The Crisis of Secularism in India

The Crisis of Secularism in India

Edited by Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

Duke University Press

Durham and London
2007
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communication between Asians and Americans.
 CONTENTS

vii Preface
xi Acknowledgments
1 Introduction Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and Anuradha Dingwaney Needham

I. Secularism’s Historical Background

45 Reflections on the Category of Secularism in India: Gandhi, Ambedkar,
and the Ethics of Communal Representation, c. 1931 Shabnum Tejani
66 A View from the South: Ramasami’s Public Critique of Religion
Paula Richman and V. Geetha
89 Nehru’s Faith Sunil Khilnani

II. Secularism and Democracy

107 Closing the Debate on Secularism: A Personal Statement Ashis Nandy
118 Living with Secularism Nivedita Menon
141 The Contradictions of Secularism Partha Chatterjee
157 The Secular State and the Limits of Dialogue Gyanendra Pandey
177 Secular Nationalism, Hindutva, and the Minority Gyan Prakash

III. Sites of Secularism: Education, Media, and Cinema

191 Secularism, History, and Contemporary Politics in India Romila Thapar
208 The Gujarat Experiment and Hindu National Realism:
Lessons for Secularism Arvind Rajagopal
225 Secularism and Popular Indian Cinema Shyam Benegal
239 Neither State nor Faith: The Transcendental Significance of
the Cinema Ravi S. Vasudevan

IV. Secularism and Personal Law

267 Siting Secularism in the Uniform Civil Code: A ‘‘Riddle Wrapped
Inside an Enigma’’? Upendra Baxi
294 The Supreme Court, the Media, and the Uniform Civil Code Debate
in India Flavia Agnes
316 Secularism and the Very Concept of Law Akeel Bilgrami

V. Conversion
333 Literacy and Conversion in the Discourse of Hindu Nationalism
Gauri Viswanathan
356 Christian Conversions, Hindutva, and Secularism Sumit Sarkar
369 Appendix: Chronology of the Career of Secularism in India
Dwaipayan Sen

373 Works Cited

397 Contributors
401 Index

vi Contents
 PREFACE

This volume is the outcome of a major three-day conference, entitled ‘‘Siting

Secularism,’’ held at Oberlin College, Ohio, in April 2002. The conference was
hugely attended and the debates, publicity, and reflection that were generated
by the issues it raised led us to envisage the production of this volume of
essays (written, for the most part, by those who gave the plenary talks).∞
Though conceptualized and planned well in advance of Godhra and post-
Godhra events, the conference took place in their shadow, giving a particular
urgency to the question of secularism in India that was being discussed over
the three days in Oberlin. On February 27, 2002, some Muslims, it was al-
leged, had attacked the Sabarmati Express at the Godhra railway station in
Gujarat. The train was carrying Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya, the
site of the Babri Masjid–Ramjanmabhoomi dispute. This incident provoked
widespread attacks, presented as retaliatory violence, against Muslims in
Ahmadabad and other places in Gujarat.
Several factors distinguished the communal violence in Gujarat 2002 from
earlier riots, including the degree and kind of violence perpetrated against the
Muslims; the links between this violence and what was largely viewed as a
Hindutva strategy deployed to garner electoral gains; and the state’s participa-
tion in this violence.
‘‘Gujarat,’’ therefore, functions as an important referent in what is viewed
by many as the most recent crisis of secularism and resonates as the occasion
and framework for most of the essays collected in this volume. Of course, the
significance of the violence in Gujarat is not restricted to its di√erence from
other instances of communal violence in India or even what it presaged for the
future of the Indian polity. For Gujarat, however ‘‘locally’’ one may name it as
an event and symptom, is crucially linked to the global situation as well—
specifically the events of 9/11 in the United States that have legitimized Presi-
dent Bush’s ‘‘war on terror.’’ Thus, the special urgency of our renewed focus
on secularism in India derives from the ways in which Gujarat articulates with
present-day local and global politics.
Although Gujarat constitutes our point of departure for this volume, other
narratives of the crisis of secularism in India point to other symptoms that it
is also cognizant of. For example, the Emergency of 1975–77, when, ironi-
cally, the term ‘‘secularism’’ first entered the constitution via the Forty-Second
Amendment; the Shah Bano case in the 1980s; the anti-Mandal agitation
and the Babri-Masjid demolition in conjunction with the Ramjanmabhoomi
movement in the 1990s. Indeed, some analyses of the crisis of secularism in
India view it as integrally connected to, and a product of, the exclusions,
elisions, and contradictions of the o≈cial nationalist imagining of an inde-
pendent India, in which secularism was conceived as central to the project of
national integration; while yet other analyses view this crisis as proceeding
not from specific events but rather as inhering in the very concept of secular-
ism. At present, no matter when or where these analyses locate the crisis of
secularism, there is a wide consensus that the rise of the Hindu right, par-
ticularly the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), in Indian politics has brought to the
fore with considerable force interrogations about the adequacy of the guaran-
tees o√ered by secularism to the safety and rights of minority communities.
Gujarat 2002 as the most recent and exacerbated instance of this phenomenon
provides both occasion and provocation for examining the ills that beset
secularism and the projects connected to it in India.
The most recent (April 2004) general elections in India, which installed a
Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (upa) at the center, defeating the
bjp-led National Democratic Alliance (nda), are viewed by many as provid-
ing the crucial breathing space within which a di√erent—perhaps renewed
secular—politics may be articulated. However, few are sanguine about this,
not least because the communalization intensified by, but not restricted to, the
rise of the Hindu right in India is now deeply and pervasively entrenched and
is likely therefore to require strenuous and sustained intervention in order to
dislodge. One such set of interventions is provided by this volume. For though
Gujarat has provided the occasion for the essays here, almost all of them are

viii Preface
future-directed—diagnosing the ills that beset the projects of secularism in
India, but providing as well sites for present and future transformations.
This volume also sets out to take stock of the theoretical debates around
the concept and program of Indian secularism, reflected in the following
broad questions: Is secularism the solution it was envisioned to be for the
multireligious Indian polity? If not, is it merely an inadequate solution? Or is
it, instead, itself the problem? How may it be understood, clarified, and recast
to serve the ends of the nation-state? The contradictions in the ideals, policies,
and practices of secularism are in urgent need of further understanding,
deliberation, and debate. We envisage The Crisis of Secularism as an opportunity
for such a retrospect, as well as an opening for productive interventions.

Note
1. This volume is not, however, the proceedings of the conference. Almost all the partici-
pants have chosen to write entirely new essays, primarily as a result of the crisis pro-
duced by the events in Gujarat. Not all the plenary speakers were able to contribute to
this volume. Mushirul Hasan, Prasenjit Duara, and Kumkum Sangari are therefore
regrettably absent from this collection. We have also included contributions from the
following scholars who were not present at the conference: Flavia Agnes, Sunil Khil-
nani, Sumit Sarkar, and Romila Thapar; Paula Richman invited V. Geetha to collaborate
with her.

Preface ix
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without the conference, ‘‘Siting Secularism,’’ it is fair to say, there would be

no collection of essays. For making the conference possible, we are indebted
to a number of people, departments, and organizations at Oberlin College
who contributed funds and indispensable organizational support. We wish to
express our gratitude to the following: Oberlin Shansi, President Nancy Dye
and members of her sta√, Clayton Koppes, then Dean of Arts and Sciences,
and members of his sta√, the Mead Swing Committee, Research and Develop-
ment Committee, Human Resources, the Multicultural Resource Center, the
South Asian Student’s Association, Mudd Library, and the departments of
English, history, politics, and African American studies. Among individuals
who gave of their time and energy, we want to thank Donna Baxter, the late
Rachel Beverley, Eric Carpenter, Deborah Cocco, Nelson deJesus, Menna De-
messie, Michael Fisher, Carl Jacobson, Priya Kumar, Lawrence Needham,
Shruti Sasidharan, Dwaipayan Sen, Sonali Seth, Kate Shorb, Shahana Siddiqui
and Neelam Srivastava, and Mary Tvaroha. We could not have done without
the English Department’s administrative assistant, Sue Elkevizth, who han-
dled so many details that it is well-nigh impossible to list all she did.
In putting together this volume, Anuradha Dingwaney Needham is grate-
ful, most of all, to Michael Fisher. She also wishes to thank the Research and
Development Committee and Nicholas Jones, then chair of the English De-
partment, for providing, respectively, funds for research and student assis-
tants and access to departmental resources.
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is grateful to the English faculty of the University
of Oxford for making available funds for travel and research assistance in the
preparation of this volume.
Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press provided crucial support, enthusi-
asm, and encouragement for this project; his assistant, Courtney Berger, has
been indispensable in providing answers for a relentless series of queries
regarding putting the manuscript together; and we wish to acknowledge Pam
Morrison’s help in shepherding the volume through its final stages.
We are deeply indebted to the anonymous readers who provided de-
tailed critical commentary and suggestions on our introduction and the indi-
vidual essays.
We are also indebted to Manav Ratti for his assiduous work on the index.

xii Acknowledgments
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and Anuradha Dingwaney Needham

