Abstract
Reflecting on the difficulty involved in cross-cultural translation of ideas, the great Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterji once wrote, ‘You can translate a word by a word, but behind the word is an idea, the thing which the word denotes, and this idea you cannot translate if it does not exist among the people in whose language you are translating’ (cited in Chatterjee, 1986: 124). Those studying secularism and contestations over state-religion relations in the context of South Asia inevitability confront the challenge of untranslatability. Secularism – as is widely agreed – has a specific European pedigree; the concept being understood as the separation of religion from the state/politics, with the former relegated to its own private sphere. The task becomes doubly difficult for those undertaking comparative inquiries given the plurality of historically specific and contextually contingent political struggles that they must account for.
Nadeem Malik takes up these twin challenges in the monograph under review. Part history and part political sociology, the book adds to comparative scholarship on the politics of secularism and religion by turning spotlight on a rather under researched region, with India being somewhat of an exception (Bhargava, 2006; Van der Veer and Lehmann, 1999). The contribution is timely in view of the surging power of the religious right playing on parochial hopes and fears.
In the Introduction, Malik problematizes, albeit briefly, the Enlightenment understanding of secularism, noting approvingly the distinctively Indian brand of secularism as elaborated, most notably, by Rajeev Bhargava. Secularism, in this view, represents equal respect for religions and a principled distance between religion and the state rather than exclusion of the former from public life. The rationale for a comparative study, on author’s account, stems from the ‘shared colonial past and the impact of the 1947 partition’ (p. 13). In Chapter 2, Malik traces the historical foundations of secularism and religious politics in the region from pre-colonial times to the British colonial rule. While pretending to be neutral as regards religious matters, the colonial administration rendered religious identities politically relevant through the institution of the census, pigeon-holing internally diverse groupings into the fixed categories of Hindu, Muslim, and so on. Colonialism also helped polarize the Indian society along communal lines through selective interventions in religious disputes and practices. At the same time, Malik argues that the introduction of ‘secular ideologies’ in British India did not uniformly represent the imposition of Western norms. Rather, it involved a process of adaptation, prompting at once secular nationalist movements as well as religious reform in the shape of the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal and the Aligarh Movement in North India (pp. 27–28).
The focus then shifts to the postcolonial period as Malik, in the next three chapters, unpacks the trajectories of secular and religious politics in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, respectively. In the penultimate chapter and Chapter 7, the author pulls the threads together, recapitulating the diverse paths to managing state-religion relations adopted by the three nation-states against the backdrop of shared colonial inheritance and the legacies of the 1947 partition. In India, Malik contends, Nehruvian secularism, predicated on the need for symmetric treatment of religious communities, faced recurrent challenges in the post-Nehru era, first with the manipulation of communal constituencies by the Indian National Congress, and since the 1990s, the ‘growing influence of the Hindutva’ even though the country’s ‘secular ethos has not been entirely dismantled’ (pp. 62–63).
Pakistan, by contrast, embarked on a different path after the passing of its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1948. Jinnah’s promise of secular governance was supplanted by a religiously inflected ideological and constitutional framework, which was then deployed cynically by political elites and military regimes to forge a homogeneous national identity and to fend off centrifugal forces. Pakistan’s centralization policy and the attendant exploitation of the Bengali population profoundly shaped the liberation movement which culminated in the independence of Bangladesh. Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s vision for ‘a secular state where Bengali culture, language, and identity could thrive’ derived from the experience of living under the hegemony of ‘the West Pakistani elite’ (p. 121). Yet, after Rehman’s assassination in 1975, Bangladesh has seen a steady erosion of secular ideals with the mounting influence of Islamist groups at home and abroad.
Overall, the book provides an illuminating map of secular and religious politics in the region, focusing in particular on the tension between foundational ideals and majoritarian politics, and the geopolitical and diasporic influences on domestic socio-political landscapes. Ultimately, Malik stakes out the position that secularism is indispensable as it offers the necessary ‘framework for managing religious differences and ensuring that all citizens, regardless of their religion, are treated equally by the state’ (p. 185).
Inevitably, a book of such breadth has its flaws. At places, the analysis seems to be lacking in depth and nuance. To illustrate, Malik takes note of some radical critiques of secularism without offering counterarguments (pp. 2–3). Ashish Nandy’s famous anti-secular manifesto is briskly paraphrased. Yet, we do not get a response to Nandy’s objections to the conceptual soundness of secularism along the lines that it fails to distinguish between religion as ideology and religion as faith (a syncretic and plural way of life), that it is embroiled in the ideology of modern statecraft, and that it unreasonably expects the faithful to expunge faith from public life (Nandy, 1998).
The related point which seems to have escaped attention is that religious faith can be a source of toleration as exemplified by the non-violent, anti-colonial politics of Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, aka Bacha Khan. Curiously, the latter finds no mention in the book despite the relevance of his legacy to religious toleration and inter-faith harmony in Pakistan. Further, while the book nicely charts the shifting dynamics of state-religion relations in the region, it rounds off with essentially the same conclusion regarding the ‘prospects for secularism’ in the three countries, that is, it hinges on the ‘state’s ability to address the growing influence of religious extremism and promote a more inclusive vision of the nation’ (p. 185).
Thinking comparatively, the author could have fruitfully drawn a distinction between national contexts where state-religion relations are relatively settled (India), and the ‘contexts characterized by unsettled state-religion relations, which are ‘beset by frequent and bitter sociopolitical struggles over fundamental ideological principles’ (Pakistan, and arguably Bangladesh), as suggested by Sadia Saeed (2016: 19). Nonetheless, it is an innovative and insightful book that will be of interest to scholars of religion and politics.