Scholars in Conversation l Professor Rajeev Bhargava with Dr Atreyee Majumder

The ‘Scholars in Conversation’ series features interviews with academics across diverse disciplines and geographies. Anchored by NLSIU faculty members, these conversations explore the work of leading voices in their fields in order to bring academic insights to bear on public discourse.

This is the first post under The Indian Political Thought Edition, which features discussions with scholars who were part of the Indian Political Thought Conference held at the university. In this interdisciplinary conference, scholars explored the historical foundations of Indian political thought, assessed their contemporary relevance, and envisioned future trajectories. This online edition expands on these conversations for our readers. 

NLSIU faculty member Dr Atreyee Majumder caught up with eminent political theorist and professor Rajeev Bhargava and engaged him in a conversation about the corpus of his work on secularism, the difference in religious life between Asia and the West, and also his recent thesis on ‘religionisation’. This conversation was recorded over a video call; an edited version of the transcript follows.

Welcome, Professor Bhargava, to this edition of ‘Scholars in Conversation’. Having read your work since I was an undergraduate student at NLSIU, it’s a privilege to engage with your work today.

In your recent comments in the KS Vyas Memorial Lecture, you coined the word ‘religionisation’ and distinguished it from communalism. You mentioned this at the Indian Political Thought Conference too. Could you say a little bit more about how this coinage came about?

I wish to make a distinction between a religious philosophical experience or perspective and religion proper. Religious philosophical experiences and perspectives have been in the world and in the subcontinent for thousands of years. For example, in India, they were embedded in the Vedic imagination. And they were much more explicit in Upanishadic thinking, in Buddhism and Jainism, and even in later Brahmanical thought. I want to distinguish these experiences and perspectives from what I call ‘religion’. This idea of religion has three features.

One, it depends on a very sharp distinction between True and False: true doctrines and false doctrines, true gods and false gods. Therefore, true religions and false religions, right? This distinction is not present in all religio-philosophical experiences. A group, or all the people within a community who adhere to a set of religious beliefs, are convinced that theirs is the only true perspective and all other perspectives are false. And because of this, a very sharp demarcation begins to exist between one’s own group and other groups, to the extent that you might see people within your group as close friends and people in other groups as enemies. All this is based on the idea that you hold the truth and all others are false, that the people within the group have to be protected from that falsity. The defence of one’s group comes with an attack of other groups. That’s one feature I think is extremely important for this idea of religion, from which I want to distinguish religious and philosophical experiences and perspectives.

The second feature of religion is that it’s totalising. In other non-totalising religious and philosophical perspectives, there’s always a distinction between one’s ethics of fulfilment—self-fulfilment—and norms of social interaction. To simplify this, let me take an example from the South Asian subcontinent. People living in the same region could follow different ethics of self-fulfilment, some could be leaning on many gods and goddesses, some on simply one god. And some others may have a perspective that doesn’t lean on god at all, right? For example, Buddhists and Jains—their original philosophies had no place for god. Many versions of Vedic Brahminism had many gods and goddesses. This ‘polytheism’ is something incorporated as an element in Buddhism as well and becomes a central feature of Puranic Hinduism. And within what later became Hinduism, there are some groups that believe only in one god, and this idea is also present in Indian philosophy.

Analytically distinct from ethics of self-fulfilment are norms of social interaction, by which I mean implicit or explicit rules one must follow in relation to other people, both within and outside the group: Who you can marry and who you can’t, who you may dine with and who may not dine with. Also, what kind of work are you allowed to do? What ethical significance or social significance does this work have? Is it higher or lower? And so on and so forth. Now, there could be a vague sort of connection between social norms and ethics of fulfilment. Not a tight connection, but a loose one. And I believe that in the subcontinent, such a loose connection existed. You could have, for example, certainly after the 1st century of the common era, a fairly rigid caste system that prescribed norms of social interaction, but you could adhere to any one of the ethical perspectives. You could move from one perspective to the other. You could even hold two perspectives at the same time or even three. So, it was possible for someone who was a Brahmin, someone with a ‘higher’ status, to either remain within Hinduism or move to Jainism or Buddhism. For example, Nagarjuna was a Brahmin, but he was one of the greatest Buddhist philosophers.

