Abstract
This Chapter is an exercise in comparative secularism. In this chapter I will be concerned basically with a critique of Western conceptions of secularism, beginning with Hegel’s invention of a particular reading of secularism that, through imperialist literature, gave a preeminent direction to the ideology of the less-religiously orientated Indian nationalists during their drawn-out independence struggle. My main concern will be to contrast the Western debates on ‘the secular’, particularly in its recent permutations or attempted revisions as a response to the crisis of modernity, with the current Indian debates—where ‘ the secular; has all but been hijacked by the Hindu Right—and to show—reversing Hegel’s trajectory—what impact the latter could have on the former. There is some evidence of this already occurring, particularly in Charles Taylor’s work and travels wherein he does make some gestures towards looking at non-Western experiences of secularism (which is taken more or less to be synonymous with secularization). There are severe limitations to this overture however, and the chapter hopes to sound a word of caution on the kind of excitement over which Taylor seems to have become something of a celebrity in the academe. Even more disappointingly, one does not find a similar emphatic approach or opening to non-Western experiences and rethinking of the secular in the works of other modernists; and I point to Habermas and Žižek as my examples, who I touch on, albeit very briefly. This lack or lacuna makes both the discourse of modernity and the supplementary critique of secularism much the poorer for it.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Although we can’t pursue this here, we note that this would not be the first time in the history of the Indian civilization that a recourse to the secular in the moral and political discourses of sovereign reinvigoration has been afforded: this happened with the Buddha who stood up to the excesses of Brahmanic priestly hegemony (Bailey and Mabbett 2008), and in the Arthashastra of Kautilya (the presumed Indian Machiavelli) (Bilimoria 1998, 2007).
- 2.
‘The Sangh’ (comprising at the helm the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), a breakaway from the Hindu Sabha, was founded in Nagpur, Maharashtra, in 1925. Its ideologues are VD Savarkar (who gave the term ‘Hindutva’), KB Hedgewar, Balasaheb Deoras, and MS Golwakar, succeeded by Rajendra Singh, who launched the movement to which were inducted Jan Sangh (now defunct), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Kar Sevaks, Bajrang Dal, Shiva Sena and a splintering of various saffron shades. One of its main activities from inception has been to impart para-military training and ideological indoctrination (Bacchetta 2004: 6). It founded two political parties: Jan Sangh (now defunct) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and has representations in the other major parties (NDA), with infiltrations into Communists and Muslim factions, ADMK, and other parties in the South.
- 3.
A brief note first on the genealogy of Personal Law, what is also often referred to as religious-community law, more broadly. Personal Law in India constitutes a legacy from the British Raj (since Warren Hastings actually) when a hybrid system of Law based on an egregious bifurcation of extant mores and customs into the ‘public’ and ‘private’ was instituted. Public codes governed fairly uniformly the criminal and certain civil codes, in commerce, public safety and security and services and welfare, and so on. Laws applicable to the private sphere of morality, which largely govern what is nowadays called Family Law, but inclusive of property rights within family, were brought under Personal Law (Bilimoria and Sharma 2000). Personal Law would then govern marriage, fiduciary partnerships, divorce, maintenance, inheritance, succession, and adoption. The jurisdiction of Personal Law remained strictly within the community’s own continuing customary, scriptural, communal and traditional legal practices. The legislature and civil courts would tread on this institution with utmost care and caution, and their jurisdiction was restricted to only those matters or disputes that were brought under the community’s provisions, dispensation or exemption within Personal Law (property distribution in an extended family upon death of the father or husband), or litigated under the Criminal or Penal Code where there is a real threat to the life and livelihood of an individual within a family dispute (e.g. enforced vagrancy following a divorce or denial of coparcenary entitlement). Hence there was the Anglo-Hindu Law for Hindus, Anglo-Mohammad Law for Muslims, and Christian Law for Europeans and Anglo-India Christians. Similar transformations of indigenous law into specific legal discourse that ended in a portmanteau of religious-legal practice occurred elsewhere, in British-governed Islamic colonies as well, e.g. Yemen, Turkey.
References
Bacchetta, Paola. 2004. Gender in the hindu national: RSS women as ideologues. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.
Bailey, Greg, and Ian Mabbett. 2008. The sociology of early Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Basu, Srimati. 2001. The personal law and the political: Indian women and inheritance law. Larson 2001: 163–183.
Baynes, K. 1998. Habermas. In Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy, ed. E. Craig. Online. http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/DD024SECT. Accessed 11 Sept 2011.
Bilimoria, P. 2002a. The enlightenment paradigm of native right and forged hybridity of cultural rights in British India. In Varieties of ethical reflection: New directions for ethics in a global context, ed. Michael Barnhardt, 235–262. Lanham: Rowman/Littlefield.
Bilimoria, P. 2002b. Postcolonial critique of reason: Spivak between Kant and Matilal. Interventions: International journal of postcolonial studies 4: 160–167.
