Covert Hinduism, Overt Secularism : A Postsecular Reading of the Indian English Novelistic Tradition

Front matter

Alessandro Vescovi A Postsecular Reading of the Indian English Novelistic Tradition Alessandro Vescovi In this book, the term “postsecular” does not denote a rejection of secularism; rather, it parallels the “post” in “post-modern” or “post-structuralist.” Vescovi argues that secularism has helped Indian fiction to reach an international audience but, at the same time, has forestalled the recognition of Hindu elements covertly woven into the narrative fabric of several modern Indian classics. His close reading is an attempt at tracing traditional elements, such as plot patterns, naming, ethics in otherwise secular narratives, countering the hegemony of rationalistic interpretive paradigms often employed by postcolonial criticism. Cover photo by Orazio Vescovi © Alessandro Vescovi Covert Hinduism, Overt Secularism A Postsecular Reading of the Indian English Novelistic Tradition ISBN 979-12-5510-105-5 (print) ISBN 979-12-5510-106-2 (PDF) ISBN 979-12-5510-107-9 (EPUB) DOI 10.54103/milanoup.143

Alessandro Vescovi COVERT HINDUISM, OVERT SECULARISM A Postsecular Reading of the Indian English Novelistic Tradition

Covert Hinduism, Overt Secularism. A Postsecular Reading of the Indian English Novelistic Tradition / Alessandro Vescovi. Milano: Milano University Press, 2024. ISBN 9791255101055 (print) ISBN 9791255101062 (PDF) ISBN 9791255101079 (EPUB) DOI 10.54103/milanoup.143 This volume, and Milano University Press publications in general, unless otherwise specified, are submitted to an external refereeing process under the responsibility of the Milano University Press Editorial Board. The works published are evaluated and approved by the Editorial Board of the publishing house, and must be compliant with the Peer review policy, the Open Access, Copyright and Licensing policy and the Publication Ethics and Complaint policy as reflected in MilanoUP publishing guidelines (Linee Guida per pubblicare su MilanoUP). The present work is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 - CC- BY-SA, the full text of which is available at the URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 This and other volumes of Milano University Press are available in open access at: https://libri.unimi.it/index.php/milanoup © The Authors for the text 2024 © Milano University Press for this edition Published by Milano University Press Via Festa del Perdono 7 – 20122 Milano Web Site: https://milanoup.unimi.it e-mail: redazione.milanoup@unimi.it The print edition of this volume can be ordered from all physical and online bookstores, and is distributed by Ledizioni (www.ledizioni.it) General note on figures and tables Unless otherwise indicated, figures and tables have been prepared by the author.

Chapter 1

Secularism, World Literature, and the Politics of Indian Novel Indian secularism I first became interested in Indian literature in the late Nineties, but it was not until 2005 that a series of coincidences offered me the opportunity to see the country with my own eyes. India’s economy was then booming. I had read about the “modernisation” process that was underway and how secularism had been instrumental to it and to a more widespread welfare. I undertook a tour of Tamil Nadu with a friend who runs a Bharata Natyam school in London; she was conducting a heritage tour for her students, who were mostly second-generation migrants to the UK. My plan was to gather material for a book on R. K. Narayan that I never wrote. I was flabbergasted by the magnificent and chaotic daily routine of so many temple goers in Tanjavur and Kumbakonam, but most of all, I was interested in villages and village life. Thus, I visited medium-sized villages, hoping to catch a whiff of Malgudi. Finding yourself all alone in a village with no maps and no knowledge of the local language is probably not the best way to come in touch with its life, so I naturally turned towards the local schools, where someone would surely speak English, I hoped. Sure enough, that proved a good tactic, thanks to the exquisite Tamilian hospitality, and probably to the curious figure I must have cut.

In one of these visits, the headmaster himself took the trouble to show me around his school, explaining how difficult it was to keep the children after a certain age as their families required them for agricultural labour, and how difficult it had been to convince different communities (i.e. Muslims and Hindus, and different castes) that their children could go to school together with no prejudice to their respective identities. He was justly very proud of his school, their work, and how they upheld secularism in their precincts. As he told me about the subjects that were taught there, I asked whether they also taught religion and how they managed with the different “communities.” “This is a government school,” he retorted firmly, “and therefore we are secular and cannot have any ‘religion’ among the subjects.” A few minutes later, as we entered an empty classroom—the pupils were attending their class under the banyan tree in the yard—I saw the words “GOD IS TRUTH” written on the blackboard in plain English. I turned to the headmaster and asked him how it came there as they do not teach religion. He did not waver, but probably thought my question a bit stupid: “That’s not religion,” he explained patiently, “it is a general truth, not a matter of Hindus or Muslims; anyone would agree with that.” Then he added almost casually: “The teacher of English or moral sciences must have written it.”

In January 2008 various vicissitudes had made me give up my project on R. K. Narayan, and I was writing a book on Amitav Ghosh instead. Thus I de - cided to visit the Doon school in Dehradun, where he had been a student in the Seventies. The headmaster was then Dr Kanti Bajpai, an economist, who had been a student from the same batch as Ghosh. He showed me around and answered my queries about the school. I asked the same question about teaching religion among other subjects, and he explained that the school has always taken pride in being secular; no students are allowed to bring signs of their creed with them. Consequently, during the morning assembly, they read from diverse sacred books—the Bible, the Quran, the Baghavad Gita, Buddha’s sermons… I was not surprised that high-school students would read religious texts during the morning assembly, nor that someone would write “God is truth” on the blackboard of a twelfth form classroom (though I am still wondering why it was written in English). I was surprised at the principals’ taking pride in their secularism and at their blindness in front of what to me appeared a blatant inconsistency.

I was yet to learn that Indians have developed their own brand of secu - larism, which is a wonderful, if sometimes fragile, constellation of practices that negotiate individual religiosity and public tolerance. Even though the word “secular” has found its way into the Indian Constitution, Indian intellectuals have not yet come to an agreement as to what “secularism” means in the subcontinent. In 1972 Mushir-Ul-Haq wrote: “For the last two decades we have been discussing about secularism, yet the term remains vague and ambiguous” (qtd. in De Rooer 2015, 32); a statement confirmed twenty-three years later by M. M. Sankhdher, who wrote: “Such a commonplace concept as secularism, with which the man of the street is so familiar […], tends to acquire the character of a riddle, a puzzle, an enigma among the intelligentsia” (qtd. in De Roover 2015, 32). According to Ashis Nandy (1995, 35), in modern India, the word secularism carries two meanings. The first was born in the West and refers to the separation of the public and religious spheres, asserting that religions should not interfere with democratic polities. Here, the meaning of secular is the opposite of sacred. The second meaning is more typically Indian; it is vaguer, and looking for it in a dictionary would be vain. Nandy defines it in the negative as the “opposite of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and fanaticism” (1995, 35). This second meaning began to circulate as the anti-colonial élite needed to mobilise Indian masses against British rule regardless of their religious differences.

Swaraj leaders understood that the European brand of secularism “would make little sense to the average Indian, rooted in a religious worldview and not exposed to the kind of debate the Church-State divide produced in premodern Europe” (Nandy 1995, 36). Thus, while secularism in the West entails the separation of State and religious hierarchies, Indian secularism stresses the equal tolerance of all religions (sarva dharma samabhava —all faiths are possible, according to a phrase attributed to Gandhi), even though it also upholds a certain differentiation or relative separation of the political and religious spheres (Pantham, 524). As Thomas Pantham suggests, the two views on secularism are not always as separate as they may appear in the above definitions. Western-educated South Asian intellectuals have often praised Indian secularism as a particular brand of the “universal” one. Likewise, T. N. Madan argues that “secularism is not an Indian ideology, but there is an Indian ideology of secularism” (1993, 668). The latter is based on three assumptions: firstly, that secularism has universal applicability, although it has “culturally specific expressions”; secondly, that it will be welcomed by modern-oriented persons; thirdly, that it will eventually succeed in India “notwithstanding all the faltering of the last four decades” (Madan 1993, 668). In 2022 as I am writing these pages, the situation has changed dramatically, especially since the BJP has won over the majority in the Indian Parliament, so that, for many people, being Indian and Hindu has become virtually the same, a position that reneges the secular premises of the Indian state and is often considered fundamentalist. Such ideas have been in circulation for dec - ades now and have even found their way into a book by Sandeep Balakrishna (2018) averring that Indian secularism has been a pseudo-secularism that basically has favoured religious and social minorities over Hindus. Historian Partha Chatterjee (1994) addressed these theories long before Balakrishna, pointing out similarities between the emergence of Fascism in Europe and Hindutva (Hindu fundamentalism) in India. A similar confutation is also found in Amartya Sen’s famous Argumentative Indian (2006a). Whatever one’s opinion about the late political success of the BJP , it certainly shows traces of a profound dissatisfaction with Indian secularism, which is probably to be sought both in the instability of the concept and its non-Indian genealogy.