Introduction

T he essays in this collection emerge from what have been termed

the ‘‘secularism debates’’ in India, the intellectual response to
the various crises of the Indian polity following the Emergency
and culminating in the Gujarat violence of 2002. While there is
broad consensus that there does exist a contemporary ‘‘crisis’’ of
secularism, how it is to be interpreted and what, if anything, is to
be done about it are matters of vigorous intellectual and political
debate. The conflict, very broadly delineated, is between ‘‘commu-
nitarians,’’ so called because of their opposition to coercive state
secularism, their advocacy of a pluralist and decentralized polity,
and their support of autonomy for religious communities; and
left-liberal secularists, who support egalitarianism, uniformity of
law, and the separation of religion from politics. It is the sharp
polarization of their positions—though it should be emphasized
that all are united in their opposition to Hindutva hegemony—that
has made secularism so divided in its meaning and e√ects. Inter-
preted as alternatively freedom or coercion, tolerance or intoler-
ance, universal or parochial, pluralist or homogenizing, national-
ist or cosmopolitan, liberal or illiberal, according to the politics
of its advocates or critics, secularism in India has been a divisive
issue—but also, we might argue, one that has therefore not been
allowed to lapse into an orthodoxy.
Before presenting the issues discussed in these essays as they
relate to the contemporary situation of India, we identify in this introductory
essay the symptoms and implications of the ‘‘crisis of secularism’’ that the
title of this volume diagnoses, and we unpack some of the meanings the term
‘‘secularism’’ bears—or, more accurately, the functions it performs—in the
modern world. This exercise, we feel, is necessary in order to provide not only
a specific geopolitical context for the essays but also a theoretical framing
that will put them in relation and dialogue with the critiques of secularism
that have been launched from other postcolonial locations as well as within
the West.
As a term, crisis of secularism lends itself to two possible ways of being
understood, whose di√erences, but also articulations, serve as an indication
of its overdetermined nature. In one interpretation the preposition ‘‘of ’’ oper-
ates reflexively, to suggest that the very basis of secularism is jeopardized, beset
by forces external to it. These forces, briefly put, are regarded as primarily
those of religion. A ‘‘crisis of ’’ secularism (or of anything else) could also
suggest a di√erent interpretation, that of a functional breakdown, an inability
to achieve its ends: ends that include, in the case of secularism, as we will see,
a long list of historical transformations. If the first corresponds to a sense of
crisis as defeat, the second identifies it as failure. Broadly—but bearing in
mind that this is o√ered only as a heuristic—we might say that in the one case
secularism is regarded primarily as a cultural or ideological phenomenon, in
the other as an aspect or crisis of the state.
Carrying this analysis further, we might observe that the dominant mode of
conceiving the crisis of secularism in the first sense is in relation to religion,
the adversary with which it is supposedly locked in struggle. This crisis of
secularism is signaled by dismay over the evidence of a growing ‘‘deprivatiza-
tion of religion,’’∞ but also, in some quarters, by the intuited demands of an
enlarged conception of the ethical and a√ective life that secularization has
failed to meet: both these responses are essentially identified with the West-
ern world.≤
But what we would like to suggest is that, while the logic of secularism is
undeniably—even constitutively—defined by opposition to religion, there is
also a further sense of the nature of the crisis that it faces today that compli-
cates this dialectic. In particular, the secularism debates that we are tracking
in this volume as they relate to the case of contemporary India are at a marked
distance from the issue of religion as such. Religion’s role in the modern
world has been vastly reconstituted, so much so that religious debates and

2 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

conflicts are no longer primarily waged over matters of belief, the true god,
salvation, or other substantive issues of faith, as they once were; it is instead
religion as the basis of identity and identitarian cultural practices—with co-
religionists constituting a community, nation, or ‘‘civilization’’—that comes
to be the ground of di√erence and hence conflict.≥
Secularism is therefore interrogated for its usefulness in addressing other
issues, without reference to religion (matters in which religion is not expected
to be the central alternative that might provide a solution): among these
are the problem of achieving the peaceful coexistence of ‘‘di√erent’’ people
(whose di√erences are often, but not always, religious), also identified as the
problem of ‘‘national unity’’; and the problem of achieving ‘‘real’’ democracy,
also identified as the problem of minorities. Secularism, we are suggesting, is
a more comprehensive and di√use package of ideas, ideals, politics, and
strategies than its representation solely as religion’s Other would lead us to
expect. This is particularly so in the postcolonial world where it has been
called on to perform multiple functions in the service of nation building.
The usual diagnosis of a West that is secular and a non-West that is non-
secular stands therefore in need of some adjustment.∂ The form in which this
opposition is increasingly frequently cast is in terms of the secular West versus
the religious (read: Islamic) non-West, aka the ‘‘clash of civilizations.’’ The
phrase ‘‘crisis of secularism’’ has begun to serve as facile euphemism for the
‘‘ ‘problem’ of Islam,’’ or shorthand for Taliban- the veil- the Rushdie a√air- 9/11.
Such a reading is dominant and persuasive even when recast in tones of
politically correct self-reproach and postmodern interrogation among intel-
lectuals in the Western academy, as, for example, in the following statement
issued at a recent major Euro-American conference on ‘‘ political theologies’’:

Imagined to be universal in both relevance and application, the rigid boundaries

by which secularist social structures divide the public sphere of political pro-
cesses from private commitments to the values inculcated by religious and
spiritual traditions have proved, instead, a source of mounting resistance on the
part of cultures in which the superiority of such structures is not self-evident.

The statement goes on to insist on the urgency of understanding the ‘‘re-

ligiously informed resistance to pressures of secularization and cultural-
political assimilation implicit in the continuing sources of tension between
the ‘secular’ West and the developing societies imagined in the West as the
‘beneficiaries’ of globalization’’ (‘‘Political Theologies’’ conference, 3–4).∑

Introduction 3
 September 11, 2001, is responsible for the ‘‘urgency’’ with which intel-
lectuals in the West today seek to understand religion in the context of global-
ization.∏ ‘‘Crisis’’ is the name given to the violence—this violence in particu-
lar, Islamic suicide bombing—by which secularism/democracy/liberalism/
reason is supposedly overpowered. Ethnic conflict and terrorism are its re-
spective national and international manifestations. If minorities and countries
at the ‘‘receiving end of globalization’’ are viewed—even if sympathetically—as
turning to violence in their attempt to ‘‘maintain a distinct sense of identity
and particularity over against Western/Enlightenment values and governance
structures’’ (‘‘Political Theologies’’ conference, 5), religion is still called on to
serve as the distinguishing mark of such minority identity struggles. Even
though the globalizing West may be blamed for such a development, it im-
plicitly remains the secular party in this narrative.
But the questions we must ask at the present moment are these: how
accurate is such a characterization of the contemporary Western world? How
complete or thorough has been the secularization of this (undi√erentiated)
West? It is true, as a matter of the historical record (and grown into a com-
monplace observation now), that secularism originated in and is a product of
the history of capitalist modernity in the West. (Less attended to is the argu-
ment that ‘‘religion’’ itself in its institutional sense, as a self-contained sphere
of belief and practices, is a product of the same history.)π But Van der Veer and
Lehmann, for instance, produce historical evidence that religion had a signifi-
cant role to play in the formation of Western nationalisms and o√er the
examples of Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain in the late nineteenth
century as ‘‘consciously Christian’’ colonial powers (6–8).∫ A number of re-
cent studies arrive at the discovery that ‘‘the world today is . . . anything but the
secularized world that had been predicted (whether joyfully or despondently)
by so many analysts of modernity’’ (Berger, 9; emphasis in original). In any
case, there is a need to distinguish between Europe and America, as Salman
Rushdie does in a recent polemical piece issued to warn against Christian
resurgence in the United States and Britain: ‘‘Few Europeans today would call
themselves religious—only 21 per cent, according to a recent European Values
Study, as opposed to 59 per cent of Americans, according to the Pew Forum.’’Ω
His explanation for this is historical: ‘‘In Europe the Enlightenment repre-
sented an escape from the power of religion to place limiting points on
thought, while in America it represented an escape into the religious freedom
of the New World—a move towards faith, rather than away from it.’’ He shares

4 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

the Europeans’ feeling that ‘‘the American combination of religion and na-
tionalism is frightening.’’
The increasing power and influence of the Christian right in the United
States is a generally acknowledged phenomenon.∞≠ What is significant is that
this faith has implicitly legitimized itself as an exercise of individual ‘‘moral
autonomy.’’ Such is the self-delusion of American liberal society, observes
Wendy Brown, that it can view ‘‘Bush’s religiosity . . . as a source of strength
and moral guidance for his deliberations and decisions while the devotee of
Allah is assumed to be without the individual will and conscience necessary to
such ratiocination’’ (‘‘Regulating Aversion’’). Furthermore, the Christian right
is usually seen as operating within the sphere of American civil society (the
classroom is its most prominent site), and hence as still keeping religion
separate from statecraft or politics as such.∞∞
Jeremy Seabrook’s diagnosis of America’s world role contradicts this no-
tion of containment. He proposes that the military and economic power of the
United States and its readiness to deploy it globally mean that it has ‘‘itself
become a world religion,’’ a di√erent and vastly more momentous matter than
simply being religious (or secular). By deploying ‘‘institutionalized terror’’ as a
recognizable religious idiom, the United States is ‘‘universally feared for the
punishment without limits’’ that it can inflict.∞≤ Karen Leonard opposes the
proposition that American imperialism is the same as religious majoritarian-
ism within the nation: ‘‘while Bush and his ilk may have Christian imperatives
in their international policy-making, there are plenty of others who are impe-
rialist without the religious tinge (free traders, not religious zealots)’’ (per-
sonal communication). This is an important reminder that war and imperial-
ism continue to have valid ‘‘secular’’ credentials in the United States. But while
religion may not be a causal factor, it is still the pervasive idiom in which the
drama of the putative clash of civilizations is being played out. As Mahmood
Mamdani observes, all analyses of political conflict tend to become ‘‘cultur-
alized’’ today: ‘‘It is no longer the market (capitalism), nor the state (democ-
racy), but culture (modernity) that is said to be the dividing line between those
in favour of a peaceful, civic existence and those inclined to terror’’ (Good
Muslim, Bad Muslim, 18). In such a scenario, it is important to identify the role
of the United States as an actively religious player itself, not just that of passive
(and secular) victim of the Other’s religious fundamentalism.
Despite this, the view of politicized religions elsewhere as the chief threat to a
secular Euro-America tends to inform what we might call the global perspec-

Introduction 5
tive on the religion-secularism pairing.∞≥ When we move from the global as
the context of the discussion to the nation as its space, the arguments shift
their emphasis, inclining toward identifying the limits and uses of secularism
within, and to, the nation. The issues are those of nationalism, citizenship,
the secular state, and the place of gender and the religious minority in a liberal
democracy. Since these are the issues that are most centrally addressed by the
essays in this volume in relation to India and the Indian subcontinent, the
quick review that follows will attempt mainly to provide a comparative dimen-
sion to the discussion.

