Indian context: ‘Hindu nationalism, Muslim resistance, Sikh defensiveness – all these are for Nandy the consequence of a kind of religious identity and subjective morality that has, in effect, been “Christianized”, which is to say put on the path toward a secular society that is deeply at odds with the older religious traditions’ (p.  151). Pecora points out that Nandy is informed by Freud in his understanding of ‘the hyper-masculinity of secular Western subjectivity, most evident in the character of the British colonizer’ (p.  158). Indeed, Nandy goes further, suggesting that the Frankfurt School’s notion of an ‘“authoritarian personality” that made the Third Reich work . . . is more or less indistinct from the masculine subjectivity required of empire building’ as ‘both the Nazi and imperial personalities are finally extensions of the secular liberal individualism required by the modern nation-state’ (p. 162). As an alternative to secularism, Nandy proposes a ‘critical traditionalism’ which, as Pecora explains: ‘imagines the possibility of recovering from religious tradition – again, primarily Hindu tradition  – the foundations of a new, post-nation-state political order’ (p.  159). According to Pecora, critical traditionalism is an attempt to address the questions of secularism ‘along Gandhian lines’ (p.  150). In this way, Nandy sees Gandhi’s project as ‘an attempt to elicit a decentred psyche open to the anarchic, playful, childlike, androgynous and (above all) non-violent moral sensibility that Gandhi derived from the supposedly original Hindu and Christian conceptions of human being and divine ideals’ (p. 156). This solution, Pecora points out, is ‘particularly un-Freudian’ as ‘it involves finding in religion as well as in a host of premodern institutions the psychological ground for a sort of androgyny’ (p.  158). Whereas Freud saw religion as an ‘infantilizing “mass psychosis”’, Nandy ‘sees in religion  – especially in the Gandhian synthesis of Hindu and Christian beliefs – a powerful counter-hegemonic force opposed to the secular masculinity of the individual subject’ (p. 158). Pecora concludes by questioning whether it is too late to return to premodern traditions as Nandy imagines. But while Pecora is perhaps justified in criticizing the plea for a return to India’s traditions, Nandy’s insistence on critiquing the present through traditions of the past is, at least to a certain degree, shared across the spectrum of the debates on secularism in both India and Europe. Indeed, Pecora makes connections between Nandy’s project and a prominent line of Western thinkers who have attempted to address the problems confronted by modernity with a re-engagement with European philosophical and religious traditions. As Pecora explains, Nandy’s idea ‘that it is only by reinterpreting the foundational texts of a cultural tradition that one can remain true to, and hence properly guided by, a cultural

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Confronting Secularism in Europe and India

identity – is equally powerful in Western thought, from Edmund Burke to Alasdair MacIntyre . . . extending into the present in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, and John Milbank’ (p. 164). In the Indian context many thinkers invoke India’s religious and cultural traditions specifically in relation to the issue of plurality. As Nandy explains: ‘traditional ways of life have, over the centuries, developed internal principles of tolerance, and these principles must have a play in contemporary politics’ (1998, p.  336). Indeed, defenders of Indian secularism are just as likely to turn to India’s past in their discussions. Bhargava, for example, reflects on how the ‘complex set of values that coalesce around what later came to be called secularism began to live much earlier’ (Bhargava, 2010a, p.  113); similarly, Amartya Sen, who sees Indian secularism as prefigured by a ‘history of the acceptance of heterodoxy’ (2005, p. 21), specifically points to the figures of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, who had a policy of religious tolerance, and to King Ashoka, who used the term dharma to promote respect among different religions across his empire (ibid., pp.  16–21). But while Sen invokes such figures to argue for a premodern precedent for secularism, Nandy makes the crucial point that there are problems with seeing these figures as secular, with Ashoka basing ‘his tolerance on Buddhism, not on secularism’, Akbar deriving ‘his tolerance not from secularism but from Islam’, and Gandhi’s religious tolerance stemming ‘from Hinduism, not from secular politics’ (1998, p. 337). But as Pecora points out, a nagging problem with his critical traditionalism is that Nandy produces very few details about which traditional sources and which interpretations of them would be able to contribute to resolving today’s conflicts. A similar criticism has been raised about Sen’s work by Jonardon Ganeri (2012, p.  3), who argues that ‘the appeal to India’s cultures of argumentation and public reasoning is hollow if it does not engage with the detail of those cultures’ (ibid., p. 7). A key element of Ganeri’s work is to question the dichotomy between reason and religion, which is so prominent in European secularism. Indeed, this is a criticism that Wenman makes of Habermas. For Habermas, as Wenman explains, the public sphere necessitates that individuals give up any claim to the universality of their faith and ‘thereby acknowledge the importance of the principle of reciprocity in . . . public engagement with others’ (p.  98). Wenman points out that Habermas links this ‘acquisition of these cognitive faculties to the processes of modernisation, following the reformation and the European enlightenment’ (p. 98). In other words, according to Wenman, Habermas’s position is that secularism has the resources to engage with others, while religious traditions do not.8 Ganeri argues, however, that ‘it is a mistake to speak of a conflict between “secular values” and “faith values”, as if a choice has to be made between the two, for the point is to see how any faith can sustain secular principles in activities of public reasoning, equipping its adherents with the resources needed to participate in deliberative democratic procedures’ (2002, p. 7). While Ganeri does not criticize secularism, his points about religious traditions having the resources within them for dealing with diversity echo similar claims made by several chapters in this volume, as well as by Nandy, who declares that ‘in the final analysis, each major faith in the region

Introduction

17

includes within it an in-house version of the other faiths both as an internal criticism and as a reminder of the diversity of the theory of transcendence’ (2002, p. 68).9 But whether or not Nandy’s critical traditionalism is in fact a viable option for India’s future, several of the essays in this volume would seem to agree that there is considerable scope for an engagement with India’s traditions in terms of offering a critical perspective on some of the central issues and debates about secularism in India today, particularly if such engagements include the level of detail demanded by Ganeri. Indeed, if we are to agree with many of the chapters in this book, then one of the central questions facing secularism in both contexts is how to deal with religious plurality. A crucial difference between India and Europe in this regard, however, is that whereas plurality has always been a defining feature of India’s religio-political landscape, the degree of diversity faced in Europe today is relatively recent. In terms of thinking through religious plurality, a re-engagement with India’s traditions might not only shed light on our understanding of secularism in India, but might offer some worthwhile perspectives on European secularism as well.

1

Reframing Secularism: Religion, Nation and Minorities in India Rochana Bajpai

Introduction Contemporary debates on secularism are characterized by a newfound respect for religion. The capacity of religion to relieve human suffering and the need for meaning, the resources that religion offers to motivate common citizenship and tackle problems of order and development, and the tenacity of religion in the face of modernization are now widely acknowledged. Respect for religion is usually accompanied by a need for secularism to recognize its ethical, intellectual and political limits vis-à-vis religion. For some, the limits of secularism are defined by cultural geography, with its remit restricted to the Christian West. Secularism, it has been influentially suggested, is a Western concept, a response of Christian societies to processes of modernization, that does not travel well to non-Western cultures and societies where it is to be found in distorted forms.1 For others, less interested in religion and more in resistance to state power, secularism is inextricably tied to homogenizing nation-states that are intolerant of difference.2 The identification of secularism with the Christian West and with the nation-state have been partially countered in revisionist theories which have highlighted the complex, multi-form character of the secular ideal (Bhargava, 1998; Sen, 1998), the fact that history, while influential, is not destiny, so that concepts can travel ‘in an inventive and imaginative way’ (Taylor, 2011a, p. 32) across cultures. Nevertheless, with the relative decline in Western power in the early twenty-first century, and the growing influence of postcolonial perspectives in the academy, the view that a chastened secularism (and liberalism more generally) should limit its ambition and scope remains influential. This essay seeks to challenge influential criticisms of secularism through an examination of its career in state practice in a key non-Western context, India. Focusing on secularism’s relationship with religion and national unity in two landmark Indian debates, the Constituent Assembly debates (1946–49) and the Shah Bano debate (1986), it argues the following. With regard to religion, Indian debates show that secularism is not necessarily hostile to religion, furthermore, separation of state

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and religion can assume multiple forms (see Bhargava’s chapter in this volume). While the multiple connotations of secularism in Indian political discourse are undoubtedly infused with ‘meanings resonant of India’s own cultural and historical experience’ (Embree, 1990, p.  87), these have also drawn substantially upon so-called Western liberal-democratic notions. Equal respect for all religions, the most popular rendition of Indian secularism, has manifestly invoked notions of separation of religion and state. As such, claims that secularism and other liberal concepts are basically unintelligible and irrelevant outside the Western Christian contexts of their birth, are overstated. With regard to national unity, Indian debates show that secularism has been closely tied to nationalism, and accrued connotations that derive from its key role in nationbuilding. Many critics see secularism as inextricably tied to the nation-state, and as such, as essentially homogenizing and hostile to minority rights (e.g. Chatterjee, 1998). Some have held that religious traditions and social practices offer better resources for the accommodation of pluralism and minorities than statist ideologies such as secularism (e.g. Nandy, 1998; see also Pecora’s chapter in this volume). By contrast, this essay shows that the relationship of secularism and national unity is complex, multifaceted and historically contingent. In state practice in India, the requirements of nation-building have been interpreted at some points as antithetical to strong multicultural rights, and at others, as requiring such rights. Indian policy-makers have not yet elaborated a normative framework of secularism as protection of minorities; this, however, does not reflect the infirmity of secularism as an ideal. The alternatives to secularism, such as the resources offered by Indian traditions and societal values have not offered a more secure basis for minority rights, and have reinforced the ideological space for Hindu nationalism.

Secularism, religion and separation Secularism is often criticized for failing to recognize the importance of religion (e.g. Madan, 1998, p.  29). In Indian debates, it is sometimes contended that the constitution-makers who instituted a secular state were a Westernized elite, naively disdainful of the strength of religious belief in India. In the Constituent Assembly debates, although the term secularism was not often used, there were frequent references to a ‘secular state’. Most advocates of a secular state emphasized that it did not imply that the state was hostile to religious belief.3 Moreover, a secular state was not a state that was incognizant of the importance of religious faith in Indian society; nor was it zealous in inculcating scepticism towards religious belief among its citizens. Speeches in this vein argued simultaneously that a secular state did not imply this, as well as that a secular state could not assume such a stance in a country such as India, where religious beliefs were deep-rooted. Supporting an amendment giving the President the option of taking his oath of office in the name of God, a proposal that was supported by representatives of religious minorities and incorporated into the Constitution, K. M. Munshi asserted: A secular state is not a Godless state. It is not a state which is pledged to eradicate or ignore religion . . . We must take cognizance of the fact that India is a religious

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23

minded country. Even while we are talking of a secular state, our mode of thought and life is largely coloured by a religious attitude to life . . . the state in India cannot be secular in the sense of being anti-religious. (CAD VII, p. 1057)4

Evidence of outright hostility to religion among advocates of a secular state in the Constituent Assembly is hard to come by. To be sure, some hostility to religion can occasionally be discerned in the speeches of modernist nationalists in the Constituent Assembly. Religious belief and affiliation were seen here as vestiges of a premodern era, which processes of secularization would soon whittle away. Secularism, it was believed, would follow once modern education, the diffusion of science and industrialization got underway (see e.g. Bilgrami, 1998; Chatterjee, 1998; Mahajan, 1998). Nehru serves to exemplify this view in most accounts, and there is some supporting evidence in his speeches and writings.5 However, most of those who spoke for secularism in the Constituent Assembly were not rationalists, or evangelists for a scientific temper. The preoccupation of the study of ideology with exemplary figures such as Nehru has meant that the significance of this strand of secularism in Indian political discourse has been overestimated. The formulation of constitutional provisions reflected complex accommodations between secularism and religion. In the Constituent Assembly debates, the proposals of ardent secularists to constitutionally restrict the scope of religion did not win out. After undergoing several permutations during its passage through various subcommittees of the Constituent Assembly, a broad definition of the right to freedom of religion was adopted, encompassing the right to ‘practice’ and ‘propagate’ religion as well as to ‘profess’ religion that extended to all persons, not only citizens (Shiva Rao, 1967 II; CAD VII, pp.  817–19, 822–24, 831–38).6 After extensive debate, the Constituent Assembly eventually decided that the state could aid educational institutions that imparted religious instruction, a position that was in keeping with the wishes of the religious-minded, including among minority representatives (Bajpai, 2011; Shiva Rao, 1967 II, pp. 221, 281). Freedom of religion was, of course, not left untrammelled: constitutional provisions explicitly permitted the state to enact laws for social welfare and reform, and also permitted state intervention in the interests of public order, morality and health; for upholding other fundamental rights provisions; and for the regulation and restriction of any economic, financial, political or secular activity associated with religious practice (Indian Constitution, Article 25). Nevertheless, religious personal laws that governed marriage, divorce, inheritance were retained, despite secularists pressing for a uniform civil code (Shiva Rao, 1967 II, pp. 162, 177; CAD VII, pp. 546–50). The cohabitation of secularism and religion has continued to define official debates in India. It was exemplified in the Shah Bano case (1986), which marked a shift to stronger multicultural policies, granting Muslims greater self-governance in the arena of religious family laws.7 The Shah Bano debate encapsulated a range of issues: questions of gender equality and the role of the state, minority rights in a democracy, the place of religion in a secular order, the jurisdiction of courts and parliaments in the sphere of religious law.8 In the discourse of the ruling Congress party, secularism was elaborated primarily in terms of equal respect for all religions. It was argued: ‘. . . the real definition [of secularism] . . . is that we show equal

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respect to all religions. The State has no religion. But the state is governed by this Constitution which guarantees full protection to all the minorities, which guarantees them their faith, their profession, their religion and their culture’ (Jagan Nath Kaushal [Congress], Lok Sabha Debates [henceforth LSD] 1986, cn. 408). Eduardo Faleiro, a prominent Congress spokesman declared: ‘.  .  .  (in) a truly secular state in a multireligious society, it is the paramount duty to equally respect all religions and give equal respect and protection to all laws, including personal laws, which are based on the religious tenets. . . .’ (LSD, cn. 343). Even more so than in the Constituent Assembly debates, secularism implied deference to religion and the religious sensibilities of the Indian people. Secularism as equal respect for all religions in the speeches of advocates of the government legislation was characterized primarily in terms of rights to religious freedom of groups.9 As in the Constituent Assembly, laws reflected complex negotiation between the domains of religion and state. Thus, for instance, on the one hand, the Parliament was promulgating an Act explicitly based on religious law, pronouncing an authoritative version of the law. On the other, the Act was not defended in terms of the intrinsic correctness of a religious doctrine, ‘the divine immutability of the Shariat’ (Hasan, 1998, pp. 75–76). Rather, the legislation was defended on democratic and secular grounds that the government had to defer to the wishes of the majority of Muslims with regard to their personal law, on account of the rights to religious freedom in a secular state.10 It might be contended that secularism’s accommodation of religion witnessed in Indian debates suggests that what we have in India is not secularism properly conceived (see De Roover, Claerhout, Balagangadhara, 2011). The view that secularism in India has not meant the separation of state and religion dominates the scholarly literature, both among critics of secularism, as well as its advocates. Dismissing secularism as ‘an alien cultural ideology’, Madan holds that there is no wall of separation in India, ‘only the notion of neutrality or equidistance between the state and the religious identity of the people’ (Madan, 1998, pp. 310, 313).11 Others, more supportive of secularism, hold equally that ‘it has never meant the separation of religion from politics’ and therefore has been appropriated ‘by communal parties and ideologies. . . .’ (Upadhyaya, 1992, pp. 851–52). A contrast between a liberal democratic model of secularism based on a wall of separation approach, and the secularism of Indian constitutional and political discourse based on the equal respect of all religions (saarva dharma samabhava) (Cossman and Kapur, 1996, p. 2621), remains influential. It is certainly true that the separation of state and religion in the sense of the prohibition of any contact whatsoever between the two has not characterized the practice of Indian state institutions at any point. Legislatures and courts in India have arbitrated in the religious affairs of Hindus, and to a lesser extent of minorities, authorized versions of religious laws and administered these laws, pronounced on the essential aspects of religion and invoked the authority of religious texts to do so (for a detailed discussion including cases, see Chatterjee, 1998; Galanter, 1998b; Mehta, 2005). However, as Rajeev Bhargava has argued (see chapter in this volume), the strict separation of mutual exclusion of religion and state of the idealized American model is only one among many conceptions of secularism.12 The separation of state and religion is not a single, simple doctrine (see also Galanter, 1998a, pp. 254–67 and Sen, 1998):

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that state and religion should be separate does not in itself tell us how this should be accomplished, which could take a variety of forms, depending upon the wider theory of secularism (Bhargava, 1998, p. 515), as well as values of the political system other than secularism (Sen, 1998, p. 467). Returning to the Constituent Assembly debates, while secularism in most cases did not involve antagonism or indifference to religion, it did include some forms of separation between state and religion. First, a secular state was taken to mean disestablishment, that is, the state would not have an official religion. A secular state was contrasted in political utterances both with a theocracy, and a religious state. Although a clause explicitly stipulating disestablishment was considered (Shiva Rao, 1967 II, pp.  87, 140, 174), disestablishment was eventually included indirectly in the Indian Constitution, most notably in the form of fundamental rights prohibiting the state from extracting taxes for the promotion of any particular religion, stipulating that no religious instruction would be provided in educational institutions maintained wholly out of state funds, and proscribing compulsory attendance at religious instruction or worship in any educational institution recognized by the state or receiving aid out of state funds. A second conception of secularism as separation was that of state impartiality between different religions. A secular state implied that the state would not give preference to any particular religion; secularism here was identified with nonsectarianism. Ananthasayanam Ayyangar held: [A secular state] only means that the State or the Government cannot aid one religion or give preference to one religion as against another. Therefore it is obliged to be absolutely secular in character, not that it has lost faith in all religions. (CAD VII, pp. 881–82)

Secularism as non-sectarianism or impartiality between religions was the conception most congenial to the temper of religious believers of different persuasions in the Constituent Assembly. Some pressed for measures such as the inclusion of the name of God in the Constitution on grounds that these were consistent with a secular state, because no particular God or religion was being favoured for special attention (see Chiriyankandath, 2000, pp.  19–20; H. V. Kamath and Pandit Malviya, CAD X, pp. 439–46). Proposals to align the state more closely with religion, favoured by religious believers of all persuasions, however, were rejected.13 Apart from a provision allowing ministers, parliamentarians and judges the option of taking their oath of office in the name of God, the Indian Constitution makes no reference to God (Smith, 1963). A third conception of secularism as separation in the Constituent Assembly debates was that of the exclusion of religion from the political domain. In a secular state, the refrain went, there ought to be no ‘mixing’ of religion and politics: religion should be a ‘personal matter’ for citizens, restricted to their individual and associational private practices. Congresswoman Renuka Ray declaimed: ‘Religion is a personal matter. Religious differences might have been exploited as a political expedient by the British, but there is no room for that in the India of today’ (CAD V, p. 268). The precise implications of the exclusion of religion from politics were rarely spelt out and

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varied among proponents. Was it applicable to the state alone, or to the wider public sphere? Did it require the de-politicization of religion, or its privatization? Which aspects of religion had to be excluded from politics – religious ideals, religious issues, religious political parties or religious organizations? Many disputes in the Constituent Assembly over the phrasing of rights to religious freedom and cultural and educational rights of religious minorities stemmed from disagreements over the precise scope of the exclusion of religion from politics. The strongest versions of the exclusion of religion from politics such as the privatization of religion were to be found among secular modernists in the Constituent Assembly, who pressed, among others, for the prohibition of religious instruction in educational institutions receiving any aid from the state (K. T. Shah, CAD VII, pp.  868–70; Tajamul Husain, CAD VII, p.  871), the banning of all religious markers (Tajamul Husain, CAD VII, pp. 818–19), prohibitions on the use of religious institutions for political purposes and the setting up of political organizations on a religious basis. Several Hindu nationalists and Gandhians in the Constituent Assembly, however, also espoused the view that religion had to be excised from the domain of the political.14 Secularism as separation was favoured for similar reasons as in many Western countries, and often invoked liberal values. A key concern motivating the adoption of secularism was that of order. Separation was regarded as a critical imperative, for as recent history had demonstrated only too well, ‘mixing religion and politics’ imperilled the nation. If conflicts about religious doctrines were played out in public institutions, the country would be torn apart. To save itself and to achieve the consolidation of the nation, the state had to keep clear of matters concerning religion. Secularism is sometimes rejected as inapplicable to India on grounds that it is the product of the struggle for power between the church and the state specific to Western Christian contexts (Madan, 1998). As scholars have noted, however, the historical emergence of secularism in Western countries was also the product of a ‘struggle to make the state relatively independent of deeply conflicting religious groups’ (Bhargava, 1998, p. 497).15 Conceptions of secularism as separation in the Constituent Assembly debates were also underpinned by values of liberal citizenship, of non-discrimination and equality for all individuals. The state had to distance itself from religion, it was argued, in order not to discriminate between its citizens on religious grounds, to treat all individuals as equals irrespective of the religion to which they belonged. Gandhian K. M. Munshi, clarified: A secular state . . . implies that citizenship is irrespective of religious belief, that every citizen, to whatever religion he may belong, is equal before the law . . . has equal civil rights, and equal opportunity to derive benefit from the state and to lead his own life and nothing more. (CAD VII, p. 1057)

K. T. Shah, a Jain secular modernist wanted the inclusion of a provision explicitly stipulating state neutrality in matters relating to religion: . . . with the actual profession of faith or belief, the State should have no concern. Nor should it, by any action of it, give any indication that it is partial to one or the

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other. All classes of citizens should have the same treatment in matters mundane from the state .. . . (ibid., p. 816)

It was argued that the state had an obligation to treat its citizens as equals, not to discriminate between them on grounds of (religious) group membership. The further assumption shared with strands of contemporary liberalism was that given a situation of religious pluralism and the importance of religion in people’s lives, this commitment would be compromised if the state identified with or gave preference to any religion. A state which was liberal in that it dealt with its citizens ‘primarily as individuals and not as groups’ (Smith, 1963, p. 170), was apprehended here as a secular state. Apart from ideas of equal citizenship rights for all individuals and state neutrality, ideas of religious liberty for individuals and groups associated with older liberal traditions also informed articulations of secularism. While a secular state was apprehended in terms of liberal citizenship, in a departure from the standard liberal position, groups as well as individuals were recognized as the subjects of rights and entitlements (Bajpai, 1997; Bhargava, 2000; Chandhoke, 2002; Galanter, 1998a; Mahajan, 1998). In political discourse, there was an easy switch between individuals and groups as entities to which a liberal regime of rights and associated norms of freedom, non-discrimination and justice would apply. The recognition of the group reflected the influence of India’s cultural traditions and also recent history where colonial practice had underscored the importance of state non-intervention in religion as part of communal entitlements. The contrast between an Indian ‘equal respect for all religions’ and a Western separation of state from religion is nevertheless influential, and continues to inform political debate. In the Shah Bano debate, for instance, K. C. Pant (Congress) explained: The fact of the matter is that our people are religious . . . we cannot change it. We have to take that into account. And therefore respect for all religions becomes the bedrock of our secularism not merely separation of religion from State. That is the difference from the western concept. . . . (LSD, 1986, cols. 389–90)

Nevertheless, articulations of equal respect for all religions in the Shah Bano debate clearly encompassed some forms of separation of state and religion. These included the view that the state did not identify with any religion, and that there was no privileged status for the religion of the majority. Separation was also significantly invoked in the elaboration of equal respect in the Shah Bano debate in the form of the requirement of state non-intervention in religion. Cabinet Minister Arjun Singh expounded on the meaning of secularism: I can only give a common sense approach which means that the State does not practice any religion, the State does not promote any religion and the State does not interfere in any religion. Every citizen is free to practice his own faith, his own religion and his own belief. (LSD, 1986, col. 403)16

The subject of the indigenous sources of Indian secularism deserves more extended treatment than is possible within the scope of this essay, but a few observations are in order.17 Secularism construed as state non-intervention and religious freedom

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has sometimes been located in the ‘age old’ values of Indian civilization of religious toleration. Some constitution-makers held that toleration of religious diversity was the Indian way of life, part of the country’s ancient traditions. Here, the creation of a secular state required not the transcendence of a ‘backward’ past as was the case in conceptions where it was viewed as a corollary of the modern nation-state, but building upon the country’s ancient heritage of the accommodation of religious pluralism. A narrower version of this claim was to found among Hindu nationalists, where the secular state was seen as an outcome of attitudes of toleration and generosity towards other faiths among the majority Hindus; attitudes that derived, it was implicitly suggested, from Hinduism’s unique capacities of openness and accommodation of diversity. Secularism here was redolent of the superiority of Hindu religion and self-congratulation on the forbearance and self-restraint of Hindus; it implied ‘that the numerical majority, the Hindus, would not use their power to give Hinduism a favoured place over other religions’ (Embree, 1990, p. 87). To recapitulate, in Indian constitutional and legislative debate, secularism has been interpreted as consistent with religion, and laws have frequently embodied a compromise between the advocates of secularism and religion. Against dominant scholarly views that hold that to the extent that secularism has existed in the Indian polity, it has done so in a form distinct from the separation of state and religion, we have seen that several forms of separation of state and religion informed conceptualizations of the secular state in Indian debates. Conceptions of secularism were espoused not by a tiny Westernized minority, but by representatives of varied ideological and political persuasions, including those with strong religious attachments of different faiths.

Secularism, national unity and minority rights Secularism has been closely associated with the problem of creating political order in contexts of religious diversity, from its inception in ideas of toleration such as Locke’s (Taylor, 2011a, p.  35). One manifestation of the link with order is to be found in the close relationship of secularism and nationalism in contemporary debates. Post-colonial scholars have often seen the close relationship of secularism and nation-building as an indicator of an inherent connection between secularism and nation-state (Chatterjee, 1998; Nandy, 1998), and of the inability of secularism and liberal ideas more generally to accommodate minority rights. This reading is, however, too narrow. It is certainly true that secularism has been often been deployed against strong multicultural rights; however, it has also served to legitimate group rights in other instances of state practice. Furthermore, Indian experience suggests that the main alternative to statist secularism, religious tolerance derived from ‘unconscious ways of life’ of people advocated by critical traditionalists such as Ashis Nandy (see Pecora’s discussion of Nandy in this volume), is much more likely to veer into majoritarianism. Conceptions of secularism and national unity have been closely entwined in India, at many levels.18 One kind of relationship between secularism and national unity has

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been instrumental. During constitution-making, many agreed that religion had to be kept separate from the state for the sake of the political integrity of the country: the recent violent partition of the country on religious lines was regarded as a direct consequence of a colonial policy of mixing religion and politics. A secular state was considered instrumental for national unity in a negative sense, in that political unity would be endangered if the state were not secular. For some, a secular state was also to be the means for consolidating national unity in a positive sense. The state was to be the agency for welding together diverse and conflicting religious groups into a nation, and it was felt that the state could only fulfil this role if it abstained from identification with any religion. A second kind of relationship between secularism and national unity was constitutive. A few Constitution-makers subscribed to a secular view of the national identity, where Indian-ness was defined primarily in political terms, in terms of membership of a state where religion was irrelevant for purposes of citizenship.19 The reigning European models of nationalism based on language and descent were rejected: commonalities of language, religion or any other cultural attribute would not serve as the basis of national identity in India’s case. Instead, the nation was conceived in political terms, as a community united by its commitment to common political ideals, those of secularism, democracy and social justice. Nationality, then, was to consist in secular democratic citizenship. Further, these ideals were construed as precluding the recognition of ethno-cultural criteria, particularly religious criteria, in the political domain. A third kind of relationship between secularism and national unity was analogical. A few Constitution-makers held that the Indian state had to be secular because this was the only kind of nation-state appropriate for the modern era – a country which aspired to join the ranks of the advanced industrialized nations of the world could not be otherwise. Nehru declared that ‘no modern, civilized State can be other than a secular State’ (quoted in Smith, 1958, p. 154). S. Radhakrishnan held: ‘The present tendency is for larger and larger aggregations . . . nationalism, not religion is the basis of modern life’ (CAD II, p. 254). Here, the claim was that one kind of idea  – a nation-state  – brought with it another  – that of secularism. For some, to be ‘modern’ was what was desired, and the nation was the appropriate locus for identity in the modern era, not religion or caste. Such views were based on a particular understanding of the history of the West, where processes of modernization were seen to be eroding religious and other ascriptive affiliations. Religious and ethno-cultural identities more broadly, it was held, had only acquired importance in the Indian context on account of poverty, illiteracy, and other features of socio-economic underdevelopment and because these had been propped up by the British for their own ends. Religion and caste would fade away once processes of modernization, arrested under colonial rule, got underway. It is only in the light of the close links between secularism and national unity that many of the connotations of secularism in India make sense. Secularism has been associated not just with the state’s stance towards religion, but also caste, and ethnic affiliation more broadly. In the Constituent Assembly debates, a secular state was understood as a state where a citizen’s rights were unaffected by her caste, linguistic or racial background, as much as her religious membership. Furthermore, the term

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‘secular’ in the Constituent Assembly debates referred not just to the stance of the state towards religious and other groups, but also to people’s attitudes and identities. For modernist nationalists, a truly secular state required the creation of a new secular ethos and identities, where individuals would cease to regard themselves and others as members of this or that community and see themselves as Indians ‘first and last’, where religious, caste and other communal distinctions would be eradicated from the ‘minds and hearts’ of individuals, as much as from the political arena. Again, secularism here did not pertain to religion alone, but to cultural affiliations more broadly. A casteridden society, Nehru claimed on several occasions, was not ‘properly secular’ (quoted in Smith, 1963, p. 292). Because the term ‘secular’ described a stance of the state and individuals not so much towards religion, as towards religious and other ethno-cultural groups, proposals pressing for a greater role for religion in the Constitution were often, without any sense of incongruity, described as ‘secular’. The term ‘secular’ was most often contrasted not with ‘religious’, but with the pejorative term ‘communal’ which was opposed to both ‘secular’ and ‘national’ in nationalist discourse (Pandey, 1990, p. 145; Pantham, 1997, p. 525). To be communal connoted, simultaneously, an inability to separate group affiliation from politics (a failure on the liberal secular front), as well as an inability to rise above loyalty to one’s narrow group and identify with the nation at large (a failure on the national front). This expansiveness of connotations of secularism in the Indian context  – encompassing caste, tribe, and on occasion, language, as well as religion, the state as well as individual attitudes – derived in part from its close relationship with national unity. Secularism in India as elsewhere has served as the answer to the problem of creating an integrated nation-state and a common national identity out of competing allegiances (Embree, 1990; Jayal, 1999). The language of secularism was ubiquitous in the Constituent Assembly debates, used across the ideological spectrum, by staunch modernists, majoritarian Hindus and Gandhian advocates alike (see Chiriyankandath, 2000). It was its close links with national unity that extended the appeal of secularism to ‘very many who would not be “secularist” in the sense of unbelief or religious indifference’ (Sarkar, 2001, p.  33). Although scholars have tended to attribute the convergence on secularism of ideologically disparate constitution-makers to a shared belief in the modern nation-state, secularism was favoured also by those who were not statists, notably Gandhians, as a means of forging nation unity.20 In late 1940s India, the requirements of nation building were seen as requiring the limitation of the scope of religion and of group-differentiated rights. Secularism accordingly was construed primarily in terms of equal citizenship rights of individuals, with the rights to religious freedom of groups recognized but restricted to the extent that these conflicted with rights to equality of individuals. Arguing that religion not be construed expansively K. M. Munshi stated: Religion must be restricted to spheres which legitimately appertain to religion, and the rest of life must be regulated, unified and modified in such a manner that we may evolve, as early as possible, a strong and consolidated nation. Our first problem and most important problem is to produce national unity in this country. (CAD VII, p. 548)21

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In the Constituent Assembly debates of the late 1940s, nationalists of different ideological hues converged on the view that quotas in legislatures and public services for religious minorities (and to a lesser extent, caste and tribal minorities) detracted from secularism. This was on several counts – because these required the recognition of a person’s religion or caste in public policy; encouraged identification with religious and caste communities; and thereby posed a threat to political integrity of the country, to the building of a sense of common Indianness, as well as to the project of creating a modern nation-state (for more detailed discussions, see Bajpai, 2000, 2008, 2011). Religion-based separate electorates in particular were regarded as the direct cause of Partition: the recognition of religious difference in state policy as practised by the British in India was a recipe for ‘continuous civil wars’ (CAD I, p.  66). For some, the recognition of premodern forms such as religion and caste in politics was an indicator of India’s ‘backwardness’, unbecoming for a country aspiring to join the ranks of advanced nation-states (see e.g. Renuka Ray, CAD V, p. 268; Mahavir Tyagi, CAD  V, p.  218). When the Constituent Assembly withdrew legislative quotas for religious minorities in August 1949, Nehru commended their abolition as ‘a historic turn in our destiny’, confessing that he had never been convinced about the provision: ‘. . . doing away with this reservation business is not only a good thing in itself . . . It shows that we are really sincere about this business of having a secular democracy’ (CAD VIII, pp. 329, 332). Importantly, legislative and employment quotas for former untouchables (Scheduled Castes) were also seen to detract from secularism, as these involved the mixing of ethnicity and politics, and also because quotas involved departures from the equal treatment of all individuals. Mahavir Tyagi urged: . . . the landless laborers, the cobblers, or those . . . who do not get enough to live, should be given special reservations . . . in place of Scheduled Caste, the words. ‘Scheduled Classes’ be substituted so that we may not inadvertently perpetuate the communal slur on our Parliaments. (CAD VIII, pp. 344–45)

Secularism was incompatible with caste both as a social hierarchy sanctioned by religion, as well as an identity group which was the focus of citizens’ loyalties (Galanter, 1984, p.  560);22 as such, caste-based quotas were seen as damaging secularism and national unity at the same time. The close links of secularism and nationalism have led many scholars to conclude that secularism does not have the resources for the accommodation of religion and of minority rights (Chatterjee, 1998; Nandy, 1998). This, however, appears as an overstatement in the light of available evidence. In the Indian Constituent Assembly debates, at a time when considerations of nation-building were paramount, secularism was construed as consistent with limited multicultural rights in nationalist opinion and with strong multicultural rights in some strands of minority opinion. For many, while secularism was construed as precluding the recognition of religious and cultural distinctions in the political arena, it was also seen to imply religious and cultural freedoms for all, in particular for minorities. Indeed, the rights of citizens to pursue religion and culture in their individual and associational capacity were regarded as the corollary of the exclusion of religion from the political domain. Minorities were to be

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guaranteed freedom in matters of religion, language and culture, and protected from discrimination and interference from the state through constitutionally entrenched and justiciable fundamental rights. The desirability of such rights was not well elaborated in nationalist opinion; and difference-blind equality in individual rights dominated (for details, see Bajpai, 2011); nevertheless, secularism was seen to entail substantial individual and group religious freedoms and allow for the expression of religious difference. Secularism was also invoked by minority representatives in support of group-differentiated rights such as quotas and religious personal laws in the Constituent Assembly.23 Proponents of Muslim personal law argued that a secular order was one in which citizens had full religious freedom, including the freedom to live by the tenets of their religious family laws (see Mahboob Ali Baig Sahib Bahadur, CAD VII, pp. 540– 46). The separation of state and religion implied the exclusion not so much of religion from politics as of the state from the realm of religion; it connoted absolute group rights to religious freedom. The identification of secularism with expansive rights to religious freedom was rejected by Constitution-makers, as were proposals for granting religious personal law absolute immunity from state interference.24 Nevertheless, secularism was construed as requiring religious freedom and as such, continued to be deployed for the legitimation of minority rights in political discourse. The employment of secularism for the legitimation of group-differentiated rights was exemplified in the Shah Bano case (1986), which saw a shift to stronger multicultural policies that granted Muslims greater self-governance in the arena of family laws. In the discourse of the ruling Congress party, secularism was identified with respect for the rights of minorities, which in turn implied deference to the wishes of Muslims with regard to their religion and, thereby, non-intervention in their personal law (see e.g. speech of Law Minister Ashok Sen introducing the Bill, LSD, 1986, cols. 345–46). Importantly, secularism was rendered consistent with strong multicultural rights not through a jettisoning of national unity, but a reinterpretation of its requirements.25 Instrumentally, secularism was thought to contribute to a range of national unity concerns, of which state stability and the maintenance of civil peace were the most prominent. Given the threats to national unity from terrorism and religious fundamentalism, the accommodation of minority fears regarding religious identity was imperative (see e.g. Arun Nehru, Minister of state for Internal Security, LSD, 1986, col. 411). This, it was argued, would contribute to greater identification of minorities with the nation (national loyalty); better relations between Hindus and Muslims (social cohesion), thereby mitigate threats to political stability. Secularism was also linked instrumentally to national unity as the platform on which diverse religious groups had historically been brought together as part of the national freedom struggle and Indian nationhood forged (Arjun Singh, LSD, 1986, cols. 402–03).26 In the Constituent Assembly debates, the recognition of religious difference in politics had been considered antithetical to national unity. Secularism was then construed as the disregard of religion as far as the rights of individuals were concerned. During the Shah Bano debate, the non-recognition of religious difference was seen as the greater threat to national unity. Secularism thus came to be recast in terms of ‘full’

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freedom of religion for minorities, including the freedom to live by their personal laws. A crucial factor in this alteration in dominant conceptions of secularism was a diminished sense of state capability, with parliamentarians cutting across party lines concurring that state-led reforms in religion would be ineffectual in themselves. When the state had been seen as all-powerful in the 1940s, a people divided by religion were to be knit into a nation through the state’s containment of religion and community affiliations. Conceptions of secularism corresponded to this. In the 1980s by contrast, when there was far less confidence in the capacity of the state to impose its will on society, national unity was seen to require greater accommodation of religion (Jayal, 1999; Varshney, 1993). The contours of secularism came to be remoulded accordingly. The realignment of secularism and national unity was underpinned by a greater deference by the state to societal traditions and practices. Secularism conceived as non-intervention in minority religions was portrayed as an extension of traditions of accommodation of cultural diversity that had characterized India from antiquity. While secularism continued to be constitutively tied to national unity, there was a subtle redefinition of how Indian identity was secular, which involved, most notably, a de-emphasis on the modernizing ambitions of the secular state of the late 1940s that had sought the restriction of the sphere of religion, and an emphasis on so-called traditional Indian societal values of the toleration of religious diversity. Analogically, too, secularism continued to be related to national unity, though this relationship was reconfigured: a secular state that respected religious diversity was seen as akin to Indian civilization that had protected different religions. The law minister, A. K. Sen, expounded on the meaning of secularism: . . . the Constitution sets up a secular democracy . . . not in the way of the uniformity of the grave, it sets up a fine mosaic where each community has its own part to play, its own culture to show and its own . . . iddat and philosophy to flower. That is Indian secularism . . . It flourishes on an acknowledgement of the different cultures of the various communities and religions which have come to stay in this great country . . . If we start on a fine mosaic and try to draw one single pattern all over the country, then we shall be playing absolutely against the very foundation of our philosophy. . . .(LSD, 1986, col. 516)

As such, secularism grounded in social and civilizational values was construed as consistent with strong multicultural policies, even as it remained closely tied to national unity. Does this suggest that religious traditions found in everyday ways of living offer better resources for accommodation of minority rights than statist norms as some scholars have suggested (e.g. Nandy, 1998)? While this might appear to be the case at first glance, a closer examination of the historical record suggests need for caution. First, although often espoused by followers of all faiths, references to Indian civilization and philosophy have often served as a conduit for the ‘unstated norms of the Hindu majority’ (Cossman and Kapur, 1996, p. 2616). While rendering secularism supportive

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of minority rights, appeals to tradition have often meant that secularism is redolent of Hindu superiority and self-congratulation on their forbearance and generosity, as reflected in the following speech in which toleration of difference was grounded in Hindu mythology: Ours is a democratic country and secularism is its sheet anchor . . . In comparison with the other countries, we have practised these things in a very liberal way since time immemorial . . . in the Ramayana . . . Ravana was the ruler of Lanka and demons were ruling there, but even Vibhishana had the freedom to plant tulsi in his house and recite the name of Lord Rama, why should we also not give them such freedom when the Congress has been struggling for ensuring security and the welfare of the minorities and the women since its inception? (Krishna Sahi, LSD, 1986, cols. 439–40)27

Hindu self-congratulation over their superior ‘liberal’ credentials (Hasan, 1998, p. 79) could slip easily into a sense of Hindu superiority vis-à-vis other religions as less open-minded, as well as a grievance against special treatment of minorities, as exploiting Hindu generosity. These were recurrent themes in the discourse of the Hindu Right in this period. A second aspect of respect for societal traditions in conceptions of secularism in the Shah Bano debate was that of deference to the beliefs and sensitivities of Muslims. State non-intervention in minority personal laws was defended as the pragmatic yet principled approach grounded in Indian traditions of secularism that meant that the state would not impose change on unwilling minorities. For many, the long-term objective remained that of national unity through a common legal framework for all citizens. Eduardo Faleiro observed: The country undoubtedly faces a treat to its unity. We have too many religions . . . too many divisive forces . . . the leaders of different communities must voluntarily . . . evolve a common system of law which will satisfy everybody and which will strengthen the unity of this country because we are Indians beyond and above being either Hindus or Christians or Parsis . . . there is no point in . . . asking the Government to bring this because it is against . . . genuine secularism. (LSD, 1986, cols. 346–47)

The argument was not that forced reform of minority laws would be unjust, but that imposition by the state would be counter-productive: for effective change to occur, the initiative for reform of personal law should come from religious communities. Given that the Indian state had undertaken reform of Hindu law in the 1950s, this stance implied that such reforms had the consent of the Hindu community. The implicit and sometimes explicit claim was that Muslims who had not consented to such reform yet, were less ‘advanced’ than the Hindus.28 K. C. Pant, minister of steel and mines, averred: ‘We cannot depend only on the law for reforms. Society has to be ready for reform . . . In Hindu society this process has been going on for decades. It had begun a hundred years ago. As a result of that and the efforts of so many tall

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leaders of this country the Hindu society has been able to regenerate itself ’ (The Telegraph, 15 May 1988, quoted in Hasan, 1989, p. 49). A third respect in which conceptions of secularism in the Shah Bano debate relied on indigenous traditions was the role of the idiom of protection of minorities.29 Muslims were included in the category of ‘weaker sections’ to whom the state owed a duty of protection, together with other groups such as women (see e.g. Frank Anthony, LSD, 1986, col. 395). The language of protection did not presuppose specific subjects and reasons in virtue of which respect or protection was due: thus for instance, it could be owed, at the same time, by the government to its citizens or to a particular subset of these; it could be owed simultaneously on account of respect for liberal rights and religious freedoms; in pursuit of a welfarist ideal of advancing the social good;30 in recognition of filial and feudal communitarian obligations to protect weaker members. So secularism as protection of religious minorities could seem to be loosely supported by a wide range of normative sources, without needing more detailed elaboration that would reveal areas of conflict between individual and group rights or between the rights of minorities and of women. As ‘weaker sections’ reliant on state protection, women and minority groups were drawn together and placed on par, the potential antagonism between their rights erased by the state’s overarching solicitude. While enabling special treatment of Muslims in some respects, the language of protection belonged within a framework where people were subjects granted privileges at the discretion of the state rather than citizens entitled to rights. One of the consequences of the intermeshing of the idioms of protection and rights was to undermine the status of rights as universal prerogatives of citizenship, and to render these akin to discretionary gifts or privileges bestowed upon subjects by a benevolent regime, affording the state greater room for manoeuvre with regard to the rights of particular sections of the population. Although the language of protection implied some recognition that minorities were in an unequal position vis-à-vis the majority, and so deserving of special help, it did not offer a strong support Muslim personal law as a multicultural right. The Shah Bano case is regarded as a pivotal moment in the rise of the Hindu right  in  India (Hasan, 1998), with the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, becoming the largest national political party in the 1990s, displacing the Congress party for the first time in India’s post-independence history. The discursive shift in conceptions of secularism can be seen as an important contributory factor. The Congress government’s case for the accommodation of minorities relied largely upon secularism construed in terms of Indian values of toleration construed positively in terms of celebration of diversity, or as was more common, negatively, in terms of nonimposition. Given as we have seen, that the slide from Indian to Hindu values was easily made, the appeal to Indian tradition could not prevent these from being viewed as a burden on the tolerance of Hindus, it could not provide a secure basis for special provisions for religious minorities. Hindu nationalist parties were the chief advocates of Indian/Hindu tradition as the basis of national identity, and the main critics of multicultural rights as obstacles to the achievement of national unity. Significantly, the Hindu nationalists did not reject secularism, or contend that secularism should have yielded to other values such as national integration, but rather, projected themselves as the principled upholders of ‘real’ secularism, challenging the ruling

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party’s claim to be secular.31 The effectiveness of the Hindu nationalist strategy lay in the fact that the discursive shift on secularism made by the ruling Congress party had put it in a double-bind – the appeal to Indian tradition on its own slid easily to an affirmation of Hindu values which were identified with Hindu nationalist parties; furthermore, a conception of secularism that emphasized religious group freedom over equal individual rights was seen to mark a shift from earlier ideals of secularism held by constitution-makers, which had emphasized the equal rights of individuals irrespective of religion. Either way, whether the Hindu nationalists appeared as chief defenders of Indian tradition and national unity, or as champions of true secularism that emphasized the irrelevance of religion for citizenship rights, the Congress party appeared discredited, as having abandoned the constitutional position on secularism for unprincipled vote-seeking ‘pseudo-secularism’ that preached ‘tolerance for religious obscurantism and bigotry’ (Chatterjee, 1998, p. 347). Could secularism have been rendered consistent with exemptions for Muslims in this instance? To begin with, as Rajeev Bhargava has argued (in his chapter in this volume) conceptions of secularism are consistent with differential treatment. In the Shah Bano case, substantive and contextual equality considerations supported differential treatment of Muslims. It could be argued that as a minority, Muslims faced a greater threat to the integrity of their religion than the majority Hindus, whose practices were inevitably supported by the state and society: hence, equal respect for Muslim citizens required that the community be given greater control over personal law that was central to its identity. As Martha Nussbaum notes, in ‘any modern secular society, the so-called secular norms that prevail are typically those that derive from a majority religious tradition’ (Nussbaum, 2005, p. 115). A further argument could be that Indian state institutions are not representative of Muslims and other minorities as they are of the majority Hindus (Mehta, 2005).32 Equal treatment of Muslims demands that the community be accorded a similar space for ‘exercising collective self-determination over their religious understandings as Hindus have’ (ibid., pp.  78–79); hence greater autonomy from state-led reform. Finally, a case could be made for special treatment on grounds that Muslims were a subordinated or oppressed group in Indian society and so deserved greater cultural autonomy. In a context where Muslims suffered violations to their right to life and liberty, reduced economic opportunities and discrimination by public and private institutions, the imposition of personal law reform on Muslims would compound injustices (SpinnerHalev, 2001, p. 86).33 However, conceptions of secularism that were consistent with differential treatment remained under-articulated by Indian policy-makers in the Shah Bano debate, as in the Constituent Assembly debates earlier. In official pronouncements on secularism it remained unclear how, normatively speaking, the transition was made from all groups having equal rights to religious freedom, to differential rights to religious freedom in the case of majority and minority religious communities.34 A standard of formal equality was put forward – since the case of Muslim women was different, differential treatment was legitimate. But why, normatively speaking, were Muslims different – why did the state seek to ‘draw lines of lines of difference where society drew them’ (MacKinnon, 2005, p.  262), when it had expressly sought not to do so

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in 1950? Given that the Indian state had overridden religious sensibilities to outlaw Hindu practices such as sati, child-marriage, and untouchability previously, its greater solicitude of minority Muslim opinion needed further argument that an appeal to Indian tradition per se could not supply  – why was religious pluralism in personal law worth preserving, when several other traditions had been jettisoned? An appeal to Indian traditions of toleration and accommodation could not on its own help here: the justification of differential treatment of Muslims required the elaboration of some form of substantive equality arguments along the lines discussed above.35 In their absence, state deference to societal traditions and sensibilities in the case of Muslims appeared to be an instance of illegitimate state partiality or ‘minority appeasement’, a slogan which simultaneously appealed to the sense that minorities were being conciliated for reasons that went beyond justice, and at the cost of the nation, and through an abuse of the tolerance of Hindus. The deficit in official secularism in India with respect to the justification of differential treatment of minority cultures was thus augmented by the turn to societal tradition in the Shah Bano debate, creating a favourable ideological climate for the success of the Hindu right.

Conclusions India’s experience highlights several important characteristics of secularism that have remained relatively neglected in mainstream debates. First, commitments to secularism can cohabit consistently with strong religious beliefs and belonging. Critics of secularism have tended to identify it with hostility towards religion, and a zeal for the privatization of religion: these, however, are not essential features of all conceptions of secularism (see Bhargava’s chapter in this volume). Official secularism in India has largely been respectful of religious belief and practice, although the extent and the grounds of respect for religion have varied over time and among actors. Second, this essay has argued that the influential contrast between a ‘Western’ model of separation between state and religion and a distinctively ‘Indian’ model of equal respect for all religions, is overstated. As scholars have shown, separation of state and religion can assume several forms. Articulations of respect for religions in India have drawn on some forms of separation between religion and state. Claims that secularism as separation cannot travel outside Western Christian contexts are thus overstated. Third, Indian debates draw attention to the close relationship of secularism and nationalism: secularism in India, as elsewhere, has often drawn support from nationalist concerns and accrued meanings that derive from its key role in nationbuilding.36 Fourth, from this it does not follow that secularism is inherently and irrevocably homogenizing, statist and incapable of accommodating pluralism as critics have sometimes suggested (e.g. Chatterjee, 1998; Nandy, 1998). The disposition of secularism towards multicultural policies in India has varied over time – at certain historical moments, secularism has been aligned against group-differentiated rights in state practice; at other times, the requirements of national unity and thereby secularism, have been construed as demanding stronger multicultural rights. Indian debates suggest that the relationship of secularism to national unity is multifaceted

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and complex; as such, characterizations of secularism as a unitary ideology necessarily committed to symmetrical treatment of all individuals, embedded within a homogenizing nation-state and inherently incompatible with multicultural pluralism, are overstated. Fifth, India’s historical record suggests that the chief alternative to secularism advocated by some of its critics, the resources for toleration in religious traditions and cultures of everyday living (e.g. Nandy, 1998), can veer easily into support for the majority religion/religious group. This is not to suggest that religious traditions and social ways of living together offer no resources for toleration and dealing with difference. It is to suggest that for contemporary multicultural societies, these resources are unlikely to suffice on their own for the protection of minority rights: India’s experience indicates that these do not offer a complete alternative to state secularism. Finally, although the Indian model in theory usefully extends models of secularism known from experience of the United States and Europe as scholars have suggested, in practice, special provisions for minority cultures continue to suffer from a justificatory deficit within state secularism in India. The fault here, however, lies not with the ideal of secularism, which has the capacity to accommodate strong religious belief and diverse religious practices, but with the normative vision and institutional imagination of Indian policy-makers. It may be that secularism does not suffice on its own for the accommodation of difference;37 nevertheless, it offers more normative resources for multiculturalism than have hitherto been tapped in state practice in India and beyond.

2

Should Europe Learn from Indian Secularism? Rajeev Bhargava

Over the last three decades, secular states, virtually everywhere, have come under strain. It is hardly surprising then that political secularism, the doctrine that defends them, has also been subjected to severe criticism. Some scholars have concluded that this critique is ethically and morally so profound and justified that it is time to abandon political secularism. I reject this conclusion. I argue that the criticism of secularism looks indefeasible only because critics have focused on mainstream conceptions developed in largely religiously homogenous societies. It is time we shifted focus away from doctrines underpinning some Western secular states towards the normative practices of a wide variety of states, including the best practices of non-Western states such as India. Once we do this, we will begin to see secularism differently, as a critical ethical and moral perspective not against religion but against religious homogenization and institutionalized (inter- and intra-religious) domination. Of all available alternatives, secularism remains our best bet to help us deal with ever-deepening religious diversity and the problems endemic to it.

Crisis of secular states? Secular states and their underlying ideology, political secularism, are under siege virtually everywhere. Secularism was severely jolted with the establishment of the first modern theocracy in 1979 in Iran. By the late 1980s, Islamic political movements had emerged in Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Chad, Senegal, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan and even in Bangladesh (see Ahmed, 1987; Kepel, 1994; Mohsin, 1999; and Westerlund, 1996). Movements challenging secular states were hardly restricted to Muslim societies. Protestant movements decrying secularism emerged in Kenya, Guatemala and the Philippines. Protestant fundamentalism became a force in American politics. Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka, Hindu nationalists in India, religious ultraorthodoxy in Israel, and Sikh nationalists in the state of Punjab in India, as well as among diasporic communities in Canada and Britain, began to question the separation of state and religion (see Juergensmeyer, 1994).

