Kappen Memorial Lecture, 1999

Historical interpretations and the Secularising of Indian Society

I would like to express my deep appreciation to Visthar for inviting me to give the Kappen Memorial Lecture.  It is indeed a privilege to honour Father Kappen for, although I had never met him, I have read with considerable interest his insightful and impressive writings.  I am also delighted to have been invited to join the group of distinguished persons who have honoured him in the past by giving these lectures.

I have chosen as my theme a subject which I think would have interested him and is these days of much concern—namely, the secularizing of Indian society.  I shall be placing the discussion in a perspective which draws on history.  This is not because I think that the Indian past was secular, but because the Indian past, if read with sensitivity, can be seen to be conducive to creating a secular society.

In the discussion on secularism in India, there is generally a reliance on the state taking a secular position as and when necessary.  This leads to a certain dependence on state initiative and action.  It seems to me that the secularization of Indian society is equally important.  I see this as complementary to a secular state.  The secularism of the state should preferably interface with the secularization of society.

I would like to discuss three aspects involved in the process of secularizing Indian society.  The first is the strengthening of civil society by insisting on defending the rights of citizens.  The second concerns the state which has to activate these rights and the third touches on the role of religion and religious institutions in civil society and the state.  All three draw on the historical past, but some aspects of these are more embedded in the past.

Let me begin by defining what I mean by secularism.  In order to understand this concept we do not have to go through its history in Europe – from Roman times to Christendom.  In the conflict between Church and State in Europe from the late medieval period, secularism was used in a specific sense arising out of the contestation of European elites through the confrontation between Catholicism and Protestantism.  But from the nineteenth century it has had a different and much wider meaning as a concept.  This change is often overlooked by those who continue to relate the concept only to the confrontation between Church and State.  The new meaning assumes the existence of religious pluralities, of their equal status and of the eventual emergence of a society in which the rights of the individual as citizens take precedence over religious identities.

The nineteenth century definition sees a secular society as one in which social ethics are based on a current and continuing regard for the well-being of fellow humans.  It does not require social ethics to be derived from a belief in God or in a future life.  It is not opposed to such beliefs but does not regard them as essential preconditions to the concerns of social ethics.  Secularisation, therefore, is a cognate of a process of historical change and this process is closely tied to the modernization of a society.  The point that I would like to underline is that it is historically specific and relates to a particular historical situation.  This historical situation is linked to the process of modernization.  To judge pre-modern societies as being secular or non-secular is somewhat anachronistic.

The modernization of a society assumes the existence of a nation-state, of democracy, of industrialization and investment (private or public) and of the emergence of a middle-class, professionally involved in this change.  I am not endorsing this change as necessarily an ideal situation.  I am assuming its historical existence in contemporary times, given our historical experience of colonialism and nationalism, and in the present day, the overpowering presence of globalisation.  There are those who disapprove of the nation-state and of industrialization, but have so far been unable to suggest workable alternatives.  That we have arrived at these forms makes it necessary for us to build into them a just and ethical society.  Such a society can only be built on a secular orientation.  Modernisation is a package and secularism is a part of it. If we do not object to the industrialization, arguing that they are part of the modernizing process, then we have little ground to object to the secularization of society.

Secularism therefore does not assume a binary opposition between that state and religion.  It is more a graduated but conscious movement towards changing society.  This is of central significance to both our concept and working of civil society.  Secularising society would strengthen civil society and allow it to effectively monitor the state, ensuring that the state maintains the required impartiality towards religious groups.  Basically, these processes are inter-meshed with democracy.  If there is a snuffing out of secularism, there is to the same extent a snuffing out of democracy.

The creation of a civil society is a relatively new experience for India and the secularizing of such a society is equally an innovation.  It comes in a post-colonial period which, in some ways, should make it easier for us to recognize its usefulness. But these are not alien ideas for modern Indians.  The debate on these matters goes back to the writings of Ram Mohun Roy and others.  Therefore, we have had two centuries of discussion on them.  It would be salutary for us if we could revive some of these earlier debates which were often far more liberal than what we hear today.