The normative idea of the modern nation as a secular institution is a Euro-

pean one whose origins can be traced to the French Revolution and its es-
tablishment of the universalistic principles of the democratic constitutional
state, marking a time when ‘‘nationalism and republicanism were kindred
spirits’’ (Habermas, 132). When nations in the non-West make claims to
secular modernity—which they insistently do—it is not republicanism alone
but also national unification that it is meant to promote. Nothing less than
the production of the identity ‘‘nation’’ is at stake. Muhammed Ali Jinnah’s
speech at the inauguration of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan spelt out
his secular vision for the new nation:

You may belong to any religion or caste or creed. That has nothing to do with the
business of the state. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are
all citizens and equal citizens of the state. We should keep that in front of us as
our ideal and you will find that in the course of time Hindus will cease to be
Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense be-
cause that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense, as
citizens of the state. (quoted in Bolitho, 197)

Almost any postcolonial national leader’s words could be chosen to illustrate

similar sentiments, but since Pakistan is usually assumed to have been an
Islamic state from its beginnings we thought it interesting to invoke Jinnah’s
secular-national ideal for our example. The nation is above and apart from
religion; religious belief is a matter of private faith; and this secular spirit will
bring into being the ‘‘nation’’ as a viable, homogeneous, governable entity.
We might say that this faith remained largely only the aspiration of the
postcolonial nation’s political leaders. Jinnah’s pedagogical rhetoric—note
also the vexed uncertainties of his address between the pronomial ‘‘we’’ and

6 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

‘‘you’’—is typical of such exhortations to the populace. To a large extent this
has to do with the nation’s historical and cultural formation. Colonialism was
the major force in producing religion-inflected nationalism as a form of
anticolonial resistance in the colonies. Surviving largely unchanged, despite
the changed circumstances of political independence in the new nations, it
has become a potent form of majoritarian religious intolerance.∞∂ In the In-
dian subcontinent such an o≈cial and elite secular political ideal of the nation
has served as a check—others might say it produces a contradiction—to the
forces of cultural nationalism on the ground.
It is because such an ideology of nationalism is so closely inflected by, and
as (a), religion, that Edward Said invoked secularism as the value with which to
oppose it, an observation illuminatingly made by Bruce Robbins (26). Said
saw secularism as a safeguard against nationalism becoming a ‘‘fetish’’ or ‘‘a
kind of desperate religious sentiment.’’ ‘‘The politics of secular interpreta-
tion’’ allows one, he maintained, to avoid ‘‘the pitfalls of nationalism’’ (Said,
Interview, 232–33).∞∑ Said knew nationalism as intimately as any postcolonial
intellectual of our time and his critique of it therefore bears some further
scrutiny, as does the key term ‘‘secularism’’ in its service.∞∏
Aamir Mufti has provided such an extended examination of the fuller im-
plications of Said’s secularism. Said’s opposition to nationalism is aligned
with secularist arguments, Mufti shows, which are ‘‘enunciated from minority
positions’’ (Mufti, ‘‘Auerbach,’’ 107). In many ways comparable to Nehru in
his secularism and rational faith, Said, unlike Nehru, did not see nationalism
as representing ‘‘a mere transcending of religious di√erence’’ but rather its
‘‘reorientation and reinscription along national lines’’ (Mufti, ‘‘Auerbach,’’
107). Such a minority skepticism about national belonging leads us to consider
a second aspect of the nation in its relationship to secularism, that of liberal
democratic citizenship.
Secular citizenship has become a fraught question particularly when posed
in relation to minorities. Mufti observes that the ideal of the new Indian na-
tion for Nehru was based on a nonidentitarian ‘‘Indianness’’ which would
bear (only) the marks of modern citizenship (as Jinnah’s comparable view
of Pakistan is), and he draws the following conclusion from this: ‘‘secular
nationalism presents a specifically Muslim modernism with the following
choice: it can either dissolve itself within that nationalist mainstream, and
simultaneously give up any claim to being ‘representative,’ or be by definition
(and perversely) communalist, retrograde, and e√ectively in collusion with the

Introduction 7
feudalizing policies of imperialism; in either case it must cease being ‘true’ to
itself ’’ (Mufti ‘‘Secularism and Minority,’’ 84). In Nehru’s defense it must be
pointed out that he was opposed to all kinds of ‘‘backward’’ looking, as he
called it, and was if anything even more scathing in his criticism of Hindu
politics. He was conscious of the minority defensiveness that prompted the
Muslim League’s demands and condemned the very di√erent aggressive poli-
tics of majoritarian religious parties like Hindu Mahasabha.∞π Nevertheless,
Mufti’s identification of the logic of secular nationalism as it would impinge
on the minority is in a general sense unerring: the justification of ‘‘equal’’
citizenship can too easily pass into a demand for uniformity, and secularism
can move quickly from its basis in arguments about national unification to
legitimizing the state’s regulation of ‘‘di√erence.’’
We have moved here beyond the basic uninflected definition of the secular
state as the institution that guarantees the freedom of religious practice to
every individual and community equally in a multireligious polity, to an inter-
rogation of its further logic. (It is important, nonetheless, to insert a quick
reminder here that secular citizenship’s o√er of an unmarked identity and
political rights to individuals is not one that all members of a minority would
refuse as being entirely worthless.) The reality of democracy as a structure that
places the majority in a di√erential (dominant) relation to minority groups
has led to a reconsideration of questions about ‘‘freedom,’’ ‘‘equality,’’ ‘‘toler-
ance,’’ and ‘‘pluralism.’’ Peter van der Veer’s caustic observation on the minor-
ity question is an argument for attending to the politics of majority rather than
that of secularism: ‘‘Regarding the treatment of minorities in a modern, dem-
ocratic polity, there is not much reason to fear a religious majority more than a
secular majority’’ (Imperial Encounters, 20). It is no longer a question of the
e≈cacy of the state in making good on its promises but of the implications of
its ‘‘spontaneous’’ identification with the majority. In its worst manifesta-
tions, majoritarianism will result in the persecution of minorities; but even at
its best it will reflect only a liberal concern with ‘‘weaker groups.’’
Talal Asad finds a possible way out of this impasse in William Connolly’s
proposal that the idea of pluralism should shift from being ‘‘a majority nation
presiding over numerous minorities in a democratic state’’ to ‘‘a democratic
state of multiple minorities contending and collaborating with a general ethos
of forbearance and critical responsiveness’’ (Asad, Formations of the Secular, 177,
citing Connolly, ‘‘Pluralism, Multiculturalism and the Nation-State,’’ 58). In
Asad’s exposition, this would then require that minorities be allowed to live,

8 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

as individuals and as a collective, ‘‘beyond national borders’’ or the conven-
tional space-time of the secular nation’s boundaries. We must aspire to a
condition in which ‘‘everyone may live as a minority among minorities’’ (180).
While this line of questioning (and answering) may have emanated from
the specific contexts of multiculturalism and its predicaments in Europe and
North America, it is being increasingly pressed into service for understanding
the Indian nation and is reflected in several of the essays in this volume. It will
be apparent that the di√erent histories and locations identified with immi-
grant minorities and ‘‘national’’ minorities generate a di√erent politics in
each case: if the former find themselves having to resist demands to assimilate
into the mainstream, the latter are denied their histories of belonging and are
called on to o√er proofs of loyalty.∞∫ At the same time we must also bear in
mind that ‘‘minority’’ and ‘‘majority’’ used as demographic descriptors of a
community can change with migration—Hindus are a minority in diaspora
but a majority at ‘‘home’’—and this in turn produces di√erent meanings for
religious identitarian politics. With the shrinking of the globe these politics
do of course merge and reinforce each other, as we pointed out earlier.∞Ω Our
perspective has to broaden beyond national boundaries, once again to take
into account the global.
The focus in the foregoing discussion on citizenship, constitutional secu-
larism, and minority right provisions in the law brings us to the problem of the
nation-state, and to the issues that surround a state-sponsored secularism.
Di√erences of view about secular modernity as a ‘‘top-down’’ imposition—
whether pedagogic or more actively coercive—spring from not only the actual
empirical evidence and the di√erent examples of the nation-states in question
that political theorists might draw on but also their judgment about the consti-
tutive nature of the state itself. The state’s intervention can be regarded either
as benign, its actions based on persuasion and negotiation, as in Charles
Taylor’s discussion of the liberal multicultural state in Canada (‘‘Modes of
Secularism’’); or it can be deemed coercive, as in Talal Asad’s perspective on
the situation of Muslims in Europe today. Asad explicitly disagrees with Tay-
lor’s ‘‘generous’’ view of the nation-state’s secular project, arguing that ‘‘the
nation-state is not a generous agent and its law does not deal in persuasion’’
(Formations of the Secular, 6). The republicanism of France, for example, implies
a uniform and normative citizenship that demands social conformity—the
complexities of the headscarf a√air illustrate the issues that ‘‘di√erence,’’ that
is, minority (Islamic) cultural practices, brought to the fore. Even in the Middle