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It is clear that secularism has a precarious life in non-Western societies. What is not clear is that the cluster of conceptions that we call secularism which have not travelled well to other societies have all developed in the west. Even less acknowledged is the fact that such conceptions and the secular states they underpin are coming under strain even in Europe where only some time back they were believed to be firmly entrenched and secure. Why so? It is true that substantive secularization of European societies has also brought in its wake extensive secularization of European states. Regardless of their religious affiliation, citizens have a large basket of civil and political rights unheard of in religion-centred states, past or present. But still, two problems remain. First, migration from former colonies and an intensified globalization has thrown together on Western public spaces pre-Christian faiths (Hindus, Buddhists, Jains), Christianity and Islam (Turner, 2001). The cumulative result is unprecedented religious diversity, the weakening of the public monopoly of single religions and the generation of mutual suspicion, distrust, hostility and conflict. This is evident in Germany and Britain but was dramatically highlighted by the headscarf issue in France and the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands shortly after the release of his controversial film about Islamic culture (see Barker, 2004; Bowen, 2007; Buruma, 2006; Freedman, 2004; and Modood et al., 2006). Here the attention of the reader must be drawn to another significant issue. The question of religious diversity is generally viewed purely within a liberal egalitarian framework. However, we are not here dealing only with the political management of multiple world views with divergent, even incommensurable conceptions of the good life who might conflict with one another in the public domain. Such a perspective ignores the structured asymmetries of power within which people with competing conceptions of good encounter one another. Prospects of discrimination, marginalization, exclusion, oppression, humiliation, degradation  – I here use domination as a term of art to cover all these distorted social relations  – hence, prospects of domination are endemic to such interactive encounters. Furthermore at issue here is not merely inter-religious domination that is the potential domination of one religious over another religious community. Also present within religion-related domination is what can be called intra-religious domination  – the discrimination, marginalization, exclusion, oppression, etc. of members of one religious community by powerful members of their own community. Indeed one frequently witnesses the intensification of intra-religious domination at the time of inter-religious domination. The great Dalit leader of India B. R. Ambedkar puts this succinctly. When groups regard each other as a menace, he argued, all their energies are spent on preparing to meet ‘the menace’. The exigencies of a common front of the majority against a powerful minority and the minority against the majority generates a ‘conspiracy of silence over social evils’ (Ambedkar, 1990, p. 247). Neither attend to them even though they are running sores and requiring immediate attention, for the simple reason that they view every measure of social reform as bound to create

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dissension and division and thereby weaken the ranks when they ought to be closed to meet the menace of the other community. (ibid.)

This ensures that there is social stagnation and the spirit of conservatism continues to dominate the thoughts and actions of both. Given what is stated above, it is not surprising that despite substantial secularization, the formal establishment of the dominant religion does little to bolster better intercommunity relations or reduce religious discrimination in several European states  – the second problem. As it turns out, the widespread belief of a secular European public sphere is a myth. The religious biases of European states have become increasingly visible with deepening religious diversity. European states have continued to privilege Christianity in one form or another. They have publicly funded religious schools, maintained real estates of churches and clerical salaries, facilitated the control by churches of cemeteries and trained the clergy. In short, there has been no impartiality within the domain of religion, and despite formal equality, this continues to have a f­ ar-reaching impact on the rest of society (Klausen, 2005). To repeat, the crisis of secular states in Europe is in part due to the fact that the secular humanist ethos endorsed by many citizens is not fully shared, particularly by those who have newly acquired citizenship. Any further secularization along secular humanist lines is not likely to resolve the crisis of European secular states. Also, many of these states have formally or informally established religion, and establishment of a single religion, even of the weaker variety, is part of the problem not the solution. They perpetuate religious and religion-based domination. What, in the face of this imbroglio, are European states to do? Those reflecting on these crises have at least four conceptions of secularism staring back at them. The four conceptions flow from the different ways in which the metaphor of separation is unpacked, the levels at which separation is sought, and the manner in which ends are conceived. The first of these conceptions is thoroughly amoral and unethical because it separates religion from the state so as to avert the ethical or moral restrictions that religions place on its ends (wealth, power). (I am talking here about Machiavellian states which may be fascist, but not necessarily.) These amoral secular states are inconsistent with the self-organization and self-understanding of most European states, at least to the extent that they appear to have forsaken their imperial pretensions. I shall not speak of this further. Two other models of secularism may guide Europe in these potentially troubling times. The first, the idealized French version has worldwide visibility as indeed has the second, the American model. Can Europe take inspiration from these two models to cope up with problems emerged by newly emergent religious diversity and inter- and intra-religious domination? Can European states be reinvigorated by these two forms of Western secularism? Can they then deal better with the new reality of the vibrant presence of multiple religions in public life and the accompanying social tensions? In what follows I argue that available mainstream conceptions of Western secularism are likely to meet neither the challenge of the vibrant public presence of religion nor of increasing religious diversity.

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The idealized French model Take first the idealized French conception. On this conception, the state must be separated from religion but the state retains the power to interfere in religion. However, religion is divested of any power to intervene in matters of state. In short, separation means one-sided exclusion. The state may interfere in religion to hinder or suppress it, or even to help religion, but in all cases only to ensure its control over religion. Religion becomes an object of law and public policy but only in terms of the state. This conception arose in response to the excessive domination of the Church, encourages an active disrespect for religion, and is concerned solely with preventing the religious order from dominating the secular. It hopes to deal with institutionalized religious domination by taming and marginalizing religion altogether. This may help states to deal with aspects of intra-religious domination – one that exists when some members of a religious community dominate members of their own religion (e.g.  anticlericalism in France). However, it has few resources to properly address ­inter-religious domination, when members of one religious community discriminate against, marginalize or even oppress members of another religious community. Indeed this model may be susceptible to the secular domination of the religious and undermine religious freedom altogether. This is evident from the fact that in France not a single school run by Muslims is subsidized by the state. This is also manifest in its failure to justly deal with the issue of headscarves. Some sections of European societies, both on the Right and the Left, are tempted to follow the French model largely because they have succumbed to the view that ‘Islam is a problem’ and the only way to straighten the devil is to use the coercive power of the state. But this would be suicidal because it leaves formal and informal establishments of Christianity in these societies untouched. Besides, every attempt to further intervene in religions is likely to meet with resistance not only from Muslims but from non-Muslims too. Any reliance on this model is likely to exacerbate problems.

The idealized American model Can these European states turn to the American model? The idealized American ­self-understanding interprets separation to mean mutual exclusion. Neither the state nor religion is meant to interfere in the domain of one another. This mutual exclusion is believed necessary to resolve conflicts between different Christian denominations, to grant some measure of equality between them, but most crucially to provide individuals the freedom to set up and maintain their own religious associations. Mutual exclusion is believed necessary for religious liberty and for the more general liberties of individuals. This strict or ‘perfect separation’, as James Madison termed it (Levy, 1994, p. 124), must take place at each of the three distinct levels of (1) ends, (2) institutions and personnel and (3) law and public policy. Levels (1) and (2) make the state non-theocratic and disestablish religion. Level (3) ensures that the state has neither a positive relationship with religion  –  for

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example there should be no policy of granting aid, even non-preferentially, to religious institutions – nor a negative relationship with it; it is not within the scope of state activity to interfere in religious matters even when some of the values (such as equality) professed by the state are violated within the religious domain. The Congress simply has no power to legislate on any matter pertaining to religion (Levy, 1994 and Hamburger, 2002). This non-interference is justified on the grounds that religion is a privileged, private (non-state) matter, and if something is amiss within this private domain, it can be mended only by those who have a right to do so within that sphere. This, according to proponents of this view, is what religious freedom means. Thus, the freedom that justifies mutual exclusion is negative liberty and is closely enmeshed with the privatization of religion. In my view, this model of secularism encourages the state to have passive respect for religion. Idealized American secularism has some resources to fight inter-religious domination (for instance, it necessitates the disestablishment of the dominant religion) but not to wage a struggle against other aspects of the same or against intrareligious dominations. Because the state is unable to facilitate freedoms or equality within religions, it forces people to exit from their religion rather than to press for intra-religious equality. Both forms of Western secularism have persistent difficulties coping with community-oriented religions such as Roman Catholicism, Islam and some forms of Hinduism and Sikhism that demand official recognition and sometimes even greater public presence for themselves  – particularly when they begin to cohabit the same society. Moreover, they were not designed for societies with deep religious diversity. Both these versions developed in the context of a single religion society and to solve the problems of one religion, namely Christianity. Both understand separation as exclusion and make individualistically conceived values – individual liberty or equality between individuals or both  – the ground for separation. Because of their diversity-resistant character and individualistic character, both these forms of Western secularism have become part of the problem.

A European secularism? But it might be argued that Europe has only to dig deeper into its own existing resources, theoretically articulate its own practices. In doing so, it might discover a sui generis model of European secularism that might be self-reliant, with little need to learn from the French and the American variants. This is just the right moment to address my agreements and disagreements with Tariq Modood. Tariq Modood and I have been in dialogue on secularism for over a decade now (see Bhargava, 2011 and Modood, 2011).1 He was among the few who very early on recognized the main point of my 1998 book: that we need not an alternative to but an alternative conception of secularism, one that is different from mainstream conceptions shaped by French laïcité and the American wall of separation variant. Since we agree on much, I begin with stating where and how much we agree.

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I agree with him (1) that most European states follow neither the French nor the American model. Virtually all European states have a stable regime of individual rights that includes the right to religious liberty. None could have managed to install such a regime without in the past attacking the power and privilege of their churches, a stridency which could not have been possible without some degree of state–church separation. Yet, unlike the French, there is no lingering hostility towards religion in other European state-structures. The case in America is different. Although American churches had a legacy of enormous power and privilege, they left it behind in Europe. This is part of what Americanization means. So, American self-understanding has rarely exhibited hostility to religion. Yet, denominational conflict compelled the state to withdraw substantial support of religion, forming another key ingredient of American selfunderstanding. In Europe, however, hostility was followed by active support. Virtually all of Europe developed an institutional arrangement that grants some privilege or public recognition to a given church. Indeed, some states still have an established church, a privileged arrangement that goes well beyond recognition. Like me, Modood finds the combination of separation of church and state and support for a given church compatible with secularism. He calls it moderate secularism. I am indifferent to the term, but I agree (2) that this is a form of secularism. States that run in accordance with such a regime are secular states. Modood is also quite right that (3) there is no effective challenge from the church or radical secularists to this moderate political secularism. This may not be the best of all possible worlds from their points of view, and currently it might even be tilted in favour of secularists, but it is an acceptable compromise. Such is the context in which non-Christian migrants, the majority of which are Muslims, have been arriving, settling and making claims that ‘relate to the place of religious identity in the public sphere’. Modood says and adds (4) that ‘it is here, if anywhere, that a sense of crisis of secularism can be found’. Our fourth straight agreement. As I stated above, the unprecedented religious diversity is accompanied by mutual suspicion, hostility and conflict. This is evident in Germany, probably even in Modood’s Britain, but was dramatically highlighted by the headscarf issue in France and the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands shortly after the release of his controversial film about Islamic culture. So we both agree that the crisis of secularism is directly related to the arrival, predominantly, of Muslim immigrants in Europe. He says: Political secularism has been destabilized, and in particular the historical flow from a moderate to radical secularism and the expectation of its continuation has been jolted. This is not because of any Christian desecularization or a ‘return of the repressed’. Rather, the jolt is created by the triple contingency of the arrival and settlement of a significant number of Muslims.

Note the language here. Political secularism, Modood says, was ‘destablized’ and ‘jolted’, words hardly any different from ‘crisis’, for crisis too refers only to a critical turning point, one that can go either way, to recovery or mortality. It does not mean imminent death, an impression falsely given by Modood’s essay.

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But let me not quibble over words. For we have another, fifth agreement to report. It lies in our joint hope that European secularism will respond to these changes. Europe can’t just go on with the same ‘moderate secularism’ and jettison the problem. As Modood puts it, this secularism needs to be multiculturalized. I take this to mean that the historical compromises between church and state have to be extended to other religions, particularly to Islam. (I don’t disagree on this point, our sixth agreement.) So, for him, moderate secularism is the best possible ideal feasible in Europe. Conceptually and normatively, all is well. It simply needs to be extended to other religions, a feat that can be accomplished by comparatively easy institutional adjustments. So, I must stand corrected. For Modood, moderate secularism can and should go on more or less as it is, but, in order to accommodate Muslims, must undergo some institutional adjustments. How then can we speak of – that horrible term – a crisis of secularism in Europe? Surely, this is hyperbolic, a gross exaggeration! Here is where we profoundly disagree. Moderate secularism, for me, is badly flawed. The multiculturalization of this secularism is neither easy nor sufficient. It is not easy because it presupposes a massive change in cultural background. Institutional adjustment is bound to be difficult because an internal link exists between the collective, secular self-understanding of European societies and deeply problematic institutional arrangements. Quite plainly, current European institutions are deeply biased. They have accommodated Christians but will not be able to accommodate Muslims on a fair and equal basis. They are not sufficient because simple accommodation without some accompanying ‘hostility’ may not work for all Muslim citizens. Why are institutional adjustments difficult to achieve? Here we must take recourse to something missing in Modood’s account, namely, history. Using a broad brush, we might say that European secularisms arose in predominantly singlereligion societies. Issues of radical individual freedom and citizenship equality arose in European societies after religious homogenization. The birth of confessional states was accompanied by massive expulsion of subject-communities whose faith differed from the religion of the ruler. Such states eventually found some place for toleration in their moral space, but as is well known, toleration was consistent with deep inequalities and with humiliating, marginalized and virtually invisible existence. The liberal-democratization and the consequent secularization of many European states has helped citizens with non-Christian faiths acquire most formal rights and we must acknowledge this as a big step forward. But such a scheme of  rights neither embodies a regime of inter-religious equality nor effectively prevents religion-based discrimination and exclusion. Indeed, it masks majoritarian, ethno-religious biases. These biases are evident in different kinds of difficulties faced by Muslims. For example, in Britain a third of all primary school children are educated by religious communities, yet applications for state funding by Muslims are frequently turned down (Bader, 2007). At one point, there were only two Muslim schools compared to 2,000 run by Roman Catholics and 4,700 by the Church of England. Similar problems persist in other European countries (ibid.). In Germany not a single school run by

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Muslims is subsidized by the state. This is also manifest in the failure of many Western European states to deal justly with the issue of headscarves, demands by Muslims to build mosques and therefore properly to practise their own faith (Germany, Italy), discrimination in ritual slaughter (Germany) or to have proper burial grounds of their own (Denmark). In recent times, as Islamophobia grips the imagination of several Western societies (exemplified by the cartoon controversy in Denmark), it is very likely that their Muslim citizens will continue to face disadvantages only on account of membership in their religious community. I return to this issue below. Removing these biases will not be easy because of resistance from the Right, institutional resilience and differences in the nature of Islam and Christianity, not to speak of non-Semitic religions such as Hinduism. Moderate secularism will be severely tested. Indeed, that test has already begun, which is why talk of strain or even crisis is justified. Why do I think so? First, one of the most conspicuous outcomes of 9/11 is the relentless securitization of states and the tightening of immigration controls. Closer surveillance of a few suspects and stricter security checks at points of entry is not the issue. The truth is that all these policies smack of cultural racism, to use Tariq Modood’s term. For instance, immigrants to Holland are given absurd citizenship tests, such as viewing a clip of homosexuals kissing or nudes on the beach, intended to gauge the levels of their social tolerance. In the state of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, parents are asked whether they are willing to allow swimming lessons for their daughters in order to determine their own fitness for citizenship. France appears to have gone one step further, passing an immigration bill that approves DNA testing and quizzing immigrants on whether or not they respect French values. As Jocelyne Cesari puts it, ‘These new measures circumvent the logic of immigration preceding integration by requiring that immigrants show signs of integration before even entering the European Union’ (Cesari, 2010, p. 12). Second, the entire discourse of Islamophobia does not help matters. When I first heard the term ‘Islamophobia’ used in the European context, I dismissed it as hyperbolic. I am not so sure now. I can understand a xenophobic response from the right wing, but why this prejudice and fear of Muslims among people who are sane, reasonable and rights sensitive? Why does it rankle so easily? Why are left-leaning liberals so easily alarmed by Muslims? Here I enter a territory where even angels fear to tread! I put my neck on the block and tentatively say the unsayable, ready to take back every word scribbled here, if corrected. I think it was David Hume who said that animosities are transmitted from one generation to another and that descendants retain a sense of hostility to old enemies long after the original motive for enmity has disappeared. These kinds of judgements, the stuff of which old wives’ tales are made, seem old-fashioned and are in severe disuse in social science, but as I said, I am willing not only to stick my neck out but also to spit out bitter words stuck in my throat. The traditional enmity between Christians and Muslims survives in the collective memory of both and so too does the urge to compete and settle old scores – not everywhere, not in everyone (Muslims and Christians in the East are certainly not part of this), but with sufficient strength to adversely affect us all.

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This is a terrible notion  – ahistorical, essentializing, and all that. I hope we can work out a version that is less troublesome and more explanatory. But till then, allow me to continue my train of thought. I remember Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s lament in an article he wrote towards the end of his life – he died the year before 9/11 – that few in the West realize how their perpetual reservations about Muslims and the generally negative perception of Islam follow a pattern set during the Crusades and which has persisted for more than a millennium (Cantwell Smith, 1997). A wise, civilized man, he scrupulously avoided saying that the animus was mutual. Or perhaps he had reason not to. Because for long periods in the twentieth century, Muslim elites cozied up to the West, while Europe and America have returned that favour rarely and only when required by their interests. The West has been dealing with Islam since the seventh century. The two have shared borders with each other, competed with and fought one another, been each other’s subjects, tried to convert one another – sometimes successfully – traded with one another, and much else. When the West was less powerful than Muslims, it feared, sometimes even hated them. The Prophet was frequently depicted as a fiend with horns – alas, even Danish cartoons have their own historical legacy. In the past two imperialist centuries, however, the West has dominated virtually everyone, including Muslims, arrogantly dismissing their way of life as inferior. Arabs know and immensely resent this. Americans are today fielding a retaliatory sentiment in a conflict that did not originate with them. Before anti-Americanism came into vogue, there already existed a centuries-old negative, competitive relationship, with alternating, egotistical claims to superiority. Two peoples who have ruled one another in the past continue to be locked in a struggle for power and domination, landing from time to time smack in the middle of a horrible syndrome. I use this term deliberately: in my use, ‘syndrome’ points, at the very least, to the breakdown of basic trust and common understanding between two peoples. And it encompasses something even more dreadful – a diseased network of neurotic relations, so completely poisoned and accompanied by such a vertiginous assortment of negative emotions (envy, malice, jealousy, spite, hatred) that communities are bound to slide down the slope of still deeper hostility and frenzied mutual destruction. Typically, when in the throes of the syndrome, animosity circulates freely, depositing layer upon layer of mutual grievance. Over time, chronic paranoia develops, intergroup relations are perverted, and the two groups begin to play antagonistic games, often fighting over nothing at all. Groups demand from one another what they cannot really get, conjure up imaginary grievances, insist precisely on just what hurts the other most – at times, obsessively desiring the very thing that the other wants, at others, the exact opposite, always with the sole purpose of negating the claims of the other. It is an abiding feature of a syndrome that, rightly or wrongly, both sides feel persistently humiliated and pushed around. A syndrome is set in motion by a long chain of closely nested, mutually interlocking actions between small, impatient extremists belonging to both groups – but eventually, horrifically, it engulfs almost everyone. The primary responsibility for the syndrome usually rests with whichever group is currently dominant, but it can also be triggered by the weaker group.

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Put the Tehran hostage issue, 9/11, the London and Madrid bombings  – large, insane acts of criminality – and the comparatively smaller issues of headscarves and minarets against this historic backdrop and they appear in a starkly different light. I know some readers must be thinking now of one Mr Huntington. Sorry, folks, but I am not talking of an inevitable clash of two essentially opposed civilizations. I merely refer to the possibility of long-term historically formed dispositions that some people learn and others get sucked into, collective propensities that won’t just go away on their own but must be intentionally dislodged or tamed. How I wish someone would try to break the syndrome! How about wholly disinterested Western help to the peoples of Libya and Syria, to assist them in throwing out dictators and setting democratic institutions in motion, and then a dignified exit, without profit in pocket, demonstrating that material or strategic interests were never the motive for intervention? I can’t say how long the syndrome will last. To the outsider, it is clear that the many communities of Christians, Muslims and secularists can scarcely afford to ignore each other. If they don’t learn to deal with one another constructively, the cataclysmic consequences will befall the whole of humanity. I have so far been talking as if the initiative lies squarely with only one agent, the European state (and its supporters), and Muslims will respond enthusiastically to any initiative from this reformed (multiculturalized) state. But this is being too sanguine about the self-understanding of Muslims or their current condition in Europe. It underestimates their alienation and ghettoization. Only after we attain a better, deeper understanding of Muslims in different parts of Europe, can we learn about what should and should not be and what currently can and cannot be accommodated. Indeed, only in a more relaxed atmosphere can a plurality of voices – the more vulnerable voices included – emerge and be better heard, a change that will have a huge bearing on our collective judgement on what should and should not be accommodated. (As of now we hear two dominant voices – the ultra-orthodox and the lapsed Muslim, the latter a convert to radical secularism.) Indeed, a hearing of these diverse voices may necessitate not just accommodation but more active fostering of some hitherto unnoticed Muslim beliefs and practices or more negative state-intervention in others; it is entirely possible that the state may not only have to support some religious practices but also inhibit others. Now, European states may be only too happy to abort some Muslim practices, but such intervention will entail a massive shift in their conception of secularism – from that of separation followed by support of religion to one of separation followed sometimes by support and sometimes by an inhibition of religion, what I call principled distance. In short, the state may have to set aside its moderate (accommodative, not hostile to religion) stance. Currently, the practice of most European states towards Muslims is: offer little official support, no accommodation, and, with few exceptions, stay indifferent to massive societal intolerance. What might be required is more support to some Muslim practices, less to others, and active interference in societal intolerance – in short, an attempt by the state to tackle both inter- and intra-religious domination. In sum, extending moderate (accommodative) secularism to Muslims, under existing conditions, will be very difficult, for it presupposes massive shifts in background cultural conditions for which Europe may not yet be prepared. Europe has not seen deep religious diversity for a very long time. It would not be too off the mark

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to say that not appreciating deep religious and cultural diversity is one of the central failures of modern Europe. To my knowledge, overcoming this is a bigger challenge than any other issue. By now, even the conceptual resources for such a change appear to be missing. In any case, moderate secularism’s accommodation will not be sufficient because the modern (democratic) state must have the legitimacy to also negatively intervene in some socio-religious practices, if only to protect the interests of vulnerable internal minorities. This in part entails abandoning moderate secularism. To respond to the challenge of deep diversity, Europe might be better off with an altogether different conception of secularism. What I have said above needs some qualification, for it ignores two facts. First, it neglects the informal politics of state and non-state actors, where interesting changes might be occurring. Second, it does not take into account the existence of the European Constitution, which is very different from the constitutions of individual European states. I acknowledge the importance of both. These factors could make a substantial difference. But difficulties block progress in these sites too. First, nothing prevents individual states from ignoring the European Constitution. Will France, Belgium, or Italy listen to the European Union if it declared the banning of the burqa to be unconstitutional? The second point is particularly noteworthy. To make it, we need to make distinctions between (1) norms of secularism embedded in the informal politics of states (and non-state actors); (2) norms embedded in formal, institutional politics and articulated in representations and reflections found in laws enacted by legislatures, executive decisions, judicial pronouncements and constitutional articles; and finally, (3) normative ideals governing the relationship between the state and religion expressed in doctrines, ideologies and political theories. I believe that the doctrinal, ideological and theoretical formulations of Western secularism are by now highly restricted and inadequate as are the formal politics and laws inspired by these doctrines and ideologies. The rehabilitation of secularism is virtually impossible unless we reduce our reliance on these formal practices and formulations. These doctrines and theories have become part of the problem, hurdles to properly examining the issues at stake. They include French laicite and the American wall of separation model, as well as the formal, institutional political practices of most European states. If we continue to remain in the grip of these formulations and practices, we would simply not notice other conceptions that have probably been pushed into the background. Once we have shifted away from these and start to focus on the normative, informal practices of a broader range of Western and non-Western states, we shall see that better forms of secular states and much more defensible versions of secularisms are available. This requires an anthropology of secular practices of Western and ­non-Western political actors, from which Modood’s moderate secularism is galaxies away.

Indian model of secularism If none of the other models are appropriate, is there another model outside the West which might provide a solution to the main problem of managing religious diversity and preventing inter- and intra-religious domination? Although theoretically less

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developed, there exists another model of secularism, one not generated exclusively in the West, which meets the needs of societies with deep religious diversity and also complies with principles of freedom and equality: the subcontinental or Indian model found loosely in the best moments of intercommunal practice in India and in the country’s constitution appropriately interpreted. In India, the existence of deep religious diversity has ensured a conceptual response not only to problems within religions but also between religions. Without taking it as a blue print, the West must examine the Indian conception and possibly learn from it (for a detailed account, see Bhargava, 2010). Several features of the Indian model are striking and relevant to wider discussion. First, multiple religions are not extras, added on as an afterthought but present at its starting-point, as part of its foundation. Indian secularism is inextricably tied to deep religious diversity. Second, it has a commitment to multiple values  – liberty and equality, not conceived narrowly as pertaining to individuals but interpreted broadly to cover the relative autonomy of religious communities and equality of status in society, as well as other more basic values such as peace and toleration between communities. It has a place not only for the right of individuals to profess their religious beliefs but also for the right of religious communities to establish and maintain educational institutions crucial for the survival and sustenance of their distinctive religious traditions. The acceptance of community-specific rights brings us to the third feature of Indian secularism. Because it was born in a deeply multi-religious society, it is concerned as much with inter-religious domination as it is with intra-religious domination. Unlike the two Western conceptions, which provided benefits to minorities only incidentally (Jews benefited in some European countries such as France not because their special needs and demands were taken care of but rather because of a change in the general climate of the society), in India, even communityspecific political rights (political reservations for religious minorities) were almost granted and were withheld in the last instance only for contextual reasons. In fact, it is arguable that a conceptual space is still available for them within the Indian constitution. Fourth, it does not erect a wall of separation between state and religion. There are boundaries, of course, but they are porous. This allows the state to intervene in religions, to help or hinder them without the impulse to control or destroy them. This involves multiple roles: granting aid to educational institutions of religious communities on a non-preferential basis; or interfering in socio-religious institutions that deny equal dignity and status to members of their own religion or to those of others (e.g. the ban on untouchability and the obligation to allow everyone, irrespective of their caste, to enter Hindu temples, and potentially to correct gender inequalities), on the basis of a more sensible understanding of equal concern and respect for all individuals and groups. In short, it interprets separation to mean not strict exclusion or strict neutrality but rather what I call ‘principled distance’, poles apart from one-sided exclusion, mutual exclusion and strict neutrality or equidistance. Fifth, it is not entirely averse to the public character of religions. Although the state is not identified with a particular religion or with religion more generally (there is no

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establishment of religion), there is official and therefore public recognition granted to religious communities. Sixth, this model shows that we do not have to choose between active hostility and passive indifference, or between disrespectful hostility and respectful indifference, towards religion. We can combine the two: show disrespect to some aspects as long as there is also active respect: the state may intervene to inhibit some practices, so long as it shows respect for other practices of the religious community and does so by publicly lending support to them. Seventh, by not fixing its commitment from the start exclusively to individual or community values or marking rigid boundaries between the public and private, India’s constitutional secularism allows decisions on these matters to be taken either within the open dynamics of democratic politics or by contextual reasoning in the courts. Finally, this commitment to multiple values and principled distance means that the state tries to balance different, ambiguous but equally important values. This makes its secular ideal more like a contextual, ethically sensitive, politically negotiated arrangement (which it really is), rather than a scientific doctrine conjured by ideologues and merely implemented by political agents. A somewhat forced, formulaic articulation of Indian secularism goes something like this. The state must keep a principled distance from all public or private, individual-oriented or community-oriented religious institutions for the sake of the equally significant (and sometimes conflicting) values of peace, this worldly goods, dignity, liberty and equality (in all its complicated individualistic or nonindividualistic versions). Indian secularism then is an ethically sensitive, negotiated settlement between diverse groups and divergent values. Allow me to elaborate on the notion of principled distance.

Principled distance What precisely is principled distance? The policy of principled distance entails a flexible approach on the question of inclusion/exclusion of religion and the engagement/disengagement of the state, which at the level of law and policy depends on the context, nature or current state of relevant religions. This engagement must be governed by principles undergirding a secular state, that is, principles that flow from a commitment to the values mentioned earlier. This means that religion may intervene in the affairs of the state if such intervention promotes freedom, equality or any other value integral to secularism. For example, citizens may support a coercive law of the state grounded purely in a religious rationale if this law is compatible with freedom or equality. Equally, the state may engage with religion or disengage from it, engage positively or negatively, but it does so depending entirely on whether or not these values are promoted or undermined. A state that intervenes or refrains from interference on this basis keeps a principled distance from all religions. This is one constitutive idea of principled distance. This idea is different from strict neutrality, that is, the idea that the state may help or hinder all religions to an equal degree and in the same manner, that if it intervenes in one religion, it must also do

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so in others. Rather, it rests upon a distinction explicitly drawn by the American philosopher Ronald Dworkin between equal treatment and treating everyone as an equal (Dworkin, 1978). The principle of equal treatment, in the relevant political sense, requires that the state treat all its citizens equally in the relevant respect, for example, in the distribution of a resource or opportunity. On the other hand, the principle of treating people as equals entails that every person or group is treated with equal concern and respect. This second principle may sometimes require equal treatment, say equal distribution of resources, but it may also occasionally dictate unequal treatment. Treating people or groups as equals is entirely consistent with differential treatment. This idea is the second ingredient in what I have called principled distance. Thus, some groups may be exempt from laws applicable to all others. For example Sikhs may be allowed to wear their turban in military service. I said that principled distance allows for differential treatment. What kind of treatment do I have in mind? First, religious groups have sought exemptions from practices in which states intervene by promulgating a law to be applied neutrally to the rest of society. This demand for non-interference is made on the ground either that the law requires them to do things not permitted by their religion or prevents them from doing acts mandated by it. For example, Sikhs demand exemptions from mandatory helmet laws and from police dress codes to accommodate religiously required turbans. Elsewhere, Jews seek exemptions from Air Force regulations to accommodate their yarmulkes. Muslim women and girls demand that the state not interfere in their religiously required chador. Jews and Muslims seek exemption from Sunday closing laws on the ground that this is not required by their religion. Principled distance allows that a practice that is banned or regulated in one culture may be permitted in the minority culture because of the distinctive status and meaning it has for its members. For many republican or liberal theories, this is a problem because of their simple, somewhat absolutist morality that gives overwhelming importance to one value, particularly to equal treatment or equal liberty. Religious groups may demand that the state refrain from interference in their practices, but they may equally demand that the state interfere in such a way as to give them special assistance so that these groups are also able to secure what other groups are able to routinely get by virtue of their social dominance in the political community. It may grant authority to religious officials to perform legally binding marriages, to have their own rules or methods of obtaining a divorce, its rules about relations between ex-husbands and ex-wives, its way of defining a will, or its laws about post-mortem allocation of property, arbitration of civil disputes and even its method of establishing property rights. Principled distance allows the possibility of such policies on the grounds that it might be unfair to hold people accountable to an unfair law. However, principled distance is not just a recipe for differential treatment in the form of special exemptions. It may even require state intervention in some religions more than in others, considering the historical and social conditions of all relevant religions. For the promotion of a particular value constitutive of secularism, some religion, relative to other religions, may require more interference from the state. For

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example, suppose that the value to be advanced is social equality. This requires in part undermining caste hierarchies. If this is the aim of the state, then it may be required of the state that it interferes in caste-ridden Hinduism much more than say Islam or Christianity. However, if a diversity-driven religious liberty is the value to be advanced by the state, then it may have to intervene in Christianity and Islam more than in Hinduism. If this is so, the state can neither strictly exclude considerations emanating from religion nor keep strict neutrality with respect to religion. It cannot antecedently decide that it will always refrain from interfering in religions or that it will interfere in each equally. Indeed, it may not relate to every religion in society in exactly the same way or intervene in each religion to the same degree or in the same manner. To want to do so would be plainly absurd. All it must ensure is that the relationship between the state and religions is guided by non-sectarian motives consistent with some values and principles. A state interfering in one religion more than in others does not automatically depart from secularism. Indian secularism rejects the assumption that ‘one size fits all’.2

Three objections Three objections might arise on reading this. First, it might be said: Look at the state of the subcontinent! Look at India! How deeply divided it remains! What about the violence against Muslims in Gujarat and against Christians in Orissa? How can success be claimed for the Indian version of secularism? I do not wish to underestimate the force of this objection. The secular ideal in India is in periodic crisis and is deeply contested. Besides, at the best of times, it generates as many problems as it solves. Practitioners of Indian secularism can learn from the institutional mechanism set up by European states to prevent intergroup violence: some facets of the institutional basis of Indian secularism can be strengthened by the example of Western states. To consolidate its minimally decent character (the protection of elementary Human Rights, for instance – West Europeans, at least as of now, will not allow any violence with genocidal intent to take place as has happened, for example, in Gujarat), India can still learn from the contemporary West. Yet, as different religious cultures claim their place in societies across the world, it may be India’s development of secularism that offers the most peaceful, freedom-sensitive and democratic way forward. In any case, this account must not be read as an apologia for the Indian state but as a reasonable and sympathetic articulation of a conception that the Indian state frequently fails to realize. My discussion is meant to focus on the comparative value of this conception and its potential for the future and not on how in fact it has fared in India. The fate of ideal conceptions with trans-cultural potential should not be decided purely on the basis of what happens to them in their place of origin. Second, it might be objected that I do not focus on the best practices of Western states and emphasize the more vocal articulations of Western secular conceptions. But that precisely is my point. The dominant conception of Western secularism is derived

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from an idealized self-understanding of two of its versions rather than from the best practices of Western states, including the practices of the United States and France. It is my view that this doctrinal conception (1) obstructs an understanding of alternative conceptions worked out on the ground by morally sensitive political agents; and (2) by influencing politicians and citizens alike, it frequently distorts the practice of many Western and non-Western states. Further, (3) it masks the many ways in which inter- or intra-religious domination persists in many Western societies. Moreover, it is this conception that has travelled to all parts of the world and is a continuing source of misunderstanding of the value of secular states. My objective is to displace these conceptions or at least put them in their place. Finally, I must deal with two further objections. First, that the principled distance version of secularism is strongly reliant on Kantian liberalism and has all the problems endemic to the latter. The second critique comes from the opposite end: it is claimed that principled distance secularism is far too pragmatic in the crude opportunistic sense, the assumption here being that any negotiation or compromise is morally mistaken. In what follows I shall try to counter these objections. I acknowledge that hitherto my account of it has been brief and therefore open to misinterpretation. Therefore, allow me to further elaborate this notion. To begin with I used the term distance to distinguish my account from a separationist reading of political secularism. On the latter view, separation of state and religion means somewhat strict and wholly unambiguous exclusion of religion from the state at each of the three levels mentioned earlier. As indicated earlier, this interpretation of separation I find neither desirable nor possible. Distance is a less extreme mode of relation. Keeping a distance from something does not prevent you from relating to it in multiple ways. It signifies only that such relation must not become so close that one who has to distance itself and what it has to distance from become virtually identical. The notion of distance opens up a terrain of multiple possibilities. It allows for flexibility when it is desperately needed and therefore, for change in perspective and practice when the situation demands. But it is precisely this openness and flexibility that has led some critics to the view that virtually any mode of relation between state and religion is permissible. To allow for anything and everything is to introduce an adhocism or opportunism that is conceptually defeating and morally outrageous. Thus, it is alleged that this model of secularism allows for state involvement in or detachment from religion grounded purely in reasons for say vote-bank politics or appeasing the tantrums of particular religious groups. But then it is precisely to block such an interpretation that I introduced the term ‘principled’ in ‘principled distance’. Every action of the state in relation to all religious communities must be grounded in, supported by and justified in terms of principles. Given this, it would be preposterous to think of principled distance as a purely tactical and opportunistic policy adopted for self-aggrandisement, for purely political and financial consideration. Principled distance is not opportunistic distance. Furthermore, the not so visible plurality of principles can hardly be overemphasized. Multiple principles always come into play in the process of any decision-making. I recognize that this multiplicity can be easily obscured by the very use of the term

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principle, which in the standard and perhaps dominant Kantian interpretation means an exception-less universal moral law. The phrase ‘principled distance’, when interpreted in these Kantian terms, may appear to have a rigid uncompromising moral singularity. In my account, however, principles are and must be multiple. Strictly speaking and in order to avoid this confusion, I should be using the term ‘value-based distance’. Principled distance, however, is crisper and tidy. I prefer it because I don’t view principles as Kantian ideologues would. I am committed to value pluralism and therefore to a potential conflict of values. There are very few instances where a single value applies unambiguously. This point needs more elucidation. In moral and political theory, broadly two views exist on moral reasoning. One form of reasoning about moral issues is acontextual. It has a list of moral values that are arranged in a hierarchy so that one value is supreme and others subordinate to it. If there is a conflict, then the value considered supreme overrides every other value. For instance, police officers are shown to be faced with a conflict between upholding the law of the land and the need to protect their child at the receiving end of the law. The police inspector is shown to have an unambiguous preference for the value of impartiality and no place whatsoever in his moral world for even the most elementary partiality towards his son. When the conflict arises, it is clear to him what is required here. He upholds the law and arrests his own son. He does so not through a process of contextual reasoning but because of his prior commitment to a supreme moral value. He has no wish to understand the point of view of his son, the feelings of his wife or the reasons why the illegal act was committed. He is committed to an absolutist morality and he applies it mechanically to everyone in every situation. As I said, this is a caricature of the kind of moral reasoning to which the mainstream conception of secularism is committed but broadly it gets the picture right. But we know that most human situations are saturated with multiple and competing values and therefore any decision requires a sensitive interpretation, negotiation and balancing of all relevant values. I consider it wrong if any one value was unreflectively and unambiguously to override other values relevant to the situation, almost as wrong as taking a decision grounded in pure considerations of wealth or power despite the need to take into account human values. The alternative model of reasoning is more nuanced. It simply has to be, if every value is not to be ordered beforehand. Let me take an example. Suppose that there is an important meeting on human rights violations to be held outside India. It is important for the participant not only personally but because of its larger social significance. Suppose also that a day before the person’s departure her father falls ill. Now there is a value conflict. Both are important. For those who follow a contextual reasoning, one of these values must be supreme. If issues of social significance are more important, then the participant must attend the meeting no matter what happens to her father. The contextualist – and I imagine most of us fall in this category – reasons differently. If the illness is life-threatening, then the participant should abandon the trip. If it is major but not necessarily a life-threatening one, the participant may ask another family member or a friend to take care of her father. She may herself curtail the visit

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from five to three days and so on. Alternatively, if her own presence is not that vital and the job she is meant to do can be performed by someone else who is willing to be a last minute replacement, then the participant may decide to go even when the illness is not life-threatening, though still serious enough to require close and urgent care. When we reason in this manner in the face of a clear instance of conflict between two or more values, we are sensitive to the concrete situation at hand and if possible we try to find a balance between both because after all it is not unreasonable to hope to fulfil both these value-based desires. A context-sensitive secularism, one based on the idea of principled distance, is what I call contextual secularism. Contextual secularism is contextual not only because it captures the idea that the precise form and content of secularism will vary from one to another context and from place to place but also that it embodies a certain model of contextual moral reasoning. This it does because of its character as a multi-value doctrine. To accept that secularism is a multi-value doctrine is to acknowledge that its constitutive values do not always sit easily with one another. On the contrary, they are frequently in conflict. Some degree of internal discord and therefore a fair amount of instability is an integral part of contextual secularism. For this reason, it forever requires fresh interpretations, contextual judgements and attempts at reconciliation and compromise. No general a priori rule of resolving these conflicts exist; no easy lexical order, no pre-existing hierarchy among values or laws that enables us to decide that, no matter what the context, a particular value must override everything else. Almost everything then is a matter of situational thinking and contextual reasoning. Whether one value overrides or is reconciled with another cannot be decided before hand. Each time the matter presents itself differently and will be differently resolved. If this is true, then the practice of secularism requires a different model of moral reasoning than the one that straightjackets our moral understanding in the form of well-delineated, explicitly stated rules (Taylor, 1994). This contextual secularism recognizes that the conflict between individual rights and group rights cannot always be adjudicated by recourse to some general and abstract principle. Rather they can only be settled case by case and may require a fine balancing of competing claims. The eventual outcome may not be wholly satisfactory to either but still be reasonably satisfactory to both. Multi-value doctrines such as secularism encourage accommodation – not the giving up of one value for the sake of another but rather their reconciliation and possible harmonization, that is to make each work without changing the basic content of apparently incompatible concepts and values. In my outlook all compromises are not wrong or despicable. If something of value is sacrificed for the sake of pure consideration of self-interest, say in the pursuit of power, wealth or fame, then clearly the decision is based on a morally dubious compromise but if one begins with the recognition that multiple values are at stake, then provided one sets issues of self-interest aside, any negotiation or balancing among values is entirely appropriate from a moral point of view. Indeed such negotiations are morally required. My entire contextualist morally sensitive approach to secularism as principled distance will lose its distinctiveness and individuality if it is viewed in any other way, say as Kantian or Machavellian.

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Thus, the decision arrived at by a defensible secular state must be viewed as a practical judgement, a result of an elaborate public reasoning with citizens over a long period of time. By its very nature it is not final but provisional and revisable. It just is the best possible answer to a problem under the circumstances at that point of time, and, retrospectively can be understood as part of a long continuing series of similar morally sensitive practical judgements. Thus, the only presupposition of Indian secularism is the desirability of reducing inter- and intra-religious and other related dominations. All the rest is up for grabs through democratic deliberations and negotiations. All relevant groups have to agree on the broad nature of principles, a general interpretation of what they mean, how distance has to be interpreted, how much closer or further the state needs to be with respect to which religion, in what context and with what detailed justification. Furthermore, although disagreement is enshrined in the constitution or in dominant political conventions, there is nothing final or un-revisable about it. One final clarification before I conclude this chapter. When I refer to the state, I always have in mind a democratic political ethos within which the state functions. In short, the word democratic is assumed to be attached to the term state. The responsibility of maintaining the health of political secularism falls not on the government alone but on a whole variety of political agents such as judges who must be impartial, bureaucrats who respect the law, a vibrant press that is not controlled by the corporate world or monitored by the surveillance of sections of the state, NGOs who articulate the needs and problems of the poor and the vulnerable and a permanently alert citizenry. The political secularism in its Indian incarnation is dependent on the complementary activities of multiple social and political actors.

Conclusion I have argued that the mode of secularism developed in the subcontinent and enshrined in the Indian constitution has rich resources to deal with contemporary problems pertaining to religious communities. I have provided three reasons why this might be so. First, all Western models of secularism grew in religiously homogenous societies focusing exclusively on the relationship between church and state. Given the growth of religious diversity in such societies, they must now incorporate this fact into their model. Since the Indian version presupposes religious diversity, Europe can learn from it. Second, in predominantly single-religion societies the focus was quite naturally on intra-religious domination – for example, clerics controlling lay persons or the persecution of dissenters and non-believers. Inter-religious domination was at best a marginal issue. However, in India both inter- and intra-religious domination are equally important. How one might address issues of inter-religious domination can also be learnt from the Indian model. Finally, since religions are nowhere near disappearing and since all of them possess some features that demand respect and others that invite disrespect, a simple strategy of non-interference or a blanket support to one or all is clearly insufficient. Though some form of separation is required it cannot mean exclusion of religion. Instead a more feasible strategy of simultaneously

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engaging with and disengaging from different aspects of different religions has become a necessity. But then, the strategy of principled distance is meant to perform precisely this complex and nuanced role. Principled distance is built into constitutional Indian secularism. Learning from its strengths and weaknesses is the third important lesson for Europe.

3

Understanding Secularism by Means of Genealogy Gavin Hyman

To talk of the ‘secular’ today is to invoke a term that marks a site of deep contestation. This is so not only because the legitimacy of the secular is so often now being questioned  – and, equally often, defended  – but also because the meaning or definition of the ‘secular’ as such is by no means unproblematic. Charles Taylor has done much to bring some order out of this chaos by carefully distinguishing between distinct understandings of what we might take the secular to mean. In his essay ‘Modes of secularism’, he has helpfully illuminated the critical differences between two ways of understanding the secular withdrawal of religious authority from public, and especially political, spaces in the Western world. The first is what he calls the ‘common ground’ approach. Here, the aim was to establish a certain ethic of peaceful coexistence and political order, a set of grounds for obedience which, while still theistic, even Christian, was based on those doctrines which were common to all Christian sects, or even to all theists . . . The crucial step that needed to be taken was to hold that the political injunctions that flowed from this common core trumped the demands of a particular confessional allegiance. (Taylor, 1998, p. 33)

The second form of secularism is what Taylor calls the ‘independent ethic’ approach: This allows us to abstract from our religious beliefs altogether. We look for certain features of the human condition which allow us to deduce exceptionless norms, including those of peace and political obedience . . . Religion, where it really counts in people’s lives and commitments, essentially will exist only in the private sphere. (Ibid., pp. 33, 34–35)

So for Taylor, we have here two quite distinct forms of secularism, and the difference between them is constituted by their respective dispositions towards religion: the

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first is constituted by what a plurality of religious traditions hold in common; the second constitutes itself by a set of values that we hold to be publicly valid regardless of what religion may or may not be practised in the private sphere.1 For some, of course, only the second constitutes secularism proper, on the grounds that this stance depends on a definition of the secular in terms of public spaces that constitute themselves apart from religion. Some might be perfectly happy for religion to persist in the private sphere, while others would be happy to see it dwindle in that sphere too; but both would be agreed that secularism means that public spaces must be kept free of any religious taint. In contrast, in distinguishing between these two modes of what he takes to be secularism, Taylor is indirectly suggesting that the essence of secularism, which is found in both models, lies not in the removal of religion from public spaces, but, rather, in an attempt to construct those spaces in ways that do justice to the surrounding religious conformity or plurality within which they are placed. Secularism is thus a way of ‘distancing’ public institutions from theological verities (and, as Taylor rightly points out, such secular ‘distancing’ took place also in the medieval world, albeit more with a view to protecting the church from secular contamination, rather than to protecting the integrity of the political function). On this understanding, the modern Western strategy of strictly separating church and state is but one contingent way of enacting this secular ‘distancing’. In this chapter, I wish to build upon and elaborate Taylor’s analysis in a way that is complementary to it. For one thing, I want to show how the transition from one form of secularism to the other can be seen to be manifested in a specific historical trajectory: that of the English-speaking (Anglo-American) world (which is not to suggest that it might not equally be manifested in other historical trajectories). Furthermore, I want to place the transition within the context of a still wider historical movement, and identify what I take to be a precedent for these two forms of secularism, namely, the English post-reformation Elizabethan settlement. While this may not obviously be a precedent for the two forms of secularism identified by Taylor, I want to suggest that what all three ‘moments’ share in common is a motivating desire to mediate unity and difference in contexts marked by a pluralization of legitimacy. The transition from one moment to the next, I suggest, may be explained by the pursuit of that same underlying motive in different ways in accordance with changing circumstances. Furthermore, I also want to suggest that the difference between the first and second configurations have often been exaggerated, while the differences between the second and the third have often been downplayed. By bringing these neglected continuities and discontinuities into focus, I want to suggest that we can discern a continuum between all three which should call into question any simple opposition between ‘secularism’ and earlier religious polities. Furthermore, such a continuum may help us to see that current paradoxes and instabilities are in fact repetitions of earlier ones, and this, in turn, should allow us to come to a greater understanding of the meaning and significance of our currently contested condition and what appropriate responses to it there may or may not be.

