RELIGION AND THE SECULARIZING OF INDIAN SOCIETY
Religion in the Indian subcontinent was, and is, a different experience from that of Europe and elsewhere. But it was redefined by colonial scholarship so as to make it comprehensible to those who saw it from a Judeo-Christian perspective. This definition was not averse to Indian scholars and to those who gave form to the socio-religious reform movements of the nineteenth century. This definition now prevails among its influential practitioners and observers. If anything it has been taken even further in making it resemble the Semitic religions. However, it does not explain the earlier practice of religion nor the presence of the variety of religions in India.
SECULARISM AND SECULARIZATION IN INDIA
Secularism, that constitutes the second theme, has been variously defined. Since most Indian religions lack a Church the question of Church and State relations would not apply. However, this does not mean that secularism has no role in India. As we have noted earlier in this book, the definition prevalent in India, is that secularism means the co-existence of all religions irrespective of their status. As an extension of this idea it is said that secularism, since it excludes divine sanction, is alien to Indian civilization, the assumption being that everything in Indian civilization requires divine sanction.
MEANING OF SECULARISM AND SECULARIZATION
I would like initially to suggest that a distinction be made between secularism and the secularizing of a society. I see secularism as an ideology whose concern is with secularizing society, and although it accepts the presence of religion this presence does not receive priority. It is distinct from religion, but not opposed to it, since its concern is with the rights and obligations of the individual in the context of multiple social relationships, in other words of the individual as citizen. The secularizing of a society moves towards giving a new direction to the identity of a citizen.
HOW SECULARIZATION BE ACHIEVED
As ideology, secularism neither has an organizational base, nor can it be politically imposed. It has to evolve from rights to citizens and changes in society and its laws appropriate to these. This requires a readjustment of the social control exercised by various traditional authorities, which includes religious authorities.
Nevertheless, secularism does challenge religious fundamentalism, in as much as the latter attempts to re-assert membership of a formal religion as the sole identity of the citizen. Religious fundamentalism is primarily a political condition that wears the authoritarian cover of a religion, and can only be terminated by ending the political inducement it offers and by undermining its claim to being the unquestioning authority over all codes.
The secularizing of society suggests a process of graduated change that endorses the kinds of values that may lead to a secular society, but the process may or may not be deliberately directed towards this. Secularizing society requires the state and civil society to ensure that social ethics assume both the equality of all its citizens and their welfare. This requires that codes be sanctioned not by religious authority, but by a civil authority. This authority would have primacy over the registration of birth, marriage and death, although religious rites could certainly be performed if so wished; and the laws governing inheritance would be part of the universal civil code. Social justice in particular would not come under any religious jurisdiction. This would extend to schemes of social welfare—such as education, employment and health—initiated by the state. In short, it should be possible for any Indian to exercise his/her rights as a citizen without seeking the sanction of any religious identity. (FOR EXAMPLE) Both the Hindu Code Bill and the Muslim Personal law and such like, would have to be replaced by a uniform, universally applicable civil law having jurisdiction over marriage and inheritance, and ensuring gender justice.
If the interface with religion is important to secularism then the more pertinent question is whether the religion’s concerned can accommodate themselves to the secularizing of Indian society. Although it is anachronistic to look for ideas similar to secularism in pre-modern societies, it could be helpful to locate elements in traditional religions and thought that would be conducive to a secularizing process. What emerges from such an investigation is that religious sanction was not invariably required to establish social laws since there were exceptions and there were differences in customary practice. Furthermore, the priority given to civil law in contemporary times is one of the major characteristics of a modern society. To that extent it does involve a new way of looking at the relationship between law and society.
RELIGIONS AND CASTES IN INDIA
Definitions of Indian religions in the last couple of centuries have generally assumed that the prototype of the Semitic religions would apply. This is particularly problematic for religions indigenous to India. In addition, it is problematic in terms of how religion is practiced in the subcontinent. The primary religious identity in pre-modern times was that of the religious sect. rather than that of formal singular religion. There is a complex history of varieties of accommodation or of contestation among the various sects that also shape the forms they take. They are not therefore, self-contained entities and have not been so in popular practice. The public articulation of religion is related to social institutions. Consequently, one aspect of religion in India is the degree to which the institution of caste as the basic organization of Indian society, structures religion.
