Reassessing Secularism and Secularisation in South Asia | Humeira Iqtidar and Tanika Sarkar in EPW

Economic and Political Weekly, Vol - XLVIII No. 50, December 14, 2013

Reassessing Secularism and Secularisation in South Asia
by Humeira Iqtidar and Tanika Sarkar

Revisiting Secularisation


Secularisation, once a key concept in debates about modernisation and modernity, has received very little academic attention over the last half century. In fact, it is often seen as a subset of or engulfed within secularism, which has been central to academic and political debates about democracy, nationalism and contemporary politics. In this special issue, we focus on both in their mutual interaction. It provides a mix of theoretically informed pieces with detailed, contextualised research adding granularity to the discussions by asking: Can secularisation happen without secularism? Or vice versa? What kinds of secularisation have specific versions of secularism promoted? Have there been reversals in secularisation, or has it been a largely linear process in south Asia?

Humeira Iqtidar (humeira.iqtidar@kcl.ac.uk) teaches politics at Kings College, London, the UK and Tanika Sarkar (sumitsarkar_2001@yahoo. co.uk) teaches history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.


There is a particular urgency that this precise historical moment in south Asia brings to our special issue. Religious nationalism of a highly organised and violent kind seriously threatens minority lives and beliefs in this part of the world, thus, rendering nuanced and critical engagements with actually existing secularisms absolutely and immediately imperative. The task is made difficult by a rather empty and self-satisfied secularism that many parts of the West, as well as those with political power in this part of the world, profess in the course of their war against terror, which is but a thinly disguised undermining of the beliefs and conduct of particular religions.

There is, simultaneously, a steady erosion of space for articulations that may challenge or interrogate dominant religious interpretations or even religious belief, per se. Historically, they have come not so much from a blind adherence to western secularism – when was the West really secular in that sense? – but from the anger of marginalised communities like dalits impatient with hierarchies that divine authorities have traditionally sanctioned. Periyar E V Ramasamy has been the one serious philosopher of atheism in modern India, while Ambedkar’s neo-Buddhism, according to some scholars, came close to the vanishing point of religion. This compels us to reassess our stance towards secularisation of areas of life, which does not in itself negate belief, but which may stray away from an entirely religious explanation, or offer parallel and plural explanations, or lead to an objectification of belief.

Secularisation, once a key concept in debates about modernisation and modernity, has received very little academic attention over the last half century. In fact, it is often seen as a subset of secularism, or is engulfed within that concept. The closely related concept of secularism, on the other hand, has been central to academic and political debates about democracy, nationalism and contemporary politics. In this special issue, we focus on both in their mutual interaction. The contributions help gather, as well as go beyond, the existing literature on these themes. They may also suggest points of departure for the entire field.

South Asia has been particularly active in generating issues intimately related to both themes. It has also produced rich, many-layered and intense debates about them in the last few decades. We bring together conversations among academics from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. For various organisational reasons, it was not possible to bring in contributions from other parts of south Asia, especially from Sri Lanka, as well as from Nepal, which has recently transitioned from being a Hindu state to a secular one.

We propose that it is of immense value to separate out secularism and secularisation, to think through the precise modalities in specific contexts – not for arcane academic and theoretical debates, but for important political purposes. Our understanding of the relationship between secularism and secularisation has important implications for political stance and arrangements, for our tolerance of vernacular expressions, and for political projects that insist on safeguarding a plurality of beliefs as well as of unbelief.

Discussions on secularism have also tended to proceed along two slightly separate paths: broad, theoretical debates that do not engage with the substantive elements of a specific context, or deeply contextualised analyses that shy away from theoretical contributions. This special issue provides a mix of theoretically informed pieces with detailed, contextualised research adding granularity to the discussions by asking: Can secularisation happen without secularism? Or vice versa? What kinds of secularisation have specific versions of secularism promoted? Have there been reversals in secularisation, or has it been a largely linear process in south Asia?

Revisiting the Debate

Rajeev Bhargava builds upon Indian experiments with secularism to suggest that we should not “misrecognize virtue as vice”. Indian secularism’s attempt to bring together individual and community rights is, he suggests, not a weakness, but precisely the kind of contextual secularism that moves beyond doctrinal positions to contain the hegemonic and undemocratic impulses in religious structures, while not condemning religion itself. Whether this can be done or not remains open to debate, since any such attempts will no doubt contain scope for much contention on the very basics: what counts as “democratic” in a particular situation? Does release from one lead to another kind of oppression? What form of oppression is worse than the others? Nevertheless, the ideal of “contextual secularism” is a step closer to a workable model and a useful move away from the complete abandonment of secular principles that characterises some critiques of secularism.

The relationship between secularism and secularisation is also a much less rigid one for Bhargava. One may not lead to the other or, indeed, be linked in any clear manner. The key distinction for him is that secularisation in Europe, at least, “was not launched as a programme of collective action”, while secularism very emphatically has to be “a collective normative project”. How this normative project will come to be owned at a broad level in society is something that he does not engage with explicitly. Implicitly, however, his argument seems to rest on a vision of a state and political agents bound by a constitution that, in the Indian context at least, has allowed productive ambiguities to support religious life, while remaining resistant to complete domination by undemocratic impulses within the different religious traditions of India.

Sudipta Kaviraj’s reading, in this collection, of Rajeev Bhargava’s distinction between ethical and political secularism renders ethical secularism closer to secularisation, inasmuch as it is about an “attitude” towards beliefs rather than a political arrangement. Bhargava does not draw this out explicitly, but Kaviraj goes some way in exploring the implications of an attitude towards belief – not just the belief itself. In a nuanced elaboration of the differences as well as the similarities in their understanding of the relationship between secularism and secularisation, Kaviraj proposes that both T N Madan and Ashis Nandy were right – albeit more harsh than was necessary – in claiming that secularism and secularisation were out of step in India.

Madan’s proposition that, given the lack of secularisation in India, secularism was an imposition by a small elite doomed to stay out of touch with the inherent religiosity of the masses, was matched by Nandy’s implicit claim that secularisation is neither inevitable nor inherent in modernity. While Kaviraj discusses some important limitations in Madan’s understanding of secularisation in Europe, the most critical limitation to both Madan and Nandy’s analysis is that they both underestimate the polyvalence in “tradition” and “modernity”. Here, Kaviraj uses Bhargava’s distinction productively to explore how both a “traditional” Hindu and a “modern” Hindu in Tagore’s novel Gora could lead towards having similar political arrangements, even when their points of departure were radically different.

However gently delivered, Kaviraj’s critique of existing criticisms of secularisation in India is scathing at two important levels. By pointing to a fundamental misreading of “tradition” in Nandy and Madan’s analysis of both Indian and European societies, Kaviraj undercuts the force of their arguments by showing that within “tradition” may lie many a possibility for completely different futures. More usefully, his reading of Tagore goes some way towards opening an approach to secularisation that can be enthusiastic about the implications without assuming a singular path to the process.

Partitions and Secularisation

Joya Chatterji’s paper in this collection highlights some of these tensions in a granular and closely historicised discussion of the debates between Pakistani and Indian diplomats right after Partition. Building on Rawl’s notion of “overlapping consensus”, Chatterji demonstrates how the elite diplomats who were part of the Calcutta Committee made conscious decisions to set aside deeply dividing concerns of religious identity and focused instead on operationalising the partition of India. More critically, she provides a perceptive and sharp articulation of how a class habitus comes into play in such situations of emergency, to argue that a kind of secularisation was enacted and embodied in this period that is not acknowledged in academic research. At the same time, her rendering allows us to see secularisation as a much more fragmented and fragile process than is generally imagined.

