Identity Politics in India and Europe

Identity Politics in India and Europe

iiâ•…â•… Identity Politics in India and Europe

Identity Politics in India and Europe

Michael Dusche

Copyright © Michael Dusche, 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 2010 by Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India www.sagepub.in Sage Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA Sage Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom Sage Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Published by Vivek Mehra for Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10/12pt Aldine 401 BT by Star Compugraphics Private Limited, Delhi and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dusche, Michael. â•… Identity politics in India and Europe/Michael Dusche. â•…â•…â•… p.╇ cm. â•… Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.╇ Identity politics—India.â•… 2.╇ Identity politics—Europe.â•… 3.╇Group identity— India.â•… 4.╇Group identity—Europe.â•… I.╇ Title. DS430.D87

305—dc22

2010

2009044222

ISBN:╇ 978-81-321-0304-2 (HB) The Sage Team:╇ Rekha Natarajan, Manali Das, Trinankur Banerjee

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

vii xi

Part I. ‘Europe’ and ‘The Muslim World’: A Brief History of Reciprocal Perceptions l l l l l l

Late Antiquity to the Beginnings of the Modern Era Encounters in the Late Roman World Islam in Western Europe: Al-Andalus Encounter in the Levant: The Crusades At the Gates of Vienna: The Ottomans in Europe The Reformation: Ushering in the Modern Era

3 8 26 36 42 45

Part II.╇ The Global Condition: Modernity and Its Critics l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l

Culture and Identity in Modern Politics The World Polity Approach Institution Decoupling Actor and Action Rationality and Rationalisation Religion and the ‘Religious’ Progress and Teleology Principal and Agent Scientific Rationality The Modern Self The Liberal System Globalised The World Polity Diffusion The Statelessness of the World Polity Inclusion and Exclusion Identity Language Culture

51 56 57 60 62 63 64 67 69 71 73 75 77 78 79 83 84 88 90

viâ•…â•… Identity Politics in India and Europe

l l l l l l l

The Political Inclusive versus Identity Politics Identity Politics in Europe Identity Politics in India Freedom to Non-development Development as Freedom Identity Politics and the Ramjanmabhumi Movement

92 95 103 111 114 119 121

Part III. Intellectual Elites and Normative Orders in India, Israel, Palestine and Turkey Introduction: Survey and Interviews Ashok Acharya l Imtiaz Ahmad l Anwar Alam l Rajeev Bhargava l Asoke Bhattacharya l Anil Bhatti l Roma Chatterji l Asghar Ali Engineer l Anjan Ghosh l Qutub Kidwai and Shirin Huda l Gurpreet Mahajan l Shail Mayaram l Deepak Mehta l Salil Misra l Ashis Nandy l Aditya Nigam l Devdutt Pattanaik l Dhruv Raina l Ruby Sain l Zeenat Shaukat Ali l Virginius Xaxa

133 144 153 162 169 182 185 193 203 211 218 233 242 250 256 280 289 300 308 317 322 334

Appendix: Binary Oppositions in Counter-hegemonic Discourse References Index About the Author

351 361 369 376

l l

Acknowledgements The bulk of this work was made possible thanks to the generous

funding of the postdoctoral research project ‘Perceptions of Threat between Europe and the Muslim World’ by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research during my tenure at the University of Erfurt, Germany, from June 2006 to April 2009. Although all the material in this book is original, it should be mentioned that earlier versions of certain sections have been presented and discussed at the semestrial meetings of the joint project group on ‘Mobilisation of Religion in Europe’ at the University of Erfurt and at various seminars and conferences. The section on ‘New Institutionalism and Meyer’s World Polity Approach’ was presented at the Third Workshop on ‘New Institutionalist Organisation Theory’ at the University of Bergamo, Italy, 23–24 March 2007, and at the International Workshop on ‘New Institutionalism, World Polity, and Religion’ at the University of Erfurt, 27–28 April 2007.1 Parts on Al-Andalus were presented at the International Conference ‘Neue west-östliche Diwane’ at the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, 16–18 May 2007. ‘Reflections on Identity Politics in Europe’ were presented at the International Conference ‘Die Vielfalt Europas—Identitäten und Räume’, organised by Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas, University of Leipzig, 6–9 June 2007.2 The part on ‘Identity Politics in India’ was presented at the annual meeting of the German and the European Associations for the Study of Religion ‘Plurality and Representation: Religion in Education, Culture, and Society’, Bremen, Germany, 23–27 September 2007. This accounts only for the most recent occasions to discuss parts of this study with scholars and the wider public. Of course, such a work has a much longer antecedent. It would not have been possible without my tenure at the Jawaharlal Nehru University during 2000 through 2005, which was sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service. This time was invaluable for gaining a deeper understanding of India, and also of Europe, since it is from the distance that the observer gains a fuller view of the picture.

viiiâ•…â•… Identity Politics in India and Europe

The considerations on language, culture and identity were developed in seminars attended in India such as the symposium on ‘Signification in Buddhist and French Traditions’ at the Indian Institute for Advanced Study, Shimla, 25–30 September 2001,3 the seminar ‘Beyond the Linguistic Turn’ at the Centre for Linguistics and English, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 22–26 January 20024, the seminar on ‘Language, Meaning and Text’ at the Centre for Philosophy, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 5–6 November 2004, and the workshop on ‘European Union Studies’ at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, 16–17 February 2005. Parts regarding globalisation, world society and global justice were the subject of the conference on ‘Tolerance in the Context of Inter-culturality and Globalisation’ at the Department of German and Russian, University of Bombay, Mumbai, 12–15 March 20025 as well as of the opening lecture for the symposium on Global Justice organised by the student members of the Cusanus-Werk, Halle, Germany, 5–8 December 2002.6 Reflections regarding religion, and especially Islam, in Europe were discussed at the seminar on ‘Asserting Religious Identities’ at the Third World Academy, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India, 16–18 October 20037 the seminar on ‘Multiculturalism in India and Europe’ at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, 6–7 November 20038 and during my visit at the Centre for Advanced Study, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, during May 2005. I am grateful for the valuable comments from participants of these conferences from the colleagues of the Erfurt project, notably Jamal Malik. I should also mention Michael Opielka from FH Jena who was a partner in the initial phase of the project. Thanks also for comments and encouragement to Antti Ruotsala and Andrew Wheatcroft. A great thanks to all of my interview partners from India, Turkey, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and to John W. Meyer from Stanford University for reading and commenting on parts of this book. Of course, the responsibility for all remaining shortcomings is entirely mine. Last but not least, a warm thanks to Anne Thomas for her help with the transcription in the interviews and in my struggle with the English language and to Rekha Natarajan and Manali Das from SAGE who took care of the smooth publication of this volume.

Acknowledgementsâ•…â•… ix

Notes 1. Michael Dusche, “ ‘Europe and the Islamic World’—Perceptions and Stereotypes,” in Forum for Postcolonial Studies, ed. Anil Bhatti (Munich: Ludwig-Maximilians University [LMU], 2007). Available online at http://www.goethezeitportal.de/fileadmin/PDF/kk/ df/postkoloniale_studien/dusche_europe_islamic.pdf (accessed August 30, 2009). 2. Michael Dusche, “Die europäische Zivilisation aus dem Blickwinkel der muslimischen Welt” [European Civilisation from the Perspective of the Muslim World], in Die Vielfalt Europas—Identitäten und Räume pp. 603–13 (Leipzig: Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas, 2009). 3. Michael Dusche, “Signification in Opaque Contexts. Interpreted Logical Forms as Attitude Contents,” in Signification in Language and Culture, ed. Harjeet Singh Gill (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2002), 161–94. 4. Michael Dusche, “Experts or Mediators? Philosophers in the Public Sphere,” in Poststructuralism and Cultural Theory, ed. Franson Manjali (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 2006), 170–84. 5. Michael Dusche, “Liberal Tolerance between People(s),” TRANS—Internet Journal for Culture Studies 5 (2002). Available online at www.inst.at/trans/5Nr/dusche5.htm. 6. Michael Dusche, “Staatliche Einheit und religiöse Vielfalt in Indien” [National Unity and Religious Diversity in India] suedasien.info (2006). Available online at www.suedasien.info/analysen/1457 (accessed August 28, 2008). 7. Michael Dusche, “Asserting Religious Identities in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in Assertive Religious Identities: India and Europe, ed. Satish Saberwal and Mushirul Hassan (New Delhi: Manohar, 2006), 415–37. 8. Michael Dusche, “Multiculturalism, Communitarianism and Liberal Pluralism,” in Religious Pluralism in South Asia and Europe, ed. Jamal Malik and Helmut Reifeld (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 120–44.

xâ•…â•… Identity Politics in India and Europe

Introduction Perceptions of self, identity, social order and peace on one hand

and fears of instability, loss of self, disorder and violent conflict on the other seem to depend on each other in a dialectical way. Perceptions of ‘the other’ form an integral part of this dialectic. This was true of the formative years of the West as well as of the Islamic world. It was true of the encounters between the European colonial powers and the nonEuropean world and it is true even today where a divide is supposed to exist between the West and the Islamic world. The history of perceptions between the West and the Islamic world does not begin with the recent terror attacks in the US, Europe, the Middle East and South Asia. These in a way only mark the moment in the West when awareness became overwhelming that something is fundamentally amiss in its relations with the countries of the so-called Islamic world. This leads to a broad examination of the roots of religiously embellished terrorism. For lack of immediate access to the life worlds and languages of the people in the Middle East and South and South-east Asia, the enquiry based itself largely on the scriptures and symbols of Islam such as the Qur’an, the deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, the Islamic legal tradition or symbols like the headscarf. This lead to new irritations and turmoil as in the infamous caricature controversy or the Regensburg speech of Pope Benedict XIV. Also the dealings with so-called Muslim minorities in Europe, Israel and India were reassessed in the light of these controversies. Honour killings, forced marriages and genital mutilations, in fact neither exclusively nor typically Islamic, are increasingly discussed in connection with Islam. Thereby, these cultural practices are given the importance of matters of conscience. They are discussed on a par with religious freedoms such as the recognition of Muslim associations as religious bodies of public law in Germany. In India, similar debates surround Muslim personal law and the practices that it supposedly entails such as polygamy—which again is not exclusively Islamic. In Europe, the willingness to concede to people of other cultures a certain degree of autonomy has reduced to make way for new forms

xiiâ•…â•… Identity Politics in India and Europe

of virtue despotism where Muslims are compelled to ‘integrate’ into a mainstream culture that increasingly becomes an object of public administration. Instead of addressing the problems as they relate to old-fashioned patriarchal ways of living, which would concern Muslims as well as non-Muslims, the debate has closed in on Muslims alone thereby alienating them more than including them in an open discussion on common norms and shared values. Explaining the other’s behaviour by recourse to her/his religion is a stratagem of ‘othering’ more than a way to mutual understanding. It has a long history. In the West, the perception of threat emanating from the Muslim world is as old as Islam itself (or the West for that matter). The perception developed in the 7th and 8th centuries when Muslim conquerors expanded the reach of Islam well into Spain, Italy and even France. Islam was portrayed as a hostile alternative to Christianity, and Muhammad was denounced as a heretic or even as the Antichrist. In the process of disengagement with the Mediterranean as a cultural region, Europe formed its Western identity first and foremost with the Islamic world as its cultural ‘other’. To build its own identity around the notion of Latin Christendom, western Europe needed Islam as its own antithesis. When the Christian religion was seen as the epitome of all that was good, Islam became the incremental evil in the eyes of the western Europeans. This perception has found its expression in European art, literature and historiography and even in some academic disciplines (Orientalism). Those expressions rage from caricature depictions of Muslims on Romanesque church buildings to the romances of the crusader period; from anti-Turkish wall hangings and paintings to learned tractates about ‘the Oriental’. The reverse was also true but very much less markedly so. For long periods, western Europe hardly figured in the mental map of the people who found themselves living in the Muslim world. If it did, it was for the ‘firanghis’ (Franks) who made their way into the Middle East as crusaders or traders. Neither posed a threat of any import before the time of European colonial expansion. The period of colonialism and later of imperialism, however, left a deep mark on the geography of the colonised lands and the minds of the people colonised. The Europeans left the Middle East and South Asia with borders drawn arbitrarily or along religious and ethnic lines, both with the potential for eternal conflict. The Israel–Palestine conflict is only one of the most persistent of these. Generally, it left the decolonised with a sense of mistrust vis-à-vis the West.