Critics of secularism in India have raised various objections.  One view states that because secularism is tied to modernity and modernity is projected in this view as a kind of sickness, we should not want it, in spite of our having been part of a modernizing process since the beginning of the century.  However, these same critics do not object to the other changes brought about by modernization such as the upholding of democracy in its contemporary forms or economic liberalization accompanied by industrialization invested in by multi-nations.  As weighty members of the middle-class, they accept the facilities of modernization for themselves but hesitate to extend them to those at or below the poverty line.  But can modernization be stemmed in a world of globalisation (which is what we have now opted to join)?  The changes are inter-linked and come in tandem.

Another objection relates to the historical past.  Secularism is said to be essentially a response to Christianity in Europe and is therefore alien to India.  This, as I have tried to point out earlier, is an erroneous view of the history of the concept of secularism, which at one state was concerned with confronting the Church but has since developed other dimensions which relate to issues of modernization.

A further objection states that India has never been secular and never will be because its essential identities were and continue to be those of religious communities—each of which is uniform and monolithic.  It is argued that community representation is now called for in the process of modernization.  Apart from being historically inaccurate as secularism is not associated with pre-modern societies, this view strengthens the notion of majority and minority communities as the constituents of Indian society.  It denies the historical fact that the identities of communities are not permanent.  They change with historical change.  Therefore, monolithic religious communities have not been the constituents of Indian society over the centuries.  This kind of communitarianism breeds its own problems and more so for a society such as ours.

Tied to this is also the theory that the nation-state is not only irrelevant but is the source of many ills.  Therefore, the state should give way to the community, defined by religion.  History is ignored, there is a denial of nation and no concern with the need for economic development in whatever form.  That there are some problems, particularly of economic development which can only be handled through the intervention of the state, would also be unacceptable to this argument.

At the popular level, current views of secularism are, broadly, of two kinds.  One is the view that secularism is opposed to religion.  The second and more prevalent view is that secularism means the co-existence of different religions and is encapsulated in the phrase, sarva dharma sambhava.  This is an Indian interpretation of the concept and arises again from the perspective of projecting Indian society as consisting of religious communities.  This, of course, has not been the case because caste, region, language and sect were often more important than a presumed uniform, religious identity.

It needs to be emphasized that secularism does not question the validity of religion per se and is therefore not opposed to religion.  Secularism should not be confused with atheism.  What secularism does question is the authority of religious institutions or institutions with religious identities over civic life.  In other words, the concerns of civil society should not be under the jurisdiction of a religious identity.

Let me turn now to the relationship of secularism in the past.  This is of considerable importance not because the past was secular (it obviously was not if secularism is a part of the modernizing process) but because, in some societies, the historical links between the state, social organizations and religions were such that they are conducive in the present day to secularizing these societies.  In other words, it is easier for some societies to be secularized in view of what they nurtured in the past.  I would like to argue that this is so for Indian society.

In speaking of secularism and history I shall discuss three broad aspects.  One is the multi-religious culture of the Indian past and what this implied for the viability of the concept of a religious community as we define it today, given that sometimes there was a convergence and sometimes a conflict among groups.  Another is the perception which the Hindus and Muslims had of each other in the past.  Associated with this is whether this perception changed with conversion to Islam.  And finally, state patronage to religious groups needs to be considered as it is pivotal to the concept of secularism.

I would like to suggest that we need to investigate more fully the links between caste, clan, community, region, language and religious articulation.  We have treated concepts such as community and religion in too limited and static a fashion.  The word community is immediately linked to religion and religion in turn is seen as an ecclesiastical structure dominating all activities.  But communities in the past were identified by a range of factors which frequently and partially overlapped.  The present-day impregnable boundaries of communities would have been alien to the past.  Similarly, religion was much more inter-twined with the social dimension than we allow for today.  Since the present-day choice seems to be moving towards either the secularization or the communalization of society, we need to examine the links between religion and society, particularly from the period of the eighth century A.D. onwards, which saw the arrival of Christianity and Islam in India.  An awareness of the socio-religious landscape of even earlier times would also be helpful.

Religious articulation in the Indian past was much more nuanced than in Europe.  This was in part because the pattern of religion was different.  The history of religion in Europe and in West Asia is a linear history, starting with a historical founder and consequential sectarian movements, supporting orthodoxy or heterodoxy in relation to the initial religious teaching of the founder.  In India, the initial religious articulation was a mosaic built on a multi-religious culture and it has continued to be that, although the project of Hindutva is now seeking to destroy the mosaic.  Even in pre-Islamic times there were many indigenous religions and the concept of a single, linear religion was not prevalent.  There was a network of castes and sects, some sharing boundaries and ideologies and some, discrete and diverse, creating a range of belief systems and practices.  There was a consciousness of identification with varying religious forms among the differing social strata.  This persisted into later periods.  The relationship between religion and society which resulted was a different kind of experience from that of Europe.  But in the eighteenth century when Orientalism began to interpret the religions of India, the model was that of Europe, and we seem not to have questioned the resulting reconstruction, analytically.