Introduction 9
East, Asad argues, initiatives for religious reform have to confront the ‘‘ambi-
tion of the secular state . . . to regulate all aspects of individual life—even
the most intimate, such as birth and death . . . ; all social activity requires
the consent of the law, and therefore of the nation-state’’ (Formations of the
Secular, 199).
In India the role of the state—in secular politics as in other matters—is sim-
ilarly ambitious. In determining how minorities and, as we will see, women,
are accommodated in the nation’s life, the state is less easy to dismiss in
contemporary Indian analyses than it is in the Euro-North American liberal
democracies. Both confidence in the ‘‘protective’’ role of the state as well as
criticism of its failures continue to be expressed in forceful and influential
ways by intellectuals in India, especially on the question of constitutional
secularism.≤≠
Gender can be instructive in moving beyond thinking about secularism as a
problem of religion.≤∞ What does the secular state o√er by way of an eman-
cipatory gender politics? We would argue that a major rationale of constitu-
tional secularism lies in its promise of support to women. O√ering women
access to citizenship and political rights is of course liberalism’s major claim
to gender justice. The debate on its uses, limits, and contradictions is a
complex and extensive one, but there would be agreement about both their
necessity and their insu≈ciency, with di√erent emphasis placed on each. In
particular the modern state o√ers itself as the alternative to religion and its
norms for women according to one definition of secularism (separation of
church and state); but according to another it is committed to ‘‘protecting’’
the religious and cultural rights of communities.≤≤
Historically of course religions could not have been expected to enshrine
‘‘rights’’ in the modern sense of the word, and it would be futile to look
to their original formulations for such an articulation. It is how present-
day communities and institutions—and this includes the state and its legal
systems—interpret religion in relation to gender relations and female sex-
uality, and how they formulate codes of behavior for women, that is of rele-
vance in judging their potential for control over or, alternatively, freedom for
women. In general, however, women are only secondary and subordinate
members of religion-based communities and, worse, are subjected to severe
controls in any fundamentalist resurgence. As the struggle for community or
group rights gains momentum, whether women within religious commu-
nities stand to benefit equally from them is a question that needs to be

10 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

addressed. The struggle for women’s rights at an international level has also
tended to reinforce the perception that minority cultural demands oppose
women’s emancipation.≤≥
But wherever religions are more rather than less egalitarian, or can be
shown to be broadly progressive about gender matters, or where a process of
internal reform within religious communities is underway, the state is proba-
bly the less desirable agent of change since the impact of internal reforms is
likely to be far more e≈cacious and substantial than state intervention. Even
though women’s individual rights cannot in any way be denied or diminished
—the rationale for liberal equality remains a powerful one—women them-
selves would prefer religion-supported forms of freedom so that they might
then be spared an aporetic shuttle between community and state in their
search for justice.≤∂ But it would appear that the conditions of possibility for
such reform would have to be created (or at least permitted) by the state, or
that state and communities must negotiate to bring about such conditions.
Most importantly, whatever accommodation has to be made between the two
obviously must involve women’s agency in a clearly ascertainable way.
Two issues that have taken on symbolic as well as actual political weight
globally in the putative struggle between secular norms and religious pa-
triarchies over women’s freedom are the veil and personal laws. Both show
how women’s agency is itself the object of interpretive struggle. The European
Human Rights Court at Strasbourg recently (July 2004) gave a ruling that
state-run Turkish schools that ban Muslim headscarves do not violate the
freedom of religion. In their unanimous judgment, the seven judges said
headscarf bans were appropriate when issued to protect the secular nature of
the Turkish state. Further, ‘‘In a superficial sense, the ban on headscarves is a
violation of the human rights of the individual, but the question before us is:
To what extent do Muslim women make independent decisions to choose
their mode of dress? There is abundant evidence from the contemporary
Muslim world that women are the most oppressed members of Muslim so-
cieties’’ (see Ishtiaq Ahmed). The decision is expected to have major implica-
tions for other European cases relating to the wearing of the veil. At a time
when more and more Muslim women claim to wear the veil as a matter of
choice, secular courts feel impelled to deny precisely that claim.
The issue of personal law is similarly fraught as it relates primarily to
Islam, in conflict with both secular groups within nation-states (including
women’s groups) and international human rights movements. In India, how-

Introduction 11
ever, it must be noted that there are four sets of personal laws, belonging to
each of the major religions, which further complicates the problem by exacer-
bating majority-minority tensions over specific issues.≤∑ Since several essays
in this volume discuss at length the implications of personal law in India, we
will not elaborate further at this juncture.
This quick overview was intended to show that secularism is called on
to serve varied functions in the nation-state. It does so in a contradictory
and variable fashion as it negotiates within a very narrow range of options
between cultural nationalism, minority/community rights, liberal individual
rights, identity politics, citizenship, and the politics of gender. In India, its
own missteps, as much as the unleashing of religious intolerance (or the
displacements of other kinds of conflicts, economic and sociopolitical, on
religious di√erence), have caused much violence in the form of riots, civil
wars, and genocide. In the next section we o√er a brief sketch of the historical
background and the contemporary political developments relating to the ca-
reer of secularism in India and the accompanying narrative of communal
violence, as providing a useful context to understanding the issues that this
volume raises.

A good place to begin an account of secularism in India is with colonial rule,

not because either state or religion—or for that matter, religious conflict, or
forms of secularism—was nonexistent in precolonial India but because colo-
nial bureaucratic rationality was responsible for the creation of religious and
caste identities as political categories, with far-reaching consequences. Ac-
cording to Gyanendra Pandey, communalism was deemed an essential and
unchanging feature of Indian society in the colonial understanding of the sub-
continent, which drew on Orientalist stereotypes about native people among
whom religious self-identification was considered a permanent and funda-
mental condition. (‘‘Communalism’’ is a specifically Indian usage describing
conflict and dissension between religious communities, particularly Hindus
and Muslims.) Pandey argues that this representation was a construction that
served the British interests of managing and governing colonized Indians and
justified the civilizing mediations of colonial rule. The policy of divide-and-
rule was a master strategy of colonial rule in India, which, by creating dissen-
sion and competition between Hindus and Muslims, successfully prevented
their alignment against British rule. This representation of natives by re-
ligious identification elided the internally di√erentiated character of commu-

12 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

nities (based on caste, sect, and other a≈liations, for instance) and their
historically changing dimensions as they confronted new contexts and con-
flicts, not least those brought about by colonialism itself (Pandey, The Con-
struction of Communalism, 6–13, 39–43, 83, 198–210).
Colonial knowledges—as reflected in matters like the census, ethnogra-
phies, legal codifications, the constitution of communal electoral constitu-
encies, and educational systems—reified communal identities along the axes
of religion and caste, as they isolated certain features, customs, and doc-
trinal prescriptions and not others as applying fundamentally to these identi-
ties. Two colonial initiatives are considered significant in ‘‘fixing’’ communi-
ties and the di√erences between them: one was census operations organized
around religion and caste as the key determinants of Indian society;≤∏ and the
other, enabled by census figures, was the installation of separate electorates
and forms of representation, a product of the Minto-Morley Reforms (1909),
reinforced by the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (1919) and the Government
of India Act (1935) which, in turn, consolidated and politicized competing
communal identities. This colonial construction of ‘‘community’’ passed into
the self-understanding of the communities so characterized. In the process,
heterogeneously formed communities were transformed and infused with an
awareness of their implication in wider, more di√use contexts, even as they
were drawn into sharpened conflicts with one another.
The nationalist movement led by the Indian National Congress had a con-
tradictory relationship with communalism or sectarian politics. (The Con-
gress was subsequently to rule over post-independence India for nearly three
decades, though not without contestation and dissent).≤π On the one hand, as
we pointed out, secularism was the ideal under which an all-India unity was
being sought, while communalism, with its sectarian politics underwritten by
competition and hostility among discrete, sharply defined religion- and caste-
inflected communities, represented an all too potent threat to this unity. In
his analysis, Kesavan emphasizes this dimension of anticolonial nationalism
when he argues that ‘‘in its origins, the Congress was a self-consciously
representative assembly of Indians from di√erent parts of India’’ (Secular Com-
mon Sense, 3), with secularism the instrument through which it sought to
dissolve particularistic identities. Secularism had been adopted as a strategic
means of achieving the first of these purposes by the Congress nationalist
party early in its career, in order to, as Kesavan puts it, ‘‘smelt a citizenry from
the ore of a heterogeneous population embedded in subjecthood’’ (Secular

Introduction 13
Common Sense, 2). Sumit Sarkar has similarly argued that ‘‘Indian nationalism
had to seek a fundamentally territorial focus, attempting to unite everyone
living in the territory of British-dominated India, irrespective of religious or
other di√erences.’’ The Congress therefore attempted to accommodate all
kinds of religious di√erences (Sarkar, ‘‘Indian Nationalism and the Politics of
Hindutva,’’ 273).≤∫ Despite its many weaknesses, in this respect at least secu-
larism, Kesavan says, ‘‘did what good political ideas do: it worked’’ (Secular
Common Sense, 10).
On the other hand, sections of the nationalist movement inherited and
used to their advantage the colonial predilection for organizing politics via
recourse to communal identities, as they do today to secure electoral gains.
They also tapped into the evolving construction of Hindu and Muslim com-
munities as these transformed themselves, or were transformed, from pri-
marily regional or local phenomena into wider supraregional or supralocal
phenomena under the pressure of the unifying drive of the colonial state.
O≈cial (that is, Congress-controlled) nationalism found it strategically nec-
essary, in other words, to wear ‘‘two faces’’ and to speak in two di√erent, even
opposing idioms—a ‘‘modernist’’ idiom, secular and democratic in its em-
phasis, which purportedly transcended the politics of religious (and caste)
communities; and an idiom invoking precisely those sectarian politics (orga-
nized, for instance, around deeply emotive and divisive issues like the cow-
protection movement or the Hindi-Urdu controversy) that nationalism had
sought to neutralize and transcend (Pandey, The Construction of Communalism,
209, 162).
In o≈cial nationalism’s recourse to a politics organized around caste and
religion, the ‘‘community’’ whose claims and interests resonated most pow-
erfully was upper-caste, male, and Hindu. While the obvious reason was
the community’s majoritarian status, other ideologies were also at play. As
G. Balachandran notes, for early nationalist discourse, Hinduism as a ‘‘great
tradition’’ and ‘‘its history as constructed in the nineteenth century’’ could be
deployed to enfold local/regional identities within a larger, more encompass-
ing all-India identity (88). And inasmuch as o≈cial nationalism’s ideologues
and leaders were predominantly Hindus, their recourse to idioms, values, and
beliefs steeped in Hinduism was predictable and also meant that the terms
of national self-identifications tended to privilege Hindu identifications over
those of other communities. Even Gandhi conceptualized free India in terms
of a Ramrajya. Often, of course, it was electoral realpolitik that determined the

