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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

In one sense, the title of the piece captures the nature of the tasks facing the contemporary generation, whether in India or in the Diaspora. This generation, unlike many from mine, is confident and self-assured; perhaps, it is proud too about the strength of its culture and traditions. Rightly so. However, personal convictions about the value of our traditions and culture do not automatically …

While reading this contribution and all the others ([1] , [3] ) I hope to write, we need to keep the context in mind. The context is this: many intellectuals, both in India and among the NRIs elsewhere, appear bent on transforming our multiple traditions into a single ‘religion’ called ‘Hinduism’. The problem does not lie in the transformation of variety and diversity into a unity. Rather, it lies …

Let me begin this contribution, the third piece about our culture and traditions([1] , [2] ), by sharing something you are familiar with. Very often, I have heard the NRI parents in the USA making the following remark: When I came to the US so many decades ago, I knew very little about Hinduism. My ignorance was driven home when I had children and they began to ask what Hinduism was. Because I had …

In our daily life, we hardly pause to reflect upon many problematic things that we routinely assume as self-evident. Such an attitude is useful since it allows us to focus on other things that occupy us at that moment. One such attitude is not to bestow too much care on how we use language: we routinely speak of similarity in meaning, identical concepts, exact and accurate translations and so on. …

When we go-about with our fellow human beings, we need to possess some or another idea about the nature of ourselves and our fellow human beings. (Call it, for the sake of convenience, an ‘intuitive theory’ about human beings.) It is an implicit understanding because each one of us does not have to be a professional philosopher or psychologist to get along with ourselves and fellow human beings. …

Balagangadhara points out an inconsistent reasoning of the western and westernized Scholars, as well as the last 400 years of humanities scholarship. “Let me summarise the dilemma. Some properties are necessary for some traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) to be religions. If one accepts this, the threat is that other cultures appear not to have religions at all. For some reason or another (I …

Colonialism has been one of the most significant phenomena in the history of humankind in the last three hundred years or so. Its importance can hardly be overstated. Yet, as many have said before, it has not been adequately theorized. There is of course a great deal of material on the histories, the effects, and the political resistances to colonialism. Reading them, however, merely increases the …

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 …

As Indians, if we have to access the Indian traditions we need two things: (a) it must be possible for us to access them; (b) we must know how to access them. That is to say, growing up in the Indian traditions not merely means that we have the possibility of accessing them if we want to but we have also learnt how to access them when we want to. Only for the sake of convenience, let me put it …

“How do we understand the idea that an enlightened person has no wants?” Before we understand what the idea says, it would be good to find out what it does not say. Understanding this would also allow us to appreciate the depth and extent of colonial consciousness. If you look at the way the Buddha was portrayed in the middle-class text books you studied (that is also how he was more or less …

One of the most common characteristics of the African culture is supposed to be its tribal nature. You could begin a study of ‘how’ European intellectuals came to this characterization. It will have something to do with the way the Jews are differentiated internally, the novelty of what they confronted in Africa, and the inability to conceptualize what ’tribes’ really are. Such a research, which …

There is ethics in India, but it is not normative ethics. It is a non-normative ethics. To get you going, consider acts like ‘generosity’, ‘kindness’, ‘bravery’, ‘friendliness’ and such like. Often called ‘virtues’, these actions do not come under the scope of normative ethics. You cannot say: “one ought to be generous”, because generosity implies doing ‘more than’ what is expected in the act of …