Introductionâ•…â•… xiii

There are thus some realities on the ground that account for the mutual misgivings that ‘Westerners’ and ‘Orientals’ tend to have about each other. These can play a promotive role in present conflicts. At the same time, they can have an internally stabilising effect on societies that have a need for an external ‘other’ in order to create a sense of cohesion among themselves. While the ‘other’ is portrayed as foreign and hostile, one assures oneself of one’s own uniqueness and identity. This can be conducive for the sense of inner cohesion that each society needs in order to form a functioning political body. At the same time, it harbours conflict both within and without. The portrayal of the Muslim ‘other’ both in India and in Europe draws on age-old stereotypes, whose genealogy can be traced back to the early encounters between the emerging world of Latin Christendom in Europe and the expanding world of Islam. This is where this book will begin. Of course, it is not possible to give a full picture of the complex relationships between the two in just a few pages. The focus is laid extensively on the origins of perceptions of Muslims as the threatening ‘other’. This ignores many positive aspects of this mutual encounter. The author is painfully aware of this. However, it is not the aim of this book to give an accurate account of a very complex and varied relationship over hundreds of years. The focus is therefore not on the relationship itself but on the role of perceptions in this relationship. Of course, India has its own and independent history of perceptions of Islam and Muslims prior to the advent of the British rule. The book can also not do justice to this very important part of the story. Through the British rule, however, the discursive spheres of India and Europe were interlinked and many of the perceptions of Muslims generated in Europe entered the colonial discourse about the Muslims in India. In enquiring into the mutual perceptions between Europe and the Islamic world, one has to take cognisance of the historical entanglements between the two. This is what this book attempts in its first part. Here the ground is laid for an alternative perception of these relations, one that does not itself fall prey to the kinds of stereotypes that have long prevented a positive appraisal of the commonalities and mutually beneficial entanglements between the two. As a result, what is portrayed as two worlds turns out really to be one single world with common references to the Abrahamitic and Judaic traditions, the Hellenic and Byzantine legacy and, more lately, the global condition of modernity. Part II of the book takes this globalised modernity as a point of departure and asks anew, where mutual threat perceptions stem from and

