Robert D. Baird, “Religion and Law in India: Adjusting to the Sacred as Secular,”

Robert D. Baird, “Religion and Law in India: Adjusting to the Sacred as Secular,” in Religion and Law in Independent India 2nd ed., Robert D. Baird, ed., 7-34 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005).

SUMMARY: The goal of this paper is to look at the place of law and religion, examines “traditional views that frequently come into conflict with The Constitution of India and the laws that are enacted by Parliament intending to implement that Constitution. Discusses the historical use of Manusmriti (8-12), the difference between that and India’s Constitution (15-16), the Constitution’s conflict with religion—that they are both opposing ideologies (18-19). Looks at legal developments in Parliament’s legislation: the Hindu Code Bill (19), the implications of Article 44 (19-20), the different schools of religious law in 1947 (20), the Constituent Assembly debate over Article 44 (20-22), the history of the Hindu Law Committee (22-23), and the arguments for the Hindu Code (23-24). Looks at legal decisions in the courts: the problem with the definition of religion versus secular (24-26), ending the idea that gods can own (26-27), their rulings on archakas (27-28), on excommunication (28-30), their “reification” of religions (30-32), how it deals with the inherent contradictions in the Constitution (32-34). Baird concludes by saying that the Indian government uses “religion” to interpret other “religions” (34).

7-“In traditional societies such as India, what we term religion is not seen so much as one aspect of society, but rather basic to all of society.”

-“The Constitution of India is less a consensus document than a document that was forged by an educated elite, strongly influenced by the ideology of the Enlightenment, and guided by influential spokespersons such as B.R. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru. More traditional voices were heard, but with notable exceptions, it was the voice of the Enlightenment that emerged victorious. This voice sought to protect minority points of view and diverse religious traditions. But inherent in that attempt at protection was the need to compel traditional points of view to give up parts of their traditions in order to provide opportunities for previously disenfranchised people.”

-AIM: to look at the place of law and religion, examines “traditional views that frequently come into conflict with The Constitution of India and the (8) laws that are enacted by Parliament intending to implement that Constitution.”, and so “we will deal with some basic principles of Manusmrti, or The Laws of Manu, as it is commonly known.”

-Manusmriti: “It is unlikely that this text was ever implemented in its entirety. In fact, it contains principles, and then offers alternatives when those principles are violated. That is an acknowledgement that it was not fully implemented…Furthermore, Manusmriti embodies an attempt on the part of the Brahmans…to capture power from the kshatriyas…for themselves by making them the authority for legal and moral issues.”, and W. Doniger [in The Laws of Manu] says that “other ancient legal texts were more widely used in legal circles.”, but Derret and Lingat [Religion, Law and the State] “hold that during the British period, Manusmriti, in conjunction with the commentaries, was widely used by jurists.”, and Doniger says in colonial India, “’Hindu Law’, or dharma shastra, was applied to nearly 80 per cent of the population of colonial India in matters of marriage and divorce, legitimacy, guardianship, adoption, inheritance, religious endowments, and so on. And in present-day India, Manu remains the basis of the Hindu marriage code, as it defines itself vis-à-vis Muslim or secular (governmental) marriage law.” [Direct quote from Doniger]



9-according to the Manusmriti it is divinely sanctioned (as opposed to sanctioned through experience or discussion), and laws are “eternally binding upon humankind”, and so in it “religion and law are inextricably bound together”, and so the law is also divinely sanctioned—“In modern times this has been the primary obstacle to forming a uniform Civil Code as called for in Article 44 of The Constitution of India.”
10-in it, “justice is served when every person or group does his or her duty and is treated appropriately in the light of the way the universe inherently is. Manu’s universe is not one in which everyone is created with equal abilities or opportunities. Moreover, it is a universe that speaks to duties rather than rights [for each group]…When these duties are realized, justice is achieved.”

-“The four classes (varnas) emerge from the body of God, and are therefore part of the creative act and part of the world as it comes from the Creator.” [PROB: not, like medieval Xnty], (11) “Each person’s duty is matched with his or her creative nature and…If they fail to do so and if punishment is require, that also is applied unequally.”

12-“The doctrines of karma and rebirth permeate the history of Indian religion.” And so they are “connected to legal materials. They do not widely modify law and punishment, but they do supplement such matters by holding that punishments from one life to another argument punishments that kings are expected to impose for crimes committed.” [PROB: not, diff than xnty]



14-looks at legal developments in independent India in terms of the Constitution (enacted by the Constituent Assembly in 1949); (15) in it, “India maintained its intent to be a secular state and Muslims who remained in India were represented in the Assembly. Indian Muslims today constitute the second largest body of Muslims in the world, second only to Indonesia.”, in the Constitution, there is no prohibition on conversion though there was debate over it in the Assembly, because Muslims and Christians argued that it was part of what it meant to be Muslim and Christian [cf Smith India as a Secular State ch. 6]

15-“B.R. Ambedkar, a former untouchable, who was educated at Columbia University (U.S.), chaired the Assembly and exerted considerable influence over it. The Constitution of India is, with few exceptions, a modern human rights document…unlike Manusmriti, constitutional [sic] this justice is based on the principle of equality. This equality extends to all men irrespective of caste, and to women in the same way as to men…[and] makes special provisions for those who have been the objects of past discrimination in order to seek a level playing field for all Indians. Article 17 abolishes untouchability and Article 16 (4) provides for the possible reservation of positions for persons in ‘backward classes.’”; and “in contrast with Manusmriti, seeks justice in this life. The doctrines of karma and rebirth are not denied, nor are they affirmed…Moreover, whatever retribution is enacted for those who violate these principles has to be enacted by a duly elected Parliament and is not left to one’s karma for punishment.”, and “While Manusmriti dealt with dharma or duty, the Constitution deals with rights. One member of the Constituent Assembly pointed this out and suggested that in addition to a section of ‘Fundamental Rights” there be a section of “Fundamental Duties.” That was never included. Moreover, (16) while Manusmriti claims the divine for its authority, The Constitiution…does not mention that realm. Elsewhere, I identified the ultimate values whereby Jawaharlal Nehru legitimated his notion of the secular state. Those values were that his view was rational and scientific, Indian, and modern. [cf Baird Essays in the History of Religions v.11, p.133]…These principles were basic for Nehru in that they were not in need of justification, but rather were used to justify other decisions. In his speech moving the Objectives Resolution at the Constituent Assembly, he stated ‘…we adhere to certain fundamental propositions which are laid down in this Declaration. These fundamental propositions, I submit, are not controversial in any real sense of the word. Nobody challenges them in India and nobody ought to challenge them, well, we shall accept that challenge and hold our position.’ [direct quote from Nehru Independence and After, emphasis added by Baird]”; plus “The modern human rights orientation is asserted in the preamble to the Constitution.” --Eg: “We, the people of India…resolved…to secure all its citizens: justice…liberty…fraternity…”

18-the fact that there are “restrictions on the otherwise free exercise of ‘religion’ constitute an admission that a conflict exists. It suggests that the Constitution may well be in conflict with traditional religious practices…In cases where a conflict…arises, religious change becomes a necessity for religious survival. But survival can only be partial can only be partial, as the conflicting tradition is modified so as to ease the grounds for conflict.”; “one of the devices for handling religious conflict is through the categories of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular.’ According to the Constitution, life can be divided into these two all-encompassing categories. It is the category of ‘religion’ that is granted freedom. But over against ‘religion’ is the ‘secular’ for which the same degree of freedom is not provided. Sometimes the realms of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ are closely related or even overlap, but it is the view of the Constitution that they ought not be confused. The very used of these categories is strikingly modern, and it is modernity that necessitates religious change.” And neither Hindu nor Muslim traditions considered “’religion’ as a segment of existence. Even the Supreme Court recognizes this to have been the case…’Sometimes practices, religious and secular, are inextricably mixed up. This is more particularly so in regard to Hindu religion because as is well known, under the provisions of ancient Smritis, all human actions from birth to death and most of the individual actions from day to day are regarded as religious in character.’ [direct quote from Shri Govindlalji v. State of Rajasthan 1963]

19-“Since the Constitution and the more traditional ways of looking at life are ideologies that involve ultimate values, they are both to that extent religious. [cf Baird Category Formation and the History of Religions] These categories, then, are not only a means for handling religious conflict and religious change, but are at the same time part of the religious system whose survival is constitutionally assured. Hence it is determined that religious conflict is handled through categories contained in one of the two conflicting ideologies. The categories of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ have become axiomatic, so that neither side of litigation is able to deny or question the categories themselves. The categories are given sanction as part of the ideology of the Constitution. Once the legitimacy of these two categories is no longer questioned, certain activities can be relegated to the ‘secular,’ thereby being cut off from the constitutional provisions for ‘religious’ freedom.”; “Law for the modern Indian state, then, departs rather significantly from Indian traditional thought. That departure is embodied in the Constitution. While the Constitution has been amended on numerous occasions by Parliament, it is that Constitution enacted into law and understood by the Supreme Court that is basic to understanding religion and law in independent India.”



-looks at legal developments in terms of “legislation by Parliament”; “During the years 1955-56, Parliament passed a number of laws that are referred to as the ‘Hindu Code Bill.’ The scope of this legislative endeavor as well as the discussion that surrounded it demonstrated that the overriding issue was the secularization of law. The religious sanction of personal law which is found in Manusmriti continues into the modern period. This results in the claim that personal laws are part of religious traditions, whether one is considering the majority Hindu tradition(s) or the India Muslim tradition(s).”

-“Article 44 of the Constitution reads: ‘The State shall endeavor to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.’ This article is included in Part IV of the Constitution titled ‘Directive Principles of State Policy.’ The articles in this Part are advisory for Parliament, but if not fulfilled, are not judiciable. Article 44 is based on the assumption that the Indian (20) secular state requires the secularization of law—that civil law should be the same for all Indians in order that nation building can continue and that all persons can be welded together equally into a modern Indian state. This requires that traditional religious expressions become modified so that they are more and more a matter of personal faith, and that the state mold a modern civil code based on justice in terms of equality…If Articles 25 and 26 secularized social reform, economics and politics, Article 44 necessitates the secularization of law.”

20-in 1947, laws in India concerning “marriage and divorce, inheritance, and join property” varied between religions and within Hindusim; “The Dhayabhaga School was dominant in Bengal and Assam, and the Mitakshara school, along with its four subdivisions prevailed throughout the rest of India. Likewise, Muslim law operated under irreconcilable diversity.” [cf Mahmood An Indian Civil Code and Islamic Law]

-All the 5 Muslims that spoke at the Constituent Assembly concerning Article 44 opposed it, that (21) these matters are religious and “must be regulated with the consent of the religious groups to which they apply” and though one of them acknowledged that for Muslims marriage is a contract and not a sacrament, it is still a religious tradition; but “K.M. Munshi finally spoke for the article and it was his point of view that carried the day. He reminded Muslim speakers that Articles 25 and 26 already regulated the secular activities associated with religious practice and made room for social welfare and reform. As he saw it, Article 44 merely adds the proposition that the personal law of the country should be united at such a time as Parliament thinks proper. As for the protection of minority rights, he throws back at the Muslim speakers the case of the khojas and Cuichi Memons. When the Shariat Act (1937) was passed, they followed certain ‘Hindu’ customs. But since they were Muslims, they were forced to abide by Shariat according to the will of the majority of the Muslims. Such codes, now as then, have to ask what is in the interest of the whole community, and a small segment cannot reasonably stand in the way of that. Singhvi continues by affirming that the intent of Article 44 is the separation of law from ‘religion.’ ‘We want to divorce religion from personal law, from what may be called social relations or from the rights of parties as regards inheritance or succession.” He holds that it is necessary to legislate in matters of personal law without actually interfering with ‘religion,’ even if that means a re-definition of ‘religion.’ [PROB: not, the implication of this is that ‘religion’ is no longer what secularism is not, it is only what secularism says it is] We are at a stage where we must unify and consolidate the nation by every means without interfering with religious practices. If, however, the religious practices in the past have been so constructed as to cover the whole field of life, we have reached a point where we must put our (22) foot down and say that these matters are not religion, that they are purely matters for secular legislation. This is what is emphasized by this article.’”; but Muslim law has never been changed by Parliament, while “hindu” law has



22-“On January 2, 1944, the government appointed a Hindu Law Committee under the chairmanship of B.N. Rau ‘for the purpose of formulating a code of Hindu law which should be complete as far as possible.’ The Committee of four, including Dr. Dwarkanath Mitler, a former judge of the Calcutta High Court, formulated a Draft Code, and on the basis of this they traveled to the major population centers of India to hear witnesses both for and against the proposed code. To their surprise, most of the witnesses were opposed to the Code on the grounds that it interfered with Hindu religion, i.e. involved the secularization of personal aw.”; Nevertheless, “the draft Hindu Code Bill was introduced into the Old Central Assembly in 1947 prior to the partition of India, but received such opposition that it was temporarily dropped. The bill was again debated on the floor of the Constituent (23) Assembly (legislative), but again, as a result of intense reaction, was dropped in September of 1951. But a new Parliament in 1955 and 1956 passed the substance of the Code in the form of four separate bills: Hindu Marriage Bill, Hindu Succession Bill, Hindu Minority and Guardianship Bill, and Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Bill. The debate that took place on these bills did not center on the secularization of law. By this time those who were opposed to codification because of the secularization of law saw that codification was inevitable so they attempted to effect what were to them desirable changes. As I argue in more detail elsewhere [“Gender Implications for a…” in Personal Laws in Modern India], most of the issues are issues that revolve around gender. They have to do with divorce, polygamy, the rights of widows to remarry, and the rights of women to inherit property. Throughout, the argument was offered that such changes in Hindu law merely gives to women the same rights that men already have.” And it outlawed polygamy

23-“The Hindu Code proposed to deal with all Hindus equally apart from caste. The division of society into four varnas, is in modern times ‘totally obsolete’ and highly objectionable. This was so obvious that no argument seemed necessary on its behalf. Law must be based on equality. Questions of monogamy, divorce, inheritance are treated as secular matters to be determined by the legislature in keeping with the principles of rationality, science, and social utility. While this is in principle true for Muslim law as well, political issues have forced Parliament to desist. Parliament has indicated it is open to codifying and reforming personal law for minority communities as well if it is asked to do so.”

-“It should come as no surprise to learn that these secular principles are affirmed by P.B. Gajendragadkar, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of India. According to Gajendragadkar, the secular state aims at the implementation of Article 44, the introduction of a uniform civil code throughout all of India. The Hindu Code was merely a step in that direction, while the government prepared Muslim public opinion for the acceptance of the secularization of Muslim family law as well.”, (24) Gajendragadkar said these family matters are “’secular’ in character and are outside the legitimate domain of ‘religion’ as contemplated by Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution” [direct quote from Gajendragadkar Secularism and the Constitution of India]

24-“in an earlier article, I showed that Nehru legitimated his view of the secular state on the unquestionable ground that [sic] is was modern, rational, scientific, and Indian. [cf “Religion and the Legitimation..” in Religion and the Legitimation of…] This is a continuation of the norms that appeared in the work of Hindu Law Committee. These values are also found in the ground for Gajendragadkar’s decision. The day is gone when one can appeal to ancient texts to settle legal matters. ‘It would be totally unscientific and unreasonable to go back to these ancient texts to find out how we should regulate our daily life today.’ [direct quote from Gajendragadkar The Hindu Code Bill]”; Gajendragadkar argues that the Hindu Code Bill should only be based on principles from the Constitution.; “In the end, then, the Hindu Code Bill was more than a systematic organization of Hindu law for all Hindus. It was also a reconfiguration of Hindu law on the principles of modernity.”



-looks at legal decisions in terms of Supreme Court decisions; (25) the definition is not in the Constitution and so “has been left to the courts, particularly the Supreme Court…if the Court says a certain practice is religious, then it is. Sometimes the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ are entwined as in the case of Mahant who by virtue of being the spiritual leader of a community exercises wide powers of property management. But here the Court did not hesitate to say that the administration of property is not religious but secular and therefore falls under potential government control.”

25-“The Supreme Court acknowledged that defining religion would be difficult if not impossible. [cf Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras V. Sirur Mutt, The Supreme Court Journal (S.C.J.) v. XXVI, 1954] But it was clear that the definition offered by the American Supreme Court in Davis v. Benson (13 U.S. 333@342) which centered on a Creator and the obligations that Creator imposed on his creation would not help in the Indian arena. To define ‘religion’ in a theistic manner would define Buddhists and Jains out of existence. Moreover, ‘religion’ is more than mere belief. ‘A religion may not only lay down a code of ethical rules for its followers to accept, it might prescribe rituals and observances, ceremonies and modes of worship which are regarded as integral parts of religion, and these forms and observances might extend even to matters of food and dress.’ [Direct quote from Madras v. Sirur Mutt]” ; in the Madras v. Sirur case, “the concept of ‘essentiality’ was introduced. The Court held that what was essential to a religion was to be determined ‘with reference to the doctrines of that religion itself.’ [direct quote] At first the Court seemed to say that it was the believers of a religion that would determine what was essential. Later it acknowledged that religions (26) are not usually monolithic and that the Court would have to make the determination. In the end the Court was unable to offer a definition of ‘religion’ and contended itself with determining whether specifications were religious as the circumstances demanded.”

26-“Although these categories have never been defined by the Courts, they are nevertheless used to resolve conflict. Sometimes a practice is considered unessential to a religion, while on other occasions the Court seems to act on its own advice in Panachand Gandhi v. State of Bombay [1954] that in difficult cases the ‘court should take a commonsense view and be actuated by considerations of practical necessity.’ [direct quote]”

-in Madras v. Sirur “it was held that the determination of what rituals were necessary in a temple was a ‘religious’ matter, but that the scale of expenses for the rituals was a ‘secular’ matter and could legitimately exist under governmental control.” [cf Digyadarshan R.R. Varu v. State of A.P. 1970], and when Sikhs contested this in Sardar Sarup Singh v. State of Punjab 1959] the Court upheld their view



-“In Bira Kishore Deb v. State of Orissa [1964], it was argued that the Shri Jajannath Temple Act of 1954 deprived the Raja of Puri of his personal property…The Court…maintained that the Act in no way limited the Raja in his ‘religious’ functions but only intended to regulate the ‘secular’ affairs of the temple. Section 15 (1) of the Act required that an appointed committee provide for the proper maintenance of worship in accord with the Record of Rights. The Court pointed out that there were two aspects to sevapuja. The one aspect has to do with the provision of the proper materials for the puja and (27) this is a ‘secular’ matter.”; “It seems clear that it is the committee that decides what is demanded by the Record of Rights and not the prest or servant…since this is intended as guarantee of ‘religious’ integrity, held the Court, it cannot be an interference with ‘religion.’ But what the adya sevak is left with is the performance of duties mandatory upon him as determined by the committee in the light of the Record of Rights. Hence the determination of duties which are ‘religious’ in accord with the Record of Rights is not itself a ‘religious’ determination…So the ‘secular’ management of the temple includes not only the financial matters but also the determination of the ‘religious’ rites demanded by the Record of Rights.”

27-“Several petitions representing Vaishnava and Saivite temples in Tamil Nadu contend that the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (Amendment) Act (1970) infringed upon their ‘relgiious’ rights in doin away with the hereditary rights of succession to the office of archaka (pujari-priest) in their temples.” [cf Seshammal and others v. State of Tamil Nadu (1972)], they said it violated Article 26(b), and that hereditary succession was essential to their religion; the Court reviewed the Agamas and agreed that having someone from another denomination would defile the image, but the Court rejected the (28) idea that hereditary succession was essential. What was essential was that the image not be polluted.” And that the hereditary principle was not “religious,” but “common usage”, plus this was supported for the Court by the fact that “any lay founder of a temple can appoint a priest”, so even though “what the archaka did in the temple in his function as pujari was ‘religious,’ the appointment of archaka and the matter in which it was done was a ‘secular matter…”

28-in Saifuddin Saheb v. State of Bombay (1962), “The issue at stake was whether the Bombay Prevention of Excommunication Act (1949) was in conflict with Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution…An earlier case [from 1948] had determined that it was within the power of the Dai [a Shia leader] to excommunicate. The petitioner argued that the practice of excommunication was essential, for without it the purity and continuity of the denomination could not be safeguarded by removing persons unsuitable for membership.”, (29) but some in the Court said it wasn’t essential, that it was “secular” and affected people’s civil rights; “In his minority judgment, Sinha, C.J., interprets the Act as the culmination of the history of social reform which began with provisions of the Bengal Code which were later incorporated in the Caste Disabilities Act of 1850…[He also] introduced a slightly different category. Instead of merely speaking of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular,’ he referred to excommunication as not being ‘purely religious’ or ‘wholly religious.’…When an Act is not ‘purely religious’ this means that there are civil consequences to the activity under consideration, not was he interested in distinguishing what they might be. He was responsible for making a judgment about actions touching on the civil rights of members of the community. Since excommunication treated the excommunicated much as a pariah, and since the Constitution abolished untouchability, the Act is valid.”, But even though this kept with the ideology of the Constitution, the Constitution also grants communities the right “to regulate themselves in matters of ‘religion.’ It was for this reason that the majority of the Court judged the Act unconstitutional.” And said excommunication was essential, and (30) one judge who has this view ignores the “civil rights” issu—“They are secondary and not his concern”—so both sides had to ignore the other side; the categories of “religious” and “secular” are “inadequate”



30-“one device used when the categories are inadequate to handle the conflict without assistance is what might be called reification. Reification is the treatment of an historical process characterized by diversity and change as a single objective entity. In the study of religion it is the treatment of ‘Hinduism,’ ‘Buddhism,’ and the like, as units of thought and practice. [cf Baird Category Formation and the History…] Where there exists a conflict between the religious claims of a community and the Constitutional ideology, the Court has used reification in aid of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular.’ This method is apparent in M.H. Quareshi v. State of Bihar [1958] contesting the constitutionality of three acts for the prevention of cow slaughter, the petitioners argued that their fundamental rights under Article 25 of the Constitution were abridged…The petitioners claimed that this was enjoined in the Holy Qur’an, but the Court contended that the verse referred to merely stipulated that people should pray and offer sacrifice. Operating under a reified concept of (31) Islam, the Court made a search for a scriptural statement making the sacrifice of a cow obligatory. A lack of obligatoriness would suggest that the practice was not essential to Muslim faith…their custom was not sufficient. By treating Islam as a reified entity and considering the petitioners as Muslims, their specific contemporary practices could be ignored…and since it was not essential it was not protected under Article 26 of the Constitution.”

