Secularisation, once a key concept in debates
about modernisation and modernity, has received very little academic
attention over the last half century. In fact, it is often seen as a
subset of or engulfed within secularism, which has been central to
academic and political debates about democracy, nationalism and
contemporary politics. In this special issue, we focus on both in their
mutual interaction. It provides a mix of theoretically informed pieces
with detailed, contextualised research adding granularity to the
discussions by asking: Can secularisation happen without secularism?
Or
vice versa? What kinds of secularisation have specific versions of
secularism promoted? Have there been reversals in secularisation, or has
it been a largely linear process in south Asia?
Humeira Iqtidar (
humeira.iqtidar@kcl.ac.uk)
teaches politics at Kings College, London, the UK and Tanika Sarkar
(sumitsarkar_2001@yahoo. co.uk) teaches history at the Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi.
There is a particular urgency that this precise historical moment in
south Asia brings to our special issue. Religious nationalism of a
highly organised and violent kind seriously threatens minority lives and
beliefs in this part of the world, thus, rendering nuanced and critical
engagements with actually existing secularisms absolutely and
immediately imperative. The task is made difficult by a rather empty and
self-satisfied secularism that many parts of the West, as well as those
with political power in this part of the world, profess in the course
of their war against terror, which is but a thinly disguised undermining
of the beliefs and conduct of particular religions.
There is, simultaneously, a steady erosion of space for articulations
that may challenge or interrogate dominant religious interpretations or
even religious belief, per se. Historically, they have come not so much
from a blind adherence to western secularism – when was the West really
secular in that sense? – but from the anger of marginalised communities
like dalits impatient with hierarchies that divine authorities have
traditionally sanctioned. Periyar E V Ramasamy has been the one serious
philosopher of atheism in modern India, while Ambedkar’s neo-Buddhism,
according to some scholars, came close to the vanishing point of
religion. This compels us to reassess our stance towards secularisation
of areas of life, which does not in itself negate belief, but which may
stray away from an entirely religious explanation, or offer parallel and
plural explanations, or lead to an objectification of belief.
Secularisation, once a key concept in debates about modernisation and
modernity, has received very little academic attention over the last
half century. In fact, it is often seen as a subset of secularism, or is
engulfed within that concept. The closely related concept of
secularism, on the other hand, has been central to academic and
political debates about democracy, nationalism and contemporary
politics. In this special issue, we focus on both in their mutual
interaction. The contributions help gather, as well as go beyond, the
existing literature on these themes. They may also suggest points of
departure for the entire field.
South Asia has been particularly active in generating issues
intimately related to both themes. It has also produced rich,
many-layered and intense debates about them in the last few decades. We
bring together conversations among academics from India, Pakistan and
Bangladesh. For various organisational reasons, it was not possible to
bring in contributions from other parts of south Asia, especially from
Sri Lanka, as well as from Nepal, which has recently transitioned from
being a Hindu state to a secular one.
We propose that it is of immense value to separate out secularism and
secularisation, to think through the precise modalities in specific
contexts – not for arcane academic and theoretical debates, but for
important political purposes. Our understanding of the relationship
between secularism and secularisation has important implications for
political stance and arrangements, for our tolerance of vernacular
expressions, and for political projects that insist on safeguarding a
plurality of beliefs as well as of unbelief.
Discussions on secularism have also tended to proceed along two
slightly separate paths: broad, theoretical debates that do not engage
with the substantive elements of a specific context, or deeply
contextualised analyses that shy away from theoretical contributions.
This special issue provides a mix of theoretically informed pieces with
detailed, contextualised research adding granularity to the discussions
by asking: Can secularisation happen without secularism? Or vice versa?
What kinds of secularisation have specific versions of secularism
promoted? Have there been reversals in secularisation, or has it been a
largely linear process in south Asia?