The distinction between religious sects was generally categorized as what have been called Brahmanism and Shramanism, and these remained constant through a major part of Indian history.  The religion espoused by the brahmanas was derived from the vedic corpus; whereas that preached and practiced by the shramanas focused on Buddhism, Jainism and other similar sects.  The practice of Vedic Brahmanism was largely confined to the upper castes as many rituals were forbidden to the shudras.  The ‘heterodox’ sects—as the Buddhists, Jainas and others have been labeled—were open to members of any caste.

The division into brahmana and shramana is reported by Megasthenes visiting India in the Mauryan period.  The grammarian Patanjali writes of the innate opposition between the two, which he compares to the opposition between the snake and the mongoose or the cat and the mouse.  Perhaps this was why the Mauryan king Ashoka repeatedly calls for the need to respect both brahmanas and shramanas.  There are Jaina texts (e.g. the Paumachariyam of Vimalasuri) that speak of the brahmanas as heretics and liars.  Some brahmanas authors, such as Krishna Mishra to whom the play Prabodha Chandrodaya is attributed, caricature Jaina monks as profligates and drunks.  Alberuni, writing in the eleventh century, refers to many religious sects and the Shamaniyya are mentioned separately.

This duality is easily visible at the elite levels and is evident in the literature.  At the more intermediate levels there prevailed what we call today Puranic Hinduism, a category which covers even contradictory sects of various kinds, some supporting Vedic Brahmanism and others opposed to it.  This was a truly creative expression in terms of the interface between religious articulation and social identity.  The openness which it supported was one of the reasons why sects with variant religious doctrines or differing social norms were all accommodated.  It grew out of the need, often social and political, to assimilate and to incorporate, even if this meant new deities, rituals and beliefs.  Or else existing deities were re-oriented, as it were, with additional mythologies and rituals.

To build a uniform, monolithic religious community out of this kind of religious articulation is virtually impossible.  Each segment was dominated by a relationship to either one caste or a cluster of castes.  Where a sect cut across a range of castes, it usually ended up as an independent and separate caste.  The social status of the various sects was dependent on who their patrons were and it was not unusual for a relatively humble cult to be transmuted over a few generations into one of importance, especially if supported by royalty.  The many aniconic deities which emerge as the focus of royal worship are part of this process, a case in point being the worship of Maniyadeo by the Chandella rulers of Bundelkhand.  The social mobility of Tantrism and the Shakta cult make a fascinating study on the interface between belief, ritual and a changing social identity.  It moves from a relatively confined fertility worship to a presence in some of the richest temples, as at Khajuraho.  Obscure families acquiring the status of royal dynasties took their cults with them and amalgamated them with the worship of the more status-bestowing deities of Brahmanism.  These social processes of family and caste mobility frequently gave direction to much that we recognize as ‘Hindu sects’.

Further down the social scale and initially more distant from these sects were the belief systems and rituals of what we have called the tribal people and those outside caste.  These were the atavikas or forest-dwellers—the Nishada, Shabara, Bhilla, Pulinda—and the many hundreds of others, and at another extreme, the Chandala, Dom and such, mentioned in the literature.  Theirs were frequently animistic religions with their own deities and rituals.  Some contradicted Brahmanical ritual.  Thus, in spite of the earlier Vedic sacrificial ritual involving the slaughter of animals, in later times animal sacrifice and the libations of alcohol common to the animistic cults were anathema to many brahmana sects.  For upper caste Hindus these groups have been mleccha or impure and have not been a part of their own religious identity for many centuries.

This variance may partially explain why the concept of dharma became central to an understanding of religion.  It referred to the social obligations and ritual duties which had to be performed in accordance with one’s varna and jati and the sect to which one belonged.  The duties differed in accordance with caste status.  Conforming to dharma demarcated the upper castes from the lower since it was expected to be more strictly observed among the former.  The lower castes were presumed to be more lax.  This raises problems for present-day attempts to project a universal and uniform Hinduism in the past and in maintaining that upper caste belief and practice define Hinduism.