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In many ways, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the foundations for secularism were first laid – albeit unwittingly – by Martin Luther in his declaration made at the Diet of Worms in 1521 in which he said: Unless I am convicted of error by the testimony of Scripture or (since I put no trust in the unsupported authority of Pope or of councils, since it is plain that they have often erred and often contradicted themselves) by manifest reasoning I stand convicted by the Scriptures to which I have appealed, and my conscience is taken captive by God’s word, I cannot and will not recant anything, for to act against our conscience is neither safe for us, nor open to us. (Luther in Bettenson, 1947, p. 285)

In making this declaration, Luther was doing much more than inaugurating a religious disagreement; there had been many such disagreements before. The radicalism of Luther’s move lay rather in his questioning the very criteria by which such disagreements might be settled. As Richard H. Popkin has observed: In this declaration of Christian liberty, Luther set forth his new criterion of religious knowledge, that what conscience is compelled to believe on reading Scripture is true. To Catholics like [Johann] Eck, this must have sounded completely incredible. For centuries, assenting that a proposition stated a religious truth meant that it was authorized by Church tradition, by the Pope, and by Councils. To claim that these standards could be wrong was like denying the rules of logic. The denial of the accepted criteria would eliminate the sole basis for testing the truth of a religious proposition. To raise even the possibility that the criteria could be faulty was to substitute another criterion by which the accepted criteria could be judged, and thus, in effect, to deny the entire framework by which orthodoxy had been determined for centuries. (Popkin, 1960, p. 3)

By questioning the very criteria of religious knowledge and, indeed, truth itself, Luther was inaugurating a cultural situation marked, above all, by what I have elsewhere characterized as a ‘pluralisation of legitimacy’ (see Hyman, 2010, pp.  23–24). This was to have enormous ramifications, with which we are still attempting to grapple today. As Popkin observes, ‘The Pandora’s box that Luther opened at Leipzig was to have the most far-reaching consequences, not just in theology but throughout man’s entire intellectual realm’ (Popkin, 1960, p. 3). A society and a culture marked by a ‘pluralisation of legitimacy’ is one that will inevitably be afflicted by instability. Indeed, this instability was not only theoretical and potential, but all too real and actual, as Europe was torn apart by wars in which religious conflict loomed large in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In this situation, the immediate imperative was to attempt to forge some form of effective unity out of an apparently irreducible plurality. Indeed, one such solution was attempted by the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, whereby it was agreed that sovereign

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rulers would be permitted to determine what would count as authoritative religious orthodoxy within their respective realms. While this attempt to mediate unity and difference operated at an overarching transcendental level, within these realms themselves, it was as though the process of the pluralization of legitimacy had never occurred; whether in Protestant or Roman Catholic states, internal unity was secured by the enforcement of conformity. While pluralistic co-existence was acknowledged as a diplomatic convention that could serve to regulate the conduct between states, it was for the most part allowed no purchase within those states themselves. In this respect, the Reformation settlement in England was unusual in that it allowed for a degree of legitimate plurality within its own borders. It is for this reason that I want to identify it as the first precedent for subsequent secularisms; it was one of the first attempts to mediate unity and difference in a way other than that of the simple enforcement of conformity. It is important, of course, not to exaggerate its distinctiveness in this regard. The English settlement was entirely consistent with the Augsburg vision in that it made participation in the state synonymous with participation in the state church, as determined by the sovereign monarch. Furthermore, insofar as it allowed a greater purchase on plurality than other contemporary ecclesiastical polities, this was more by way of accident than by explicit intent, at least at the outset. Nonetheless, the English church–state settlement of the late sixteenth century provides an interesting example of an early attempt to mediate unity and difference which set a precedent later to be developed in alternative configurations. In England, the effects of the pluralization of legitimacy had been experienced directly as a series of violent oscillations in a relatively short period between 1533 and 1558. During this time, under successive monarchs, the country veered between Roman Catholicism, a conservative ‘catholic’ Protestantism (Henry VIII), a more ‘extreme’ almost puritan Protestantism (Edward VI), a restoration of Roman Catholicism again (Mary I) before the installation of a moderate and mediating Protestantism under Elizabeth I. At Elizabeth’s accession, her primary motive was to establish religious and political unity. But it was by no means clear what form such unity would take and what would be the character of the English Protestant church that few doubted she would seek to establish. The uncertainty arose from the fact that Queen’s own religious commitments and sensibilities were in marked contrast to those of her most senior ecclesiastical advisors and the most powerful parliamentarians. They were, for the most part, deeply Protestant, indeed Puritan divines, while the Queen herself was more conservative and catholic both liturgically and theologically. The eventual shape and character of the Anglican church was the result of a pragmatic compromise between these two powerful but contrary forces. In other words, the evolution of Anglicanism into a broad church that could easily accommodate differences did not come about because it was the explicit theological vision and design of its founders, but because the nature of its birth made it particularly amenable to become such (see Dickens, 1964, chapters  12–14). As the Reformation historian A. G. Dickens has commented, Elizabeth ‘cannot be credited with a prophetic latitudinarian policy which foresaw the rich diversity of Anglicanism. Her preferences of 1558–59 nevertheless made this diversity possible; perhaps no young woman of 25 has ever taken personal decisions having consequences so momentous’ (ibid., p.  295). If in

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some senses accidental and pragmatic, these conditions nevertheless provided fertile ground for Richard Hooker to develop his theological balance between Protestant and Catholic ideals that would soon become the hallmark of Anglicanism and that would be so amenable to internal plurality. If Elizabeth’s primary aim was to secure religious and political unity, therefore, this was a unity that was attained and perpetuated on the basis of a considerable internal plurality. While this may not have been Elizabeth’s desire, it may well be that the resulting unity was all the stronger because of it. It is also noteworthy that the means by which this unity was attained was primarily liturgical rather than theological in character, and that the debates through which this practical compromise was forged revolved for the most part around questions of public worship. The Act of Uniformity of 1559 made provision for the restoration of what was for the most part the second Prayer Book of Edward VI (1552). This was significant in that it was considerably more Protestant than the first Prayer Book of 1549 (a testimony to the strength of Protestant opinion in Church and Parliament); but, equally significantly, it made modifications in a conservative direction, thus making concessions to the theological temper of the Queen herself. Again, while this was the result of compromise between contending forces, the practical outcome was to allow for a considerable diversity within worship, the key medium through which Anglican unity was maintained. As John H. R. Moorman has commented, the picture which we get of the Elizabethan Church is one not of uniformity, but of diversity . . . Even loyalty to the Prayer Book allowed for a good deal of variety, then as now; for additions could be made and rubrics could be ‘interpreted’ in all kinds of ways without causing undue anxiety to the average conscience. (Moorman, 1953, p. 216)

If ecclesiastical unity was maintained primarily through liturgy rather than doctrine, it has, of course, to be admitted that the two are not clearly separable. Liturgy implies, and is only intelligible within, a particular doctrinal context, but, crucially, these beliefs were for the most part implied rather than defined. Admittedly, the Convocation of the Church of England did formulate the Thirty-Nine Articles (which were actually a revision of the Forty-Two Articles of 1553), but these were relatively vague and permissive when compared with other contemporary ecclesiastical formularies. Indeed, as Moorman again comments, the articles ‘are not meant to be a formulary of the Christian faith. They are a statement of the Church of England’s attitude towards the doctrinal disputes which were convulsing Europe at the time, including such doctrines as Predestination and Transubstantiation’ (ibid., p. 214). The Anglican settlement was, for its time, a remarkably successful attempt to deal with the crisis arising from a pluralization of legitimacy by striking a pragmatic balance between unity and diversity. It seems almost by accident to have stumbled into such an ingenious solution. The Reformation, with its inauguration of a pluralization of legitimacy and its emphasis on the inviolability of individual judgement, seemed inevitably to entail a proliferation of plurality. It was singularly fortunate that the Anglican church, by a combination of initial accident and later design, forged an

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ecclesiology that was able to accommodate this plurality, and was thus able to serve as an effective state church for the entire nation. The dynamics of the Reformation, however, were such that plurality would inevitably proliferate further – to such an extent that it would no longer be  containable by the Anglican framework at all. Indeed, it was the ultimate inability  of the old unity to accommodate the new plurality that gave rise to the second polity that I want to consider, namely, the new understanding of the church–state relationship that was forged by the newly independent United States of America. The decisive separation between church and state, by which this relationship was constituted was not co-terminous with the declaration of independence itself, neither was its adoption automatic. Both George Washington and Patrick Henry, for instance, initially defended the established status of religion in the State of Virginia. But what became known as the Virginia Statute which formulated the separation between church and state was drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and enacted by the state legislature of Virginia in 1786. The principles of the statute were subsequently incorporated into the American constitution through the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The revolutionary character of this innovation has often been asserted. As Martin  E.  Marty has put it: The Virgina event, by common consent, was the most decisive element in an epochal shift in the Western world’s approach to relations between civil and religious spheres of life after fourteen centuries . . . For those who like to speak of an ‘Age of Constantine’ that began in the fourth century, there is reason to regard the Virginia act as the key moment of the end of that age and the beginning of a new one. (Marty, 1988, pp. 1–2)

But while the rupture with the old order has often been recognized, the continuities with it have often been overlooked. Indeed, I want to suggest that the Virginia Statute actually embodied a continuation of the policy of the Anglican settlement albeit by other means. In other words, it was another attempt to mediate unity and plurality in a situation marked by a pluralization of legitimacy. Of course, it is evident from the wording of the preamble to the Virginia Statute and from numerous other sources that Jefferson’s primary motivation in promoting the statute was his commitment to the principle of the inviolability of the individual’s conscience, a religious conviction initially stated in embryonic form by Martin Luther and developed subsequently by numerous other thinkers, notably John Locke. But one of the practical outcomes of this commitment was an increasing proliferation of plurality; this was particularly manifest in a country whose earliest immigrant settlers had been those for whom the religious polity of England was experienced as being unduly restrictive. The great advantage of the Jeffersonian model was that it was better able to accommodate this. In part, then, the transition from an Anglican religious establishment to a polity of religious disestablishment may be said to have come about because the overarching mediating religious framework of establishment, inherited from the erstwhile ‘mother country’ came

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to be regarded as too restrictive in relation to at least parts of what it was meant to contain. At the same time, however, the adoption of the Virgina statute did not entail a situation of irreducible religious plurality. Indeed, the imperative to maintain some kind of religious unity in the midst of this plurality remained as strong as ever. There was still felt to be the need for an overarching mediating framework that would constitute a unity while creating the conditions for a domesticated diversity within it. Yet clearly, the English model would have to be adapted, and in such a way that it would address and overcome its undue restrictiveness. What this meant, in effect, was that the overarching mediating framework would have to be less ‘dense’ or ‘thick’ in terms of its own religious, doctrinal and ideological content. Contrary to what is often thought, this did not mean that the state should be free of any trace of religious belief. As Thomas E. Buckley has said of Jefferson, ‘While a major purpose of his administration was “to strengthen . . . religious freedom”, he did not desire a “government without religion”. That charge, he later confided to an ally, was a “lie” fostered by his enemies’ (Buckley, 1988, p. 93). Furthermore, as he also points out, themes relating to a Creator God who implanted a law of nature from which are derived natural rights, and the acknowledgement of national dependence on divine providence, are all to be found in the Declaration of Independence, and some, indeed, in the Virginia Statute (ibid., p. 80). But if the overarching framework was to become more embracing of diversity and less exclusionary and distorting of that which was within it, the framework itself would have to become much ‘thinner’. If it was to remain theistic (and there seemed to be no doubt that it should be), then it would have to become a ‘thin theism’. Fortunately, such a thin theism was indeed ready and available in the then fashionable natural theology. Indeed, the Enlightenment tradition of natural theology perfectly fitted the political bill, and this for a number of reasons. For one thing, its conclusions were held to be certain, that is, demonstrable truths reached on the basis of natural reason. This was something that had been lacking in the English Elizabethan settlement, but by now the legacy of Cartesian philosophical certainty had become unmistakable. Indeed, it was not only unmistakable but indispensable. As the United States was itself constituted by a much broader religious plurality than was sixteenth-century England, it was all the more important that the overarching mediating framework be one that was, religiously and philosophically, indubitable. That is to say, a framework to which all – no matter what their specific denominational religious adherence  – would, without contention, be able to subscribe. The other main characteristic of natural theology was that its conclusions were startlingly minimal. It was able to reach conclusions on the existence of a deity, a creator God, but not on any further doctrinal speculations. As is well known, these were to be relegated to the sphere of ‘private belief ’. This, then, is the emergence of the ‘common ground’ secularism identified by Taylor. It meant that denominationally specific beliefs and practices were to be limited to the private realm while the limited tenets of natural theology were alone deemed appropriate in the public realm. The latter were certain, demonstrable and public, while the former were contentious, subjective and private.

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This is why, as John Clayton has pointed out, Thomas Jefferson laid down that religious teaching in public universities should be limited to the study of natural theology, the only properly ‘scientific’ theology, in contrast to the ‘unscientific’ sphere of denominationally specific religious doctrine in which private citizens were nonetheless permitted to indulge in the privacy of their own homes. As Clayton has put it, Although Jefferson had no desire to exclude consideration of normative religious claims as such from the public sphere, he did nonetheless wish to control entry to that sphere by excluding all consideration of what he regarded as sectarian belief, those beliefs expressing a parochial commitment and not grounded in public reason. (Clayton, 2006, p. 24)

Understood thus, it can be seen that the new religious and political polity of the United States marked less of a radical break with the English Anglican establishment settlement than has often been thought. On the contrary, I am suggesting, it was directly continuous with it, and was pursuing the same policy, albeit by other and updated means. Indeed, the Anglican settlement within the United Kingdom was very shortly to develop in the same direction, and indeed outstrip it, albeit in its own distinctive way. Intrinsic to the Anglican settlement was the conviction that participation in the state (or, to use a term anachronistic in this context, citizenship) was co-terminous with participation in the established state church. The inevitable corollary of this, of course, was that non-Anglicans were unable to vote, hold public office, worship publicly and so forth. A mere half-century or so after American independence, England too was to find that its unifying, mediating church–state framework was too ‘thick’ and substantive; as in the United States, the conviction began to take hold that if it was to continue to be effective, the framework would need to be ‘thinned’ down, even if only gradually. Thus, in 1828, the ‘disabilities’ then suffered by protestant non-conformists were lifted, and a year later, Roman Catholics were likewise emancipated. These were, in fact, momentous developments for they sundered that hitherto unbreakable Elizabethan bond whereby to be a subject of the monarch was synonymous with being a member of the Church of England. The significance of this was not lost upon many contemporary figures prominent in church and state. The young William Gladstone, at that time some years away from his several prime ministerships, fought a doughty battle against what he perceived to be the ‘secularisation’ of the state. King George IV himself was implacably opposed to the latter measure, and some hoped that he might exercise the even then long defunct royal veto. But, in the memorable words of Owen Chadwick, ‘On Monday 16th April [1829], hating the bill and sobbing as his gouty hand signed, the king returned it approved’ (Chadwick, 1966, p.  7). Well might he have sobbed, for his hand was enacting the sundering of a settlement that had served England well for more than two centuries. If any entertained doubts about this, these would soon be dispelled as the process of the secularization of parliament gathered pace. In 1858, Jews were admitted to parliament and thus to full citizenship of the state, as were atheists in 1886. By these measures, and without formal disestablishment of the Church of England, the religio-political settlement had mutated into a form not far

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removed from that prevailing in the United States. It could be argued, therefore, that from 1828 and certainly by 1886, the established status of the Church of England had become something of an anachronism. If it was still established in principle, it was only doubtfully so in practice (see Hyman, 2010, pp. 12–13). By this stage, of course, the ‘thin theism’ had become so thin as to be non-existent. Not only had the tenets and procedures of natural theology collapsed, but also the mediating framework now had to be evacuated of all traces of theism if it was to encompass even atheism and still command universal assent. It is at this point that we can observe the transition to our third historical ‘moment’, the approach characterized by Taylor as the ‘independent ethic’ secularism, and we have seen that the shift was occasioned by the emergence of a proliferating plurality that the older model was unable to contain. By 1886, Great Britain had inaugurated a religio-political framework that was substantively ‘thinner’ than that adopted by the United States a century before. But the United States was undergoing a similar and parallel transition. As Taylor has commented: The Founders seemed to concur in some kind of Christian outlook, verging on a New Testament-inspired Deism in some cases. This could be pushed laterally into a vaguer biblical theism to accommodate Jews. But the US now contains substantial numbers of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and adherents of many other views. The common ground shifts, or becomes rapidly etiolated. (Taylor, 1998, pp. 35–36)

So in order to be as all-embracing as possible, the overarching mediating framework now had to be as doctrinally thin as possible. Such a unifying framework was still indispensable; but now that the Anglican settlement of the sixteenth century and the American settlement of the eighteenth century were now too substantive (and therefore too restrictive) to be feasible, the unifying function could now only be served by a framework that was ideologically minimalist, constituted only by abstract commitments to democracy, human rights, equality and so forth. This is, in effect, the inauguration of what is popularly known as the ‘secular’ world, and its assumptions and procedures have extended far beyond England and America. We have also travelled far beyond Jefferson’s founding vision, rooted as it was in a unifying natural theology. The situation is complicated still further in the United States which persists in maintaining the ‘fiction’ of fidelity to the documents and intentions of the Founding Fathers. In reality, however, successive Supreme Court judgements have extended Jefferson’s principles significantly. As Clayton has commented, ‘Subsequent judicial interpretation by the American Supreme Court has raised and reinforced . . . [the] wall [of separation between church and state], which for Jefferson had been neither especially high nor particularly substantial’ (Clayton, 2006, pp.  22–23). And as Taylor again has observed in relation to his two models of secularism, ‘In the actual, chequered history of the American separation, both models have been in play, with the common ground justification being paramount in the early days, and the independent ethic outlook gaining ground in more recent times’ (Taylor, 1998, p. 35).

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Thus the framework of contemporary liberal secularism (the ‘independent ethic’ model) should by no means be regarded as the end point of a teleological process of attaining freedom from religion. On the contrary, it is a repetition – albeit different – of the sixteenth- and eighteenth-century attempts to provide an overarching mediating framework that can encompass differences. Secularism, then, far from being juxtaposed to these earlier religious polities is, in fact, in direct continuity with them. If this is so, then there is every reason to suppose that secularism itself it will turn out to be as contingent and fragile as they were. Furthermore, insofar as it might become destabilized – as there are signs that it currently is – this is quite likely to be for similar reasons that the previous polities were. That is to say, secularism is likely to fragment when it is no longer able to contain the multiplicity within it. It is important to note, however, the distinct form that this takes in the contemporary instance. Religions as totalities now become the functional equivalent of ‘parties’ or ‘factions’ within the sixteenth-century Church of England or of protestant Christian denominations in eighteenth-century America. In other words, religions as totalities are now functionally understood to be local, contingent, private and subjective, that is to say, the very opposite of what religions actually perceive themselves to be. This process was, of course, already well underway in Jefferson’s day. The historian J.  G.  A.  Pocock speaks of a ‘profound change in the definition of religion itself, one that is altogether crucial to our understanding of the opening words of Jefferson’s preamble to the Virginia Statute . . .’ He sees this change emerging out of late seventeenth-century developments, especially the philosophy of John Locke whereby religion is re-defined as consisting in the holding of ‘opinions’ (Pocock, 1988, p. 60). He speaks of a process whereby freedom of religion was attained through defining religion as something less than its adherents might affirm it to be. The Virginia Statute is not neutral as to religion; it defines it, declaring it to be something – opinion or free inquiry – and denying it to be something else – a presence of Christ as anything more than a historic figure about whom opinions may be held. (Ibid., p. 68)

But if this was so in Jefferson’s day, the constriction has become even more severe today. In the eighteenth century, it was at least only specific aspects of religious belief and practice that were deemed local and contestable, in relation to other aspects that were deemed public and certain; now it is religions in their entirety that are deemed local and contestable – which is a much more punitive constriction. Furthermore, it is not only Christian denominations that are today defined in this way, but all world religious traditions. Viewed in these terms, it is not difficult to see why religious traditions themselves might become dissatisfied  – to put it mildly  – with modern secular democracy. If the price to be paid for participation in the secular polity is for the status of all religions to be reduced to the equivalent of eighteenth-century Christian denominations, then little wonder that there has recently been a religious backlash against secularism. Furthermore, while Christianity has historically adapted itself to and colluded with this development, this is not so of religions found outside Europe and America. On a global scale, therefore, the clash is likely to be all the starker.

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But this also brings to light the way in which the apparently ‘empty’ and ‘procedural’ processes of secular democracy are in reality covertly but thickly ideological. This can be seen most clearly when one considers that secular democracy does not merely ‘regulate’ between political projects that espouse transcendent and specifically religious values and those that renounce them. On the contrary, intrinsic to its regulating function is the conviction that appeals to such values are inappropriate to the public political sphere and should be relegated to the ‘private’ sphere of religious observance. Once again, of course, religions in their entirety are now being relegated to the function and role previously assigned to local ‘denominational’ beliefs and practices in the eighteenth-century American settlement. Now that ‘natural theology’ is no longer able to perform the unifying public role that it once did, the only remaining solution has been to evacuate the unifying framework of all transcendent values or appeals. The practical result of this, as has often been observed, is that secular democracy operates against the background of an uncompromisingly immanentist ontology that actually prohibits the entry of transcendent values into the public realm. The framework of modern politics is thus one that operates on a plane of immanence. As such, secular democracy assumes an ontology that directly conflicts with the basic beliefs and assumptions of most of the major world religious traditions. We are thus reaching a situation in which the overarching supposedly unifying political framework is not only no longer able to contain the multiplicity that is found within it, but also finds itself in direct conflict with significant parts of that multiplicity.2 In light of the genealogy I have briefly been tracing, therefore, my suggestion is that the current instability of secularism is in some ways nothing new, but in other ways distinctly novel. It is nothing new in the sense that it may be viewed as yet another instance of the overarching unifying framework coming to appear unduly limited in relation to the plurality that it is attempting to contain within it. The current ‘crisis’ of secularism may perhaps then be viewed as a repetition – albeit different – of earlier such crises. That is to say, the very factors we have identified as presaging the shift from ‘established’ Anglicanism to a ‘disestablished’ America underpinned by ‘natural theology’ and, then again, the shift from the latter to a religiously ‘empty’ secularism are now being experienced anew. On the other hand, this may be viewed as being distinctly novel and disorientating. For, faced with previous such crises, the response has always been to ‘thin down’ the unifying framework so that it may more effectively mediate between the multiplied plurality within it. But this process would seem already to have reached a terminal condition. The content of the mediating framework has already been thinned to such an extent that it has become vacuous; it seems that there is nowhere further for this ‘thinning’ process to go. The ‘thinning’ of substantive values has reached its apotheosis in the elevation of the purely procedural, which has now become the only ‘value’ that there can be. Quite what the next step might be is therefore by no means obvious. What, then, may we learn from this historical context and what light may be shed on the contemporary paradoxes in which we seem to be enmeshed? First, the historical precedents, if such they be, clearly demonstrate the futility of any stubborn

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attempt to defend the ‘secular’ status quo. We have seen that once the overarching mediating framework has become no longer universally efficacious as such, it will be useless to attempt any artificial preservation of it; any such attempt will only give rise to self-defeating paradoxes. For instance, if the efficacy of the secular as a transcendental regulator was predicated on its being accorded a universal assent, it is precisely this universal assent that no longer holds. Proponents of secularism thus find themselves in a situation wherein they defend the secular insofar as it performs this universal mediating function, and yet the very fact that they are having to engage in such a debate is itself an indication that the universal mediating function is no longer being performed. This is not to suggest, of course, that it will no longer be possible to be a ‘secularist’ of the ‘independent ethic’ type in the current state of transition, but insofar as such a ‘secularism’ does continue to exist, its nature will be qualitatively different from its nature in the past. If ‘secularism’ will no longer be able to serve as the transcendental regulator of differences, it will have to accept a new status as a partisan participant in the encounter of differences. In many ways, therefore, it will have to undergo an experience somewhat akin to that undergone by Christianity in Western history. The genealogy we have been unfolding has been one in which Christianity itself (or aspects of it) was able to serve as a regulating framework, but that in time it had to accept a subsidiary status as that which was itself being regulated. ‘Secularism’ of the ‘independent ethic’ variety may well have to undergo a similar transformation in its own self-understanding. In this context, we may view the increasingly vocal attempts of politicians, journalists and others to defend the inherited political secular polity as being both misguided, futile and, ultimately, counter-productive. Secondly, what lessons may be learned for the possibilities of a way forward if not in a defence of the secular status quo? It is not my intention here to offer any kind of political ‘plan’ or ‘programme’ in answer to this question. But we can at least give some indication of the direction in which we should move as well as identifying paths that should be avoided. We have already observed the paradox that the current supposedly mediating secular framework is both ideologically as ‘thin’ and ‘empty’ as can be, but that this apparent ‘thinness’ actually masks a substantive ‘thickness’. If this is so, then perhaps the way forward is to continue the ‘thinning’ process after all. In which case, perhaps the historical trajectory we have been unfolding has not reached a terminal condition in the way that we previously suggested. The challenge to mediate unity and difference is as strong as ever. But if the ‘empty’ procedural framework of secular liberalism is actually embodiment of a ‘thick’ commitment to ontological immanence, then perhaps it is precisely this ‘thick’ commitment that will need to be ‘thinned’ down. If an overarching mediating framework comprised of substantive values has already given way to a purely procedural framework committed to the regulation of conflict, then a further ‘thinning’ of this framework can now only result in a dissolution of any transcendental framework as such. In other words, the ‘thinning’ process must be carried to such an extent that the very notion of any overarching mediating framework must finally be jettisoned. The attempt to mediate unity and difference will therefore now have to be negotiated from the ground upwards; the sought unity will now have to emerge from within and

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out of the multiplicity rather than from some transcendental regulating structure outside it. To gesture in this direction is by no means to say anything entirely new. On the contrary, it is an expression of an emerging, if sometimes obscured, broad consensus among philosophers, political theorists and theologians. Charles Taylor believes some form of secularism to be imperative while William E. Connolly has insisted that it is imperative to move beyond secularism. But Taylor believes it is necessary to develop a form of secularism that is other than that of the ‘independent ethic’ model, whereas Connolly believes secularism to be indissolubly linked to such a model. In their actual prescriptions, they may be seen to move closer together. Taylor calls for a mode of secularism which he calls one of ‘overlapping consensus’. This is where a ground of convergence to which all can subscribe in the public sphere can be articulated. But the reasons and justifications for subscribing to these common values may differ. For instance, in the ‘new’ secular society, there will be agreement on the right to life, but the reasons for subscribing to this will vary according to whether one is an atheist, a rationalist, a Christian or a Buddhist, and so forth. In other words, the reasons for adhering to the overlapping consensus come from within the faith (and non-faith) traditions themselves, rather than from some independent or neutral common ground (Taylor, 1998, pp. 48ff.). Understood thus, Taylor’s defence of secularism is not so far away from Connolly’s repudiation of it. For he too suggests that a mediation between differences must be derived from within those differences themselves. He says that ‘the most urgent need today is to mix presumptively generous sensibilities into a variety of theistic and nontheistic creeds, sensibilities attuned to the contemporary need to transfigure relations of antagonism between faiths into relations of agonistic respect’ (Connolly, 2006, p. 285). For him, this entails a commitment to pluralism, a commitment that he is careful to distinguish from cultural relativism as well as from secularism. He points out that ‘for secularists, religion is safely relegated to the private realm only because secularists also contend that there is an independent way of reaching authoritative public agreements without recourse to the diverse religious faiths of citizens.’ Secularists differ as to where they think this ‘independent way’ is to be located but, he goes on to say, all such attempts are inadequate because none of them folds the reflexivity needed into faith-practices themselves. They do not, in my view, because they pretend to identify a forum above faith through which to regulate diverse faiths. If the nobility of secularism resides in its quest to enable multiple faiths to co-exist on the same territory, its shallowness resides in the hubris of its distinction between private faith and public reason. (Ibid., p. 292)

This leads Connolly to advocate a deep pluralism wherein the virtues of genuine respect towards and a commitment to hospitable co-existence with the other are not imposed on faiths from without the traditions, but are actually cultivated from within them, on the basis of their own internal resources. The theologian Graham Ward has likewise pointed in a similar direction. Indeed, he suggests that the overarching mediating framework of secular liberalism has

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already started collapsing, and this is why he believes there to have been a return to ‘theological traditions and tradition-based forms of reasoning’ (Ward, 2003, p. ix). And yet, Ward recognizes that this move will be enacted not just within Christianity but across a multiplicity of traditions. He acknowledges that the concomitant danger of this is the potential emergence of what he calls ‘culture wars’ (ibid., pp. 138ff.). Initially, such wars will be between the faith traditions and secular liberalism itself, but then, as secular liberalism declines, the danger is that these faith traditions will turn upon each other. In order to avert this danger, Ward says that each theological tradition must resist ‘the pressure to fetishize their faith’; they must resist the temptation to reify the particularity of their tradition by turning it into an idol. Once again, this resistance to the reification of particular faiths can only be effected by cultivating resources to be found within those faith traditions themselves, rather than by subscribing to an overarching transcendental secular framework. As to the question of how such a proposal may be practically enacted, it follows from the nature of the proposal itself that there can be no single answer. But the controversial lecture of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, on shari’a law in Britain perhaps provide one example of a concrete suggestion that is moving in the direction we have been sketching. For his proposal was precisely one that eschewed any universal and non-negotiable mediating framework of the kind hitherto embodied by the secular state. It explored the possibilities for a plurality of religious and legal jurisdictions whereby these would be given formal recognition by a society and its state. As such, it may be viewed as precisely such an attempt to mediate between unity and difference by means of the resources to be found within the particular religious traditions themselves (Williams, 2008). Here, then, is another practical proposal that assumes, first, that the mediating framework of modern secularism creates more problems than it solves and, second, that its vital work must now be done not through the creation of yet another such independent framework but through the development of a disposition by means of which that which was thought to require regulation now participates in the responsibility of regulating itself. A more than cursory glance at the thought of these (and other) thinkers would, of course, reveal countless differences. But they are at least moving in the same general direction. Furthermore, it is a direction that makes the Indian experience of secularism particularly pertinent. For as several essays in this volume, as elsewhere, suggest, India has historically developed a model of secularism that is not constrained by the Western ‘independent ethic’ model, and which has emerged much more organically out of the religious traditions of India themselves. The Indian experience therefore provides one actual example of a religio-political configuration along the lines of what many thinkers in the west are advocating. This is not to deny that Indian secularism has experienced its own challenges and problems; neither is it to suggest that its model could be easily transplanted to the west. But if it does not provide any easy panacea, it may potentially serve as an instructive precedent and a source of inspiration. In conclusion, therefore, the brief and limited genealogy I have developed here may serve to shed some light on the current paradoxes we in the west are experiencing as modern secularism experiences a crisis in its own self-confidence. By placing this

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experience in the context of a wider historical trajectory we can begin to discern the ways in which the current period of transition is both continuous and discontinuous with previous ones. By discerning these continuities and discontinuities, we may also be able to shed some light on what might be appropriate or inappropriate ways forward. The genealogy may also serve to provide some historical credence and contextual justification for the future directions that have been suggested by Taylor, Connolly, Ward, Williams and other contemporary thinkers. In terms of their practical enactment, the proposals are difficult and complex. But in our contemporary condition, easy solutions have become elusive and complexity unavoidable. Our historical trajectory has shown that the easier solutions of the past were made easy by the experience of the pluralization of legitimacy being in some sense containable. It was containable because the multiplicity that it unleashed was mediated by a transcendental framework that was of varying degrees of ideological ‘thickness’ at different points in history. But today, as we have seen, any such transcendental framework has become unsustainable as its historical trajectory seems inevitably to culminate in its own self-dissolution. Thus it is that we today experience this pluralization of legitimacy as being not containable but, on the contrary, irreducible. The challenge, therefore, is to develop a model of unity that emerges out of, rather than seeks to repress, this irreducible plurality.

4

The Political Theology of Indian ­Christian ­Citizenship: An Instance of Secularism as Culture Nandini Chatterjee

Introduction: The problematic of minority rights and minority cultures in ‘secularism’ Writing in April 1947, in the run-up to Indian independence, Rev. Canon M. A. C. Warren, the general secretary of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), wrote an article on the problems and prospects of Indian Christians as citizens of a newly liberated country in which they formed a small minority of people. Warren saw the Indian situation as part of a global problem regarding the status of minorities in recently liberated countries, which had weak or non-existent political, legal and social traditions capable of securing religious freedom. He pronounced the prospects to be bleak and prophesied an inevitable period of suffering for such minorities – ranging from social discrimination to persecution and genocide. His recommendation, however, was that Indian Christians should focus on religious freedom as a general principle and not on specific rights or privileges for themselves. This is because Indian Christians, according to Warren, were the only real Indians in a nation that was hardly a nation  – rent as it was by cultural and religious divisions. Because of their non-communal outlook, Indian Christians did not have to battle any deeper instincts in order to profess loyalty to the Indian nation. Thus it was their true destiny, according to Rev. Warren, to seek religious freedom not as protection against the state but as a common good (Warren, 1947, pp. 47–50). As a Western missionary, Warren may have indulged in some wishful thinking about Christian regeneration of the world without adequately recognizing the changed global realities. His recommendation of self-sacrifice to non-Western Christians sounds irresponsible, and may well have been the result of a safe distance. Nevertheless, his comments are a good place to begin a discussion of secularism and its historical articulation in India, for two reasons. The first is that Warren’s not particularly thoughtful observations touched upon a range of overlapping issues

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related to the notoriously ambiguous term ‘secularism’, whose definition, despite multiple conferences, symposia and collective publications, remains frustratingly (and creatively) unsettled.1 Choosing to use one or more of the terms available  – secularization, secularism and secular, many scholars write (as Warren did) variably about social change, political ideology or civic governance, often one standing in for, or believed to be co-related and causatively linked to the rest. These linkages were often premised on a normative vision of modern life and a meta-narrative of historical progression towards that condition.2 In the wake of some serious efforts to both parse down the concept into more specific propositions3 and to group research produced in relation to one or more of these areas,4 scholars working on very different contexts have moved away from the idea that ‘secularism’ is an easily identifiable Euro-American model of liberal governance5 and non-religious socio-intellectual life, and towards a more unstable constellation of ideas in which (liberal and illiberal) statecraft abounds, and paradoxically, so does religion.6 In other publications, I have reflected on the history of what we might call ‘state secularism’ in India, proposing, first, that it is not necessarily a culturally specific deviation from a stable Western model of institutional specialization or political life (‘separation of church and state’), but that it is a system of laws, governance and political behaviour that evolved out of the British colonial effort not to efface or marginalize religion, but regulate it.7 Many of the legal and constitutional arrangements that provide the defining features of ‘Indian secularism’ demonstrably emerged out of a century and half of legal developments preceding 1947. This was certainly the case for policy and law related to religious instruction in public-funded education, the management and regulation of religious institutions and the application of religionbased family laws (personal laws) (Chatterjee, 2011). Given that, I am yet to be convinced by those analyses which trace an Indian ‘model’ of secularism to the ideas of any single Indian intellectual – Gandhi, Nehru, or anybody else – or a set of them, for that matter. This article, however, is not about colonial governance per se. Instead, it focuses on the processes of self-formulation  – in interaction with regulatory authorities and institutions, including the state, but also churches, community associations, etc. Since E. P. Thompson, many historians and anthropologists have noted how law, and other such authoritative, ideologically charged rules, enable moments of self-expression, even self-assertion. While such articulations are inevitably highly stylized, they often prove durable. I am particularly interested in examining how this may be so for selves that are declared (by those selves and others) to be in the minority, coeval to the emergence of popular sovereignty; in this case, the formation of the Indian nation-state. Minorities, especially religious minorities and their political and cultural accommodation, are both a central problematic and a crucial test of success for a democracy. The problematic is related to the imperative of defining and securing a sufficiently capacious but adequately inspiring political ethic of belonging, against which the dominant groups are likely to strain, producing discrimination and oppression, leading to consequent alienation and disengagement on the part of minorities. This in itself is a banal point – but with the growing concern for locating the imaginative

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sources of political ethics,8 both within the liberal tradition and beyond it  – makes it worthwhile to examine historical material, where such is available, to discover how people have imagined themselves, individually and collectively, as political communities, in this case, both as the Indian Christian community and as (part) of the Indian nation-state. In particular, this article works with the hypothesis that being a minority is a learned, rehearsed and evolving form of cultural and political behaviour. It argues that there is nothing a priori about the nature of ‘group rights’ claimed by such collectives, or by others on their behalf. It demonstrates instead how twinned claims of identity and rights, while working on cultural material, re-fashion them radically in communication with processes of governance.9 Extending that argument towards its broader implications, I am inspired by earlier scholarship that criticized efforts to evaluate the allegedly distinctive Indian expression of secularism against ideal-typical models.10 I would additionally urge caution against the notion of an Indian ‘model’ of secularism – for in my view, this ‘modular’ view inevitably leads to a search for and discovery of historically inaccurate causes  – whether those are found in India’s cultural heritage, demographics or intellectual history. To underscore this point: while there are indeed historically inherited elements that may influence the development of identity, how a political community, in the minority or otherwise, conceives of itself is the product of numerous historical contingencies. In Indian Christians, we have a community recognized in law (among other things, through personal laws regulating family matters), by the constitution, and through a host of associations and institutions, which have of course shifted with time. We also have the most diverse, divided and dispersed community conceivable  – given its formation out of ancient churches, colonial intellectuals, and subaltern groups seeking spiritual and material salvation. In addition, this was a community which had to constantly justify its international connections without while struggling with racial domination within. And yet, in so far as the story of Christianity has been linked to that of secularism in India, it has been a story of Western missionaries and British Evangelicals joining hands in a project of conquest and control, using the façade of secularism-as-liberty as a mask for motivations that were inevitably Christian and ineluctably imperial.11 This chapter turns instead to the fertile political ideas of the fragile Indian community in whose name many others attempted to speak, but who themselves produced creative interpretations of nationhood, religious tradition and of the political ethics deriving from both. And herein lies the second and greater relevance of the CMS secretary Warren’s comments  – that he accurately summarized a political and religious attitude that had become extremely common among a key segment of the Indian Christian leadership by the early twentieth century. I will call this attitude the political theology of ‘Indian Christian citizenship’  – with conscious attention to its key notions of service and suffering and renunciation of rights and protection. The fact that this political concept served classic liberal ends of political deliberation and constitutional government should not obscure the fact that it was explicitly premised on a notion of sacrifice and transcendence, as much as other exegeses of popular sovereignty that accorded a far more central role to violence. This was a

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specific way of belonging to a nation and being a minority at the same time, one that aimed at idealistic general leadership rather than defensive minority status. It was a noble and high-minded concept, but like all such pieties, had very large blind spots. In the Indian context, this emphasis on suffering and selfless service implied a paternalistic and non-combative approach to social inequality – especially that of caste. Given that the vast majority of Christians in India came from dalit, or the most oppressed caste background, this could be seen as markedly obtuse. It also had crucial overtones of repression – both of male and female sexuality – which became explicit over discussions about Christian family law. Self-denial and self-control also provided models of political rectitude which specifically delegitimized an emphasis on community-specific rights. It is relatively easy to see why such an approach to being Christian would accord very well with broader nationalist trends. But functional convenience cannot explain why and how such a concept of citizenship began to be articulated by Indian Christian leaders long before nationalism itself had taken recognizable political form in India, let alone win a significant following. In explaining the imperatives that propelled such an intellectual and cultural development, we must pay attention to the experience of racism, the theological contests and the associational politics of Christians in colonial India.

Institutional racism and religious authority The first of these imperatives was the need felt by elite Indian converts to Christianity, to claim their religion as their own, contesting the prolonged tutelage that European and American missionaries expected of ‘their’ disciples. Here was a serious conflict of perception. Some of the best-known nineteenth-century Indian Christians belonged to the same radical social milieu as the metropolitan literati, in that they combined social rebellion with religious experimentation and frequently travelled from one to the other. It is clear from personal narratives that many of those who became Christian saw their conversion in terms of their personal intellectual and spiritual journey, baptism marking their attainment of an elevated spiritual state,12 rather than being born again into an infantile state requiring prolonged instruction. This explains the shrillness with which they disputed any aspersion on their capacity – professional or spiritual, these two being constantly associated. Understanding the nature of these seemingly petty but ubiquitous and divisive disputes over pay and position in church and mission enables us to appreciate their connection with the more abstract theological discussions over the content, purpose and implications of Christianity, which I will discuss in the next section.13 One persistent bone of contention was the distinction between the realms of the church and the mission, a racialized division that owed its creation and sustenance both to colonial state policy and the nature of mission funding. As far as the Government of India was concerned, it maintained the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment, primarily for providing religious services to British expatriates. From 1813 this establishment was headed by the Bishop of Calcutta, the Metropolitan of India. Missions to ‘natives’ on the other hand, were not paid for by the government,

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on the principle that the religions of the ‘natives’ were not to be interfered with. Crucially, the principle of not patronizing missions was extended to ‘mission churches’ or Indian congregations gathered by the missionaries. This made the Indian priests entirely dependent on the missionary societies – in the Anglican case the Society for Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the CMS – which in turn depended on private subscriptions.14 In the early nineteenth century, a young Bengali Christian called Krishna Mohan Banerjea, found the situation unacceptable. Krishna Mohan Banerjea was among the first upper caste Bengali converts to Protestant Christianity,15 and among the most important Indian Christians of the nineteenth century. He was a prolific journalist, a Sanskrit scholar, a member of the Asiatic society, fellow of Calcutta University and a founding member of the nationalist Indian Association. His literary work was also vital in producing early Christian Scriptural translations and exegesis in Bengali, and as professor of the Bishop’s College, he trained several Indian priests in theology (Ghosha, 1980). Krishna Mohan was notoriously ostracized by his family for permitting a group of friends to organize a beef-eating party in the family home. When he eventually converted to Christianity, the CMS rescued him from destitution by finding him a job as a schoolteacher in 1832. By 1836, however, he was in irreconcilable conflict with his employers. He refused to serve a period of probation away from Calcutta, on grounds of his ill-health, his wife’s advanced pregnancy, his having already served an adequate probation, the inadequate salary proposed, and also because he was under instructions from the Bishop of Calcutta to remain in Calcutta to study for his upcoming ordination. In particular, Krishna Mohan questioned the authority of a partly lay missionary committee over him, a candidate for ordination under the sole authority of the bishop.16 After several bitter exchanges, the CMS Calcutta (Corresponding) Committee felt that it could not in good conscience support the ordination of a ‘native’ Christian who would not prove his obedience by serving his period of probation, and dismissed Krishna Mohan Banerjea from the CMS’s employment.17 Krishna Mohan did have sufficient patronage from the Bishop to be ordained, as he had desired, and he found a position as pastor of a native church under the SPG (Ghosha, 1980, pp. 22–24). None of this addressed the pervasive assumption that Europeans and ‘natives’ were different and ought to be treated as such. Inevitably, therefore, Krishna Mohan managed to disappoint his patron, Bishop Daniel Wilson, by refusing the post of canon in the new Cathedral at Calcutta, because he was offered a lower salary than European canons (Bateman, 1860, II, p.  285). Bishop Wilson urged that the Indian church could not afford an expensive clergy; Krishna Mohan responded that the Anglo-Indians and poor Europeans could similarly not afford their European chaplains, and were nevertheless supplied with them (Gibbs, 1972, p.  180). Finally Krishna Mohan found suitable employment as professor in the Bishop’s College, where he worked for 15  years, from 1852 to 1867 (Ghosha, 1980, p. 36). Not all were as talented and fortunate as Krishna Mohan – in general, the salaries of Indian mission employees remained abysmally low. For example, in 1866–67, a Head Catechist could expect, after 25  years of service with the CMS, a salary of 40 rupees per month, subject to knowledge of English. In contrast, a newly arrived

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missionary, earned 138 rupees if single and 203 rupees if married. Most Indian employees earned far less.18 Indians, by definition, could not be missionaries. As late as the 1910s, owing to a shortage of European personnel, a few highly educated Indian Christians were employed as missionaries, with a European missionary’s salary,19 but this limited experiment was discontinued following the recommendations of the CMS delegation to India in 1921–22. Henceforth, the native church, and native church councils, were made solely responsible for the salaries of the Indian Christian university graduate priests. While this measure was represented as giving independence to the Indian churches,20 the first Indian Anglican bishop, V. S. Azariah appointed in 1913, was not convinced. He complained against the consequent mission-church divide, condemning the manner in which better-funded and more prestigious mission work was dominated by mission councils sporting the token Indian, while the Indian church councils were left in charge of impoverished Indian congregations.21 It was not even clear that such a division of spheres would permit ‘native’ churches to be fully independent. In the first meeting of the Punjab Native Church Council, constituted under directives issued by the CMS in 1876, Indian Christians associated with the CMS asked questions which may have showed their ignorance of basic episcopal principles, or perhaps their alienation from them. Abdullah Athim, a government servant from Amritsar, suggested that all church officials, including the bishop, should be elected by the members of the church,22 an idea too unorthodox to even merit discussion, but one that revealed a strikingly different attitude towards the value of hierarchy in religious life. That hierarchy, racially determined as it was in the Indian Christian churches, proved to be a persistent one. When in the 1910s, the Bishop of Madras Henry Whitehead proposed the candidature of V. S. Azariah for the first Indian Anglican bishop, his proposal threatened the hitherto intact racial division which separated British clergymen of the government’s ecclesiastical department, from the Indian clergymen tending to Indian flock. In the end, Azariah could only have an assistant bishopric with the special proviso that he would not officiate in the Bishop’s absence, and would only exercise episcopal authority over the poor Telugu area of Dornakal  – thereby sidestepping the possibility of Indian authority over Europeans.23 This description of the nature of hierarchy within one of the largest Indian Christian churches (the Church of England in India), is not intended for revealing yet another instance of the ‘rule of colonial difference’. The point, instead, is to consider how this explicitly racial hierarchy, constantly challenged by the most eminent of Indian Christians, may have shaped the latter’s conceptions of community  – both religious and national. Geoffrey Oddie has suggested, plausibly, that such experience of racism pushed a significant number of early elite converts to Christianity towards anti-colonial nationalism, at least in the period when the Indian National Congress was a liberal, constitutionalist association, its ideology untarnished by cultural nationalism (Oddie, 2001, pp. 346–66). I would suggest a more complex process. Rather than seeing nationalism as a natural reaction to racism, and cultural nationalism an inevitable barrier to the

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political participation of minorities, I will describe instead the intellectual efforts of Indian Christians alienated by the nature of authority within their religious community. I will describe the selection and adroit combination of various elements of their Indian heritage by these men and women, who in trying to describe their faith attempted to make it their own possession  – not a conditional gift from superiors using race as marker and as justification. This overlooked instance of creative cultural nationalism by a minority community challenged the legitimacy of racialized hierarchy within the religious community on one hand, and enabled participation in the broader political community of the Indian nation, on the other. Because the disputes were about the organization and meaning of religion in the first place, the conclusions these people drew about community and nationhood are significant instances of how (some) Indians have thought about religion in the polity. The following section examines the nature of Indian Christian thought from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing how the need to question racial hierarchy led to an expansive attitude towards national heritage, producing a politically significant liberal theology.

Translations and hierarchy The liberalism of Indian Christian theology, in the sense of its active toleration, respect and incorporation of key concepts and some doctrines from other religions, especially Sanskritic Hinduism, has been commented on by several scholars. Lionel Caplan described how liberal theology was dominant in the Church of South India even in the 1980s, and explained the recent success of Pentecostal missions in Madras with reference to the alienation of the vast majority of Indian Christians from this dominant theology (Caplan, 1987).24 Dalit theologians since the 1980s have stridently denounced this ‘Sanskritic theology’ which has failed to address the aspirations and needs of the vast majority of Indian Christians. Anthony Copley and Geoffrey Oddie have seen this theological liberalism (some have called it eclecticism) as symptomatic of a broader cultural process – the effort by elite upper caste converts to Christianity to reconcile India with the West, and to assuage a guilt born of abandoning their intellectual and spiritual roots (Copley, 1997 and Oddie, 2001). Here, I propose that this marked pattern of affirming of a decidedly Hindu past by these admittedly elite Indian Christian thinkers must also be read as a protest, one that provided a key intellectual stage in producing the political theology of Christian citizenship. The issue of religious translation, and of politics over it, is of course a broader one. Roberto Nobili’s brush with the Inquisition in the seventeenth century25 had revealed both the necessity and danger of culturally relocating doctrine, but too little attention has been paid to the crucial but precarious role performed in this process by those cultural intermediaries, the class of ‘native assistants’ to which Krishna Mohan belonged. As we have seen, people such as Krishna Mohan often had a very different understanding of their role, compared to their missionary employers. This section will discuss four key issues related to theological acculturation, that were commonly disputed – first, caste; second, the distinction between culture and

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religion; third, the importance (or otherwise) of sacraments; and fourth, the nature of legitimate religious organization. Studying these disputes while remaining aware of the persistent conflicts over religious authority discussed in the previous section, allows us to appreciate the highly contestatory nature of Christian theological interpretation in colonial India. The much-studied struggles over caste in Indian churches and its ultimate prohibition by European Protestant authorities in the mid-nineteenth century were part of that broader question of what precisely were the cultural, social and moral correlates of Christian confession. In his detailed study of the split of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK)’s Tanjore congregation in 1829, and the excommunication of the Christian poet, Vedanayagam Pillai, Denis Hudson has suggested a conflict between different ways of being Christian – a Western one and a Malabarian one. Whether or not that cultural divide was quite so stark, Pillai’s ‘Humble Address’ to the missionary authorities in London stridently complained about wrongheaded ‘reformist’ missionaries and their obsession with doctrinally irrelevant social customs. He criticized those ‘who should preach on the faith of the Son of God [but] preach now all the day long more than ten times upon the subject of eating with the Pallar and Parayer promiscuously’.26 Western missionaries had themselves debated the appropriate boundaries between religious doctrine and social mores, and Nobili’s trial had revealed the heightened stakes associated with such a debate in a culturally unfamiliar locale, where almost any social custom could appear doctrinally suspect. With relation to caste, until the late 1820s the policy had been to treat it as a harmless culturally specific ‘prejudice’. Bishop Heber, the second Anglican Bishop of Calcutta, recommended being open-minded towards caste, just as the Apostle Paul had been towards ‘almost similar prejudices of the Jewish converts’ (Smith, 1895, p.  315). However, once Protestant missions, under the leadership of the fifth bishop of Calcutta, Daniel Wilson, had decided that caste was irreconcilable with Christian confession, the disputes manifested themselves as matters of religious authority (Forrester, 1980). Thus Vedanayagam Pillai found himself excommunicated, and upper-caste Christians of the Anglican congregation of Tanjore, appealing to the Governor of Madras for possession of their own church, found themselves rebuffed by the official line that it was a matter for internal regulation by ecclesiastical authorities, that is the very missionary authorities that they had been complaining against (Bateman, 1860, Vol I, pp. 429–58). Fifty years later, this conflict re-appeared in a different guise, when a later generation of Indian Christian mission workers, all professedly opposed to caste, failed to find anything amiss in the social groupings of a newly formed Christian community in Bengal, near Krishnanagar. When the local missionary asserted that what was going on consisted of ‘caste, caste, and nothing but caste’, the Indian deputation took offence at this questioning of their expertise and authority, re-stating that this was not caste as they knew it.27 These contests over the right to determine the contents and correlates of one’s own religion, also manifested themselves in doctrinal disputes with less obvious social implications. One recurrent feature of these highly abstract theological debates was the matter of Scriptural tradition. As the current generation of dalit Christian

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activists correctly point out, most Indian Christian theologians (both the more and less systematic thinkers among them) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries found it impossible not to re-embrace parts of the Sanskritic philosophical heritage. While this intellectual choice must have reflected their own elite backgrounds, it was a choice nevertheless, and one that was a reaction to the conflicts over religious authority that this chapter has been discussing. We find evidence of this deliberate choice by looking at the intellectual trajectory of the unusually prolific scholar, Krishna Mohan Banerjea. In his earlier works, Krishna Mohan attempted to argue rather traditionally (i.e. in line with Evangelical missiology) that Sanskrit Scriptures were externally unverifiable, mutually contradictory, derivative and socially obtuse. He even criticized the Evangelical Scotsman, James Ballantyne, principal of the Benares Sanskrit College between 1845 and 1861, for attempting to prove to his Brahmin students that the Siddhantic astronomical texts28 logically led on to the truth of European science and from thence to Christianity.29 However, in one of his own last publications, The Arian Witness, published 1875, Krishna Mohan asserted that the crucial elements of Christian revelation had been recorded and preserved in the Sanskrit scriptures, even though their true meaning had been forgotten. Thus the self-sacrifice of the Purusa in the RigVeda Samhita,30 prophesied the redeeming sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In The Relation between Christianity and Hinduism published 1881, he came to argue that the forefathers of Hindus had an equally valuable foresight of ‘the great mystery of Godliness’ as the Jewish seers themselves, hence they could and should embrace the Jesus of the New Testament as the perfect Prajapati of the Vedas (Banerjea, 1882). Krishna Mohan’s ideas, especially his efforts to establish the equivalence of Indian and Jewish precursors to Christianity, provided a historicist argument against those that may claim Christianity as a Western gift to India. Understandably, therefore, his ideas were borrowed and reiterated several times over the next 100 years, his historicist strategy being repeatedly used to question the European conflation of Christian confession with specific dogmas, liturgy, church structure and social standards. In the twentieth century, Pandipeddi Chenchiah (1886–1959), an alumnus of the Madras Christian College and later a judge, rejected the historical relation between the Old and New Testaments outright, saying: Why should it be necessary to understand the Old Testament to grasp the Sermon on the Mount? . . . Why should a Hindu understand the complicated Pauline theology to follow Jesus? . . . I can pick up material for an Old Testament in Hinduism making selections in the light of what Jesus said and did. That was exactly what early Christians did and later Hindu converts ought to do. (Quoted in Boyd, 1969, p. 158)

If the historicist argument enabled a decoupling of Christian faith from its allegedly non-essential and historically specific correlates produced by the specific trajectory of European history, this paved the way for questioning some very fundamental aspects of the way in which Christianity was presented in India by Euro-American missionaries. Predictably, one such aspect was the disciplining role of the Christian

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churches in relation to Christian sacraments, one of which was baptism. Krishna Mohan was initially unconvinced of its necessity, and when he did eventually seek baptism from Alexander Duff, he explicitly asked to be baptized at Duff ’s home rather than in the church, consciously choosing personal discipleship over denominational membership.31 The two earliest entirely indigenous Protestant churches in India  – Christo Samaj of Bengal and National Church of Madras – did not use baptism for initiation into exclusive membership (Baago, 1967). In the twentieth century, a Gujarati convert from Vaishnavism, Manilal Parekh, although baptized in the Anglican church, rejected its value in a sermon he delivered in 1924, saying that where baptism should create the adhikara or right of bearing witness and being an acharya or prophet, it merely created membership in a community that was distanced from society and antinational. Parekh’s statement of the implications of baptism is a striking instance of the perceptive gap between elite Indian converts to Christianity and their European or American missionary mentors. Like many others, Parekh believed that baptism, if undertaken at all, should mark the culmination of a spiritual journey and the recognition of elevated spiritual status – not the sign of inclusion into a herd of novices similarly lacking in individuality as well as authority (Parekh, 1924). Liturgy similarly provided occasion for alienation and alternative conceptions, which explicitly borrowed from the Sanskritic Hindu heritage on the one hand, and referred to the nature of legitimate religious organization on the other. A. J. Appasamy, theologian, professor of Bishop’s College Calcutta, and later bishop of Coimbatore in the Church of South India, reported with approval his father’s exasperation with the uninspiring church, and the latter’s exploration of Yoga as a spiritual exercise. Apart from its foreignness, many Indian Christians complained of the church’s fragmentation into dozens of denominations, replicating the missionary societies. The idea that a truly Indian church could arise out of these struck Pandipeddi Chenchiah as a ‘capital joke’ (Richard, 2002, p. 9). Deeply influenced by the political activist-turned-spiritual leader Aurobindo Ghosh, Chenchiah recommended that in place of the church there should be local religious communities, or ashrams, centred around a spiritual teacher or guru (Boyd, 1969, pp. 159–63). In the early twentieth century, a small number of European and American missionaries began to agree. The American Methodist missionary, Eli Stanley Jones, suggested in his 1925 book The Christ of the Indian Road that the only way to preach Christ’s universal message in a time of cultural and political conflict was to let go of the ‘very long line – a line that stretched from Genesis to Revelation, on to Western civilisation and to the Western Christian Church’ and instead ‘take [one’s] stand at Christ, (Jones, 1925, p. 16). However, even if such anti-ecclesiastical Christo-centrism may have been applauded by the avant-garde new generation among the missionaries, it generally found little welcome from the established Christian hierarchy. Thus, in spite of the monastic tradition within the Catholic church, Brahmabandhav Upadhyay’s efforts to create a Christian ashram came to nought. And when Sadhu Sundar Singh, a Sikh convert to Christianity and a travelling ascetic preacher made his appearance, he was wildly fêted by the who’s who of Indian Christianity, but was delicensed by the Anglican church for his inability to conform to denominational boundaries in his preaching (Andrews, 1934, pp. 94–95).32

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When liberal theology itself took a downturn in Europe in the 1930s, Indian Christian leaders sharply distanced themselves from the doctrinal and cultural neoorthodoxy of Western missionaries. On the eve of the World Missionary Conference at Tambaram, near Madras, a group of lay Tamil Christians found themselves preparing to rebut the argument that the Gospel message was complete and unalterable, universally applicable in the same form irrespective of differences in culture. They were specifically reacting to a book written by Hendrik Kraemer, professor of history of religions at Leiden, called The Christian message in the non-Christian world (Preface in Kraemer, 1938) which repeated Karl Barth’s neo-orthodoxy.33 The ‘Rethinking Group’, as they came to be known, urged that the Indian church should be able to think for itself. While it celebrated the reforming influence of Christianity on Hinduism and Hindus, it denounced the domination of Christianity by missionaries, whom they accused of obstructing the development of a genuine Indian expression of Christianity. They denied that they were relativistic to truth, and asserted that their aversion to the contemporary church structures arose not from their social snobbery but their dislike of foreign domination (Job et al., 1938).