With the coming of religion, you lose this flexibility. The connection between ethical perspective and norms of social interaction becomes very tight, and sometimes so tight that it becomes one system. So, it’s not possible for you to be part of one social system or structure and have a very different ethical perspective, right? There’s a commitment to a comprehensive system, which includes certain norms of social behaviour and a certain marga (path) of total self-fulfilment. You believe this is the true system and has only one true god, and it’s against everybody else. Conversion means a total change to another comprehensive social and ethical system, and a rejection of everything of the past. These are the features that are common to what I call religion.

There’s a third feature, which is not as crucial, but nonetheless I include it in my idea of religion: a propensity not just to have social power but to have political power. So, religious community must strive for a state of its own—Islamic state or Catholic state or, a Jewish or Hindu state, so you can have social and political power. Concentrated public power must have a stamp of this one true perspective.

These are the three features of religion, and this process of becoming a religion and moving away from multiple religio-philosophical experiences is what I call religionisation.

So, this merging of the social, theological, and political dimensions of our beliefs and practices is a relatively recent historical phenomenon?

In India, it’s a modern phenomenon. This is not the case in other parts of the world, in which all these three features appear together in the past or in the early modern age. In Europe and what we generally call the West—I have argued and I think most people have argued—modernisation brought in secularisation, which limits religion. Secularisation was against religionisation.

With the coming of modernity in other parts of the world, you have not one truth but multiple truths. You have a pluralist idea of ethical fulfilment. Intellectual pluralism and ethical pluralism are associated with modernity, in which norms of social interaction and ethics of self-fulfilment are disconnected, instead of having a social body that is totally controlling. Let’s say—I’m just giving an example, it needn’t be this way, not all churches have been like this—but, let’s say, the church. You dismantle the power of the church or the power of one social body so it is not all controlling, and you also separate church and state. Now these are processes that have been linked to modernisation in the West.

But in India, of course, plurality and separation were present before modernity. You didn’t have a religious state. You had multiple ethical perspectives supported by a state or even different states.

This totalising tendency you mention, are you then arguing that this has its germ in Abrahamic Western religion, that Eastern religions are not like this?

Well, I wouldn’t like to put it like that. I don’t want to recreate a kind of a dichotomy between East and West. But it is true that India is not an exception to this—the whole of Asia is pretty much like this. If you look at China, there have always been three ways of thought or being—Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist.

It’s certainly mentioned in Marco Polo’s travelogues. He tries very hard to convince Kublai Khan that he should become a Christian, and Kublai Khan refuses. Khan would be called a defender of many faiths today.

Much of South East Asia—Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar—is like this, I mean the coexistence of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims. It’s all kinds of layer upon layer. In Indonesia you find Borobudur, which is one of the largest Buddhist temples cum monasteries. So, this is not a plea for Indian exceptionalism. I think the whole of Asia has been like this, and I’m pretty certain that Africa has been like this too.

So religion is an idea, a fatal idea, that is introduced into the world, and at some stage in the many histories of the world …

It becomes common sense.

Yeah, it becomes common sense, but not everywhere. And it’s no longer restricted to believers in god. Forms of communism have been like this. So, for them, the only true truth is scientific socialism, right? And others who don’t believe in it are enemies?

So, they are non-believers.

They are non-believers. The idea of god, which is so central to the Western tradition—there have been certain forms of scientism that are like that. For example, logical positivism, which is an early 20th century phenomenon that emerged in Vienna. It is a dangerous idea because it believes that only scientific truth is meaningful. All other forms of thinking are meaningless, not just untruths.

It also starts to say that poetry, art, religion are meaningless. These are absurd, meaningless—that the only statement that is meaningful is one which can be verifiable, and once you establish it’s a verifiable statement, then you can enter the realm of truth and falsehood. Then you can say, yes, it’s verified, it’s true, or it’s not verified, it’s false, but the rest is meaningless. This is an extreme view.

Science as a form of religion.

I would not even say that. I just say it’s dogma. Communism and certain forms of reason introduce the same thing. And I would say that, you know, Hindutva, an idea based on one true belonging, is but one form in that category.

