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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2010
In the early 1960s, Donald Smith's India as a Secular State questioned the credentials of the Indian state's secularism. Since then the issue of what constitutes secularism in India has loomed large in Indian political thought. Like a number of other key categories in political history, such as nationalism, the debate has centred on the question whether the Indian state's version of secularism is viable in its own right or not, and if it is viable, whether it extends the concept of secularism in new and innovative directions. The other possibility is to see this secularism as a “derivative discourse” (to adopt a phrase from Partha Chatterjee), confusedly echoing Western notions of secularism, with the caste and communal complexities of Indian society and the structuring role of religion in everyday life at odds with any coherent or recognisable notion of secularism.
1 Smith, Donald Eugene, India as a Secular State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), chap. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Taylor, Charles, “Modes of Secularism”, in Bhargava, Rajeev, ed., Secularism and Its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31–70, 32–4Google Scholar. These standard definitions of secularism are contested by Talal Asad in his wide-ranging and incisive Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
3 Partha Chatterjee, “Secularism and Tolerance”, in Bhargava, Secularism and Its Critics, 345–79.
4 Part IV of the Indian Constitution (Articles 36–51) provides the Directive Principles of State Policy. These principles outline ideals the state should strive for, and certain rights the state should aim to secure by the regulation of its legislative and administrative policy. The Directive Principles also include directions to the legislature and the executive with regard to the state's exercise of its legal and executive powers. These directives are not enforceable by the courts. If the government of the day fails to carry out the objects defined by these principles, no court can make the government ensure them. See Basu, Durga Das, Introduction to the Constitution of India (New Delhi: Prentice Hall, 1983), chap. 9Google Scholar.
5 For a useful discussion of India's legal pluralism see Rudolph, Susanne H. and Rudolph, Lloyd I., “Living with Difference in India: Legal Pluralism and Legal Universalism in Historical Context”, in Larson, G. J., ed., Religion and Personal Law in Secular India: A call to Judgement (Bloomington, IN: Bloomington University Press, 2001), 36–65Google Scholar. They argue for a more nuanced view, suggesting that the Uniform Civil Code has to be seen as a process, not an outcome, and that presenting the secular situation in India as a choice between such a code and personal law is “too sharp”. The Uniform Civil Code need not be incompatible with the existence and integrity of personal laws rooted in religion (54).
6 Although Srivastava deals with a number of literary works, she tends to focus on Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988), Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance (1997), Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1993), and, to a lesser extent, Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel (1989).
7 Upendra Baxi, “Siting Secularism in the Uniform Civil Code: A ‘Riddle Wrapped Inside an Enigma?’”, 267–93.
8 Gyanendra Pandey, “The Secular State and the Limits of Dialogue”, 157–76.
9 Flavia Agnes, “The Supreme Court, the Media, and the Uniform Civil Code Debate in India”, 294–315.
10 Shyam Benegal, “Secularism and Popular Indian Cinema”, 225–38.
11 Ravi S. Vasudevan, “Neither State nor Faith: The Transcendental Significance of the Cinema”, 239–63.
12 They point out that while José Cassanova focuses on instances of the resurgence of Christianity in the West, he also refers to the public resurgence of Islam as a prime example of the “deprivatization” of religion (34, n. 1). They also point out, though, that Islam is not seen as a problem for the West by all intellectuals (34–5, n. 6).
13 Shabnum Tejani, “Reflections on the Category of Secularism in India: Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the Ethics of Communal Representation, c. 1931”, 45–65.
14 Sunil Khilnani, “Nehru's Faith”, 89–103.
15 Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)Google Scholar.
16 Paula Richman and V. Geetha, “A View from the South: Ramasami's Public Critique of Religion”, 66–88.
17 For an explication of this notion of the paralegal in political society in South Asia see Chatterjee, Partha, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
18 Partha Chatterjee, “The Contradictions of Secularism”, 141–56.
19 Sen, Amartya, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 69Google Scholar.
20 Mufti, Aamar, “Secularism and Minority: Elements of a Critique”, Social Text 45 (1995), 75–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Said, Edward, “Secular Criticism”, in idem, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983), 26, 29Google Scholar.
22 Gyan Prakash, “Secular Nationalism, Hindutva, and the Minority”, 177–88.
23 Gyanendra Pandey, “The Secular State and the Limits of Dialogue”, 157–76.
24 Romila Thapar, “Secularism, History, and Contemporary Politics in India”, 197–207. See also Pirbhai, M. Reza, “Demons in Hindutva: Writing a Theology for Hindu Nationalism”, Modern Intellectual History 5/1 (April 2008), 27–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a trenchant critique of how contemporary right-wing Hindu publications draw on colonial-era British and German indology for their construction of a Hindu “self” and a non-Hindu “Other”.
25 Arvind Rajgopal, “The Gujarat Experiment and Hindu National Realism: Lessons for Secularism”, 208–24.
26 Gauri Viswanathan, “Literacy and Conversion in the Discourse of Hindu Nationalism”, 333–55.
27 Sumit Sarkar, “Christian Conversions, Hindutva, and Secularism”, 356–67.
28 Aravamudan, Srinivas, Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 190Google Scholar.
29 Smith, India as a Secular State, 498–9, 351–6.
30 See the epigraph to Basu, Introduction to the Constitution of India.
31 I am thinking here of Singh's, Jaswant recent book, Jinnah: India–Partition–Independence (Delhi: Rupa, 2009)Google Scholar, and L. K. Advani's reported depiction of Jinnah as a committed secularist during his trip to Pakistan in June 2005.
32 The classic study here is Watt's, IanThe Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963)Google Scholar.
33 Cunningham, Valentine, Everywhere Spoken against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), chap. 9, 279Google Scholar; and Wright, Robert Glenn, The Social Christian Novel (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989)Google Scholar.