Christian citizenship: Family, community and nation How did this syncretic approach to faith and culture translate into the shaping of Christian political identity? Chandra Mallampalli, pointing to the stark difference in the attitudes of Protestants and Catholics of Madras Presidency towards nationalism, has proposed a straightforward connection between the Sanskritized theology of the Protestants and their inclination towards a Sanskritized, that is, Hinduized nationalism (Mallampalli, 2004). While Mallampalli is correct about the Catholic–Protestant political divide, Protestants varied hugely in their political choices. There were sharp divides on key issues relating to community rights and nationalist politics even among the ‘Rethinking Group’. Liberal theology did not make a nationalist. However, the reverse is true – those Indian Christians who were the most sympathetic towards nationalism, and those who, partly as a result, emerged as national-level leaders of the Christian community between the 1920s and 1940s, did share the cultural-doctrinal trajectory just described, and it formed a coherent intellectual basis for their nonsectarian approach to religious identity. In a conception of political community that I, and some of them (as we shall see) called ‘Christian citizenship’, the effort to achieve religious autonomy from racial domination, mediated through the active re-embracing of Sanskritic religio-philosophical heritage, produced a form of politics that we can call cultural nationalism, but also cultural secularism. We can observe this political conception forming as early as the mid-nineteenth century. Krishna Mohan Banerjea, whose career and writings we discussed earlier, not only subscribed to several worthy nationalist causes such as opposition to the Vernacular Press Act, but also commented on the specific civil disabilities suffered by Indian Christians. Two common deprivations suffered, from the point of view of upper class and caste men converted to Christianity, was the loss of control over wives and children, and over inheritable property. Krishna Mohan himself supported

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the passing of a specific law in 1850 known as the Caste Disabilities Removal Act, or the Lex Loci Act, which provided as a general principle that a change of religion leading to loss of caste, would not affect civil rights otherwise possessed, especially the right to inheritance. However, when it came to reclaiming undeniably community-specific rights, Krishna Mohan, who himself had to ‘rescue’ his wife from his family with the help of a British magistrate, took a different approach. Reacting to the Native Converts’ Marriage Dissolution Bill of 1866, which would dissolve the marriage of a convert to Christianity if the unconverted spouse refused to resume conjugal relations within three months, Krishna Mohan Banerjea said rather harshly to the Government’s Select Committee that the law was entirely the creation of missionaries who were totally unrepresentative of Indian Christians and who treated the latter as their serfs.34 Krishna Mohan’s point of view was that such a law would remove the possibility of slow reconciliation of deserting spouses, and by extension, of winning over Hindu society in general. Banerjea was being unfair: the missionary Rev. R. Winter of the (SPG) mission to Delhi similarly stated that he didn’t know of any Indian converts ‘panting’ to be re-admitted to marital life.35 On the other hand, Rev. W. T. Satthianadhan, of Madras, an Indian clergyman, responded to Banerjea (and Winter) that the scale of religious conversions in south India made the legal measure essential, implying that the righteous moral posture of north Indian and Bengali Christians arose from their being acquainted with an unrepresentatively small number of conversions.36 A similar debate over who best understood and represented interests of Indian Christians animated the All India Conference of Indian Christians (AICIC), formed in 1914. This was the first nation-wide political forum of Indian Christians, which actively lobbied the government on matters related to the community, but it did not contest elections as a political party. In spite of periodic recruitment drives which mirrored that of the Congress, the AICIC was essentially a Protestant association. It was also purely Indian in membership  – unlike all other bodies of similarly broad territorial scope. Although not a political party, it tried to present itself to the government as the mouthpiece of Indian Christians and was accepted to be at least one of the most important ones. One issue that constantly divided the members of this organization is whether political representation of Indian Christians would be best secured by a general electorate, or through the implementation of communityspecific electorates whereby only Christians could elect Christian leaders to reserved parliamentary seats. Between 1914 and 1947, this matter was constantly debated within the AICIC, with the non-sectarian view gaining a precarious dominance in the 1920s, mainly under the leadership of a man called Kanakarayan Thiruselvam Paul  – a Tamil Protesant layman from Salem, who in his career and ideas brought together all those features of Indian Christianity that we have discussed so far – resentment of foreign missionary control, a rejection of racial and cultural inferiority, a service orientation and a non-confrontational approach to other religions. K. T. Paul’s entry into public life began with his co-option by the YMCA in 1905, and in 1916 he became the first Indian national general secretary of this organization (Popley, 1938, p.  128). A founder member of the AICIC, he would become its President in 1923. Paul

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represented the Indian Christians in the First Round Table Conference in London on Indian constitutional reforms in 1930. When Paul died, tributes from leading Indian politicians, including Gandhi, applauded his ability to prevent his faith from diluting his nationalism.37 Speaking to the Calcutta Missionary Conference of 1912, (that is, the fourth decennial gathering of most Protestant mission societies in India), Paul pilloried foreign missionaries for behaving like hyper-organized dominators, rather than true gurus. He deplored the separation of mission and church, the automatic exclusion of Indians from ‘missions’ and the expectation that the Indian church would ‘receive and shepherd proselytes secured by the Mission, and . . . conduct a little fancy “Home Mission” in its neighbourhood’. In an indirect reference to dalit Christians, Paul acknowledged that the Indian church was drawn from such social strata as lacked such leadership qualities. And yet, he pointed out, the Madras University had produced 1200–1300 Indian Christian graduates, and in Sadhu Sundar Singh, Indian Christians in the south and north had a leader par excellence. The most urgent problem, he argued was that of race.38 As for Paul’s religious views, he was also founder member and director of the National Missionary Society (Popley, 1938, pp.  37–39), an indigenous missionary society formed in 1906 with YMCA support, through which Paul no doubt sought to fulfil his ambition of the Indian church leading missions rather than the other way round. However, by 1916, K. T. Paul confessed his doctrinal perplexity in a letter to a friend. After the World War, he said: I feel now that though my conviction is strong enough to determine my own conduct I cannot propagate it to others. The entire ethical standards are so essentially in the melting cauldron and volcanic water that while my own feet shall be on the rock ledge which I feel below me, I shall not preach my faith to others . . . They know too, they are sincere too, they have Christ as well. Who am I here. Let me act in sweetness and confidence, in service . . . Is this ‘illogical’? Is this a ‘compromise’? Not indeed. [sic] To abstain from proselytizing is no compromise. It may be due to a true humility.39

Paul’s correspondent was Leonard Elmhirst, another YMCA man recruited by Rabindranath Tagore to create Sriniketan, or the first agricultural education college under nationalist auspices. Like Elmhirst, Paul found himself more drawn to nonsectarian social work, in his case within the YMCA’s ‘Rural department’ of which he was in charge from 1914. Although he had been consistently voicing similar sentiments from much earlier, Paul fully expounded his theory of Christian citizenship in his Presidential speech to the AICIC in 1923. ‘Christian citizenship’, according to Paul, was not simply a matter of being Christian by confession, for Europe, which was Christian, had failed to demonstrate Christian statesmanship in the World War, and even if all Indians became Christians they would not necessarily thereby become Christian citizens. It was certainly not about seeking relief for community-specific grievances – indeed Indian Christians had no such grievances to complain of. Christian citizenship was about

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assuming ‘national stewardship’, it was about actively reconciling Hindus and Muslims, about using local government positions for social service in the spirit of nishkama karma – that is performance of duties without expectation of returns or rewards, for oneself as well as for the community. The concept of nishkama karma was an explicit reference to Vedantic philosophy expounded in dramatic mode in the Bhagavad Gita, a didactic text that was part of India’s longest epic – the Mahabharata. The Gita had been re-discovered as the ‘gospel’ of Indian nationalists in the early twentieth century. Religious reformers such as Swami Vivekananda also privileged this text, especially its recommendation of dedication to duty without aspiration for returns or rewards.40 Like most Hindus of the period, Paul translated karma as social service, but his translation of reward/phal was distinctive: the rewards to be abjured were political rights, especially those specific to a community. The sooner we get off the stilted pedestal of rights and begin to climb the rugged steep of responsibility, the truer will be our perspective of the situation and of the relative values of our various opportunities. In front of the enormous needs of our country and of the gigantic work yet waiting to be done unto her uplift, all talk of the fishes and loaves becomes utterly untenable.41

Paul had support within the AICIC – for the organization did vote in favour of his ideas. Among his key supporters were YMCA leaders from the Punjab – specifically the Rallia Ram brothers, who would later have occasion to bemoan the ‘primitive religiosity’ that stood in the way of nationalism in India (Rallia Ram, 1931).42 However, the matter was far from settled. Three years later, the President of the UP Indian Christian Association, J. M. David, sent a blunt and angry message to that year’s AICIC conference, expressing the hope that ‘YMCA views’ on communal electorates would not prevail. ‘Spectacular YMCA views are one thing,’ he said, ‘and practical politics and preservation of one’s very existence another.’43 In spite of David’s warning, in subsequent years YMCA views continued to dominate the AICIC, and indeed national-level Christian politics, and the YMCA itself claimed to represent not just the view of Protestants but of Indian Christians in general. As we have seen, Paul represented Indian Christians during the First Round Table Conference in London in 1930. Following his sudden death, he was replaced by S. K. Datta  – another YMCA general secretary, a medical doctor, and one-time principal of Forman Christian College, Lahore. Datta came of a family of Bengali Brahmos converted to Christianity and settled in the Punjab over several generations. He was of the opinion that the sectarianism of Indian Christians arose from two principal reasons – their small number, and the fact that ‘Protestantism in India was foreign-missionary-ridden’.44 At the Round Table Conferences, Datta was in complete accord with Gandhi’s position, both on minorities and Depressed Classes. He found his Catholic and separatist counterpart – Rao Bahadur Pannirselvam – distasteful, and deeply resented being asked to represent the Christian position (as opposed to the general Indian view) on anything.45 Datta epitomized the attitude of the successful Indian Christian politicians of the mid-twentieth century  – they may have been moderate in their nationalism, but extreme in their rejection of a sectarian identity.

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A decade later, during the Constituent Assembly debates between 1946–48, Christian members gloried in the fact that they asked for no special privileges, and from this basis pronounced even caste-based reservations as anti-national. The Christian Congressman, H. C. Mookerjee, member of the Minorities Advisory Committee and Vice-President of the Assembly, said that the masses of India needed food, shelter, medical aid and good roads, not political reservations, such demands arising from the ambitious middle- to upper-class persons alone. He acquiesced in the House’s decision to reserve seats in parliament for Scheduled Castes with reluctance, urging that this measure should be limited by time (Constituent Assembly Debates, 1950, pp. 269–355).

Conclusion Selflessness as a political orientation inevitably reeks of false consciousness, or of hypocrisy. And yet, in explaining the apparently conservative disavowal of rightsbased feminism by many women activists in modern India, Rochona Majumdar has pointed to their affirmation of tyag or sacrifice as a virtuous act worthy of modern women who were authentically Indian. She has argued forcefully that such illiberal claims of virtue enabled both social critique and political empowerment (Majumdar, 2002). In an unusual reversal of gender roles, elite Protestant Christian men in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India attempted similarly to construct virtuous political selves by denying the boundedness of their community and, by extension, by rejecting legal safeguards intended for vulnerable minority communities. Like the women activists Majumdar has discussed, they too deployed Indian tradition in making such claims. In doing so, they may indeed have empowered themselves in a certain fashion  – not least by seeking and securing an activist space beyond the restrictive tutelage of European and American missions. This activist space was not restricted to the political success of a small number of individuals, but the much larger Christian social presence in Indian society, which, even in the much altered milieu of today, goes far beyond the expected role of a minority community. Anybody aware of the educational landscape of modern India would recognize this point. On the other hand, by conflating themselves with their community, these leaders may well have failed to address the needs and aspirations of the vast majority of dalit Christians, both within the churches and outside them. Dalit Christians, unlike all other dalits, remain excluded from the benefits of the affirmative action policies of the Indian government. Whether by endorsing a more restrictive view of religion and community belonging, their elite leaders may have secured such rights for them, is another question. My effort, in this paper, has been to trace the evolution of a political ethic professed by the leaders of a minority community in colonial India, which derived explicitly from their distinctive line of theological interpretation. This theological trend consisted of a systematic re-appropriation of doctrines, philosophy, religious

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ceremonies and social practices which derived from the Indic, specifically, Sanskritic Hindu heritage. As we have seen, the embracing and assertion of such national heritage served as an intellectual and ethical tool for Indian Christian leaders, with which to challenge the racially defined nature of authority in their religious organizations – the mission-churches. Cultural nationalism thus enabled an assertion of internal religious autonomy, before it served as a mode of communication and connection with the broader political community of the Indian nation. As such, this is about secularism both from the vantage point of public and intellectual life. This chapter may be seen as a historical case-study against which the formulations (and recommendation) of the accommodation of faith-based existence and activism, transcending the ‘immanent frame’ of a secular age may be tested. At the very least, such a study can hope to contribute some instances of what such transcendental politics might look like, which in the Indian case steps beyond the unrealistically isolated figure of Gandhi. Indeed, the staunch political liberalism and constitutionalism of the Christian leadership just described may not fulfil the vision of communitarian alternatives proposed by some scholars as an antidote to the alleged crisis of secularism in contemporary India.46 Liberalism, however, is always inflected by its cultural roots, as are each of its constitutive elements, including religious toleration and secularism. It would be a fallacy to trace all those roots back to Enlightenment Europe, and to reject them as derivative whenever they are found outside the Western world.

5

Secularism, Agonism, and the Politics of Conviction Mark Wenman

The repeated emergence of religious disagreements in the public life of ‘secular’ societies has been one of the defining features of liberal democratic politics in the aftermath of the cold war. This has taken several forms, and these reflect the divergent traditions of secularism and laicism that shape the contours of different national contexts. For example, the political mobilization of evangelical Christianity in the United States around contentious public policy areas such as women’s right to abortion and same sex marriages, the controversies that have surrounded the French Government’s decision to ban the display of religious insignia in public institutions and more recently to outlaw face covering in any public space, and the rise of violent conflicts between Hindus and Muslims following the destruction of the Babri Mosque by Hindu nationalists in December 1992. However, the general trends are also sufficiently pronounced for us to identify an apparent crisis of ‘secular’ institutions in contemporary liberal democracies. Indeed, one common theme has been the political mobilization of the indignation of the ‘faithful’, against a perceived decadence of modern societies, and this tendency has been most sharply felt in the spread of global Islamist terrorism following the attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, and manifest in the subsequently atrocities in Madrid (2004), London (2005), Mumbai (2008) and many other locations around the world. In this chapter I consider the impact of these developments from the standpoint of normative political theory. The chapter begins with an assessment of the predominant liberal response to the rise of religion in the public sphere, put forward most notably by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Although Rawls distinguished his approach from Enlightenment defences of secularism, which, he thought, too closely resembled the comprehensive religious doctrines that they sought to depose; he nonetheless associated political liberalism with a defence of the impartiality of the (secular) state vis-à-vis a plurality of ‘comprehensive doctrines’, and he believed that this view can be defended with recourse to a ‘public use of reason’ that ought to be acceptable to all dispassionate and clear thinking citizens. In Habermas’ recent

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work, these liberal ideals are explicitly connected to an account of secularization conceived as a process of political modernization, which sees traditional religious worldviews progressively transformed by post-conventional forms of morality. Here I examine the conceits of these liberal approaches. I show how they remain marked by the theological concepts and categories which they claim to leave behind; that declarations of neutrality are blind to the deep connections between liberalism and the ascendency of Protestantism in the moral and economic traditions of the West; and I expose the way in which liberal doctrine is profoundly implicated in the tendency towards passive nihilism that grows out of the European Enlightenment and which manifests here as a desire to transcend the politics of ideological and religious conviction. Although my focus is on the traditions of thought and practice that have emerged out of the European reformation and Enlightenment, in the context of globalization these developments also increasingly impact upon and resonate with the politics of ‘secularism’ that have developed outside the Western tradition. At the core of the liberal doctrine is an anxiety about the politics of conviction. This generates an anaemic vision of the democratic polity, modelled on an impossible ideal of juridical impartiality. Having exposed the liberal worldview to a form of ideology critique, I then draw on primarily William Connolly, Alain Badiou, and Michel Foucault to present an alternative model of a post-secular agonistic politics of conviction. I challenge liberal anxieties about the politics of the engaged militant, and make the case that the current rise of religiously motivated violence does not follow from confident self-belief but is also a form of passive nihilism. This is crucial to understand, because a revivified post-secular form of democratic politics needn’t be afraid of the politics of conviction. Indeed, today more than ever we need forms of religious and non-religious belief, forms of political passion that have the courage to confront the trauma of nihilism and confidently to assert their faith or conviction. Connolly’s critique of the Enlightenment distinction between reason and faith, and his presentation of democracy in terms of a post-secular agon where different doctrines engage effectively on an equal epistemic basis, provide crucial ingredients in the model of democracy elaborated here. However, we will see that his notion of ‘agonistic respect’ remains too close to liberal anxieties about the dangers lurking in the politics of conviction, and his theory cannot deliver the ethico-political basis of a rejuvenated public sphere. Badiou’s appeal to an ethics of engaged militancy stands in contrast to Connolly, and his reflections offer an effective antidote to passive nihilism, but Badiou presents the politics of conviction in an overly purified form, and his emphasis on the affirmative power of belief needs to be connected up to the multifarious strategies of reciprocal persuasion that also represent essential components in the democratic mêlée. This is where Foucault’s work on the Roman ideal of parrhesia, speaking freely and candidly, is especially instructive. Indeed, we will see that these Foucauldean reflections point the way to the principal virtues of the post-secular democratic agon, where contending religious and non-religious protagonists seek to persuade one another of the wider significance of their beliefs by becoming a living embodiment of their own convictions. These virtues provide an important alternative to liberal theory and might just offer the key to a rejuvenated

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public sphere, which facilitates a groundless and yet constructive contest between believers and non-believers, theists and atheists alike, and in the wake of the European Enlightenment.

Liberalism and the crisis of secular modernity In some significant respects, the transition from Rawls’s early to his later work tracked the developments in liberal democratic politics outlined above. In A Theory of Justice (1971) Rawls presented a deontological defence of ‘justice as fairness’, that ensures the priority of the right (procedural impartiality) over the good (individual chosen values and ends). The idea was to put basic civil rights (freedom of speech, association, of religious conscience, etc.) and a minimum level of social redistribution (the ‘maximin’ or ‘difference principle’) on a secure procedural basis, and primarily in contrast to the slippery calculations of consequentialist theories (Rawls, 1972). However, by the time of Political Liberalism (1993) the centre of gravity in Rawls’s argument had shifted, subtlety perhaps, towards a stronger vindication of the impartiality of core constitutional rights, which are now seen as needing to be upheld against the pressure of intense religious convictions. Under pressure too from his communitarian critics, the move to the later work also involved a rejection of the abstract ‘moral constructivism’ of the ‘original position’, and a depiction instead of justice emerging from a de facto public use of reason, between all those citizens who have an ‘enduring desire to honour fair terms of co-operation and to be fully co-operating members’ of a modern (secular) society (Rawls, 1987, p.  1; 1996, pp.  xv–xvii, 55, 99–101). In modern, Western, post-reformation societies, no general comprehensive doctrine – such as Protestant or Catholic Christianity – can assume the role of a publicly accountable basis of political justice, because of the fact of religious and moral pluralism. The principal objective of the exercise of public reason, with its norm of reciprocity, is therefore to remove from the political agenda the most divisive issues in the hope that convergence on a basic conception of justice (as procedural impartiality) may be achieved. In other words, on this second formulation, Rawls claimed to have identified a way to secure an ‘overlapping consensus’ on constitutional essentials that ‘bypass[es] religion and philosophy’s profoundest controversies’, relegating them to the private sphere of individual moral choice (ibid., pp. 1, 14, 23; 1996, pp. xvi, 55). Rawls’s work has an enormous prestige in Anglo-American normative political theory, and in many respects Political Liberalism delineates the core of the liberal imaginary of the modern secular state, especially as it has been experienced in the United States. Habermas summarizes what is at stake here when he says: Only the ideologically neutral exercise of secular governmental authority within the framework of the constitutional state can ensure that different communities of belief can coexist on a basis of equal rights and mutual tolerance, while nevertheless remaining unreconciled at the level of their substantive worldviews or doctrines. (Habermas, 2008a, pp. 2–3)

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It is important to appreciate that on the Rawlsian model, there is scope for the introduction of private convictions into the public life of the democratic polity. The principles of free speech and of association allow groups of organized and likeminded citizens to introduce their ‘reasonable’ comprehensive doctrines into public debate and civil society. However, on the liberal model, the cut and thrust of day-to-day democratic politics clearly has a subordinate status to the elevated business of legislation on ‘constitutional essentials’, or, following Bruce Ackerman, on ‘higher law making’, and, most importantly, controversial issues must be kept out of the institutions of majoritarian government as much as possible, to be decided upon by cool-headed judges, and with the Supreme Court representing the exemplar of the public use of reason (Ackerman, 1991, p. 6; Rawls, 1996, p. 231). From the agonistic perspective, the predominance of the liberal viewpoint is tied up with a dangerous juridification of politics, which tends to alienate ordinary people from the democratic process, and which hands over power to unelected judges, administrators and expects (see e.g. Gray, 1995, p. 9; Mouffe, 2005, p. 123). Of course, the notion of juridical impartiality is an important aspiration in modern politics, and especially in matters of criminal justice. However, these liberal approaches underestimate the many factors that problematize this aspiration, and measure the actual workings of the democratic state, from the imaginary viewpoint of this purified jurisprudence. I return to the conceits and the consequences of the liberal attempt to depoliticize religious conviction below. However, we first need to also consider Habermas’s recent work, where he has sought to develop the Rawlsian framework, and precisely in order to address the present resurgence of religion in the public sphere. Habermas’s defence of secularism is sophisticated, and most importantly he links the liberal notion of impartiality to a theory of societal modernization. Habermas identifies processes at work in modernity that see traditional worldviews progressively reworked by ‘post-conventional’ or self-reflective forms of morality. Once his contribution is brought into the frame, it becomes clear that not only impartiality but also the status of rationality and modernity hang in the balance in the present crisis of secularism. Habermas emphasizes that the liberal theory of secularism presupposes that citizens ‘must have [already] learned to relate their religious convictions in reflexively coherent ways to the fact of religious and ideological pluralism’ (Habermas, 2008a, p. 4). On his view, the ‘political virtue of treating each other civilly is an expression of distinctive cognitive attitudes’, which ‘cannot be prescribed – they can only be learned’ (ibid., p. 3). Throughout Habermas’s work, he has elaborated the content of these cognitive attitudes at great length. There is no scope here to explore these points in detail, but, in short, we could say that a capacity for post-conventional morality entails giving up any claim to universality for your faith, and thereby acknowledging the importance of the principle of reciprocity in your public engagement with others. Habermas has also linked the acquisition of these cognitive faculties to the processes of modernization, following the reformation and the European Enlightenment. Again, in brief, we could say that Habermas places confidence in the capacity of modern institutions and practices to bring out the potential for reciprocity (as well as transparency, inclusion and sincerity), which he sees as intrinsic to the fact of human communication. Importantly, the democratic

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process itself is central to these modern learning processes. As the transcendent authority of the Deity withdraws from the political realm in the early modern period, citizens increasingly have to take responsibility for the legitimation of political power, and the exercise of this duty is itself one of the principal drivers towards mature post-conventional attitudes. Over time, the impartiality of the secular state is more and more embraced willingly, rather than being accepted only as a begrudging truce or Hobbesean modus vivendi, that is a purely pragmatic exit from the ‘destructive effects of violent inter-confessional conflicts’ following the reformation (Habermas, 2011a, p. 21). Habermas acknowledges the ‘enduring vitality of religion’ under conditions of modernity, he links the present resurgence of religion to the ‘growing and disarming systemic strains on the social integration of our societies’, and he has recently turned to the question of the particular burdens that the principles of public reason place on religious and secular citizens alike (Habermas, 2008a, p. 308; 2011, p. 23). On the face of it, Habermas sees a greater role for religious conviction in public life than does Rawls, and he does not share the latter’s desire to systematically bypass moments of controversy. Indeed, Habermas thinks that ‘vital and nonfundamentalist religious communities can become a transformative force in the centre of a democratic civilsociety  – [and] all the more so when frictions between religious and secular voices provoke inspiring controversies on normative issues and thereby stimulate an awareness of their relevance’ (Habermas, 2011a, p. 25). However, Habermas’s account of the exchange between religious believers and modern secular citizens is framed by a clear assertion of the priority of reason over faith or religious conviction. Religious citizens not only have to give up claims to the universality of their fundamentals in order to participate in these exchanges; Habermas goes further than this and insists that their contributions must be translated into the language of modern reason ‘before they can find their way onto the agendas of parliaments, courts and administrative bodies and influence their decisions’ (ibid.). Indeed, the institutions and procedures of modern democracies are designed precisely to ensure that ‘only secular contributions from the Babel of voices’ in civil society pass into ‘formal proceedings within political bodies’ (Habermas, 2008a, p. 131). If these burdens seem too one-sided, the exercise of public reason places comparable constraints on non-religious citizens, who ‘should not be allowed to reject out of hand the possibility that the contributions formulated in religious language could have a rational content’ (ibid., p.  5). Habermas emphasizes the historical contribution of the Judeo-Christian tradition to the moral learning processes of the West, and insists that the major world religions might still contain ‘untapped moral intuitions’ that ‘could provide inspiration if only their message were translated into rational discourse and their profane truth contents were set free’ (ibid., p.  6; 2011a, p.  27). Consequently, secular citizens ‘are obliged not to publically dismiss religious contributions to political opinion and will formation as mere noise, or even nonsense, from the start’ (Habermas, 2011a, p. 26). In fact, they too are obliged to participate in the necessary conversion process, to help translate religious idiolect into the language of public reason, or, we might say, to extract the rational kernel from the metaphysical or theistic shell (Habermas, 2008a, p. 310).

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From the standpoint of modern rationalism, Habermas no doubt extends considerable generosity to religious believers. From the vantage point of his account of modernity as a moral learning process, not only Jerry Falwell but also Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens would have a lot of catching up to do. However, while Habermas’s approach offers the religious believer some protection from the rationalist zealotry of Dawkins,1 he seems unaware of how patronizing his own formulations must nonetheless appear to those who testify to some religious conviction. Indeed, the consequence of Habermas’s theory of modernity is effectively to infantilize religious believers in relation to modern (i.e. grown-up) reason. Like Rawls, the credibility of Habermas’s approach stands on the formula: secularism = modernity = rationality = impartiality. In the following section we examine some of the reasons why this formula does not stand up to close scrutiny.

The conceits of liberal secularism At the core of liberal ideology is a false image of politics, where politics is understood narrowly as a distinct sphere of public institutions which can be successfully delineated from the private lives of individuals, and with the two domains mediated by civil society, which is itself conceived as a realm of purely voluntary associations, where individuals freely choose their own conception of the good. What this captivating image misses is the deeper insight that all social relations (identities and institutions) are at some fundamental level the product of politics, understood extensively as the power to shape or frame the symbolic parameters of the social realm. The recognition of the constitutive nature of politics has been most clearly articulated in the work of post-structuralist thinkers, such as Foucault and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Foucault, 1983; Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). From this perspective, the liberal notion of impartiality is in fact a myth, but this is not an ideology that distorts any kind of deeper objective reality, instead this is a fabrication that serves to cover over the irreducible element of force in the symbolic constitution of society. It is important to demystify the liberal pretences to neutrality and rationality, and the specific objective here is to consider how the status of ‘secularism’ fits into this more general exposé. We will see that the conceits of liberal secularism are simultaneously conceptual, socio-historical and epistemological, and we start by drawing attention the concealment of the theological substructures of the ostensibly ‘secular’ concepts of liberal political theory. This theme has been most clearly articulated by Carl Schmitt in his Political Theology, where he famously claimed that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts’ (Schmitt, 2005, p.  36). This legacy is most explicit in conventional notions of sovereignty, whether of the state or of the individual, that continue to support contemporary liberal theory, and which are modelled on the omnipotence of the Deity (Jean Bodin’s ‘uncommanded commander’), understood as a fully autonomous agent.2 Indeed, to the extent that a whole host of key concepts in contemporary political and legal theory (obligation, freedom, individual right, etc.) are predicated on the notion of a freely determined ‘will’, they are all more

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or less shadows of former theological concepts. This is not the place to elaborate this thesis in detail, but we should nonetheless also draw attention to the thick traces of the theological imaginary in the liberal notion of ‘impartiality’, which is more or less modelled on the traditional conception of the transcendent God, who stands in a position of judgement from a (no) place (Rawls’s ‘original position’, or Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’), somewhere beyond the temporal world. Viewed in these terms we could say that we have never really been entirely ‘secular’. Indeed, as Claude Lefort has argued, the endurance of certain core religious ‘schemata’ and representations after the transition to modern democracy, thanks to their ‘displacement and transference’ onto new conceptual entities, suggests that in a certain sense the ‘theologico-political’ imaginary remains a ‘primary datum’ in the symbolic constitution of modern society (Lefort, 1988, p. 249).3 It is also important to appreciate that the current hegemony of liberalism has been coextensive with the relative exclusion from public life of an alternative set of theologico-political categories that were more or less reworked in ostensibly secular form in the nineteenth-century socialist and Marxist traditions, and were dealt a severe blow at the end of the cold war. The relationship between Marxism and religion is of course complex, and Marx was also committed to a rationalist vision of modernity, in which the ‘abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is a demand for their true happiness’ (Marx, 1994, p. 58). Nevertheless, at the same time, the transferral of erstwhile theological categories into the core Marxist imaginary is unmistakable: the fallen state of modern capitalism, communism as a future redemptive moment, and also as a return to a prelapsarian plenitude, and the proletariat as the chosen people who will deliver this judgement at the end of time, etc. There have been some fine attempts to rework Marx’s ‘secular’ messianism, for example in Walter Benjamin (1999), Jacques Derrida (1994) and Judith Butler (2011). However, the objective here is not to endorse any of these particular approaches. Instead, the key point is to note that the consolidation of the supposedly neutral categories of liberal ‘secularism’, has in reality been coextensive with the hegemonic ascendency of liberalism (with its basic adaptation of a particular set of theological categories: sovereignty, the individual ‘will’, formal equality before the law, etc.) over alternative versions of ‘secularism’ (which have historically been bound up with the diffusion of an alternative set of theological categories: eschatology, messianism, redemption, etc.). Moreover, we should also appreciate that the resurgent evangelical and Pentecostal movements, as well as militant Islam, have effectively stepped into this gap left by the withdrawal of Marxism as a material force in world politics. We will return to this point below, and consider prospects for a post-secular form of agonistic politics that welcomes a restoration of both religious and nonreligious forms of political militancy and conviction, understood as vital elements in democratic politics. However, the conceits of liberal secularism extend beyond the implausible disavowal of the theistic genealogy of its own concepts. Indeed, we must also consider some socio-historical reasons to reject the falsehoods of liberal secularism. The liberal notion of impartiality masks the underlying grammar of modern societies, because beneath the halo of the public and private spheres,

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and the insistence on the sacred distinctions between state and civil society, lie dominant societal priorities, forms of habit and subjectivity, that carry think traces of the Protestant heritage. Indeed, the foundational moral status attributed to the rights of the individual in modern Western societies is a direct outgrowth of Protestant Christianity. After the reformation, the Protestant believer finds himself in a personal relationship with God, which is no longer mediated through the authority of the Catholic communion, but through self-examination and the doctrine of sola fide. The very notion of modern ‘inner-subjectivity’ is to a large extent a product of this introspective conversation with the Deity (see Graf, 2009, pp. 58–59). This means that not all denominations really had an equal status in the new ‘secular’ space that emerged from the sixteenth-century wars of religion. In fact, while tolerance was initially granted – for example in France in 1598 – by a Catholic majority to a Huguenot minority, ironically in the long run it has been the traditional authority of the Catholic Church which has been decisively undermined by modern individualism. The reformation overturned the ecclesiastical monopoly on the mediation of salvation, and this dislocation became the motor force of a dynamic tension between individualism and all kinds of community/tradition that is definitive of societal modernization. Moreover, in many respects, the processes of modernization and globalization have seen the ideology of ‘possessive’, ‘unencumbered’ or ‘asocial’ individualism that originally grew out of the Protestant reformation gradually disseminated across the planet. Habermas acknowledges the growth of individualism as one of the causes of societal modernization, but the central role of Protestantism in this story is set aside in his recent formulations, and he misrepresents this dynamic as a progressive learning process, whereas it is better seen as contributing to a pervasive tendency towards nihilism characteristic of modern societies. However, before we turn to the question of nihilism we should also first acknowledge the very specific connection between Protestantism and rise of modern capitalism, and here the Weberian thesis about the relationship between the growth and spread of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and the ‘this-worldly asceticism’ that drove early capitalism remains paramount (Weber, 2005). In some important respects, the dominant features of contemporary capitalist societies are in tension with the self-denial, inner restraint, hard work, time thrift and rejection of luxury in the pursuit of wealth that defined the early Protestant sects. This is especially so in the West, where high levels of personal debt and conspicuous consumerism are also key drivers in capitalist societies today. Nevertheless, there can also be little doubt that the modern world has been, and continues to be utterly transformed by the methodical and compulsive activity that initially grew out of the Protestant’s anxiety to establish his worth, or his proximity to salvation, through ‘this worldly activity’. It was this spark that released the disciplined life associated with religious piety from the mediaeval monasteries, and which continues to ‘prowl around in the world’ today in the form of a systematic preoccupation with efficiency, profit and economic growth. At this point we need to move beyond this strategy of exposing the conceits of liberal secularism, and focus instead on the effects of the core liberal mythology. This is because the illusionary insistence on the neutrality of the state, or of the impartiality of

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political decision-making, is both symptom and a contributing cause of a generalized drift towards nihilism. This tendency has always been at the core of the European Enlightenment, and, ironically perhaps, as Gianni Vattimo has stressed, this is really one of the principal sources behind the present return of religion (Vattimo, 1999, p. 32). Again, there is scope here only to briefly sketch this diagnosis, but here we are effectively in the terrain of the Nietzschean scandal of the ‘death of God’. We moderns have killed him, and with his passing we have undermined all that he held in place in the order of tradition, authority and unexamined truth. This is the principal lesson of the processes of modernization, and, we should add, this is despite the basic transference of theological concepts and categories in the transition to modernity outlined earlier. Indeed: When the ancient idea of the universe as a meaningful whole in which the individual can immerse himself is no longer believed, and when the idea of a transcendent world of bliss beyond this world has similarly become untenable, then we are in the terrain of modern nihilism. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 13)

Nietzsche saw numerous trends in the West (going back to Plato’s devaluation of the world of appearances), which culminate in modern nihilism, but it is the epistemological scepticism that defines post-Cartesian Enlightenment science and philosophy that really spells the end of the authoritative status of scripture and revealed truth (Nietzsche, 1990, p. 80). When the method of hyperbolic doubt becomes a precondition for any positive knowledge, we are already well on the road to a modern condition where gnawing anxiety and doubt accompany every truth claim, and everybody, whether or not they have the courage to admit it to themselves, subconsciously knows it. Indeed, this is the definitive characteristic of modern man, his basic propensity towards generalized ‘unbelief ’ (or nihilism). Modern man essentially ‘knows not which way to turn’, and this is because the world has been stripped of its highest values, and ‘there is no longer a word left of what was formally called ‘truth’ (Nietzsche, 2003, p. 162). The blows that have been delivered to the traditional status of ‘truth’ by the Enlightenment and modernity are fatal and irreversible. Nietzsche had no regret about the emergence of Enlightenment scepticism, which he saw as a precondition for the advent of a truly vigorous form of active nihilism (ibid., p. 184). Similarly, he held the traditional believer and his unexamined conviction in contempt, and associated his exclusive reliance on religious belief with weakness and dependency (ibid.). However, Nietzsche’s view of modern ‘reason’ was not equivalent to Habermas’s depiction of modernity as a moral learning process. Indeed, Nietzsche prefigured the later generation of postmodernist thinkers, from Foucault, to Vattimo and Richard Rorty, who share the basic insight that all claims to truth, including those of the modern sciences, are made and not found. Indeed, the apostles of modern reason tend to rely on surrogates for the Deity  – the priority of method, of accurate observation, of the logic of non-contradiction, as well as notions of efficient causality, of system, process and mechanism, etc. – which, on close inspection, all turn out to be fables, nothing more than a ‘mobile army of metaphors’ (Nietzsche, 1976; Rorty, 1989).

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Most significantly then for Nietzsche, the impact of modernity is felt as a trauma in the order of knowledge, one that undermines the status of religion and reason, and, as a consequence, (post) modern society gravitates towards a condition of passive nihilism, a ‘world [potentially] rendered valueless by the collapse of absolutes and authority’ (Villa, 1992, p. 287). In many respects, the ascendency of liberal doctrine is the political metonymy of this more general malaise. What is this political space that is supposedly rendered neutral by the exercise of impartial judgement? This is really a space of passive nihilism, the empty space of the ‘original position’ devoid of life, passion, significance and conviction. Indeed, this is perhaps the profound paradox of political modernity; that the initial desire to ward off religiously motivated violence, leads eventually to a widespread paralysis in the order of political belief or conviction. On the face of it, the current resurgence of religion in the public sphere is an impassioned response to this generalized unbelief, an explosion of religious conviction as retort to the crass consumerism of the modern individual, who seeks easy comfort from the shock of nihilism in the satisfactions of a materialistic society (Nietzsche’s ‘last man’). However, here it is also instructive to consider Slavoj Žižek’s evaluation of the current religiously motivated violence, which he says is also a symptom of passive nihilism. The Christian, Hindu or Jihadist fundamentalist violence is not really grounded in a confident assertion of faith, but rather in a basic lack of conviction (Žižek, 2008, p. 73). In the case of religious terrorism we are ‘dealing with hatred pure and simple: destroying the obstacle, the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the World Trade Centre was what really mattered, not achieving the noble goal of a truly Christian or Muslim society’ (ibid., p. 78). In other words, the various modes of religious fanaticism that have emerged in the present context are actually a displacement for an underlying lack of belief. Intense expressions of religious devotion reflect an anxiety in the order of knowledge, and acts of fundamentalist violence are a substitute for genuine belief. These reflections tell us something about the basic predicament of all forms of belief (theistic and atheistic, religious and non-religious) in the context of (post) modern nihilism. How does anybody nurture a confident, self-assured (non-violent) sense of belief, in the circumstances of the ‘death of God’ (i.e. in the wake of tradition, ecclesiastical authority, unexamined conviction, etc.), and also, following the demise of the surrogates for these categories in the tradition of modern ‘reason’? It is here that Nietzsche took solace in the thought of the ‘overman’ who confronts the trauma of passive nihilism, accepts the groundlessness of all belief, and yet who still finds the courage to ‘posit’ for himself ‘productively, a goal, a why, a faith’, for ‘there is much one can achieve only by means of a conviction’ (Nietzsche, 1968, pp. 17, 18; 2003, pp. 134, 184). According to Žižek, it is really only the atheist who has the strength to carry through this active form of nihilism. He says: What, then, is the proper atheist stance? Not a continuous desperate struggle against theism, of course – but not a simple indifference to belief either. That is to say: what if, in a kind of negation of the negation, true atheism were to return to belief (faith?), asserting it without reference to God  – only atheists can truly

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believe; the only true belief is belief without any support in the authority of some presupposed figure of the ‘big Other’. (Žižek’, 2009, p. 101)

However, I don’t see why we could not also envisage a post-Enlightenment form of theism, one that likewise faces up to the trauma of modern nihilism, and which similarly manifests as the courage to assert a groundless form of self-assured theistic conviction, in the style of Blaise Pascal or Søren Kierkegaard. Of course, this effectively precludes a return to the unexamined truth of premodern ecclesiastical authority and tradition; the key point is that both theistic and atheistic ‘believers’ alike, have no choice today but to grapple with the circumstances of the ‘death of God’. However, this is not necessarily the same as the refutation of his existence, instead it marks the withdrawal of the authority he (or his surrogates) ensured, whether that is the order of religion or reason. Indeed, as John Caputo has said, in the context of the selfconscious nihilism of the postmodern condition, or in the paradoxical circumstances of the death of the death of God, where the Enlightenment priority of reason over religion has been shown to be untenable, we find ourselves (ironically perhaps) in the situation where God can make something of a comeback (Caputo, 2007, p. 145).

Agonism as post-secularism In the remainder of the chapter I explore prospects for an agonistic alternative to the crisis of liberal secularism. Connolly has written extensively on secularism and the politics of religion, and most notably in Why I am Not a Secularist (1999). His work provides crucial initial stepping-stones into a brave new world of post-secular agonistic politics, but we will see that there are also certain core limitations in his approach, and especially in his presentation of agonistic respect as the principal virtue in agonistic politics. Connolly helps us to move beyond Rawls and Habermas in two key respects. First, Connolly has argued that the modern insistence on a clear distinction between reason and faith, or science and religion, cannot be sustained (Connolly, 2005, pp.  4–5). His argument is predicated upon a model of human embodiment. From Connolly’s perspective, modern rationalists (from Descartes to Habermas), work with a false image of a disembodied consciousness or cognition, one that does not appreciate the complex interdependency of the brain/body processes that condition human language and consciousness. Theorists of secular modernity therefore move too quickly to quarantine their chosen model of isolated ‘reason’ (e.g. the Cartesian cogito, or Habermas’s inter-subjective model of communication) from passion and the flesh, and they are correspondingly unmindful of the role that ‘enactment, discipline, and ritual’ play in the reproduction of all forms of knowledge, including modern ‘reason’ (ibid., p. 53). As Connolly puts it, we ‘need to pass through the Enlightenment, in its dominant modes, coming out at a place that respects its opposition to theocratic governance while simultaneously moving beyond the overbearing confidence in reason’ (ibid.). Once this point is established, Connolly moves to put a whole range of alternative faiths, ideologies, ontologies and philosophies on an equal epistemic status (ibid., pp. 4–5). None of the contending

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knowledge claims that circulate in contemporary politics can be grounded in any kind of consistent epistemology, nor can they be arbitrated through a supposedly impartial use of public reason. This is a controversial point, and Connolly takes an equally bold move when, in contrast to the liberal anaemia, he insists that democratic politics ought to be conceived as a vigorous public debate between these contending doctrines. By way of contrast to the liberal model of secularism, Connolly wants to see ‘more religious and nonreligious variety in public life’ and he imagines agonistic democracy as a ‘vibrant public pluralism’ in which multiple constituencies engage the ‘mysteries of identity and difference’ through participation in democratic politics (Connolly, 1999, pp. 4, 39; 1991, p. 194). However, Connolly has also been at pains to address liberal anxieties about the prospect of democratic politics regressing to something resembling the early modern wars of religion. Indeed, he shares a broadly liberal diagnosis of the present resurgence of religiously motivated violence, which he associates especially with fundamentalism, understood as a fanatical excess of belief (Connolly, 2005, p.  17). For Connolly, fundamentalism is characterized by the ‘tendency to define your faith as absolutely authoritative for others, and to treat it as under severe assault or even persecution until it is confessed by every one with whom you interact’ (ibid., p. 18). He sees the deeper causes of religious (and secular) fanaticism to lie in the all-too-human need for security and reassurance in the face of existential suffering and anxiety. This gives rise to a politics of ressentiment, where individuals typically seek to secure their own identity by identifying others as ‘delinquent’ or as ‘deviant’ from their own ‘true’ faith (Connolly, 1991, p. 3). Connolly finds an exemplary instance of this tendency in the writings of St Augustine, who, in the context of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, sought to secure the One True Faith by defining the Manicheans and Pelagians as ‘heretical’ and as carriers of ‘evil’ (see e.g. Augustine, 1983, pp. 156–57; Connolly, 1993a, p. 78). On Connolly’s reading, this tendency has subsequently become deeply engrained in Western civilization. Connolly’s antidote to the ‘Augustinian imperative’ is the notion of ‘agonistic respect’ or ‘critical responsiveness’, presented as an ethos, sensibility or civic virtue which can be cultivated by the advocates of any faith, if they can only come to terms with the ‘comparative contestability’ of their beliefs (Connolly, 1999, pp. 143–56; 1993b, 382; 2000, p. 611). He urges the individual to ‘sacrifice the demand for the unquestioned hegemony’ of his/her faith, and to learn to appreciate the ‘extent to which it must appear profoundly contestable to others inducted into different practices’ (Connolly, 2005, pp. 32–33). Even fundamentalists . . . can participate in such relations of complementary dissonance, to the extent, first, they acknowledge how their own faith appears contestable and offensive in some respects from other points of view, and to the degree, second, they affirm restrictions in the ways they press their demands in light of this first awareness. (Connolly, 1993a, p. 29)

However, Connolly’s insistence that democratic partisans cultivate a sense of the contestability of their own convictions is too close to the liberal model. Clearly

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Connolly does not share the rationalist and cognitivist assumptions that underpin Habermas’s approach. In fact, he has repeatedly stressed the importance of ritual and bodily self-discipline in the sustenance of the ethical life of the individual. Individuals need to work ‘patiently on specific contingencies’ in themselves in order to cultivate an ethical sensibility they can affirm without ressentiment (Connolly, 1995, p.  69; 1993c, p. 157). Nevertheless, the core message of the Connollean sermon is essentially congruent with Habermas’s notion of ‘post-conventional morality’. The key to relations of reciprocity with other citizens is the inner-acknowledgement that your convictions cannot lay claim to a wider universality. The problem with this gesture is that Connolly overestimates the role of ressentiment in political life, and so he too worries too much about the politics of conviction. Connolly’s approach is ill-equipped to deliver a politics of confident self-belief, because, as Antonio Vazquez-Arroyo puts it, from Connolly’s perspective ‘conviction becomes a synonym for authoritarianism’ (Vazquez-Arroyo, 2004, p. 14). Connolly claims to derive his emphasis on the importance of ‘greater diversity and generosity in life’ and his ‘ethic of letting be’ in no small measure from Nietzsche (Connolly, 1995b, p. 131; 1993c, pp. 159, 161). However, Connolly’s preoccupation with the political dangers supposedly lurking in the ‘Augustinian imperative’, end up placing his ethos of agonistic respect at some considerable distance from the central message of Nietzsche’s thought. As Gilles Deleuze says, the truly affirmative spirit does not struggle against ressentiment (Deleuze, 1983, p. 33). Connolly’s ethos is a form of adjustment to the other for the sake of diversity, and, as Nietzsche says, this ‘adaptation’ is itself a form of reactivity, and a misunderstanding of the essentially assertive message of his philosophy (Nietzsche, 1994, p.  52). Indeed, Connolly effectively folds an element of judgement into the actor’s internal selfrelation. The actor is expected to exercise this judgement as a form of self-censoring, acknowledging the contestability of her own convictions, and as a prerequisite for entering into properly agonistic relations with diverse others. His ethic of criticalself-relation ultimately ends up reproducing a passive kind of nihilism, where buoyant self-assertion is compelled to kneel in the presence of inner doubt and reservation. Moreover, this approach is problematic, because more than anything today, we need the politics of the devout Christian, Hindu and Muslim, the committed socialist, the engaged feminist and the champion of environmentalism. These are really the only hope for the generation of new values and forms of life under conditions of passive nihilism, and these bold innovations simply won’t emerge through Connolleanstyle self-testimonies of inherent contestability. A post-secular agonistic politics of conviction needs to be set out on more robust underpinnings, and here Badiou’s short book on St Paul is compelling.

Agonism and the politics of conviction In this final section, I take some inspiration from Badiou’s reflections on the ethos of the engaged militant, and these ideas are combined with insights from Hannah Arendt, Max Weber and Foucault, who together give us an indication of how a

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politics of (theistic and atheistic, religious and non-religious) conviction might be brought back into the democratic agon, understood as a dynamic exchange of mutual persuasions. In Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Badiou shows how an ethics of conviction is definitive not only of religious faith, but also of ‘secular’ forms of militancy, as expressed for example in the Marxist tradition (Badiou, 2003, pp.  2, 31). He derives a model of militant conviction from the enthusiasm and self-confidence of first-century Christianity, from an assessment of Paul and his testament of universal love. Badiou’s affirmative appropriation of Paul stands in clear distinction to Connolly’s fashioning of an ethos of agonistic respect, as a defence-reaction against Augustine’s confrontational doctrine, which is in turn grounded in existential ressentiment.4 Badiou derives from Paul a conception of truth that is distinct from the truths of philosophy but also, on Badiou’s account, from ‘mere opinions’. As Badiou says, the militant Paul is not a philosopher because he knows that the universal cannot take the form of a ‘set of conceptual generalities’ (ibid., p. 108). Instead, Paul testifies to the universality of a ‘singular event’, the truth of Christ’s divinity and resurrection (ibid.). Indeed, here Badiou defines truth as conviction, the militant is an engaged actor or partisan who is marked out by her fidelity to the universal status of a singular event (Badiou, 2001, p. 42). This kind of truth is sustained by faith, and cannot be refuted through empirical falsification or syllogistic reasoning (Badiou, 2003, p.  106). Indeed, in contrast to Nietzsche’s own assessment of the slavishness of the teachings of the Apostle, Badiou sees in Paul all the ingredients of the Overman. Paul exemplifies a mode of conviction as ‘self-legitimating subjective declaration’, a commitment to ‘grand politics’, and an affirmation of life over death and servitude (ibid., p. 61). Badiou’s insistence on militant conviction as a source of political innovation provides a remedy to passive nihilism. His emphasis on the confident faith of the engaged partisan, is out of step with the clear anxieties about the politics of conviction that characterize the dominant liberal notions of secularism, as well as Connolly’s reflections on ‘agonistic respect’. However, Badiou’s theory also carries several implications that are incompatible with the post-secular form of agonistic politics being suggested here. Badiou reveals the limitations of his contribution, when he juxtaposes truth as militant conviction, to what he presents as the inherently corrupting quality of ‘opinions’. Indeed, Badiou can’t disguise his contempt for ‘mere opinions’. He says, the vast majority of contemporary political orientations have ‘nothing to do with truth . . . they organize a repulsive mixture of power and opinions’ (ibid., 70). The ‘fundamental maxim of the militant is ‘do not argue over opinions’ (Romans 14.14; ibid., p. 100). Here Badiou demonstrates his lack of understanding of the irreducible elements of pluralism and tragedy that condition political life. The fact is that what appears to one individual or group of people as a deep conviction, will similarly appear to others as a ‘mere’ opinion. Consequently, as Arendt says, politics is inherently a ‘drawn-out wearisome process of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise’, that is, of wining over diverse opinions (Arendt, 1965, p. 83). One key question then is whether or not it is possible to conceive of a post-secular democratic politics in terms of an on-going dynamic exchange between ‘convictions’ and ‘opinions’, that is, to find ways

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to insert the energy and resoluteness that Badiou rightly associates with the engaged partisan into the political world of multiple judgements and opinions, and without the actor having to introduce Connollean style self-doubt (contestability) into her pride, her self-confidence and her convictions, in order to obtain a boarding pass into the democratic agon. Badiou has nothing to contribute here, but then neither does Connolly’s notion of agonistic resect. Instead, we can draw a little on the wisdom of Weber and Foucault, who, despite their differences, both had something to say about why we should have a little faith in politics itself, understood as a strategic play of reciprocal persuasions. Although the precise formulation is a little different, Badiou’s depiction of the committed militant more or less corresponds to Weber’s account of the advocate of an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’, who doesn’t give consideration to consequences, and whom Weber similarly associates with the religious ‘crusader’ and with the modern revolutionary temperament (Weber, 1993, pp.  122, 125). On Weber’s account, this disposition represents one basic personality in political life, and one which he contrasts with the equally significant advocate of an ‘ethic of responsibility’ defined in terms of a strategic concern with consequences, or with weighing means and ends, and on his view these ‘are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements, which only in unison constitute a genuine man . . . who can have the ‘calling for politics’ (ibid., p. 127). Or, as Maurizio Viroli puts it, the ‘true political leader is a person who is able to imagine new and better worlds and manners of living, and to work, with determination and prudence, to make them real’ (Viroli, 2008, p. 27). These formulations are altogether better suited to a post-secular agonistic politics of contending beliefs than either Badiou’s ethic of militant conviction without strategy, or Connolly’s ethic of professed selfcontestability. Instead, the main suggestion here is for the actor to combine her sense of conviction with an equally important recognition of the public virtues associated with the art of persuasion. Here, Foucault also offers important insights into how the actor might translate her ‘conviction’ into an effective public engagement with carriers of alternate ‘opinions’, in his discussion of parrhesia. Foucault derived his account of parrhesia (speaking freely or with libertas) from late Roman antiquity, and the term refers to a form of self-artistry, that was practiced by public officials, and designed to cultivate a capacity to speak candidly. Parrhesia is a mode of speech that enables ‘one to say what one has to say, as one wishes to say it, when one wishes to say it, and in the form one thinks is necessary for saying it’ (Foucault, 2005, p.  372). The virtue at the heart of the practice of parrhesia is for the actor to establish a kind of congruence between her speech and her conduct (ibid., p. 402). The crucial objective is to cultivate an ethics of confident self-assertion, so that I become a living example of my own convictions (ibid., pp.  406–07). Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Junior and Che Guevara might all provide historical examples of this kind of lived ethos of self-assured engagement, and it seems to me that this particular gloss on the techniques-of-the-self might prove to be highly appropriate for the democratic actor in the present context, where various sets of convictions

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(theistic and atheistic, religious and ‘secular’) contend for recognition in the public sphere, and where accomplishment will depend on the ability to persuade others of the wider significance or universality of her convictions. What saves this form of agonistic politics from sinking into a passive form of nihilism, is that on this model the passion of one set of believers is pressed and constrained not by inner doubt and reservation (Connollean ‘contestability’), but primarily by the vitality and strategies of other sets of believers, and in an on-going and expansive form of democratic politics.

