Sadanand Menon: Secular society and its discontents

CRITICALLY INCLINED

In many recent discussions, I have tried to make the point that my entry point into the notion of the 'secular' is not a denial of faith but a 'faith in the faith of the other'.

Secularism cannot be about the 'absence' of faith; indeed it is about the 'assertion' of faith "" faith in freedom and people, not dogmas. One of the limitations of the 'secularism' debate is that it is often presented as being contra-distinct from religiosity. This is problematic. We need to be able to reinvent the 'secular' as an entirely valid space within the practice of faith and politics where one pauses to acknowledge the other, the one who is different, the alien, the non-believer.

The idea of the secular society, though, is an ideal deeply implicated in its own contradictions. It is defined by its discontents. At best, it demands a near impossible fairness on the part of the state and its citizens. Sometimes this translates as the need to demonstrate a 'lack of faith in faith.' Radical poet Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, once wrote:

"O, I'm sure that God above
Would cease to feel a fool,
If every temple were to be
A hospital or school."

This is, often, good polemics, but hardly addresses the issue of the large-scale acknowledgement of faith.

While the notion of 'secularism' being the principle of the state's equidistance from religion is a relatively new and inherited definition in India, the history of the subcontinent is replete with stories of rulers professing a specific faith being impartial in their accommodation of other faiths. Emperor Akbar even initiated a universal religion, synthesising Islam, Hinduism and other forms of worship. It's a different matter that Din-e-Ilahi never took off.

The real issue in 'old' India was, of course, the exclusionary practice of caste hierarchy, which denied basic humanity to a large segment of the population "" a problem that continues to vitiate democratic politics here to this day. The discourse on secularism in India will need to find a way of including the condition of the Dalits (those ritually excluded from the practice of faith) who remain pawns on the elaborate chessboard of the conflict of faiths.

When Hinduism first consolidated around the eighth century, resulting in a virtual bulldozing of Buddhism out of the subcontinent, it was not accompanied by processes of healing and restoration. However, by the time of the conflicts generated by the Islamic invasions and consolidations of the 12th century, a distinctly syncretistic content had begun to inform the faith discourse.

Inspired by Persian Sufism or the rejection of doctrinaire worship through the insertion of the principle of 'human ecstasy' as divine agency, the subcontinent witnessed an extraordinary peoples' cultural wave, called the 'Bhakti Movement', which sought to wrench faith away from being vested in the divine and the male to restore it to the human and feminine. Kabir, Surdas, Meerabai, Bulle Shah, Tulsidas, Jayadeva, Nanak and Tukaram were some of the icons of this movement, which succeeded in rattling the foundations of the divisive agendas of established vested interests in the faith business.

Interestingly, even today the secular movement in India has only these worthies of some 700 years vintage as the ideological trump cards of their counter-politics. The compositions written by 'Bhakti poets' as simple songs in a mind-blowing range of peoples' dialects, still remain the only way to get to the hearts and minds of warring religious camps in India.

It was this very 'humanising' of the 'abstract divine' that inaugurated the era of the resurgence of Vaishnavism in the 14th century, through a new literalism around its principal 'gods', Sri Rama and Sri Krishna. Both were wrenched away from mythology to occupy 'real' space. An elaborate 'nativity' was attributed to them, replete with a place of birth and real-time heroics. Their ballads were re-designated as 'histories'. It laid the foundation for the 20th century Ram temple movement in Ayodhya, culminating in the destruction of the Babri masjid in 1992 and the subsequent electoral legitimisation of the anti-secular Hindutva parties.

The period of colonial rule contributed to the suppression of the syncretistic movements and the ascendancy of reactionary Vaishnavism, till it virtually became the subtext of the Indian national movement too, as epitomised in a wholesale politicisation and absorption of it by Mahatma Gandhi.

This has led to significant charges, in recent times, of the Indian freedom movement being, at bottom, a movement of resurgent Vaishnavism (now homogenised as 'Hinduism') "" that the seed for sectarianism was inherent in the nationalist impulse. Dalit leaders like Babasaheb Ambedkar and backward caste leaders like 'Periyar' E V Ramaswamy Naicker were sharply critical of what they understood as a 'Hindu-Brahminical hijacking' of the freedom agenda, leading to the creation of what would eventually be a 'Hindu state' "" a prediction steadily being fulfilled over the past decade.

Obviously, this is what prompted the incorporation of the term 'secular' in the preamble to the Indian Constitution. And this is why secularism (more than anything else) is the most embattled of the Constitutional guarantees even 57 years after India declared itself a sovereign, secular, democratic republic. Not a day has passed since then when the idea of the 'secular' has not been threatened. The idea of the secular society remains a deep discontent.