Understanding Secularism

From The Argumentative Indian, by Amartya Sen

The long history of heterodoxy (in India) has a bearing not only on the development and survival of democracy in India, it has also richly contributed, I would argue, to the emergence of secularism in India, and even to the form Indian secularism takes, which is not exactly the same as the way secularism is defined in parts of the West. The tolerance of religious diversity is implicitly reflected in India’s having served as a shared home - in the chronology of history - for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Christians, Parsees, Sikhs, Baha’is and others. The Vedas, which date back at least to the middle of the second millennium BCE, paved the way for what is now called Hinduism (that term was devised much later by Persians and Arabs, after the river Sindhu or Indus). Buddhism and Jainism had both emerged by the sixth century BCE. Buddhism, the practice of which is now rather sparse in India, was the dominant religion of the country for nearly a thousand years. Jainism, on the other hand, born at the same time as Buddhism, has survived as a powerful Indian religion over two and a half millennia.

Jews came to India, it appears, shortly after the fall of Jerusalem, though there are other theories as well (including the claim that the members of the Bene Israel community first arrived in the eighth century BCE, and, more plausibly, that they came in 175 BCE). Jewish arrivals continued in later waves, in the fifth and sixth centuries from southern Arabia and Persia until the last wave of Baghdadi Jews from Iraq and Syria, mostly to Bombay and Calcutta, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Christians, too, came very early, and by the fourth century there were large Christian communities in what is now Kerala. Parsees started arriving in the late seventh century, as soon as persecution of Zoroastrianism began in Persia. The Baha’is were among the last groups to seek refuge in India, in the last century. Over this long period there were other migrations, including the settlement of Muslim Arab traders, which began on India’s western coast in the eighth century, well before the invasions that came from other Muslim countries via the more warlike north-western routes. There were in addition many conversions, especially to Islam. Each religious community managed to retain its identity within India’s multi-religious spectrum.

The toleration of diversity has also been explicitly defended by strong arguments in favor of the richness of variation, including fulsome praise of the need to interact with each other, in mutual respect, through dialogue. In the last section, I discussed the contributions made to public reasoning by two of the grandest of Indian emperors, Ashoka and Akbar. How relevant are their ideas for the content and reach if Indian secularism?

Ashoka, as was mentioned earlier, wanted a general agreement on the need to conduct arguments with ‘restraint and regard to speech’: ‘a person must not do reverence to his own sect or disparage the beliefs of another without reason.’ He went on to argue: ‘Depreciation should be for specific reasons only, because the sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another.’ Ashoka supplemented this general moral and political principle by a dialectical argument based on enlightened self-interest: ‘For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own sect, in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest injury on his own sect.’

Akbar not only made unequivocal pronouncements on the priority of tolerance, but also laid the foundations of a secular legal structure and of religious neutrality of the state, which included the duty to ensure that ‘no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.’ Despite his deep interest in other religions and his brief attempt to launch a new religion, Din-i-ilahi (God’s religion), based on a combination of good points chosen from different faiths, Akbar did remain a good Muslim himself. Indeed, when Akbar died in 1605, the Islamic theologian Abdul Haq, who had been quite critical of Akbar’s lapses from orthodoxy, concluded with some satisfaction that, despite his ‘innovations’, Akbar had remained a proper Muslim.

The meetings that Akbar arranged in the late sixteenth century for public dialogue involved members of different religious faiths (including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsees, Jains, Jews, and even atheists). While the historical background of Indian secularism can be traced to the trend of thinking that had begun to take root well before Akbar, the politics of secularism received a tremendous boost from Akbar’s championing of pluralist ideas, along with his insistence that the state should be completely impartial between different religions. Akbar’s own political decisions reflected his pluralist commitments, well exemplified even by his insistence on filling his court with non-Muslim intellectuals and artists (including the great Hindu musician Tansen) in addition to Muslim ones, and, rather remarkably, by his trusting a Hindu former king (Raja Man Singh), who had been defeated earlier by Akbar, to serve as the general commander of his armed forces.

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This is an excellent and thought-provoking book, one that’s particularly timely given the culture of intolerance that’s growing and thriving in India and the world. While its certainly not light reading, I’d urge you to go through at least the first 100-pages. And then you may just want to continue! :o)

[Reproduced without permission from The Argumentative Indian, by Amartya Sen]