Conclusion In this chapter we have explored some of the conceits of the dominant liberal understandings of ‘secularism’. The claim to impartiality and rationality conceals the reworking of theological categories in the conceptual framework of liberalism, masks the deep-rooted priority of the Protestant heritage in the liberal value system and more generally in modern capitalist forms of social subjectivity, and the liberal doctrine is complicit in the pervasive drift towards passive nihilism characteristic of late modernity. The predominance of liberalism after the end of the cold war has been coextensive with the demise of Marxism, and the corresponding rise of militant forms of religion. However, the current upsurge of religiously motivated violence does not reflect confident self-belief, but is also a symptom of passive nihilism. What we need today is to build a post-secular democratic politics, and on the groundless foundation of multiple forms of religious and non-religious belief, or on the basis of diverse forms of conviction that find the courage to pass through the ordeal of (post) modern nihilism. I have also outlined a brief sketch of how these protagonists might contend with one another in a revitalized democratic struggle, where public scrutiny of alternate beliefs remains crucial, but where these exchanges cannot be grounded in any form of rationality, epistemology or a ‘public use of reason’. In this context, citizens of different persuasions might speak candidly to one another, and engage in a game of common persuasion about the substantive value of contending beliefs. In closing, we might consider what if anything remains of the ‘secular’ in this vision of a post-Enlightenment politics of conviction, or in the circumstances of the death of the death of God? Here we should note that Vattimo associates the secular precisely with the advent of (post) modern nihilism (in the deconstruction of Western metaphysics), because (post) modern nihilism effectively dethrones all forms of sacred or transcendent authority (Vattimo, 1999). However, this formulation depreciates the ways in which God makes something of a comeback in the postmodern levelling out of the distinction between reason and faith, and Vattimo also presupposes an exclusive relationship between secularism and a particular reading of Christianity, with its focal point in the self-levelling of God in the event of incarnation (ibid.). By way of contrast to this kind of soft prioritizing of the Christian legacy, we might look for an alternative model of post-secularism in those who have contributed to the affirmative vision of agonistic politics developed here, that is Arendt, Weber and Foucault. Each

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of these theorists drew inspiration, in part, from a certain kind of ‘worldliness’ that was definitive of the Greek polis and also the Roman republic, and perhaps this might provide a clue to the status of the post-secular in a context where the distinctions between reason and faith are no longer tenable. The tentative suggestion is that we might discover a political mechanism to introduce theistic and atheistic enthusiasm (or Badiouian style conviction), into the temporal world. The hope is that this vision of post-secularism as a political renaissance, which borrows a few tips from the ancients, might provide an alternative to the currently hegemonic economic forms of ‘worldliness’, that is the relentless pursuit of profit and of economic growth, which are the on-going legacy of the Protestant reformation.

6

Secularism, History and Violence in India Deborah Sutton

Introduction Unlike in many European nations, where, over the longue durée, diversity has been kept in check by periodic expulsions and culls, in India the idea of secularism emerged as a response to diversity as a fundamental attribute of the nation. Secularism emerged in South Asia from the Indian freedom movement, at the time when a complex array of responses to the British colonial intervention were being formed, refined and contested over an area as vast and as diverse as Europe. The production of Indian secularism, therefore, has a claim to be far more profound precisely for having been an idea which was wrought through a testing and emphatic encounter with the brutal realities of European political power and more particularly European liberal thought. Indian secularism has been created through a vast and reflexive contestation with European colonization; on the one hand in textual terms by an intellectual class which was well versed in the conventions of post-enlightenment European thought (including the secular ideal), and on the other by a myriad of popular practices in a cultural context which stands outside the Judeo-Christian frame. In identifying the particularities of Indian secularism in a comparative context one runs the risk of turning those particularities into peculiarities. Indian secularism might become an Oriental curiosity, a version or even perversion of a clearly articulated European ideal  – identified with a corpus of thought, defined constitutionally and intellectually – which has been taken by the Asiatic and chopped, refined and adulterated. This chapter seeks to argue that Indian secularism should be taken very seriously as an articulation of the relationship between religion, politics and society which cannot rely, as in the Euro-American world, on being grounded in the realms of Judeo-Christian history, culture or epistemology. Such a reading of secularism cannot see it as the failure or perversion of an idea which has been pulled out of place. After all, secularism emerged in Europe from a fulcrum of religious dissent and is no less historically conditioned or, indeed, contingent. In this chapter, I argue that the secular in India is significant precisely because it represents

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a contested possibility; a realm of dispute and tension rather than the pretence of a cogent system of state authority. Rather than seeing Indian secularism as primarily cohered and tested within the constitutional machinery of the state, I explore it as a political idiom which breaches the division between state authority and social politics of the everyday. As an idea and as a contested parameter of state authority, Indian secularism possesses an urgency and vitality which it long lacked elsewhere, certainly in the United Kingdom. In the years following partition and Indian independence, when the Indian state’s engagement with linguistic, religious and caste diversity was critical, a British parliamentary report on the establishment of democracy in colonial territories defined six ‘modern secular ideologies’: imperialism, nationalism, internationalism, race, communism and democracy (Anon., 1953, p. 6). The authors of the report smugly – if incorrectly – reflected on Britain’s ‘homogenous and cohesive nature’. ‘Unity’, the report intoned, ‘cannot be achieved without uniformity’ (ibid., p. 16). These British civil servants claimed that the United Kingdom had no need of the elaborate constitutional mechanisms set in place ostensibly to off-set the complex and diverse populations encountered in countries which now sought their freedom from British rule. This chapter pursues three lines of discussion. The first is an exploration of the scholarly and, in particular, historical interrogation of secularism as an ideal professed by the independent Indian state: from nationalist histories which lauded secularism as an attribute of the early Congress state to more recent histories which have cast grave doubts on the credibility of those claims. The second is the role of the historical episteme in secular claims. While historical analysis has provided the means to question and debate the ‘secular’ Indian state, history as a discipline has faced considerable challenges in the last 30 years as critics – chief among them Ashis Nandy  – have convincingly suggested that the practice of history is implicated in the contortions forced upon Indian political life by the machineries of modernity. Nandy contends that the disciplined historical imagination and the secular ideal rely upon the same presumptions of post-enlightenment European thought and that both have marginalized a host of possibilities: social, narrative, mnemonic, cultural and political. The third line of critical discussion engages with the recent interrogation of the relationship between secularism and caste in India. Has the Indian secular – in its many manifestations – long been a pre-emptive negation of caste politics? Certainly, the issue of caste emerges through the interstices between scholarship, politics and violence. Each part of this chapter draws upon a set of important and exemplary texts which have both configured and contested the idea of secularism in India. The selection is not definitive, by any means, but offers a map of the realm of the secular in dispute. Many of the interrogations of secularism which this chapter explores, followed, almost immediately, acts of civic violence in which the secular state was implicated. Essays by Ashis Nandy, Prakash Chandra Upadhayay and Dilip Menon were published soon after and were explicitly informed by episodes of ostensibly religious violence in India: the anti-Sikh riots of 1984; protests against the Mandal Commission in the early 1990s; the communal riots which followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the genocide against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 (Nandy, 1985; 1995b;

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Menon, 2010; and Upadhyaya, 1992). The argument is not that secularism has a closer relationship with violence than would be found in a Western state which professes some observance of the secular principle; far from it. The European tendency for the prosecution and persecution of religious minorities, whether by legal discrimination or physical slaughter, has a far stronger historical relationship with the idea of secularism and the presumptions of secular politics (Asad, 2003 and Connolly, 1999). Violence in the Anglo-American world has come to be defined as something with its origins, if not its terminus, outside of the nation-state; as terrorism. In contrast, civic violence in India – whether taking the form of the sporadic riot or the everyday violence of caste prejudice – is a violence founded within the intimacies of national diversity. Diversity in India has been an innate and reflexive attribute of its political, religious, social and cultural existence which is harnessed by, but which precedes and exceeds, the fact of national sovereignty.

Histories of secularism and the state One of the few consensuses which emerges in the great breadth and depth of writing about secularism in India is that secularism was embraced by the (upper echelons of the) Indian freedom struggle as a corollary of the best possible form of nationalism in a territory of India’s size and diversity. Tejani identifies the 1940s as the point at which the term secular gains currency in nationalist circles (Tejani, 2008). The secular ideal was pushed most fervently by those committed to the promises and credibility of centralized government in the years following the violent partition of British and Princely India. This chapter begins with a reappraisal of the role of the Indian state in the brutalities which followed the 1947 partition which created the sovereign states of Pakistan and India. Such a reappraisal followed decades of historical scholarship in which an assertion of the secular ideal – and the faith of historians writing about it – formed a shield around the agents of this early state; effectively insulating the state from a close identification with the violence and alienations which accompanied its birth. The secular ideal was enunciated thoughtfully by Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the principal ideologues of nationalist resistance and as India’s first Prime Minister. Nehru’s own inclinations sought a relegation of any and all religious sensibilities away from the realm of public politics. Nehru presumed that this subtraction of the devotional from the political would rely not on sanction but on gradual, maturing disinterest (Zachariah, 2004). India’s modernity would necessitate, Nehru and others assumed, its evolution into a nation in which religious belief or preference would have no bearing on the functioning of the executive, judicial or bureaucratic arms of government. This ideal found no resemblance in the myriad of movements and politics which had constituted the struggle against British imperialism. Indeed, the cultural politics broadly associated with criticism and rejection of the British intervention effectively bound together politics and culture to a degree unprecedented in the subcontinent (Gilmartin, 1998). At independence, Nehru was forced to bargain with the powerful proponents of politics informed by religion. From these complex

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constitutional negotiations emerged a compromised secularism in which ‘minority rights’ were assured and a tacit Hindu majority was assuaged and silhouetted. These compromises were combined with a state ideology in which industry, science and production were pushed conspicuously and triumphantly centre stage. Secularism formed one part of a triumvirate: state ideology of secularism, socialism and nonalignment (Deshpande, 1995). By this method, Nehru presumed, India would modernize in an irresistible manner that would suffocate partisan obscurantism (religion) in public life. The debates of the nascent Constituent Assembly have been used with effect to illustrate the political landscape across which secularism was defined (Bajpai, 2008; see also Bajpai’s chapter in this volume). Secularism was evoked in any number of legislative schemes that would have explicitly required the state to mark religion and religious identities (Chiriyankandath, 1999). Nehru expressed his frustration at the variety and eclecticism of uses to which the term was put: May I beg with all humility those gentlemen who use this word often to consult some dictionary before they use it? . . . it is brought in all contexts, as if by saying that we are a secular state we have done something amazingly generous . . . We have only done something which every country does except a very few misguided and backward countries in the world. (quoted in ibid., p. 54)

Nehru’s suggestion that secularism was nothing extraordinary underlines his understanding of the necessary conditions of its success. Secularism could not be imposed or legislated. It was a system which, by virtue of India’s syncretic history, political and public life would default if properly developed (Nigam, 2006, p.  75).1 For decades after independence, nationalist histories sought no further than Nehru’s foresight as proof that secularism had been established as the defining characteristic of the early Indian state. Secularism was simply, according to affirmative biographies of the state which were closely associated with the Congress Party, ‘dominant in the fifties’ (Chandra et al., 1999, p. 434). According to one of the most eminent and important historians of the nationalist movement, Bipan Chandra: ‘Secularism was from the beginning made a basic constituent of the nationalist ideology’ (Chandra et al., 2000, p.  522; see also Chandra, 2008, p.  25). Despite the skill and efficiency with which Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – the figurehead of Indian nationhood – intermingled religion and politics for the purpose of amassing and controlling, with mixed success, popular participation in the freedom struggle, secularism had, Chandra long argued, stood firm as a fundamental principle of the Congress-led nationalist movement from the 1880s (Chandra, 2008, p. 19). In taking power in 1947, the Congress state ‘succeeded in making secularism a basic pillar of its Constitution as also its state and society’ (Chandra, 1993, p. 12). Secularism in these national histories was an historical corrective to the forces of communal politics and violence which had immediately preceded and accompanied independence. The partition of India prompted the largest migration known to history as populations crossed barely defined lines between the newly created states of India and Pakistan. In the violence which accompanied migration at least one million people lost their lives and incalculable losses were

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suffered to property and livelihoods. In the conventional historical narrative of the secular ideal, the early Indian state was touched only in principle by partition. Trauma was located firmly elsewhere: in the social sphere of the displaced. Partition was a terminal event, rather than a process, that the Congress leadership was simply unable to prevent and from which they were therefore exonerated. New histories – multi-vocal, rigorous and critical – provide a scholarly rejoinder to the claims made by historians faithful to the political machinery of the early Indian state. Recent historical scholarship has disabused us of a great many assumptions associated with the early years of the Indian state. A new relationship has been created between the didactic emphasis of the secular as state ideology and the fabric of the social quotidian torn apart by partition. After independence, the state brutally exercised its ability to exclude on the basis of religious identities. Vazira Zamindar’s study of the ‘long partition’ exposes the everyday violence against persons, property and secular principle which was carried out in the years following the division of British India and the princely states into India and Pakistan. The state custody of evacuee property effectively prevented Muslims temporarily displaced from their homes in Delhi from returning to them; and incidences of property capture were common. The narratives created of refugees and migration masks the forced displacement of Delhi’s Muslims with the knowledge or active sanction of the government authorities (Zamindar, 2007, p. 31; see also Khan, 2008, p. 151, pp. 158–160 and Chatterji, 2007). Muslims within the expansive Indian diaspora were especially vulnerable to the aspirations of Indian diplomats keen to flex the secular principle over populations located outside of the boundaries of the newly sovereign nation-state (Sutton, 2007). The Indian author and intellectual Ahmed Ali fell foul of this enthusiasm to exercise the exclusionary capacity of the state. Ali, who had been a member and proponent of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Movement and who was serving as a British Council Visiting Professor to the University of China in Nanking in 1947, was refused re-entry into India after the formal partition and was forced to migrate to Pakistan (Introduction by the author, Ahmed, 1993 and Ahmed, 2009). In East Africa in the 1950s, Indian diplomats aggressively tested and measured the rights of non-domiciled Indians to Indian citizenship: A very fitting comparison has been made between the duties of an Indian citizen and a British citizen. Respect for, and acceptance of ‘secularism’ is as much the duty of an Indian citizen as respect and acceptance of the King is a duty of the British citizen.2

The secular could become a metonym of the nation; allowing the calibration of individual national identity against a definition of political conduct. The delinquent figure was consistently the non-Hindu whose cultural and political comportment was placed in perpetual suspicion. The exercise of authority over these populations was facilitated by their dislocation: the Indian Commissions controlled access to passports and visas and had therefore an ability to exercise a selective definition of citizenry which was unrealizable on the partition borders of Bengal and Punjab. The

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authoritarian assertion of secularism outside of the nation was an extravagant and even compensatory demonstration of power. The creation of histories for Indian secularism after independence that are not grounded in nostalgic assumptions has only recently been attempted. Several studies have traced longer trajectories of politics and legislation in order to demonstrate the complexities and nuances of the idea of ‘secular’. Nandini Chatterjee elegantly delineates a fragment of the secular created in colonial law to define Christian marriages and in doing so summarizes the entanglement of civil and personal laws as they evolved in India from the end of the eighteenth century onwards (Chatterjee, 2010). Chatterjee observes that personal laws in India, divided across lines of religion, represent not a separation of state from religion, but, ‘rather an active undertaking by the state to dispense religion as right’ (ibid., p. 539). Personal law in India continues to be fundamentally anchored in the delineation of religious identity. These laws do not merely mediate a private sphere of family law but have provoked moments of profound public debate and conflict in which secularism becomes a distant and unsecured referent.

History, violence and secularism The relationship between secularism and history has been provocatively interrogated by Ashis Nandy (Nandy, 1984; 1988; 1989). In two essays written in the aftermath of communal violence, Nandy damned first secularism and then history as epistemic blind-alleys  – vestiges of the colonial intervention which wrought complex and irreparable harm on the imaginations of Indian governance and scholarship (Nandy, 1985; 1995b). Nandy’s ‘Anti-secular Manifesto’ is an attack on those who conflated their faith in secularism with a trust in the state to protect its citizens from the very forms of oppression secularism is vaunted to prevent. The essay was published within a year of the anti-Sikh riots of November 1984. The mass murder of Sikhs, most of which took place in New Delhi, immediately followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two Sikh body guards on 31 October 1984. The massacres were carried out over a number of days, with the knowledge and connivance of the police, by organized mobs carrying voter lists provided by Congress party cadres.3 Only 20 people have been convicted of murder with a series of subsequent enquiries skirting round, though failing to convict, Congress Party members associated with the violence.4 Described only in the final part of Nandy’s essay, the riots form the epicentre of his analysis. Dubbed ‘secular riots’ by Nandy, the carnage was openly promoted and organized by Congress Party cadres and carried out by a machinery of violence which barely paid lip-service to the sensibilities of religious identity. The riots were perfectly secular in their dependence upon modern media, transportation infrastructure and the criminal lure of impersonal violence (Nandy, 1985). Nandy dispenses with any definition of secularism other than to say, as he opens his argument, that it is ‘an improper Indianism’. Secularism is, charges Nandy, a concept, ‘borrowed from Western history’ which has failed to keep pace with the politics of India as they developed after

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1947. It is synonymous with modernity and the violences of the colonial intervention through which the pretensions of modernity were inflicted. Proving his own point about the beguiling capacities of historical narrative, Nandy professes a degree of faith in the ghost of secularism past: ‘secularism has served the Indian citizenry well for a long period of time, especially so in the early years after Independence under the easy, benign modernist, Jawaharlal Nehru.’ During these first years, ‘the Indian power elite was choosy about whom it admitted’ (ibid., p.  16). Exclusions, such as Ahmed Ali’s, attest to the existence of ‘choosiness’, albeit not to Nandy’s faith in the unpartisan sensibilities of the early Congress elite. In the aftermath of the communal riots which followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, Nandy turned once again on the pretensions of secularism but this time through its principal narrative vehicle: history. Like the ‘Anti-secular Manifesto’, ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’, published in 1995, denounced history as an idea and practice before rounding on the responses of the ‘secular historians’ to the dispute over a mosque site in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya (Nandy, 1995b). In 1984, the Bharatiya Janata Party, together with its sister organizations within the network of Hindu right-wing political groups known as the Sangh Parivar, initiated an inflammatory campaign of chauvinist politics which claimed the site of the Babri Masjid as the Ramjanmabhumi, the birth place of the Hindu god Ram. In December 1992, a mob tore down the sixteenth-century mosque incited by a promise to restore the site to Hinduism. In the two months that followed, around 900 people were killed in communal riots. The destruction of the masjid was ostensibly preceded by a claim that archaeological remains had been found adjacent to the site which showed (1) that the site of the mosque overlay the remains of a temple which had been destroyed and replaced by a mosque in the seventeenth century and (2) that this temple structure had marked the birthplace of the god Ram.5 Historians who disputed the campaign did what historians can be best expected to do: they pushed the dispute backwards into history, creating a set of narratives which began in the eighteenth century and, in doing so, rooted the dispute firmly in the colonial past. In 1990 a group of historians from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi issued a pamphlet, The Political Abuse of History, and in 1991, a collection of essays was published, Anatomy of a Confrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India, edited by Sarvepalli Gopal (Gopal, 1993).6 The publication presented a set of critical, interrogative histories of redoubtable scholarship which levelly described and contextualized the claims of the right-wing ideologues and of opportunistic archaeologists who had provided support for the Ramjanmabhumi claim. Nevertheless, the determination of historians to intervene in the dispute led to an awkward embrace between politics and scholarship. The modern historical imagination can take many forms but none can credibly encompass a devotional perspective. Devotional faith remained the trump card of Hindu chauvinists determined to reclaim, from history, the disputed site. Empirical proof, scholarly conviction and civil propriety were found to be poor weapons against the mobilization of a politics of dispossession and religious fundamentalism. Nandy’s critique went further than regarding

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the discipline of history as an impotent opponent of communal incitement. The premises of academic, secular history provided an useful rhetorical adversary for the Hindu-right which could – without any necessity of detailed engagement with the scholarship produced – vilify its authors as elite, urban, ‘pseudo-secularists’ out of touch with the voice of the Hindu majority.7 South Asia furnishes elaborate proofs of the relationship between historical practice and authority, most pointedly during the period of British colonialism. History provided a narrative hand-maiden to official discourse, emphasizing the credibility and necessity of the colonial intervention. The generation of histories from the eighteenth century onwards were deliberate attempts to discipline and reform the perceived paucity of the native historical imagination (Lal, 2005, pp. 27–78). Only once irreversible Hegelian time had been embraced, held imperial histories, could India proceed towards modernity. It was the historical imagination from which the often invidious notion of ‘influence’ emerged. It is useful to remind ourselves that influence was an astrological term which less describes than mystifies a relationship in which the only certainty is hierarchy. Separated from the mysteries of the stars, ‘influence’ is assumed to provide an acceptable term of historical explanation. Histories identify a chain of events; charting progressive change  – whether manifest through intellectual suggestion or warfare – to form a sequence in which those influenced are made beholden or subordinate to those who influence. British influence, enacted through colonial governance, could encompass the brutal articulation of violent power, didactic institutional practices and the subtleties of reformist discourse. The redemption of history from the cycles of myth and memory was regarded as an essential corollary of colonial authority in which colonizer would come to know the colonized and, in turn, the colonized would come properly to know themselves. The imbrication of history and secularism raises profoundly uncomfortable questions for the discipline of history. History and secularism are both corrective, modernizing disciplines: historical argument cultivates a desire for some recognizable truth, notwithstanding the discipline’s acceptance that such a truth is necessarily subject to incessant revisitation and correction. History moves through the agency of individuals and materials of the world and has found no means, from within the frames of modernity, to admit of the miraculous. The modern historical imagination is a secular pursuit, redeemed from any hint of the messianic or any taint of the mythic. Historicism recognizes alternatives only as deviation; as phenomena which must necessarily be brought within the frames of linear history. Nandy was unsparing of his criticism of history as a discipline unable to free itself from its colonial determinates or to relate to other ways of remembering and, more significantly, forgetting. It is in the act of ‘principled forgetting’ that Nandy locates an Indian cultural response to difference and episodic conflict. Such a willingness to forego remembrance in the interests of continuing to live (alongside others) provides a compelling suggestion which is anathema to the historicist imagination. We, as historians, pride ourselves on picking over sources to recover new orders of causality and consequence. As a discipline which sought to develop practices comparable to those of science, history finds virtue in empirical rigour, verifiable evidence and in the internal coherence of

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their organization and elaboration. A decision to remove or to refuse a particular memory or a possible past strains the totalizing instinct of the historian, an instinct closely related to the cataloguing habits of the colonial administrator.8

Caste, violence and secularism Nandy’s critique of both secularism and history rests on their cultural illegitimacy; they are epistemological cuckoos who wrested their place in Indian thought from more meaningful possibilities. A more recent suggestion has been made that secularism was welcomed into a comfortable Indian nest. This analysis suggests that our reading of Indian secularism should not pivot on its limits or failings but upon the enduring fit found for secularism as a defining rhetorical attribute of the Indian nation: constitutionally, culturally and politically. This emergent argument hinges on the close, if tacit, relationship between the idea of the nation and upper-caste Hindu identity. A symbiosis has been created between claims made in the name of the secular ideal and the needs of the upper-caste Hindu elite. Caste, as a silent interstice of violence, was never addressed by Nandy who couches his arguments in the general registers of the Indian and (European) other. This section of the chapter turns to the relationship between caste Hinduism and secularism. The analytical association between the secular ideal and Hinduism is not a new one. Donald Smith suggested as much in his work in the early 1960s (Smith, 1963, pp. 150–68). Secularism understood as a toleration for different religious positions could be regarded as underwritten in India by a particular, and Gandhian, Hindu universalism according to which all religions were treated as distinct but equal devotional routes to god. There was political mileage in mapping religious philosophy onto national demographics. In 1953 K. N. Katju, a member of the Constituent Assembly and later Home Minister, averred that ‘without a Hindu majority, India could not have adopted a secular constitution’ (quoted in Chiriyankandath, 1999). Statements such as these have been regarded as misunderstandings of the meaning of the secular, of the kind which so exasperated Nehru. Katju intended to evoke the tolerance presumed to be implicit to Hinduism. A recent foregrounding of the social, cultural and economic dynamics of caste, rather than the philosophical tenets of Hinduism, raises more pointed questions about the nature of Indian secularism. The relationship between caste and religion on the one hand and caste and politics on the other can be interrogated in almost every register of the vast debate on Indian secularism. In constitutional terms, the establishment of the Indian state as a secular state rested on the rejection of the divisive architecture of political representation introduced during the colonial intervention. The constitutional framework devised from the beginning of the twentieth century was deliberately calibrated to strengthen colonial authority by nurturing social, cultural and political divisions on the basis of religious identity. The devolution of (selected forms of) authority to the provisional level that was introduced under ‘dyarchy’ after 1919 served  the dual purpose of meeting the need for urgent retrenchment after the

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end of the First World War and seeking out new allies for the Imperial project. At both the national and provincial levels political organizations which consolidated community identity were encouraged and assuaged. Constituent Assembly debates following independence in 1947 make clear that for a majority of Indian politicians the removal of voting rights apportioned according to religious community – put in place by the colonial state from 1909 onwards – was to be among the first works of the independent state (Tejani, 2008). The continuation of these fragmented constituencies was fiercely rejected by the majority of Hindu representatives in the Constituent Assembly immediately after independence. Religious representation was a relic of colonial ‘divide and rule’ and was held culpable for the religious genocide which took place amidst partition. Not only would the continuation of religious voting rights be an affront to the secular national project; its elimination offered a means of defining that project. Only two constitutional divisions of the Indian population persisted: those of caste and tribe. The provision of caste reservation effectively separated caste from religion and, in doing so, set caste adrift from the secular ideal. Caste was to be no more than an index of deprivation  – synonymous with ‘backwardness’  – and as such would be addressed through the constitutional provision of proportional ‘reservations’ in employment and education. By this manoeuvre caste  – as a register of hierarchy, discrimination and violence – ceased to provide a consideration through which the Indian secular state could be questioned. The upper caste political elite were indelibly linked to the secular. Caste, and any realm of politics which claimed caste as an attribute, was placed outside the defining realms of secularism: religion and national history. Caste and secularism collided in scholarly literature in the early 1990s following an analysis which, like Nandy’s, took its cue from civic disorder in 1990. A commission – named after its Chairman B. P. Mandal – had been established in 1979 to address the relationship between caste and social and economic deprivation. At the end of 1980, the Mandal Commission produced a report recommending a substantial enlargement of the reservations provided for in the Constitution to members of ‘Other Backward Castes’, a category which – claimed the report – accounted for 52 per cent of India’s population. An attempt in 1990 to implement the report’s recommendation led to violent protests and the self-immolation of a number of upper-caste, male students. The disturbances culminated in the fall of the government of Prime Minister V. P. Singh. Prakash Chandra Upadhyaya’s substantial analysis of Indian secularism offers a scholarly reflection prompted by the implications of the Commission and its enduring aftermath. Indian secularism, he argued, was synonymous with Hindu ‘majoritarianism’, the pretence of democracy which guarded and sustained the interests of a tiny upper caste and class minority. Secularism, Upadhyaya argued, ‘is subordinated to the nationalism of the Hindu majority’; a majority voiced by an upper-caste elite who were keen – before independence – to use the idioms of caste and community to cement their authority (Upadhyaya, 1992). Once independence was secured, the association of class interests and caste identities could be dispatched from the sphere of politics by a species of secularism within which religious communities were acknowledged by the Congress-dominated state to be nominally equal. This secularism was both marginal and pretentious and did little or nothing to prevent the deliberate manipulation of

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community identities by politicians who otherwise vehemently denied any ‘communal tendencies’. Upadhyaya opens his argument with a characterization of the anti-Mandal Commission campaigners: When lower caste groups attempted to use the majoritarian vocabulary of community to demand social and economic justice, high caste elites responded by calling on merit, competition and efficiency – slogans of a market society – to justify their unwillingness to countenance further reservation. Yet in the Indian context, these bourgeois-liberal slogans have little appeal beyond the narrow circle of the dominant elites. (Ibid., p. 819)

This characterization of the Mandal Commission’s opponents, who in Upadhyaya’s analysis included a substantial representation of India’s scholarly elite, earned a withering response from economic historian Dharma Kumar who described Upadhyay’s argument as ‘tediously familiar’ and ‘turgid’ (Kumar, 1994, p. 223).9 The Ramjanmabhumi movement, which led to the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, was deliberately calibrated by the right-wing Hindu party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, to cultivate and harness the violent potential provoked by the Mandal Commission (Dasgupta, 1990). The Ramjanmabhumi movement offered a means to redress a caste Hindu identity affronted by a ‘pseudo-secular’ attack on their position of India’s true and natural citizens. This displacement of caste into communal violence in the 1990s is resonant with Dilip Menon’s discussion of the broader relationship between caste and communal violence following the violence in Gujarat in 2002 in which 2,000 Muslims were killed (Menon, 2010). Riots broke out after a train was attacked at Godhra railway station at the end of February 2002. Members of low-caste communities from central Gujarat took part in the violence that was ignored, if not escalated, by the Gujarat police. Menon suggests that there has been a ‘deflection’ of the violence innate to Hinduism into communal violence. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the challenges to uppercaste domination made by low-caste groups were redirected, under the auspices and symbols of Hindu revivalism, towards and against the figure of the Muslim. As a nationalist politics emerged in which the everyday violence of caste hierarchy could have no ostensible part, communal division offered a means both to externalize that violence and to create brief, instrumental alliances between high and low caste in the execution of violence against another, non-Hindu, community. The involvement of low-caste groups in acts of communal violence, in the name of Hinduism, during the atrocities which accompanied partition provides a defining moment of Indian independence. Menon’s argument connects with the re-framing of the Hindu as the secular after independence. This manoeuvre simultaneously validated suspicion of the Muslim-Indian (as opposed to the Hindu-Indian identity which was the axiomatic national identity) and placed caste beyond the interrogative fields of the communal problem. Menon’s historical argument is framed within the observation that South Asian scholars have long been reluctant to confront ‘the violence that is endemic to Hinduism’, that is to say the everyday physical and social violence through which caste

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is defined in the majority of upper-caste households, regardless of their profession of the secular ideal (ibid., p.  125). The high-caste identity of the vast majority of Hindu-Indian intellectuals has long been an uncomfortable truism. Though all would acknowledge the relationship between socio-economic privilege, caste and education in verbal exchanges, few have ventured to explore the issue in print. The repression of caste among Indian scholars has been elegantly delineated by Vivek Dhareshwar who, again following the Mandal Commission controversy, questioned, ‘the solipsism of the secular self with regard to caste’ (Dhareshwar, 1993, p. 115). The tendency of most historians to avoid the ‘caste’ question has guaranteed that questions asked about caste in conference and seminar contexts are regarded as immature and misplaced. There has, however, been a very recent increase of histories which place caste at the centre of their analyses (Rawat, 2010; Rao, 2009). Prominent among them is Ramnarayan Rawat’s work on the exclusion of dalit (low-caste) groups from the twin realms of history and secularism. Rawat’s exploration of the histories of the low castes of the United Provinces (later Uttar Pradesh) volubly demonstrates the means by which these communities were removed from the dynamics of historical change, an elision which required a significant misrepresentation of the occupations with which they were associated.10 M. S. S. Pandian has argued for the importance of ‘local manifestations’ in any understanding of secularism’s ‘political work’ and, in doing so, places caste at the centre of his analysis (Pandian, 2012). Pandian suggests that a positive correlation exists between the political history of the anti-caste/­nonBrahmin movement in Tamil Nadu and the political and cultural accommodation of Tamil Muslims. The compromises made by the non-Brahmin movement from the 1950s onwards in terms of its commitment to atheism and rationality opened up a political space in which religion was not beyond and outside of politics, but in which it could be critically engaged. Whereas Nandy’s alternative to secularism rests on the toleration innate to Hinduism, for Pandian the failure of violent communal politics in Tamil Nadu has depended upon a politics critical of the social and cultural mores of Hinduism and a political debate in which religion is considered, ‘in terms of what it ought to be rather than what it is’ (ibid., p. 62). Despite the earlier anxieties of many commentators, Pandian included, that the Hindu right was poised to make political gains in the state, attempts to garner popular support for the Hindu right have been met with complete disinterest. The reason for the political impotence of the Hindu right in Tamil Nadu  – bearing in mind that the Hindu right is almost universally regarded as the pre-eminent threat to Indian secularism – is the capacity of the two dominant political parties in the state to create a reflexive politics around both caste and religion (ibid.). In any evaluation of secularism in India, caste will, henceforth, take a central role. The reified existence of secularism as a referent of Indian state ideology was predicated on the elision of caste as a meaningful measure of that ideology. What constitutes a caste, or low-caste, identity has become particularly embattled. There is an acceptance – albeit sentimental rather than political – of the systemic victimization of low-caste groups through the ritual, social and economic hierarchies of caste society. However, the enlargement of the constitutional provisions created in 1951 to include ‘Other Backward Classes’ has created a new political landscape  – undermining the

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centralized, dynastic hegemony of the Congress Party. The emergence of what Nigam categorized as ‘infra-nationalisms’ in the late-1970s saw the arrival of a politics openly based on ‘caste, community and language’ (Nigam, 2006, p. 95). Politics which appeal to caste and ‘Other Backward Class’ (a category which includes non-Hindu) identities, and the increased importance of local and state-level political networks, have created a bewilderingly complex terrain of potential affiliations and, often unstable, alliances between different social and political organizations in which centralized Congress dominance can no longer be assured.

The everyday lives of secularism Both the analytical rigour with which the secular idea is pursued in Indian scholarship and the frequency of its everyday usage are exceptional. However, the two rarely coincide. While extensive and redoubtable scholarship seeks to pin down the meanings, comparability and histories of the secular in India, secularism in popular parlance has acquired an extraordinary idiomatic flexibility. The sheer variety of social, cultural and political realms upon which the secular principle purchase has no equivalent in any other nation. People, spaces, things and processes can be deemed secular, nonsecular or insufficiently secular. Restaurants, festivals and individuals can be described as secular. The Vastu Kala School of architecture in Delhi occupies ‘Secular House’; its cafe is the ‘Secular House Cafe’. Secular can describe a social practice or even individuated perception. As a term secular is transliterated without elaboration. The Hindi observation, ‘Yeh, bahut secular admi hei’ (he is a very secular man) is not an uncommon observation. Far from representing a corruption, the idiomatic traditions of the term in India articulate popular ownership. This popular ownership necessarily involves usage which can be vague, ambiguous and indiscriminate. However, the discursive adventures of secularism indicate something beyond it which is being articulated through its apparent authority, its unquestioned and indefinable quality as a word which is both intimate and alien. The greatest significance of secularism in India is its existence as a site of contentious, popular debate in which no single definition of secularism is either discernible or perhaps desirable. The secular goes beyond its intentional constitutional articulation but once it has left the landscape of debate in which it is a conspicuous political tool, how should, or can, it be pursued? Recent attempts have been made to engage with the cultural inflections of the secular as ideal or possibility in post-1947 literature and film (Kumar, 2008; Srivastava, 2008). These analyses move decisively beyond the field of political or constitutional debate. However, the secular seems a faintly inoperative and indeterminate term; novel and film are cast as arbiters of the secular ideal, set apart from the everyday lives in which the Indian secular is most significantly manifest. It is in its absence that the most recent and original exploration of Indian secularism has been effected. Faisal Devji offers a new way of thinking about the correlation of different religious identities in India in an analysis which begins with the rebellious soldiers who rose against British authority in northern India in 1857. The affront to religious sensibilities – through the real and rumoured presence of pork and beef fat

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as lubricants for bullet casings – was at the forefront of the mutineers’ grievances and the rebellion saw an unambiguous unity of soldiers who expressed the very different sensibilities of Brahmin and Muslim. The unity, argues Devji, was possible not in spite of these differences but because of the very particular way in which differences were understood during the rebellion. In rejecting British authority, the mutineers, ‘sacrifice[d] their own interests for the other’s religious scruples without sharing these in any way’ (Devji, 2012, p. 27). Gandhi’s twentieth-century articulations of the possibilities and limits of Indian nationhood became, in Devji’s analysis, continuations of this earlier grammar of distinction. This reading reveals an arrangement of everyday difference in India which differs subtly but fundamentally from the ordering of identity in the liberal west. The everyday relations which permit collaboration in the name of sensibilities not shared, and potentially in conflict, does not subsist on the assumption of an implicitly tolerant Hinduism. As Menon, Pandian and Rawat have shown, secularism was fashioned by the Hindu political elite to elide perpetual caste violence. Instead, Devji directs us to the operation of a friendship across the ‘empire of distinctions’ in which the possibility of violence is not an anathema but an inherent possibility (ibid., p. 92). Across this relational landscape, politics is enhanced, rather than diminished, by difference. It was across this terrain that Gandhi sought a politics which rejected ‘naturalized commonality’ and accommodated diversity through the moral elevation of the minority and, in its extremes, privileged absolute individualism (ibid., pp. 51–65). Majorities can assemble in India, most certainly. Since the 1980s, such majorities have fashioned themselves to violent effect but quickly collapsed in on the temporary alliances upon which they depended. The moral elevation Gandhi advocated for the minority has been borrowed by the Hindu right in protesting the marginalization of the upper-caste Hindu. During the Mandal protests, after the destruction of the Babri Masjid and in Gujarat in 2002, a wounded, majoritarian sensibility was deployed with violent and devastating consequences. But since its only instrument can be violence, and the concomitant loss of any moral claim, no sustainable politics of the majority is feasible in India. In the everyday sense of the term, secularism belongs to a disposition which is not particular to India but does stand outside of the Western habits of comportment which depend upon sensitivities attached to individuated personal space, possessions and intention. In Indian parlance, the notion of the secular is analogous to the oft enacted concept of ‘adjustment’; a far more proactive acceptance of the inconvenience of multitudinous diversity than the mute and passive concept of ‘toleration’. Adjustment requires the recognition of incessant and necessary negotiation and recognizes the real possibility of increments of unanticipated modification. The negotiation of identity in India is premised on communication and enactment (in contrast to the separating layers upon which status in the west depends) – a premise in which impermeable boundaries and absolutes cannot prosper. The extent and flaws of the Indian state ensure the absence of anything approaching complacent consensus on any matter. If secularism in India is anything, it is a consensus on the necessity of debate; a debate which is in turn premised upon the necessity of maintaining a democratic state. This chapter has sought to highlight the defining attributes of the secular in India though it has done little

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to ease comparison with the Anglo-American world. The excruciating constancy of comparison does not allow a meaningful discussion. Indian secularism is not an historically episodic variance on some definitive, Western ideal. The secular in India is an aperture; a root into a field of debate which extends far beyond it. The alien nature of secularism, that it is an idea contingently inserted and uneasily assimilated, provides the basis for an interrogation from which nothing escapes. It is a useful way to think but a better way to question. The state has neither enshrined, nor been entrusted, with sole rights to the term ‘secular’. It is significant that only in 1976, in the midst of Indira Gandhi’s twoyear suspension of democratic government in India and a regime of violent state oppression, that the term was inserted, along with socialism, into the preamble of the Indian Constitution. Unsurprisingly then, the Indian state is under constant popular surveillance. This surveillance must be seen to include both the urbane criticism of elites and the newer politics of identity which seek out the worm holes of the secular constitution. The secular in India best operates in two registers simultaneously: as a scepticism of authority – religious or political – and an endorsement of the capacity for everyday adjustment which is not predicated on a didactic emphasis of the imminence of difference but on its quite unremarkable inevitability.

7

Confronting the Confrontation: Europe beyond Secularism? Evert van der Zweerde

If words serve to blur things, it is because the conflict over words is inseparable from the battle over things. Jacques Rancière, 20091 Perhaps it is premature to speak of a post-secular Europe, but one can certainly perceive a significant shift in the European Zeitgeist. José Casanova, 20072

Introduction Behind the headlines in European newspapers and blocked from view by discussions about Brussels-based budgetary discipline and possible Grexits or Brixits, discussions are going on in Europe that are connected to an ‘eternal’ problem: the relation between politics and religion. This sensitive issue, the relevance whereof extends well beyond the confines of Europe or the European Union, comes to the fore in a wide range of questions. Should the preamble of a European Constitution contain a reference to God or to Christianity, as Vatican and Orthodox Patriarchates have pleaded? How should the European Union give shape to the ‘open, transparent and regular dialogue’ with religious and secular organizations that it committed itself to in Article 17.3 of the 2009 Lisbon Treaty? Is it a deplorable fact that the European Union does not have a Religionspolitik (Kallscheuer, 2008, p.  21)? Is it a ‘secular’ position when ‘the union respects . . . the status under national law of churches and religious associations or communities in the Member States’,3 if what it respects ranges from French laïcité to constitutional protection of the Orthodox Church in Greece? Was Samuel Huntington right that Greece is ‘an anomaly, the Orthodox outsider in Western organizations’ and never ‘an easy member of either the EU or NATO’, due to its lying on the wrong side of ‘the Eastern Boundary of Western Civilization’

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(Huntington, 1998, p. 159, 162ff.)? Can ‘Islamic’ countries like Turkey or Bosnia join the European Union? Are European citizens of Islamic faith citizens like any others or are they a special group deserving special treatment? Are they perhaps even more European than European citizens who continue to stick to their national identities (Ramadan, 2003)? Is there a grain of truth in the claim by Jean-Claude Milner that ‘European democratic peace was nothing but the result of the extermination of the Jews of Europe’ (Rancière, 2005, p. 16)?4 Is it relevant, finally, that the peace-project of European cooperation and integration was started after World War II by Roman Catholic Christian-Democrats of such as Jean Monnet, Alcide de Gaspari and Konrad Adenauer – is ‘Europe’ a ‘Catholic’ project, bearing in mind the strong bond between nation-state and Reformation?5 What these questions have in common is their connection with secularity. ‘Secular’ is often confronted with its opposite: secularism appears as the opposite or even enemy of religion, that is as an alternative comprehensive world view (or as a variant of atheism); secularization, long taken for granted as a process, is contrasted with desecularization; the notion of ‘post-secular’ has made its way into wider debates. The present chapter confronts the confrontation between ‘secular’ and its opposites, and asks if a ‘post-secular’ position can be construed that could guide Europe beyond secularism. To this end, it is made up of three parts: the first focuses on conceptual considerations, the second part highlights the political dimension and the third part engages in the recent debate around ‘post-secular’. The thesis that I defend is that it is both possible and desirable to develop a postsecular stance, one that is enacted within a debate that is reflexive by default. This stance has important implications: (1) it implies a rejection of secularism as an ideology (a point shared with Heiner Bielefeldt, Jürgen Habermas and many others); (2) it also implies (pace Habermas) a rejection of any ‘special treatment’ of ‘religious positions’ or ‘religious citizens’ in contrast with other kinds of positions and citizens (a point shared with Taylor and others); (3) finally, it implies a deconstruction of the cluster of notions around ‘the secular’. Although this may appear as a ‘European’ problem, the spread and ‘export’ of secular regimes and secularist ideologies to other parts of the world implies that such a deconstruction may have an impact beyond Europe, too.

Conceptual considerations concerning ‘Secularity’ and ‘Postness’ If the questions just listed relate to the ‘big issue’ of politics and religion – or religion and politics – and if they are connected to the concepts and phenomena of secularity, secularization and secularism,6 we can assume that the current debate about ‘the post-secular’ bears on them as well. Starting with Habermas’s Glauben und Wissen [Faith and Knowledge] of 2001, in which a ‘post-secular society’ was mentioned five times (Reese-Schäfer, 2009, p. 62), this concept, which opens up a new conceptual field  – post-secularity, post-secularism  – has entered scholarly debate and even become a new buzzword. It is offered as a possible way out of the opposition of ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ that burdens not only the process of European

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integration, but also the domestic politics of many European states. Examples are the Danish cartoon affairs, Turkish başörtüsü [headscarf] controversies, burqa legislation in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, the minaret referendum in Switzerland, the political murders of Theo van Gogh and of 77 Norwegian young Social Democrats, Islamic and Hindu family law in British boroughs, the religious obligation of Sikhs to carry a kirpan (reluctantly accepted in the United Kingdom, but anathema in France), the Pussy Riot trial in Moscow, the German debate over religiously motivated circumcision, and Dutch-attempted legislation on ritual slaughter, both kosher and ḥalāl, which led to strong protest by Muslims and, notably, Jews, who had long regarded the Netherlands as a tolerant haven.7 All these issues entail a conflict between the sacred principle of freedom of religion and some other, equally sacred principle (freedom of expression, animal rights, integrity of the body, etc.). Obviously, the precise meaning of ‘post-secular’ and its derivatives depends on the meaning of ‘secular’. Unfortunately, the meaning of the latter is heavily disputed and hard to assess objectively, since, as Talal Asad puts it, ‘the secular is so much part of our modern life, [that] it is not easy to grasp it directly’ (Asad, 2003, p. 16). A limited survey, based on Hermann Lübbe, José Casanova, Charles Taylor, Bryan Turner, Graeme Smith, Danièle Hervieu-Léger and Carl Schmitt, yields eight meanings of ‘secularity’ (the meanings of secularization and secularism can be derived from them, the first pointing to a process or a policy, the second to an appreciation or an ideology): transfer of persons and property from church to worldly jurisdiction (this is the oldest meaning of secularization), differentiation of societal spheres including religion and politics, decline of religious beliefs and practices, private character of religion, problematicity of faith, detachment of the world from ‘higher times’, adjustment of religion to changed circumstances, and transformation of theological into secular discourse.8 These meanings have a common root in the original meaning of ‘secular’ which Robert Markus and Matthias Riedl date back to the North African outskirts of the Roman Empire before its Christianization (Markus, 2006; Riedl, 2012). Riedl dates it back to 180, when Christians from the village of Scillium paid their due (including taxes) to the Emperor (represented by his proconsul), claiming that they did accept the authority of Caesar, but precisely as Caesar [quasi Caesar], not as their Lord [dominus] (Riedl, 2012, p. 14). This articulates a ‘third’ field, penetrating like a wedge between both the Roman and the Christian oppositions of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’, creating a realm that can be shared with others, who do not share the same opposition of sacred and profane, that is, both non-Christians and other-Christians. While the Biblical ‘Give Caesar what is Caesar’s’ [Matthew 22.21] left undecided what was Caesar’s, the Scillians developed a position between acceptance and indifference vis-à-vis the things imperii huius saeculi. Western Christianity was shaped by this ambiguous tension between accommodation in and non-identification with ‘this’ world. A strong case has been made that ‘secular’ makes full sense only within the (post-) Latin/Western Christian context in which it arose (Casanova, 2009, p. 19). This does not mean that ‘secular’ and its derivatives cannot make sense in other contexts, such as a predominantly Hindu, Eastern Orthodox Christian or Islamic

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context. It can still meaningfully refer to phenomena, processes, attitudes, ideologies, etc., but it will sit uneasily in any other conceptual context than the Western one. For example, the widespread discourse on Islam and ‘the secular’ suffers from the notorious and not accidental untranslatability of ‘secular’ into Arabic (Keane, 2000, p. 35; Tamimi, 2000, p. 13; Filaly-Ansary, 2005, p. 154f.).9 The cause of this unease is that in all non-Western Christian cases whatever is qualified as ‘secular’ stands in opposition to the dominant religion – keeping it ‘out of politics’ or competing with it by means of a more or less official ‘secularism’  – whereas in the case of (post-) Latin Christian contexts it ‘sits easily’ because ‘secular’ makes full sense against that specific religious background, and can even be perceived as the very realization of Christianity (Hervieu-Léger, 1993, p.  32; Smith, 2008, p.  2; Vattimo, 2002, p.  85). In a recent discussion with Habermas, Taylor and West, Judith Butler claimed that ‘secularization may be well one way that Jewish life continues to be Jewish’, in line with her statement that it ‘makes a different kind of sense to refer to a secular Jew than to a secular Catholic’, indeed suggesting that a secular Jew remains a secular Jew, which implies that to suggest that ‘secular’ has a singular meaning, is to inscribe oneself, in the case of at least Europe and North America, in a (post-) Latin Christian conceptual frame (Butler, 2011, p. 72). Other contexts, different both culturally and in terms of political institutions, have become part of the European  – or Western  – context. If secularity sits uneasily for many, it still ‘sits’ for all, and (post-) Christians can comfortably decide for others if they fit or not. As Charles Taylor and Craig Calhoun put it during a discussion with Habermas in 2009: Taylor:  I just want to tell you one more thing. When we say ‘religion,’ we mustn’t think of just Christianity. There are Buddhists, there are Hindus. A lot of the things you [Habermas, EvdZ] said don’t apply to the other cases at all. That really should give us pause before we make general remarks about – Calhoun:  Right. This is being argued from within the Western experience. There would need to be a bunch of different discussions within other historical trajectories. Taylor:  And they’re all here now. Calhoun:  Indeed they are. And they are us. (Mendieta et al., 2011, p. 68f.; emphasis mine, EvdZ)

The last sentence transforms a possible opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ into a political claim that points to a new opposition, viz. between those of ‘us’ for whom ‘they’ are part of ‘us’ and those of ‘us’ for whom ‘they’ are not – but look who is talking! The question whether this ‘us’ can be the citizenry of a stable polity points towards a politically relevant discussion of post-secularity. For this discussion, the best point of departure is the original context: the essay by Habermas and the discussion that it ignited (see the next section). First, however, some attention needs to be given to the other part of ‘postsecular’: postness. Does ‘post-’ mean after or beyond? Three ‘post-’ terms in academic discourse: postmodern, postdemocratic and post-Westphalian, can be taken from

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Jean-François Lyotard, Colin Crouch and Wendy Brown. Taking into account Philip Gorski’s sceptical urge to ‘consider whether the concept of the post-secular refers to an actual shift in the social world, or whether its deployment results, instead, from a zealous need to detect epochal turning points in every minor twist of the historical road’, we should add that there are not ‘actual shifts in the social world’ on the one hand, and ‘fashionable shifts in academia’ on the other, as if the two were separate: ‘In other words, the question is: Which world has changed  – the “real” one or the scholarly one? To some degree, . . . the answer is “both” ’ (Gorski, 2012, p. 2). Since Lyotard articulated as the core of the postmodern condition that ‘[T]he grand narrative has lost its credibility, whatever the form of unification that it is given: speculative narrative, emancipation narrative’ (Lyotard, 1979, p. 63), his key idea has gained ground. Of course, the world has seen many grand narratives since, but indeed their credibility has waned, both inside academia, and outside it, where the domineering socio-political reality, that is liberal democracy, seems capable of doing without, and where alternatives quickly appear as shallow, fashionable or constructed. This does not mean that there is less demand: many people deplore the demise of ‘thick ideologies’ and the absence of ultimate idea(l)s that people can believe in. Postmodernity is haunted, it seems, by a particular nostalgia, that might even explain a certain envy vis-à-vis people who do believe in their cause, even if we dread that cause (say, the reestablishing of the Caliphate). Next, in his diagnosis of ‘post-democracy’ as a situation in which ‘the forms of democracy remain fully in place’, but ‘politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of ­pre-democratic times’ (Crouch, 2010, p.  6), Crouch analyses ‘the use of “post-” terms in general’ in temporal terms: Time period 1 is pre-X, and will have certain characteristics associated with lack of X. Time period 2 is the high tide of X, when many things are touched by it and changed from their state in time 1. Time period 3 is post-X. This implies that something new has come into existence to reduce the importance of X by going beyond it in some sense; some things will therefore look different from both time  1 and time 2. However, X will still have left its mark; there will be strong traces of it still around; while some things start to look rather like they did in time 1 again. ‘Post-’ periods should therefore be expected to be very complex. (Ibid., p. 20)

The question is whether this also applies to ‘post-secular’ (I doubt if it applies to democracy or ‘modernity’ either, but that is not the issue here). The notion of a ‘post-Westphalian’ order, finally, contains the same tension between being after and being beyond or over. It is hard to ignore the persistence of the ‘Westphalian’ idea of the sovereign nation-state, as if there had not been a longstanding discussion about its retreat and decline, or at least the disappearance of its primacy. Brown’s suggestion, based on her ‘post-Westphalian’ hypothesis, that ‘the prefix “post” signifies a formation that is temporally after but not over that to which it is affixed’, and that therefore ‘we use the term “post” only for a present whose past

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continues to capture and structure it’ (Brown, 2010, p.  21), can be connected with Gorski’s suggestion that ‘[P]ostmodernism can be read in at least two different ways. In one reading, postmodernism claims that modernity is over and hence that we live in a “postmodern” era; in another view, postmodernism insists that the universalistic claims associated with modernity can no longer be sustained without demurral’ (Gorski, 2012, p. 2). The phenomena associated with modernity have not disappeared, modernization is in full swing in many parts of the world, and the world is rife with universalistic claims. Does ‘postmodern condition’ mean a world shaped by modernity, in which academic ‘post’-discourse is the demurral of a world that is as furiously modernizing as it ever was? The difficulties connected with postmodern, postdemocratic, and post-Westphalian return in the discussion of post-secular. Gorski writes: The question of the post-secular posits two lines of inquiry: first, determinations about the state of religiosity in the world; second, understanding the new ways that social scientists, philosophers, historians, and scholars from across disciplines are paying and not paying attention to religion. (Ibid.)