Every religion reflects an acceptance of caste in differing degree. Some Hindu sects are obsessive about caste others are more flexible. Islam and Sikhism have denied it in theory but conform to much of it in practice, particularly in rules of marriage and of inheritance of property. Caste implies diverse customary codes of identification, and these often differentiate the practice of religion even within the same formal religious identity. Some religious sects formulated and furthered caste organization and some opposed it in various ways. Many rituals were practiced only by particular castes in particular locations. A section of people, now referred to as Other Backward Caste Hindus (OBC) and of course the Dalits, were not permitted to worship in the sanctum of Hindu temples. Even now, some temples deny them entry. Their beliefs and practices have inevitably differed fr om those of upper-caste Hindus, although attempts are being made in recent times to iron out differences and present uniformity. Recruiting tribal groups into Hindu society in Gujarat at the time of the Godhra genocide in 2002, by various agencies of Hindutva, was not just religious conversion as they could be used politically. Hinduism is perhaps better seen as a mosaic of religious sects rather than a single uniform religion along the lines of a monotheistic Judeo-Christian type of religion. Sectarian differentiation can arise as a break-away from an established practice of a religion. Equally often there has been the assertion of a higher status by a caste accompanied by a change in religious practices imitating those of the higher castes. As has often been said, it is not the belief system that has to be uniform within each caste but rather the practice of the ritual, therefore, orthopraxy is more important than orthodoxy.
Religious sects in India have distinct identities. Some that have been included within the umbrella label of Hinduism are nevertheless at varying distances in belief and practice from each other. There are other practices and identities in the other religions of India such as in Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Jainism and neo- Buddhism, each with a different take on religion and on secularism. Most of these have their forms of fundamentalism as well—be it Hindu, Islamic or Sikh. Their institutions establish their agendas vis-à-vis both state and society, and they use a religious identity for political mobilization as and when they need to.
SECULARIZATION BY TRADITIONAL
MEANS
SOCIAL ETHICS AND RELIGIONS
1. The process of secularizing society can draw on traditional ways in which social relationships were articulated. Central to the values that governed most societies was the concept of social ethics. The definition varied, as for example, between Brahmanism and Buddhism. The Bhagvad Gita, for example, would not, on any account, have been the message of the Buddha. Whatever the message of the Gita, the fact that it had to be endorsed by a vision of the divine, would disqualify it as appropriate to secularism. One wonders where social ethics went when bodily pollution became a reason for casting out certain social groups and reducing them to servitude. As a contrast to this, and essential to the meaning of secular, would be social ethics focusing on social equality and human well-being, but without claiming divine sanction.
2. The insistence on viewing secularism as the reverse image of religion has detracted from its origins linked to modernity and to nationalism, to its articulation in the nation-state, and more directly to democratic values. Secularism and democracy are intrinsically interwoven. In theory, nationalism redefines social codes to make them inclusive and universal. To that extent it opposes exclusive religious identities, except where nationalism itself endorses a religious identity. However, this is not a characteristic only of modern times. There were occasions in the earlier past when social ethics presuming the equality of all, had primacy in debates on social codes and some of these did not seek a divine mandate. If such an ethic endorsed social values broadly of a kind underlying the secularizing of society, then this would suggest, not a secular society in early times, but a potentially proto-secular presence in a culture. It may not always have been present in practice but could be referred to as a principal. This might be useful when drawing upon a tradition.
SOURCES OF SECULAR OR PROTO SECULAR IDEOLOGIES
This proto-secular presence in India, as it might be called, did not come from the text-bound, established formal religions of Vedic Brahmanism, Puranic Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism, but from ideologies that were distanced from these formal religions or were even opposed to them.
ALTERNATIVE RELIGIONS -- Shramanic sects
This presence asserted an alternative structure of social ethics where caste distinctions were initially at least irrelevant to religious ritual and were not a primary value. Such ideologies had a substantial following and included Buddhists, Jainas, and a range of diverse free-thinking sects. These have been swept into the general category of Hinduism but need to be distinguished very clearly. They represent a gradation ranging from opposition to distancing and for a variety of reasons. These have constituted a substratum that was distinct from the formal religions and have been present since the earliest times to now. This substratum has been articulate and popular with large numbers of people, but is not given its due recognition because in our times they do not constitute formal religion. Instead they are often arbitrarily and as a fragment, fitted into one or other of the formal religions.