Secularism in the West The Western genealogy of secularism is interesting in that the term has taken on new layers of meaning over time without entirely obliterating the older ones. In Latin the word saeculum referred to one’s lifetime, and later to the material life on Earth as opposed to the spiritual afterlife. The medieval chant that goes by the name of Dies Irae provides a good example. It describes the Day of Doom with the words: “Dies irae dies illa solvet seclum in favilla,” which might be roughly translated as “That day of wrath dissolves the sec(u)lum (everything that is material) in embers.” The word acquired a social connotation after Martin Luther’s Reformation (launched in 1517). An increasing number of European 271. Secularism, World Literature, and the Politics of Indian Novel princes, particularly German, turned Protestant and confiscated the Church’s real estates in their territories. Abbeys, convents, and their lands were thus “secularised,” that is seized by the State. The whole process is usually described as “secularisation of ecclesiastical lands,” and was officially recognised by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. This treaty considered “secularisation” as a fait accompli and established the principle epitomised in the phrase “cuius regio eius religio”—which practically meant that both Lutheranism and Catholicism were accepted, and each state would follow the religion elected by its ruler. This was the first step in the establishment of nation-states in Europe, which would receive a final systematisation at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. The order sanctioned by the Peace of Augsburg continued undisturbed until 1618 when a war between Catholic and Protestant powers in continental Europe erupted that would last until 1648, and would be afterwards known as the Thirty Years War. Spain, France, Holland, Sweden, the Emperor, and the Papacy were all variously involved in the conflict. Among the reasons behind the dispute was the legitimacy of secularisation. After three decades of battles and bloodshed, which impoverished all the parties involved, the principal actors in the conflict decided to put an end to it through a treaty that goes by the name of Peace of Westphalia (1648). Apart from drawing new borders, the treaty confirmed the principles of the Peace of Augsburg—accepting Calvinism as a religion along with Catholicism and Lutheranism—and sanctioned the sovereignty of each European nation, protecting them from the encroachment of any external power. This, of course, included the Pope, who lost much of his power on the European chessboard. Thus, the modern nation-state was born under the auspices of a “secular doctrine,” where “secular” denoted the separation of political and religious spheres. The agreement was somewhat successful, as no other wars of religion were subsequently fought in Europe, even though episodes of religious intolerance would blacken the history of the continent for many years to come.

Following the Peace of Westphalia, the word “secular” gained currency in the political jargon and acquired the connotations of “modern” and “tolerant,” which are fundamental in its later Indian adoption. However, before travelling to India, the concept, which was born of historical necessity, underwent the scrutiny of political philosophers, who refined, enriched, and promoted it to the status of a universal value. In 1670 Baruch Spinoza published his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which rejects any interference from religious hierarchies in the working of the State but accepts the notion of a State religion. Likewise, John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) offers a reflection on the neces - sity of separating State and religion, pushing the latter to the private sphere of the citizens’ lives. Locke’s rationale for dividing political and religious spheres does not rest on the rejection of religion, but rather on a theological premise. The philosopher believed that the Gospel, unlike the Old Testament, positively excludes a religious commonwealth (De Roover 2015, 142-145). While the Old Testament was the source of the Jewish Law, the Gospel does not prescribe any temporal (secular) law, but rather invites the faithful to belong together in spirit only. Toleration follows as a necessity since the social compact founding society and the spiritual covenant founding religion are cleanly separated. However, De Roover notes, Locke’s toleration cannot be applied to religions which do not recognise the legitimacy of the State, or for that matter, to atheism. Locke’s ideas, stripped of their theological basis, became the model for American liberalism. At the time of the American Declaration of Independence, religious liberals, such as the Baptists or the Quakers, would agree with secular liberals such as Thomas Jefferson in advocating freedom of cult and non-interference between the State and religious groups (De Roover 2015). Consequently, the First Amendment in 1791 read “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof.” The principle of a modern State equidistant from religious confessions was turned into practice and would find enthusiastic imitators in other political cultures, such as Turkey in 1920, and India in 1947 (Copland 2013, 13). Secularism was firmly welded to the idea of modern and liberal democracy.