Things are even more complicated, because the opposition of religious and secular (which organizes Gorski’s discourse) is not obvious. This becomes clear when we confront it with Graeme Smith’s claim that ‘secularism in not the end of Christianity, nor is it a sign of the godless nature of the West’, but ‘. . . a new manifestation of Christianity, . . . one that is not immediately obvious because it lacks the usual scaffolding we associate with the Christian religion’ (Smith, 2010, p. 2f.), a claim which conflicts both with Gorski’s religious-secular opposition and with Peter Berger’s claim that ‘experiments with secularized religion have generally failed’ (Berger, 1999, p. 4). If Smith is right, secularized religion is, on the contrary, a great success, whereas if Berger is right, we would be back to the religious-secular opposition, the failure of secularized religion being due to a contradiction in terms. Secondly, asking if scholars are paying or not paying attention to religion is not just about ‘paying attention’, but about the possible bearing of the very notions of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’ on scholarly discourse. John Milbank rightly claims that any sociological approach of religion, whether positivist or constructivist, has already bracketed out religion and theology. Milbank argued that one of the more sophisticated sociologists of religion, Bryan Turner, was ‘suspicious of most recent sociology of religion’, rightly seeing it ‘as quasi-theological, and still confined by nineteenthcentury perspectives’ (Milbank, 2006, p. 140).10 Turner reacted to Milbank’s argument, saying ‘that (secular) sociology has failed to provide a universal, rational language of the social’ and that the ‘task of modern Christian theology’ would be, for Milbank, to act as a social science instead of sociology by ‘elaborating a genuinely universal discourse of the social’ (Turner, 2011, p.  149).11 The gist of this argument is that, even if we doubt the idea of a ‘genuinely universal discourse of the social’ in general, there is no discourse possible on religion that does not take position vis-à-vis religion and theology, hence there can neither be a religiously neutral sociology of religion nor a sociologically neutral perception of religion. Danièle Hervieu-Léger counters

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the argument that sociology of religion might have the limited agenda of ‘treating religious  facts as one treats any other social facts, from a sociological perspective, in other words to construct, classify, and compare them, and to treat them in terms of relations and conflicts’, with the rhetorical question ‘whether the sociologist of religions can escape the imperative of having to destroy his object at the very moment when he submits it to the procedures of analysis that are those of his discipline’ (Hervieu-Léger, 1993, p. 27f.). Even the mere collecting of empirical data is impossible without a conception of religion that decides which possible data are relevant for the study of religion: the idea that counting service attendance or replies to questions like ‘Do you believe in Hell?’ will tell us something about religion relies on an abstract split of inside and outside (Manent, 2006, p. 67f.). That split, however, between forum internum and forum externum is firmly rooted in Western Christianity. One should not totally deny or neglect the temporal meaning of ‘post-’ in notions like ‘post-secular’. After all, time moves on, and people do ascribe different meanings to historical periods, they do inscribe themselves in different frameworks, and these meanings and frameworks often stand in a temporal sequence. Still, the other meaning of ‘post-’, that of ‘beyond’ has primacy: I suggest to understand ‘post-secular’ as meaning ‘beyond the opposition between the secular and the non-secular’. Surely, to claim that ‘post-’ in notions like ‘post-secular’ must mean beyond rather than after is not to suggest that this is ‘easy’; Ronald Beiner rightly criticized a ‘good deal of fashionable talk about “post-secularism” as a, as it were, natural counterpart to postmodernism’, suggesting that ‘one should shudder (at least a little bit) at the facile notion of moving “beyond” secularism’ (Beiner, 2011, p. 5, n. 9). It will be difficult to overcome secularist assumptions theoretically, as it may be hard to articulate practical alternatives. Still, assuming that secularism has lost most of its credibility (Nandy, 2010, p. 337), and supposing that a return to ‘pre-secularity’ is not realistic, the only option left is to move beyond the ‘secular/non-secular’ dichotomy as the organizing duality. Post-secularity as a case of ‘post-X’ thus is neither coming after secularity/ secularization/secularism in historical time, but with ‘strong traces of it still [being] around’ [Crouch], nor a continuation of X, only this time accompanied by doubts, demurrals and question marks. It rather is part of the same cluster as post-modernity, post-democracy, and post-nationality, pointing to the active refusal, academically and politically, to sacralize any process of X-ization or to engage in any form of X-ism: modernism, ‘democratism’, nationalism, islamism, secularism or postmodernism. The postmodern perspective, to quote Agnes Heller, is ‘alien to all “isms” (Heller, 1999, p.  1). Part of being a citizen of a postmodern world is to civilize one’s x by refraining from raising it to the level of an X.

Civilizing the Gods – the political dimension The concepts of ‘secular’ and ‘post’ are hard to pin down, and far from neutral. Notions in the conceptual field of ‘secular’ may seem neutral or objective, but they never are: they are always-also polemical notions. It suffices to look at the cover of

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books on religion in contemporary society – think of God is Dead by Steve Bruce – to see that there is no neutrality in religious matters.12 If, for example, the number of people worshipping in mosques in the United Kingdom is growing, while the number of active believers in the Church of England is decreasing, sociologists might capture these facts under the headings of ‘growth of Islam’ and ‘secularization’ respectively, but it seems impossible to take a neutral stance with respect to these phenomena. If the numbers would be equal, a neutral position would be to say that the level of religious beliefs and practices in England is not changing and that there is zero secularization on this parameter. To call decreasing church attendance ‘secularization’ is as much a choice as it is not to call the growing number of mosques ‘desecularization’  – or not to combine the two sets of facts under the general heading of a ‘shift of religious affiliation from Christianity to Islam’ (similar to, say, a shift in hooliganism from Chelsea to Arsenal). The example shows that to take a ‘neutral stance’ is not neutral: people may have nothing against Muslims and still protest against the religiously indifferent remark that this is a mere shift in religious preferences in society. Religion is deeply political, even if many religious people deny this (Christians often have strong anti-political feelings), while claiming that ‘religion has got nothing to do with politics’ is even more political, as is the opposite claim that religion must bear on politics (which also has a strong tradition in Christianity, as it does in Islam, too). As for the notions of the ‘post-’ family, they generate passionate discussion in both academic and artistic circles ever since Lyotard ‘put the first postmodern cat among the modernist pigeons’ (Woods, 1999, p.  20). To protest against the idea of a ‘postmodern’ era, condition or position, is to identify with (aspects of) modernity, that is to be a (partial) modernist, and a similar argument applies to ‘post-democratic’, ‘postWestphalian and post-secular’. This is not academic fashion, but struggle at the level of concepts and perceptions. Max Weber was acutely aware of this a century ago: I just ask: how should a faithful Catholic on the one hand, and a freemason on the other, in a course on forms of church and state or on history of religion – how should they ever be brought to the same evaluation of these things? That is excluded. Yet, the university professor should desire, and should demand of himself to be useful, through his knowledge and methods, for both the one and the other. (Weber, 1988, p. 602)

People of different religious or non-religious background can acknowledge the same facts, but their evaluations of those facts will often go in opposite directions. Some applaud any decrease in religiosity and may hope that the next generation of Muslims will stop praying at the mosque, while others may find any religion better than no religion and develop a discourse on Abrahamic religion. Some will identify religion and church, while for others non-churched religion is tantamount to true religion. Some may identify the decline of the Church of England with a crisis of the British nation, while others see it as the liberation of religion from state tutelage. Some may fear, others may envy the strong faith of their Islamic co-citizens. Still others may question the primacy of the opposition of religion and non-religion,

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and suggest an opposition of fanaticism and liberalism, or of dogmatism and open-mindedness, applying it to both religious and ‘secular’ worldviews. This draws different lines through society: between ‘reasonable’ and ‘unreasonable’ comprehensive doctrines (John Rawls), between those who are either religiously or secularly tone-deaf, but try to tune into the other side, and those who do not even try to listen or understand (Cornel West), or between those who are prone to enter a ‘domination-free discussion’ and those who are not (Jürgen Habermas). Nor is this a cognitive problem, a matter of ‘understanding what the Divine is for one or the other, or: in one or the other order [Ordnung]’ (ibid., p. 604). While the ideal of objectivity to which Weber appealed with his distinction between questions of knowledge and problems of life has come under massive attack (but can still be upheld as an ideal), there is also the political question of how to deal with the plurality of answers to fundamental questions that religious and non-religious worldviews address. Religiously homogeneous societies are rare, if only because religions themselves have a strong tendency to diversify into a plurality of positions that are not only different from each other, but also each other’s Other. There is ample reason to assume that the world, including Europe, will continue to house people who are different on parameters such as wealth, education, political participation, ethnicity and ‘religion’. Although extreme positions, such as staunch atheism and religious fundamentalism, are relatively rare in Europe (Gauchet, 1998, p.  29), and many people have ‘vague’ or implicit religious identities, there are large numbers of people whose religious identity is relevant in relation to morality, society and politics. Apart from individuals and groups who identify explicitly in religious terms, there is a broad variety of religious organizations, congregations and networks, some, but not all of which are ‘churches’ in the sense that has been predominant in Europe for centuries. Finally, there are polities, that is the European Union and its member-states, who have to relate, one way or another, to the presence of those less or more socially and politically relevant individual and collective identities and institutions. One way of dealing with these issues is establishment. The principle of Augsburg (1555), cuius regio eius religio, was not only about the subordination of ecclesiastical to civil power, but also about the idea that a polity [regio] needs a religion, or something functionally equivalent, for its internal cohesion, societal peace or national identity.13 A shared ‘religio’ makes a polity strong inwardly and outwardly, realizing the ‘prepolitical foundations [vorpolitische Grundlagen]’ that Habermas and Ratzinger quarrelled about (Habermas et al., 2005). From the often overlooked discussion of ecclesiastical power in Hobbes’s Leviathan, and the stated need of a civil religion in the last chapter of Rousseau’s Du contrat social, to the official scientific atheism [nauchnyj ateizm] of the former USSR, and Habermas’s construction of a constitutional patriotism [Verfassungspatriottismus], there is a perceived need of some kind of broadly shared worldview or doctrine. The discussion is about, first, how ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ such a worldview should be, second, what its relation should be to traditional religions and, third, whether or how polities have the right, or even obligation, to actively engage in its production or propagation. The simultaneous invention of nation-state and national church/religion is one of the elements of

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modernity that continue to determine Europe in its present stage, and it has become clear that ‘secularism/laïcisme’ is a religio in the Augsburgian sense. This is why that other big invention, the ‘secular state’ with its ‘worldview-neutralized state power [weltanschaulich neutralisierte Staatsgewalt]’ runs the permanent risk of elevating ‘secularism’ to the rank of a post-religious religio (Habermas, 2005, pp. 123 and 129; Bielefeldt, 1998, p. 476). In this discussion, the parameters have recently changed. First, even if Europe still is exceptionally non-religious or ‘secular’ if compared to the rest of the world, the decline of religious beliefs and practices and the degree of ‘religiosity’ that people ascribe to themselves seem to have stabilized. Secondly, groups with strong religious identities, some Muslims, but also Orthodox Christians, have become numerically stronger and publicly more visible – if all citizens are to be equal, their input must gain legitimacy and credibility. Thirdly, the disappearance from Eastern Europe of the official religio of Marxism–Leninism, with ‘scientific atheism’ as one of its component parts, robbed Western Europe of its constitutive other, and left an alleged vacuum; it is unclear whether this should be filled with something ‘functionally equivalent’ or, by contrast, left open to the mechanisms of civil society. Combining these factors, one can say that ‘religion’ is becoming both more diverse and more public in Europe.14 Consequently, polities must readdress religious issues, they have to reengage in ‘religion politics’ and they have to reinvent the overall relationship between religion, society and polity. Even the European Union, which did not have a ‘politics of religion’ in the past, can no longer afford itself that luxury, as it recognized in the Lisbon Treaty. A post-Augsburgian order can also be post-Westphalian. Economic globalization might be the final blow to another European principle, the ‘Münster Principle’ of 1648 that has organized the Westphalian order – a world territorially divided into sovereign (nation-) states – but the principles are not identical, despite their historical match. A post-Westphalian order is not coincidental with a post-Augsburgian one. Referring to Appadurai’s notion of modernity at large and Anderson’s idea of imagined communities, Casanova introduced the concept of global denominationalism: What is really new about this contemporary global situation, is the fact that, for the first time, all world religions can be really reproduced as de-territorialized global imagined communities, detached from the civilizational context in which they were traditionally embedded. (. . .) This expansion of de-territorialized, transnational, global imagined communities, which encompasses both the so-called old world religions and the many new forms of hybrid globalized religions . . . I call emerging global denominationalism. (Casanova, 2009, p. 38f.)

Such a ‘global denominationalism’ would be the final blow to the ‘Augsburg Principle’ that defined a world in which each ‘king’ decides about the religion of the subjects in his dominion. A globally denominationalist world would rely on the detachment of religion and territory, a single cosmopolis with many ‘homes’: dār al-islām would coexist with dār al-masīḥ, dār al-būdā,15 etc., one world would consist of a plurality of oikumenai, rather than of a limited number of ‘Huntingtonian’ religion-based

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civilizations, and all these homes and communities would be part of a larger urbs while none of them would claim to coincide with it, let alone ‘rule’ it spiritually. Each tradition would then have to generate its own conceptual construction of this situation in its own terms. All such constructions, moreover, and this is truly novel, would, as Kristina Stöckl has argued, have to be reflexive: ‘a post-secular society distinguishes itself not only from a secular order, in which religion has been banned from the public sphere, but also from a pre-secular constitution of society, in which public sphere is identical with religion’ (Stöckl, 2009, p. 117). Still, whether utopian or not, a ‘post-secular’ non-identity of public sphere and religion would neither answer the question if and how ‘religion’ could or might or should ‘go public’ or if and how ‘religious arguments’ (or non-religious ones) qualify as ‘public reason’, nor would it answer the political question how to deal with this and who decides about it. To make things worse, to the extent to which a polity claims to be democratic, these questions cannot be answered prior to the democratic processes of deliberation and decision. It is far from accidental that the expression ‘Let’s not talk religion!’ contains the plural pronoun ‘us’: it is only in communicating that we can decide not to address a particular topic or field of topics. The ‘return of religion’ is truly disturbing the ‘secular’ order: it is not only in India that religion, to quote Ashis Nandy, ‘has entered public life but through the back door’ (Nandy, 2010, p. 332). There are good reasons to rather have religion enter politics and public life through the front door. One is that an open discussion between religious and non-religious motivations will be to the benefit of both ‘secularists’ and ‘religionists’; another is that the field of positions may show itself to be much more complex than simple dichotomies of ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ suggest; a third is that democratic polities cannot deny offhand the legitimacy of the preferences and motivations of large numbers of citizens (the AKP in Turkey, the BJP in India, the PJD in Morocco can serve as major cases in point). All of the above fall under the heading of ‘dealing with difference’ with the aim, in Morton Schoolman’s words, to ‘avert the conversion of difference into otherness’ (Habermas, 2005, p.  16). This, however, is not the only option, as the massacre performed by Anders Breivik has shown. This is why the Breivik case, irrespective of its psychopathological dimension, must be perceived as a political murder. It is not only theoretically imaginable to remove, in the name of identity or homogeneity, all undesirable humans from a given society: Europe carries practical expertise in its collective political memory. In 1928, Carl Schmitt wryly listed the possibilities: If national homogeneity is not there in political reality . . . various possible solutions present themselves. First of all the attempt of a peaceful settlement  .  .  .  segregation or gradual, peaceful assimilation to the dominant nation. (. . .) The other method is quicker and more violent: elimination of the foreign component through repression, ostracism of the heterogeneous population and similar radical means. (Schmitt, 2003, p. 231f.)

The conflict between inclusion and exclusion is as old as human history, and expulsion has always been an option, both for political regimes and for populations that want

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to get rid of ‘foreigners’. The large-scale killing of European Jews was a combination of official state policies and popular rage, and anti-Semitism was far from limited to German Nazi’s. Similarly, anti-Islamism is not limited to the extreme Right, and there is no a priori reason why history should not repeat itself. Of course, many people will object, saying that ‘we’ do not want this. This may be true of author and reader of these lines, but that means that we abstain from suggesting that ‘we’ means ‘everybody’ or ‘all Europeans’. If one rejects solving the conflict by the forced removal from society of religiously heterogeneous elements, or by the imposition of an official religious or non-religious worldview, under simultaneous marginalization of all other worldviews, there seem to be only two options left. One is the complete exclusion of religion and, more broadly, worldview, from the public sphere; the other is the inclusion of all religious and non-religious worldviews in it. The first option risks ending up with a purely formalistic and procedural conception of politics and political society that is unlikely to receive the support of sufficiently large numbers of citizens – the critical mass of any political community – and is likely to erode further erode the ‘normative preconditions that the liberal secular state cannot itself guarantee’ (Habermas et al., 2005, p. 16). The second option risks re-inviting the ‘War of the Gods’ between all kinds of religious and non-religious worldviews, for which the ‘secular state’ was a solution in the first place. It is this deadlock that Habermas tries to overcome with the notion of a ‘post-secular’ society, and the question is whether his proposal indeed is a third option.

Post-secularity as a way out for Europe? The discussion about post-secularity was initiated by Habermas in the early twentyfirst century: Glauben und Wissen [Faith and Knowledge] of 2001 (the groundbreaking lecture on the occasion of the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels 2001), his famous dialogue with Joseph Ratzinger of 2005, and ‘Religion in der Öffentlichkeit [Religion in the Public Sphere]’, also 2005, included in Between Naturalism and Religion. The notion has played a prominent role in intellectual debates since (Reder and Schmidt, 2008, p. 15). This is due to Habermas’s prominence as a major European thinker and Europeanist, as well as to the pertinence of the topic of the actual, possible, potential or desirable place and role of religion in ‘the public dimension of society’ [Öffentlichkeit]. Habermas has been part of more ‘post-’ discussions: the notion of ‘post-metaphysical thought [Postmetaphysisches Denken]’ obtained currency through his writings (Habermas, 2005, pp. 147, 149), he started to write about a ‘postnational constellation [postnationale Konstellation]’ as early as 1998 (Habermas, 1998), and recently provided a critical discussion of ‘postdemocratic executive federalism [postdemokratischer Exekutivföderalismus]’ in connection with European political integration (Habermas, 2011b, p. 48). At the same time, while taking part in a ‘post-discourse’ that waves goodbye to key elements of modernity (secularity, democracy, metaphysics and the nation), Habermas does this not with a postmodern pathos, but with the aim of saving the unfulfilled [unerfüllt] project of modernity by correcting the derailing [entgleisend]

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process of modernization. It is part of being ‘post-modern’ that History stops being an argument, even if history continues to be a reservoir of relevant arrangements, practices and repertoires. Habermas, however, perpetuates a historical argumentation, both in his claim that ‘a “post-secular” society must at some point have been in a “secular” state’ (Habermas, 2006, p. 4; cf. Singh, 2010, p. 82), and in his 2011 essay on European constitutionalism: Still, state power had to be secularized and law thoroughly turned into positive law, before the legitimation of rule could become dependent on legally institutionalized consent of the ruled. Only then could the democratic codification of the execution of political domination take off that is relevant for our context. This codification deploys not only a nationalizing, but also a civilizing force, to the extent to which it rids state power of its authoritarian nature and thereby transforms the state of aggregation of the political itself. (Habermas, 2011b, p. 44f.)

In this text, meant to foster a Europe-to-come, Habermas shows no sign of wanting to negotiate the secularity of the state or to stop giving it that name. This means that the new idea of a post-secular society goes along with the old idea of a secular state (Habermas, 2011a, p.  23). Rather than accusing Habermas of inconsistency, I think that he, perhaps more than any other thinker, articulates a real dilemma that European society is facing. Habermas emphasizes the polemical character of these discussions: However, the critical overcoming of what from my perspective is a secularistically limited consciousness [säkularistisch beschränktes Bewusstsein] is essentially contested – at least as much contested as the theological replies to the cognitive challenges of Modernity that took effect since the Reformation (and certainly not only among Protestants) [emphasis mine, EvdZ]. (Habermas, 2005, p. 146)

Habermas is right that it may be just as difficult for ‘secularists’ as it is for ‘religionists’ to overcome their ‘limited consciousness’ – an endeavour that he justifies by claiming that it requires a complementary learning process on the part of both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ (or, as he also calls them, ‘non-religious’) citizens (Habermas, 2005, pp. 142, 145f.; Habermas, 2011a, pp. 24, 26f.; cf. Stöckl, 2009, p. 117). The learning processes, however, are not only different: the burden, pace Habermas (Habermas, 2005, p. 144), is also asymmetrical. ‘Religious’ citizens must relate ‘to competing religions in a reasonable way’, leave ‘decisions concerning mundane knowledge to the institutional sciences’ and make ‘the egalitarian premises of the morality of human rights compatible’ with their ‘own articles of faith’ (Habermas, 2011a, p.  26f.). The ‘secular portion of the population’ must engage in a ‘similar reflection on the limits of a secular or postmetaphysical kind of insight’ and perform a ‘self-reflexive overcoming of a secularistically hardened and exclusionary self-understanding of modernity [selbstreflexive Überwindung eines säkularistisch verhärteten und exklusiven Selbstverständnisses der Moderne]’, that is,

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it must stop seeing religion as arcane, archaic or inferior – which is a lot more than traditional toleration (Habermas, 2005, p.  145; 2011a, p.  27). These requirements are asymmetrical: religious citizens are politically necessitated to transform their religious worldview, while secular citizens face the moral obligation to overcome the limitations of their secularist consciousness. Habermas has more than once qualified himself as ‘religiously tone-deaf [religiös unmusikalisch]’, with a clear reference to Max Weber’s famous self-qualification (Habermas, 2001, p. 30; and Habermas et al., 2005, p. 35).16 In his contribution to the debate on The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, Cornel West makes an interesting claim: . . . when we are talking about rethinking secularism, we have to think of the ways in which secular thinkers . . . must become more religiously musical. Too many secular thinkers are religiously tone-deaf and flat-footed. But it cuts the other way, too. Religious persons like myself must be secularly musical . . . (West, 2011, p. 93)

Habermas follows Weber in not relating ‘negatively’ to religion, sharing with West a willingness to listen and understand. The question is: Can tone-deaf people hear the music even if they try to listen? Religious citizens, it seems, must learn to understand and play secular music, whereas secular citizens are expected to learn to listen to the music of ‘vibrant world religions’, after which they are able, like Habermas himself, to integrate its valuable elements, ‘“truth contents” in the sense of suppressed or untapped moral intuitions’ into their own compositions (Habermas, 2011a, p. 27). This does not mean to give up secularity, since, as Aakash Singh polemicizes, ‘in his account, the secular would assimilate the religious like a blood infusion, becoming more vibrant and stronger thereby, but not losing its advantage’ (Singh, 2010, p. 76). If, however, as Craig Calhoun puts it, ‘religion is not a special case’ (Mendieta et al., 2011, p. 67) or, as Taylor puts it, ‘there is no reason to single out religion, as against nonreligious, “secular” . . ., or atheist viewpoints’ (Taylor, 2011b, p. 37), the opposition of ‘secular’ vs. ‘religious’ no longer holds. This does not exclude that elements of the regime of secularity  – often misnamed ‘secularism’  – can be retained, regauged, or indeed, as Taylor suggests, invented in other contexts (Taylor, 2010, p.  31). It may generally be politically wise not to privilege one particular worldview over others, if one thinks that people should be free in their choice of worldview. It may also be religiously unwise to identify one’s worldview with a particular political regime, if you want to avoid political interference in the affairs of your religious community or worldview related association, or if you dread subordination to the goals of a given polity. History offers a rich reservoir of repertoires, practices and arrangements, and of historical examples, which, depending on the context and one’s aims, can become Do’s and Don’ts. Religion and politics must not conflict. It does mean, however, two other things. One is that such arrangements ought to be dissociated from the notions of the ‘secular’ family, because the latter re-invoke the conflict that they were supposed to solve in the first place. The other is that no such arrangement can claim a lineage to historical developments  – ‘secularization’ in the case of Western Christianity  – within or of one’s own tradition, even if this

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happens to be its actual historical background. That would privilege the originators of the arrangement over the other participants in it. To say, for example, that Western societies can accommodate religious diversity, because Christianity has gradually developed the notion of freedom of religion within a secular political framework, is not only historically myopic. It also is to deny or underestimate the possible perception of functionally equivalent arrangements in other, for example polytheistic terms: ‘Religious tolerance outside the bounds of secularism is exactly what it says it is. It not only means tolerance of religions but also tolerance that is religious’ (Nandy, 2010, p.  344). The problem with the widespread discourse about the (Judeo-) Christian roots of Europe is not that it glosses over European traditions of anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews, but that it turns alleged historical facts into political foundations, a move that makes sense only if those facts are part of a providential plan – which is the case for Ratzinger and, in secularized form, even Habermas. The asymmetry in his complementary learning process presupposes Habermas’s opposition of ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ citizens. Indeed, his ‘postsecular society remains, to a large extent, a secular one’ (Loobuyck et al., 2010, p. 55), in which, obviously, ‘secular’ citizens fit better than their ‘religious’ colleagues do. But is this an adequate opposition in societies in which the vast majority of citizens are neither virulently secularist nor deeply religious, but mostly passively agnostic or vaguely Christian? Modifying the notion of a ‘post-secular society’, Mendieta and Vanantwerpen refer to Habermas’s position as a post-secular stance, which indeed seems more adequate: In recognition of the fact that religion has not withered away under the pressures of modernization, Habermas has increasingly stressed the importance of cultivating a ‘post-secular’ stance, an approach that both reckons with the continuing global vitality of religion and emphasizes the importance of ‘translating’ the ethical insights of religious traditions with a view to their incorporation into a ‘postmetaphysical’ philosophical perspective. The postsecular stance looks to religious sources of meaning and motivation as both a helpful and even indispensable ally in confronting the forces of global capitalism, while underscoring the crucial differences between faith and knowledge. (Mendieta et al., 2011, p. 4)17

In order to articulate a third option, however, two more steps must be made. The first is to reject the equation of the opposition between faith and knowledge with that between science and religion; first, because science can easily itself become an object of faith, especially among ‘secularists’ or what today are called ‘Enlightenment fundamentalists’; and second, because religious traditions entail a lot of knowledge, including the knowledge of how to deal prudently with religious difference or, more broadly, difference of world-view. In a world that is, to quote Peter Berger, ‘as furiously religious as it ever was’ (Berger et al., 1999, pp. 2, 9), we will have to rely on religious traditions and regimes of toleration. The other, related step, is to deconstruct the very notion of ‘the secular’. When, during their discussion, Taylor argues that ‘[W]hat Jürgen calls “secular” I’ll call “neutral”,’ Calhoun too quickly comments that ‘that doesn’t seem to be the

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heart of the difference’, suggesting that calling it neutral or secular does not matter (Mendieta et al., 2011, p. 67). It may not be the heart of the matter, but it lies very close to it. If Markus and Riedl are right that ‘the secular’ was invented by Christians in the pre-Constantine Roman Empire in order to demarcate a neutral domain that could be recognized, appreciated and shared with others ‘without reference to religion’ (Markus, 2006, p. 6), that is not sacralizing it, but also not depreciating it as part of the profane, then to call this invention ‘secular’ is to identify with its context of invention. To call what can be shared without reference to religion ‘secular’ is to refer to religion, whereas to call it ‘neutral’ is not to deny the context of invention, but to refuse to inscribe that invention into a religious narrative of secularization. This means, paradoxically, that if Augustine was right in radically distinguishing historia sacra and historia profana (Riedl, 2012, p. 16), this also applies to the invention of ‘the secular’ as a category. It may be a fortunate invention, a work of genius, or even a shining example for all times and places, but it must so be claimed without reference to a particular religion. That, to say the least, is part of the heart of the matter: part of the worldview-neutrality of the polity is not calling it ‘secular’ or ‘laïque/laiklik’. To present the worldview-neutral state as the historical result of a however twisted, unfulfilled or derailing Western modernity that is the outcome of a process of secularization, is not only to beg the philosophical question, but also to weaken the political case.

Conclusion All conflicts and controversies mentioned in this chapter will somehow be practically settled. Burqinis will either be allowed or prohibited during sports events in France, kirpans will either be legitimately carried or not carried by Sikhs in the United Kingdom, Turkish MPs will be allowed or not be allowed to wear a başörtüsü, and kosher meat will either be produced in the Netherlands or it will be imported. Sometimes a compromise will be found, in other cases prosecution will follow, and those affected will have to accommodate, assimilate, emigrate or go underground. However, these political solutions do not put an end to the bataille sur les mots – the theoretical and conceptual struggles that reflect conflict in society. The problem is not, therefore, with political decisions as such, but with their consistency and the extent to which they foster ‘political community’: Do they or do they not rely on a broader set of principles and norms that all citizens can in principle subscribe to, or are they biased to one particular side? Do they treat equally all churches, sects, organizations and associations, or do they privilege traditional religions? Is there an implicit secularism in the decisions of political and legal authorities, constitutional courts in particular? Should the European Union, the supranational polity of which most Europeans are citizens in addition to their national citizenship, and which has, to quote Habermas, ‘crystallized into a constituted commonality [verfasstes Gemeinwesen] that enjoys the authority of binding legislation vis-à-vis the member states without the backing of a matching state power [kongruente Staatsgewalt]’ (Habermas, 2011b, p. 61) be (post-)Christian, secular, or neutral? In all these cases, pragmatic and normative dimensions overlap and intersect.

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The ideas developed in this chapter imply that the confrontation between secularism, in both aggressive and benevolent forms, and the plurality of religious, non-religious, quasi-religious and pseudo-religious worldviews that oppose secularism (and which they tend to see as a denial or rejection of religion, or simply as another worldview), can only be overcome if ‘we’ (academics, politicians and citizens) move beyond the conceptual framework of ‘the secular’. This is not an easy task: Habermas offers an illustration when he speaks of a ‘post-secular society’ as one that prepares for the ‘continued existence of religious communities’ in a ‘continuously secularizing environment’, thus displaying his benevolent secularism (Habermas, 2011a, p.  13). The persistent opposition of secular and religious reproduces the Latin Christian conceptual framework within which the notion of ‘the secular’ obtains its full meaning. If, therefore, we want to defend that feature of our political and juridical order that is habitually referred to as its ‘secularity’ in a self-critical manner, we must relate critically to the very terminology in which it is stated. A truly post-secular society would be one in which ‘secular’ and its derivatives form an entry in historical dictionaries only. Until that is a reality, a post-secular stance must be an element of immanent critique that cannot avoid re-invoking what it criticizes. A post-secular Europe will be a post-Christian Europe, but again, the question is what that means. A Europe in which large numbers of citizens no longer or only vaguely identify themselves as ‘Christian’ will continue to be haunted, as Raymond Geuss puts it, by a morality ‘that aims to simplify our world by dividing human actions into two dichotomous categories: good and evil, with nothing in between’ (Geuss, 2008, pp. 39, 101). If ‘the secular’ was initially invented to posit something in between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the profane’ (see the introductory section), we can only conclude that this invention has been overshadowed, within the Christian framework, by a strict duality. One form of this axiological duality is the dichotomous opposition of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ employed by both religion and secularism, and we may expect this dualistic tendency to reappear in other forms. It is clear that a post-secular stance entails a rejection of ‘secularism’: but it should also include a deconstruction of the very concept of which it is the ‘ism’. A postsecular stance, even if it continues to be ‘haunted’ by the family of concepts around ‘the secular’, must move beyond the binary opposition of secular and religious once it understands that these two notions are ‘mutually constitutive’ (Gorski, 2012, p. 15). It must explore, to quote Talal Asad, which ‘practical options are opened up or closed by the notion that the world has no significant binary features, that it is, on the contrary, divided into overlapping, fragmented cultures, hybrid selves, continuously dissolving and emerging social states’, and this implies unpacking ‘the various assumptions on which secularism – a modern doctrine of the world in the world – is based’ (Asad, 2003, p. 15). Deconstructing secularism, while addressing self-critically the Christian conceptual framework that it has inherited its notion of ‘the secular’ from, is the only way out. Beyond the alternative options of procedural neutralization and engaging in a new ‘War of the Gods’, the third option consists in confronting the confrontation itself, leaving both ‘religionism’ and ‘secularism’ behind. At this point, much can be learned from other religious traditions, for example, from discussions in and about Russia, Turkey or India. When, limiting myself to the third case, we see Rajeev Bhargava and

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Ashis Nandy engage in an evaluation of secularism in the case of India, an interesting pattern emerges. Bhargava argues in favour of a purely political, as opposed to an ‘ethical’ secularism, coming to close to Taylor’s notion of neutrality of the state, and he claims that political secularism ‘demands that the state be principally distanced from all religious and non-religious ultimate ideals’, and further ‘demands only that everyone – believer, non-believer – gives up a little bit of what is of exclusive importance in order to sustain that which is generally valuable’ (Bhargava, 2010c, pp. 494, 496). Is this not also to invite Nandy’s ‘internal principles of tolerance’ that ‘the traditional ways of life have, over the centuries, developed’ (Nandy, 2010, p. 336), in the precise sense in which ‘the secular’ was invented in Latin Christendom, namely as ‘giving up a little bit of what is of exclusive importance in order to sustain that which is generally valuable?’ The only remaining difference might then be that between a moderation of secularism in order to accommodate religious traditions, provided they develop their own conception of moderation, and a moderation of all-isms, including secularism. What we can see is a pattern that we can label ‘moderation in the plural’: moderation as opposed to fanaticism or zealotry, and plural as opposed to the kind of singularity that continues to be assumed in secularism, however moderate it may be. If this pattern is global, and potentially fitting to Casanova’s global denominationalism, it also undermines the ‘Huntingtonian’ idea of a clash of mutually irreconcilable civilizations. What is clashing in the world today, Europe included, are not civilizations, but conceptualizations of one’s own civilization. The core of a post-secular stance is the active refusal to engage in ‘secularism’ (or any other X-ism), and, more generally, of holding back when it comes to the ultimate questions of life and human existence. The only viable political theology is, therefore, an active agnosticism. This is both more, and less than Habermas’s plea for being ‘agnostisch und lernbereit zugleich’ [agnostic and eager to learn at the same time] (Habermas, 2005, p. 149): it is less, because we do not have to agree – not even ‘ideally’ – but must learn to cope with difference; it is more, because we have to avoid an implicitly secularist position. It is also more, and less than West’s plea to become more religiously or secularly musical: it is less, because being agnostic does not imply getting to know or having to enjoy the other’s music; it is more, because it is not easy to resist the centripetal forces of a (post-)monotheistic mindset. The only way of dealing with the War of the Gods is to let them have their fights on Olympus. The question is: Are we strong enough to keep them there? Which is tantamount to asking: Can we form a ‘we’ that lives with necessarily unsatisfactory solutions and without ‘final answers’?

8

Secularization beyond Western Eyes: Ashis Nandy and the Defence of Innocence Vincent P. Pecora

One of the primary critiques of the standard secularization thesis derived from Max Weber has been articulated by a widely published scholar based in India  – Ashis Nandy – who, though Christian by parentage and early education, is deeply committed to the idea that the life and thought of Mohandas K. Gandhi provides the beginnings of an adequate, non-Western and specifically Indian approach to the question of secularization.1 In what follows, I focus on Nandy’s forceful riposte to Weberian models and his reframing of the question of secularization along Gandhian lines. His writing demonstrates both the historical necessity of separating secularization in the Christian West from its appearance in the East and the difficulty of constructing a counter-narrative of secularization today outside the constraints of Western analysis.2 It is important to examine Nandy’s critique, for it elaborates an alternate history of secularization that most Western scholarship has been reluctant to embrace. *  *  * It is impossible to comprehend Nandy’s arguments about secularism, the West and India unless one also grasps the enormously complex and deeply intertwined nature of the economic, social, political and religious conflicts that have roiled India since its independence.3 What Michel Foucault simply called ‘governmentality’ or what John Rawls referred to as ‘political liberalism’, by which the secular nation-state comes to supersede the historically embedded ‘comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines’ of a population, has had a very different history in India than it has had in most Western societies. The production of a political subject that is governable with a minimum of hard coercion is clearly one of the most impressive and undeniable achievements of Western civil society, whether or not one likes the results. France worked with single-minded determination to create this subject during the Third Republic (1871–1914) (see E. Weber, 1976); Germany also did so in the years between Bismarck and World War I, and has tried to do so again after the Nazi debacle and the

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end of the subsequent cold-war division of the country; and, after the collapse of its inchoate national idea in the Civil War, the United States (like Germany and France and Great Britain at different tempos) relied heavily on public education, military conscription, widely circulated newsprint and magazine publication, increasingly powerful civil institutions such as professional associations, unions and political parties, and an increasingly unified and uniform ‘culture industry’ in order to create a national subject that simply did not exist in ante-bellum America. One might add that the creation of an American national subject was still quite partial as late as 1964, when the passage of civil rights legislation ended what was essentially racial apartheid in the United States. Much contemporary cultural conflict in America (as in France and Germany) is still about the degree of political ‘governmentality’ citizens are willing to accept. But however one demarcates the periods of this history, it is impossible to deny that something like Foucault’s softly governable subject is the hallmark of liberal, constitutional, Western nation-states, and that this subject may be deeply connected to Christianity and to the modes of secularization that, as Weber noted, it both spawned and was overcome by. By the same token, it is difficult to deny that India, despite its obvious success at creating a democratic nation in a Western mode, faces challenges in its attempt to produce a liberal political subject that are simply unimaginable in most of the West’s democracies.4 Nandy’s view of secularism is, first, intimately tied up with his sense that India’s history, including both a variegated tradition of religious community and conflict and especially a powerful Hindu heritage, cannot produce, and should not be forced to produce, a political subjectivity that is alien to it. Second, his understanding of secularism is that it is inseparable from a ‘muscular Christianity’ – not the Christianity of Christ that became so important for Mohandas K. Gandhi  – that was equally a stimulus to and an effect of imperial Catholicism and imperial Protestantism. While the perspective that defines the modern West by its ‘managerial’ societies can hardly be restricted to Foucault  – Alasdair MacIntyre made this sort of argument from the conservative side of the political spectrum and he particularly blamed the Reformation for it (see MacIntyre, 1984) – it is clear that Nandy’s arguments about the unsuitability for India of the political subject managed by the institutions of Western civil society are quite different from anything either Foucault or MacIntyre has proposed. The key to Nandy’s approach is a complex array of issues raised by Gandhi (and to a lesser extent Rabindranath Tagore) in Gandhi’s powerful and ultimately successful strategy of resistance to the British Raj, a strategy of non-violent noncooperation that for Nandy draws on the most authentic parts of the Hindu heritage. This strategy did not include the creation of the liberal Indian nation-state under Jawaharlal Nehru, with its strong inclination towards Western European socialism. Nehru’s state fostered a decidedly secular, democratic-socialist, non-aligned political structure that guided India for much of the later twentieth century under Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, and grandson, Rajiv Gandhi. In turn, Nehru’s politics invited an even more populist, neo-Marxian, anti-colonial critique, as promoted by the Subaltern Studies Group, which built on the writings of Antonio Gramsci

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and Ranajit Guha (see Gramsci, 1989 and Guha, 1963). In one sense, what Nandy has dedicated his life’s work to questioning is not simply the relevance to India of the secular nation-state of the West, but its apparent teleological trajectory towards the sort of democratic socialism that after World War II seemed to be the future of Western Europe and perhaps of India too. In another sense, however, what Nandy began to develop in the early 1980s through his critique of both secularism and the liberal nation-state is a perspective that Subaltern Studies figures like Guha would eventually come to approach on their own terms (see Guha, 1998). Nandy’s larger project rests on his perception that India’s attempt to mimic the Western liberal state, the Western secular subject, and Western notions of governmentality has in fact produced communal violence. In his view, India’s post1947 acquiescence to the globally enforced economic demand for an autonomous, assertive and even bellicose secular subject is what has caused all the enmity in the first place. Hindu nationalism, Muslim resistance, Sikh defensiveness – all these are for Nandy the consequence of a kind of religious identity and subjective morality that has, in effect, been ‘Christianized’, which is to say put on the path towards a secular society that is deeply at odds with the older religious traditions, primarily Hindu, that had guaranteed peaceful coexistence in India before the coming of the Raj. How Nandy gets to this conclusion, which is deeply counter-intuitive to the Western observer, is important. *  *  * Perhaps Nandy’s most significant work to date is one of his earlier books, The Intimate Enemy, and I want to focus on it at some length because I believe it provides Nandy’s best account of the foundational categories of his thinking. I do this by elaborating five major themes that shape his views on secularization.

Gender The book’s two long essays are remarkable for the way they interweave, especially in the first essay (‘The Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age, and Ideology in British India’), discursive categories – gender roles and religion in particular – that previous critiques of the consciousness of colonizer and colonized alike (such as those by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, V. G. Kiernan and Edward Said) rarely addressed with the same depth or insight. For Nandy, these earlier critiques too often defended ‘a non-West which itself is a construction of the West’ (Nandy, 1983, p. xii), including its understanding of individual subjectivity. He argues that ‘the homology between sexual and political domination’ was ‘not central’ to the early phases of British rule in India (1757–1830), but developed only with the advent of evangelical and then secularizing impulses towards economic development in the nineteenth century (ibid., p. 4). These included an unconsciously ‘collaborationist’ response by Indian intellectuals that enabled the imperial project: an Indian reinterpretation of India’s religious past, which in effect re-wrote India’s Hindu heritage in order to make it

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seem more like (and hence more competitive with) the muscular Christianity of the British Raj (ibid., p. 7). The re-writing of the religious past was accomplished ‘most dramatically’ for Nandy by Michael Madhusudan Dutt, whose Bengali epic Meghnadvadh Kavya (1861) retells the story of the Ramayana (sixth- to second-century bce, a text of many complete and incomplete manuscripts and possible contributors, though attributed in the verses themselves and by tradition to Valmiki, who is celebrated as the ‘first’ poet of Sanskrit literature) by ‘turning the traditionally sacred figures of Rāma and Laksmana into weak-kneed, passive-aggressive, feminine villains and the demons Rāvana and his son Meghnād into majestic, masculine, modern heroes’ (Nandy, 1983, p. 19). In Valmiki’s tale, Prince Rama is virtuous and sinned against: he is the seventh avatar of the god Vishnu, who incarnates Rama specifically to do away with Ravana, king of Sri Lanka and an unrighteous demon or rakshasa, also known as a ‘man-eater’, a figure blessed by Brahma with protection against other gods and demons following thousands of years of penance for earlier wrongs. When Rama’s stepmother insists (based on an earlier promise by Rama’s father) on installing her own son as heir and demands Rama’s banishment, Rama insists on accepting his fate and goes willingly into exile with his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana as hermits. Rama and Lakshmana successfully fend off a host of demons sent their way by Ravana. In revenge, Ravana kidnaps Sita. The monkey god Hanuman, in league with Rama, eventually discovers Sita imprisoned in Sri Lanka, where she not only remains faithful to Rama, but refuses contact with any male (even the would-be rescuer Hanuman) other than her husband. Led by Hanuman and his league of monkey warriors, Rama and his party make their way to Sri Lanka, kill Ravana, and reunite with Sita. A later (post-Valmiki) addition to the tale provides an account of various subsequent events: Rama crowned king at home, Sita banished on rumours of infidelity, the birth of Rama’s two sons, Sita’s successful request that her mother, the earth, swallow her up as proof of her innocence (Sita also means furrow, and she has been compared to a goddess of agriculture), and Rama’s ascension to his heavenly home as Vishnu (see Basham, 1968, pp. 414–15). In many ways, the tale (like the Homeric epics) is thus an agon both divine (Vishnu versus Brahma) and human (virtuous Rama versus treacherous Ravana). By contrast, Madhusudan Dutt  – who had earlier converted to the Church of England and rejected Hinduism – transforms the struggle between Rama and Ravana into a political allegory, now ‘with morality on the side of the demons’ (Nandy, 1983, p. 19). Thus, while in Valmiki’s Ramayana the exemplary and quasi-divine (but in no sense morally perfect) figure of Rama finally recovers Sita and triumphs over Ravana, thereby rightfully assuming the role as crown prince in Ayodhya that had been unjustly denied him, Madhusudan’s version of the tale presents Rama as corrupt even as he defeats and kills ‘the courageous, proud, achievement-oriented, competitive, efficient, technologically superior, “sporting” demons symbolized by Meghnād [Ravana’s son]’ (ibid.). For Nandy, Madhusudan Dutt’s alternative rendering of the tale becomes a primary exhibit in his indictment against forms of mid-nineteenth revisionism in Indian culture that perversely served to make Indian culture far more like Western, Christian culture than it had been earlier, and to purposes that for Nandy represent a sort of betrayal of India’s essential nature, a betrayal vainly motivated by efforts to confront the Raj on its own terms.

