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The relation between religion and politics remains one of the important issues of our time. The discussions on this relation swing between two extremes: religious fundamentalism and liberal secularism. These are regarded as opposites. As the liberal perspective sees it, the secular state and its principles of neutrality and toleration are antidotes to religious fundamentalism[1]. Recently, this …

The annual reports of the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) have long irked politicians and citizens from countries placed on its ‘watch list’. This is no different in India. In the 2015 report released about a fortnight ago, the country again occupies an unenviable spot in Tier 2, which includes countries where the religious freedom violations engaged in or tolerated by …

Rape of a Country Jakob De Roover Imagine. A filmmaker travels to Belgium because she has heard about the pedophilia scandals in the country. She directs a documentary film including an interview with an infamous pedophile, who says that the girls he raped had actually seduced him and that they really enjoyed it. The filmmaker then comments that Belgian society is responsible for creating such …

After the Paris attacks came the questions: Is this violence caused by Islam or unrelated to religion? Are the perpetrators believers or madmen? Do they represent the extremists that we find in any ideology? The responses were diverse: ‘Islam is a threat to free speech’. But many Muslims joined the protest marches in defence of the freedom of expression. ‘Not all Muslims are terrorists, but most …

Check Balu’s paper on comparative theology, and in particular Francis Clooney’s: Translation, interpretration and culture: on the disingenuity of a comparative theology

Editor’s Note: This article appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy. Authored by SN Balagangadhara and Jakob De Roover. For an alternative research programme (paradigm) for studying India, Indian culture and Indian culture, study Balagangadhara’s Reconceptualizing Indian Studies, published by OUP, India. There are few places in the contemporary world where the problems of cultural …

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the Journal of American Academy of Religion Abstract The paper attempts a contrast between the process and the structure of the Christian and the Indian spirituality. Drawing attention to their dissimilarities, it attempts to reformulate the differences among the Indian traditions in a novel way. It argues that cultures and traditions are not just different; …

We all agree that events like the Gujarat riots are tragic and terrible. But what is the role of intellectuals in avoiding similar tragedies in the future? Why can’t religion be political? Obviously, the duty of the intellectual is to try and help us understand the nature of the events and the violence involved. In India and abroad, the concepts of ‘communalism’ and ‘communal violence’ are often …

What does it mean to be an Indian in this time and age? What does India have to give to the contemporary world? These overarching questions that echo in the mind of the post-colonial Indian cannot be truly answered by Western frameworks instituted at the behest of colonialism. This book sets the stage for a reconceptualization of India studies. Clearing away intellectual deadwood, it initiates a …

[Original , published in ASIANetwork Exchange XVI (1): 57–63.] During the last two decades, I have been pursuing an unorthodox way of studying cultural differences, focusing mainly on the Indian and the western cultures. Because I believe that one can answer questions about the circumscription of the words ‘Indian’ and ‘western’ cultures satisfactorily (Balangangadhara, 1994), I will assume their …

The sustained efforts by certain Hindu groups in the west to redefine and “correct” long existing Hindu traditions are perhaps reflective of their desire to put in place a cogent and structured religious system that is able to hold its own against other scripture-based religions. Concomitantly, American identity politics and European political correctness is also “forcing” minority communities to …

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 …

Colonial Experience of Indian Intellectuals Opposing factions in the Orientalist-Anglicist controversy in the 19th century shared a common understanding of Indian religion and society. Europeans from diverse ideological and religious backgrounds identified the brahmins as priests and brahmanism as a ‘religion of the priests’. This common understanding derived its consistency from a Christian …

Review of Imaging Hinduism: A Postcolonial perspective. By Sharada Sugirtharajah. Routledge, 2003. 164 pages This book is the first of its kind to bring post-colonial perspectivesinto a study of Hinduism. Consequently, there are no conventionalreference points for the author to use to build her narrative. She has to figure out how to use the conceptual apparatus ofthe one to study the other. In …

A Disquieting Suggestion Arthur Danto, the well-known American philosopher, prefaced a book he wrote in the 70’s on oriental thought and moral philosophy titled Mysticism and Morality with the following words: The factual beliefs (that the civilizations of the East) take for granted are …too alien to our (the West’s) representations of the World to be grafted on to it, and in consequence their …

[ Original , published Philosophica 40 (2): 77–107] Introduction Should action sciences exist, it is obvious what they would have to study; the nature of human action, the kind of knowledge that actions generate, the process of learning to perform different types of action and so forth. Comparative anthropology, as a discipline, studies and contrasts, where such contrasts are possible, the …

Though the book was published nearly two decades ago, Said’s Orientalism continues to be topical. Many have rejected the message of this work; others have attempted to develop its arguments yet further. This article will not be one more interpretation of Said’s book; after all, there are many such interpretations, including Said’s own. Instead, it probes the phenomenon of ‘post-Orientalism’. Even …

Introduction Perhaps it is best that we begin on a personal note. Neither of the two authors of this article is a ‘specialist’ in the domain of argumentation theory. Even though we have picked up smatterings of logic, we are not professionals working on either informal or formal logic. One of us is a practicing anthropologist, while the other is oriented towards comparative anthropology. And yet, …