However, American liberalism is not the only outcome of the encounter between secularism and politics. French laïcité positively refuses any public display of religious affiliation, thus encroaching upon the second tenet of secularism, namely the liberty of cult (De Roover 2015). Secularism as an antireligious doctrine, later endorsed by the USSR and China, first took shape in Britain, where the term secularism appeared for the first time in 1851 in the writings of the agnostic socialist thinker George J. Holyoake (1817-1906). In 1876 he founded the Secular Review, printed until 1907, and became a prominent member of the National Secular Society. To Holyoake the term “secularism” was preferable to “atheism” as it does not criticise religion per se, but only what he considered the errors of religion. He believed that secularism was an epistemological stance that considered religions with detachment, and a political attitude that stressed the “secular element” of human life. To him secularism entailed a sense of duty towards the “development of the physical, moral, and intellectual nature of man to the highest perceivable point,” as he argued that “[t]he Secular is sacred in its influence on life, for by purity of material conditions the loftiest natures are best sustained, and the lower the most surely elevated” (Holyoake 1871, 11). Holyoake remained mostly silent about religion, but he never considered it an adversary. To him “Secularism is a series of principles intended for the guidance of those who find Theology indefinite, or inadequate” (Holyoake 1871, 12). However, the word would become almost synonymous with atheism when new members of the National Secular Society, like Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, argued that religion positively hindered social advancement, and advocated active atheism as an antidote (Perumal 1987). 291. Secularism, World Literature, and the Politics of Indian Novel

Over time the political and historical scenario that we have just recalled has appended a number of different meanings to the word “secular” and its European equivalents—laïcité, Säkularismus, sekularisme, laicità, secularismo, секуляризм, λαϊκισμός. Depending on the context, the word may carry any of these meanings even in contemporary Europe. Still, its implications are far from exhausted; for our purpose, we should look at two further connotations that bring “secularism” into the sociological and epistemological realms, namely “disenchantment” and “ideology.” Max Weber borrowed the word “disenchantment”1 from Friedrich Schiller to refer to the process whereby, over the last millennium or so, people have gradually given up their beliefs in magic. The notion is foreshadowed by Giambattista Vico’s theory of the three ages of man. In La scienza nuova (1725- 1744) Vico maintained that every civilisation develops through three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. In the first, primitive men are “all wonder” before natural phenomena. Clueless as to what may originate them, they attribute them to magic and explain the world through poetic language, i.e. myths. Myth is an emplotment of magic. As civilisation develops, it forms a notion of organised religion, which offers the first kind of rationalisation of myths. Religions, particularly monotheistic ones, may provide a unifying principle and a single explanation for natural phenomena. In the third age, philosophy supersedes religion; rational and scientific explanations are sought and commonly accepted. Magic, which is a necessary element of the myth and of most religions, ceases to be a living presence in the life of humans. Vico is interesting in this context because he always retained a Christian view. In his analysis, disenchantment is not brought about by secularisation but by rationalism.

Max Weber moves from a similar standpoint. He refers to disenchantment twice in his writings: in The Ethics of Protestantism (1905), and in two lectures delivered in 1919 and published posthumously as Disenchantment and Charisma (2020). Weber attributes disenchantment to the “Protestant ethos,” which has criticised and emptied Catholic rituals, like eucharist and sacraments, of their magical salvific elements. The Protestant motto sola scriptura et sola fide is actually doing away with every external agency except God’s Grace. Although disenchantment and secularisation are not one and the same, they are nonetheless strictly connected. According to Weber, Protestantism is a “secular religion” that promotes and encourages material welfare and capital accumulation. Disenchantment is not brought about by a more widespread knowledge of events but rather by a different worldview. It is based on the epistemological premise that one could come to know something if one wishes to, even when 1 The German phrase is “Entzauberung der Welt,” which is slightly different from its English translation. According to Swatos (1981, 120), the English “enchantment” has “lost its magical or mystical connotation” and mostly refers to the “appeal or fascination” of the world. In German the phrase actually means that “agencies of magic and spiritual power have lost their grip on the lives of men and the affairs of nature,” which is the meaning we favour here.

one ignores it at the moment. Thus, one may be utterly ignorant of how a hurricane moves or under what conditions it is formed, or of how leaves turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar, but one finds no magic in that because one trusts that some human specialist knows it and one could come to know it if one really wanted. While men in an enchanted world were powerless in front of natural events, disenchanted men do not have more agency, but nourish the comforting notion that they could gain agency if they tried. Rationalism and secularism cooperate in disenchanting the world. The former by promising a rational explanation for everything, and the latter by denying divine intervention in natural affairs. The corollary is that human efforts combined with rationality may change the course of nature. An enchanted world, on the contrary, is beyond human control and claims awe and respect.

