We also noticed that Nehru found people misusing the word, and hence his advice to use a dictionary before using it. For instance, hearing an utterance/word/sentence from a reliable person is considered to be one of the pillars of truth and meaning making in Indian philosophy (Matilal 2001). Bilgrami, Akeel (2012): “Secularism: Its Content and Context,” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 47, No 4, 28 January. The late Husain, son of Daud Sheth, often stayed at the Phoenix Ashram, and enthusiastically joined our prayers. The students I was talking to had grown up when rhetoric used by right-wing nationalism had made “secular” appear to them as the last resort of the lazy and corrupt, an indolence and eyewash of the Congress. Nützliche Phrasen, übersetzt von Deutsch in 28 Sprachen.
Popular posts on Facebook and Twitter show inflections, usages, and morphed forms of “secularism” in the public sphere. It may even be possible to read the good Muslim as a fantasy of the liberal Hindu, a fantasy propelled by partition in the years after 1947, or as the political scientist Sanjay Palshikar notes, “an internal matter of a group of people: liberal Hindus talking to other liberal Hindus” (personal conversation with the author, 6 May 2019).
… In that “sarvadharmasambhav”—an ethic of treating religions with the same and equal respect—is not an equivalent; it is rather a new original.
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And if it has, does it leave the English word intact? (Constituent Assembly Debates 1949). Echoes of the hypothetical and unsullied authentic origin haunt us in our negotiations with this subject, making us forget this fact. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. It is clear in these two disparate but connected instances (for Nehru was not directly responding to Mishra), that Mishra was worried about “secular” hijacking an ancient past; while Nehru was seeing secular as a blueprint for the future.
It is again the non-incidental word slippery that draws my attention rather than the obvious Hindu majoritarian stance he takes. I did not of course know what exactly this secularism meant and how far the State intends to cover the life and manners of our people. The late Sheth Rustomji and his children too attended the prayer meetings. This book is not going to be digestible to those Muslims who live in this country but avoid condemning Islamic terrorism. Ahmad, Imtiaz (2017): “India’s Secular Journey,” Sociological Bulletin, Vol 66, No 3, pp 1–14. Language and translation are not separate; but conjoined at the hip of meaning-making processes. Full list of synonyms for Non-secular is here. It must be remembered though that I report this conversation from the period of 2014, and these were students of engineering, hence these conversations were outside their domain discipline. (Gandhi 1930). All questions of origin are also questions of movement, and therefore translation.
“Panth or sect symbolises devotion towards any specific belief, specific way of prayer and specific form of God but Dharma symbolises absolute and eternal values which can never change like laws of nature,” he argued. Testimony of a trustworthy person as an important means of knowledge and truth is sabdapramana. Secular means worldly, non-religious, or not spiritual. a widespread misconception exists in India that a unique, uncomplicated separation of religion from the state is a feature of all modern Western societies, that this separation is conceived in the same manner everywhere, and because consensus on the precise relation between religion and state practice is an incontrovertible fact, the secularity of the state is a settled, stable feature in all western politics (Bhargav 1998). Not anymore. These two words, secularism and sarvadharmasambhav, formed at one level a bilingualism, that is to say, they mean the same thing in the Indian context. ( Log Out / Conceived as an aspiration for the Indian republic, secularism of the Indian state has a chequered history.1 It was enshrined in the Constitution without being specifically named so, and the word was added to the preamble in 1976 through the 42nd amendment. We have only done something which every country does except a very few misguided and backward countries in the world.
Ignored and forgotten, Mishra was the governor of the north-eastern states, member of the Rajya Sabha and member of the Constitution Draft Committee. Rita Kothari (rita.kothari@ashoka.edu.in) teaches English at Ashoka University, Sonepat. Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
The term secular as a form of self-description is used by the educated elite of India, liberal Hindus living in metropolitan cities (my own location would be in that class) and has a self-righteous air to it. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Its inclusion in our Bhajnavali is a tribute to truth loving Husain’s memory. Talking of Muslims in particular, Ahmad (2017) says, “For them the presence of Nehru at the helm of affairs was a greater assurance that they would be treated fairly.” Did Nehru present testimony of a reliable person? Tejani (2011) mentions in her introduction to Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890–1950 that as a student writing on modern India, she was struck by the ubiquitous and vehement insistence—in both journalistic and scholarly literature as well as amongst her friends—that India was a secular nation. In an earlier section, we saw indications of this perception.
