THE POLITICS OF SECULARIZATION AND ITS MORAL DISCONTENTS/DISENCHANTMENTS
Keywords:
Secularism, Secularity, Taylor, India, Personal Law, PseudoSecularism, Constitution, Muslim, Hindu, Post-ColonialAbstract
The paper seeks to demonstrate how a political-philosophical idea became a worldwide movement, a driving ideology, that has had a formidably deconstructive impact on significant religious practices of societies wedded to traditional patterns of culture, law and morality. But this Enlightenment epistemé has also come increasingly under scrutiny for its shortcomings in recognizing the moral basis of certain cultural patterns religious predilections that people are increasingly not prepared to abandon altogether. From disenchantments (of the sacred and religionmoral proclivities in the public spheres, with some exemptions in the private sphere, such as ‘Personal Law’ in British India and colonial Turkey) we now have with the so-called ‘return of religion in the Western world’ moved to a situation of discontentment with the rampant secularization of societies in the wake of modernity and decolonisation. After engaging with Charles Taylor’s re-configuration of his challenging thesis of secularity, the paper moves to the Indian scenario and its confused handling of secularism in our post-colonial times.
References
K. Baynes, “Habermas,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig, http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/DD024SECT, Accessed 11 September 2011.
Charles Taylor, The Secular Age, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007, 2.
Crittenden Paul, “A Secular Age: Reflections on Charles Taylor’s Recent Book,” Sophia 48, 4 (November 2009), 469-478.
Peter Singer, “Singer vs Lennox: Is There a God? Big Ideas,” ABC TV, www. abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2011/09/06/3310342.htm, Accessed 15 September 2011.
Arvind-Pal Mandair, Religion and the Spectre of the West, Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality and the Politics of Transnation, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, 13.
Eduardo Mendieta, “Society’s Religion: The Rise of Social Theory, Globalization, and the Invention of Religion,” in Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases, eds., Dwight N. Hopkins and Lois Ann Lorentzen, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001, 46-65.
Purushottama Bilimoria, “Nietzsche as ‘Europe’s Buddha’ and ‘Asia’s Superman,” Sophia 47 (2008), 359-376.
Pieter Duvenage, ‘Communicative Reason and Religion: The Case of Habermas,’ Sophia 49, 3 (2010), 343-357.
Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge: Polity, 2008, 211.
Robert Eisen, The Peace and Violence of Judaism: From the Bible to Modern Zionism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Purushottama Bilimoria, “Postcolonial Critique of Reason: Spivak between Kant and Matilal,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4: 160-167.
Dipankar Gupta, “Gandhi before Habermas: The Democratic Consequences of Ahimsa,” Economic and Political Weekly 7 (2009), 27-33.
Agnes Heller, “Moses Hsūang-Tsang and History” in Eliot Deutsch, ed. Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991, 535-547, 540.
Enrique Dussel, “Modernity, Eurocentricism, and Trans-modernity: In Dialogue with Charles Taylor” in The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Taylor and the Philosophy of Liberation, translated and edited by Eduardo Mendietta, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1996, 129-159.
Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, “Conversations with Žižek,” New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2004, 88-89.
Discussed in Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 1: Alternative Spiritualities, New York: Continuum, 2004, 8-9.
Rob Warner, Secularization and Its Discontents, New York: Continuum, 2010.
Purushottama Bilimoria, “The Pseudo-Secularization of Hindutva and Its Campaign for Uniform Civil Codes,” Nidan: Journal for the Study of Hinduism 18 (2006), 1-21.
Mushirul Hasan, “Minority Identity and Its Discontents,” South Asian Bulletin 14 (1994), 24-40.
Rajeev Dhavan, “The Road to Xanadu: India’s Quest for Secularism” in Larson Gerald James, ed., Religion and Personal Law in Secular India, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001, 301-329, 311.
Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon, eds., In a Minority: Essays on Muslim Women in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005, 7.
Srimati Basu, “The Personal Law and the Political: Indian Women and Inheritance Law” in Larson, ed., Religion and Personal Law in Secular India, 163183, 180.
Paola Bacchetta, Gender in the Hindu National: RSS Women as Ideologues, New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004, 122.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, 134-56.
Dussel, The Underside of Modernity, 1996. Dussel Enrique, Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism and Liberation Theology, ed., Eduardo Mendieta, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Joseph Prabhu, “Philosophy in an Age of Reason,” Australian Religious Studies Review 25, 2 (2012), 123-138, 134-5.
Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: An Introduction, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 137.