For example, early Buddhism had a substantial following and there was much in Indian culture that has been imprinted with it. Patronage came in part from royalty but more from householders—small-scale land owners and merchants. For almost a thousand years its presence was almost hegemonic. By the late first millennium AD, Buddhist centres in India had dwindled to a few pockets, or else had been so transmuted that the initial teaching had moved into the shadows. Brahmanism as the hegemonic religion replaced Buddhism. The Puranas, refer to the shramanas as mahamoha, those who delude people with their erroneous teaching. This was despite the fact that some Puranic sects grew out of an interface between the two.
The centrality of its interpretation of social ethics was pre-eminent in early Buddhism. The emphasis was on the relationship between the individual and society, and on ethical equality, not endorsing the Brahmanical rules of caste as a divinely ordained inequality.
Brahmanical varna-ashrama-dharma Vs Buddhist ethic
However, the Shramanic sects did not attempt to eliminate caste from society. The Brahmanical varna-ashrama-dharma, the caste ordering of society, insisted on a hierarchy of status and identity in a system of castes and this determined social behaviour and obligations. The hierarchy of social status was controlled through rules of marriage and social obligations and the specificity of rituals. Divine sanction was the source of legitimation. The observance of caste regulations is so insistent in brahmanical texts that obviously there must have been violations else the insistence would not have been necessary.
The Buddhist ethic to the contrary, envisaged social behaviour as being determined by ethical norms conducive to universal well-being, irrespective of caste and divine sanction. Even though subsequent to his death the Buddha was deified and deities were incorporated in Buddhism, nevertheless the understanding of the social ethic remained a constant factor. My concern here is not with the discussion on the liberation of the individual from rebirth, but with the ethic governing the relationship between the individual and society. The two are not disconnected.
Living according to the precepts of the middle way may not be enough to preclude rebirth but would ensure a better rebirth than otherwise. The existence of deity was not central to the discussion of social behaviour. The kernel of the Buddha’s teaching drew on causality to explain the human condition and proposed the practice of the middle way as a partial solution. There was no immortal soul therefore impermanence was pervasive. The Buddhist dhamma was the universal ethic of family and community privileging non-violence, tolerance and respect for the individual. These values applied equally to all since they assumed the equality of all and the inter-connection of all sentient beings. The ethic was encapsulated in conduct towards various social categories such as parents, friends, teachers and those for whom the individual worked and those who worked for the individual.
The explanation in Buddhist sources of how political authority and the state came about reflects the same concerns. The utopian beginnings of human society gradually gave way to a dystopia. This was caused by the emergence of families as discrete social units and by their claims to private property. It eventually became necessary for people to elect one among them to ensure protection from mutual greed and to enforce the laws that were applicable to all. The mutual interdependence of temporal and spiritual power is rejected by the early Buddhist tradition. In later centuries the Buddhist Order, the Sangha, negotiated with those that wielded political power to establish its own authority. This was not the equivalent of a Church since it was technically the community of Buddhist monks, with no intervention of deity. The upholding of dhamma was said to be the most important duty of the ruler and even of the universal monarch—the chakravartin. An attempt was made at propagating some of these ideas by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka but at the level of imperial polity it did not survive his reign in any direct way. Nevertheless, it has been viewed as a threat to the Brahmanical vision of society. The appeal of the Buddhist ethic was maximally to the householder, perhaps the most effective patron of Buddhism. Equality was assumed since wealth was acquired through labour, effort and righteous means. The ruler had to provide sustenance for the poor apart from ensuring good administration and general prosperity. It is also significant that Buddhism and Jainism acknowledged the right of women to become nuns. This was not absolute freedom but at least it permitted a way of life alternate to the conventional one. The frequency of donations at Buddhist places of worship, by nuns and by women donors, often on behalf of their families, would suggest that they had more freedom than just the choice of joining the Order.
