Jakob

A text like my article on the secularism debate (EPW, September 28, 2002), is something more than a sequence of sentences. This is a scientific text, which builds an argument. Therefore, the different sentences have different status according to their function in the argument. Some are premises, and others state the conclusions that follow from these. Some sentences illustrate the point made, yet …

On the Indian Debate and Its Western Origins The rise of Hindutva has often been interpreted as a threat to the secular state. Similarly, the recent outbursts of Hindu-Muslim conflict are said to be related to the decay of secularism. The author argues that the concept of secularism is fundamentally obscure, since it is founded upon an arbitrary distinction between the religious and the secular. …

The Indian debate on religious conversion has been an ongoing one for a few centuries now. However, the mutual understanding between the advocates and the adversaries of conversion has not advanced much. This paper suggests that this is due to the fact that Hindus and Christians refer to two different objects when they discuss ‘religion’. The traits which the Christians ascribe to religion account …

In the last few decades, “secularism” has become the subject of caustic debate in the Indian media. The dispute about the value of this idea to contemporary India is no longer confined to the academic circles. Politicians, journalists and others have strong views on the topic. Secularism regularly surfaces in newspaper articles, speeches and public meetings. The critics of the idea, however, are …

In years to come, the Indian community in the U.S. will face a major challenge from American pluralism. This is the first time a powerful community of pagans has to be accommodated within the American society. The NRI community is well-educated, well-to-do and proud of its cultural traditions. At the same time, the representation of the Indian traditions in the U.S. educational system shows a …

What is at stake in the California textbook controversy? Few would agree that it concerns only the image of Hinduism as offered to the pupils of the California state schools. The controversy involves much more than that alone. It is the next phase in the NRI community’s struggle for a less biased and more benign portrayal of Hinduism in the educational system and in American society in general. In …

So far, our answers have always taken this form: in the moment of secularization, the formal structures or cognitive schemes of Christianity are diffused accordingly as they lose their specific doctrinal content. In this formulation, it is as though the logical form of religion is able to spread itself by disposing of its semantic content. Thus, both the common sense of the West and the scholarly …

We have developed partial explanations of why the secularism debate in India takes such peculiar forms and why otherwise intelligent people talk nonsense here. But we don’t do so by pegging our use of the word secularism “onto Balu’s theory about the nature of religion and how that entity religion behaves in the world” and then expecting that other people do the same. Let me quickly repeat our …

We do not have any clear explanation of the nature and rise of American identity politics as yet. But here are a few speculative intuitions: Identity politics seems to be the way in which the dominant culture in America compels other cultural communities to become variants of itself. It sustains a basic model of society which neutralizes groups that challenge the dominant culture by making them …

The absence of supernatural entities in the Indian traditions may seem counterintuitive to many. We can let someone else do the talking for us, namely Dale B. Martin in his interesting book Inventing Superstition: from the Hippocratics to the Christians (Harvard University Press, 2004): “One of the basic arguments of this book is that, contrary to many modern assumptions, the category of “the …

While reading Shabnum Tejani’s *Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History (*2008), I ran into the same weird point that Neera Chandhoke also tried to make at the RRI platform debate on secularism. This is a combination of the old claim that ‘secularism’ has acquired a different meaning in India and a general theoretical point: ‘secularism does not have any essence or universal meaning, …

1: Atheism is a phenomenon that came into being in the western culture at around the time of the so-called Enlightenment. The West claims that it liberated itself from the dogmas of the Christian religion in this Enlightenment, and those who call themselves atheists mean by this that they belong to the enlightened people who “have escaped from the dogmatic illusions of religion.” Now, as it has …

The logical steps that inevitably make the claim that God revealed His Will in Jesus Christ into an unconditional and exclusive truth claim are fairly simple: (a) Christianity says that the universe was created by God, and that this universe is the perfect embodiment of His will or plan; (b) Furthermore, it claims that this God has revealed His Will to humankind, and that this revelation is the …

One of these so-called secular accounts that are in fact Christian is the belief that all cultures have a religion. It is simply a secularization of the Christian belief that the biblical God gave religion to humankind, which was transformed into the assumption that religion is a cultural universal during the Enlightenment. This pre-theoretical assumption precedes all empirical research and …