As we have seen, secularisation agreed well with the Protestant mindset until, in some philosophical contexts, it became overtly antireligious and almost synonymous with agnosticism and atheism. The German theologist Friedrich Gogarten (1887-1967) in a book published in 1953 distinguished between “secularisation” from “secularism.” The former carries a positive connotation and comes from an evolution of the Christian thought confronting the world; the latter has a negative connotation and refers to worldly institutions and polities that aim at replacing the divine. Gogarten interestingly does not attribute such a trend to a misunderstanding of secularisation, but rather to the overestimate of its positive elements—a surfeit of belief in the secular. Thereby secularism unwarrantedly indicts and impeaches harmless religious beliefs and practices. We shall call this enthusiastic belief in secularism “ideological.” “Ideology” is yet another term that may cover a variety of meanings, so that it calls for a few words of introduction. Terry Eagleton (2007, 1-2) lists no less than sixteen different connotations for this term. Some of them will be useful in this context, namely: “(b) a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class; (c) ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political pow - er; forms of thought motivated by social interests; […] (h) identity thinking; (i) socially necessary illusion.” These are the meanings that best describe the position of Nandy and Madan when they use the term “ideological” to criticise Indian secularism.

Madan writes that “secularism can itself pretend to become a religion […] as the ideology of the State” (Madan 1993, 674). Likewise, Nandy talks of “State-centric ideologies in the Indian polity” (Nandy 1995, 41). Both scholars maintain that an “ideology” borrowed from the West cannot and should not become hegemonic and modernise India. Secularism should be the very opposite of ideology: according to its genealogy it should be rational and tolerant. It would be expected that secularists endorse ideas only after a critical scrutiny. Critics of secularism in India believe that this scrutiny has never taken place because the connotations of “modern” and “non-communal” have 311. Secularism, World Literature, and the Politics of Indian Novel prevailed, overshadowing other implications of the term.2 While believers may be prompted to adopt or reject a certain idea or practice simply by the demands of a religious authority or a tradition, secularists should be guided only by their critical sense. However, once secularism, like other systems of beliefs, has become synonymous with modernity or tolerance, political rhetoric has made it hard to gainsay any practice or idea that is presented as secular, since objecting to it may be construed as a disavowal of democratic, modern, tolerant, and liberal values. Hence secularism may become an ideology in the senses expressed in (b) and (h)—a distinctive idea of a social group; identity thinking. The reasoning goes: “I belong to an élite of modern and forward-thinking people, and I do not want to fall out with them just because I criticise a certain idea that presents itself as a secularist.” Indira Gandhi was an illustrious victim of the (i) meaning—socially necessary illusion. After the Blue Star operation in Amritsar, during which the government troops stormed the Golden Temple, religious resentment was running high in India. Some security officials advised the Prime Minister that she should change her Sikh bodyguards with someone from a different community, as it was impossible to be certain of their loyalty. Mrs Gandhi retorted that India was a secular country and it would not be acceptable to show anything different. On October 31, 1984 her Sikh bodyguards opened fire against her; she died a few hours later. Surely, she was not blind to the communal tensions of 1984, and she was a devout Hindu at the time of her death. Still, she believed that a Prime Minister should appear unflinchingly secular, and miscalculated the risk.

For the purpose of this study, we shall call “ideological” every instance of secular action, including speech acts, that is not inspired by a philosophical or by personal conviction, but rather by the need to be recognised as “secular” for whatever reason—as Eagleton suggests, ideas which help the dominant political power, foster individual or group identity, social illusion, etc. This distinction is similar to the one that Arne Naess (2008) posits between deep and shallow ecology. Deep ecology is grounded in a religious or philosophical view and considers the environment as a value per se. Shallow ecology, on the contrary, is anthropocentric and considers the environment as a resource for the human species. Likewise, ideological secularism is not prompted by a philosophical conviction but by some kind of social convenience.