Pre-empting a possible critique that this was a very limited form of secularisation which did not permeate down to other parts of the state machinery, Chatterji then discusses the example of protocols agreed between police officers in the contested area of Kutch, to show how elite decisions or decisions in one part of the system do tend to travel elsewhere, albeit in precarious ways. This paper highlights not just important limitations to assuming a wide-ranging pervasiveness to nationalist and religious identities, but also foregrounds the theoretical limitations of secularisation theory.

Secularisation is often presented as a one-time event, a relatively permanent result of a linear trajectory to modernisation that once achieved is hard to dislodge. Chatterji, on the other hand, shows how secularisation can also be a fleeting and fragmented process – one that may permeate some aspects of social and political life, but not all, and may resonate in some contexts more strongly, but not equally in all.

The details that Chatterji provides in her paper of the conversations which took place during the Calcutta meeting are fascinating for the ways in which class interests and habitus seem to override religious and nationalist concerns. She is careful to insist that this cannot be seen outside the specific context, nor as an aberration only but as another space in which the partition of India played out. This is, then, as important a venue, and these players as critical, in understanding the future trajectories of the two countries and their relationship with each other as the many who lived the partition in much more tumultuous ways.

A later and no less acrimonious separation, that of Bangladesh from Pakistan, haunts Samia Huq’s paper about the Bangladeshi state’s attempts at managing religion. She moves away from teleologically determined notions of secularism and secularisation to explore Bangladesh’s aspirations to the secular through a look at the Islamic Foundation of Bangladesh – a semi-autonomous religious entity that describes its purpose as “research, publication and expansion of Allah’s one and only chosen complete code of life in order to enrich the lives of majority of the country’s population according to the beneficent stream brought by Islam”. She brings to the fore not just the transformations within the Islamic Foundation itself, but also the differential readings of Islam supported by the Bangladeshi state at different historical junctures and their impact on secularisation within the country.

The inclusion of secularism as one of the pillars of the newly formed Bangladeshi state in 1971 was operationalised through a vision of secularisation that entailed the banning of religious parties. Not only was this useful for keeping the Jamaat-e-Islami out of the space of legitimate politics – this, after the treacherous role the party had played during Bangladesh’s war of independence, was critical – but it also allowed a transcendence beyond religion to Bangladeshi politics.

Huq pays close attention to the writings and ideas of Abul Hashim, one time ideologue and head of the Islamic Foundation during Ayub’s era who espoused a modernist vision of Islam. Abul Hashim’s close association with the Ayub regime has tainted later readings of his role, but Huq shows skilfully how his reading of Islam allowed for a more capacious understanding of the self, polity and religious duty.

Huq’s innovative and careful reading pays several kinds of dividends. First, this exploration of Abul Hashim’s thought is part of a growing body of academic literature on political thought from non-western contexts that highlight the continuous and creative entanglement between the West and the non-West over the last few centuries. Second, she sensitises us to the compulsions created by a hermeneutic approach. The current version of the Islamic Foundation, which garners much support from the Bangladeshi government, Huq argues, actually fosters a narrower conception of Islam and the relationship of Muslims with non-Muslims. This, in spite of the fact that the party in government is committed to a version of secularism that espouses, at least at the level of rhetoric, rights for minorities and non-Muslims in the Muslim majority state of Bangladesh. In contrast, Abul Hashim’s approach privileged ijtehad, and the rights of other human beings, huquq-ul-Ibad, over ritualistic practice. Third, this analysis allows us a comparison between two avowedly secular regimes in Bangladesh, one under General Ayub (when it was East Pakistan), and the other, Sheikh Hasina’s regime today. Rather than the usual comparisons between professedly secular or non-secular regimes, this analysis allows us a glimpse into the permutations possible within the “secular”.

De-secularisation

Taking a broad look at moments in Pakistan’s history where the “distance between the supposedly separate spheres of religion and secular life” was effaced, Sadia Saeed proposes that de-secularisation offers a useful frame for understanding these developments. She contends that rather than Islamisation, which implies the increasing use of Islamic norms and values for policymaking, or counter-secularisation, which is a very problematic process for democratic functioning, the term desecularisation is useful because it retains the same features as secularisation: contingent and creative change instituted through exigencies of state formation and political processes. Like secularisation, it can unfold at either the state or the societal level.