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Nandy does not claim that Madhusudan’s is the first reinterpretation of the Ramayana – the tale is probably North Indian in character, and Rama is presented as a Prince of Ayodhya, just south of Nepal – since variants can be found in South India, Nepal, throughout Southeast Asia, and in Buddhist, Jain and Sikh treatments.5 And in some of these alternative or dissenting versions, especially in the Puranic era (roughly 300–1200 ce), Ravana is given a more heroic character, and Rama is much less virtuous. But Nandy’s point does not involve the originality of Dutt’s revisionism. Rather, Nandy wants to emphasize the cultural and political role that Dutt’s revisionism played in its time. For Nandy, the moral role-reversal effected in Madhusudan Dutt’s version served a particular purpose in the context of the later Raj, allowing Madhusudan to use ‘Rāma and his rabble’ (Nandy traces the phrase to Madhusudan) as representative of childish, effeminate, ascetic and politically impotent elements within Indian tradition that the more adult, masculine, possessive and worldly forces represented by Ravana and especially his son Meghnad needed to overcome. Not incidentally, Nandy also sees the traditionally unrighteous Ravana as symbolic of the secular force of modernity in Madhusudan’s retelling, and not simply as another side of the Ramayana myth. Madhusudan Dutt thus turns the Ramayana epic into a tragedy – which it is not, in Nandy’s view – with a significance that was quite opposed to earlier (Puranic) understandings of tragedy as simply the inevitable transience of all things (the death of Krishna is Nandy’s example). In doing so, Nandy suggests, Madhusudan introduced into the tale a modern sense of the tragic that derives from the death of a Promethean, and hence anti-theistic, hero at the hands of a backward and pastoral prince whose righteousness is a sham. It is hard to find appropriate analogies in the West for the case of the Ramayana and the Meghnadvadh Kavya, at least as Nandy reads them. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey perform some of the same functions in the Western literary tradition as do the Ramayana and the Mahabarata in India. But the significance of Homer’s version of the Trojan War, which also involved wife-napping and less than perfect gods working out their antagonisms by means of the mortals they chose to assist, was revised (one could even say reversed) rather early on by Virgil’s Aeneid. In any case, the coming of Christianity more or less evacuated Homer’s epic of any religious significance for its later readers, something manifestly untrue of the Ramayana. One could perhaps point to William Blake’s late eighteenth-century re-writing of Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Nietzsche’s subsequent ‘transvaluation’ of the entire Christian moral tradition, as parallels for Dutt’s revision, since both Blake and Nietzsche surely elevated a formerly demonized Promethean man to a status he had not had before. But neither Blake nor Nietzsche, however blasphemous, revolutionary and finally secular they were, could be taken as having contributed to the imperial domination of European civilization by a foreign, industrial-capitalist society bent on unremitting progress and transformation. Moreover, in a way contrary to what Nandy’s perspective would suggest, many initially saw Blake and Nietzsche as traitors to the cause of Western civilization, and not just to its moral traditions, rather than as exemplars of it. In the end, there may be no adequate Western analogy for the effect of Madhusudan Dutt’s Meghnadvadh Kavya precisely because there is also nothing in the West, beyond the religiously obsolete Homer who is now just a cipher to

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most university students, to compare properly with the Ramayana. (James Joyce’s Ulysses may today often be the odd introduction to Homer for modern university students, but then Joyce’s text is finally far more a comic, Judeo-Christian homage than a reversal: Odysseus is still the admirable, wily hero, even if Penelope is now somewhat less than faithful to him.) Unlike Homer’s epics, Valmiki’s Ramayana continues to function within Indian culture – and especially for Nandy – on many different levels. In the late 1980s, a televised rendition of the Ramayana, running to 78 episodes and by some accounts attracting in excess of 100 million viewers, was a phenomenon capable of rearranging the daily schedules of ordinary people. For the sake of comparison, the series finale of M*A*S*H on CBS also drew just over 100 million viewers in 1983, and that episode became the most popular drama in American television history. Religiously, the Ramayana remains central to Hindu belief and practice as a tale of divine intervention in human affairs, one that continues to have a powerful resonance within Indian thought in ways that no one would claim for Homer within Western religious traditions. Rama, as the incarnated Vishnu, is still a very popular god and the object of pilgrimages in northern India, whose story has the power to guide the listener out of sin and towards perfection. A tradition dating back to the eighteenth century holds that the site of the Islamic Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, built in the early sixteenth century and destroyed by a mob of Hindutva kar sewaks (essentially, a religious defence force) in 1992, was originally, based on evidence in Valmiki’s Ramayana, the birthplace of Lord Rama and thus a site holy to Hindus (see Narain, 1993). Morally, the tale represents a multitude of noble virtues in Rama, including acceptance of one’s fate, perseverance in the face of injustice, tribal loyalty and violence only in self-defence. Politically, it is the story of a true, first-born prince eventually restored to his throne, having achieved the conquest of the kingdom of Lanka, and thus became a model for the art, architecture and manners of Hindu court and temple up to the reign of the Moghul emperors. As literature, the epic has had an immense influence: it is a poem imitated by later poets across South and Southeast Asia, the centrepiece of extensive commentary, and a drama performed in many staged versions to this day. Finally, at the level of gender roles, two issues are especially central for Nandy: Sita is the chaste and caring wife; and Rama in Valmiki’s version is an approximation of an ideal of finely tempered, one might say passive and intellectual, masculinity that for Nandy has been lost in modern nationalist India. Nandy sees Madhusudan Dutt’s contribution as part of a larger trend in Hindu revisionism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India, one that – via the work of novelists such as Bankimchandra Chatterjee, who was of central significance to the first generation of Indian nationalists in Nandy’s telling – reconstructed the Hindu religious past into a ‘lost golden age’ that was far closer in structure to Christianity and hence to the political power of the West. Krishna, for example, loses his childlike playfulness, androgyny, sensitivity and idealism, and becomes in Nandy’s words, a respectable, righteous, didactic, ‘hard’ god, protecting the glories of Hinduism as a proper religion and preserving it as an internally consistent moral and cultural

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system.. . . a normal, non-pagan male god who would not humiliate his devotees in front of the progressive Westerners. (Nandy, 1983, p. 24)

These were the characteristics developed by Swami Dyanand Saraswati and Swami Vivekananda at the end of the nineteenth century into what was for Nandy a wholesale Christianization of Hindu thought that sought to have an Abrahamic Book (the Vedas and the Gita), a developmental history, a near-monotheistic theology, and a sense of asceticism that was closer to that of John Calvin than to the ancient texts themselves. By this means, the ‘open, anarchic federation of sub-cultures and textual authorities’ (ibid., p.  28) that Hinduism comprised was thus rationalized and, for Nandy, given a progressive and masculine character that would serve the interests of a secular, capitalist state.6 Perhaps it would be appropriate to call Nandy’s vision of this Christianization of Hinduism a neo-Weberian reformation-under-duress of religious and economic traditionalism. For Nandy, something equally damaging happened to many Western dissenters, among them Oscar Wilde, G. E. Moore, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster and W. H. Auden. All of these figures were opposed in varying degrees to empire, all of them were in varying degrees homosexual, and all of them were in Nandy’s view ostracized ‘living protests’ against both dominant British culture and India’s misguided attempts to emulate it (ibid., pp.  42–43). It was only the vestiges of India’s traditionally ‘androgynous cosmology and style’ that finally produced a ‘transcultural protest’ against the ‘hypermasculine’ Raj in the form of Mohandas Gandhi (ibid., p.  48). Thus, Nandy finds an increased emphasis, especially after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, on the notion of Kshatriyahood in the Hindu past (Kshatriya designating the warrior, ruling caste in the ancient Vedic social order). In this turn towards a belligerent nationalism, the cerebral and ascetic elements of existence (Nandy calls them ‘Apollonian’) are overcome by the ‘violent, “virile”, active Kshatriya, the latter representing – however odd this may seem to the modern consciousness – the feminine principle in the cosmos’, which Nandy calls ‘Dionysian’ (ibid., p. 10).7 For Nandy, the essential colonial opposition, one emulated by means of the Indian nationalist emphasis on Kshatryiahood above all other Hindu traditions, was not between masculine and feminine. Rather, in way curiously compatible with Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick’s later elaborations of ‘homosociality’ (that is, the intensification of hyper-masculine erotic bonding by means, and in the service, of the rigorous disavowal of homosexuality), Nandy argues that the central psychological opposition for the colonizer is the superior masculine versus the inferior ‘femininein-the-masculine’  – that is, hermaphroditism or androgyny, or, in Nandy’s view, homosexuality (see Sedgwick, 1985). Gandhi overturns this opposition, not only in the service of an embrace of androgyny, but also in the sense that the feminine, understood less as conjugal sexuality than as maternal care, becomes superior to the masculine, which is in turn superior to sheer cowardice (see Nandy, 1983, p.  53). Gandhi’s synthesis of Hindu and Christian beliefs is thus for Nandy a complete reversal of the Christianization of Hinduism synthesized by figures like Madhusudan Dutt and Bankimchandra Chatterjee. While the latter produce no more than colonial

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mimicry of the path towards a governable subject, via the reordering of an entire psycho-sexual worldview designed for the secular nation-state, Gandhi’s project is an attempt to elicit a decentred psyche open to the anarchic, playful, childlike, androgynous and (above all) non-violent moral sensibility that Gandhi derived from the supposedly original Hindu and Christian conceptions of human being and divine ideals. Nandy’s views of gender are at the heart of his project and it would be fair to say that, more than any other facet of his work, his attempt to revise the gendering of politics that he finds imposed on India by the West is what most distinguishes his contribution to post-colonial thought. This is not, I should immediately add, the same as saying that Nandy is at all concerned with what are called ‘gender politics’ in the West – that is, with the actual relations between men and women, the inequities of economic and political power between them, and the cultural distinctions between those roles that are deemed acceptable for men and those deemed acceptable for women. He is not. But his critique of masculinity has its own counterpart in Western thought, and deserves serious consideration. Nandy’s account of the relationship between the masculine subject of the Western polity and the lure of empire in the last 200  years will seem obvious enough to most of his Western readers in the present day. What Nandy does not do, except for counter-intuitively parsing the meaning of sati in India, is connect his dismantling of masculinity to the rise of a socially assertive, economically self-interested, culturally ambitious and thoroughly modern woman (on sati, see Nandy, 1995c, pp.  32–52; and 2004, pp.  33–61). Wilde and Forster make it into his pantheon of anti-imperial men who question orthodox maleness. George Bernard Shaw, who wrote about saintly prostitutes (Mrs. Warren’s Profession) and less than maternal female saints (Saint Joan), does not. Nor do the Brontës, George Eliot or Jean Rhys. Virginia Woolf ’s quite relevant point, in A Room of One’s Own, that conflict between the sexes was only increasing as women became more assertive  – so that men seemed hyper-masculine in response  – all of this is beyond Nandy’s purview. If Nandy is correct when he writes approvingly that, for Gandhi, ‘more central to this concept of womanhood was the traditional Indian belief in the primacy of maternity over conjugality in feminine identity’, and that ‘this belief specified that woman as an object and source of sexuality was inferior to woman as source of motherliness and caritas’, then there is a bigger lacuna at the heart of Nandy’s project than might at first appear (Nandy, 1983, p. 54; Nandy’s emphasis). What is missing, both from Gandhi’s ‘fear of sexuality’ (ibid.) and Nandy’s appropriation of the feminine as something to be incorporated within the masculine, is any place at all for modern female subjectivity. This is not, I think, a simple sin of omission. It is fundamental to Nandy’s project of ‘critical traditionalism’, since what that project leaves out is precisely what the arrival of post-traditionalist ideas of enlightenment and modernity have come to mean in the widest sense of the terms: that is, what Hans Blumenberg designates as the ‘creative subject’ bearing a ‘principle of self-assertion’ that becomes rightfully available to all, rich and poor, Muslim and Hindu, men and women, whatever the ancient myths and moral codes might say (see Blumenberg, 1985, p. 34). Nandy may designate this as a peculiarly Western deformation of Western tradition. But whether

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or not he thinks it is appropriate for India and can be derived from indigenous source texts, it is what is happening, even in India. In many cases, the state (even in the form of the local police) is being called to function as an arbiter. As Saritha Rai writes about young couples who end up working through marital discord in police stations in Bangalore, tensions produced by changes in the traditional roles of men and women – changes driven largely by women who want the same prerogatives as men – cannot be resolved by reference to primordial texts in which such challenges were largely unknown. A working woman in her early 30s recently walked into [a police commissioner’s] office to complain that her husband was abusive and cruel. Her husband came later and complained that she smoked, drank and partied too much. He insisted that she be a ‘traditional wife.’ A few conversations later, Mr. Reddy [the commissioner] managed to persuade the couple to agree that they had been smoking, drinking and partying together for many months before marrying. ‘They needed to adjust to the marriage and to each other,’ he said. (Rai 2012, p. A9)

Nandy does not acknowledge that his central notion of the ‘feminine-in-themasculine’ functions as if the traditional roles of women themselves can be preserved in some sort of time warp – there is nothing ‘critical’ on this score in his work, yet it would not be a mistake to say that, perhaps first among all the subaltern groups that resisted the hyper-masculinity of Western modernity, women (that is, half of the population) had the most to gain, and they knew it. But the problem of putting all one’s eggs in a basket called androgyny-for-menonly is not at all specific to India. Almost all religiously based calls for a return to traditionalism, critical or otherwise, end up butting heads with the irreducible matter of a woman’s right to be, like a man, an autonomous, self-determining subject in the full, Kantian sense of the term. The conflict is more than obvious when one looks to modern Christian fundamentalism and the many conservative strands of Islam. Nandy’s ‘critical traditionalism’ circumvents Kant by insisting that, in the event, the creation of a Western ‘masculine’ (Kantian) man ended up depriving Indian men of the ‘femininein-the-masculine’ that had been as much their birthright as Kshatryahood. For Nandy, Kantian man became less than he could be by comparison to the all-sided-nature and sweep of the masculine within Indian tradition. Of this, I have no doubt – it is a point argued persuasively in the West by figures such as Foucault, whose dismantling of a hardened male subjectivity is as supportive of Nandy’s as it is silent on the subjectivity of women. But in the case of women, it is not really a both/and proposition for Nandy – there is no discussion of a complementary ‘masculine-in-the-feminine’, no elaboration of an androgyny for women that can be derived as an alternative from the ancient Vedas and the Ramayana.8 The hyper-masculine subject of Kiplingesque empire building might well be corrected by learning Gandhi’s lessons. But this will have no effect whatsoever on the larger question Nandy does not confront: what to do with what has in effect been a revolution in gender roles – and I mean roles assumed by real men and women – since the height of the Raj in Victorian Britain. The religious traditions that for Nandy

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remain open to constant critical reinterpretation seem stunningly silent, at least in his readings, on this point. And yet one could argue, following Virginia Woolf, that modernity itself, including the assumption of hyper-masculine stances by those most threatened, was in very large part driven by the assumption of autonomous subject positions by women no longer restricted to mother and caregiver, and open to the full panoply of polymorphously perverse sexualities that had traditionally been available, as Nandy admits, to men – that is, by women whose desire for autonomy did not seem at all like a Christian-inspired, Western-invented restriction of their capacities in any way. The politics Nandy constructs on the basis of his account of non-Western gender is thus a politics wearing blinders. It simply pretends that half of the causality behind the Western secularizing history he is criticizing does not exist.

Freud Nandy’s use of Freud – which is profoundly opposed, in its own way, to Fanon’s – is central to his perspective in ways that are completely different from most previous post-colonial criticism (see Nandy, 1995c). Where Fanon sees Freud (backed by Hegel’s dialectic of self-consciousness, Nietzsche’s will to power, and Sartre’s existential decisionism) as providing a path towards a robust, independent, post-Oedipal masculine subjectivity for the black man – even to the rather absurd point of denying that ‘homosexuality’ ever existed in Martinique (Fanon, 1967, p. 180, n 44) – Nandy (a trained psychologist in his own right) attacks the ‘masculinism’ of the Western, imperializing subject directly. For Nandy, Freud is valuable precisely because his later investigations, which posited both a drive towards sexual fulfilment and a drive towards aggression, help us understand the hyper-masculinity of secular Western subjectivity, most evident in the character of the British colonizer. Nandy does not believe  – and in this he would find some support in Freud, though few would say Freud’s late Civilization and Its Discontents is particularly optimistic on this score – that the resolution of Oedipal conflict in the male child must necessarily reproduce a male adult who is fated to succumb as tragically as his forbears had to the aggressive instinct. Nandy’s rationale for this claim, however, is particularly un-Freudian, for it involves finding in religion as well as in a host of premodern institutions the psychological ground for a sort of androgyny, which is to say, for an ideal of the ‘feminine-in-themasculine’ subject that had been all but banished from the devices of ‘governmentality’ in the West. Religion is therefore not to be understood as the infantilizing ‘mass psychosis’ that in Freud’s view merely reproduces the child’s helpless dependence on a father’s protection and therefore a father’s approval. This is the Freud that was so important not only to Fanon but to generations of anti-imperialists after him, who came to see in religion an ideological reproduction and reinforcement of the colonial predicament, which placed the colonized male in the position of impotent child in relation to his colonizing master.9 By contrast, Nandy sees in religion – especially in the Gandhian synthesis of Hindu and Christian beliefs  – a powerful counter-hegemonic force opposed to the secular masculinity of the individual subject and a means of rejecting

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the coercive reproduction of the patriarchal family’s Oedipalizing cycle in the relations between old, tutelary Western states and new, politically pubescent colonized states. This element of Nandy’s critique is aimed at dismantling both the pretensions of the colonizer to unquestioned authority and the desire of the colonized to inhabit the colonizer’s secular (autonomous and strong) subjectivity as a way of competing with the imperialist psyche on its own, aggressively masculine grounds. Like Gramsci, in many ways, Nandy starts with the assumption that colonizer and colonized necessarily form a dyad that authorizes the hegemony of the colonizer’s mentality from both sides of the equation. For Nandy, the colonized implicitly or explicitly comes to accept the colonizer’s secular individualism, aggressive pursuit of material interests, and Weberian ‘iron cage’ of social relations devoted to purposive rationality as inherently superior to the value-rational consciousness of premodern communities, which are generally anchored by one or more religious traditions.10 In this way, the colonized generally wind up granting a perverse sort of psychological approval to the forces that are oppressing them. But for Nandy this also means that – as in Jean Rhys’s critique of Charlotte Brontë’s picture of empire in Jane Eyre, and to an extent in Brontë’s own picture of disabled imperial masculinity  – the colonizer is almost as damaged as the colonized. Nandy elsewhere cites Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, which is subtitled ‘Reflections from Damaged Life’. Adorno’s subtitle is an apt one for Nandy’s view of the Western soul. This perspective, as unforgiving in Nandy as it is in Adorno, nevertheless can produce striking psychological insights. Nandy’s brief account of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘moral blindness’ is more penetrating and astute than any yet written. Kipling distinguished between the victim who fights well and pays back the tormentor in his own coin and the victim who is passive-aggressive, effeminate, and fights back through non-cooperation, shirking, irresponsibility, malingering and refusal to value face-to-face fights. The first was the ‘ideal victim’ Kipling wished to be, the second was the victim’s life young Kipling lived and hated living. If he did not have any compassion for the victims of this world, he did not have any compassion for a part of himself. (Nandy, 1983, p. 69)

But what Nandy offers in response with his notion of ‘unheroic but critical traditionalism which develops a sensitivity to new experiences of evil’ (ibid., p. vii) is finally quite different from Adorno’s tragic vision. Where Adorno ultimately  – and rather unconvincingly  – placed his faith in the modernist work of art as the only remaining reservoir of resistance to the administered society, Nandy’s ‘critical traditionalism’ imagines the possibility of recovering from religious tradition – again, primarily Hindu tradition  – the foundations of a new, post-nation-state political order by means of the selective deployment of the analytical tools of modern thought, including Freud and especially Freudian notions of introjection, the Heglian-Marxism of the Frankfurt School, and the tools of post-colonial resistance developed by Fanon and those who followed. Nandy’s use of Freud and psychology in general is refreshing for anyone steeped in the harsher existential truisms of post-colonial thought after Fanon. Homi Bhabha’s

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revisionary readings of Fanon and far more subtle use of psychoanalytic cultural critique as derived from Jacques Lacan are in many ways prefigured in Nandy’s work. But where Bhabha tends to settle simply for a greater degree of complexity and perplexity in the relations between colonizer and colonized than one finds in Fanon, Nandy’s critique of Western subjectivity is far more thorough, and it begins with his implicit rejection of the essential Freudian psycho-drama, Oedipalization. Indeed, Nandy seems to have in mind not only the recovery, via a selective recuperation of tradition, of a premodern sense of community. He also implies that he is in search of something like a pre-Oedipal notion of the ego. When he finds, not only in Gandhi the man, but in various versions of Hindu myth, a psyche that is anarchic, playful and childlike, that revels in its androgyny, and that displays resistance to authority by means of non-violent obstinacy, Nandy is also locating in the characteristics of Freud’s pre-Oedipal child precisely those attributes that he claims have been repressed by Western masculinity, even as they persist (in various states of forgetfulness) in the Indian ‘feminine-in-the-masculine’. Where previous anti-imperial and post-colonial critiques, especially those influenced by Marx and Freud, have insisted that the colonizer’s Prospero-like treatment of the colonized as a primitive, childlike Caliban capable (at best) of careful mimicry must be overturned by insisting on the mature, even violently assertive, dignity of the colonized – Fanon, leaning heavily on Nietzsche and Sartre, insists ‘I am my own foundation’ (Fanon, 1967, p. 231) – Nandy instead emphasizes the historical reality, cultural viability and political efficacy of an anarchic pre-Oedipal psyche that the colonizers had treated, to their own regret in the case of Gandhi, with disdain and ridicule. Nandy thus also refuses the narrative of Hegelian coming to self-consciousness that lies behind Freud’s use of Oedipus, and that was equally important to Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois before him. In Fanon’s terms: Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions. It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend. It is that other being in whom the meaning of his life is condensed. (Ibid., p. 217)

Nandy’s response is to refuse both the desire to ‘impose’ the colonized’s existence on the colonizer – a refusal of what is an obvious imitation of the colonizer’s coercive enactment of the master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit  – and to reject the idea that the ‘human worth and reality’ of the colonized depends in any way at all on recognition by the colonizer. Where Fanon’s existential man is essentially alone, defined only via recognition by the other, Nandy’s ‘inviolable core of Indianness’ has by contrast nothing to do with an individual thrown in Heideggerian fashion into an uncaring world and demanding recognition from the other, precisely because Nandy’s ‘core of Indianness’ is itself a pluri-centric derivative of the religious, moral and psychological foundations of the tradition, however much reinterpreted over time.11

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The Oedipal narrative, once inflated into its full cultural dimension in a text like Civilization and Its Discontents, is not then just about producing an adult male who has worked through his deadly, agonistic relationship to his father by agreeing to endure a certain amount of guilt in return for a certain amount of autonomy, self-assertiveness and aim-inhibited pleasure in worldly achievement. It is also, for Nandy, about the story the West tells itself: it is about the production of the ‘bourgeois’ life-world, with its optimistically progressive sense of development and the separate peace it has made with its past and its patriarchs. Which is to say that Western culture has proven its willingness to live with the guilt of having abandoned, outgrown, or, as Nandy sees it, secularized the religious-ethical meaning of its past and its patriarchs in order, as Matthew Arnold once noted, to embrace ‘doing as one likes’. Where, as Nandy would be the first to admit, the anarchic, childlike and androgynous Apollonian man of Hindu tradition is ‘unselfconsciously’ constrained by the myths and narratives of his tradition, the Dionysian, hyper-masculine subject of the liberal state is no more than a creature of the ‘iron cage’ of human relations that are thoroughly subordinated to the marketplace and the managerial administration of the liberal state. In refusing Freud’s secularizing narrative of Oedipal development and Oedipalized civilization, however, Nandy may be attempting to discard far more than he imagines. Those struggling for the means of bare subsistence as well as the more prosperous middle and upper classes in India may care little about retaining a certain notion of non-Western, pre-Oedipal subjectivity, even were they to be convinced by Nandy’s arguments of its traditional importance. They may be driven much more by what Freud called Ananke – necessity – a part of Freud’s thought that Nandy seems to have little use for. ‘We can only be satisfied therefore’, Freud writes towards the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, if we assert that the process of civilization is a modification which the vital process experiences under the influence of a task set it by Eros and instigated by Ananke  – by the exigencies of reality; and that this task is one of uniting separate individuals into a community bound together by libidinal ties. (Freud, 1961, p. 104)

Nandy may disagree with Freud on the value of the religious heritage, and to me at least this is an entirely reasonable point to make. As Freud himself noted, putatively quoting Theodor Fontane, ‘We cannot do without auxiliary constructions’; and this is so because of Ananke, because ‘life, as we find it, is too hard for us’ and ‘we cannot dispense with palliative measures’ (ibid., p. 23). Even Nandy’s more robust defence of religious tradition as essential to some sort of ‘core’ identity is not, in my view, prima facie irrational. But as Bronislaw Malinowski once demonstrated, no premodern people, no matter how steeped in scientifically absurd magical beliefs, ever survived by ignoring the realities of nature when it came to planting and harvesting (see Malinowski, 1948). Modern human societies are no different. Based on Nandy’s own essays on science, technology and culture, which are not the least Luddite in tone, I believe Nandy would agree with Freud on the irreducibility of Ananke. But what is missing in Nandy is any full appreciation of the consequences of Freud’s

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Oedipalizing narrative about modern civilization’s struggle with Ananke, both in the East and the West, a struggle that may entail precisely the assertive individual with his or her quota of aggression, repression, sublimation and ambivalence, along with the restrictive compartmentalization of the anarchic play-instinct (to use Friedrich Schiller’s term) that Nandy, not unlike Herbert Marcuse once upon a time, wants to rediscover. The result, I think, is every bit as utopian as Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization was in its own era, and no less willing to underestimate the power of necessity, at least as Freud understood it.

The dialectic of enlightenment Nandy borrows heavily from the Frankfurt School for Social Research, especially from their critique of the ‘authoritarian personality’, a critique based on research done during and after the Nazi ascendency in Europe, and from Herbert Marcuse’s idea of the ‘one-dimensional man’ produced by modern, administered capitalism (see Adorno et al., 1960, and Marcuse, 1964). For Nandy, the ‘authoritarian personality’ that made the Third Reich work – that is, the willingness of those who carried out atrocities to do so without questioning the moral implications of their orders because their primary psychological motivation was the desire to follow orders in the first place, as Hannah Arendt would memorably put it in her account of Adolf Eichmann at his trial  – is more or less indistinct from the masculine subjectivity required of empire building, as the anxiety to conform to the dictates of the fictional Chandrapore’s military club in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India would suggest (see Arendt, 2006 and Forster, 1984). And both the Nazi and imperial personalities are finally extensions of the secular liberal individualism required by the modern nation-state, as in Adorno’s later writings, in which the category of ‘the individual’ is itself emptied of meaning even as it is increasingly deployed by an administered society and its culture industry (see Adorno, 1984, p.  63). While Adorno is drawing on research concerning the authoritarian personality, on his own notions of the culture industry, and on what he saw as the increasingly administered nature of society in the Cold War years, his remarks clearly look forward to Foucault’s account of governmentality and even to MacIntyre’s critique of the managerial society. Frankfurt School theory plays a large role in Nandy’s critique of scientific knowledge as the sign of the triumph of the unmoored, secular subject of Western modernity. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s understanding of a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ is central here (see Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002). Modern science  – not unlike the Kantian moral individual  – has achieved so great a measure of autonomy from all notions of the communal good (which Hegel had called Sittlichkeit, or ethics) that science and technology have come to represent forms of rationality that are no more than mythical in their own right. What a purely purposive-rational science and the technological transformations that can be derived from it accomplishes, once unfettered from any value-rational system of thought, is in effect the myth of the modern age for Adorno and Horkeimer, and very much for Nandy too (see Nandy, 1987, pp. 95–126).

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But when Horkheimer on occasion wrote of the Western Christian religious tradition as a possible resource of resistance to an industrial-military complex (to borrow Dwight Eisenhower’s phrase) that operated, as if ‘value-free’, outside the boundaries of all existing moral traditions, he typically fell back on the argument that there remained historically available sources of rationality and moral value within the modern, secular, autonomous subject that emerged from Kant (see Horkheimer, 1974, pp. 34–50). There was no suggestion of a ‘critical traditionalism’ in his work, and indeed the subsequent elaboration of Frankfurt School ideals by Jürgen Habermas has reduced even these historical remnants to what he calls ‘semantic potentials’ in the language of earlier moral and religious traditions that should not be hastily discarded (see Habermas, 1983, p. 155). By contrast, Nandy remains wedded to the argument that the autonomous moral subjectivity generated by the West is simply inappropriate for the sorts of consciousness one finds in India, and that only a traditionalism that borrows critically – if selectively – from its past can serve to preserve that traditionalism. Where Habermas’s subject is distinctly modern and consciously uses the ‘semantic potentials’ of its past to leaven the managerial goals of civil society, Nandy’s ‘critical traditionalism’ is designed to resist the formation of the modern subject from the start. Nandy insists throughout his work that he has no desire to embrace a nostalgic, romantic or purely spiritual alternative to the Western process of secularization  – he does not wish to return India to the village-centred Gemeinschaft that Ferdinand Tönnies opposed to capitalism’s anomic Gesellschaft.12 But this still leaves him ultimately confronting the same unattainable utopian prospect that confronted Marcuse  – a more or less total re-orientation of the psychic life of a population that, whatever its various attachments to tradition, such a population would find almost impossible to achieve.

Myth versus History Nandy has a most exceptional, though oddly Nietzschean and postmodern, understanding of history. This stems, in part, from Nandy’s preference for a perspective that he finds in Gandhi, who ‘rejected history and affirmed the primacy of myths over historical chronicles’ (Nandy, 1983, p.  55). What this means, for both Gandhi and Nandy, is that India and the West are to be seen as fundamentally distinct where understandings of time consciousness are concerned. For the West – and here Nandy essentially agrees with Carl Schmitt, who argued that the political history of the West after Hobbes was at the same time a religious history, so that all political concepts of the state should be seen as secularized religious concepts (Schmitt, 1985, p. 37) – history is an inevitable progress (as Marx, building on Hegelian Christianity, claimed) from primitive, pagan and a-historical communism, to a period of class struggle, including the religious ideologies this struggle produces, to an end of history with the coming of a class-less scientific and secular communism. For Nandy, drawing on Gandhi, the struggle is in the end all about reconceiving the past, so that we move from a past that is just one version (‘a special case’) of the present, to a ‘fractured present’ made up of ‘competing pasts’, to a ‘remaking’ of the present, including the past, to a collective agreement on a ‘new past’ (Nandy, 1983, p. 57). What Nandy is saying is that no present

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can be authentically conceived – or, at least, ought to be conceived, with or without imperial coercion  – unless the new present can be first discovered in the past of a particular civilization or culture. One forms the new myths of the present by carving them out of displaced, forgotten or repressed alternative narratives recovered from the past. For Nandy, this is really not merely one option among others for India. It is the only means of reconceiving the present, just as the West (following progressive narratives such as the one Marx proposed) operates in such a way that it can only imagine a future that is a more enlightened, self-conscious and secular form of its benighted beginnings, and can only think of its present as a way of leaving the substance of that past behind. Western notions of progress are thus inseparable for Nandy from this frankly Hegelian dialectic, where the modern nation-state recovers a prelapsarian harmony, after much conflict and struggle, on the grounds of mature, enlightened and fully aware self-consciousness, whether that telos is imagined in material (Marxian) or Christian (spiritual) forms (Nandy, 1983, pp. 58–59). Nandy’s claim that the ‘inviolable core of Indianness’ depends far more on myth than history is in many ways not at all foreign to Western sensibilities. This sort of claim about the mythic identity of a Volk or people has a long and far-reaching history in Western thought, beginning with the work of Montesquieu, Herder, Macpherson, Rousseau and Fichte. Nationalism in the West would be almost unthinkable without a certain strain of such mythic identity running through it. France is equal parts Jean d’Arc and French Revolution, and as goes France so go innumerable modern ­nationstates conceived in imitation of it.13 Nandy’s complementary idea  – that it is only by reinterpreting the foundational texts of a cultural tradition that one can remain true to, and hence properly guided by, a cultural identity  – is equally powerful in Western thought, from Edmund Burke to Alasdair MacIntyre. In so many ways, a powerful, related critique of bourgeois or Whiggish history runs throughout the twentieth century in the West, beginning with Nietzsche, elaborated in different ways by Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Karl Löwith, Siegfried Kracauer, Hayden White and Michel Foucault, and extending into the present in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank. This critique has had a striking revisionary impact on the way ‘progressive’ history has come to be understood, especially in the wake of the demise of a viable socialist alternative to Western capitalism and the paradoxical rise of a post-secular understanding of religious history, in which the standard ‘secularization thesis’ has been called into question. Nandy fits squarely within this revisionist post-secular tradition, through which, as Grace Davie has put it, an alternative suggestion is increasingly gaining ground: the possibility that secularization is not a universal process, but belongs instead to a relatively short and particular period of European history which still assumed (amongst other things) that whatever characterized Europe’s religious life today would characterize everyone else’s tomorrow. (Davie, 2000, p. 1)

This has been, mutatis mutandis, Nandy’s position for several decades now, and it is the most compelling argument he has to make. The fact that the Arab Spring of

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2012 briefly produced in Egypt an aftermath in which the overthrow of a tyrannical secularist generated not only the election of a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood as prime minister but increased intolerance for minority Coptic Christians and the increasing irrelevance of the secular students who initiated the uprising speaks directly to Davie’s point. There is no reason to believe that Nandy’s critique of a thoroughgoing secularism for India is any less cogent than Davie’s diagnosis that European history may not prove to be a universal template. But like that of some other Western sociologists of religion, Davie’s concern is with the meaning that the memory of a Christian religious tradition retains in the midst of declining practice in Western Europe. She certainly makes no claim that a return to traditionalist or religious modes of governance at some variance to the development of the European nation-state is desirable. Nandy’s critique is something far more: it is the assertion of an ‘inviolable core of Indianness’ that can be preserved in the face of a globalizing modernity, without resort to Hindutva nationalism, abstract spirituality or romantic community, and in stark opposition to the nation-state that since Nehru had governed India, by using only the playful, anarchic and non-violent hermeneutic tools of the reinterpretation of the Hindu epics. Nandy’s problem is that it is not simply a question of a personal, intellectual and highly educated preference for myth over history. It is instead a question of turning myth, however reinterpreted, into history. The likelihood that Nandy, or anyone else for that matter, would be able to produce popular agreement about which myths, and which new interpretations of them, would be suitable for resolving the conflicts in a place as crisscrossed as is India by multiple and competing narratives of cultural identity is miniscule at best.

Anti-nationalism The ultimate political question raised by Nandy’s perspective, as I have already implied, concerns the unsuitability of the nation-state for India, a question that in turn has implications for Nandy’s larger and wholesale rejection of nationalism. On the one hand, Nandy ends the second essay in The Intimate Enemy (‘The Uncolonized Mind: A Post-Colonial View of India and the West’) with the claim that he has no wish ‘to reverse the standard stereotypes to create a neo-romantic ideology of the irrational, the mythic or the renunciatory’ (Nandy, 1983, p.  113). Elsewhere in the book, he specifically criticizes the false alternative of either a mystical spiritualism based on a dreamy vision of the past or the harder realities of westernized India. Instead, he wants to emphasize cultural ambiguity and fluidity, both ‘within India and within the West’ (ibid., p. 74; Nandy’s emphasis): the opposition between Dionysian masculinism and Apollonian androgyny – or the ‘feminine-in-the-masculine’ – exists in both societies. And yet India is nevertheless distinct on this score, and not simply because of its history of colonization. ‘Probably the uniqueness of Indian culture lies not so much in a unique ideology as in the society’s traditional ability to live with cultural ambiguities and to use them to build psychological and even metaphysical defenses against cultural invasions’ (ibid., p. 107). This means that ‘in order to truly

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live, the inviolable core of Indianness seems to affirm, it might be sometimes better to be dead in somebody else’s eyes, so as to be alive for one’s own self ’ (ibid., p. 111). The openness of Indianness to ‘cultural ambiguity’, one might then say, is ultimately always in the defence of some ‘core of Indianness’, which, again, it is impossible not to see as deriving in very large part from its Hindu heritage. Nandy saves some of his strongest condemnations in the course of his work for Hindu nationalism (Hindutva). As he puts it in a later essay, ‘Speaking pessimistically, Hindutva will be the end of Hinduism’ (Nandy, 2004, p. 126). Yet it is also true for Nandy that there is some ‘core’ of Indian consciousness, rooted in the common people, the rural, the folk and in the complexities of multiple ethnic and religious sects that have come to make it up, that needs to be preserved. In one of his more remarkable statements on what he means by a core that is defended through ambiguity, Nandy writes: ‘The alternative to Hindu nationalism is the peculiar mix of classical and folk Hinduism and the unselfconscious Hinduism by which most Indians, Hindus and non-Hindus, live’ (Nandy, 1983, p. 104). But then, what sort of polity can achieve this preservation-of-core-identity-within cultural-ambiguity that is Nandy’s vision for India? Nandy refers approvingly, for example, to Freud’s analysis of the nation-state (a citation is not given), at a point where Freud seems to be reproducing some of the central insights of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and more recently Giorgio Agamben. Many years ago, at the time of World War I, a person as manifestly apolitical as Sigmund Freud claimed that the state had forbidden to the individual the practice of ‘wrong-doing’ not because of a desire to abolish it but because of a desire to monopolize it. (Nandy, 2004, p. 233)

While it is unclear what, exactly, Nandy means by implying that he is against the state’s Hobbesian monopoly on violence – that is, at what levels of society he believes both the general prohibition against violence and the sanction for the legitimate use of violence in self-defence should be located – he does provide one clue. Declaring that ‘South Asian societies are woven not around the state, but around their plural cultures and pluri-cultural identities’, he predicts that these societies will again discover ‘the grandeur of the humble, everyday life of their peoples and their little cultures’  – though he also predicts he will not live to see that day (ibid., p. 247). Nandy’s critique of nationalism is perhaps the most familiar of all for the Western intellectual, who has for at least the past century often found himself or herself at odds with what can only be called the insupportable myth of national identity. It would be no exaggeration to say that for liberal and cosmopolitan Western intellectuals since the time of the treaty of Versailles and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, no political dilemma has been more persistent or more intractable than the task of separating the seemingly irreducible fact of national affiliation from the heightened emotional and often mythic consciousness of nationalism. Ernest Renan’s powerfully demystifying metaphor comparing the modern nation to a ‘daily plebiscite’, rather than to some inborn substance comprising history, language, race and religion, is perfectly cogent and salutary (Renan, 2001, p.  175). But no nation on earth ever

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actually functioned according to such a principle. Where the objective behaviour of the major Western nation-states is concerned, it makes little difference whether one follows theoretical modernists such as Elie Kedourie (Kedourie, 1996) and Ernest Gellner (Gellner, 1983) or primordialists such as Clifford Geertz (Geertz, 1963) and Anthony D. Smith (Smith, 1991). Renan’s insight notwithstanding, the demands for social stability and ‘governmentality’ are almost impossible to meet without some recourse to the mythical dimensions of nationalism and exceptionalism, even from leaders who could be expected to know better (Barack Obama comes to mind). Hence Nandy’s suspicion of the nation-state as a political structure, and especially his suspicion of the masculinist trope of nationalism, will find much support among Western intellectuals, for whom the difficulty of living with a politics that constantly veers towards the lowest and most vulgar forms of aggressive fantasy is the intractable political dilemma facing every responsible individual. At the same time, Nandy’s solution to the problems posed by hyper-masculinist nationalism depends not merely on increased scepticism towards the myth of the nation-state but also increased credulity towards the myth of the common people, or what in German might be called the Volk. In Western thought outside Germany, this embrace of the Volk has been more commonly known as populism, and it has taken both distinctly left-wing (as in early twentieth-century American progressivism) and distinctly right-wing (as in the American Tea Party today) paths, that is, either vaguely socialist or vaguely communal-anarchist trajectories. To Western intellectuals after Hitler, the preference for myth over history, and for the re-functioning of mythic thought to serve modern needs, may imply a very disturbing underside. It is obvious that Nandy, to his credit, has no interest in the racial arguments that made the Nazi appropriation of völkisch thought far more powerful and devastating than any previous use of myth to buttress collective coherence. But it is important to recognize that there were also modern German intellectuals who, like Nandy, opposed the modern nation-state as a political entity, had little if any interest in biological understandings of race, and embraced instead the mythic structure of a civilization’s consciousness, which they believed could be traced back to the middle ages. As I have argued elsewhere, even the accomplished Viennese historian Otto Brunner elaborated in detail why the modern, secular, liberal nation-state that had become the norm in Western Europe, and that appeared in Germany only between the rise of Bismarck and the disorder of the Weimar Republic, was completely unsuitable for the German mind (Pecora, 2012). What Brunner believed, however naively, was that the Third Reich would return Germany to something like the constitutional mentality of medieval Austria, where the state had not yet claimed a Hobbesian monopoly on violence; where the ‘little cultures’ of the pre-nation-state Volk settled their disputes internally, via feuds; where Macht and Recht (might and right/law) were more or less synonymous; and where a mélange of Germanic lands and peoples were integrated in an extensive federation of separate territories unified only by their consciousness of a divinely grounded Recht  – which Brunner called ‘the good old law’, rooted in Old Testament narratives of primordial peoples and their lands – and by their deep awareness of belonging to something called the Reich (empire) which

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was imprinted on them as the inviolable core of their Germanness (see Brunner, 1943). No matter how sympathetic bien-pensant post-Hitler Western intellectuals might be towards Nandy’s suspicions about the nation-state, especially about the nation-state in full imperialist ardour, they will wind up singularly unimpressed by Nandy’s recourse to myth and its reinterpretation as a viable political response. For them  – for me  – the world desperately needs less myth and more history, not the reverse. *  *  * Nandy’s post-secular argument, or rather, his argument for a specifically Indian version of secularism, can be reduced to two basic claims. First, in contrast to the ‘hard’ Cartesian-Christian subject of the West, whose relatively fixed ego usually demands a sharp ideological boundary distinguishing the religion of the self from the religion of the other, and hence, in a secular regime, a third super-ego position, occupied by the state and outside all religious ideologies whatsoever, the ‘non-Western meaning of secularism revolves around equal respect for all religions’. Less crudely, this idea of secularism implies that while public life may or may not be kept free of religion, it must have a space for a continuous dialogue among religious traditions and between the religious and the secular. That is, in the final analysis, each major faith in the region includes within it an in-house version of the other faiths both as an internal criticism and as a reminder of the diversity of the theory of transcendence. (Nandy, 2002, p. 68)

Where the Western subject and the Westernized Indian subject produce only an inflexible religious ‘ideology’ that reinforces inflexible ego boundaries, the authentically Indian subject produces religious ‘faith’. ‘By faith’, Nandy writes, ‘I mean religion as a way of life, a tradition which is definitionally non-monolithic and operationally plural’ (ibid., p. 62). The Indian subject of a religious faith is thus fluid, dynamic and multi-centric, with a psyche akin to what Mikhail Bakhtin called the ‘heteroglossic’ and ‘dialogic’ voice of a novel’s character or narrator (see Bakhtin, 1981). Nandy’s second major claim is that India has available to it a ‘“patrimony” in the matter of inter-religious or inter-ethnic understanding’, which is ‘acknowledged, selfconsciously or unwittingly’ (Nandy, 2002, p. 116). Nandy refers to this understanding of patrimony as the ‘third model’ available to India for dealing with communal conflict, a model that is superior both to the centralized French republican model of secularism imitated through much of the developing world and favoured by the South Asian intelligentsia, and especially popular in socialist regimes; and the dominant model now practiced in India that is based on pragmatic accommodation, compromise and tactical conflict-management. Instead, he argues for a ‘participatory democracy’ in which ‘citizens will employ categories and interpretive frames in the public sphere known to them through their heritage in turn transmitted through religious, community and family traditions. The deployment of such categories and

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frames is not usually a well-thought-out cognitive choice; most people using them live in a world defined by these categories’ (ibid., p. 117). It is a strategy, Nandy believes, that has never really been tried out in India, though it remains the most significant part of Gandhi’s legacy. Here, I think, we come to some crucial assumptions on Nandy’s part, assumptions that few in the West or India will find very convincing. The idea that there is an Indian subjectivity that is simply and fundamentally different from the subjectivity of what he likes to call ‘Western man’ is fraught with problems. Can he in fact be arguing that a commonplace Indian subjectivity has remained more or less the same for thousands of years of Indian history? That what Blumenberg calls the ‘self-assertion’ accompanying the Copernican Revolution, which has come to be considered a democratic and inalienable right in the West, has no legitimate purchase or place in India? That however multi-cultural India has long been, there remains some ‘core of Indianness’ derivable ultimately from ancient Hindu narratives? That the specifically Indian conception of gender he outlines has not been disturbed, and perhaps even fundamentally overturned, by the increasing presence of women in economic, social and cultural life in India, women whose own ‘feminine’ subjectivity is unlikely to be appropriately defined in Nandy’s terms as maternal care-giver, no matter what their affiliations to their patrimony might imply? But these issues are minor, I think, compared to the ones raised by Nandy’s second basic claim that true religious faith is embodied by a ‘way of life’ that can remain unconscious or unwitting for those who are motivated by it – that is, distinct from any ‘well-thought-out cognitive choice’ – and that it is only by relying on the uniquely heteroglossic nature of these unconscious ways of life, which Pierre Bourdieu would perhaps call lived ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1990, pp.  78–83), guided by ‘community leadership’ (Nandy, 2002, p.  118), that India can find an appropriate model of inter-religious harmony. This model assumes something that most serious scholarship on ‘participatory democracy’, of whatever stripe, would firmly reject: the assumption that people who now putatively exist for the most part unconsciously enclosed in their ‘way of life’, beyond ‘cognitive’ choices, and who speak for themselves by drawing for the most part ‘unwittingly’ upon their family’s and community’s traditions and leaders, will remain for the foreseeable future in this unselfconscious, non-cognitive and largely uncritical relationship with their traditions and their communities. Nandy once noted that his writing is designed ‘to justify and defend the innocence which confronted modern Western colonialism’ (Nandy, 1983, p. ix). But no nation, whatever its history and however marred by or innocent of imperial conquest, has been able to embrace ‘participatory democracy’ and not endure a process by which unconscious faith becomes conscious, by which the modest self-assertion presumably enjoyed by all does not often lead to sharp criticism and even a complete break with family, community and tradition. This process is on the one hand precisely what Tönnies describes in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, and even Tönnies, with his obvious nostalgia, knew it was a one-way street. It is also the process at the heart of that post-epic genre called ‘the novel’, and especially the Bildungsroman, which displays both the inevitable drive towards

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full self-consciousness (to borrow from Hegel) as well as the inevitability of the ration of loneliness and anomie that attends increased autonomy. In short, it is a process with outlines in the West as old as the Fall of Man and as recent as Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Nandy would no doubt object that Indian tradition has no story of the Fall and that his own use of Freud excises Freud’s tragic pessimism. But what is for me an insurmountable problem in his ‘third model’ is Nandy’s sense that India can preserve from historical change its traditions, families, communities and above all its ‘inviolable core of Indianness’ as an unconscious ‘way of life’ (as long as the reinterpretation of these entities can be discovered always only within the traditions themselves), even as it fully embraces at the same time ‘participatory democracy’ and rejects the notion of a more or less secular public sphere. There is no earthly nation I know of that would fit this description, because from almost any logic, Indian or Western, the internal contradictions are too great. Turkey has rediscovered its Islamic traditions, but it has done so (up to this point) within the constraints of a fairly long tradition of Frenchstyle secular government inherited from Kamal Ataturk. Lebanon is perhaps closer to Nandy’s ideal, but even here, one finds a secular republican state shaped by the pragmatic compromises of Nandy’s second model of secularism, with a Maronite Christian President, a Sunni Muslim Prime Minister, and a Shi’ite Muslim Speaker of Parliament – and Lebanon, one might add, has never been a good model of political stability. In this sense, the currents of secularization that have run so thoroughly, though with diverse consequences, throughout the West cannot be kept at bay, like the North Sea from Holland, by the dikes of Indian subjectivity. Nandy writes, oddly, as a thoroughly modern and cosmopolitan intellectual who imagines that majoritarian segments of India will (and should) remain over time in precisely the same innocent life-world, unconsciously affiliated to family, community and religious tradition, no matter how rapidly or slowly, peacefully or violently, the world both within India and outside of it alters. It is almost as if Nandy’s vision of India has been designed for a museum  – a museum with lots of internal dissension among the curators, lots of disagreement among the members, a wide array of doctrines and styles and movements on display, and an overarching commitment to the health of the institution itself – but a museum all the same. Neither nations nor cultures are museums, however, and it is only the most quixotic of intellectual enterprises that would try to make them so.

Notes Introduction 1 This well-known quotation is from Gandhi’s autobiography, composed in 1927 (2009, p. 463). 2 Some of the significant re-thinkings of and challenges to secularism include: William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (2000); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003); Vincent Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (2006); Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, The Crisis of Secularism in India (2007); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (2007); Geoffry Brahm Levey and Tariq Modood, Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship (2008); Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age (2010); Rajeev Bhargava, The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (2010b); Linell Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age (2010); Michael Warner, Jonathan van Antwerpen and Craig Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (2010); Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (2011); Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan van Antwerpen, Rethinking Secularism (2011). 3 In addressing this issue, Taylor distinguishes between two modes of secularism. Whereas one mode – which he calls the ‘independent political ethic’ – comes across in non-European societies as ‘the imposition of one metaphysical view over others’ (1998, p. 37), another mode – which he calls the ‘common ground’ model – ‘can be readapted to ever-new contexts’ (ibid.). 4 Wenman makes a similar point in Chapter 5 (p. 102). 5 For further discussions on neo-Hinduism, see Halbass (1988, pp. 217–46 and 1995, pp. 229–350). 6 In characterizing Indian Christian political engagement in this way, we might see some similarities with the ‘politics of conviction’ that Wenman discusses in Chapter 5. 7 See also Nussbaum, 2007, p. 333. 8 Calhoun has made a similar criticism, suggesting that ‘Habermas seems to believe that . . . religious people make a prior and less rational prejudgement but that the nonreligious are at least potentially free of such prejudice’ (Calhoun, 2011, p. 83). 9 Connolly makes a similar point: ‘it may be possible to uncover traces of other traditions in the substructure of your own, thereby opening up spaces for relations for partial indebtedness and agonistic respect between interdependent partisans’ (Connelly, 1999, p. 10).

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Chapter 1 1 Versions of this argument are to be found in Madan 1998; Roover, Claerhout and Balagangadhara, 2011. 2 This informs the critiques of Nandy, 1998; Chatterjee, 1998. 3 While the inclusion of the term ‘secular’ was proposed during the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly (see K. T. Shah, CAD VII, pp. 815–16), there was no explicit mention of a secular state in the Constitution, until the Preamble was amended to include the term in 1976. 4 See also Rev. Jerome D’ Souza, CAD VII, p. 1059. Secularism was considered consistent with religious belief – see for example M. Ananthasayanam Ayyangar, CAD VII, p. 881. 5 While instances of antipathy for religion can be found in Nehru’s writings (see Madan, 1998, p. 310), Nehru may not have seen secularization as an inexorable historical process that would erode traditional religion (Khilnani, 2002). 6 This was in keeping with the demands of many religious minorities, in particular, Christian representatives such as Anglo Indian leader Frank Antony, who argued that propagation was fundamental to the Christian faith. 7 On the distinction between strong and weak multiculturalism in the context of state recognition of religious personal laws and the Shah Bano case, see, for instance, Shachar, 1998; Spinner-Halev, 2001. In India, there is a common criminal law for all Indians, but in family or ‘personal’ law matters such as marriage, divorce, succession and maintenance, members of the major religious communities (Hindu, Muslim and Christian) are governed by their respective religious laws. 8 While often discussed as a key instance of conflict between minority rights and gender justice, the latter is not the focus of this essay. For analyses of political discourse in Shah Bano, see in particular Jayal, 1999; Parashar, 1992; Pathak and Sundarrajan, 1989; Hasan, 1998; Das, 1994. 9 See speeches of Congresswoman Rajendra Kumari Bajpai, LSD, 1986, col. 426, Ebrahim Sulaiman Sait, Muslim League member, LSD, 1986, col. 492–93. 10 Little attempt was made by the government to ascertain opinion among Muslims as a whole; instead, the views of a conservative clergy were accepted as representing the majority opinion in the community – see Agnes, 2005; Hasan, 1994; Parashar, 1992. 11 Madan’s critique of secularism is multifaceted. He sees the notion of ‘privatization of religion’ as a late Christian idea, at odds with ‘South Asia’s major religious traditions – Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism – [which] are totalizing in character . . .’ (Madan, 1998, pp. 302, 319). As a strategy that is not ‘rooted, fullblooded’, the Indian policy of state secularism is ‘feeble’ (ibid., p. 300). See also Larson, 2001, p. 100. 12 D. E. Smith’s classic text on Indian secularism, for instance, states that the concept of separation means ‘simply that religion and the state function in two basically different areas of human activity, each with its own objectives and methods’ (Smith, 1963, p. 6). 13 It might be wondered whether state impartiality between religions really is a form of separation of state and religion, as it does not preclude non-discriminatory state support for all religions. As long as separation is not identified with the complete dissociation of the state from religion, however, some forms of non-discriminatory

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state support for religious institutions can be seen as consistent with separation, as implying, for instance, that state policy is not affected by the religious affiliations of institutions (e.g. state support for educational institutions or hospitals irrespective of the religious denominations to which they are attached: Sen, 1998, p. 457). The common view that Gandhi was opposed to the separation of state and religion (Nandy, 1998, p. 343) is misleading. Writing in the Harijan in 1942, Gandhi noted: ‘We have suffered enough from state-aided religion and a state church . . . A Society or a group which depends partly or wholly on state aid for the existence of its religion does not deserve, or . . . does not have any religion worth the name’ (quoted in Smith, 1963, p. 149). Western practice reflects both what Bhargava terms the religious strife model, as well as the church–state model of secularism (Bhargava, 1998, pp. 525–26). Of course, the state was clearly interfering in religion in the sense of authorizing particular version of Muslim law, bringing the latter under interpretive control of state courts. See Chatterjee, 1998; Agnes, 2005. On Hindu religious beliefs and a secular state in India, see for example Smith, 1963. This draws upon David Miller’s distinction (Miller, 1978) between instrumental, constitutive and analogical relationships between concepts. Broadly speaking, two main conceptions of India’s national identity can be distinguished, secular nationalist and Hindu nationalist (Varshney, 1993, p. 235). On similarities in the positions of secular modernists and Hindu nationalists in the context of the Constituent Assembly debates, see for instance Bajpai, 2000, 2011; Jaffrelot, 2004; and more broadly, Chatterjee, 1995; Sarkar, 1997. S. Radhakrishnan pressed for the inclusion of a caveat: ‘. . . It is our ideal to develop a homogenous democratic state – that is why we have provided for fundamental rights, we allow no discrimination in public employment, we say it is a secular State’. . . (CAD V, pp. 283–84). See also Smith, 1963 and Galanter 1998a. While the primary nationalist anxiety was about caste in its ‘horizontal’ aspect – the persistence of caste as a unit of affiliation – ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ aspects of caste were conflated in nationalist denunciations of casteism as anti-secular, allowing national unity concerns to draw legitimacy from the egalitarian critique of the caste system, even though reservations directly challenged caste as a hierarchical social order. See for instance, Sardar Hukam Singh’s speech in support of quotas for ‘backward’ Sikhs, CAD X, p. 235. The reform of Hindu law loomed large on the agenda in this period – see for example Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s speech CAD VII, pp. 781–82. Among grounds of opposition was that group rights to religion could limit individual religious freedoms to not be governed by religious personal laws or to change these laws in the future – for criticisms along these lines, see CAD VII, p. 778. On the centrality of national unity concerns in the Shah Bano debate, see also Parashar, 1992; Hasan, 1998; these do not, however, focus on the links of national unity and secularism. In the changed notions of national unity and secularism in Congress discourse, a retelling of the story of secularism in Indian nationalism was crucial – for details, see Bajpai, 2011. As this speech illustrates, the lives of characters in Hindu myths were humanized and used as historical evidence – the ‘evidential value’ of the lives cited from Hindu epics was the same as historical instances of protection of minorities. On the use of myths

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Notes as historical evidence, see Bhattacharya, 1993; Chatterjee, 1995; and for a discussion, Bajpai, 2011. As Chatterjee observes, the differential treatment of majority and minority communities with respect personal law has been justified in India through a ‘pragmatic argument’ that there is ‘a certain lag in the readiness of the different communities to accept reforms . . .’ (Chatterjee, 1998, p. 362). On the incongruity in the notion of equal citizenship created by the state reform of Hindu laws in the 1950s, see Chatterjee, 1998. On the discourse of protection in the Shah Bano debate, see Pathak and Sunder Rajan, 1989, pp. 565–70; on the convergence of this discourse in the case of women and minorities, see Jayal, 1999, pp. 137–38. The Criminal Procedure Code from which Muslims were being exempted was a colonial legislation in origin and substance, whose concern was ‘not with individual rights, but rather with vagrancy as a threat to public order’ (Das, 1994, p. 128). As Chatterjee notes, in Hindu nationalism, ‘the term ‘secular’ is not itself made a target of attack’ (Chatterjee, 1998, p. 347). As Mehta notes, the ‘so-called reforms in Hindu laws’ were an instance not so much of ‘a secular state imposing reform on a religion, but the Hindu community, through its representatives, interpreting the requirements of their own religion anew’ (Mehta, 2005, p. 78). See also Galanter, 1998b. Spinner-Halev notes that in contexts of group oppression in which the state is implicated, the ‘normal liberal model’ needs to be questioned, and ‘avoiding the injustice of imposing reform on oppressed groups’ can be more important than ‘avoiding the injustice of discrimination against women’ (Spinner-Halev, 2001, pp. 86, 95). The state had undertaken reform of Hindu law in the 1950s in the teeth of opposition from orthodox Hindus, so its stance in the Shah Bano debate implied in effect greater religious autonomy for Muslims. Notable elaborations in the political theory literature include Kymlicka, 1989; 1995; Young, 1990; Spinner-Halev, 2001. Indian parliaments and courts have elaborated substantive equality justifications for differential treatment in the context of preferential provisions for lower castes, but not that of religious personal law (Mackinnon, 2005). The move from all groups having equal rights to religious freedom, to (some) religious minorities having in effect greater freedom from state regulation, was not one that was elaborated in policy discourse. On the links between secularism and national unity in France, see Laborde, 2008. Some scholars have suggested that in the area of religious personal law, for instance, democratic self-determination by religious communities is the best way forward – see Chatterjee, 1998; Mehta, 2005.