We have to recognize that there was a distinction between the religion of the elites and that of those low on the social scale.  The hierarchy among sects often follows caste hierarchy.  And, most important of all, the religion of the actual majority of the population is rarely recorded in early historical sources.  It usually has to be inferred from indirect evidence, for what has survived is largely the literature and visual evidence of the elite.  We tend to extend this evidence to all social levels, which is historically an inaccurate procedure.  But a faithful reconstruction of the religion of the majority would lead to some surprises.  The beliefs and rituals of those at the lower end of the social scale are frequently part of what I have described elsewhere as perhaps constituting a kind of counter-culture.  Religious boundaries are blurred, religious practices over-lap and mythologies are inter-twined.  This is not because the indigenous religions of India were necessarily tolerant as we like to believe, but because the religious articulation of the majority emerged from negotiating differences.  Such negotiations can be potentially seminal to a secularizing process.

I have stated earlier that the secularization of Indian society would be easier than that of many other societies.  Let me expand on this.  Frequently in the past and even sometimes today, religious sectarian identity is subordinated to the identity of caste.  The identity of caste takes into consideration marriage rules and personal law, inheritance laws, occupation, location and forms of worship.  Therefore, that which goes into the making of what we today would call matters pertaining to civil society remains central.  Religious rituals among Hindus were according to caste.  Caste determined who could enter which temple and where a person could offer worship.

The other side of this was that religious belief was often a personal matter.  As long as caste regulations were observed, personal belief was of individual concern.  Rituals presupposed certain belief patterns.  Nevertheless, religious dogma was seldom over-arching across an immense social span.  This encouraged a certain openness in these religions different from the model familiar to us from the semitic religions.  This openness is now declining through the imposition of a uniform, monolithic view of religion and by the communalization of society.  Many religious sects (e.g. those which are included in the Shramanic and Bhakti tradition and others of a more esoteric kind) focused on the liberation of the individual soul, and worshippers could observe a variety of forms of worship.  The projected relationship between worshipper and deity was not constricted by the requirements of ritual and belief.  The argument that religious belief is a personal matter would not be altogether alien to the Indian tradition.

In this connection let me add that, for almost a thousand years, Buddhism was a major Indian religion and has left its imprint in various ways, even if the imprint is not immediately recognizable.  The Buddha did not insist on a belief in deity arguing that this was something which could not be proven.  The Buddha also maintained that social ethics were man-made.  This element of rationality was not unusual in Indian thought. But we have tended to ignore it or even deny it.  Alternate belief systems endorsed renouncers who could sometimes be dissenters as they were bound neither by caste nor by ritual.  Whether as sannyasi or bhikhshu or sufi or whether as pir, faqir, guru or sant, they were widely respected, allowed their space and on occasion even supported as players in local politics.

Given the analogy of the mosaic, the question arises as to how conflicts and convergences were handled among sects.  The convergences are evident in Puranic Hinduism, in the Bhakti sects and in many religious movements of an even more popular kind.  Convergences led to break-away castes or the amalgamation of castes into new jaits.  But there were also conflicts, as it is to be expected from a complex society. In the Rjataranini, Kalhana mentions attacks on the Buddhists in Kashmir.  Shashanka in Eastern India is accused of the same according to Banabhatta, the author of the Harshacharita.  The rivalry between the Jainas and Shaivas resulted in each accusing the other of intent to harm.  Scuffles of a violent kind over precedence at the Kumbha Mela between the Dashanamis and the Bairagis are depicted in miniature paintings.

These conflicts often had elements of the play of power, involving competition for royal patronage and tensions of an economic and professional kind.  But the conflict was limited to specific areas and groups, and was not pan-Indian.  There was no sense of holy war—a jehad or a crusade.  Religious intolerance was less severe when compared to Europe or West Asia, but acute intolerance took a social form with untouchability constituting the worst form of degradation known to human society.  Such groups were excluded from the religion and rituals of caste Hindus.  Therefore, we need to investigate the reasons for either hostilities or assimilations and to locate the social tensions involved.  It does not help us to pretend that confrontations did not exist or to try and explain all hostilities as coming about only with the arrival of Islam in India.