Revisiting the Debate
Rajeev Bhargava builds upon Indian experiments with secularism to
suggest that we should not “misrecognize virtue as vice”. Indian
secularism’s attempt to bring together individual and community rights
is, he suggests, not a weakness, but precisely the kind of contextual
secularism that moves beyond doctrinal positions to contain the
hegemonic and undemocratic impulses in religious structures, while not
condemning religion itself. Whether this can be done or not remains open
to debate, since any such attempts will no doubt contain scope for much
contention on the very basics: what counts as “democratic” in a
particular situation? Does release from one lead to another kind of
oppression? What form of oppression is worse than the others?
Nevertheless, the ideal of “contextual secularism” is a step closer to a
workable model and a useful move away from the complete abandonment of
secular principles that characterises some critiques of secularism.
The relationship between secularism and secularisation is also a much
less rigid one for Bhargava. One may not lead to the other or, indeed,
be linked in any clear manner. The key distinction for him is that
secularisation in Europe, at least, “was not launched as a programme of
collective action”, while secularism very emphatically has to be “a
collective normative project”. How this normative project will come to
be owned at a broad level in society is something that he does not
engage with explicitly. Implicitly, however, his argument seems to rest
on a vision of a state and political agents bound by a constitution
that, in the Indian context at least, has allowed productive ambiguities
to support religious life, while remaining resistant to complete
domination by undemocratic impulses within the different religious
traditions of India.
Sudipta Kaviraj’s reading, in this collection, of Rajeev Bhargava’s
distinction between ethical and political secularism renders ethical
secularism closer to secularisation, inasmuch as it is about an
“attitude” towards beliefs rather than a political arrangement. Bhargava
does not draw this out explicitly, but Kaviraj goes some way in
exploring the implications of an attitude towards belief – not just the
belief itself. In a nuanced elaboration of the differences as well as
the similarities in their understanding of the relationship between
secularism and secularisation, Kaviraj proposes that both T N Madan and
Ashis Nandy were right – albeit more harsh than was necessary – in
claiming that secularism and secularisation were out of step in India.
Madan’s proposition that, given the lack of secularisation in India,
secularism was an imposition by a small elite doomed to stay out of
touch with the inherent religiosity of the masses, was matched by
Nandy’s implicit claim that secularisation is neither inevitable nor
inherent in modernity. While Kaviraj discusses some important
limitations in Madan’s understanding of secularisation in Europe, the
most critical limitation to both Madan and Nandy’s analysis is that they
both underestimate the polyvalence in “tradition” and “modernity”.
Here, Kaviraj uses Bhargava’s distinction productively to explore how
both a “traditional” Hindu and a “modern” Hindu in Tagore’s novel
Gora could lead towards having similar political arrangements, even when their points of departure were radically different.
However gently delivered, Kaviraj’s critique of existing criticisms
of secularisation in India is scathing at two important levels. By
pointing to a fundamental misreading of “tradition” in Nandy and Madan’s
analysis of both Indian and European societies, Kaviraj undercuts the
force of their arguments by showing that within “tradition” may lie many
a possibility for completely different futures. More usefully, his
reading of Tagore goes some way towards opening an approach to
secularisation that can be enthusiastic about the implications without
assuming a singular path to the process.
Partitions and Secularisation
Joya Chatterji’s paper in this collection highlights some of these
tensions in a granular and closely historicised discussion of the
debates between Pakistani and Indian diplomats right after Partition.
Building on Rawl’s notion of “overlapping consensus”, Chatterji
demonstrates how the elite diplomats who were part of the Calcutta
Committee made conscious decisions to set aside deeply dividing concerns
of religious identity and focused instead on operationalising the
partition of India. More critically, she provides a perceptive and sharp
articulation of how a class habitus comes into play in such situations
of emergency, to argue that a kind of secularisation was enacted and
embodied in this period that is not acknowledged in academic research.
At the same time, her rendering allows us to see secularisation as a
much more fragmented and fragile process than is generally imagined.
Pre-empting a possible critique that this was a very limited form of
secularisation which did not permeate down to other parts of the state
machinery, Chatterji then discusses the example of protocols agreed
between police officers in the contested area of Kutch, to show how
elite decisions or decisions in one part of the system do tend to travel
elsewhere, albeit in precarious ways. This paper highlights not just
important limitations to assuming a wide-ranging pervasiveness to
nationalist and religious identities, but also foregrounds the
theoretical limitations of secularisation theory.