Buddhism, even when patronized by rulers did not establish a new social order. But it provided an alternate ideology to the Brahmanical order and thus indirectly legitimized many non-brahmanical and often lower caste movements that preached an ethic similar to the Buddhist. Some among these movements gained sanction for this ethic through the intervention of deity, but there were others that made no reference to deity. The questioning of deity particularly in context of social ethics was not limited to the Buddha. Such views persisted as parallel schools of thought among sects well into later times.
CHANGES IN HINDUISM AND RISE OF NEW SECTS
By the first millennium AD
Many ancient texts referring to and describing the religions of India mention two categories: the Brahmanic and the Shramanic. The latter, mainly Buddhism and Jainism, subsumed other non-Brahmanical groups. The Brahmanical religion underwent much change. Vedic Brahmanism constituted the orthodoxy. Its focus was the elaborate sacrificial ritual lasting sometimes up to a couple of years and conducted by a hierarchy of brahmana priests. By the first millennium AD, although it was still venerated, it began to be superseded by the popular religion described by modern scholars as Puranic Hinduism. The major gods and rituals changed—with Indra and Agni giving way to Shiva and Vishnu—and the innovation of worshipping icons in shrines and temples. It was a competitor of the Shramanic religion and its flexibility allowed it to absorb a variety of myths and practices of various groups of people. The resulting multiplicity of sects encouraged the osmosis of ideas and practices but discourged the notion of an over-arching religion recognizable as a uniform belief system. New sects emerged. Migrant sects from elsewhere such as the Sufis who trickled in from Persia in the early centuries of the second millennium AD, gave rise to further sects in India. The dialogue between Sufi and Bhakti teaching was reflected in many of the religious trends in this period. Some sects had been and were renunciatory, others evolved into new castes often asserting a higher status than previously.
Period after the thirteenth century
The period after the thirteenth century saw a scatter of religious teachers—the gurus and the pirs—who had the largest followings of mixed Hindu, Muslim and other groups, up until the last century. These teachers cut across caste and formal religions. There emerged a distinctive Guru-Pir tradition in Indian religion, unfortunately not given the attention it deserves because much of its teaching was oral and it attracted the non-elite person in the main. The impact of this tradition is evident on all the formal religions even when they opposed these teachings. The message they endorsed was that of social equality rather than caste hierarchies, and a concern for the human condition—the message that appealed to those who saw themselves as the subordinated but not the defeated. The renouncer in Indian society as a figure of moral authority reaching beyond a single religious identity also has a bearing on social ethics. Mysticism apart, many more renouncers were concerned with the mainsprings of society and how these could be directed towards the welfare of its constituents at all levels. This moral authority lay not only in challenging deity—as in the many myths of ascetics threatening to overthrow a god or gods fearing the power of the ascetic—but also in legitimating political and social protest.
INTERFACE BETWEEN RELIGION AND SECULARISM
Gandhi’s adoption of the symbols of asceticism was not just an individual quirk. He was using, consciously or subconsciously, the continuation of a long tradition of linking moral authority, as distinct from religious authority, with protest. I have tried to argue that religion in pre-colonial India had, and in some ways continues to have, a different structure and trajectory from religion elsewhere, both in form and in relation to society. Therefore, as a prelude to the interface between religion and secularism, we have to re-examine our definitions of religions in India.
COLONIAL VIEW OF INDIAN RELIGION
The current debate on secularism is not a radical departure from some ideologies of pre-modern Indian society, but the emphases and mechanisms are naturally different. The definition of religion in India has been partial, based as it has been largely only on the study of the belief systems and ritual practices as described in the texts used by the dominant castes and elite groups. This was further strengthened in the colonial projection of Indian religions as monolithic, static, uniform entities, virtually unconnected to any social context. The colonial state recognized only the formal religions of what it called Hinduism and of Islam and contoured them in keeping with its own perspectives on Indian religion. Colonial ethnography collected data on the supporters of the Guru-Pir religious articulation in the Gazetteers and Censuses. There was also data available in the regional languages. Yet, ironically, the distinctive identity of such groups was not recognized. They were marginalized and excluded from the construction of Indian religion. Their articulation was both oral and textual but not always written in the language of the cultural mainstream. The notion of monolithic religions of the majority and the minority communities tended to shuffle everyone into monolithic identity slots. With the coming of nationalism there was a turning to these identities especially when drawing upon tradition and cultural heritage.