Chapter 2 1 Unattributed quotations of Modood in succeeding paragraphs are from the latter source. 2 This is part of what I mean by Contextual Secularism. For similar views on contextual thinking see Taylor, 1994; Parekh, 2000; and Carens, 2000.

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Chapter 3 1 In his book A Secular Age, Taylor further distinguishes between three distinct understandings of the secular. The first refers to the deliberate withdrawal of religious authority from public and especially political spaces; the second to the decline of religious belief and practice, so that religion becomes increasingly irrelevant to increasing numbers of people; and the third to ‘a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 3). In this 2007 book, Taylor seeks to explore the nature of the secular in this third sense. In his 1998 paper, however, which I am invoking here, he was more concerned with the first. The two types of secularism identified in his 1998 paper, therefore, may be viewed as sub-divisions of the first type of secularism identified in his 2007 book. 2 Taylor makes a similar point when he says that: ‘what the unbelieving “secularist” sees as a necessary policing of the boundary of a common independent public sphere, will often be perceived by the religious as a gratuitous extrusion of religion in the name of a rival metaphysical belief. What to one side is a more strict and consistent application of the principles of neutrality is seen by the other side as partisanship. What this other side sees as legitimate public expressions of religious belonging will often be castigated by the first as the exaltation of some peoples’ beliefs over others. This problem is compounded when society diversifies to contain substantial numbers of adherents of non-Judaeo-Christian religions. If even some Christians find the “post-Christian” independent ethic partisan, how much harder will Muslims find it to swallow it’ (Taylor, 1998, pp. 36–37).

Chapter 4 1 To quote John Bowen’s summative comments on a collection of essays on secularism in various contexts published in 2010, that ‘Even during the most drawn-out of debates over “nationalism” or “revolution,”’ there was a sense ‘. . . that we were all talking about the same thing’. Such is not the case with ‘secularism’ (Bowen, 2010, p. 680). 2 Hadden, 1987; on whether or not the analytical model may be rescued from the clutches of normativity, see Casanova, 2006 and Asad, 2006. 3 Casanova, 1997; Calhoun et al., 2011, pp. 1–30. 4 ‘Editorial comments’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52: 3 (2010), pp. 489–94. 5 As for example has been proposed most systematically in Smith, 1963. The criticism that many Western states had varying levels of association with religious institutions and ideologies which ought to be accommodated within a more capacious model of ‘church-state’ relations, did not qualitatively alter the terms of the debate. 6 In this connection, see Asad, 2003 and all the articles in The Hedgehog Review, 2006. 7 And in arguing so, I was deeply inspired by Talal Asad’s suggestions, vis-à-vis the Islamic veil affair in France, that secularism is above all about the regulation of religion.

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8 Charles Taylor’s voluminous output is located both within the liberal tradition (with explicit reference to Rawls) and illuminated by explicit engagement with non-Western contexts, specifically – the Indian one. Writing with reference to a very different category of texts (although not necessarily endorsing them), Kahn’s interpretation of Carl Schmitt’s political theology refers to the same need (for Kahn, reality) of the imaginative, exceptional, extra-rational and transcendent in functioning political communities. Both Taylor and Kahn of course write most explicitly with reference to the United States. See Taylor, 1998 and Taylor, 2007 – although the latter book is much more about the history, contours and dilemmas of a disenchanted mindscape (the ‘immanent frame’) and the existential need to transcend it. See also Kahn, 2011. 9 In formulating this idea, I am indebted to Saba Mahmood, and her reflections on the geopolitically labile identity of Coptic Christians in Egypt in Mahmood, 2012. 10 Especially Galanter, 1998 and Sen, 1998. 11 As argued in Viswanathan, 1989, Studdert-Kennedy, 1998 and van der Veer, 2001. Van der Veer has returned to the idea of concealed motives in van der Veer, 2011. However, I find the idea of secularism as ‘crypto-Christianity’ particularly ineffective, and in the Indian case, it effaces the most interesting parts of the story of Christianity in India. 12 A sense of this journey is offered by Powell, 1996. Also see the biography of another Bengali convert, Golaknath Chatterjee, written by an admiring grandchild, based on Golaknath’s own account. In this story, Golaknath emulates an Indian spiritual seeker, akin to a Hindu Yogi or a Muslim Sufi, undertaking perilous journeys, undergoing much suffering, preaching to ordinary people on the way and finally seeking baptism in Christianity of his own initiative, immediately proceeding to preach it to others. H. G., 1932, pp. 56–87. The point was explicitly stated by Manilal Parekh, whose views we shall discuss later in this chapter. 13 For similar quarrels in the London Missionary Society (LMS) in the Cape Colony, and an analysis of the larger disputes over authority that these enfolded, see Elbourne, 1999. 14 For a detailed discussion of these arrangements, see Chatterjee, 2011, Chapter 6. 15 Mahesh Chandra Ghose, whose baptism preceded Banerjea’s by two months, did not live long. 16 Correspondence with K. M. Banerjea, CMS Archives, Birmingham University Library (henceforth BUL), CI1/ O66/15. 17 Calcutta Corresponding Committee to Secretaries, Church Missionary Society, London, 20 March 1837, and 3 August 1837, in ‘Reports of the Calcutta Corresponding Committee, 1823–1878’, CMS Archives, BUL, C I1/ O2/8–9. 18 Fifteenth meeting of the Agra district mission conference, 10 and 11 September 1866, CMS Archives, BUL, CI 1/O4/1/14; North-India salaries: memorandum for use of sub-committee, 1867, pp. 123–34, CMS Archives, BUL, CI 1/L7. 19 Revised prospectus re-training and pay of ordained Indian graduates 1918, pp. 285–88, CMS Archives, BUL, G2 I7 L9, and Gibbs, 1972, p. 362. 20 ‘Payment of Indian Workers’ in Report of the Church Missionary Society’s Delegation to India, 1921–22 (London: CMS, 1922), pp. 105–07. 21 Proceedings of the Fifth Meeting of the National Missionary Council, held at Benares, 1918, pp. 13–19. It is worth mentioning here that Anglicans were not in the least isolated in maintaining the common-sense racial division of labour between missions and church – for very similar patterns in the Scottish Free Church Mission, related to

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the well-known author and folklorist, Lal Behari Day, see Macpherson, 1900, p. 29. The introduction by Dr Thomas Smith, Day’s old teacher, justified this discriminatory policy. A Native Church for the Natives of India, Giving an Account of the Formation of a Native Church Council for the Punjab Mssion of the Church Missionary Society and of the Proceedings at their First Meeting at Umritsur, 31 March to 2 April 1877 (Lahore, 1877), pp. 53–63. Madras Ecclesiastical Proceedings, 4 October 1909, No. 68, pp. 2–3, India Office Records (henceforth IOR), British Library (henceforth BL), P/8256, and BillingtonHarper, 2000, especially pp. 122–33. CSI is the ecumenical Protestant church in communion with the Church of England. On which, see Cronin, 1959; for an analysis of intellectual differences between Nobili and his chief detractor in the same mission, Gonçalo Fernandes, see Zupanov, 1993 and Zupanov, 1999. Vedanayagam Sastri, ‘Humble address’, dated 18 January 1829, first in the six essays collectively titled ‘Sadeterattoo’ (Explaining Caste), which themselves form an English introduction to the Tamil manuscript ‘The Foolishness of Amending Caste’, ff. 8–9, Oriental Manuscripts, BL, Or.11,742. For identification as well as analysis of this source, I am reliant on Hudson, 2000, pp. 148–57. Krishnagar, 1878, CMS Archives, BUL, CI 1/02/19. Principally the Surya Siddhanta, composed around 400 ce and Bhaskaracharya’s commentary on it, the Siddhanta Siromani. Ballantyne was not alone in his enthusiasm for the Surya Siddhanta, the translation of this text caused much excitement among missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century. See for example, Burgess, 1855. Bayly, 2000; Dodson, 2002, No. 404 (26 April 1855), J. R. Ballantyne to J. Thomason, dated 20 October 1852, BL, OIOC, NWP GP, P/215/43; Dodson, 2007, p. 111. ‘Purusa-Sukta’, Book 10, hymn 90, in Griffith,1897, Vol. II, pp. 517–20. Anon., ‘The Revd. Krishna Mohun Bonerjee’, The India Review and Journal of Foreign Science and the Arts, 7, 1843, pp. 622–31, at 628. Andrews himself was an exceptional personality. He came to India as a member of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi, and remained to become an activist supporter of Indian nationalism. In his opinion, thought the Bishop’s decision on the Sadhu’s case was narrow and ‘unlooked-for’. Barth was led to his theological position from the shock of finding his theological teachers aligned with the German cause in the First World War. Liberal theology’s celebration of ethnic and national characteristics in religious expression apparently left it morally incapable of criticizing any negative aspects of national culture or nationalist politics. Forrester, 1980, p. 175. From the Lord Bishop of Calcutta to the Viceroy of India, forwarding Krishna Mohan Banerjea’s printed pamphlet, as well as letters from Tara Chand and Rev. R. Winter of the SPG mission to Delhi, in Report of the Select Committee on the Bill to legalize, under certain circumstances, the re-marriage of native converts to Christianity, and associated papers, Government of India, Bills and Acts, 1866, pp. 18–52, IOR, BL, L/PJ/5/8. Ibid., pp. 43–45. Ibid., pp. 51–54. On Satthianadhan and the history of this illustrious Tamil Christian family, see Jackson, 2003.

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37 C. F. Andrews, ‘Kanakarayan T. Paul: A Great Christian Leader’, a review of H. A. Popley, K. T. Paul: Christian leader, newspaper clipping, K. T. Paul papers, United Theological College Archives, Bangalore. 38 K. T. Paul, ‘Indian Leadership in Mission and Church’, in Calcutta Decennial Missionary Conference, 1912, copy in KT Paul Papers. 39 K. T. Paul to Leonard K. Elmhirst, Bangalore, 16 June 1916, Dartington Hall Archives (DHA), Dartington, LKE/IN/13/G/5. 40 ‘Your entitlement is only to the rite, not ever at all to its fruits. Be not motivated by the fruits of acts, but also do not purposely avoid acts. Abandon self-interest, Dhanamjaya, and perform the acts while applying this singlemindedness. Remain equable in success and failure – this equableness is called the application; for the act as such is far inferior to the application of singleness of purpose to it, Dhanamjaya. Seek shelter in this single-mindedness – pitiful are those who are motivated by fruits!’ Bhagavad Gita, 1997, pp. 31–32. 41 K. T. Paul, ‘The Presidential Speech’, Report of the tenth session of the All India Conference of Indian Christians, Bangalore (Cover missing, 1923), pp. 10–27, UTC Archives, Bangalore. 42 B. L. Rallia Ram was a graduate of Lahore University, secretary of YMCA Punjab, later National General Secretary of the YMCA of India, Burma and Ceylon, and Chairman of the Students’ Christian Association of India, Burma and Ceylon, and also Secretary of the Punjab Indian Christian Association. The Rallia Ram brothers became closely associated with the Gandhian Congress in the Punjab and Mrs. K. L. Rallia Ram was an assistant of helper of the Chrtistian Gandhian Rajkumari Amrit Kaur. 43 ‘The Question of Communal Representation’, Report of the thirteenth session of the All India Conference of Indian Christians, Madras (Madras, 1926), p. 47, UTC Archives, Bangalore. 44 Margarita Barns, S. K. Datta and his People, Margarita Barns Papers, BL, Mss Eur C576. 45 Papers related to the Round Table Conference in London, S. K. Datta Private Papers, BL, MssEur/F178/29. 46 Famously by Ashish Nandy, in Nandy 1998 and, more recently, Nandy 2007.

Chapter 5 1 In the writings of Dawkins and Hitchens religious believers are depicted as full of credulity and prejudice, the spread of religious conviction is likened to the plague or crack addiction, and there is flatly nothing positive in religion or devout practice. See, for example Dawkins, 2007; Hitchens, 2007. 2 Mindful of the impermanence of sovereign power under conditions of modernity, Schmitt likened the sovereign instead to the status of the miracle in theology, because the sovereign decision is always an exceptional moment that ‘breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition’ (Schmitt, 2005, p. 15). 3 For a detailed explanation of modernity in terms of a gradual transference of divine attributes to Man, Nature, Society and History, see also Gillespie, 2008. 4 Ironically perhaps, for a self-styled Nietzschean, this leaves Connolly’s ethos of agonistic respect as a kind of double reactivity.

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Chapter 6 1 Romila Thapar makes a similar argument; that Indian history provided an ‘ambience’ for secularism. See Thapar, 2007. 2 J. Rameshwar Rao, First Secretary, Indian High Commission, Nairobi to B. N. Nanda, Dep. Sec., Ministry of External Affairs, 24/12/1951, AII/52/6423/31, National Archives of India. 3 Who Are the Guilty? Report of a joint inquiry into the causes and impact of the riots in Delhi from 31 October to 10 November, Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties and Peoples’ Union for Democratic Rights. PUDR (December 1984), New Delhi, 1984. See http://www.pucl.org/Topics/Religion-communalism/2003/who-are-guilty.htm (accessed October 2012). 4 In August 2005, a Government Enquiry admitted that ‘credible evidence’ existed that Congress leaders had incited and materially assisted in attacks on Sikhs living in Delhi. Sajjan Kumar, a Congress politician, is currently under trial for his role in inciting the violence. 5 For a lucid summary of the dispute to 2005, see Davis, 2009. 6 See also the excellent work by Shereen Ratnagar: Ratnagar and Mandal, 2007 and Ratnagar, 1994. 7 The term ‘pseudo-secularist’ gained considerable currency in right-wing counterarguments. 8 For a seminal discussion of the relationship between colonial administration, empiricism and enumeration see Appadurai, 1993. 9 Kumar took issue with the Mandal Commission and its proponents elsewhere: see Kumar, 1992. 10 Rawat demonstrates the inaccuracy of the association of the low-caste chamars with leather-working; a colonial myth maintained and reproduced by subsequent histories. Rawat, 2010.

Chapter 7 1 Rancière, 2009, p. 93 [orig.: Rancière 2005, p.101: ‘Si les mots servent à brouiller les choses, c’est parce que la bataille sur les mots est indissociable de la bataille sur les choses’]. 2 Casanova 2007, p. 342 [orig.: ‘Vielleicht ist es voreilig, von einem postsäkularem Europa zu sprechen, aber man kann gewiß einen bedeutsamen Wandel im europäischen Zeitgeist spüren’]. (Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine, EvdZ). 3 TFEU (‘Lisbon Treaty’, 2009), article 17.1. 4 Rancière’s is critically referring is to J. C. Milner (2003), Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (Paris: Verdier). 5 See A. Hastings (1997), The Construction of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); A. D. Smith (2003), Chosen Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press); P. Ihalainen (2005), Protestant Nations Redefined (Leiden & Boston, MA: Brill). 6 We must distinguish between those three – ‘secularism’ in particular is often used when ‘secularity’ is meant – similar to ‘pluralism’, ‘multiculturalism’, etc. (Casanova,

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14 15 16

17

Notes 2009, p. 19; Turner, 2011, p. 128; Keane, 2000, p. 29ff.; Lübbe, 1975, p. 131; Krämer, 2007, p. 176). See, for example, the impressive Diary of a stupefied rabbi, by the Orthodox Dutch rabbi Lodi van der Kamp: Dagboek van een verdoofd rabbijn (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 2012). See my ‘Ponimaja sekuljarnost’ (Making Sense of Secularity)’, Gosudarstvo, Religija, Tserkov’ v Rossii i za rubezhom, 2012, Vol. 2, 69–113. Cf. several of the contributions to this volume. Reference is to Bryan S. Turner (1983), Religion and Social Theory: A Materialist Perspective (London: Heinemann). Reference is to the 1990 first edition of Milbank, 2006. Surely, books must sell, but the question is why publishers think that a cover will have a positive effect on sale figures. For an elaboration of the institutional dimension, see Evert van der Zweerde, ‘Permanente Asymmetrie; Kirche und Staat, Staat und Kirche,’ Osteuropa 59 (2009), nr. 6, 47–62, and idem, ‘Politics and Religion in Post-Imperial Orthodox Christian Societies: The Mutual Asymmetry of Church and State’, in Nadia al-Bagdadi, Anca Sincan, Ionut Biliuta (eds), Transforming a Church: Eastern Christianities in Postimperial Societies (Budapest: CEU Press, [forthcoming]). To give just one example: it has become normal that both imams and priests appear on Dutch television talkshows in recognizably religious garments. The ‘Home of Islam’, the ‘Home of Christianity’, the ‘Home of Buddha’. Weber’s self-description in a 1909 letter to Ferdinand Tönnies: ‘Although I am religiously absolutely tone-deaf, . . . after precise self-scrutiny I am neither antireligious nor irreligious (Ich bin zwar religiös absolut unmusikalisch . . . Aber ich bin nach genauer Selbstprüfung weder antireligiös noch irreligiös)’ (Marianne Weber, Max Weber (München and Zürich: Piper, [1926], 1989), p. 339). Reference is to Eduardo Mendieta, ‘A Post-secular World Society? An Interview with Jürgen Habermas, The Immanent Frame’, at http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/02/03/apostsecular-world-society/.

Chapter 8 1 As Weber observed in the very first line of his introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, with a sly irony rarely reproduced by those who followed his lead: ‘A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value’ (Weber, 2005, p. xxvii; Weber’s emphasis). Current revisionism concerning secularization is aimed directly at Weber’s assumption, even if that revisionism generally ignores the equivocal nature of Weber’s language. For a wide-ranging account of what the secularization thesis has meant, see Bruce, 1992. 2 For a good account of the difficulty I invoke here, see the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty argues that for ‘history’ itself, as a discipline practiced in universities (whether in the West or in India), Europe ‘remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories. . . . In this sense, “Indian” history itself is in a

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position of subalternity. . . .’ (Chakrabarty, 2000b, p. 27). While Chakrabarty’s goal is ‘provincializing Europe’, he also admits that ‘political modernity’ is ‘impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe’ (ibid., p. 4). For Chakrabarty’s critical discussion of Nandy, see Chakrabarty, 2000a. For a complementary account how the discipline of history in China became a narrative about the rise of the Western-style nation-state, see Duara, 1995. 3 As I write, India is once again going through a period of what has been routinely called ‘communal violence’ ever since the partition of 1947 that created Pakistan in response to a Hindi-Muslim civil war that erupted when India won its independence from Great Britain (see Yardly, 2012a). In 2003, the Indian government allocated almost half of Assam, in its northwest, to the Bodo (pronounced Bo-ro) people, who number about 5 per cent of Assam’s population. The Bodo are an indigenous tribe that settled in the Brahmaputra Valley of Assam perhaps as early as the second-millennium bce, that was ‘Hinduized’ by Aryan migrations in the seventh and again in the sixteenth centuries, conquered by the Ahoms in the thirteenth century, and are now overwhelmingly (perhaps 90%) Hindu, the rest being either Christian or adherents of a primordial, animist, totemic and ancestor-worshipping belief called Bathou (see Devi, 2004, pp. 4–14). The second largest community after the Bodos in Bodoland is Muslim, made up of both a native Muslim population and (beginning in the 1960s) increasingly of Muslim immigrants from what was, at the time of Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971, a truly destitute place, and what is still one of the most densely populated regions on earth. In consequence, the right of Muslims in Bodoland to land ownership is carefully restricted as a means of guaranteeing Bodo supremacy in their autonomous region, which just happens to share its southwest border with Muslim Bangladesh (see Yardly, 2012b). While the Bodos claim illegal Bangladeshi immigrants are seizing vacant land in the district, the Muslims of Assam and Bodoland see this claim as no more than a cover story to hide what is in effect ‘ethnic cleansing’ – an effort, spearheaded by nationalists, not only to rid Bodoland of Muslims altogether but to expand the boundaries of Bodoland itself by changing the facts on the ground in the other direction. The most recent consequence, as two startling New York Times stories recount, is that 78 people have been confirmed killed in Assam, 14,000 homes have been burned and 300,000 people have ended up in refugee camps. As Jim Yardly astutely observes, had the same turmoil and refugee situation occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, many Western nations would have declared a humanitarian crisis. In India, by contrast, such an event has perhaps come to seem all too expected. 4 Whether the current influx of Muslim immigrants in France, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain and elsewhere in Europe will substantially alter this situation is open to debate – but that is fodder for a different essay. 5 Nandy’s attitude to the originality of Valmiki’s Ramayana is somewhat ambiguous. In a footnote to a 1997 essay (‘A Report on the Present State of Health of the Gods and Godesses in South Asia’), for example, Nandy refers to Valmiki’s text as both the ‘original’ and his ‘grandmother’s conventional version’ of the Ramayana. But the difference may not matter that much to him, since Nandy also acknowledges in the essay that in the end neither Madhusudan Dutt’s version nor earlier revisions of Valmiki’s text are – and perhaps cannot be, given the complexity of Indian tradition – truly rebellious: in the cosmic order of things, even the fate of Ravana, ‘the fearsome Brahmarakshasa, the worst kind of rakshasa, is intertwined

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with Rama’: that is, ‘by dying at the hands of Rama, the incarnation of Vishnu, Ravana reaches his personal god, Vishnu’. It is precisely this sort of complexity that Nandy claims was lost in the ‘hero-worship’ that Bengalis showed to Dutt after the Meghnadvadh Kavya was published (see Nandy, 2004, p. 144, n 14). 6 Nandy’s claim about the Christianization of Hindu beliefs in modern times is also partially borne out in the case of the god Vishnu, who often appears in Western accounts as if he were a member of a trinity of gods including Brahma and Shiva, with Vishnu as ‘preserver’, Brahma as ‘creator’ and Shiva as ‘transformer’. This Western account is not in fact devoid of evidence in the Hindu texts; it is simply far too limited. Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu do appear at times in the Puranic era as part of an attempt at a synthesis of older, separate Vedic traditions. (In the earlier Ramayana, for example, Vishnu and Brahma are clearly rivals, not unlike Homer’s gods.) The Puranic attempt at synthesis resulted in the concept of the Trimurti, that is, a tri-partite manifestation of the supreme god. ‘But the attempt cannot be regarded as a great success, for Brahmā never gained an ascendency comparable’ to that of Shiva or Vishnu, ‘and the different sects often conceived the Trimūrti as really the three manifestations of their own sectarian god, whom they regarded as Brahman or Absolute’ (Majumdar, 1956, Vol. IV, p. 49). Indeed, Hindu practice remains largely composed of different strains that tend to consider one or the other of Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma supreme – no actual trinity can be said to exist. Nevertheless, ‘early Western students of Hinduism were impressed by the parallel between the Hindu trinity and that of Christianity. In fact the parallel is not very close, and the Hindu trinity, unlike the Holy Trinity of Christianity, never really “caught on”. All Hindu trinitarianism tended to favor one god of the three; thus, from the context it is clear that Kālidāsa’s hymn to the Trimūrti is really addressed to Brahmā, here looked on as the high god. The Trimūrti was in fact an artificial growth, and had little real influence’ (Basham, 1968, p. 313). In this sense, Nandy’s political-theological account of the Christianization of Hinduism under the Raj, given the pressure on Indian intellectuals to adopt a Christianized nationalist consciousness, gains some support. It is not so much that nineteenth-century accounts of a Hindu ‘trinity’ were completely fabricated. Rather, they extracted a thin thread of religious ideation from a far more complicated and contradictory tradition, and then presented it as if it were the whole, or at least dominant, truth. 7 Nandy does not note it, but his use of these terms is oddly closer—though the terminology is reversed – to their original meanings in J. J. Bachofen than in Nietzsche. In Bachofen’s influential mid-nineteenth-century writing on mother-right, religion and myth, exemplified in Das Mutterrecht, the Dionysian and Apollonian represent two masculine phases in the development of the patriarchy. The earlier phase, which represents the fecundating principle of the male in conjunction with the female, Bachofen calls Dionysian. The subsequent phase, which is completely spiritual and leads to a self-generating patriarchy that transcends woman altogether, he calls the Apollonian. Bachofen is the likely source of the terms for Nietzsche, who emphasized in The Birth of Tragedy what in Bachofen had only been partial, that is, the opposition between the two forces. Nietzsche’s Dionysus, however, does retain the aggression and violence that Nandy associates with the figure, though Nietzsche’s Dionysus is also a god of intoxicated laughter and play—characteristics Nandy associates with the ‘female-within-the-male’ Apollonian and with the pre-Christianized residues of Hindu belief, and certainly not with the Raj (see Bachofen, 1975). 8 In Egypt today, for example, the problem of the assertive woman is not at all merely a theoretical or academic issue. As Osama Abou Salama, described in a New York

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10

11

12

13

183

Times feature as a ‘professor of botany at Cairo University and member of the Muslim Brotherhood’, tells young men and women in his premarital counselling class: ‘a woman . . . takes pleasure in being a follower and finds ease in obeying a husband who loves her’ (El-Naggar, 2012, p. A1). What is most astonishing to the author of the story, Mona El-Naggar, is that no one in the class, neither the men nor the women, finds anything objectionable in the message. Presumably this is not exactly what Nandy has in mind when he extols ‘critical traditionalism’. But it is hard not to come to the conclusion that almost any sort of religious traditionalism would share many of the beliefs that Mr Abou Salama is sharing with his class. Truly traditional, Opus Dei Catholicism might not, after all, teach lessons very different from this one in its own pre-marital counselling. Hence the sort of issues El-Naggar describes highlight for me an intractable problem for Nandy’s entire project. Octave Mannoni would find something similar in the relation of Shakespeare’s Prospero and Caliban, which became an allegory for the pre-Oedipal underdevelopment of the colonized male’s psychological situation in relation to the colonizer (see Mannoni, 1964). Weber outlines four primary types of social action: (1) instrumentally rational, by which our expectations about the behavior of others are mere means to the achievement of our goals; (2) value rational, by which our belief in moral, aesthetic or religious values determines our actions independently of their likelihood of success; (3) affective, by which our behaviour is determined by our emotional responses; and (4) traditional, by which our behaviour is determined by ‘ingrained habituation’, that is, something closer to what Bourdieu (referring to social class) means by a ‘habitus’ of learned dispositions and their improvisational variations (Bourdieu, 1990, pp. 78–83) – which Weber calls ‘a matter of almost automatic reaction to habitual stimuli’, and which is thus close to what Nandy often means by unselfconscious tradition – rather than a tradition in the sense of past ideas that one preserves consciously and of past ideals to which one aspires, as in Edmund Burke (Weber, 1978, pp. 24–26). The last three of these primary types of social action then lead to corresponding types of legitimate social order, including types of legality and political administration. Instrumental rationality, the closest to mere self-interest and to the secular ‘iron cage’ of the marketplace, was and continues to be variously constrained by other forms of social action, even as it manifests increased resistance to them. Fanon does admit he would have great interest in having contact with ‘a Negro literature or architecture of the third century before Christ’, but ‘absolutely cannot see how this fact would change anything in the lives of eight-year-old children who labour in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadaloupe’ (Fanon, 1967, p. 230). As Nandy may be aware, one of the original exemplifications of Gemeinschaft or community for Tönnies comes from H. S. Maine’s Ancient Law, which isolates the traditional family, clan and village life of India as representative of ‘stationary societies’ (Maine, 1986, p. 257; see also Pecora, 1997, pp. 201–03). We should recall, for example, that Rousseau, despite his fame as promulgator of a ‘social contract’, also wrote a tract called ‘Considerations on the Government of Poland’, in which his recommendations are directly focused on the need to preserve an inviolable core of Polishness (see Rousseau, 1972).

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Index 9/11  46, 48 accommodative secularism  3, 48 Ackerman, B.  98 Act of Uniformity, the  65 Adenauer, K.  132 Adorno, T.  13, 159, 162 Minima Moralia  159 Agamben, G.  16, 164 agonism  105–10 and the politics of conviction  107–10 as post-secularism  105–7 agonistic respect  73, 96, 105, 106, 108, 171n. 9, 178n. 4 ahimsa (non-violence)  9, 11 Ahmed, A.  117 Ahmed, I.  39 Akbar, Emperor  16 Ali, A.  119 All India Conference of Indian Christians (AICIC)  88 Ambedkar, B. R.  40, 173n. 24 American Revolution, the  4 American Tea Party, the  167 Americanization  44 Anderson, B.  140 see also imagined communities Andrews, C. F.  86, 178n. 37 androgyny  154, 155, 157, 160 Anthony, F.  35, 172n. 6 anti-Americanism  47 anticlericalism  42 anti-Islamism  14, 142 Anti-secular manifesto (Nandy’s)  12 anti-Semitism  14, 142, 145 anti-Sikh riots (1984)  12, 114, 118 Appadurai, A.  140, 179n. 8 see also modernity at large Appasamy, A. J.  86 Arendt, H.  107, 108, 110, 162

Asad, T.  10, 115, 133, 147, 171n. 2, 175nn. 2, 6–7 asceticism  9, 102, 155 Ashoka, King  16 Asiatic society, the  81 atheism  14, 69, 104, 124, 132, 139 Athim, A.  82 Auden, W. H.  155 Augsburg Principle  140 Aurobindo, Sri  8, 86 authoritarian personality, the  15, 162 Azariah, V. S.  82 Baago, K.  86 Babri Mosque, demolition of  2, 95, 114, 119, 123, 126, 154 communal riots after, the  114, 119 Bader, V.  45 Badiou, A.  96, 107, 108, 109 Saint Paul:The Foundation of Universalism  108 Bajpai, R.  3, 6, 8, 13, 23, 27, 31, 32, 116, 173n. 26, 174n. 27 Bakhtin, M.  168 Balagangadhara, S. N.  24, 172n. 1 Ballantyne, J.  85 Banerjea, K. M.  81, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 177nn. 34–7 The Arian Witness  85 The Relation between Christianity and Hinduism  85 Barker, C. R.  40 Barth, K.  87, 177n. 33 Basham, A. L.  152, 182n. 6 Bateman, J.  81, 84 Beiner, R.  137 Benjamin, W.  101, 164 Berger, P.  136, 145 Bhabha, H.  159, 160 Bhagavad Gita, the  9, 90, 155, 178n. 40

202

Index

Bharatiya Janata Party, the  119, 123 Bhargava, R.  3, 5, 6, 13, 14, 16, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 32, 36, 37, 43, 50, 147, 148, 171n. 2, 173n. 15 see also contextual secularism Bielefeldt, H.  132, 140 Bilgrami, A.  11, 23 Bismarck, O. von  149, 167 Blake, W.  153 Blumenberg, H.  156, 169 Bodin, J.  100 Bourdieu, P.  169, 183n. 10 Bowen, J.  40, 185n. 1 Boyd, R.  85, 86 Breivik, A.  141 British Raj  150 muscular Christianity of, the  152 Brontë, C.  159 Jane Eyre  159 Brown, W.  135–6 Bruce, S.  138, 180n. 1 God is Dead  138 Brunner, B.  167, 168 Buckley, T. E.  67 Buddhism  16, 172n. 11 Burke, E.  16, 164, 183n. 10 burqa legislation  13, 133 Buruma, I.  40 Butler, J.  101, 134, 171n. 2 Calcutta Missionary Conference (1912)  89 Calhoun, C.  7, 134, 144, 145, 171nn. 2, 8, 175n. 3 Calvin, J.  155 Cantwell Smith, W.  47 Caplan, L.  83 Caputo, J.  105 Casanova, J.  7, 133, 140, 148, 175nn. 2–3, 179nn. 2, 6 see also global denominationalism Caste Disabilities Removal Act  88 Cavanaugh, W.  10, 12 Césaire, A.  151 Cesari, J.  46 Chadwick, O.  68 Chandhoke, N.  27 Chandra, B.  116 Chatterjee, B.  154, 155

Chatterjee, N.  9, 13, 31, 78 Chatterjee, P.  2, 3, 22, 23, 24, 28, 36, 37, 172n. 2, 173n. 16, 174nn. 27–8, 31, 37 Chatterji, J.  117, 118 Chenchiah, P.  85, 86 child-marriage  37 Chiriyankandath, J.  25, 30, 116, 121 Christianity  5, 6, 7, 40, 46, 53, 79, 85, 87, 110, 150, 153, 154 Christo Samaj of Bengal  86 Church Missionary Society (CMS)  77, 81, 82 Church of England, the  65, 68, 69, 70, 152 Church of South India  86 Civil War, the  150 Claerhout, S.  24, 172n. 1 Clayton, J.  68, 69 cold war, the  110 colonialism  4 British  4, 120 Western  169 colonization  4, 12, 15, 113, 165 common ground approach, the  61 communal  30 communalism  8 Connolly, W. E.  2, 8, 11, 13, 73, 75, 96, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 115, 171nn. 2, 9, 178n. 4 Why I am Not a Secularist  105, 171n. 2 Constituent Assembly debates (1946–9), the  21, 31, 36, 91, 122 constitutional patriotism  139 contextual secularism  6, 56, 174n. 2 Copley, A.  8, 83 Cossman, B.  24, 33 critical traditionalism  4, 13, 15, 16, 17, 156, 157, 159, 163, 183n. 8 Crouch, C.  135 cultural nationalism  82–3, 87, 92 see also nationalism cultural racism  46 cultural secularism  87 dalit Christians  91 Danish cartoon affair, the  13, 46, 47, 133 Dasgupta, S.  123 Datta, S. K.  90

Index David, J. M.  90 Davie, G.  164, 165 Dawkins, R.  100, 178n. 1 Deleuze, G.  107 Derrida, J.  101 Descartes, R.  105 desecularization  44, 132, 138 Deshpande, S.  116 Devji, F.  125–6, 181n. 3 dharma  16 Dhareshwar, V.  124 Dickens, A. G.  64 Du Bois, W. E. B.  160 Duff, A.  86 Dworkin, R.  52 Dyanand Saraswati, Swami  155 Edward VI  64 ego, the  160, 168 Eisenhower, D.  163 Eliot, G.  156 Elizabeth, I.  64, 65 Elmhirst, L.  89, 178n. 39 Embree, A.  8, 22, 28, 30 English Elizabethan settlement, the  67 Enlightenment, the  4, 67, 105 European  96, 97, 98, 103 eschatology  101 European Constitution, the  49 European secularism  16, 17, 43–9 Christianity and  5 post-secularity  131–48 conceptual considerations  132–7 political dimension, the  137–42 recent debates  142–6 European Union, the  49 exceptionalism  167 Faleiro, E.  24, 34 Falwell, J.  100 Fanon, F.  151, 158, 159, 160, 183n. 11 feminine-in-the-masculine  155, 157, 160, 165 Fichte, J. G.  164 Filaly-Ansary, A.  134 first Prayer Book of Edward VI, the  65 First World War, the  122 Fontane, T.  161 Forrester, D. B.  84

203

Forster, E. M.  155, 156, 162, 177n. 33 A Passage to India  162 Foucault, M.  11, 13, 96, 100, 103, 107, 109, 110, 149, 150, 157, 162, 164 Fourteen Points, Woodrow Wilson’s  166 Frankfurt School for Social Research  162 Freedman, J.  40 French Revolution, the  4, 164 French secularism  168 Freud, S.  13, 15, 158–62, 166, 170 Civilization and Its Discontents  158, 161, 170 fundamentalism  32, 106, 157 Protestant fundamentalism  39 Galanter, M.  24, 27, 31, 32, 173n. 21, 174n. 32, 176n. 10 Gandhi, I.  118, 127 Gandhi, M.  8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 78, 89, 92, 109, 116, 126, 149, 150, 155, 156, 157, 160, 163, 169, 171n. 1, 173n. 14 Gandhi, R.  150 Ganeri, J.  16, 17 Gaspari, A. de  132 Gauchet, M.  139 Geertz, C.  167 Gellner, E.  167 George IV, King  68 German debate over circumcision, the  133 Geuss, R.  147 Ghosha, R.  81 Gibbs, M. E.  81 Gilmartin, D.  115 Gladstone, W.  68 global denominationalism  140, 148 globalization  40, 96, 102 economic  140 Gopal, S.  119 Gorski, P.  135, 136, 147 governmentality  149, 150, 151, 158, 162, 167 Graf, F. W.  102 Gramsci, A.  13, 150, 151, 159 Gray, J.  98 Guevara, C.  109 Guha, R.  151 Gujarat riots, the  2, 53, 114, 123, 126

204

Index

Habermas, Jürgen  2, 13, 14, 16, 95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 132, 134, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 163, 171nn. 2, 8 Between Naturalism and Religion  142 Glauben und Wissen  132, 142 Hamburger, P.  43 Hasan, Z.  24, 34, 35, 172nn. 8, 10, 173n. 25 headscarves issue, the  42, 46, 48 see also Turkish başörtüsü controversies Hegel, G. W. F.  158, 160, 162 Phenomenology of Spirit  160 Heller, A.  137 Henry, P.  66 Henry  viii  64 Herder, G.  164  hermaphroditism  155 Hervieu-Léger, D.  133, 134, 136, 137 Hindu nationalism  15 Hinduism  8, 9, 16, 28, 43, 46, 53, 87, 121, 121–5, 123, 124, 152, 155, 172n. 11 classical  166 folk  166 unselfconscious  166 Hindutva nationalism  165, 166 Nandy’s condemnation of  166 history,  Nandy’s understanding of  163–4 Hitchens, C.  100, 178n. 1 Hitler, A.  167 Hobbes, T.  139, 163 Leviathan  139 Homer  153, 154 Iliad  153 Odyssey  153 homosociality  155 Hooker, R.  65 Horkheimer, M.  162, 163 Hudson, D.  84, 177n. 26 Hume, D.  4, 46 Huntington, S.  131, 132 Husain, T.  26 Hyman, G.  7, 8, 11, 13, 63, 69 idealized American secularism  42–3 idealized French secularism  42 imagined communities  140 imperialism  114 British  115

independent ethic approach  61 Indian Christian citizenship,  family, community and nation  87–91 minority issues  77–80 political theology of  77–92 racism and authority  80–3 religious translation and hierarchy  83–7 Indian nationalism  9, 173n. 26, 177n. 32 Indian secularism  6, 9, 16, 21–38, 49–51, 78 and European secularism  39–58 features of  50–1 national unity and minority rights and  28–37 religion and separation and  22–8 three objections to  53–7 Indian subjectivity  169, 170 individualism  15, 102, 126, 159, 162 industrial-military complex  163 introjection  159 Islam  16, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 53, 157, 172n. 11 Islamophobia  46 Jayal, N. G.  30, 33, 172n. 8, 174n. 29 Jefferson, T.  7, 66, 67, 68, 69 Jesus Christ  85, 108 Job, G. V.  87 Jones, E. S.  86 The Christ of the Indian Road  86 Joyce, J.  154 Ulysses  154 Juergensmeyer, M.  7, 39, 171n. 2 Kallscheuer, O.  131 Kamath, H. V.  25 Kant, I.  4, 157, 163 Kantian liberalism  54 Kapur, R.  24, 33 Katju, K. N.  121 Kaushal, J. N.  24 Keane, J.  134, 180n. 6 Kedourie, E.  167 Keynes, J. M.  155 Kepel, G.  39 Khan, Y.  117 Kierkegaard, S.  105 Kiernan, V. G.  151 King, Jr., M. L.  109

Index Kipling, R.  159 Klausen, J.  41 Kracauer, S.  164 Kraemer, H.  87 The Christian message in the non-Christian world  87 Kshatriya hood  155, 157 Kumar, D.  123, 179n. 9 Kumar, P.  125 Lacan, J.  160 Laclau, E.  100 laicism  95 Lal, V.  120 Lefort, C.  101 Levy, L. W.  42, 43 Lex Loci Act, the  88 liberal secularism,  conceits of, the  100–5 liberalism  2, 21, 27, 72, 73, 74, 83, 92, 95, 96, 101, 110, 139, 149 see also political liberalism secular liberalism and the crisis of secular modernity  97–100 Kantian  54 theological  9, 83 Lisbon Treaty, the  140 Locke, J.  4, 28, 66, 70 London bombings, the  48, 95 Loobuyck, P.  145 Löwith, K.  164 Lübbe, H.  133, 180n. 6 Luther, M.  63, 66 Lyotard, J.-F.  135, 138 M*A*S*H (on CBS)  154 MacIntyre, A.  16, 150, 162, 164 MacKinnon, C. A.  36, 174n. 35 Macpherson, G.  164, 177n. 21 Madan, T. N.  2, 3, 22, 24, 26, 172nn. 1, 5, 11 Madhusudan Dutt, M.  152, 153, 154, 155, 181–2n. 5 Meghnadvadh Kavya  152, 153 Madison, J.  42 Madrid bombings, the  48, 95 Mahabharata, the  90, 153 Mahajan, G.  23, 27, 32 Mahmood, S.  5 majoritarianism  28, 122 Majumdar, R.  91, 182n. 6

205

Malinowski, B.  161 Mallampalli, C.  87 Malviya, P.  25 Mandal, B. P.  122 Mandal Commission, the  114, 122, 123, 124, 179n. 9 protests against  114, 126 Manent, P.  137 Marcuse, H.  162, 163 Eros and Civilization  162 Markus, R.  133, 146 Marty, M. E.  66 Marx, K.  12, 101, 160, 163, 164 Marxism  110 Mary  i, 64 Maugham, S.  155 Mehta, P. B.  24, 36, 174nn. 32, 37 Mendieta, E.  134, 144, 146, 180n. 17 Menon, D.  114, 115, 123, 126 messianism  101 Milbank, J.  16, 136, 164, 180n. 11 Milner, J.-C.  14, 132, 179n. 4 Milton, J.  153 Paradise Lost  153 minaret referendum, the  133 moderate secularism  44, 45, 46, 48, 49 modern capitalism  101, 102 modern nihilism  103, 104, 105, 110 see also nihilism modern rationalism  100 modernity  12, 103, 138, 140, 156, 178n. 2 modernity at large  140 modernization  12, 21, 29, 96, 98, 102, 103, 136, 143, 145 Modi, N.  2 Modood, T.  40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 171n. 2, 174n. 1 Mohsin, A.  39 Monnet, J.  132 Montesquieu, C.  164 Mookerjee, H. C.  91 Moore, G. E.  155 Moorman, J. H. R.  65 moral constructivism  97 Mouffe, C.  98, 100 Muhammed, Prophet  47 Mumbai terror attacks  95 Munshi, K. M.  22, 26, 30 Münster Principle of 1648, the  140 Muslim resistance  15, 151

206

Index

Nandy, A.  2, 3, 4, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 28, 31, 33, 37, 38, 114, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 137, 141, 145, 148, 149–70, 172n. 2, 173n. 14, 178n. 46, 181–2n 5, 182nn. 6–7, 183n. 12 see also critical traditionalism The Intimate Enemy  151–70 anti-nationalism  165–70 dialectic of enlightenment, the  162–3 Freud, use of  158–62 gender in  151–8 myth versus history  163–5 Narain, H.  154 National Church of Madras  86 National Missionary Society  89 nationalism  4, 8, 22, 28, 29, 31, 37, 80, 82, 87, 90, 115, 164, 167, 174n. 31 see also Indian nationalism nation-state  28 Native Converts’ Marriage Dissolution Bill  88 Nehru, A.  32 Nehru, J.  9, 23, 29, 30, 78, 115, 116, 119, 150, 165, 172n. 5 neo-Hinduism  8, 171n. 5 Nietzsche, F.  7, 13, 103, 104, 107, 108, 153, 158, 160, 164, 182n. 7 Nigam, A.  116, 125 nihilism  11, 103, 110 nishkama karma  90 Nobili, R.  83, 84, 177n. 25 Nussbaum, M.  36, 171n. 7 Obama, B.  167 Oddie, G.  82, 83 Oedipalization  160 one-dimensional man, the  162 Pandey,  30 Pandian, M. S. S.  124, 126 Pannirselvam, R. B.  90 Pant, K. C.  27, 34 Pantham, T.  30 Parekh, M.  86, 174n. 2 parrhesia  11, 96, 109 participatory democracy  168, 169, 170 Pascal, B.  105 Paul, K. T.  88, 89, 90, 178nn. 37–9, 41 Peace of Augsberg, the  4, 63

Pecora, V.  4, 7, 13, 14, 15, 16, 22, 28, 167, 171n. 2, 183n. 12 Pillai, V.  84 Plato  103 pluralization of legitimacy  63–6, 75 pluralism  3, 22, 37, 38, 55, 73, 106, 108, 179n. 6 multicultural  38 religious  2, 27, 28, 37, 97, 98 Pocock, J. G. A.  70 political liberalism  92, 95, 149 political secularism  2–6, 44, 54 in Europe  4 political theology  14, 79, 83, 148 Popkin, R. H.  63 Popley, H. A.  88, 89, 178n. 37 populism  167 post-democracy  135 postdemocratic executive federalism  142 postmodernism  136, 137 postmodernity  135 postnational constellation  142 post-secular society  145 principled distance  51–5, 56, 58 see also value-based distance progressivism  167 Protestant Christianity  102 Protestant reformation  111 Protestantism  64, 90, 96, 102, 150 Punjab Native Church Council  82 Pussy Riot trial in Moscow, the  133 racism  46, 82 institutional  80–3 Radhakrishnan, S.  8, 29, 173n. 21 radical secularism  48 Rai, S.  157 Ramadan, T.  132 Ramayana, the  152, 153, 154, 157 Valmiki’s versus Madhusudan’s version  152, 181n. 5 Ramjanmabhumi movement, the  123 Ram-Prasad, C.  3 Rancière, J.  132, 179nn. 1, 4 Rao, A.  124 Ratzinger, J.  139, 142, 145 Rawat, R.  124, 126 Rawls, J.  95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 139, 149, 176n. 8 Political Liberalism  97 A Theory of Justice  97

Index Ray, R.  25, 31 redemption  101 Reder, M.  142 Reese-Schäfer, W.  132 Reformation,  Protestant  4 Reformation settlement, the  64 Renan, E.  166, 167 Rethinking Group, The  87 Rhys, J.  156, 159 Richard, H. L.  86 Riedl, M.  133, 146 RigVeda Samhita  85 ritual slaughter, Dutch-attempted legislation on  133 Roman Catholicism  43 Roover, J. de  24 Rorty, R.  103 Rousseau, J.-J.  139, 164, 183n. 13 Du contrat social  139 Roy, R.  8 Sahi, K.  34 Said, E.  151 Saint Augustine  108, 146 Saint Paul  84, 107, 108 Sangh Parivar, the  119 Sanskritic Hinduism  9, 83 Sanskritic theology  83 Sarkar, S.  30, 173n. 20 Sartre, J.-P.  158, 160 sati  37 Satthianadhan, W. T.  88 satyagraha  8 Schiller, F.  162 Schmidt, J.  142 Schmitt, C.  100, 133, 141, 163, 164, 176n. 8, 178n. 2 Political Theology  100 Schoolman, M.  141 scientific atheism  139, 140 second Prayer Book of Edward VI, the  65 secular, the  30, 78, 172n. 3, 175n. 1 secular distancing  62 secular liberalism  72, 73, 74 secular modernity  7 liberalism and  97–100 secular politics  16 secular states,  crisis of, the  39–41

207

secularism,  alternatives to  13–17 caste Hinduism and  121–5 as a Christian response to modernization  21 as culture  77–92 minority cultures  77–80 everyday lives of  125–7 genealogical understanding of  61–75 histories of  115–18 history, violence and  118–21 modern  9, 11 modes  171n. 3 Nandy’s understanding of  150 and national unity  29 and nationalism  8 political secularism  2–6 and religion  6–9 religion, violence and  9–12 Western  14 secularity  132, 179n. 6 eight meanings of  133 secularization  13, 23, 40, 41, 45, 68, 78, 96, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 144, 146, 149, 150, 163, 170, 172n. 5, 180nn. 1–2 Sedgwick, E. K.  155 selflessness  91 Sen, A.  16, 21, 24, 25, 173n. 13 Sen, A. K.  32, 33 Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, the  155 Shah, K. T.  26 Shah Bano case, the  3, 23, 32, 35, 36, 172nn. 7–8 Shah Bano debate (1986), the  21, 27, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 173n. 25, 174nn. 29, 34 shari’a law  74 Shaw, G. B.  156 Mrs. Warren’s profession  156 Saint Joan  156 Shiva Rao, B.  23, 25 Sikh defensiveness  15 Sikhism  43, 172n. 11 Singh, A.  144 Singh, V. P.  122 Sittlichkeit  162 Smith, A. D.  167, 179n. 5 Smith, D. E.  25, 27, 29, 121, 172n. 12, 173nn. 14, 17, 21, 175n. 5

208

Index

Smith, G.  84, 133, 134, 136 Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK)  84 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG)  81, 88 Spinner-Halev, J.  36, 172n. 7, 174nn. 33, 35 Srivastava, N.  125 state secularism  38, 78, 172n. 11 Stöckl, K.  141, 143 Strachey, L.  155 super-ego  168 Sutton, D.  9, 10, 12, 117 svaraj (self-rule)  8 Tagore, D.  8 Tagore, R.  89, 150 Tambiah, S.  2 Tamimi, A.  134 Taylor, C.  5, 7, 9, 10, 21, 28, 56, 61, 62, 69, 73, 75, 132, 133, 134, 144, 145, 148, 171nn. 2–3, 174n. 2, 175nn. 1–2, 176n. 8 ‘Modes of secularism’  61 Tehran hostage issue, the  48 Tejani, S.  115, 122 terrorism  9, 10, 11, 32, 95, 104, 115 theism  67, 69, 104, 105 Third Reich, the  15, 162, 167 Third Republic, the  149 Thompson, E. P.  78 Treaty of Versailles, the  166 Treaty of Westphalia, the  4 Trojan War, the  153 Turkish başörtüsü controversies  133 see also headscarves issue Turner, B. S.  40, 133, 136, 180nn. 6, 10 Tyagi, M.  31

Van Antwerpen, J.  7, 145, 171n. 2 Van Gogh, T.  40, 44, 133 murder of  133 Varshney, A.  33, 173n. 19 Vattimo, G.  103, 110, 134 Vazquez-Arroyo, A.  107 Vedas, the  155, 157 Veer, P. van der  2, 5 Vernacular Press Act  87 Villa, D. R.  104 Virgil  153 Aeneid  153 Virginia Statute, the  7, 67 Viroli, M.  109 Viswanathan, G.  5, 176n. 11 Vivekananda, Swami  8, 90, 155 Volk  167

untouchability  37, 50 Upadhyay, B.  86 Upadhyaya, P. C.  24, 114, 115, 122, 123

Ward, G.  73, 74, 75 Warren, M. A. C  77, 78, 79 Wars of Religion  10 Washington, G.  66 Weber, E.  149 Weber, M.  7, 13, 16, 102, 107, 109, 110, 138, 139, 144, 180n. 1, 183n. 10 Wenman, M.  9, 11, 13, 16, 171nn. 4, 6 West, C.  134, 139, 144 Westerlund, D.  39 White, H.  164 Whitehead, H.  82 Wilde, O.  155, 156 Williams, R.  74, 75 Wilson, D.  81, 84 Winter, R.  88, 177nn. 34–6 Woods, T.  138 Woolf, V.  155, 156, 158 A Room of One’s Own  156 World Missionary Conference  87 World Trade Centre, attack on  95 World War I  149, 177n. 33 World War II  132, 151

Vaishnavism  86 Valmiki  152, 154, 181n. 5 see also Ramayana value-based distance  55

Zachariah, B.  115 Zamindar, V. F.-Y.  117 Žižek, S.  11, 16, 104, 105, 164 Zweerde, E. van der  13, 14, 180n. 13