14 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

prominence of Hindu agendas and beliefs. For the Congress base in the
provinces and its provincial committees were often made up of strident Hindu
factions. As this base expanded and was brought into the fold of the national
party, even moderate and overtly nonsectarian leaders did not hesitate to
endorse these factions’ agendas and beliefs. Indeed, secularism as the ideol-
ogy through which an all-India unity was sought, when reformulated for the
Indian context, is seen by many to participate in what is characterized as the
‘‘majoritarian emphasis’’ of o≈cial Indian nationalism. Such an understand-
ing is confirmed by Upendra Baxi, who defines India as a ‘‘Hindu-secular
state’’ (‘‘The Constitutional Discourse on Secularism,’’ 231).
The partition of the subcontinent in 1947 has been regarded as a product of
the divisiveness and hostility caused not only by the cumulatively reified re-
ligious and cultural di√erences put in place by colonial policies but also by
‘‘the confident assumption held by the majority of the Congress leadership
that national solidarity was inherently a quality of India’s [Hindu] cultural
heritage’’ (Balachandran, 100). Predictably, this generated fear and defensive-
ness among Muslims. At the same time, the drive for a separate nation among
Muslims increasingly made some Hindus feel that an overtly communal orga-
nization like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was most likely to be their de-
fender. In turn, Partition generated significant reversals: the Congress turned
its back on separate electorates and reserved seats for any minority based on
religion and faith and reneged on its earlier promise of making Hindustani
written in the Nagari and Persian scripts into the national language, nominat-
ing instead Hindi written in Devanagari (Shefali Jha, ‘‘Rights versus Rep-
resentation’’; Pai, 2076; Kesavan, 9).
Partition made secularism a particularly fraught political idea at the time of
the framing of the Constitution, leading to acrimonious debate in the discus-
sions leading up to the Preamble to the Constitution (1946–1950).≤Ω (The
actual term ‘‘secularism,’’ in fact, had to wait until 1976 to enter the Constitu-
tion.) From the beginning its definition and the values and actions it was
supposed to exemplify were a√ected by divergent positions, exemplified by
the Nehru-Gandhi opposition. Nehru’s idea of secularism sought a strict
separation between religion and politics, while Gandhi’s religion-inflected
idiom advocated ‘‘tolerance’’ and pluralism, as opposed to rationalist secular-
ism, as a means of promoting the harmonious coexistence of di√erent reli-
gions and religious communities in the Indian polity. But secularism provided
at least the necessary reassurance to minorities ‘‘at [this] critical moment in

Introduction 15
our history,’’ as Kesavan says: ‘‘it held the pass and helped buy time’’ (Secular
Common Sense, 10).
In independent India, the secularism ideal has had to encounter and adapt
to the reality of electoral politics. The increasing recourse to communal iden-
tities and agendas in post-independence Indian society and politics is of
course by now a well-worn lament among commentators. Secularism has
been defined by and embedded in not only these calculations of electoral
politics but in a complex of related issues having to do with shifting modali-
ties of caste relations, subcontinental and international politics, the major
economic restructuring beginning in the 1980s, and most of all the rise to
power of Hindu political parties, all of which have led to a series of impasses
in the secular narrative of independent India.
Although sectarian tension between groups defined by religion and culture
has been a part of India’s colonial and post-independence history, a new
phase of sectarian politics was inaugurated in 1994. For most of the following
decade the Bharatiya Janata party (bjp) ruled as the majority party in the
coalition government at the center. With bjp’s filiative links to the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (rss) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (vhp)—the three
are defined as the ‘‘political,’’ the ‘‘organizational,’’ and ‘‘social’’ parties of
the Sangha parivar—‘‘majority communalism,’’ through its commitment to a
Hindu Rashtra (or nation), became an ideological and intimate part of the
state apparatus and a legal means through which conflict between groups was
addressed. For at the heart of the rss, which is the founding party of the
rss-vhp-bjp combine, is the belief in a homogeneous Hindu identity and
culture as coterminous with the nation, India, in which Muslims and Chris-
tians remain foreigners and outsiders until such time as they give up their
religious di√erence.≥≠
Furthermore, the rss has been deeply invested since its inception in the
‘‘myth’’ of a ‘‘continuous thousand-year struggle of Hindus against Muslims
as the structuring principle of Indian history’’ (Tapan Basu et al., 47, 2).
When, therefore, the bjp leveled the charge of ‘‘pseudo secularism’’ against
the actions of the judiciary and state under Congress, its primary target was
not the inconsistencies and contradictions that are part and parcel of Indian
variant of secularism in general but rather the policies that were designed
specifically to protect minorities and their rights. Embracing formal equality,
the bjp insisted that its own ‘‘positive secularism’’ entailed ‘‘Justice for all,
appeasement to none’’ (1998 bjp election manifesto). The insistence on its

16 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

own brand of secularism was intended to mark the bjp’s disavowal of a
theocratic state, since that is how Pakistan is represented. But its presumption
of democracy as ‘‘the rule of the majority,’’ and therefore of Hindus, blurs the
line between a theocratic state and one that aspires to the rule of the majority
in this way. The dominant Hindu community did not have to embrace the idea
of a ‘‘state religion’’ under the bjp: India was de facto a Hindu nation state.
The bjp’s animus against conversion (the attacks by the rss and Bajrang Dal,
which is vhp’s youth organization, on Christian churches and missionaries,
and its support of anticonversion legislation), its advocacy of a Uniform Civil
Code and the removal of Article 370 (which grants special status for Kash-
mir), and most recently the attack on minorities in Gujarat gave indication
of the shift of the bjp-led Indian government toward an overtly Hindutva
agenda.
Meticulous, ideologically determined e√orts have gone into the formation
of the Hindutva movement (characterized by the Sangha as a ‘‘spontaneous
mass movement in search of a Hindu identity’’). While these e√orts range
from the ‘‘massively organized public events’’ like ‘‘riots, demonstrations,
processions, media spectacles’’ to the less public but carefully coordinated
organizational ones through which the Sangha has successfully created sev-
eral interrelated organizations as their a≈liates (Ludden, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 16;
Tapan Basu et al., 59–60), the most insidious work has been directed toward
education and thereby to the slow, clandestine transformation of the mind.
Indeed, teaching has been central to the ideological agenda of the Sangha.
(Romila Thapar’s essay in this volume addresses how the teaching and writ-
ing of history has been annexed to the Sangha’s ideological agendas.)
Communalism, we have been suggesting, is neither new nor restricted to
the Sangha parivar, inscribed as it was, even if often implicitly, within some
of o≈cial Indian nationalism’s self-definitions. Nor can we restrict the vio-
lence we associate with communalism, rendered especially visible during
‘‘riots’’ that break out periodically, to the Sangha parivar alone. India’s post-
independence history is, after all, marked with riots from 1947 on, of which
the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in 1984 can be linked back to Congress. None-
theless, as most analyses concede, the violence in Gujarat against Muslims in
2002 was of a di√erent order from numerous earlier events of the kind gen-
erally coded as ‘‘communal violence.’’ The state’s refusal to check Hindu
groups on the rampage made it an example of what Upendra Baxi describes as
‘‘regime-supported’’ rather than ‘‘regime-tolerated’’ violence. These attacks

Introduction 17
were entirely consistent with the agenda that lies at the heart of Hindutva,
which the bjp as the Sangh’s political party sought to realize. For what Gujarat
shared with the other longer processes of ideological mobilization that have
gone before it was precisely the e√ort to reimagine and reconstitute India as
a Hindu nation. In this e√ort, Gujarat was made to serve as the ‘‘testing-
ground’’ for ‘‘measuring the tolerance-level of the Indian polity by the fathers
of the new nation’’ (Tanika Sarkar, ‘‘Semiotics,’’ 2872).
Whether all this constitutes the defeat of the idea of a composite multi-
religious, multiethnic polity that secularism was meant to underwrite is di≈-
cult to assert in absolute terms. What the last decade or so has brought to the
surface much more starkly is a definite shift in the way overt appeals to a
majority identity and identification have been made to work e√ectively.
In the fourteenth Lok Sabha elections held in March 2004, a Congress-led
United Progressive Alliance (upa) came to power at the center, defeating the
bjp-led National Democratic Alliance (nda). Many commentators read this
as ‘‘a decisive vote against communalism,’’ and as the Indian people’s ‘‘rea≈r-
mation of a commitment to pluralism and secularism’’ (Roy, ‘‘Darkness’’; but
see also Chenoy and the All India Christian Council’s press statement of
May 14, 2004). Others, however, soberly recalled the Congress Party’s record
of involvement in earlier instances of communal violence. The di√erences
between the bjp and the Congress in this matter were worth noting, however,
as in Rajagopal’s analysis: that while ‘‘it is true the Congress sought votes
on communal grounds,’’ this was so ‘‘more often from Muslims and lower
castes, and seldom o≈cially on the Hindu platform,’’ and while both the
Congress Party and bjp abetted communal riots, the Congress ‘‘always lo-
calized the impact of communal violence,’’ whereas the bjp ‘‘invariably tried
to nationalize it’’ (Rajagopal, ‘‘The bjp’s Publicity E√ect’’).
The Center for the Study of Developing Societies, as part of its National
Election Study (nes) 2004, conducted a post-poll survey whose findings led
one commentator, Abhay Datar, to question whether the Congress victory was
indeed the ‘‘unequivocal verdict for secular politics’’ that it was held to be.
‘‘Majoritarian sentiments,’’ he says, are still in evidence in the sharply polar-
ized opinions expressed by Muslims and Hindus when it comes to assigning
responsibility for the Gujarat violence which is ‘‘perceived through a commu-
nal lens.’’ What’s more, there is considerable support, and not only among
Hindus, for a ban on religious conversion and on interreligious marriages.
For him, this sits oddly with what he calls ‘‘commonly held modernist opin-

