Secular

Let us suppose that some school or another in India also prescribes uniform to its students. A Sikh boy and a Muslim girl enroll. They wear the colors of the school, including the right colored turban (or, if the Sikh kid is too young, his hair tied up in a knot) and the right-colored head scarf. From what I know of the Indian schools, most schools (including the fellow-students) would let the …

We can all accept the fact, I suppose, that some thing or another is a religious symbol to someone when s/he belongs to that religion whose symbol it is. In this sense, the Cross (for a long period of time), the figure of the Prophet Mohammed (also for a long period of time) and the star of David (in the course of this century) are symbols that carry religious significance to the Christians, …

What is wrong with the intercultural exchange of categories? Throughout one gets the impression that there is something “fundamentally wrong” with categories shifting in meaning over time or with the introduction of categories from one culture into another culture. But what is important about these shifts in meaning? What exactly is the problem in introducing the category of religion into India or …

The theories (and discussions) about secularism constitute a test case for the claims advanced in ‘The Heathen in his blindness: Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion’ about the universalizing drive of religion. I have suggested that religion spreads by secularizing itself, and that the distinction between the secular and the religious is drawn by and within a religion. If this is the case, …

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 …

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, …

Today, there are multiple images of India current in the West. There is the mystic India, an image that the German Romantics created and the ‘flower children’ of the sixties made popular. There is the third world India with enormous poverty and suffering, which the developmental workers have projected. There is also the India, the centre of IT outsourcing, which the developments in the last decade …

The question appears to be: need one accept certain premises of Christianity (whether Protestant or Catholic varieties) in order that the dominant understanding of, say, the secular state and the caste to make sense? That those to whom such accounts make sense do not explicitly subscribe to the premises of a specific religious appears to throw doubt on our claims. Consider the very distinction …