NATIONAL MOVEMENT AND RELIFIOUS NATIONALISM
Secular nationalism in the anti- colonial struggle was followed closely by Hindu and Muslim nationalisms. These were less concerned with confronting colonial power and more with confronting the other religious nationalism. They were seminal to the current communalism which apart from its political agenda, has no place for religious articulation that cannot be firmly located in one of the two monoliths. Battles over places of worship frequently occur often accompanied by violence. These are places where earlier adherents of all kinds of religious sects would worship together, and where religious identities had been ambiguous and blurred. Muslim ‘nationalism’ succeeded in establishing a state—Pakistan. Hindu nationalism is anxious to make India into a Hindu state, which so far has been evaded. Religious nationalism is not so distant from religious fundamentalism and is therefore hostile to secularism.
HINDU RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM AS HINDUTVA
Interestingly, Hindu nationalism has reformulated Hinduism and calls it Hindutva. I have referred to this elsewhere as Syndicated Hinduism.
1. This has been called an attempt to ‘semitize Hinduism’ by giving it a format and organization that approximates the Judeo-Christian. Doubtless the rationale is the belief that a religion organized in this way is more effective for modern political mobilization.
2. The search for a historical founder has not met with success, there never having been one.
3. The authority of a single sacred text is being sought but meets the same problem. Congregational worship has been introduced to create a sense of community.
4. There have been attempts to establish an ecclesiastical organization as a surrogate Church, to dictate the beliefs and laws of the religion.
5. Multiple deities weaken the claim that a monotheistic God is embedded in the worship of one out of many deities. A monotheistic God implies a different understanding of the role of deity than one among a number of deities.
6. Further, to boost nationalism, the enemy of the nation has to be targeted and the choice for this can be the Muslim or the Christian. This was made only too apparent in the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and the assault on Christians in Odisha and other areas.
7. Islamic fundamentalism provides a gnawing parallel often used to justify retaliation by other religious fundamentalisms.
8. The noticeable increase in religiosity is in part due to the changed condition of society where we now are part of the market economy required of current globalization.
There is a visible expansion of the middle class with a greater competition among people to join it. Those that succeed improve their material life and need to exhibit their success through lavish spending on religiosity among other things; those that do not succeed, feel the insecurity of having competed and lost and turn to religion for solace.
9. Globalization increases insecurity and reverses the economic system with which people were earlier familiar. Providing rational solutions get dismissed when the mood is to propagate irrationality and superstition. It is noticeable as to how many otherwise urbane middle-class men go around with red mouli threads and black threads tied to their wrists, and wear cheap rings set with monga or other ‘auspicious’ gemstones, to ensure their success and well-being.
PROBLEMS FOR SECULARIZATION IN INDIA
1.Secularism in India faces the fundamentalism of various religions— Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam. These are movements that wish to retain control over the institutions of society and force an observance of religious laws rather than civil law. The control extends to denying lower castes access to social justice on more than one occasion. This opposes secular values.
2. Secularism in India has to contend with religious institutions and caste dominated ones, which up to a point are a manifestation of religions attempting to control society.
3. It also has to contend with a rather weak attempt by the state to ensure human rights and social justice for lower castes, Dalits and women, such rights if strongly backed would reinforce secularism, since secularism has the same aspirations.
But the effort should not stop with just a demonstration of upward mobility by a few through the internalization of upper caste religion and culture ways. On a larger scale it has preferred conversion to what is being called neo-Buddhism. It can be viewed as part of a continuous tradition although it has to be kept from becoming a historical anachronism.
In conclusion I would like to reiterate three points :
1. if religion is to be treated as a counterpoint to secularism then the form of the religious articulation that is being contested has to be defined for each society. In formulating the meaning of secularism for the present, ideologies from the past that might assist in this formulation could be drawn upon.
2. And since secularism as an ideology is associated with the nation-state it becomes part of the emergent institutions of this historical change.
3. Inevitably secularizing society requires defining citizenship through creating a new identity, an identity based on essential human rights being equally and justly available to all citizens..
No comments:
Post a Comment