The "secular ideal" before secularism

a preliminary sketch

Rajeev Bhargava

pp. 159-180

in: Linell E. Cady, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (eds), Comparative secularisms in a global age, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Till a decade ago, there was a virtual consensus in India, a view shared by both its opponents and defenders, that secularism was alien to Indian culture and civilization. This view was to be found in the writings of T. N. Madan who claimed that secularism was a gift of Christianity, a product of the dialectic between Protestantism and the Enlightenment.¹ Another example is K. M. Panikkar, who claimed that a modern, democratic, egalitarian, and secular Indian state was built on modern European traditions, not the foundations of ancient Indian thought.² For Madan this alienness was the principal cause of the troubles of secularism in India. In his view, the distance between secularism and an Indian cultural ethos was so great that it had little hope of taking root and bringing peace between warring religious communities. Contrary to this view, Panikkar drew the opposite conclusion that the alienness of secularism from ancient traditions and Hindu thought meant not the redundancy of secularism but rather the estrangement of ancient traditions and Hindu thought from contemporary social reality. With the birth of new socioeconomic relations and their rupture with older orders, concepts developed in a different earlier context had to give way to new concepts. Thus, there was nothing surprising about the alleged alien character of secularism to ancient Indian culture or thought.