Suchergebnisse

Tracing the social, political, and intellectual genealogies of the concepts of secularism and communalism from the late nineteenth century until the ratification of the Indian constitution in 1950, she shows how secularism came to be bound up with ideas about nationalism and national identity.

AbstractUrban expansion in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on India's urban land economies. Historians argue that in this period, urban India went through an increasing marketization of land and that improvement trusts had a significant hand in accelerating land speculation. In the case of Bombay, we still understand little of the relationship between the activities of the Bombay Improvement Trust and rising land values. The article examines key legal disputes around compensation for land acquired by the Trust for public purpose before and after World War I. Such cases show how the Trust and the judiciary shaped changing expectations around what comprised 'market value' and consequently became deeply involved in Bombay's land economy. Where officials had earlier resisted valuations that they believed encouraged speculation, after the 1920s the resolution of disputes incorporated future value as a legitimate and necessary part of the economy.

AbstractDrawing on recent debates on secularism, this article addresses the methodological problem of writing histories of secularism in context. It considers the experience of India. I argue that a study of the issues from which secularism emerged historically offers a way out of the secularism-religion binary which, in India, has obscured contemporary problems related to democracy. These issues had to do with ensuring the public representation of minorities, both religious and caste, regardless of their relative size or social power. Scholarship on the minority question has begun with the constituent assembly and that on secularism centered on the category of religion. In contrast, this article argues that caste was central to the formulation of Indian secularism and requires a longer historical perspective. It maintains that secularism reified the religious minority and, in so doing, denied both its potential to overcome marginality and the legitimacy of the community in the nation.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I. Secularism's Historical Background -- Reflections on the Category of Secularism in India: Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the Ethics of Communal Representation, c. 1931 -- A View from the South: Ramasami's Public Critique of Religion -- Nehru's Faith -- II. Secularism and Democracy -- Closing the Debate on Secularism: A Personal Statement -- Living with Secularism -- The Contradictions of Secularism -- The Secular State and the Limits of Dialogue -- Secular Nationalism, Hindutva, and the Minority -- III. Sites of Secularism: Education, Media, and Cinema -- Secularism, History, and Contemporary Politics in India -- The Gujarat Experiment and Hindu National Realism: Lessons for Secularism -- Secularism and Popular Indian Cinema -- Neither State nor Faith: The Transcendental Significance of the Cinema -- IV. Secularism and Personal Law -- Siting Secularism in the Uniform Civil Code: A ''Riddle Wrapped Inside an Enigma''? -- The Supreme Court, the Media, and the Uniform Civil Code Debate in India -- Secularism and the Very Concept of Law -- V. Conversion -- Literacy and Conversion in the Discourse of Hindu Nationalism -- Christian Conversions, Hindutva, and Secularism -- Appendix: Chronology of the Career of Secularism in India -- Works Cited -- Contributors -- Index