18 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

ions on secularism.’’ Simultaneously, and in contrast with the Hindu right’s
agendas, there is support for ‘‘separate civil codes for each religion,’’ and for
protection of minorities’ interests and rights. But this vies, in turn, with the
belief that ‘‘democracy is about the majority community doing what it likes.’’
What emerges from Datar’s analysis, then, is a picture of (religious) commu-
nities enclosed within their own separate spheres, allowed to live and let live,
but without any substantive interaction or active engagement across their
di√erences. This is an impoverished, passive notion of tolerance that is itself
undercut by the view that democracy is an arena reserved for the majority to do
‘‘what it likes.’’
Referring, in particular, to the Indian electorate’s rejection of the nda’s
economic policies—‘‘pro-rich, pro-corporate, pro-liberal[ization]’’ (Bidwai)—
as the driving force in its defeat, Datar suggests that inasmuch as the ‘‘voters
preferred to think of their mundane and material interests, disregarding a call
to stick to religious identity,’’ secularism ‘‘triumph[ed].’’≥∞ And it is ‘‘this
version of secularism that provides a stronger guarantee against communal-
ism.’’ What’s more, secularism’s ‘‘triumph’’ in this instance can be construed
as going hand in hand with democracy’s (if, that is, we define democracy as
the workings of a numerical majority), whereby numerically large, economi-
cally oppressed or marginalized classes, dissatisfied with the results of India’s
economic liberalization reforms, asserted their right to dispatch a govern-
ment they saw as callously uncaring of the concerns of its ordinary citizens,
composed largely of the urban and rural poor.≥≤
But this electoral reversal, significant though it undeniably is, is not by
itself a guarantee that the kinds of communal/religious identifications the
Hindu right has been so successful in mobilizing will now simply disappear.≥≥
The Hindu right’s ideological hegemony, even under the current dispensation
at the center, is not to be taken lightly. But if this hegemony has been con-
structed through sustained e√ort and intervention, there is hope that a coun-
terhegemonic e√ort can equally well commit itself to a similar e√ort and
intervention. Indeed some of this e√ort and intervention can be said to have
already begun, by sections of civil society and activist civil society groups.
Aiyer and Malik have remarked on civil society’s significant role in supporting
democracy, in particular the ‘‘watch-dog role’’ that it performs by calling the
state to account when minorities have been under assault as, for example, was
the case in Gujarat 2002. The nature of this intervention is constituted by the
interactions between civil society and the state, and the support of the con-

Introduction 19
stitutional provisions and policies that articulate minority rights under the
banner of secularism (Aiyer and Malik, 4707–09).≥∂ These are some of the
possibilities that we turn to in considering the future of secularism in the
concluding section of this introduction.

Before presenting the issues discussed in these essays, it would be useful to

draw attention to the particular, not to say peculiar, nature of India’s o≈cial
secular policy. In the West secularism historically sought the separation of the
spheres of state and religious authority, broadly to correspond to the domains
of public and private life. The Indian state has chosen to interpret secularism
di√erently: it has undertaken the charge to ensure the protection of all religions.
It therefore makes a huge investment in matters of religion, unlike any nation
in the West—for example, by administering religious trusts, declaring holi-
days for religious festivals, preserving the system of di√erent personal laws
for di√erent communities, undertaking the reform of religious law, having
secular courts interpret religious laws, and so on. This raises the problem of
where the boundaries of state secularism are to be drawn.≥∑
But equally it is the exacerbated expectations of secularism as political
ideology and civic practice that have led to the inflation of its significance in
the Indian context. Secularism was intended to achieve several ends in the new
nation: to serve as a means of unifying the recently partitioned and hugely
heterogeneous nation; o√er religious freedom and the protection of the state
to the number of sizable minority religious communities who constituted it;
reform Hindu practices, particularly caste discrimination; and set the nation
on the path of ‘‘modernization’’ and ‘‘progress.’’ However, the last two items
on this agenda never really took o√ with any momentum. Though secularism
is primarily berated today for being a ‘‘modernizing’’ force, the modernizing
project has never been carried through in India through secular ideologies
with the energy it was in Turkey, for example. As for secularism’s relation to
caste, the two opening essays in this collection discuss it primarily in terms of
a ‘‘road not taken.’’
The issue most relevant to secularism today is therefore that of minority
rights. Whether secularism should be called on to promote minorities’ rights as
one of its functions, and conversely, whether minority rights is best served by
secularism, is a question perhaps specific to India. Mukul Kesavan argues that
‘‘the protection of minorities should be derived from larger positions on
citizenship and the rights it implies. Otherwise secularism stops being a guide

20 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

to political action’’ (15). The constitutional provision through which minority
rights are secured is that of equality. Equality, in this context, has been ame-
nable to at least two di√ering, though not necessarily mutually exclusive,
interpretations: formal equality would require that all religious communities
be treated the same, whereas substantive equality is anchored in a recognition
of structural and institutionalized inequalities in society that require ‘‘re-
medial’’ provisions for the victims of these inequalities so as to bring about a
level playing field that would ensure their full and equal participation in
social, economic, and cultural rights (Chandhoke Beyond Secularism, 62; see
also Crossman and Kapur, 62–68).
Whether minorities should be given special treatment by the state was and
continues to be a matter of bitter conflict in the political arena. The Constituent
Assembly debates record the strong sentiment of several members that the rec-
ognition of community-specific political rights for religious minorities violated
the core principles of secularism (though community-specific social rights
were acknowledged to be necessary and correct); as a consequence separate
electorates for minorities was ruled out (Bhargava, ‘‘India’s Secular Constitu-
tion,’’ 118–23). Predictably, whenever ‘‘secularism’’ has meant providing for
substantive equality for religious minorities, it has drawn the ire of Hindutva
ideologues. These provisions are regarded as ‘‘appeasement’’ of minorities
and create a backlash in the form of retaliatory violence. But Upendra Baxi has
demonstrated how selectively the Hindu right has drawn on examples of
inconsistencies that mark state and judicial interventions in the sphere of
religion, ignoring or disregarding those on behalf of the majority Hindu
community (‘‘The Constitutional Discourse of Secularism,’’ 218–19). And in
actual fact, upper-caste male Hindu dominance in administration and the
professions has systematically discriminated against minorities and lower
castes and kept them in a state of prolonged underdevelopment.
Although secularism in India is predominantly expressed thus in terms of
state doctrine—not always in opposition to an ‘‘Indian’’ way of life that is
generally regarded as pervasively and deeply religious, but in tension with
it≥∏ —there have also been and continue to be significant traditions of popular
tolerance, rationalism, secular humanism, and attitudes skeptical and ironic
about religion, which are not reducible to the forms of elite or cosmopolitan
secularism that are routinely attributed to the influence of Nehru and/or a
deracinated modernity: in other words, what we might call an ‘‘indigenous’’
secularism, as belief and practice. It is fairly common to refer to Buddhism,

Introduction 21
Kabir, Akbar’s Din Ilahi, Dara Sikoh, Ram Mohan Roy and Brahmo Samaj
(reformist Hinduism), Ambedkar and Periyar in this context: a medley of
names and influences that are broadly ‘‘secular’’ in spirit.≥π Hinduism itself, it
is often claimed, is marked by ‘‘tolerance,’’ or at least by eclecticism, hetero-
geneity, decentralization, assimilation, and syncreticism—in marked contrast
to present-day Westernized and nationalist Hinduism.≥∫ But it is not only the
past, and not only the ‘‘folk,’’ who give evidence of such a counterreligious
strain. The work of a modern poet like Arun Kolatkar signals the profound
resonance of a skepticism that is marked with compassion and even what we
might call, paradoxically, faith.≥Ω But there is much work yet to be done on
establishing or forging the connections between this indigenous secularism
which is part of the intellectual traditions of India and its ways of life, and
o≈cial secularism as political ideology.

As we explained at the start, this volume emerges from what are called the
‘‘secularism debates’’ in India today, and as such expresses a diversity of
views. We have also identified the many issues relating to law, democracy,
citizenship, and nationalism that secularism addresses in the Indian context
and that find representation in this collection of essays. At the same time it is
only fair to give some warning about the limits of a volume like this one.
Despite its crisis, secularism bears a normative status within and as constitu-
tive of a modernity that remains the context from which we perform our
critique. The critique of secularism is therefore obliged to be self-reflexive, an
insider job by secularists themselves. In the contemporary academy it would
seem that few exercises of this kind are performed by the professedly re-
ligious.∂≠ Or at least the discourses of the ontotheological and the postsecular
today inhabit other spaces than that of the historical, social science, and
cultural critiques of secularism such as this one. Writing about a conference
on religion that he had convened in Capri, in 1994, Derrida defined the (limits
of the) participants’ position thus: ‘‘We are not priests bound in a ministry,
nor theologians, nor qualified, competent representatives of religion, nor
enemies of religion as such. . . . But we also share a commitment to En-
lightenment values.’’ Derrida called this an intellectual attempt to think reli-
gion ‘‘within the limits of reason alone’’ (46). Something of those limits
operate in the same way among the essays assembled here, even as a critique
of secularism.
Religion, in these essays as well as in the broader discourse which con-