Secularisation is often presented as a one-time event, a relatively
permanent result of a linear trajectory to modernisation that once
achieved is hard to dislodge. Chatterji, on the other hand, shows how
secularisation can also be a fleeting and fragmented process – one that
may permeate some aspects of social and political life, but not all, and
may resonate in some contexts more strongly, but not equally in all.
The details that Chatterji provides in her paper of the conversations
which took place during the Calcutta meeting are fascinating for the
ways in which class interests and habitus seem to override religious and
nationalist concerns. She is careful to insist that this cannot be seen
outside the specific context, nor as an aberration only but as another
space in which the partition of India played out. This is, then, as
important a venue, and these players as critical, in understanding the
future trajectories of the two countries and their relationship with
each other as the many who lived the partition in much more tumultuous
ways.
A later and no less acrimonious separation, that of Bangladesh from
Pakistan, haunts Samia Huq’s paper about the Bangladeshi state’s
attempts at managing religion. She moves away from teleologically
determined notions of secularism and secularisation to explore
Bangladesh’s aspirations to the secular through a look at the Islamic
Foundation of Bangladesh – a semi-autonomous religious entity that
describes its purpose as “research, publication and expansion of Allah’s
one and only chosen complete code of life in order to enrich the lives
of majority of the country’s population according to the beneficent
stream brought by Islam”. She brings to the fore not just the
transformations within the Islamic Foundation itself, but also the
differential readings of Islam supported by the Bangladeshi state at
different historical junctures and their impact on secularisation within
the country.
The inclusion of secularism as one of the pillars of the newly formed
Bangladeshi state in 1971 was operationalised through a vision of
secularisation that entailed the banning of religious parties. Not only
was this useful for keeping the Jamaat-e-Islami out of the space of
legitimate politics – this, after the treacherous role the party had
played during Bangladesh’s war of independence, was critical – but it
also allowed a transcendence beyond religion to Bangladeshi politics.
Huq pays close attention to the writings and ideas of Abul Hashim,
one time ideologue and head of the Islamic Foundation during Ayub’s era
who espoused a modernist vision of Islam. Abul Hashim’s close
association with the Ayub regime has tainted later readings of his role,
but Huq shows skilfully how his reading of Islam allowed for a more
capacious understanding of the self, polity and religious duty.
Huq’s innovative and careful reading pays several kinds of dividends.
First, this exploration of Abul Hashim’s thought is part of a growing
body of academic literature on political thought from non-western
contexts that highlight the continuous and creative entanglement between
the West and the non-West over the last few centuries. Second, she
sensitises us to the compulsions created by a hermeneutic approach. The
current version of the Islamic Foundation, which garners much support
from the Bangladeshi government, Huq argues, actually fosters a narrower
conception of Islam and the relationship of Muslims with non-Muslims.
This, in spite of the fact that the party in government is committed to a
version of secularism that espouses, at least at the level of rhetoric,
rights for minorities and non-Muslims in the Muslim majority state of
Bangladesh. In contrast, Abul Hashim’s approach privileged
ijtehad, and the rights of other human beings,
huquq-ul-Ibad,
over ritualistic practice. Third, this analysis allows us a comparison
between two avowedly secular regimes in Bangladesh, one under General
Ayub (when it was East Pakistan), and the other, Sheikh Hasina’s regime
today. Rather than the usual comparisons between professedly secular or
non-secular regimes, this analysis allows us a glimpse into the
permutations possible within the “secular”.
De-secularisation
Taking a broad look at moments in Pakistan’s history where the
“distance between the supposedly separate spheres of religion and
secular life” was effaced, Sadia Saeed proposes that de-secularisation
offers a useful frame for understanding these developments. She contends
that rather than Islamisation, which implies the increasing use of
Islamic norms and values for policymaking, or counter-secularisation,
which is a very problematic process for democratic functioning, the term
desecularisation is useful because it retains the same features as
secularisation: contingent and creative change instituted through
exigencies of state formation and political processes. Like
secularisation, it can unfold at either the state or the societal level.
