THE CRISIS OF SECULARISM IN INDIA

In: Modern intellectual history: MIH, Band 7, Heft 3, S. 653-666

Abstract

In the early 1960s, Donald Smith's India as a Secular State questioned the credentials of the Indian state's secularism. Since then the issue of what constitutes secularism in India has loomed large in Indian political thought. Like a number of other key categories in political history, such as nationalism, the debate has centred on the question whether the Indian state's version of secularism is viable in its own right or not, and if it is viable, whether it extends the concept of secularism in new and innovative directions. The other possibility is to see this secularism as a "derivative discourse" (to adopt a phrase from Partha Chatterjee), confusedly echoing Western notions of secularism, with the caste and communal complexities of Indian society and the structuring role of religion in everyday life at odds with any coherent or recognisable notion of secularism.