Right. We all know your early work on principled distance that distinguished Indian secularism from Western secularism. You have also deeply disagreed with TN Madan’s and Ashis Nandy’s work. We know Nandy and Madan’s criticisms of Indian secularism. You say that their argument on secularism is that it is a kind of flawed modernity.

The distinctiveness of Indian secularism, can you take us through your disagreement a little bit—the older one in which you disagreed with Ashis Nandy and others as well as your recent insight that you also have some deep agreement with the Ashis Nandy kind of argument?

Until, say, about 10 years ago, I didn’t have a clear idea on what modernisation had brought to India. I just felt that we were all in the modern condition and inescapably so, and that modernity was a pretty much unambiguously good thing, because it brought equality, a new idea of freedom, and new forms of solidarity. And I thought that religion had been a source of a lot of trouble, which secular states had to deal with, and therefore I kind of disagreed with people like Ashis Nandy, who I still disagree with to some extent. I believe that Nandy and Madan saw only real secularism, that is Western, which was largely anti-religion, anti-religious. They did not distinguish between different forms of Western secularisms.

US secularism was never against religion, for example. But they also did not distinguish religion from religious experiences and practices. They used religion more or less as a universal category instantiated by different region-specific religions. I don’t accept that. But now, I agree more with their critique of secular modernity. True, Ashis Nandy and TN Madan say that Indian religions are, you know, a way of life and there may be something called Indian secularism, but they don’t really spell it out in the way in which I’ve begun to now.

I’ve taken this idea pretty much for granted in modern Western societies and all modern societies: there are religions, and wherever there are religions, there are bound to be religious conflict as well as managing that conflict and liberating individuals from their own religions. Because religion is not only prone to conflict but also deeply conservative, particularly to its women. One needs a secular state for emancipation of individuals and which also, in a sense, prevents inter-religious conflict. And I argue that Indian secularism, therefore, is a necessity. But modern Indian secularism is not the same as US secularism because the patterns of state-religion relationships are very different—in the US you have separation as mutual exclusion. By which I mean that religion has to be excluded from the affairs of the state and state has to be excluded from the affairs of religion. So, they are two completely separate areas of jurisdiction—religious jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of the state. This is necessary for liberty.

And more specifically, religious liberty, because the context in the US is denominational pluralism, right? It is alluding to something which, in a deeper sense, was very much what India was about. So, this modernist impulse in the US was for pluralism. Let there be many denominations, let there be many churches, and let the individuals decide which church they want to belong to. And the state should be out of that. So, it was to protect religious liberty and denominational pluralism that state-church separation was required. And then when democracy began to grow, it was also for equality of citizenship. Of course, these are all ideals. It’s never been the case. It’s never fully realised. Yet what makes it different from India is all this denominational pluralism exists within a single religion, Protestant Christianity to begin with and, later, other Christianities.

The second kind of Western secularism is France, where the state is dominant and so it’s not mutual exclusion but one-sided exclusion. The state can interfere in the affairs of religion, but religion cannot interfere in the affairs of the state. So, the church cannot interfere in the affairs of the state as much as the state can, and you can see that even today, the state can control what you wear. Either a hijab or a cross, the state can say, well, you cannot wear that in public. It can control religion.

So, this evacuation of power from religion and repositing it in the state—we should see it with some suspicion, right?

Again, ultimately it all depends on ethical and moral values. What is this power being used for? Some people are not interested in ethical and moral values and think this is all a sham. But I don’t think so. These ideals are important and therefore it’s not just for power. Whether it is religious or political, this power has to be used for something.

It may be used towards unethical realisation or actualisation?

Yes, of course. Now, how do you regulate social relations? Are they going to be egalitarian or non-egalitarian? Are they going to be hierarchical or non-hierarchical? Above everything else, in the US model, religion is separate from the fabric of political and social life. You know, it’s beyond us. So, all the Protestants could believe that there is one Christian god and his commands are greater than everything else. But not all people in the US today believe this. Most Indians don’t either. In our Constitution, we have a critical respect for religion. This anyway is my view and my view of secularism. All religions are ambivalent. There are some aspects that are deeply troubling, both intra-religious and inter-religious. They cause trouble between religions, and they cause oppression and humiliation. Within each religion, there are lots of tendencies to humiliate their own members. In order to tackle these, we have to introduce what I call principled distance: there’s no strict separation. The state can engage with religion or disengage from it, and it engaging negatively or positively in some cases helps religion. This engagement may entail recognition of religion. We have religion-based minority rights, right? And those religious communities are explicitly recognised in the Indian Constitution. There will be no preferential treatment.