A major issue in observations on secularism in India is that of the relations in the past between what are referred to in recent times as the Hindu and Muslim communities.  I would like to suggest that this is the wrong premise on which to start looking at the history of this relationship.  There was a consciousness of different beliefs, of identities with different sects of Islam or Hinduism, but there was no consciousness of a uniform, monolithic Hindu community or a similar Muslim community until the last few centuries.  Prior to that, alliances or confrontations were between smaller, localized groups, among whom the process of negotiation continued, albeit in some case with new religious tones.

How then did these groups perceive each other?   The use of “Hindu” as an identity by those whom we today call Hindus did not gain currency until about the fifteenth century.  Prior to that, religious identity was based on sect and caste and an all-inclusive term was not thought necessary.  ‘Hindu’ as it is now known was an invention of those who viewed the sub-continent from beyond the Indus.  The name derives from the river—Sindhu.  This goes back to ancient Iranian times.   In the eighth century A.D. the Arabs referred to the area as al-Hind.  It was initially a geographical term and Hindu was an ethnic identity.   It was later used by extension to mean all those inhabitants of the sub-continent who practiced religions other than Islam and Christianity.

Equally interesting is the fact that the Hindus did not initially refer to those who arrived in India as followers of Islam or Muslims.  There were diverse forms of identity which each had their own historical interest.  The Arabs conquered Sind, but came more frequently as traders from wWest Asia.  They were employed in high administrative positions in the territory of the Rashtrakuta rulers, and are frequently referred to as Tajikas.  The Turks who came from Central Asia and Afghanistan are described by the ethnic term, Turushka.  Some were also referred to as Shakas and Yavanas, the former being the old name for the Scythians of Central Asia and the latter, for the Greeks.  The use of the term mleccha is a marker of social distance, used for those viewed as being outside caste society.  Since a variety of people from tribals to local kings are variously called mlecca, it cannot be assumed that it always carried a sense of contempt.

There is in the use of these terms a historical continuity because they mark the people as coming from West Asia and Central Asia with which areas there had earlier been centuries of coming and going.  The labels used are similar to those of pre-Islamic times.  There is also a suggestion of a certain familiarity, for, if people are given a name used earlier in history it does indicate that they are not perceived as entirely alien.  What is also interesting is that even the Turks and the Arabs do not seem to see themselves as part of a single Islamic expedition.  In the Turko-Persian chronicles, conquests in India and the establishing of Islamic rule through the Delhi Sultanate are attributed entirely to Mahmud of Ghazni.  The Arabs are generally ignored, even though their contacts and conquests preceded those of Mahmud.

Among Muslims in India, the majority were Indian converts to Islam.  The process of conversion in the past requires an intensive study, as there are a number of popular misconceptions about conversion to Islam.

The Turko-Persian chronicles seem to mention normative figures.  They sometimes refer to fifty thousand infidels being either killed or converted, and an equal number of Muslim heretics being killed by zealous Sunni Muslim conquerors such as Mahmud of Ghazni.  The figure is evidently fantasy, to be used readily in any situation and is unlikely to tell us much.  What is interesting about the conversions to Islam is that they were of two main kinds.  One was of the individual who may have converted out of conviction or, if he was socially well-placed such as some Rajputs, he may have converted for reasons of political expediency.  The others were conversions by caste (when an entire jati would convert).  These were by far the larger in number and more common.

Conversion by caste means that the stories of having to choose between conversion or death are, to say the least, exaggerated.  In some cases there may well have been threats but this was clearly not the norm.  The question of why, in the same village or town, some jatis convert and others do not, is the more significant.  Further, conversion by jati meant that many of the practices, especially those relating to marriage and kinship relations, inheritance and customary law of the jati, were not discontinued. This is clear from social practices maintaining the regulations of the zat, the equivalent of a jati.  The Meos of Rajasthan, for example, even as Muslims, continue to observe particular social norms prevalent among non-Muslims of their social status but not observed by Muslim rajputs of the same region.  The upper caste convert would be more inclined to observe the shariat.  In any case his caste practices would be different from those of the lower status Meos.  Such a situation finds endless repetition in other parts of the sub-continent.

