06-26-2009, 08:30 PM
Timely book review in The Telegraph, 26 June 2009
Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History: 1890-1950
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HISTORY WITHOUT AN ENDÂ
Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History 1890-1950 By Shabnum Tejani, Permanent Black, Rs 695
<b>This is a serious book on a very important subject which does not quite live up to the promise of its subtitle. Despite this, what it does achieve is significant.</b>
Secularism in the Indian context has become a contentious and an ambiguous subject. The author does not attempt to support any of the existing definitions or to arrive at a new one of her own. She argues that secularism in India can be understood in particular historical contexts. She defines her own project thus: âThis book reconstructs such a history [of secularism] as a series of acts, focusing on six historical moments from 1890 to 1950. I argue that each moment represents both possibility and closure, marking a point when the meaning of a certain political concept crystallized. These concepts include Hindu community, patriotism, communal, communalism, the democratic majority, and secular citizenship.ââ
<b>Of the six moments she chooses, three are popular movements located in Maharashtra and Sind: cow protection, Swadeshi and Khilafat; the other three are related to the constitutional debates in 1909, 1932 and 1950.</b> In western India, in the period 1893-1911, movements that were self-consciously political claimed the mantle of ânationalismââ. Shabnum Tejani argues that âthe cultural and political idioms of this period became integral to formulations of Indian nationalism in later years.ââ The term, âcommunalismâ, acquired its Indian connotation between 1906 and 1909, and the distinction between nationalism and communalism sharpened during the Khilafat movement and its aftermath. The beginnings of democracy in India in the 1930s witnessed the separation between majority and minority communities and their appropriation by different political formations. This process defined minorities not just in terms of religion but also in terms of castes.
Apart from its thematic importance, there is another aspect of this monograph that should be noted. Each chapter and the sections to which they belong follow a chronological framework. The chapters are also written as narratives. But the book as a whole does not follow an obvious narrative line. It also does not chase an overarching question or hypothesis that it seeks to answer. On the contrary, the author, in a series of nuanced and open-ended arguments, tries to show how words and concepts changed and shifted their meanings and definitions in particular political contexts. These shifts in meaning â and the author acknowledges her debt to the work of Quentin Skinner in this regard â do not suggest that critical concepts like nationalism, communalism and secularism always moved in one clearly defined direction. She is emphatic that her concerns are anti-teleological for âthe end of the story was neither obvious nor inevitable.ââ Her stated project is to reconstruct the genealogies of secularism and of communalism. Those genealogies are still incomplete and open. In a very vital sense, we still live within the history of Indian secularism.
The book is theoretically informed but the theory never dominates the histories that the author tries to set out. It is good to have a history book that revels in the open-endedness of its argument and its mode of writing. The author deserves to be congratulated for having the courage to choose for her first book an extremely complex subject and for having written about it with exemplary courage.
RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE
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Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History: 1890-1950
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
HISTORY WITHOUT AN ENDÂ
Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History 1890-1950 By Shabnum Tejani, Permanent Black, Rs 695
<b>This is a serious book on a very important subject which does not quite live up to the promise of its subtitle. Despite this, what it does achieve is significant.</b>
Secularism in the Indian context has become a contentious and an ambiguous subject. The author does not attempt to support any of the existing definitions or to arrive at a new one of her own. She argues that secularism in India can be understood in particular historical contexts. She defines her own project thus: âThis book reconstructs such a history [of secularism] as a series of acts, focusing on six historical moments from 1890 to 1950. I argue that each moment represents both possibility and closure, marking a point when the meaning of a certain political concept crystallized. These concepts include Hindu community, patriotism, communal, communalism, the democratic majority, and secular citizenship.ââ
<b>Of the six moments she chooses, three are popular movements located in Maharashtra and Sind: cow protection, Swadeshi and Khilafat; the other three are related to the constitutional debates in 1909, 1932 and 1950.</b> In western India, in the period 1893-1911, movements that were self-consciously political claimed the mantle of ânationalismââ. Shabnum Tejani argues that âthe cultural and political idioms of this period became integral to formulations of Indian nationalism in later years.ââ The term, âcommunalismâ, acquired its Indian connotation between 1906 and 1909, and the distinction between nationalism and communalism sharpened during the Khilafat movement and its aftermath. The beginnings of democracy in India in the 1930s witnessed the separation between majority and minority communities and their appropriation by different political formations. This process defined minorities not just in terms of religion but also in terms of castes.
Apart from its thematic importance, there is another aspect of this monograph that should be noted. Each chapter and the sections to which they belong follow a chronological framework. The chapters are also written as narratives. But the book as a whole does not follow an obvious narrative line. It also does not chase an overarching question or hypothesis that it seeks to answer. On the contrary, the author, in a series of nuanced and open-ended arguments, tries to show how words and concepts changed and shifted their meanings and definitions in particular political contexts. These shifts in meaning â and the author acknowledges her debt to the work of Quentin Skinner in this regard â do not suggest that critical concepts like nationalism, communalism and secularism always moved in one clearly defined direction. She is emphatic that her concerns are anti-teleological for âthe end of the story was neither obvious nor inevitable.ââ Her stated project is to reconstruct the genealogies of secularism and of communalism. Those genealogies are still incomplete and open. In a very vital sense, we still live within the history of Indian secularism.
The book is theoretically informed but the theory never dominates the histories that the author tries to set out. It is good to have a history book that revels in the open-endedness of its argument and its mode of writing. The author deserves to be congratulated for having the courage to choose for her first book an extremely complex subject and for having written about it with exemplary courage.
RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE
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