22 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

stitutes them, is primarily addressed in terms of historical explanation or as a
sociology of religion.∂∞ Such analyses do not envisage religious beliefs and
practices as ‘‘pure’’ alternative to secular modernity. The ‘‘religious’’ is a con-
cept that encounters a notable impasse in the work of contemporary postcolo-
nial intellectuals who attempt to go beyond respectful or wistful acknowledg-
ment of this ‘‘other’’ knowledge. Gayatri Spivak, for example, grapples, via
Kant, with the demands of both reason and critique on the one hand and the
‘‘transcendental’’ on the other, seeking to preserve (only) the ‘‘letter’’ of secu-
larism while yielding to the ‘‘spirit’’ of the religious (as we understand her
invocation of Kant’s ‘‘e√ects of grace’’ to mean)—and ends with the humani-
ties in the university as a training in and for such a ‘‘detranscendentalized’’
religion (‘‘Terror’’). We have failed to do justice to this powerful and coura-
geous argument; but even this scant paraphrase will suggest that her turn to
the humanities functions as a refusal of religion as a spiritual alternative.
The avoidance of religion in these terms in the endeavors of postcolonial
intellectuals is not to be confused with the response of ‘‘sanitized secularists
who are hysterical at the mention of religion’’ whom Spivak derides, rightly, as
being ‘‘quite out of touch with the world’s peoples’’ and of having ‘‘buried
their heads in the sand’’ (‘‘Terror,’’ 102). On the contrary, there is an exem-
plary move among some of them to acknowledge the religious as a subaltern
and/or populist aspiration, an autonomous ‘‘life world,’’ not only or always
oppositional but also complementary/alternative to secularism and the state.
Among these, Dipesh Chakrabarty is notable for his attempts to theorize
religion as subalternity—but always within the aporetic enclosure of the dis-
course of modernity which forbids its full and desired realization.∂≤ Thus,
while he criticizes the failure of Marxist colonial and postcolonial historians
of India to understand ‘‘the place of the ‘religious’ in Indian public and
political life’’ (‘‘Radical Histories,’’ 753), and the inability of even the Sub-
altern historians to engage in a ‘‘democratic’’ dialogue with the subaltern
(because their conversation would never permit the latter to convince the
former of the ‘‘existence of ghosts and spirits’’ [757]), he is unable to himself
perform reparation for these failures. At the close of his essay, he takes
recourse to a plea to rescue religion from its fascistic anti-Enlightenment
identification in Europe so that ‘‘we’’ may be free to creatively fabricate ‘‘new
forms of life’’ (758). Such self-imposed limits to his enterprise do not merely
reflect the intellectual’s historical helplessness to engage subaltern, other
knowledges, as he claims, but mark also the scrupulous integrity of this

Introduction 23
refusal.∂≥ But as a discourse on religion, these gestures contribute little to the
contemporary secularism debates beyond a (sometimes sentimental) admira-
tion for the Other of religion, and the familiar angst of the intellectual for
whom it lies forever beyond comprehension.
We have dwelt at such length on the issue of religion in order to o√er some
explanation, within a broader intellectual framework, for its absence in the
discussion of secularism in these pages. That said, we now turn to the essays
themselves.
The historical analysis undertaken in the first two essays of the opening
section of this volume (‘‘Secularism’s Historical Background’’) is o√ered as a
corrective to the dominant definition of secularism endorsed by Indian na-
tionalism as well as in our usual understanding of secularism’s major func-
tion in the multireligious state as that of a homogenizing nationalist force.
Interrogating the significance assigned to religion to the virtual exclusion of
the ‘‘question of caste,’’ Shabnum Tejani’s essay (‘‘Reflections on the Category
of Secularism in India: Gandhi and Ambedkar at the Round Table Confer-
ences, 1931’’) focuses on one historical moment in what came to be defined as
secularism: 1931–32, when the Round Table Conferences were held in Lon-
don to map the constitution for a future independent India. The debates at the
conferences made clear that religion and caste were both implicated in the
arguments for and against separate electorates in particular, and those re-
garding the modalities of just and fair representation of minority interests
more generally. Tracking the positions of the opposed parties, Tejani argues
that these debates were, in e√ect, about ‘‘the place of social di√erence in the
context of the emergent nation’’: whereas for one group ‘‘the communal or
minority question . . . was one for nationalism to overcome,’’ for the other this
question was inextricably tied to the place the minorities would have in the
future nation.
In the following essay, ‘‘A View from the South: Ramasami’s Public Critique
of Religion,’’ Paula Richman and V. Geetha also highlight the inextricability of
issues of religion and caste through their discussion of E. V. Ramasami, leader
of the Self-Respect movement in the predominantly Tamil-speaking region of
India. Ramasami viewed secularism, they suggest, ‘‘less as a political ideal and
more as a desired social good.’’ Furthermore, he argued that inasmuch as
Hinduism could be seen as endorsing caste hierarchies and inequalities, a
critique of caste necessarily entailed a critique of religion. Thus, tolerance
perceived in Gandhian terms as ‘‘freedom of all religions’’ made no sense to

24 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

him. A proponent of a ‘‘rationalist, egalitarian, secular world view,’’ Ramasami
drew also from a ‘‘pre-history’’ of rational thought located in Buddhism.
Buddhism’s ‘‘rational-ethical core’’ was greatly valued by its various adher-
ents, especially in the 1880s. (Tejani similarly suggests that Ambedkar’s inter-
est in Buddhism was preeminently ‘‘secular,’’ connected as it was to an ethics
of Dalit emancipation.) For Ramasami reason was pugattarivu, or ‘‘the intel-
ligence that is born out of discernment.’’ Richman and Geetha remark that this
intelligence, unlike the reason of the Enlightenment, is not ‘‘singular’’ but
rather ‘‘emerges out of experience.’’ It signals objectivity, a critical stance and
dissent from prevailing orthodoxies.
Sunil Khilnani, in the third essay in this section, similarly locates a self-
reflexive, ‘‘rational-ethical core’’ to Nehru’s ethics, constituting something
like a ‘‘faith,’’ which provided ‘‘a non-religious bedrock’’ for his morality and
deeply influenced his political philosophy and behaviour (‘‘Nehru’s Faith’’). At
a time when Nehru’s investment in a liberal, secular, Indian polity is in con-
siderable disrepair, and the proponents of ‘‘Nehruvian secularism’’ the object
often of virulent critique, Khilnani’s essay seeks to recover that aspect of
Nehru’s thought which seems to have much in common with what, following
from the accounts of Tejani and Richman and Geetha above, can be called a
‘‘minority’’ strain within the contemporary discourse of secularism.
Ashis Nandy’s ‘‘Closing the Debate on Secularism: A Personal Statement,’’
which leads the next section (‘‘Secularism and Democracy’’), criticizes secu-
larism of the Nehruvian kind because it is ‘‘insu≈ciently grounded in culture,
particularly vernacular culture.’’ The values that have protected religious mi-
norities in India, he believes, are quite other than those derived from Euro-
pean rationality: those of ‘‘tolerance,’’ also named ‘‘hospitality’’ or ‘‘conviven-
cia’’ (a term derived from the exemplary instance of Moorish Spain). In other
words, ‘‘there has arisen a contradiction between democracy and secularism.’’
It is this perception that informs the two following essays in this section
as well, though its implications are understood and dealt with di√erently.
Nivedita Menon (‘‘Living with Secularism’’) agrees with Nandy that secular-
ism and democracy are at odds with one another. She too locates secularism
in a rarefied realm, that of ‘‘the state and its institutions, and the rational
contractual associations of civil society’’ (emphasis added). But she makes no
commitment to his faith in the popular practices of tolerance. On the contrary
she insists on the ‘‘overwhelming participation of the ordinary citizens in the
targeted violence against Muslims’’ in Gujarat.

Introduction 25
 Menon’s analysis draws on Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between civil
and political society in India. ‘‘Democracy,’’ the behavior of the majority popu-
lation, operates on the terrain of political society. For secularism to e√ectively
counter the Hindu right’s strategies of communalization, Menon argues, it
has to learn to function in this political society. Chatterjee’s own essay in this
volume, ‘‘The Contradictions of Secularism,’’ returns to the vexed point that
‘‘democracy itself is no guarantee of secularism.’’ Through an extended analy-
sis of a controversy regarding unauthorized madrasahs (Muslim religious
schools), Chatterjee raises the issue (one that has preoccupied him in his
earlier work, especially ‘‘Secularism and Toleration’’) of reform as something
that needs to undertaken internally, from within the minority community.
Chatterjee suggests that those best positioned to represent the community in
negotiating the terms of both reform within the community itself and (its
interaction) with the state are political representatives who are themselves
Muslims, and who thus ‘‘straddle both the government and community, out-
side and inside.’’ They enjoy considerable support from their Muslim constit-
uents, but as ‘‘political representatives’’ in the left parties, they can also speak
to the state government and represent and negotiate minority interests with
the government. For him, the ‘‘real democratic space where the interventions
must be made is in the local and the vernacular.’’
Several of the essays in this volume—in particular, those by Chatterjee,
Pandey, Prakash, Bilgrami, Baxi, and Agnes—return us to a challenge that
has been with us from the outset: the place of religious and minority di√er-
ence in the Indian polity. These essays engage anew with this challenge in
terms of both ‘‘majority’’ and ‘‘minority’’ communities marking the sites for
transformation and reform through critiques of existing political structures
and ideologies—not least, the ‘‘nation’’—and suggesting thereby the means
through which change can be accomplished. For both Gyanendra Pandey and
Gyan Prakash the very structures and politics that have produced the catego-
ries ‘‘majority’’ and ‘‘minority’’ constitute the problem to be addressed rather
than acceded to. For, as Pandey points out (‘‘The Secular State and the Limits of
Dialogue’’), Chatterjee himself recognized (in ‘‘Secularism and Tolerance’’)
that these categories have been produced and maintained by dominant politi-
cal discourse. Thus, while Pandey too emphasizes the sphere of the political or
politics as the place where negotiation of minority di√erence takes place, for
him the question of representation remains a fraught one. The concept of a
‘‘dialogue’’ between the state and the minority community must recognize, he