Saeed focuses on a few moments that put religious minorities at a disadvantage, whether in symbolic terms, such as a choice of design for the Pakistani flag that would be more inclusive, or in practical terms, such as the 1984 Ordinance that prohibited Ahmadis from proclaiming any of the activities reserved for “Muslims” as their own. This included the call to prayers (Azan) as well as the right to call their place of worship a mosque. What Saeed seems to suggest implicitly, too, is that such a notion of de-secularisation carries many of the same dilemmas that the concept of secularisation did. For instance, the notion of de-secularisation may indicate that the past was less overtly religious than the present, much like secularisation theorists assumed that the European past was more religious than many contemporary historians believe it had been (Casanova 1994; Gauchet 1997). Certainly, the history she lays out alerts us to another common feature of both de-secularisation and secularisation: their fragmented, incomplete unfolding and ongoing contestations in Pakistan.

In working through the specifics of not the state as a whole, but certain state-sanctioned institutions concerned with conservation of heritage sites, Hilal Ahmed looks into the ways in which a very “India-specific” notion of secularisation may be worked out in a particular instance. He focuses on the controversy between The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Wakf Board (UPSWB) regarding the management of the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal, built as a mausoleum by the emperor Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, also contains within the building complex a mosque and some other buildings. It is the use of the mosque by the local community as a site of religious worship in a site otherwise declared a “secular” national monument that raises conflicting claims of ownership by different bodies. The ASI emphasises the “secular” nature of a protected national monument, while the Wakf board is committed to retain the mosque as a site of religious ritual. The reasons for the controversy are not self-explanatory, and neither was the controversy inevitable. The ASI had managed the Taj Mahal since colonial times, and while local Muslims had had varying levels of access to the mosque, the controversy did not arise at a moment of unusual religious observance at the mosque.

Ahmed’s paper shows once again the many complications brought about by the state’s management of religious practice in various mundane spaces. While not explicitly articulated as such by Ahmed, the controversy seems to be a product of a particular moment in Indian history where the process of “monumentalisation” comes into some contradiction with the increased political ambitions of the UPSWB to “represent” some Muslims at least.

Overview

In her bibliographical essay, Mohita Bhatia provides a useful overview of the way the place of religion in public and private life in south Asia has been approached by scholarly studies, particularly in the last few decades. Some of them have not been concerned explicitly with understanding the processes of secularisation, but with discussions of religion. It is clear that many of the studies she refers to do not explicitly disentangle secularisation specifically, but taken together their impact is towards opening religion up as a more fluid, pluralised and internally contested category. While that in itself does not lead to secularisation, this re-evaluation of the definition and role of religion significantly undermines the tenets of mainstream secularisation theories that often have built upon monolithic definitions of religion. Many of the studies that Bhatia details recognise that fuzzy boundaries and chaotic slippages operate between one religion and the other, as well as between the “religious” and the “secular”. While there is little consensus about the precise definition of secularisation, it does seem certain that the interest in redefining religion will have important consequences for how it is understood.

We support the move away from a reductive analysis of religion and its relationship to everyday life as well as political and economic structures. There seems to be a need for future debates about what precise place to accord religion, as one, but not the only, vocabulary and field where all kinds of social relations and change – tolerant and progressive, as well as oppressive ones – can work themselves out. More importantly, we need to evaluate carefully whether secularised areas of life that have cleared themselves of belief are sustainable or necessary as important dimensions of life, existing within deeply religious societies, without seeming to have come from a western inspiration as a mimetic effort. Hopefully, the issue will suggest new directions in our understanding of these matters.

References

Casanova, Jose (1994): Public Religion in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Gauchet, Raymond (1997): The Disenchantment of the World: Political History of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press).