The ideological aspects of secularism can be partly explained through Benedetto Croce’s and Jacob De Roover’s original theories about Christianity. Benedetto Croce, who was an idealistic, agnostic philosopher deeply influenced by Hegel, famously applied religious lexis to politics in his History of Europe of the XIX Century (1932). There he spoke of the liberal idea as a religion titling 2 Incidentally “modern” is another term that is seldom defined and whose positive connotation is seldom discussed.

the first “The religion of freedom.” Ten years later, Croce authored a famous pamphlet called Perché non possiamo non dirci “cristiani” (Why We Cannot Help Calling Ourselves “Christians,” 1942), where he maintained that all Western philosophy would have never existed without the tenets of Christian theology. Even secularism, he avers, sinks its roots in Christianity. More recently, and independently of Croce who is nowhere mentioned in his book, Jacob De Rooer has proposed a similar theory expounded in Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism (2015). Working within the framework studies inaugurated by S. N. Balagangadhara, De Rooer maintains that in Europe Christianity, particularly Protestantism, has provided a frame of mind and a set of ideas that have made the notion of secularism possible. He maintains that Western secularism is a “secularization of theology” (De Roover 2015, 55). Questions, methods, and patterns of the Christian mindset have been emptied of their supernatural content but have otherwise remained unchanged. Contrary to what is often thought, De Rooer provocatively affirms that “Western culture does not lie in its secularity, but in its religiosity” (2015, 65).

Croce’s and De Roover’s insights may explain why, in the West, political doctrines (another term borrowed from the religious sphere) tend to become ideologies. The Greeks invented both tyranny and democracy, but they never made either into an ideology, while both fascism and communism are considered ideologies. Those who follow an ideology also tend to apply certain behavioural patterns consistently to different aspects of their lives, from ethical and metaphysical down to simpler preoccupations such as games or food. Every choice will be made according to its consistency with the chosen ideology. Christianity may be said to be the first instance of ideological thought in the West, as Christians refused everything that was not Christian, thus incurring the ire of the Roman state that saw in it a danger to stability. Later philosophical or political systems have resorted to ideology as a ploy to gain acceptance and stability. Even Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, famously popularised by Said, implies ideology. When a notion becomes hegemonic, it is also ideological in the sense that a social group accepts it without scrutiny. Secularism in India When the concept of secularism reached India at the time of decolonization, the word was heavily loaded with meanings, both historical and philo - sophical. Among the former, the idea that the church should not interfere with the matters of the State made little sense in India and found therefore little opposition. More poignant was the notion that all religions should be “tol - erated,” though not supported by the State.

The equation of secularism and modernity—whatever this term may come to mean—was generally accepted, and to this day, the word secularism has retained a positive connotation. Even 331. Secularism, World Literature, and the Politics of Indian Novel the Hindu parties that criticise the secular policy of the former Governments do not attack secularism per se, but accuse the adversaries of implementing a “pseudo-secularism” favouring religious minorities over Hindus (Chatterjee 1994; Sen 2006b; Balakrishna 2018). As for the philosophical notions attached to the idea of secularism, they were hardly ever discussed outside intellectual circles, but have been the target of non-fundamentalist liberal intellectuals like Ashish Nandy and T. N. Madan. They blame the connection between secularism and Protestantism, the tyranny of rationalism that it implies—Weber’s disenchantment—and finally the ideologization of secularism, which often attacks religion from the rhetorical vantage point of modernity. Furthermore, the idea that religiosity should be restricted to the personal sphere makes little sense for Hinduism, which is properly speaking a way of life covering every daily activity, including, say, literature, sport, or cooking together with spirituality. *** Although the concept of secularism in India is relatively new, the relationship between religion and politics, and between different religions has a long history. Thus, to understand the complicated relationship of Indian intellectuals to secularism, it is necessary to briefly recall the relationship between state and religion in Indian history even before the European concept of secularism reached the subcontinent.

Although India never developed the philosophical concept of secularism autonomously, religious and political authorities lived side by side for thousands of years. What we now call Hinduism—a name that began to circulate only during British domination—has gone through various phases, none of which has ever entirely superseded the former. Thus, although the Vedic Gods are now remembered only as part of cosmogonic myths, the Vedas have not ceased to be considered the foundational texts of Hinduism, along with later texts, such as the Puranas. Even a champion of modern Hinduism like Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma, would refer to the Vedas as the fixed point for any discussion on religion. And yet, many intervening currents have concurred to shape the complex features of Hinduism. Leaving aside all popular instances of religiosity, too complicated and too little documented to be remembered by official histories, we should mention the Brahmanical tradition, the ascetic turn that also gave rise to Buddhism and Jainism, the bhakti movements, and the religious reformers of the XVIII and XIX centuries. A history of Hinduism is much beyond the scope of this book, but it will be useful to briefly recall these movements with reference to secularism in order to offer an idea of the complexity of the religious traditions within Hinduism and try to trace them in contemporary literature.