31-“Another concept which takes the Court beyond the categories of ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ is superstition. Gajendragadkar, J., used this concept in Durgah Committee v. Hussain Ali [1961]. There he stated that an historical community might sincerely believe that a practice is essential to their religion when it is merely a superstitious accretion. In Yagnapurushdasji v. Muldas [1966], this concept plays a more decisive role in his decision. The issue was whether the temples of the Swaminarayan Sampradaya sect come under the Bombay Hindu Places of Public Worship Act (1956), since the appellants contended that they were not Hindus but a separate religion. At the end of a lengthy consideration of the nature of Hinduism and the tenets of the Swarminaryan Sampradaya sect it was concluded that they were Hindus. Of some importance was the fact that the sect had not objected to being so classified in Census reports… Gajendragadkar, J., held that although the contention of the sect began in sincerity, it was founded on…(33)’superstition, ignorance, and complete misunderstanding of the true teaching of Hindu religion and of the real significance of the tenets and philosophy thought by Swaminarayan himself.’[Direct quote]” –this was reification: “First, there was a determination of the essential tenets of Hinduism. Since the appellants contended they were not Hindus, it was also necessary to find out what the Swaminarayan sect ought to believe if it were true to its founder. The result of the Court’s research was that, although the appellants were sincere in their contention, they did not properly understand their own faith.” And this was equated with superstition and ignorance

32-“In Venkataramana Dvaru v. State of Mysore [1958], the Gowda Saraswat Brahman sect contended that the Madras Temple Entry Authrization Act (1947)…was a violation of Article 26(b)…They hel that who was entitled to participate in temple worship was a matter of ‘religion.’ Admitting the precedent that ‘religion’ includes practices as well as beliefs, the Court proceeded to determine whether exclusion of a person from a temple was a matter of ‘religion’ according to ‘Hindu ceremonial law.’ The Court observed that along with the growth of temple worship, there also grew up a body of literature called Agamas…One such text includes degrees of participation”, and (33) based on that text, the Court at first thought that this meant low castes could be within viewing distance, but it was brought up that “In a 1908 case, Sangkarakinga Nadam v. Raja Rajeswara Dorai, it was agreed by the Privy Council that trustees who agreed to admit persons into the temple whom the Agamas did not permit were guilty of breach of trust. The Court agreed that temple entry was a matter of ‘religion.’” But then the Court admitted this conflicted with Article 25(2)(b) (opening all Hindu institutions to all classes), “Appeal was made to the ‘rule of harmonious construction’ whereby two conflicting provisions are interpreted in such a manner as to give effect to both. The Court then agreed to the opening of the temple to all classes of Hindus. The right of the denomination to exclude members of the public from worshipping in the temple, although protected under Article 26(b), must give way to Article 25(2)(b). This does not mean that anyone can go into any part of the temple at anytime. Hence the denomination was permitted the right to exclude the general public from certain religious services. The Court felt that it had given effect to both provisions in as much as even after the exclusions from certain religious services, ‘What is left to the public of the right of worship is something substantial and not merely the husk of it.’ [direct quote”, (34) “The judgment said, in effect, that traditional practices could not be maintained in their entirety because Article 25(2)(b) denied such practices….This case, then, admits the existence of a conflict between tradition and the new ideology, and it implements religious change.”



34-“I have called this ideology which distinguishes ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ a ‘New Great Tradition.’ [cf “Uniform Civil Code…” in Essays in the History of Religion] It is enshrined in the Constitution, embodied in legislation passed by Parliament, and enforced in the courts. Since independence there has been occasional opposition to it, none perhaps more threatening than the present opposition from the Hindu right. This segment of India is presently in power politically (2001), and some have called for a revision of the present Constitution. That proposal has itself been the object of considerable discussion. The argument is that under the existing Constitution, minorities have been favored over the majority community and that must charge.”—this is a “religious conflict” because “it is a conflict over the ultimate way one perceives the world.”, some see sacred as encompassing everything and some “seek to distinguish between ‘religion,’ and the ‘secular’ realms of the economy, society, politics, and law.”

Raminder Kaur, “Spectacles of Nationalism in the Ganapati Ustav of Maharashtra”

Raminder Kaur, “Spectacles of Nationalism in the Ganapati Ustav of Maharashtra” in Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India, Richard H. Davis ed. (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007), 206-241

SUMMARY: Article looks at the nationalist representations in mandap at the annual Ganapati festival in Mumbai and Pune. Categorizes the mandap (208), gives a history of the festival (209-211), describes the 6 kinds of nationalist (rashriya) displays (211-213). The rest of the essay is spent describing the 7 tropes used in the tableaux (214): first explains the use of religious themes in the tableaux (215-218); heroes (218-220); events (221-223); space (223-225); gender (225-228); the Other (228-230); progress (232-235); and anicononic emblems (236-238). The author ends by saying these types or “imagining” are different than the media’s type (239-241).

208-“This chapter considers the main features of…nationalist displays and performances.”, like those at the Mumbai Ganapati Ustav (festival) celebrating India’s independence anniversary, “Indigenously described as rashtriya (nationalist), such displays deal directly with issues to do with the nation—its history, present constituencies, crises, celebrations, and its hope for future prosperity and well-being. The tableaux can be presented in the form of a single vignette or, as…a masala display. Masala narratives invoke religious stories embroidered with the historical, social or topical, and then channeled into a nationalist narrative. For purposes of analysis—an act not removed from festival participants themselves—rashtriya displays can be segregated further into different kinds of nationalism, such as Hindu chauvinistic, “secular” and regionalist. Hindu chauvinist tableaux tend to prioritize the holiness and integrity of the nation and the Hindu religion. “Secular” ones tend to have the Congress predilection. They emphasize the brotherhood between all national religions, primarily, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity, although they posit external threats intent on breaking this bhai-bhai (brotherhood) situation. And regionalist displays refer specifically to a Maharastrian sense of heritage and cohesion. These versions of nationalism lie on a continuum where imagery and concepts to do with particular versions of nationalism seep into one another.”

209-in preparation for the festival, many various members of the community participate in constructing the pandal (canvass to protect visitors from monsoon rains) and the mandap (shrine) for Ganish/Ganapati, many local mandal (organizations) are also involved

-“The deity, Ganapati, is considered vighnaharta (the remover of obstacles), sukhakarta (one who makes happiness and peace), and dukhaharta (one who removes pain and sadness). The scribe of the Mahabharata embodies both wisdom and mischief. He is considered fearful and warrior-like yet benign and beneficent. Effectively, he is an ambivalent god, Ganapati’s devotees see him as lying on the threshold of the divine and mundane realms—a teller of mythical tales, but also a feature of much more earthly tales as shown by the elaborate festive tableaux. In several cases, as we shall see below, Ganapati’s characteristic as a remover of obstacles is vividly re-enacted in terms of his role in ‘removing’ evil from Indian society—whether it is in the form of colonialism, political shenanigans or other social ills.”

210-“The public (sarvajanik) festival was indeed the outcome of an emergent nationalist consciousness. From the 1890s, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and a number of other key community leaders, such as the Ayurvedic doctor Bhausaheb Rangari, were instrumental in politicizing the Ganapati ustav. When the British took over the Peshwa’s rule in western India in 1818, the festival was primarily a religious occasion confined to households and mandirs. From the 1890s, the celebrations were conducted on a grand public scale over a period of eleven days, along with ceremonies, lectures and debates on current issues. British colonial laws against political gatherings were circumvented with the use of a religious festival to publicly disseminate views against the ills of society—including colonialism.”



-“In recent years, nationalism has undergone catalytic change. Anti-colonial struggles embedded in the history of the sarvajanik Ganapati utsava have predisposed the festival to revivalism of nationalist ideals as well as it being part of a campaign for ‘public awakening’ (lokjagriti). The public circuits of media networks and collective gatherings provided a performative occasion to disseminate messages that were probably motivated but often veiled in religious allegories.”

-some have complained about the “’vulgarization’ of the festival—namely, the excessive commercialism, racketeering, and ‘obscene’ behaviour and dances during immersion processions. This was largely a middle-class response to what was seen as the increasing plebeianization of a religious festival. In 1986, newspaper-oriented competitions began to encourage festivals based on religiously and socially progressive grounds. Of these, the Girnar-Loksatta Ganeshotsava competition is one of the longest running, having been established in 1987. Organizers here advocated the principle of national integration through festival praxis, a theme that was adapted by other festival competitions. Centennial celebrations since 1992 recalled the festival’s glorious past during colonial times, when it was seen as having a progressive role to play without undermining its religious purpose to unite people with each other and with god.” Cf Kaur Performative Politics

-“Such project have been coterminous with the political agenda of the Hindutva brigade, particularly since the 1980s…(211)the festival was increasingly used to propagate ideas conducive to the Hindutva project. Topical matters were often filtered through Hinduitva-influenced narratives in mandap tableaux”, Therefore, “versions of the nation are played out in several ways in the festival context”, plus “contradictions and contestatory opinion unsettle overriding conclusions as to the festival’s character…the repertoire of images and themes is shared, but it is given a twist in accord with self- or group-interests. Tehre is a fine line between rashritya (nationalist) and rajnaitik (political) conduct. However, their ethical associations are distinct and, in the end, subject to partialities: to be seen as rashtriya is to be seen as selfless devotion to the nation, where as rajnaitik conduct is seen as self-interest and manipulative.”



-rashriya displays “are a significant component of a wide range of displays”, lists 6 kinds: 1) “religious or mythological” that depict stories of gods and goddesses, usually from the Mahabharata or Ramayana, (212) and Ganapati is sometimes palced in it; 2) historical (aitihasik)—recent historical events (Shivaji, Pshwa’s Court, British, etc); 3) “topical or ‘latest’”, current news; 4) “social” (samajik)—“public good or health-related themes”, environmental awareness, vaccinations, education, need for jobs, water conservation; 5) “theme-based”: Ajanta caves, Nine Planets, etc; 6) “Entertaining” or “commercial”, circus, dancers, etc

-sometimes they are combined; and if you look at cultural representations as indicating nationalism, then they all could be seen as nationalistic and therefore also (213) political, but “rashriya tableaux are still indigenously perceived as distinct from dharmik ones: the former clearly about the nation, the latter ostensibly about religious subject matter. Thus I do not directly consider tableaux depicting solely religious themes around the figure of Ganapati here, only so much as to acknowledge their potency in fueling an already ‘spiritualized culture’ of nationalism. [cf Kapferer Legends of People] The relevance of dharmik tableaux for nationalism in the contemporary festival is implicit due to the (re) constructions of the nation as a Hindu site. Re-presentations of versions of a more inclusive nation, although still articulated in the folds of a Hindu festival, correspond to festival participants’ notion of rashtriya tableaux. In the process, views of the nation are fetishized and eternalized; sacrifices for and veneration of the nation are encouraged and consistently maintained.”