xivâ•…â•… Identity Politics in India and Europe

what function they fulfil in the set-up of the modern polity. The analysis thus turns from rather sweeping comparisons between spheres of great magnitude, both geographically and in terms of civilisational depth, to the more manageable sphere of the nation-state. Here it can be observed how alleged perceptions of threat are being created through discourse and whom they serve in the arena of national and international politics. The conflict lines here are not between civilisational spheres but they cut right through individual societies and mark the difference between various adaptations of modernity to varying local conditions. Often controversies over the right combination of modern precepts and traditional ways of life take hybrid forms and it becomes quite difficult to make out if a social movement is modern or non-modern or progressive or regressive. ‘Modernity’ as a term is thus used value-free in this study. Modernity holds out promises but never lives up to them. The outcome is always ambivalent, the ambivalence ranging from wholesome to horrid. There is thus hardly any point in labelling social movements or conceptions of social order as modern or non-modern if it were not for the implicit reference to a time when mass politics did not exist, when masses did not matter in the equations of those wielding power and when the political mobilisation of masses for a common cause did not make any sense. The modern age, which, after humble beginnings, culminates for the first time in the American and the French revolutions, thus marks a watershed beyond which today’s concepts of statehood and politics tend to lose their meaning. On this side of the watershed, mass politics has been established as the prime resource of power. Power based on mass politics can be generated in democratic ways. However, it can also be generated in demagogical ways serving the interests of only a few ruling elites. The latter is sometimes called identity politics. This term will figure prominently in the analysis of the interplays of power in three different contexts. The study from which this book emerged looks at three national contexts—India, Israel, Palestine and Turkey—with an interest in the fault lines of conflict in these countries. The analysis therefore looks at the conceptions of normative order that are prevalent or contested in these countries. Altercations between the defendants of the established order and their challengers are looked at through the lens of academic and intellectual discourse. As an empirical access route to these discourses, interviews were taken with academics from social sciences and humanities in India, Israel, the

Introductionâ•…â•… xv

Palestinian occupied territories and Turkey. Those taken in India are printed in Part III of this volume. The ones taken in Israel, Palestine and Turkey will form the subject of a second volume. Together they form the basis of an assessment of the three countries regarding the role that their academic elites play in the controversies surrounding the identity of their polity. With the dangers of identity politics lurking in the background, academic elites were assessed with regard to the tempering role that they might play in these discourses.

xviâ•…â•… Identity Politics in India and Europe

Part I

‘Europe’ and ‘The Muslim World’: A Brief History of Reciprocal Perceptions

2

IDENTITY POLITICS IN INDIA AND EUROPE

Late Antiquity to the Beginnings of the Modern Era FOR CENTURIES, THE SELF-PERCEPTION OF WESTERN Europe has been construed as against its ‘other’, the Orient, which was largely perceived as the world of Islam. At least since the work of Edward Said, one has become wary of this distinction.1 However, with rising Islamophobia in ‘the West’, the juxtaposition of ‘Europe’ and ‘the Muslim world’ has again become widespread. Discourses on European identity in the context of Europe’s struggle for a future constitution are increasingly framed in the old terminology of the predominantly Islamic Orient and a predominantly Christian Occident. This sweeping and facile imagery is marred by entities that do not quite fit into the bipolar divide. Europe is full of examples of regions that form part of Europe and, at the same time, the Muslim world. This may be true for the present as is the case with countries and regions of the Balkans that still are of a predominantly Muslim population. Or it may be true of other countries or regions that, at some point of their history, were under Muslim rule such as much of Spain or parts of Italy. The Orient equally is full of examples that resist such categorisation. Turkey is one example. Ever since the times of Kemal Pasha, modern Turkey has struggled to become part of the West. In many ways, it is today a Western country. In many other ways, and in spite of its official laïcism, it is still a Muslim country. Israel forms another example. Geographically located in West Asia and with much of its history, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, forming part of that locale, Israel is still perceived as a Western country. India is yet another such example. For Europeans, India was always part of ‘the Orient’. To the extent that it was ruled by Muslim dynasties, it also formed part of the Muslim world. One could add other examples; however, the three examples mentioned here formed the basis of the research project out of which this book has grown. The focus of this book is on India. Turkey, Israel and Palestine will be the subject of a subsequent publication. While these examples challenge the dichotomy between Europe and the Muslim world, this dichotomy seems too entrenched to be overcome