Moreover, Dalits, Adivasis, women are mistreated to different degrees and in different ways in all religions. If you have a constitutional commitment to equality and justice, you can’t treat religion as above everything else. The Constitution is above all religions. So, it can ‘hinder’ conservative religion for the sake of social justice. And so, this principled distance idea.

In doing that, are you also kind of moving towards the Ashis Nandy position—are you also adopting a critique of modernity, that it was supposed to liberate us from all social evils but has not quite managed to do it? The second question is, in your recent work, Hope and Despair: 100 Ethical Reflections, you say that the Indian ethical dimension is threatened. What is your understanding of ethics here, that is, not a person or a community but the nation state having an ethical dimension?

Not quite. See, the nation can be understood in two different ways. One is that it’s not the ethnic nation. This goes against my very grain. I cannot accept the idea. Accepting it is accepting European ideas of nationhood. It is to accept Hindutva. It is to accept the Islamic State of Pakistan. It is to accept the Jewish state of Israel. I totally reject that.

But the nation is also, in the earlier sense of the word, a people. The whole of people living in a territory is a nation. So that is the demos from which both a certain kind of civic nationalism and democracy grow.

Right. My last question to you: has the modern liberated us from the internal and external oppressions of various kinds of communalism, which can take the form of religion or ethnicity or other kinds? Also, why does the category ‘religion’ persist? It, in fact, has amplified itself in the last 25 years, since 2001 when 9/11 happened. We find that the category of religion has become louder than ever. How? Why is that so?

Pay attention to the fact that as a word catches on, the meaning of that word becomes frayed. And this is true of not only ‘modern’ and ‘religion’ but also ‘nation’. This is true of ‘democracy’. This is true of ‘secular’. People begin to lose a grip on the meaning as they get caught in the force of the word, the sound of it.

Everybody uses the word ‘religion’ and they put different valences to it, some positive, some negative. For a lot of contemporary intellectuals, nation always had a very negative valence—not always, but in the last 40 years. And religion was taken seriously but not questioned properly by the same people. Why should that be the case? Why are you not questioning religion? You’re questioning secularism all the time and you’re questioning the nation all the time, but you’re not questioning religion. That’s absurd. I mean, this is my question to my fellow friends and so on. And this includes Ashis Nandy and others.

True, things which are so much a part of modernity, like the violence of modernity, wasn’t taken seriously. Hats off to people like Ashis Nandy who did it, but they ended up rejecting the modern altogether. But you know, there’s no way that we can reject all these things. They are here. At the same time, I also used to believe that freedom, equality, and so on are exclusively modern ideas. I don’t believe that now.

You don’t believe that now?

No, I don’t believe that. I think it’s a new configuration, right? It’s not as if there were no struggles for social justice in the past or no egalitarian ideas. In the past, people were challenging hierarchies in ways which we do not recognise as egalitarian. We just need to be more historical and more aware of the history of our world and our own region.

I just wrote a little Facebook post. I don’t remember which international newspaper or magazine I referred to in it, but I talked about someone referring to an era akin to the Weimar period. And a lot of people feel that we are going through the same kind of anxieties and the same trends as the Weimar period.

Yeah, it’s a kind of twilight era before big wars.

So is it just a return to some unfinished agenda of the late 19th or early 20th century? I don’t know.

In India, of course, it is not a return. It’s a birth. As I said, religion is new. Elements of religion were there in the past. I agree. It was there in what we today call Hinduism. It was certainly there in Christianity and Islam, in certain kinds of Islam, not all of Islam. And Islam, of course, is not one thing. I mean there are so many different currents in different parts of the world that Islam came from and it came at different periods—to put it all together as one again is so stupid and lazy.

Sure, sure. And thank you for being the defender of public reason that you are, Professor Rajeev Bhargava.

 

About the Authors

Rajeev Bhargava is a political theorist and the director of the Institute of Indian Thought at the Centre for Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist of South Asia and an associate professor at NLSIU.