213-“Nationalist ideas appear to be ubiquitous in contemporary India, as increased economic liberalization, media connections and international polity have led to the emergence of greater self-awareness and identity politics.” Which existed in colonial times but increased with growing media economic, and political networks [cf Kothari “Globalisation and Revival of Tradition”], and “narratives of modernity” are mixed with older images to adapt with the Indian context


214-“tropes through which the nation is visualized are premised on several interrelated themes”: 1) people idealized as heroes in struggle for sovereignty and democracy; 2) important events for national consciousness; 3) “representations of gender”; 4) “constructions of the Other”; 5) “presentations of space, nature and territory”; 6) “indices of national progress and modernization”; and 7) “aniconic emblems that evoke the national ideal”


215-“The majority of Hindu festival participants acquiesce with the hegemonic schema, particularly as representations of the nation, and indeed of Ganapati, tend to represent moral universes, and are believed to lie beyond contestation.”, though there are still different kinds of representations/interpretations [cf Richman “Epic and State: Contesting…” and Monkekar “Television Tales”] but there is a “’bounded’ range of innovations and negotiations” and none are copies of another; and even for a single display the creators (from the mandal president to the art director) have different ideas of its meaning, and human agency

216-and since the political ideas are mixed with ethics and other values, “the political can be sanctified” in colonial times nationalistic ideas had to be hidden but now nationalistic themes are free to be and are promoted, but political views are subsumed to the people appear as though they are putting society before self interest

-Ganapati is highly revered, seen as the “guarantor of justice” and “has come to symbolize the nation itself for festival participants>’, “Conversely, the nation—with its constellation of heroes and heroines, particular histories, achievements, heritage and perceived vulnerability inb the face of outside (217) threats—is considered as sacred and ineffable as the deity.” And is thus the “object of devotion” [direct quote from Kapferer], and the mandaps are then combined with “entertainment idioms” which also (218) give pleasure to the viewer



218-the heroic figures displayed include martyrs, freedom fighters, social workers and even sports and cultural icons “as they are deemed to contribute to the glory of the Indian nation on an international scale”; “As national status lends an air of divinity to the protagonists, their personal and political allegiances are leveled out so that they appear as ‘personalities without personalities’…they are essentially types without psychological individuality, hypostasized icons rather than realistic portraits.”, and while realistic portraits cause viewer to identify with the person, the icon status of these mandal doesn’t

219-and “historical figures” are used even if the user has different political allegiances (eg Shiv Sena and its mandal idolize Gandhi); but “there is perpetual cultural contestation” over these figures (eg some Hindutva groups praise Nathuram Bodse, Gandhi’s assassin) so there is a hierarchy of national icons

-and the figures have “valorized the notion of sacrifice”, the (220) “renouncer-in-the-world”; and people also represent ideals like “unity in diversity” and “soldier, farmer, scientist” (eg mother Theresa and Tilak, respectively)



221-iconic events are portrayed to show a place has a historical lineage (often pre-dating 1947) to create national identity; assassinations play important roles; (222) some religious tableaux show stories of a halcyon national past that becomes corrupted and is redeemed through events—and so this idealizes certain activities to help the nation succeed in its struggle against tyranny, (223) it’s an “invented golden age”; and contemporary issues are also included; (223)-also there are representatives of India’s land and landscape, with (224) the image of the state often anthropomorphosized and scarred or crying over various problems (Kashmir, famine)—(225) representations of nature are linked to “the sanctity of the country”

225-there are common gender prepresentations, “reinforced by latter-day Hindutva”, they show most often “masculine fighters” and “upstanding” females, though there are some exceptions; and men are shown as the products of tilling, (226) “the sons of soil” and women are shown as the tillers and sacred cow—opposed to the androgynous idea adopted by Gandhi “to defeat colonial dichotomies”—men are also associated with Ram, women with Sita—a testament to Chatterjee’s idea (in The Nation and its Fragments) that the inner/home spirituality is extended to make the homeland a sacred space; (227) plus women’s issues are put into the idea that the nation is deteriorating; and women are held up to the sati ideal and (228) therefore are increasingly domesticated

228-representations of the Other are “required” for nationalist discourse, and they vary in rashriya tableaux—British, Muslim, etc; “The Other acts as (229) a foil against which national identity is further crystallized”, Hansen showed that there was a “demise of the Ganapati Utsav as a national vehicle in the 1950s and 1960s when nationalism was seen to have reached its goal and the Other in the form of colonialism was officially expelled in 1947”, but wars with Pakistan (’48, ’64, ’71, ’99) and China (’62) caused an increased feeling of national identity; and now Muslims are “stereotyped as the over-sexed, deceitful, disloyal aggressor” [cf Chakravarty “Towards a Genesis…” in Communalism in India], and frequently Muslims/Pakistanis are shown as non-human beasts or (hindu) demons and disrupting “the harmonious fabric (230) of society”; (230) “internal cleavages of caste and class are to varying degrees mitigated” , and sometimes people of all religions are shown as living together in harmony

232-citing Anderson, says: “Looking forwards, going upwards, advancing forth, gliding into a ‘limitless future,’ are all metaphors which are implicated in nationalist representations.”, and mountains are seen as epitomizing that height; and technological devices (eg planes, satellites, computers) are also often displayed to represent India’s advancement, (233) but these advancements are only considered good if they are useful for the common man, (234) though early on technology was seen as representative of greedy capitalists (235) threatening traditional ways of life, but now this has changed and “This is where the modernist pantheon of ‘farmers, soldiers and scientists’ resides in the national imaginary.”

236-nationalist iconographies are also common and get embedded with “emotional attributes”, eg the tricolor flag is seen as immortal [cf Singh Our National Flag], though there is contestation because Hindutvas promote the saffron flag, but (237) since 1971 it has been illegal to desecrate the tricolor flag as well as national historic sites and the national bird, the peacock, though there was once a Ganapati murti with the tricolors; they have also used a lot of images of light (alluding to darkness of anti-national forces)—though Dyer in White (1997) showed how “light is a fundamental quality of European Christian imagery, which correlates with an ethic of racialized whiteness.”—but fire also connotes purity/sacrifices; plus there’s the internationally popular torch of freedom; so heroic figures are bathed in light in the sound and light shows, and evil figures are in darkness; (238) darkness is also associated with colonialism and self-interest



234-the media allows for the nation’s imagining, but performative events are another kind—not just (240) “projections of the mind, but also the physicality of presence amongst like people. To be in the same place at the same time is not necessarily to say that we make face-to-face encounters but the knowledge and experience of being there in spirit and in mind enables other vectors of national imagining.”, and “The representation of space in the compositions of mandap tableaux, and the territorial use of space, and in the public spread of the mandap, and the public processions to immersion sites are crucial to the national project in envisioning, activating and asserting territorial control and prosperity.”

240-due to the festival’s timing, it becomes an “experience of history in present”, (241) children dress up as national heroes, and so history is also re-lived

241-and because the ideas presented are fluid and can be downplayed or emphasized, through their complex relationships, this is “propagation of cultural, or quite literally, spectacular nationalism”

Heinrich Von Stietencron, “Charisma and Canon: The Dynamics of Legitimization and Innovation in Indian Religions,”

Heinrich Von Stietencron, “Charisma and Canon: The Dynamics of Legitimization and Innovation in Indian Religions,” in Charisma and Canon: Essays on the Religious History of the Indian Subcontinent, ed. Vasudha Dalmia, Angelika Malinar, and Martin Christof. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 14-38.

SUMMARY: Believes Indian religions have “charisma” and “canon” in the sense that it they are used in Christianity and by Weber. Gives history of “charisma” and “canon” (14-15), and offers a theory for the pattern in which the 2 interact (16). Looks at “charisma” of Kings in early Vedic religions (17-21), then how its use changed for Brahmins (21-24), and finally how it has been used for images of gods (26-27).

14-note # 1 (p 32): gives history of word “charisma”: “Derived from the Greek charis, meaning grace, favour; the charismata (pl. of charisma) mentioned in the Greek Bible were ‘gifts of grace’ or special power attributed to the agency of the Holy Spirit but operating in exceptional human beings. They included the gift of healing, prophecy, exorcism of evil spirits, working miracles, unusual knowledge, wisdom, faith or love, as well as glossalalia…the ability to interpret these utterances and unusual oratorical capacities in general (see, e.g., Paul in I. Cor. 12.1-14.40; Acts 2:1-12). These examples were derived from the life of Christ and his immediate disciples and were later expanded to include unbending heroism, fearless testimony in martyrdom, visions, and communication with superhuman beings. For important works on charisma prior to Max Weber, see Sohm (1892-1923) and Holl (1898) [Weber cites both]. Other cultures have basically similar notions, with additional emphasis on the special powers of the hero, the shaman, the yogi or the magician, etc. These are extensively listed in Parrinder (1987: 218-22).”
“Max Weber…defined it as ‘a certain quality of individual personal personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.’ (Weber 1964: 358).”

-note #2 (p 33) describes “canon”: “The Greek term kanon is a loan word derived from Semitic languages, signifying originally a reed, used as a straight measuring rod or standard of length. In its application in Greek, the term acquired the two basic meanings of ‘norm’, ‘formal basis for distinguishing truth from falsehood,’ and ‘complete enumeration’, ‘scientific list’. In early Christianity it was used for the binding norms of true Christian faith (the Latin counterpart being regula) and for authorized collections of sayings, decisions, or laws.”

14-canon is a “deliberate” collection of religious messages, “It transforms haphazard individual recollection into authoritative tradition or sacred scripture. As such, it itself becomes endowed with an aura of sacredness which derives both from the original seers, rsis, prophets or teachers who formulate the message, and from the eternal truth which is that to be encapsulated in the text of canonical scripture.”, note #3 adds that: “in ritual performance, [canons can] induce charismatic experience in a perceptive audience. Instances of this kind are the unveiling and unrolling of the Torah, and the unwrapping of the Qur’an or the Guru Granth Sahib.”; “Such a canon is one of the strongest possible forms of defining and securing a specific religious identity. [PROB: this is unselfconsciously (and to some, innocuously) Orientalist because it implies only text-based religions can have the ‘strongest’ form of identity making; even though he says canon could be orally-based, it only is “strongest” for him when there is a set standard of tradition—and this is more difficult to determine when it’s orally based; and his bias towards text is reinforced by him using texts for the vast majority of his examples] In its contrast with the doctrines of other creeds, the canon is a continuous source of self-awareness and self-definition. It provides meaning and direction to the community as a whole and to each individual member by representing both the ultimate truth and the means of attaining it.”; a (15) canon can “arrest time” by picking out essentials “eternally valid” [PROB: not really a prob—its similar to B. Anderson’s ideas about time]

15-charisma “takes precedence over the canon by bringing into convincing shape those innovative ideas, concepts, models of behavior and approaches to the divine that create a new religious movement.”