4

IDENTITY POLITICS IN INDIA AND EUROPE

in a simple act of good will or political correctness. The antagonism resides firmly in the minds of people and since to a great extent our social reality is formed by what most of us believe the antagonism between Europe and the Muslim world is ‘real’. Hopefully, by looking at the fuzzy borders of our ‘selves’ and those of our ‘others’, we will eventually change our minds and think of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in less antagonistic terms. Moreover, any juxtaposition or contrast requires a third entity, which is commonly called tertium comparationis, by reference to which comparisons can be drawn. In the case at hand, it is not clear what the relevant tertium comparationis should be. Europe denotes a region by way of a geographical term. If the Muslim world is to be understood accordingly as denoting a geographical region, then the question arises as to why we should single out such an enormous geographical sphere by reference to a religion. Besides, from a European perspective, it is far from obvious that the Muslim world looking back on ‘us’ should see Europe, first and foremost, and not the USA, for example. Here again, the juxtaposition of Europe and the Muslim world is more indicative of European self-centredness than anything else. The asymmetrical categorisation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in geographical versus religious terms seems to be a contemporary version of the tropes ‘civilised’ versus ‘barbarian’ that hail from Greek and Roman antiquity. The terminology suggests that here we have an area where people have emancipated themselves from their dependence on religious mythological thinking and there we have a civilisation that is wrapped in myth and obscurity. Here we have the civilisation that has outgrown its received traditions and religion attachments in favour of individual autonomy, wherein reside every human’s dignity. There we have a civilisation that is stuck in pre-Enlightenment notions of humanity, where human dignity is inseparably linked with the fulfilment of role expectations within received traditions, traditions that are justified by reference to Islam. To create an awareness of the persistence of such tropes is a major concern of this book.2 Here, it is argued that at least for the period commonly referred to as the Middle Ages, that is, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginnings of the European colonial expansion and the time of Reformation (roughly 500–1500 CE), we can easily find symmetric labels for the two emerging civilisations, namely the ‘Arabicate’ and the ‘Latinate’ civilisations.3 The underlying notion of civilisation is that of a semiotic frame of reference that serves members of different cultures (which in turn are semiotic frames of reference) as a common basis for communication.

Late Antiquity to the Beginnings of the Modern Era

5

Through such semiotic reference frames, people share certain basic tenets about the character and composition of the world and its history, possibly of metaphysical worlds beyond the empirical world and their significance for their life here and now and thereafter. Those frames of reference are not self-contained and sealed. They overlap and supersede each other both synchronously and diachronously. A single person can be aware of several symbolic frames of reference and thereby partake in several civilisations at once. Frequently, civilisations share a common lingua franca like Arabic, Latin or Sanskrit. These linguae francae are often part of ‘high culture’ and therefore less frequently used in everyday contexts. They often form the register of the educated classes (monks, scribes, priests and the learned). It seems appropriate to speak of Arabicate, Latinate or Indic civilisations meaning each a set of cultural spheres that partake in the semiotic frame of reference that is offered in Arabic, Latin or Sanskrit language and literature. Taking part in one frame of reference does not preclude the simultaneous partaking of that same person in other frames of reference. Thus, people living in Delhi in the 19th century could be simultaneously partaking in Arabic-, Persian-, Urdu-, Sanskrit- and English-based semiotic frames of reference. Which of them being the dominant frame of reference informs us about prevailing power relations and about the dominance or hegemony that the elite of one culture or civilisation exerts over another. While the characterisation of the two civilisations as Arabicate and Latinate seems justifiable for the Middle Ages, the same becomes increasingly questionable in the modern era, that is, the period starting roughly with the processes of Reformation in the 16th century CE and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, with subsequent developments such as the Enlightenment, processes of secularisation, modern state formation, bourgeois revolution, democratisation and technological innovation. Processes of colonial expansion, capitalism, imperialism and globalisation drew more and more regions into the maelstrom of an interdependent and entangled history where a distinct civilisation of modernity, lately with English as the predominant language, came to supersede all other civilisations. Of course, the discourse of modernity is not a homogeneous one, as Shmuel Eisenstadt has pointed out.4 However, even if one grants that modernity has taken markedly different courses even within Europe, not to speak of the non-European world, a common reference point—a tertium comparationis—needs to be stipulated in order to maintain a certain semantic congruence between different discourses of modernity.5