The reason that I am asking because I would like to use your classification in a research paper. If Mishra’s obfuscated and ideological use of the word betrays both ignorance and intention, Jawaharlal Nehru himself lists actions rather than clarity on boundaries of meaning.
Constituent Assembly of India Debates (Proceedings) (1948): Volume VII (onstitutionofindia.net/constitution_assembly_debates/volume/7/1948-11-18).
The idea of “making sense” of another context, language through available set of linguistic and non-linguistic codes is its most basic expression. Introducing the concept of sarvadharmasambhav or equality of religions Gandhi says the following: This is the new name we have given to the Ashram observance which we know as “tolerance.” “Sahishnuta” is a translation of the English word “tolerance.” I did not like that word, but could not think of a better one. These terms were used after “secular” was added to the preamble of the Constitution in the 1970s through the 42nd constitutional amendment. The first half of the paper combines dominant and emerging views on secularism along with an ethnography of the term “secular” in the everyday.
It is understandable that views such as the above create a synonymy between secularism and composite culture. Indian theories of knowledge provide a list of attributes for knowledge formation—wisdom, age and so on. If Mishra betrayed anxiety about the concept “secular” that might hijack an ancient past and tradition, Nehru spoke of a republic-in-the making that would do well by imitating the best examples in the world. In Phoenix we had our daily prayers in the same way as in Sabarmati, and Mussalmans as well as Christians attended them along with the Hindus.
It has a great deal of importance, no doubt. Pranab Bardhan, Sudipto Mundle, Rohini Somanathan, Gurpreet Mahajan, Surinder S. Jodhka, Ila Patnaik, Pulapre Balakrishnan, Suhas Palshikar, Nandini Sundar, Editor Jean Dreze, Co-Editor Kamal Nayan Chaubey, https://www.inkhabar.com/national/9986-rajnath-singh-in-loksabhaspeech, Life at the Margins of Salt and Desperation: A Photo Essay, The Story of a Peasant Struggle in Jiwandesar, Rajasthan, Privatisation and the Voluntary Retirement Scheme, Dalit Feminist Voices on Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice, Sectarian Violence in India: Hindu–Muslim Conflict, 1966–2015. How does this word refuse to be bound to a definite and consensual meaning in India, yet used freely, finding its definitions in objects rather than in itself?
For instance, Kannada and Tamil use secularism-near words but that are expressive of being above caste rather than religion. It also means that there is a play or game involved. Really speaking, the story of the English word secular is at one level a story of non-translation. Nehru’s assertion that “India’s temples are its dams” which my generation grew up with, made us think of Nehru as uber-secular and uber-modern. If my memory serves me right, Maganlal or Kashi was once leading us in singing this hymn, when Rustomji Sheth exclaimed joyously “Say the name of Hormazd instead of the name of Rama.” [Dada Ramji ne badle Dada Hormazud gao nee]. Those who want robust secularism, sarvadharmasambhav, and human rights with unshakeable faith in democracy, such believers and non-believers are the ideal readers of this book” (Shah 2009).7. On the whole, abstract ideas and also sometimes a set of practices make their reproduction in other cultures challenging.
Advani believed he was firmly clinching the wrong definitions of being secular in India.
This paper traces the conceptual-linguistic journey of the term “secular” in India and shows how its entry into any discussion was accompanied by questions of ambivalence about equivalence. EPW consults referees from a database of 200+ academicians in different fields of the social sciences on papers that are published in the Special Article and Notes sections. I particularly want to thank Sundar Sarukkai and Sarvar Shery Chand for detailed comments. We follow the path of the English word “secular,” watch the theatre of language, and brood over the relationship between this word and everyday India. To tie up the many threads of this paper, we tracked the English word secularism, and showed how it was accompanied by an anxiety of sense and equivalence through the years. EPW looks forward to your comments. Clearly, the myth and reality differed as they always do; or perhaps, the understanding of secularism differed widely on the ground. Derrida (2001) describes the “passion” for translation by which language comes to lick another without leaving the other body intact. I have had the benefit of discussions with Sanjay Palshikar, Sudipta Kaviraj, Sehnaz Tahir, Catherine Clementine, Pascal Sieger, Kama Mclean, Abhijit Kothari and Robert J C Young.