-“Thus, while canon stands for permanence, charisma stands for innovation. This leads us directly into the dialectics of timelessness versus time-governed life, of transcendence versus worldly existence, of permanence versus change. They are opposing yet interacting principles that are constitutive for all religions and, indeed, for all human effort at creating and implementing order in a cosmos that is materially and biologically constituted and, therefore, equally liable to chaotic growth and decay.” [PROB: implies that there is a distinction between supernatural/charisma from the worldly/material/biological things—this distinction is Orientalist; he is too reliant on Weber, what if charisma is not so rare (the ‘exception’’) in all religions? This dichotomy makes it easy to rewrite religions in a secular-sacred way]

16-says the “one major defect in every canon” is that it preserves the social and cultural context of its redactors; it’s a “defect” because as cultures and languages change people can’t understand as well “the original message”; it “inevitably leads to a continually growing gap between the canon and its addressees” [PROB: goes against many “religious” peoples’ ideas]; “As can be seen, this is a dilemma that all religions have to face, whether their sacred tradition is remembered or written down—most notably the so-called ‘high’ religion that refer to a transcendent reality and claim universal truth.” And that’s why commentary is so important and even sometimes becomes “scripture in its own right”

-and says that the changing of religions’ laws follows the pattern of charisma—law/canon—gap between it and public—new charisma—change in law/canon; his evidence that this happens in all religions is in note #9: “The formation of canonical scripture is fairly well documented in” all the major religions, including Indian Vedanta schools, and adds “The typology derivable from those as well as from Roman canonization of law render the myth of Vedavyasa’s one-man-achievement of collecting and arranging all the Vedic hymns rather unlikely.” [PROB: I don’t take it for granted that this is true for all “religions”—especially because “religion” is such a broad term, I don’t necessarily think everyone has a strict canon. So without citation, I can’t believe this is anything but an Orientalist imposition; good scholars, (imo Asad, Anderson, Gay, eg) meticulously cite everything—no doing so not only suggests intellectual laziness but that you are taking your ideas for granted, as if they are “truths” that all people (should) accept, which thereby creates stereotypes and generalizations which have potential to be harmful for the very reason that they have embodied in the certain assumptions that might be wrong and can have political implications, especially when printed by scholars whose words have an aura of legitimacy. That was Said’s whole point in Orientalism!]



17-looks at how “hindu religions provide their devotees with sufficiently frequent charismatic experiences to keep both their emotional engagement and their intellectual interest in religion alive”, looking primarily at religious texts [PROB: text-based]

18-points out a difference between Hindu religions and Abrahamic ones, especially Christianity, is that those people with charisma in Hinduism “appear only as recurrent sparks of light in and endless sequence of time cycles.”

-hindu religions use guruparampara, lines of authorized transmission of scripture and exegesis from fully trained teachers, as their exegesis charisma/legitimacy



-“In the Indian literary tradition, the notion of charisma is first and primarily linked to the king. It is a kind of radiation, power and unfailing fortune that distinguishes its bearer from other persons or entities. It can be directly experienced in the encounter with a charismatic person. Both in ancient Iranian and Indian tradition, charisma was conceived of as a kind of subtle, luminous substance that could be conferred on a deserving person by a God (19) or by ritual action. This concept goes back to the second millennium BC, when the Indian and Iranian Aryans had not yet separated.”
“The ancient Persians called this substance x’arenah [“related to Persan farnah: glory”], (the corresponding Sanskrit word is svarna or suvarna, with sri or tejas as alternative designations), and it described the faculty to know and achieve what others were unable to know and doi, as well as that golden radiance which can be perceived in a victor or in a powerful, successful king.”, and inVedic times there were tests for this (eg saying poetry, throwing dice, chariot races—all for which Indra was responsible for the outcome)—so this “directly corresponded to the fits of grace of the charisma of the Greek” [PROB: was this the view of religious practitioners?], sometimes other gods are seen as present in people with charisma too

19-the Sri did not belong to the sing, but to the position, and “could leave him abruptly if he failed to protect the dharma or misused his power for selfish ends.” And this brought disaster to the country; an idea also in ancient Iranian myths; this charismatic kingship is much less stable than in “institutionalized hereditary kingship” in which charisma and the rituals to prove it are very regulated and able to be passed on; (21) plus the Aryan version allowed for charismatic authority to come from the outside (ie outsiders could legitimately come in)



21-in Vedic times, Brahmins were also seen as having charisma—“divine inspiration”—and it was institutionalized, but due to social changes, in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE , there were religious reform movements against the Brahmins which took some Brahmins’ patrons and adopted image-worship instead of Vedic rituals, plus vedic religion had already been separating from popular religious practices

22-plus the Kusana empire (ruled early first millennium AD) brought the notion of divine kingship which they inherited from the Maurya Empire; Brahmins lost power with rise of bhakti (personal relation to a god), then kept their status by proving useful to rulers with their literacy and learning, then their “Dominance in religious affairs was regained only when they condescended to earn their living with temple worship, when they started appropriating the leadership of popular religious movements…and when they gave a theological form to the growing monotheistic religions.” [cf Stietencron “orthodox Attitudes Towards Temple Service…” Central Asiatic Journal v 21 n 2: 126-37; and note #20 says the monotheistic development was at least partially influenced by Hellenistic Seleucids (via Mauryans) and Zoroastrians], “It was at this stage that a new priesthood in a changed society could again claim to be entitled to the charisma of office.”—then they needed to theologically justify a transfer of charisma from king to priest, which was done with the myth of Parasuram [cf Gail 1977]

-this change began with identifying “Lakulisa, the famous Saiva teacher of the second century, with Siva himself” during the 4th century CE; and (23) an initiation ceremony for it, diksa, was started; (24) and the priest becomes for devotees “almost a substitute for God himself”



26-says images of gods receive charisma through rituals like charisma in people; there are 2 kinds of images (murti): household shrine and temple; in the house, god is cred for as a member of the family; in the temple, god is to be submitted to as a king who protects his people [image is seen as a “focus of identification” of the deity who is known to be , really, omnipresent], (27) and there are rituals to renew their charisma too

Ashis Nandy, “The Politics of Secularism and The Recovery of Religious Tolerance”

Ashis Nandy, “The Politics of Secularism and The Recovery of Religious Tolerance” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford University Press: 1998), 321-344.

SUMMARY: His goal is to expose how the Western idea of religious tolerance and secularism used by Indian intellectuals and the middle class support their religious violence (321-322). He first describes 4 trends that have taken place in India since WWII. 1) The separation of faith and ideology in religions (322-323); 2) contrasting Indian religions to Western values (323-324); 3) secularism says that Indian religion and culture opposes religious tolerance and modernity (324); and 4) secularism imposes an idea of a singular (as opposed to plural) view of self, which is a Christian idea as well (324-325). Also, there have developed 2 meanings of the word secularism: one is separation of religion from other aspects of the state, one is accepting the good aspects of all religions and its involvement in the state (326-330). Gives 4 reasons why secularism has failed (331-334). Describes 3 responses to secularism in India (334-337). Criticizes moderns/secularism for “hijacking” old religiously tolerant leaders, and not being able to prevent religious violence (337-338). Says moderns have pathological psychologies (340). And whoever supports secularism or western concepts thus supports violence (342-343). His solution is to have a Gandhian view of religion (344).

321-in the “post-colonial structures of knowledge in the third world [there] is a peculiar form of imperialism of categories. Under such imperialism, a conceptual domain is sometimes hegemonized by concept produced and honed in the West, hegemonized so effectively that the original domain vanishes from our awareness. Intellect and intelligence become IQ, the oral cultures become the cultures of the non-liberate or the uneducated, the oppressed become the proletariat, social change becomes development. After a while, people begin to forget that IQ is only a crude measure of intelligence and someday someone else may think up another kind of index to assess the same thing: that social change did not begin with development dies a natural or unnatural death.”

THESIS:-“…I seek to provide a political preface to the recovery of a well-known domain of public concern in South Asia, ethnic and especially religious tolerance from the hegemonic language of secularism popularized by the Westernized intellectuals and middle classes to religious tolerance earlier, has increasingly become a cover for the complicity of the modern intellectuals and (322) the modernizing middle class of South Asia in the new forms of religious violence that have entered the Asian scene. These are the forms in which the state, the media, and the ideologies of national security, development, and modernity propagated by the modern intelligentsia and the middle classes play crucial roles.”, but first he describes “four trends that have become clearly visible in South Asia during this century but particularly after the Second World War.”



322-“The first and the most important of these trends is that each religion in our part of the world has been split into two: faith and ideology. Both are inappropriate terms but I give them in this article, specific private meanings to serve my purpose. By faith I mean religion as a way of life, a tradition that is definitionally non-monolithic and operationally plural. I say ‘definitionally’ because, unless a religion is geographically and culturally confined to a small area, religion as a way of life, linked by a common faith having some theological space for heterogeneity.”
“By ideology I mean religion as a subnational, national or cross-national identifier of populations contesting for or protecting non-religious, usually political or socio-economic interests. Such religions-as-ideologies usually get identified with one or more texts which, rather than the ways of life of the believers, then become the final identifiers of the pure forms of the religions. The texts help anchor the ideologies in something seemingly concrete and delimited and in effect provide a set of manageable operational definitions.”

-“These two categories are not mutually exclusive; they are like two axes on which could be plotted the state of contemporary religions. One way of explaining the difference between the two is to conceive of ideology as something that, for individuals and people who believe in it, needs to be constantly protected and faith as something that the faithful usually expect to protect them. For a faith always includes a theory of transcendence and usually sanctions the experience of transcendence and usually sanctions the experience of transcendence, whereas an ideology tends to bypass or fear theories and experiences of transcendence, except when they could be used for secular purposes.” [PROB: these cats are not self-evident and are very problematic—these ideas are not so clearly separated by people and ideologies existed by rulers before the West came, and better travel and communications technology could have just made it more visible now, plus Nandy doesn’t cite any sources for this]

-“The modern state always prefers to deal with religious ideologies rather than with faiths. It is wary of both forms of religion but it (323) finds the ways of life more inchoate and hence, unmanageable, even though it is faith rather than ideology that has traditionally shown more pliability and catholicity. It is religion-as-faith that prompted 200,000 Indians to declare themselves to be Mohammendan Hindus in the census of 1911; and it was the catholicity of faith that prompted Mole-Salam Girasia Rajput to traditionally have two names for every member of the community, one Hindu and one Muslim. [cf Lokhandwala “Indian Islam: Composite Culture and Interpretation” New Quest march-April 1985 (50) pp. 87-101] It is religion-as-ideology, on the other hand, that prompted a significant proportion of the Punjabi-speaking Hindus to declare Hindi as their mother tongue, thus underlining the differences between Sikhism and Hinduism and sowing the seeds for the creation of a new minority. Likewise, it is religion-as-ideology that has provided a potent tool to the Jamat e Islam: to disown the traditional, plural forms of Islam in the Indian subcontinent and disjunct official religion from everyday life, to produce a pre-packaged Islam for Muslims uprooted and decultured by the processes of engineered social change in the region.”



