HISTORY WITHOUT AN END

Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History 1890-1950
By Shabnum Tejani, Permanent Black, Rs 695

This is a serious book on a very important subject which does not
quite live up to the promise of its subtitle. Despite this, what it
does achieve is significant.

Secularism in the Indian context has become a contentious and an
ambiguous subject. The author does not attempt to support any of the
existing definitions or to arrive at a new one of her own. She argues
that secularism in India can be understood in particular historical
contexts. She defines her own project thus: “This book reconstructs
such a history [of secularism] as a series of acts, focusing on six
historical moments from 1890 to 1950. I argue that each moment
represents both possibility and closure, marking a point when the
meaning of a certain political concept crystallized. These concepts
include Hindu community, patriotism, communal, communalism, the
democratic majority, and secular citizenship.’’

Of the six moments she chooses, three are popular movements located
in Maharashtra and Sind: cow protection, Swadeshi and Khilafat; the
other three are related to the constitutional debates in 1909, 1932
and 1950. In western India, in the period 1893-1911, movements that
were self-consciously political claimed the mantle of “nationalism’’.
Shabnum Tejani argues that “the cultural and political idioms of this
period became integral to formulations of Indian nationalism in later
years.’’ The term, ‘communalism’, acquired its Indian connotation
between 1906 and 1909, and the distinction between nationalism and
communalism sharpened during the Khilafat movement and its aftermath.
The beginnings of democracy in India in the 1930s witnessed the
separation between majority and minority communities and their
appropriation by different political formations. This process defined
minorities not just in terms of religion but also in terms of castes.

Apart from its thematic importance, there is another aspect of this
monograph that should be noted. Each chapter and the sections to
which they belong follow a chronological framework. The chapters are
also written as narratives. But the book as a whole does not follow
an obvious narrative line. It also does not chase an overarching
question or hypothesis that it seeks to answer. On the contrary, the
author, in a series of nuanced and open-ended arguments, tries to
show how words and concepts changed and shifted their meanings and
definitions in particular political contexts. These shifts in meaning
— and the author acknowledges her debt to the work of Quentin Skinner
in this regard — do not suggest that critical concepts like
nationalism, communalism and secularism always moved in one clearly
defined direction. She is emphatic that her concerns are anti-
teleological for “the end of the story was neither obvious nor
inevitable.’’ Her stated project is to reconstruct the genealogies of
secularism and of communalism. Those genealogies are still incomplete
and open. In a very vital sense, we still live within the history of
Indian secularism.

The book is theoretically informed but the theory never dominates the
histories that the author tries to set out. It is good to have a
history book that revels in the open-endedness of its argument and
its mode of writing. The author deserves to be congratulated for
having the courage to choose for her first book an extremely complex
subject and for having written about it with exemplary courage.

RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE