Roots of unity in diversity

After the trauma of partition, Independent India under Jawaharlal Nehru sought to return religion to people's private space and keep the state and public life strictly secular or non-religious.

However, communalism was not rooted out; because of Nehru's stature, speaking out against secularism became politically incorrect. There was a conspiracy of silence on the latent communal forces in the country. These eventually reappeared, as developments since the 1980s show.

How must secularism be redefined so that it is not brought down again like the Babri Masjid? The academics who have come together between these covers feel, along with T N Madan, that what is needed is "participatory pluralism" and not an anti-religious "hegemonic and homogenising secularism".

Their attempt is to focus on the composite culture that has emerged in India and given rise to a syncretic and inclusive pluralism that has defined Indian civilisation. Instead of people leaving behind their religion when they enter the public space, the solution is to "live together separately", like bees in compartments in a beehive.

A wonderful example of living together is Ajmer, put on the map by its sufi shrine. Its study posed a methodological challenge. There is an established way of dealing with conflict, but how do you study its absence? "There are, to my knowledge, no accounts of communities living together," says Shail Mayaram.

The author finds that to live together you have to share myths and traditions, have networked livelihoods, and end up with blurred identities. The shrine has helped create the shared space for coexistence. It has "assisted the peaceful penetration of Islam, that was itself transformed in the process" and the custodians of the shrine "take great pride" in its "eclectic traditions".

Successful commerce has also played a key role. Sindhi traders dominate the dargah bazaar; the annual urs has a turnover of Rs 10 crore, so there is every incentive to ensure that pilgrims keep coming.

Though the market plays a major role in settling Sindhi-Muslim disputes, feelings of togetherness go deeper. "Despite their affiliation with right-wing parties, several shopkeepers begin their day by first placing the keys to their shop at the feet of the tomb." Muslims and Sindhis live cheek by jowl, as do Dalits and Muslims. "It is the 'unheroic quality of everyday life' that sustains pluralism."

For sheer contrast, there is a chapter on Ahmedabad's Holi riot of 1714""which involved Muslims, Jains and Hindus""based on the earliest available description of such a conflict in India. Najaf Haider's two versions of the episode, taken from Persian chronicles, differ. The riot's flashpoint was the celebration of Holi.

One version speaks of a cow slaughter and the killing of Muslim youth, presumably the son of the butcher who slaughtered the cow. The other version does not mention these slaughters.

Commercial rivalry seems to have set the stage; there was an obscure mistrust of the Bania community, with the cow and Holi acting as pretexts for action. On the positive side, communities were not divided entirely along religious lines; the local administration failed initially but the Mughal state apparatus contained things thereafter.

The enemy of living together is religious purism. Asim Roy records how Islam on the subcontinent has come to be seen in two strands, the scriptural, on the one hand, and the pragmatic, on the other, bearing labels like "high" versus "low", and "purist" versus "syncretic".

Historically, this found expression in the contempt that immigrant Muslims had for the Muslim masses in Bengal and the popular folk religion""with continuing belief in astrology and magic""they practised.

Arguing for the inevitable give and take that makes up the world of living together separately, Roy says that "the claim for a single monolithic, universal perspective on Islam is not only unhistorical and untenable, but also fraught with great danger".

The aim of the whole intellectual exercise, as Adnan Farooqui and Vasundhara Sirnate say in the last chapter, is to reinvigorate "academic interest in a past where cultures and communities were not viewed as monolithic entities and all cultural boundaries were porous enough to allow for a certain degree of permissible interaction.

What usually resulted were syncretic traditions, which drew on the enormous reserves of varied cultures present in the Indian cub-continent." This meticulous academic exercise has but one missing element""an index.

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LIVING TOGETHER SEPARATELY: CULTURAL INDIA IN HISTORY AND POLITICS

Mushirul Hasan and Asim Roy (ed)
Oxford University Press
Price: Rs 750; Pages: 427