*323-2nd: “…during the last two centuries or so, there has grown a tendency to view the older faiths of the region through the eyes of post-medieval European Christianity and its various offshoots—such as the masculine Christianity associated with nineteenth century missionaries like Joshua Marshman and William Carey in South Asia or its mirror image in the orthodox modernism vended by the likes of Frederich Engels and Thomas Huxley. Because this particular Eurocentric way of looking at faiths gradually came to be associated with the dominant culture of the colonial states in the region, it subsumes under it a set of the colonial states in the region, it subsumes under it a set of clear polarities: centre versus periphery, true faith versus its distortions, civil versus primordial, and great traditions versus local cultures.”

*-“It is a part of the same story that in each of the dyads, the second category is set up to lose. It is also a part of the same story that, once the colonial concept of state was internalized by the societies of the region through the nationalist ideology, in turn heavily influenced b the Western theories of state and statecraft [cf Chatterjee Nationalist Thought…], the nascent nation-states of the region took upon themselves the same (324) civilizing mission that the colonial states had once taken upon themselves vis-à-vis the ancient faiths of the subcontinent.”



324-“Third, the idea of secularism, an import from nineteenth century Europe into South Asia, has acquired immense potency in the middle-class cultures and state sectors of South Asia, thanks to its connection with and response to religion-as-ideology. Secularism has little to say about cultures—it is definitionally ethnophobic and frequently ethnocidal, unless of course cultures and those living by cultures are willing to show total subservience to the modern nation-state and become ornaments or adjuncts to modern living—and the orthodox secularists have no clue to the way a religion can link up different faiths or ways of life according to its own configurative principles.”

-“To such secularists, religion is an ideology in opposition to the ideology of modern statecraft and, therefore, needs to be contained. They feel even more uncomfortable with religion-as-a faith claiming to have its own principles of tolerance and intolerance, for that claim denies the state and middle-class ideologies of the state the right to be the ultimate reservoir of sanity and the ultimate arbiter among different religions and communities. [note #3 says hes unsure about using the word tolerance “because it itself is a product of the secular world-view”] This denial is particularly galling to those who see the clash between two faiths merely as a clash of socioeconomic interests, not as a simultaneous clash between conflicting interests and a philosophical encounter between two metaphysics. The Westernized middle classes and literati of South Asia love to call such differences as liabilities and as sources of ethnic violence.”



-“Fourth, the imported idea of secularism has become increasingly incompatible and, as it were, uncomfortable with the somewhat fluid definitions of the self with which many (325) live. [cultural and psychological definitions, cf Roland “Psychoanalysis in India and Japan”] Such a self, which can be conceptually viewed as a configuration of selves, simultaneously shapes, invokes, and reflects the configurative principles of religions-as-faiths. It also happens to be a negation of the modern conception of selfhood acquired partly from the Enlightenment West and partly from a rediscovery of previously recessive elements in Indian traditions. [PROB: doesn’t idfy sources for this, and takes for granted an “Enlightenment” idea of self (kantian, Hegelian?)] Religion-as-ideology, working with the concept of well-bounded, mutually exclusive religious identities, on the other hand, is more compatible with and analogous to the definition of the self as a byproduct of secularization.” [cf Miller’s “theses on the question of religion in India”, a conference paper], and “secularism has no inkling of this distinct, though certainly no unique, form of self-definition…because secularism is, as T. N. Madan puts it, a gift of Christianity…” [PROB: he’s saying Protestant Xnty can’t accommodate multiple identities at once—and gives no support]



326-“I call myself an anti-secularist because I feel that the ideology and politics of secularism have more or less exhausted their possibilities.”; thee are 2 meanings of word “secularism” in India: a dictionary one and “a non-standard local meaning which, many like to believe, is typically and distinctively Indian or South Asian (as we shall see below, it also has a Western tail, but that tail is now increasingly vestigial).”; the first meaning “chalks out n area in public life where religion is not admitted…Implicit in the ideology is the belief that managing the public realm (327) is a science that is essentially universal, that religion, to the extent it is opposed to the Baconian world-image of science, is an open or potential threat to any modern polity.”; “In contrast, the non-Western meaning of secularism revolves around equal respect for all religions. This is the way it is usually put by public figure. Less crudely stated, it implies that while the public life may or not be kept free of religion, it must have space for a continuous dialogue among religious traditions and between the religious and the secular—that, in the ultimate analysis, each major faith in the region includes within it an in-house version, of other faiths both as an internal criticism and as a reminder of the diversity of the theory of transcendence.”

327-“Recently, Ali Akhtar Khan has drawn attention to the fact that George Jacob Hoyoake, who coined the word secularism in 1850, advocated a secularism accomadative of religion, a secularism that would moreover emphasize diversities and coexistence in the matter of faith. His contemporary, Joseph Bradlaugh, on the other hand, believed in a secularism that rejected religion and made science its deity. [cf Ahmed “Muslims and Boycott Call” The Times of Indian Society 14 jan 1987] Most non-modern Indians…pushed around by the political and cultural forces unleashed by colonialism still operating in Indian society, have unwittingly opted for the accommodative and pluralist meaning while India’s Westernized intellectuals have consciously opted for the abolition of religion from the public sphere.” [PROB: he’s comparing common people to a very small group—and are there some non-westernized intellectuals who support the second def—because he says politicisans do , so they prolly have intellectuals to support them]

-“…Gandhi obviously had this [second] adulterated meaning in mind on the few occasions when he seemed to plead for secularism. This is clear from his notorious claim that those who thought that religion and politics could be kept separate, understood neither religion nor politics.” And this is the idea that is “more compatible with the meaning a majority of Indians” have for secularism

-the first meaning “has dominated India’s middle-class public (328) consciousness, [but] the Indian people and, till recently most practicing Indian politicians, have depended on the accommodative meaning.” [PROB: what is his evidence for the mid classes view?]

328-“The danger is that the first meaning is supported by the accelerating process of modernization in India. As a consequence now, there is a clearer fit between the declared ideology of the modern Indian nation-state and the secularism that fears religions and ethnicities…Associated with this…is a hidden political hierarchy…[which] makes a fourfold classification of the political actors in the subcontinent.”; “At the top of the hierarchy are those who are believers neither in public nor in private”, eg literati and Nehru (though it was later revealed he believed in astrology and tantra); the second are those who don’t believe in public but do in private eg Indira Gandhi and (329) a “sizeable portion of the middle classes”; 3rd believe in public but not in private eg Muhammad Ali Jinnah and D. V. Savarkar, “Such persons can sometimes be dangerous because to them religion is a political tool and a means of fighting one’s own and one’s community’s sense of cultural inadequacy. Religion to them is not a matter of piety.”, “often these heroes invoke the classical versions of their faiths to underplay, marginalize, or even delegitimize the existing ways of life associated with their faiths.”, their goal “has always been to homogenize their cobelievers into proper political formations…” and resist religious diversity and dialogue; (330) 4th are public and private believers, eg Gandhi; the categories aren’t pure in reality and people can change



331- secularism hasn’t led to elimination of religion or greater tolerance in India or anywhere, even England; “…for some hundred and fifty years the Indian have been told that one of the reasons Britain dominated India and one of the reasons why the Indian were colonized was that they were not secular, whereas Britain was.”

*-secularism hasn’t worked because: 1) early political elite was small and so it was relatively easy to screen out people who weren’t secular, but as political representatives have increased in numbers, screening is more difficult; (332) 2) “it has become more and more obvious to a large number of people that modernity is now no longer the ideology of a small minority…These Indians now sense the ‘irreversibility’ of secularization…Much of the fanaticism and violence associated with religion comes today from this sense of defeat of the believers…”; (333) 3) the modern state “guarantees no protection to them against the sufferings inflicted by the state itself in the name of its ideology” and “the state frequently uses its ideology to silence its non-conforming citizens”—while appealing to the believers to keep the public sphere free of religion”; 4) “the proposition that the values derived from the secular ideology of the state would be a better guide to political action and to a less violent and richer political life (in comparison to the values derived from the religious faith) has become even more unconvincing to large parts of Indian society than it was a few decades ago…(334) the culture of the Indian state has very little moral authority left”



334-“every major religious community in the [post-colonial] region has produced three responses” to the idea that the “Western Man rules the world…because of his superior understanding of the relationship between religion and politics.”, “These responses have clear-cut relationship with the splitting of religions described at the beginning of this article; actually, they derive from the split.”

-first response: “to model oneself on the Western Man. Here something more than mimicry of ‘imitation’ is involved. The response consists in a desperate attempt to capture, within one’s own self and culture, traits seen as the reasons for the West’s success on the world state.”, popular response of modern India

335-2nd “is that of the zealot…[whose] sole goal is to somehow defeat the Western man at his own game, the way Japan, for instance has done in economic affairs…what passes as fundamentalism, fanaticism, or revivalism is often only another form of Westernization becoming popular among the psychologically uprooted middle classes in South Asia.”, says an example is in “Pak a Few Steps from Bomb” The Times of India 29 Jan 1987; eg the idea that one can “decontaminate Hinduism of its folk elements, turn it into a classical Vedantic faith, and then give it additional teeth with the aid of Western technology and secular statecraft, so that the Hindus can take on and ultimately defeat all their external and internal enemies, if necessary by liquidating all forms of ethnic plurality within the Hinduism and India, to equal the Western Man as a new Ubermenschen.”, eg justifying a religious text by saying it’s supported by modern science—“Such responses of the zealot are the ultimate admission of defeat. They constitute the cultural bed on which grows the revivalism of the defeated, the so-called fundamental movements in South Asia, based on the zealot’s instrumental concept of religion as an ideological principle for political mobilization and state formation. Modern scholarship sees zealotry as a retrogression into primitivism and as a pathology of traditions. At closer sight it proves to be a by-product and a pathology of modernity. For instance, whatever the revivalist Hindu may seek to revive, it is not Hinduism. The pathetically comic, martial uniform of khaki (336) shorts, which the RSS cadres have to wear, tell it all. Modeled on the uniform of the colonial police, the khaki shorts not only identify the RSS as an illegitimate child of Western colonialism but as a direct progeny of the semiticizing Hindu reform movements under colonialism, Orientalist concepts of ‘proper’ religion, and upon the modern Western concepts of the nation-state, nationality, and nationalism…One begins to judge the everyday life-style of the Hindus, their diversity and heterogeneity negatively, usually with a clear touch of hostility and contempt. Likewise, there is nothing fundamentally Islamic about the fundamentalist Muslims who have to constantly try to disenfranchise the ordinary Muslims as peripheral and delegitimize the religious practice of a huge majority of Muslims the world over as un-Islamic.” And also with Sikhism and sri Lankan Buddhism [PROB: same criticism as earlier: the harsh distinction doesn’t really work, especially given anderson’s ideas on nationalism—they aren’t purely “western” in the sense that all ideas associated with the west must be accepted; plus these groups borrow from their own religious histories which has elements of the things they are doing]