Caste identities frequently determined both custom and religious practices.  There are a number of communities along the west coast which trace themselves back to settlements of Arab traders who over the centuries appear to have picked up wives and observances locally.  The Khojas, Bohras, Navayats, Mapillahs—to mention just a few—observed a type of Islam which may not have been recognizable to the Momin weavers in Uttar Pradesh.  The Gazatteer of Bijapur, dating to 1881, describes the largest Muslim population as being those of the lower castes.  They not only retained their original caste names, but also stated that they worshipped Hindu deities, celebrated Hindu festivals, prohibited the eating of beef and only rarely went to pray in the mosque.  Have we prematurely rushed to identify these groups as either Hindu or Muslim, for they are better described as either Hinduised Muslims or Islamicised Hindus?  They, and others like them, some now listed as either Muslim or Hindu, are in effect the actual majority whose religion was part of what I have elsewhere referred to as a counter-culture.  They neither conformed to the orthodoxies of elite religions, nor did they constitute a uniform, monolithic community.

What seems to become evident is that Indian social organization takes precedence even over religious practices, which claim to be uniformly observed.  But the actual practices conform more to caste rules than to the rules of the religion even among non-Hindus.  This is of course changing in recent times.  The fear of being a vulnerable minority encourages a move towards homogenizing religious practices and politicizing religious identities.  That the fears are justified is being amply demonstrated in the wanton attacks, particularly in the last few months, on the persons and properties of those identified as non-Hindus.

The coming of Islam, therefore, did not create two monolithic communities—the Hindu and the Muslim—hostile to each other, as is the belief of those who support a communal interpretation of the Indian past.  Readings of the history of the last thousand years are based largely on court chronicles which had many axes to grind, not least of which the exaggeration of accounts of Islamic conquests and conversions.  These are now ceasing to be taken at face value and are beginning to be examined more analytically—a process which historians have to adopt for every kind of evidence, whatever its religious or other identity.  There are other data as well such as varieties of texts of regional and local history, of compositions associated with popular religious sects, of the oral tradition of folk literature and even pictorial representations of world-views.  These are beginning to sensitize us to a different perspective of the societies of earlier times.

The picture that emerges is one of a constant process of cultural translation and social negotiation.  This was a process that can be recognized from much earlier times and which continued, although the units of the transaction underwent change.  Hostility or friendliness differed from situation to situation.  Those that sought to be converted aspired to a different society or to different advantages and these in turn required negotiating.  The choice of the degree to which the new observances were to be followed varied from group to group depending on its interests and is reflected in the studies of regional communities and lower caste groups.  It is these populations, marginalized in our studies of the past, which were and are the real majority if numbers are to be counted, not the brahmanised Hindu or the Muslim as defined by the mullah.

I will now turn to the third broad aspect, that of state patronage.  This has been treated the world over largely as a matter of political expediency, although efforts are frequently made to disguise it as goodwill.  The ruling dynasties of India have maintained a transparency about the need to privilege a variety of religious sects.  The edicts of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka insist on both brahmanas and shramanas being shown respect in spite of the king’s own preference for Buddhism.  The Ikshvaku dynasty seems to have decided on a gender division: the men patronized the Vedic sacrificial rituals and the women made donations to the Buddhist sangha.  There is an on-going controversy as to whether the seventh century king, Harsha of Kannauj, was a patron of the Buddhists or the shaivas, so meticulously did he give to each.  The Solankis encouraged the building of Jaina temples in Gujarat and also built a mosque for the Arabs with whom they traded.  The Mughals (this included Aurangazeb) made grants to Sufis and to Brahmanas and contributed towards the building of temples and mosques and towards the maintenance of the mathas of the jogis.  Akbar even invented a new religion, combining elements from the prevailing religions, which predictably did not survive.

When families of obscure origin rose to be rulers as was often the case from the eighth century A.D. onwards, they elevated their traditional cults and merged them into the practice of the more established religions.  The reverse process was also known.  Royal families became the patrons of the cults of groups which were seemingly marginalized but whose loyalty was important to political stability.  This provided a support of popular religious sects channeled through royal patronage.  Thus the Yadavas of deogiri became patrons of the cult of Vitthoba, which was in origin a cult of Vitthoba, which was in origin a cult of the pastoralists of the region.  It has been argued that the cult of Jaggantha in Orissa has similar folk and tribal origins.

If many of these activities were assimilative, some were also exclusive.  The destruction of temples was among these.  Temples were symbols of religious sectarian devotion, but they were also cultural idioms.  They were financial treasuries and also political statements when they were built by royalty.  Attacks on temples began before the coming of Islam.  Some are due to religious rivalries as between the Shaivas and the Jainas, some were raided by kings facing a fiscal crisis as in Kashmir, some were subjected to desecration as a sign of victory in a campaign as by the victorious Rashtrakutas against the Paramaras.