6

IDENTITY POLITICS IN INDIA AND EUROPE

In connection with modern processes of secularisation, the same point has been made by José Casanova. According to Casanova, certain features commonly associated with modernity like functional and structural differentiation ‘serve to define the very structure of modernity’, universally, whereas others like the privatisation of religion represent historical options.6 In order to compare different courses of modernity and still recognise all of them as related, we are in need of a concept of modernity that encompasses, as a generic term, all instances of modernity, however different they may be in their respective regional or cultural contexts. We are in need of a common reference point denoting the commonalities in all these discourses also in order to distinguish discourses of modernity from pre-modern discourses. Speaking of a civilisation of modernity in contrast to the pre-modern civilisations of the Middle Ages, I am referring to the specific difference that is marked by the loss of the religious frame of reference as the singular reference point permeating all medieval discourses. Pre-modern civilisations are characterised by the fact that discourses of all spheres, politics, science, philosophy, ethics, law, and so on, share a common religious reference point (that is, good politics is Christian politics, good science is Christian science, good philosophy is Christian philosophy). ‘Modernity’ in the singular thus refers to the establishment of spheres of discourse independent from the previously dominant religious frame of reference. This coincides with sociological processes of functional differentiation of the spheres of politics, law, science and religion. Such processes, if studied with reference to a particular region or culture, can be varied. There is no master plan that is followed everywhere and there is no norm that allows us to decide what is a good or bad, a complete or an incomplete process of functional differentiation. Therefore, the use of ‘modernities’ in the plural seems justified. We can speak of an Egyptian and a French and an Indian and an English modernity without precluding the possibility that they all share something in common, which for the purpose of this book I take to be the emancipation of social spheres and spheres of discourse from the dominant religion-based framework. For our juxtaposition of Europe and the Muslim world, this means that modernity is not suitable as differentia specifica because it would suggest that Europe alone had undergone processes of modernity and the Muslim world or India either had been left out or would trail after Europe in its imperfect emulation of the European example. This would furthermore suggest that there could be only one true model of modernity, the European one, which other regions of the world would have to follow in

Late Antiquity to the Beginnings of the Modern Era

7

order to know the true promise of a secular characterisation. This, however, is precisely what Eisenstadt and Casanova have dissuaded us to do. Major lines of conflict are thus not running along geographical borderlines but along semiotic reference frames. It seems to be the fundamental mistake of Samuel P. Huntington’s theory of culture groups, and their alleged propensity to clash, that he suggests that culture coincides with geographical region. Instead, debates and possibly conflict about symbolic dislocations seem to permeate societies. The resulting lines of conflict cut right through the geographical demarcations of allegedly traditional versus post-traditional societies. The relevant altercation, therefore, seems to be with modernity in the context of traditional society and with traditional frames of reference in the context of post-traditional societies. These altercations can be found predominantly in traditional societies as in India where modernity is challenged and adopted in a modified and mellowed way before the backdrop of traditional Indian social norms, or they can be found in predominantly post-traditional societies such as Germany where migrant and autochthonous traditionalists challenge the modern, individualistic frame of reference by pushing the discourse towards preoccupations with culture and religion, family, traditional values and differentiation of social roles according to gender, and so on. Israel and Turkey form yet two other contexts. In these societies, both factions, traditionalists and post-traditionalists, seem to be quite strong.

Notes 1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). 2. The use of tropes has been extended from usage in linguistics and literary criticism to the field of philosophy of history by, among other theorists, Hayden White in his Metahistory (Baltimore: Hopkins, 1973). Tropes are generally understood to be styles of discourse underlying the historian’s writing of history. They are historically determined in as much as the historiography of every period is defined by specific types of trope. 3. In analogy to Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s term ‘Islamicate’. See his The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilisation, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). Thanks to Jamal Malik for the hint. 4. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2005). 5 . This point has been stressed by Björn Wittrock in his “Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition,” in Multiple Modernities, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2005), 31–60. 6. See José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 39f.