336-3rd “comes usually form the non-modern majority of a society, though to the globalized middle-class intellectuals it may look like the response of a minority. This response does not keep religion separate from politics, but it does say that the traditional ways of life over the centuries, developed internal principles of tolerance, and these principles must have a play in contemporary politics. This response affirms that religious communities in traditional societies have known how to live with one another.”, traditional India tolerated jews, Christians, Zoroastrians [PROB: there were several outside, non-religious factors for this, especially caste which many consider oppressive], religious violence was extremely rare in pre-modern India, but now is increasing to a lot [PROB: ignores oppression by medieval lords, and jews, xns, and zoroas have generally been too small to revolt and there were many fights between hindus, buds, and Muslims], he gives as evidence: “Even now, Indian villages an small towns can take credit for largely having avoided communal riots.” [PROB: I say that what has really changed is urbanization, communications tech, travel speed, and warfare technology], “Obviously, somewhere and somehow, religious violence (337) has something to do with the urban-industrial vision of life and with the political processes the vision lets loose.” [PROB: this is far from “obvious”]



337-“Let us not forget that the great symbols of religious tolerance in India over the last 2000 years have not been modern though the moderns have managed to hijack some of these symbols.”, “For example, when the modern Indians project the idea of secularism into the past, to say that Emperor Ashoka was ‘secular’, they ignore that Ashoka was not exactly a secular ruler; he was a practicing Buddhist even in his public life. He based his tolerance on Buddhism, not secularism. Likewise, the other symbol of interreligious amity in modern India, Emperor Akbar, derived his tolerance not from secularism but from Islam: he believed that tolerance was the message of Islam.”

-“the new forms of religious violence in this part of the world are becoming paradoxically, increasingly secular. The anti-Sikh riots that too place in Delhi in November 1984, the anti-Muslim riots in Ahmedabad in 1985 during the anti-reservation stir and the ‘anti-Hindu’ riots in Bangalore in 1986 they were all associated not so much with religious hatred as with political cost calculations and/or economic greed.”

338-“the Western concept of secularism has played a crucial role in South Asian societies; has worked as a check against some forms of ethnic intolerance and violence, and has contributed to humane governance at certain times and places.” But “Secularism cannot cope with many of the new fears and intolerance of religions and ethnicities, nor provide any protection against the new forms of violence that have come to be associated with such intolerance. Nor can secularism contain those who provide the major justifications for calculated pogroms and ethnocides in terms of the dominant ideology of the state.”



340-creates a table that explains the interaction of the 3 groups of people who react to secularism; table is based on social and psychological studies from the 1940s to 1970s; “The stereotyping, authoritarian submission, sado-masochism, and the heavy use of the ego defenses of projection, displacement and rationalization that, according to some of those studies, went with authorizationianism and dogmatism, have not become irrelevant, as Sudhir Kakar shows once again in a recent Paper. [cf “Some unconscious Aspects of Ethnic…” in Das, Mirrors of Violence] There are resolute demonologies that divide religious communities and endorse ethnic violence, but these have begun to ply a less and less central role in such violence. They have become increasingly one of the psychological markers of those participating in the mobs involved in rioting or in pogrom, not of those planning, initiating, or legitimizing mob-action.”, “This is another way of saying that the planners, instigators, and legitimizers of religious and ethnic violence can be now identified as secular users of non-secular forces or impulses in the society…In the lace of these factors have come a new set of personality traits and defense mechanisms, the most important of which are the more ‘primitive’ defense such as isolation and denial. These defenses ensure, paradoxically, the primacy of cognitive factors in violence over the affective and the conative.” [PROB: uses Western psychology on Asians]

-342-“state-linked internal colonialism uses legitimating core concepts like national security, development, modern science and technology. Any society, for that matter any aggregate, that gives unrestrained play or support to these concepts gets automatically linked to the colonial structure of the present-day world and is doomed to promote violence and expropriation, particularly of the kind directed against the smaller minorities such as the tribals…” [PROB: at what point do u determine someone is using enough western concepts to be considered complicit?]

343-“Secularism has become a handy adjunct to this set of legitimating core concepts.”, helping to legitimize elites’ role as leaders and have monopoly on religious and ethnic tolerance. “To accept the ideology of secularism is to accept the ideologies of progress and modernity as the new justifications of domination, and the use of violence to sustain these ideologies as the new opiates of the masses.”

344-Nandy promotes a Gandhian form of religious tolerance, the Gandhian idea of a sanatani, an “orthodox Hindu” who was also a Muslim, Sikh, and Christian based on this sanatan dharma; Hindu nationalists killed him; and other hindu and non-Hindu secularists dominate India using Gandhi as an example of tolerance, but they forget that you have to accept all faiths

T. N. Madan, “Secularism in its Place”

T. N. Madan, “Secularism in its Place” in Secularism and its Critics ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 297-320.

SUMMARY: Article originally published in 1987, but also has a postscript from 1996. Madan gives a brief history of word “secularism” (297-298). He criticizes the imposition of secularization on India because he says it is an essentially Protestant idea (306-307) and in India’s religions (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism), secularism is “encompassed” as a subordinate aspect of the religious worldview (303-306)—and so “secularism” cannot be simply “translated” to India’s culture (307-309). Looks at Nehru’s views on the subject (310-311) and compares him to Lenin and Ataturk (312). In the Postscript he addresses critics of his original article (316-320).



297-says word “secularization” was first used in 1648 at end of 30 years war in Europe, referred to “the transfer of church properties to the exclusive control of princes.”, then “on 2 November, 1789, Talleyrand announced to the French National Assembly that all ecclesiastical goods were at the disposal of nation as indeed they should have been still later, when George Jacob Holyoake coined the term (298) ‘secularism’ in 1851 and led a rationalist movement of protest in England, secularization was built into the ideology of progress. Secularization, though nowhere more than a fragmentary and incomplete process, has ever since retained a positive connotation.”

298-“ ‘Secularization’ is nowadays generally employed to refer to, in the words of Peter Berger, ‘the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols’.” [direct quote from The Social Reality of Religion], and different areas are differently amenable to secularism (eg economic area is very amenable, and the political area less so)

THESIS-“I believe that in the prevailing circumstances secularism in South Asia as a generally shared credo of life is impossible, as a basis for state action impracticable, and as a blueprint for the foreseeable future impotent. It is impossible as a credo of life because the great majority of the people of South Asia are in their own eyes active adherents of some religious faith. It is impracticable as a basis for state action either because Buddhism and Islam have been declared state or state-protected religions or because the stance of religious neutrality or equidistance is difficult to maintain since religious minorities do not share the majority’s view of what this entails for the state. And it is impotent as a blueprint for the future because, by its very nature, it is incapable of countering religious fundamentalism and fanaticism.”

-“Secularism is the dream of a minority that wishes to shape the majority in its own image, that whishes to impose its will upon history but lacks the power to do so under a democratically organized polity. In an open society the state will reflect the character of that society. Secularism is therefore a social myth that draws a cover over the failure of this minority to separate politics from religion in the society in which its members live.” And for the minority to “stigmatize the majority as primordially oriented” is (299) “moral arrogance and worse…political folly.”

300-secularization marginalizes religious faith and makes fundamentalists: “There are no fundamentalists or revivalists in traditional society.”


-“The point to stress…is that…Secularism as a widely shared worldview has failed to make headway in India.”, the views in the popular pro-secular books (Smith’s India as a Secular State and Kothari’s Politics in India) “have been belied”

-Indian secularism has proven to be weak; (301) “It trivializes religious difference as well as the notion of the unity of religions, and really fails to provide guidance for viable political action, for it is not a rooted, full-blooded, and well though-out Weltanschauung, only a stratagem. It has been so self-confessedly for fundamentalist organizations such as the Muslim Jama’at-i-Islami. [cf Islam in Secular India] I would like to suggest that it was also so for Jawaharlal Nehru…”

301-Secularism’s failure “underscores the failure of the society and the state to bring under control the divisive forces that resulted in the partition of the subcontinent in 1947…tempers continue to rage, and occasionally…blood even flows in some places, as a result of mutual hostility” of different religions; “What produces this hostility? Surely not religious faith itself [though on p299 he says he won’t define religion], for even religious traditions which take an uncompromising view of ‘nonbelievers’…speak with multiple tongues and pregnant ambiguity…It was not religious difference as such but its exploitation by calculating politicians for the achievement of secular ends that produced the communal divide.”



*303-Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism all distinguish between “religious” and “secular” and “these religions have the same view of the relationship between the categories of the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’.” [Madan says: “I wish I had the time to elaborate on this theme…” which allows him to not provide more support for this bold statement]; “My studies convince me that in Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism this relationship is hierarchical (in the sense in which Louis Dumont uses this term).”

-“Thus, though Buddhism may well be considered as the one South Asian religious tradition which, by denying supernatural beings any significant role in human life, has the most secularist potential, yet this would be an oversimplified view of it. What is important is not only what Emile Durkheim so clearly perceived, namely the central importance of the category of the ‘sacred’ in Buddhism, but also (and more significantly in the present context) the fact, so well documented for us by Stanley Tambiah that the bhikkhu, or the world renouncer, is superior to the chakkavatti, or the world conqueror, and that neither exists by himself.”

-“Similarly, in every Sikh gurudwara the sacred sword is placed for veneration at a lower level than the holy book, the Granth Sahab, which is the repository of the Word (shabad), despite the fact that, for the Sikhs, the sword too symbolizes the divinity or, more accurately, the inseparability of the spiritual and the religious functions.”