The temple was not just a place of worship.  Like the church and the mosque it was also an institution.  The destruction of temples therefore cannot be explained away simplistically as invariably an expression of religious bigotry.  The other facets of this activity have also to be understood.  This understanding has often to do with matters such as political and economic expediency, the demonstration of power and a punishment for disloyalty.  Those Turkish conquerors who destroyed temples were doing so to cash in on iconoclasm, on the looting of wealth and to project this destruction as a symbol of triumph.

Characteristic of royal patronage in India, it could change from ruler to ruler within the same dynasty.  The choice of the recipient depended on the personal inclinations of the ruler and also on state policies.  The tradition, therefore, was of multiple, although not impartial, patronage to various religious sects, irrespective of the religion of the ruler.  But this policy of patronage to multiple religious sects is not secularism.  It merely permits some religious sects to be comfortable.  However, such a history of multiple patronage does make the secularizing of society today more acceptable.  By this I do not mean that the state should continue to follow a policy of multiple patronage.  Such patronage to religious sects is a marker of a pre-modern society and is therefore not required now in changed historical situations.  But its historical legacy underlines the political acceptance of a multi-religious society and facilitates the transition from a multi-religious society to a secular society.

Let me conclude by returning to the issue with which I started, the secularizing of Indian society.  There has been some hostility to secularism, in part because it is projected as a denial of religion.  I have tried to show that this is not the meaning of secularism.  The more fierce hostility has risen not from the fear of weakening religion but from the fear that if the politics of religious communities are replaced by the attempt to empower civil society, it will encourage a system that gives primacy to the rights and equality of all citizens.  This is essential to the secularizing of society.  As long as some citizens are regarded as more Indian than others and this differentiation draws from the notion of exclusive religious communities, concern with matters of social and economic change will be set aside and attention diverted to a pretense of safeguarding religion and the nation.

The intensification of Hindutva has acted, as intended by its followers, to divert attention from the fact that almost half the population of India is at or below the poverty line and is denied even the most basic rights and amenities.  Instead of working towards providing these rights and amenities to the tribals and the dalits, the focus has been shifted to the irrelevant question of the right to convert. The hype surrounding the issue of which Indians are indigenous and which are foreign (basing this identity on the false premise of whether they follow a religion which is indigenous to the sub-continent or is west Asian in origin) has led to the most inhuman and unethical behaviour on the part of groups claiming to defend Hinduism and is directed towards those labeled as Muslims and Christians.

The insistence on identifying Indians by religious communities now determines which is the majority community and which the minorities.  This kind of majoritarianism makes a mockery of democracy because it is a predetermined majority.  Indian society as defined by religious communities is the product of a colonial perspective on Indian society.  By insisting on this identity we are reinforcing the politics of colonialism rather than moving in an independent, democratic direction.

The secularizing of Indian society is necessary to both improving the condition of those below the poverty line and those who are victims of majoritarian communalism.  This requires the empowering of civil society, which would have to be based on the centrality of social ethics—the creating and nurturing of values focusing on a concern and respect for fellow citizens.  This is a necessary precondition for secularizing society and would in turn strengthen the secular policies of the state.  Social ethics would involve legal order, political freedom, individual autonomy and material well-being.  And these in effect mean not only the equality of every citizen before the law but, more than that, the access of every citizen to the law.  Democratic rights of representation assume unhindered adult franchise and would oppose ideologies which endorse social hierarchies.  Material well-being would involve a minimum economic security in the form of social welfare.  Social welfare subsumes the right to elementary education and the availability of basic health facilities—the least a modern state is expected to provide.  Education is pivotal to this change.  The right to personal religious expression would be safeguarded in a consciousness of individual autonomy.

The failure so far to implement these requirements in any appreciable measure makes it evident that they cannot be left to the will of a government or to the whims of the state.  It is now necessary for civil society to act towards the establishing of the kind of freedom implicit in these demands and conducive to endorsing social ethics.  Let me remind you that almost two hundred years ago, in 1810, Ram Mohun Roy had stated that, ‘The freedom of the political community is a prerequisite to the freedom of the individual.’  We have yet to achieve the fullness of this freedom.