Bilimoria, P. 2006. The pseudo-secularization of Hindutva and its campaign for uniform civil codes. Nidan: Journal of the Department of Hindu Studies 18: 1–21.
Bilimoria, P. 2007. Dismantling normativity in Indian ethics—from Vedic altarity to the Gītā’s alterity. In The ethical dimension and deconstruction normative ethics, ed. Youru Wang, 33–74. New York: Routledge.
Bilimoria, P. 2008. Nietzsche as ‘Europe’s Buddha’ and ‘Asia’s Superman’. Sophia 47: 359–376.
Bilimoria, P. 2009. The pseudo-secularization of Hindutva and its campaign for uniform civil codes. Nidān 18: 1–21.
Bilimoria, P., and Dina Al-Kassim eds. 2013. Postcolonialism reason and its critiques, deliberations on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s thoughts. New Delhi/New York: Oxford University Press.
Bilimoria, Purushottama, and Sharma, Renuka. 2000. Muslim personal law in India: Colonial legacy and current debates. Preliminary Report. http://www.law.emory.edu/ifl/index2.html. Accessed 11 Aug 2011.
Bilimoria, P. 1998. Kautilya (Fl. C.321-C.296 BC), Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 220–222. London, UK: Routledge. [D1] http://www.deakin.edu.au/research/admin/pubs/reports/database/dynamic/output/cat/catdef.php#D1
Bilimoria. P. 2011. Hegel’s spectre on indian thought and its god-in-nothingness, Review essay on Arvind-Pal Mandair’s 2010. Religion and the spectre of the west, Sikhism, India, postcoloniality and the politics of transnation. In Religions of South Asia, special issue edited by Balbinder Singh Bhogal. Forthcoming.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The national and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dhavan, Rajeev. 2001. The road to Xanadu: India’s quest for secularism. In Religion and personal law in secular India: A call to judgment, ed. Gerald James Larson, 301–329. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Dussel, Enrique. 1996. Modernity, eurocentricism, and trans-modernity: In dialogue with Charles Taylor. In The underside of modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Taylor and the philosophy of liberation. Trans. and ed. Mendieta, Eduardo, 129–159. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.
Duvenage, Pieter. 2010. Communicative reason and religion: The case of Habermas. Sophia 49(3): 343–357.
Eisen, Robert. 2011. The peace and violence of Judaism: From the Bible to modern zionism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gandhi, Leela. 1998. Postcolonial theory: A critical introduction. New York: Colombia University Press.
Gupta, Dipankar. 2009. Gandhi before Habermas: The democratic consequences of Ahimsa. Economic and Political Weekly 7: 27–33.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1985. The philosophical discourse of modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. Between naturalism and religion: Philosophical essays. Cambridge: Polity.
Hasan, Mushirul. 1994. Minority identity and its discontents. South Asian Bulletin 14: 24–40.
Hasan, Zoya, and Ritu Menon (eds.). 2005. In a minority: Essays on Muslim Women in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Mandair, Arvind-Pal. 2010. Religion and the spectre of the West, Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality and the politics of transation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mehta, Pratap Banu. 2010. India: The politics of religious reform and conflcit. In Religion, the enlightenment and the new global order, ed. John M. Owen IV and J. Judd Owen, 174–192. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mendieta, Eduardo. 2001. Society’s religion: The rise of social theory, globalization, and the invention of religion. In Religions/globalizations: Theories and cases, eds. Dwight N. Hopkins, and Lois Ann Lorentzen, 46–65. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mendieta, Eduardo. 2009. Transcending the ‘Gory Cradle of Humanity’: War, loyalty, and civic action in Royce and James. In Pragmatism, nation, and race: Community in the age of Empire, ed. Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta, 222–241. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Parashar, Arcana. 2002. Women and family law reform in India. London: Sage Publications.
Parekh, Bhikhu. 1999. Colonialism, tradition and reform: An analysis of Gandhi’s political discourse. New Delhi: Sage.
Prabhu, Joseph. 2012. Philosophy in an age of reason. Australian Religious Studies Review 25(2):123–138. Special Issue on Religion & Postcolonialism guest edited by P. Bilimoria.
Singer, Peter. 2011. Singer vs Lennox: Is there a God? Big Ideas, ABC TV. www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2011/09/06/3310342.htm. Accessed 15 Sept 2011.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A critique of postcolonial reason: Towards a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 2007. The secular age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Warner, Rob. 2010. Secularization and its discontents. New York: Continuum.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. The death of god. Keynote address at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting Montréal, Québec. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/videos/the-death-of-god/. Accessed 15 Sept 2011.
Žižek, Slavoj, and Daly, Glyn. 2004. Conversations with Zizek. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bilimoria, P. (2014). Disenchantments of Secularism: The West and India. In: Sharpe, M., Nickelson, D. (eds) Secularisations and Their Debates. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7116-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7116-1_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-7115-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-7116-1
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)