-“I would like to expand a little more on Hinduism and Islam. I would have preferred not to go all the way back to the Rig Veda of three thousand years ago, were it not for the fact that it presents explicitly, employing a fascinating simile, the hierarchical relationship and temporal power. It would seem that originally the two functions were differentiated, but they were later deliberately brought together, for the regnum (kshatra) could not subsist on its own without the sacerdotium (brahma) that provided its principle of legitimacy…(304) Let me move on to the Kautilya Arthashastra (? Fourth century BC/AD) which has been often enough said to present an amoral theory of political power. Such a reading is, however, contestable. What I find more acceptable is the view that the Arthashastra teaches that the rational pursuit of economic and political ends (artha) must be carried out in fulfillment and not violation of dharma.”; and in “traditional Brahmanical political thought, cultural pluralism within the State was accepted and the king was the protector of everybody’s dharma…Hence the idea of a state religion was not entertained…Some of these traditional ideas have reverberated in the practice of Hindu kings and their subjects all the way down the corridors of time into the twentieth century. [cf Mayer “Perceptions of Princely Rule”] Even today, these ideas are relevant in the context of the only surviving Hindu monarchy of the world, Nepal, where the king is considered an (305) incarnation of God and yet has to be consecrated by the Brahman royal priest.”
“In our own times, it was, of course, Mahatma Gandhi who restated the traditional point of view in the changed context of the twentieth century, emphasizing the inseparability of religion and politics and the superiority of the former over the latter.”, though the state was obliged to ensure religions can grow, while “no religion that depended on state support deserved to survive. In other words, the inseparability of religion and politics in the Indian context, and generally, was for Gandhi fundamentally a distinct issue from the separation of the state from the church in Christendom. When he did advocate that ‘religion and state should be separate’, he clarified that this was to limit the role of the state to ‘secular welfare’, and to allow it no admittance into the religious life of the people. Clearly, the hierarchical relationship is irreversible.”

305-“Traditionally Islam postulates a single chain of command in the political domain: God-Prophet-Caliph-King. God Almighty is the ever-active sovereign of His universe which is governed by His will. In his own life Prophet Muhammad symbolized the unity of faith (din) and the material world (dawle). His successors (khalifa) were the guardians on whose authority the kings ruled. They (the kings) were but the Shadow of God on earth, holding power as a trust and answerable to their maker on the Day of Judgment and like everybody else. In India, Ziyaud-Din Barni …(mid-fourteenth century) theologian (306) and political commentator, wrote of religion and temporal government, of prophets and kings, as twin brothers, but without leaving the reader in any doubt about whom he placed first.”
“In the twentieth century, Muhammad Iqbal occupies a very special place as an interpreter of Islam in South Asia. Rejecting the secularist programme of Turkish nationalists, he wrote: ‘In Islam the spiritual and the temporal are not two distinct domains, and the nature of an act, however secular in its import, is determined by the attitude of mind with which the agent does it…In Islam it is the same reality, which appears as Church looked at from one point of view and State from another.’ [direct quote from The Reconstruction of Religious Thought] Iqbal further explains: ‘The ultimate Reality, according to the Qur’an, is spiritual, and its life consists in its temporal activity. The spirit finds its opportunities in the natural, the material, the secular. All that is secular is therefore sacred in the roots of its being…There is no such thing as a profane world…All is holy ground’.”; then Madan quotes Fazlur Rahman as saying “Secularism destroys the sanctity and universality (transcendence) of all moral values” [direct quote from Islam and Modernity]

-[PROB: only looks at certain expressions of religions and makes reductionist claims]

306-“…the search for secular elements in the cultural traditions of this region is a futile exercise, for it is not these but an ideology of secularism that is absent and is resisted. What is important, therefore, is the relationship between the categories, and this is unmistakably hierarchical, the (307) religious encompassing the secular.”, says this view was even in Christianity until the Reformation—Madan takes the Weverian thesis, saying that secularization was connected to Protestantism, individualism, rationalization, and intellectualism [PROB: he ignore other ecoc and poll motives for secularization]; “The general secularization of life in the West after the Reformation is significantly, though only partly, an unintended consequence of this religious idea.—that the individual is responsible for his own salvation; Madan tries to make his view unreproachable by adding: “This is not the occasion to go into the details of the well-grounded idea that secularization is a gift of Christianity to mankind, but” we must recognize the at the privatization of religion is indeed a “gift of Christianity”



308-“…the idea of secularism, a gift of Christianity, has been built into western social theorists’ paradigms of modernization, and since these paradigms are believed to have universal applicability, the elements that converged historically—that is in a unique manner—to constitute modern life in Europe in the sixteenth and the following three centuries, have come to be presented as the requirements of modernization elsewhere, and this must be questioned. Paradoxically, the uniqueness of the history of modern Europe lies, we are asked to believe, in its generalizability.”
“In other words, secularism as an ideology has emerged from the dialectic of modern science and Protestantism, not from a simple repudiation of religion and the rise of rationalism. Even the Enlightenment—its English and German versions in particular—was not against religion as such but against revealed religion or a transcendental justification for religion…Models of modernization, however, prescribe the transfer of secularism to non-western societies without regard for the character of their religious traditions or for the gifts that these might have to offer.”

-and “translations are not easily achieved. As Bankim Chandra Chatterji (that towering late nineteenth-century Indian intellectual) put it, ‘You can translate a word by a word, but behind the word is an idea, the thing which the word denotes, and this idea you cannot translate, if it does not exist among the people in whose language you are translating’. [in Nationalist Though and the Colonial World] It is imperative, then, that a people must themselves render their historical experience meaningful: others may not do this for them. [PROB: not really a problem, but a line I very much agree with, though Madan doesn’t deal with the issue that even within societies there are competing groups and if an idea or term is picked up by one, that doesn’t necessarily mean all agree with it] Borrowed ideas, unless internalized do not have the power to bestow on us the gift and grace of living…(309) once a cultural definition of a phenomenon or of a relationship (say, between religion and politics, or society and the state) has been crystallized, it follows that subsequent formulations of it, whether endogenous or exogenous, can only be re-definitions.” And different traditions survive in different groups; “In short, the transferability of the idea of secularism to the countries of South Asia is beset with many difficulties and should not be taken for granted.”

309-“Secularism must be put in its place, which is not a question of rejecting it but of finding the proper means for its expression. In multireligious societies, such as those of South Asia, it should be realized that secularism may not be restricted to rationalism, that it is compatible with faith, and that rationalism (as understood in the West) is not the sole motive force of a modern state.” [PROB: assumes that rationalism is seen as the only cause of secularization—it may be a very popular modern idea, but is in no way uniform, even among common people who all have varying understandings of secularization’s history, largely depending on their religious leaning]



310-in India, there’s no wall of separation between church and state, but an idea that there is “neutrality or equidistance between the state and the religious identity of the people”, and “not only Nehru but all Indians who consider themselves patriotic and modern, nationalist and rationalist, subscribe to it. What makes it impotent is that it is a purely negative strategy and, in the history of mankind, nothing positive has even been built on denials or negations alone.”

-“An examination of Nehru’s writings and speeches brings out very clearly his conviction that religion is a hinderance to ‘the tendency to change and progress inherent in human society’ and that ‘the belief in supernatural agency which ordains everything has led to a certain irresponsibility on the social plane, and emotion and sentimentality have taken the place of reasoned though and inquiry’.” [direct quote in The Discovery of India]; Nehru contrasted religion to science, and believed communalism would vanish with modernization [cf Nehru’s An Autobiography] and (311) economic improvement; Nehru wrote in 1961: “It is perhaps not very easy even to find a good word in Hindi for ‘secular’. Some people think it means something opposed to religion. That obviously is not correct…It is a state which honours all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities.” [from other writings]; and based on Nehru’s views and his political position, Madan says he can be compared to Lenin and Ataturk



312-Lenin “played n active and direct part in the formulation of the 1918 decree on ‘the separation of the church from the state and of the school from the church’. While every citizen was in principle free to profess any religion, or none at all, he could not actively propagate it; what is more, the educational function of the communist part ensured that ‘senseless ideas’ arising from a false consciousness would be countered.”

-“Similarly, Ataturk proceeded by one deliberate step after another, beginning with the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924, of the religious orders in 1925, of Shari’a courts in 1926, and of Islam as the state religion in 1928. The process of secularization was continued thereafter, and the changes effected were strictly enforced with Kemal himself often setting the example in even minor points of detail.” [PROB: 1) these places weren’t colonized like India and 2) secularization was a process that did not start simply from the force of these leaders]



313-“Contrary to what may be presumed, it is not religious zealots alone who contribute to fundamentalism or fanaticism, which are a misunderstanding of religion, reducing it to mere political bickering [PROB: a very narrow def of these terms], but also the secularists who deny the very legitimacy of religion in human life and society and provide a reaction.”

314-“Maybe religion is not a fake as Marx asserted; maybe there is something eternal about it as Durkheim maintained.” [PROB: 1) durk essentially wrote off rel as a social feeling and 2) there have been many prominent theories of religion before and since durk that are less problematic in many respects]

-Madan has “no solutions to suggest”, though he’s “not advocating the establishment of a Hindu state in India—not at all. It simply will not work.”; “…the only way secularism in South Asia, understood as interreligious understanding, may succeed would be for us to take both religion and secularism seriously and not reject the former as superstition and reduce the latter to a mask for communalism or mere expediency. Secularism would have to imply that those who profess no religion have a place in society equal to that of others, not higher or lower.”



316-in a postscript written in 1996 he says at the time of writing the original article, “There were not many intellectuals then who either showed an awareness of the limitations of secularism as a world-view or expressed any great unease about the recrudescence of religious fanaticism in the form of communalized politics or fundamentalist movements.”, “only a few intellectual had dissented with” the hope for secularism, “Ashis Nandy being the most notable among them.” Cf Nandy “A Counter-Statement on Humanistic Temper” Mainstream 10 Oct 1981; and “An Anti-Secularist Manifesto” Seminar 314, 1985, pp 1-11

-he points out there have been several critics of the article: Bailey “Religion and Religiosity” Contributions to Indian Sociology 25, no. 2, 1991; Baxi “Secularism: Real and Pseudo” in M. M. Sankhdher (ed.) Secularism in India (1992); Beteille “Secularism and the Intellectuals” Economic and Political Weekly 29, no. 10 (1994)

317-“It is imperative that we distinguish between secularization (in Beteille’s (318) words, ‘a social process that unfolds itself on its own, as it were’) and secularism (‘an ideology that some members of society strive consciously to espouse and promote’)”

318-“Looking back, it seems that I did perhaps overemphasize the holistic character of traditional religions, particularly Hinduism” as critics of that article have pointed out; and (319) “It would obviously be a throwback to an untenable Durkheimian sociological extremism to envisage a society in which the secular is non-existent, and I did not mean to propose such a monistic thesis.”, his main point was that the secular is “encompassed by the religious”; plus he admits to religious diversity under the broad banner of “Hindu”, but says that overall Christianity makes a strong distinction between secular and sacred that other religions don’t—“This does not mean that Indians have first to be converted to Christianity before they may be expected to appreciate the virtues of secularism in the sense of its being the ideology of secularization. It only draws attention to the need for greater efforts on the part of Indian intellectuals to clarify the notion of secularism in a (320) context-sensitive manner, drawing upon India’s pluralist traditions.” And says “the masses of this country…[are] comfortable with religious pluralism, and indeed practice it in one form or another. The traditional elite, from whom the great majority of today’s intellectuals are descended, generally disapprove of such pluralism as the superstitious ways of the masses.”

320-secularism should be better related to Indian religious views, “but this should not mean the imposition of one particular meaning on it, and it has to be made into a national ethos. This will take doing and will take time.”, and the responsibility falls on the intellectuals’ shoulders