Saeed focuses on a few moments that put religious minorities at a
disadvantage, whether in symbolic terms, such as a choice of design for
the Pakistani flag that would be more inclusive, or in practical terms,
such as the 1984 Ordinance that prohibited Ahmadis from proclaiming any
of the activities reserved for “Muslims” as their own. This included the
call to prayers (
Azan) as well as the right to call their place
of worship a mosque. What Saeed seems to suggest implicitly, too, is
that such a notion of de-secularisation carries many of the same
dilemmas that the concept of secularisation did. For instance, the
notion of de-secularisation may indicate that the past was less overtly
religious than the present, much like secularisation theorists assumed
that the European past was more religious than many contemporary
historians believe it had been (Casanova 1994; Gauchet 1997). Certainly,
the history she lays out alerts us to another common feature of both
de-secularisation and secularisation: their fragmented, incomplete
unfolding and ongoing contestations in Pakistan.
In working through the specifics of not the state as a whole, but
certain state-sanctioned institutions concerned with conservation of
heritage sites, Hilal Ahmed looks into the ways in which a very
“India-specific” notion of secularisation may be worked out in a
particular instance. He focuses on the controversy between The
Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central
Wakf Board (UPSWB) regarding the management of the Taj Mahal. The Taj
Mahal, built as a mausoleum by the emperor Shah Jahan for his wife
Mumtaz Mahal, also contains within the building complex a mosque and
some other buildings. It is the use of the mosque by the local community
as a site of religious worship in a site otherwise declared a “secular”
national monument that raises conflicting claims of ownership by
different bodies. The ASI emphasises the “secular” nature of a protected
national monument, while the Wakf board is committed to retain the
mosque as a site of religious ritual. The reasons for the controversy
are not self-explanatory, and neither was the controversy inevitable.
The ASI had managed the Taj Mahal since colonial times, and while local
Muslims had had varying levels of access to the mosque, the controversy
did not arise at a moment of unusual religious observance at the mosque.
Ahmed’s paper shows once again the many complications brought about
by the state’s management of religious practice in various mundane
spaces. While not explicitly articulated as such by Ahmed, the
controversy seems to be a product of a particular moment in Indian
history where the process of “monumentalisation” comes into some
contradiction with the increased political ambitions of the UPSWB to
“represent” some Muslims at least.
Overview
In her bibliographical essay, Mohita Bhatia provides a useful
overview of the way the place of religion in public and private life in
south Asia has been approached by scholarly studies, particularly in the
last few decades. Some of them have not been concerned explicitly with
understanding the processes of secularisation, but with discussions of
religion. It is clear that many of the studies she refers to do not
explicitly disentangle secularisation specifically, but taken together
their impact is towards opening religion up as a more fluid, pluralised
and internally contested category. While that in itself does not lead to
secularisation, this re-evaluation of the definition and role of
religion significantly undermines the tenets of mainstream
secularisation theories that often have built upon monolithic
definitions of religion. Many of the studies that Bhatia details
recognise that fuzzy boundaries and chaotic slippages operate between
one religion and the other, as well as between the “religious” and the
“secular”. While there is little consensus about the precise definition
of secularisation, it does seem certain that the interest in redefining
religion will have important consequences for how it is understood.
We support the move away from a reductive analysis of religion and
its relationship to everyday life as well as political and economic
structures. There seems to be a need for future debates about what
precise place to accord religion, as one, but not the only, vocabulary
and field where all kinds of social relations and change – tolerant and
progressive, as well as oppressive ones – can work themselves out. More
importantly, we need to evaluate carefully whether secularised areas of
life that have cleared themselves of belief are sustainable or necessary
as important dimensions of life, existing within deeply religious
societies, without seeming to have come from a western inspiration as a
mimetic effort. Hopefully, the issue will suggest new directions in our
understanding of these matters.
References
Casanova, Jose (1994):
Public Religion in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Gauchet, Raymond (1997):
The Disenchantment of the World: Political History of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