26 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

notes, the unequal nature of the parties involved. His recommendations focus
on uncoupling the ‘‘state’’ from the ‘‘majority’’ (‘‘mainstream’’) and from the
‘‘nation.’’ Echoing William Connolly, Pandey argues instead for ‘‘the recogni-
tion of all communities—secularists, modernists, conservatives, Christians,
Buddhists, Hindus, working people, or middle classes—as minorities, with no
place for an unquestioned, and permanent majority.’’ Gyan Prakash’s essay,
‘‘Secular Nationalism, Hindutva, and the Minority,’’ begins in an emphatic way
by identifying the challenge of Gujarat to lie in revisioning ‘‘the place of
minorities in the nation’s body politic,’’ and not in the relationship between
secular politics and religion. Going further than Nandy and Chatterjee, he
joins Aamir Mufti in questioning the relegation of the minority to the margins
of the nation. For him, any conversation on secular politics will have to be ‘‘not
amongst an assumed center of majority of the nation, but rather from the point
of view of those defined as minorities in order to rework the structure that
produces di√erent valuations of culture and power.’’ Prakash’s and Pandey’s
arguments derive their force from a theoretically and politically resonant
conception of the ‘‘minority’’ position as the site from which transformation
will emanate.∂∂
The essays in the next section,‘‘Sites of Secularism’’—the sites being educa-
tion, the media, and popular cinema—move into an examination of both
secularism and Hindutva as ideological forces shaping everyday perceptions
as well as conflict and crisis in India. It is the nation—its identity and its
production—that is at stake in these representational sites. Romila Thapar’s
essay ‘‘Secularism, History, and Contemporary Politics in India’’ shows how
and why ‘‘history’’ has become a site of struggle between contending forces in
India. Hindutva ideologues, supported by the bjp government at the cen-
ter, produced revisionary history textbooks for use in schools, employing a
‘‘sledge-hammer history reducing everything to a single reading.’’ The past
was being used, she shows, ‘‘not only to politicize history in order to support a
particular ideology, but to then use such history for political mobilization.’’
In her view, this kind of selective and propagandistic version of the past
threatens ‘‘the idea of India as a democratic, secular society.’’
Arvind Rajagopal finds in an emergent ‘‘Hindu national realism’’ a major
threat to secularism. The phrase is a description of a relatively recent phenom-
enon, that of ‘‘the masses attributing the causes of collective action to objec-
tive events recorded in television and print news.’’ The impact of the media is
thus ideological in a particularly insidious way. Rajagopal provides a close

Introduction 27
reading of the ‘‘split media,’’ the di√erences between English-language news-
papers and vernacular newspapers, respectively assumed to be ‘‘secular’’ and
‘‘communalist’’ in their news coverage, a contrast also reflected in the Con-
gress party’s distinctively di√erent manifestoes in English and Gujarati before
the Assembly elections. Rajagopal’s analysis finds that the media (national
television, in particular) are an important technical means for Hindutva’s
production of a national identity, especially significant during a period of
crisis and rapid change.
Two essays address popular Hindi cinema. Shyam Benegal’s ‘‘Secularism
and Popular Indian Cinema’’ focuses on the ways in which ‘‘nationalism’s as-
pirations and anxieties (particularly around religious di√erences) are repre-
sented, managed or contained in cinema at di√erent historical moments.’’
Benegal finds that the representation of religious di√erences and of minor-
ity communities (especially Muslims) is responsive to the imperatives of secu-
lar nationalism. Minority figures are almost always rendered in a sanitized
and typical fashion, and seldom as other than marginal except in the genre
of ‘‘Muslim socials.’’ By way of contrast, ‘‘New Cinema’’ marked a break
in such practices of cinematic rendition, taking on more complex social
subjects, including minority subjects as protagonists, which were dealt with
‘‘realistically.’’
Ravi Vasudevan’s essay (‘‘Neither State nor Faith: The Transcendental Sig-
nificance of the Cinema’’) departs from this understanding of popular Hindi
cinema as continuous with secular nationalism’s representations of minor-
ity communities and subjects. By focusing on early films like Phalke’s Shree
Krishna Janma, Shantaram’s Shejari (Neighbors), historicals like Sohrab Modi’s
Pukar, and popular Hindi cinema’s deployment of the star performer (for
example, Raj Kapoor and Nana Patekar), Vasudevan argues that Hindi popu-
lar cinema articulates an alternative site of meaning making, with respect
to secularism representing ‘‘a space beyond bounded [caste- or religion-
determined] identity,’’ than that privileged by the state or faith. In so doing,
Hindi popular cinema operates as a powerful competitor to the state’s repre-
sentations of secularism. Hence the anxiety of the state associated with the
potential power of cinematic narratives, which enjoy a ‘‘mass constituency.’’
The essays in the last two sections deal with what have become the most
crucial and controversial sites of crisis for secularism in India: personal law
and conversion. India has a dual law structure: uniform criminal and civil
laws, but separate personal laws for di√erent religious communities. The

28 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham

Indian Constitution approves a Uniform Civil Code (ucc) applicable to all
citizens irrespective of their religion, but it exists at present only as a Directive
Principle.∂∑ Personal law, since it is envisaged as a means of securing commu-
nity identity and respecting religious di√erence, operates therefore within
rather than despite a constitutional commitment to secularism. Following the
Shah Bano case in 1986, the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) has made the ucc a
prominent issue on its agenda. Conversion is a similarly fraught issue: while
constitutionally the freedom to ‘‘profess, practice and propagate religion’’ is a
fundamental right, conversion is resisted by the Hindu right as constituting a
threat to Hinduism.
Upendra Baxi’s essay (‘‘Siting Secularism in the Uniform Civil Code: A
‘Riddle Wrapped Inside an Enigma’?’’), which opens the section on secular-
ism and personal law, is framed by the question ‘‘What pertinence may the
ucc have for the discourse concerning ‘secularism’?’’ Reform of personal law
is not the sole panacea for women’s oppression that it is often taken to be.
Besides, personal law is only one of several structures of operative laws that
regulate the lives of Indian women, and not necessarily the most intimate—
among them ‘‘local’’ laws (lex loci) and ‘‘communitarian’’ laws. Baxi’s project
of ‘‘Reading Shah Bano’’ in this essay is an attempt to restore her as ‘‘an
actually existing figure of resistance.’’ Her wish not to be seen as a ‘‘napak
aurat’’ (impious woman), taken together with her (seemingly contradictory)
actions in approaching the secular courts for redress, signal, in his reading,
her radical desire ‘‘to pioneer the shari’a in feminist ways.’’
Flavia Agnes (‘‘The Supreme Court, the Media, and the Uniform Civil Code
Debate’’) criticizes the role of the courts and the media in making the ucc
debate controversial, by examining the judicial pronouncements and the me-
dia coverage in three recent cases, including Shah Bano. She finds that in every
case the court included gratuitous references to the need for a ucc and made
‘‘veiled or direct insinuations’’ against Muslim law—which the media were
only too willing to (mis)represent. Not only is the ucc not a ‘‘magic wand’’
for achieving gender justice, its invocation is often antiminority in its import.
Agnes then traces the afterlife of the Muslim Women Act of 1986. Originally
viewed as a regressive legislation, in the courts it has turned out to be a boon
to divorced Muslim women, giving them maintenance in the spirit of shari’a—
and hence without provoking a political backlash. Agnes ends with a call for
the acknowledgment of ‘‘Muslim women’s agency’’ in fighting for the reform
of ‘‘their’’ personal laws.

Introduction 29
 In ‘‘Secularism and the Very Concept of Law,’’ Akeel Bilgrami locates the
problem of personal law within an abstract and general problematic: ‘‘Can
culture and religion provide grounds for exemptions from a secular liberal
nation’s laws?’’ Staging an argument between the secularist and the multi-
culturalist, he rehearses the philosophical arguments underlying the ‘‘very
concept of law,’’ as that which must be uniform or not exist at all as law
(although the ‘‘secularist’’ may allow exemptions to this rule on ‘‘pragmatic’’
considerations). On the other side is the multiculturalist’s argument that
‘‘laws are for people’’ and therefore their religious sentiments must be taken
into account to formulate exemptions from a general law if need be. Bilgrami
ends with a question: can (Muslim) personal law in India best be understood
in terms of the secularist’s ‘‘pragmatic’’ reasons, or the multiculturalist’s
‘‘principled’’ reasons? This framing of personal law as a question of the law
has di√erent but equally significant implications from framing it within the
minority rights question that is its usual context.
Together these three essays provoke a fresh look at the personal law ques-
tion from theoretical, historical, judicial, and activist perspectives. In the last
two essays, on conversion, a similar inquiry is set in motion. Gauri Viswana-
than, in ‘‘Literacy and Conversion in the Discourse of Hindu Nationalism,’’
suggests that the Hindu right’s bizarre suspicion about the Nobel laureate
Amartya Sen’s work on development and literacy can be attributed to its con-
voluted association of both these activities with Christian missionary work,
and of the latter with the conversion of (usually poor and lower-caste) Hindus.
To see conversion solely in this light, however, forecloses on its potential uses
in a plural society as a form of ‘‘intersubjective communication.’’ Secularism
tends to view freedom of religion only as ‘‘freedom from religion,’’ or religious
freedom only as ‘‘a euphemism for conversion.’’ Hinduism in particular finds
literacy threatening because, itself a faith that does not require the media-
tion of the written word, it fears that ‘‘access to language [may contain] the
potential to introduce worldviews at variance with those a≈rmed by the com-
munity.’’ And because literacy is embedded in this cultural context, educa-
tion’s implementation as a fundamental right has been resisted by the secular
Indian state.
Sumit Sarkar (‘‘Christian Conversions, Hindutva, and Secularism’’) rebuts
two of the assumptions that underlie the ‘‘common-sense’’ suspicion about
Christian conversions—one, that Hinduism is an open and nonproselytizing
religion and the other that Christianity is an alien religion and its missionaries
are ‘‘agents of imperialism’’—by turning up historical evidence that doesn’t

30 R. Sunder Rajan and A. D. Needham