Encounters in the Late Roman World THE HISTORY OF MUTUAL PERCEPTIONS BETWEEN Europe and the

Muslim world has been studied extensively by a number of authors.1 To a large degree, these studies include the history of reciprocal perceptions pure and simple between the Arabicate Muslim world and the world of Latinate Christendom. The latter is taken as the historical basis of what we call Western Europe today.2 By implication, these studies also cover the particular history of reciprocal perceptions between the Latinate and the Arabicate worlds. An important turn in the historical writing about the encounter between East and West was marked by Edward W. Said’s critique of Western Orientalism (Said, Orientalism). Said’s fundamental criticism of the academic discipline labelled ‘Orientalism’ and the ideological critique of the Orientalist discourse rests on the observation that ‘the Orient’ itself is a questionable category. As a theoretical category, it is too broad and assumes too great a level of generalisation. Geographically, an academic field of oriental studies would cover everything to the east of Europe, from the so-called Near East, Turkey, the Levant and Egypt, to the socalled Far East, China, Japan and South East Asia with Arabia, Central Asia and South Asia, in between. Even Africa is fitted in somewhere. It would seem absurd to assume that this enormous area should have been and still be home to a single, more or less homogeneous civilisation on the basis of which its inhabitants could be attributed any common features that set them apart from the inhabitants of western Europe. Said’s observations have not remained without objection. Historian Margrit Pernau observes that even though the breaking up of fixed categories such as Orient and Occident may have been Said’s original intention, he ends up juxtaposing a homogeneous and mighty West with a just as homogeneous, but impotent, East.3 Just the antecedents have changed. The accused East becomes the victim and the heroic West becomes the perpetrator. More appropriately, one would emphasise the possibility (and actuality) of cultural overlap and syncretism and entanglements and mutual dependencies where victims and perpetrators could not easily be distinguished.

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However, Said does not discard all of Orientalist scholarship. He does allow for criteria to distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false’ knowledge about the Orient. With Isaiah Berlin, he denounces the common Orientalist attitude as ‘profoundly anti-empirical’ and compares it to a kind of modern myth making. It shares with magic and with mythology the self-containing, selfreinforcing character of a closed system, in which objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter.4

Said would thus allow for a productive reassessment of Orientalist scholarship in the light of empirical data. This is precisely what postOrientalist scholarship attempts to do today in the name of ‘entangled history’ (histoire croisée) for instance.5 Thus, the question arises: in the light of what empirical evidence can we afford to speak of Europe and the Muslim world even after Said? Asia as well as Europe have been (and are) home to a great number and variety of civilisations which at times intersect and overlap. One needs only to remember that the Hellenic, the Roman, the Byzantine, the Arab and the Ottoman Empires integrated important parts of Asia, Africa and Europe. Nevertheless, for a specific period, say from the early Middle Ages until the modern era, one can set apart two civilisations, one emerging from West Asia and another emerging from the rubble of the Roman Empire in Western Europe—the Arabicate and the Latinate civilisations; the divide is not to be taken as absolute. Both civilisations share common reference points and origins in late antiquity and both categories allow for further differentiation. On a very general level, at least they do not seem incommensurable. Both civilisations are marked by the fact that a single language of education, Arabic and Latin, and a common universe of reference, of religious symbols and narratives, expand over vast tracts of different local cultures and their respective vernaculars. For most of the time under consideration, these two realms coexisted side by side with frontiers moving back and forth but with none of them being able to dominate or subdue the other. This changed with the time of the European colonial expansion and with globalising exigencies of modernity. With globalisation today, the distinction between the two civilisations may not be so marked any more, for a global ‘Anglicate’ civilisation seems to have superseded both the worlds. However, the formative period for both civilisations, the so-called Middle Ages, still has an impact today. One indication of this impact

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is the fact that it was in those centuries that most of the repertoire of how to represent ‘the other’, the terminology and imagery of reciprocal perception was created. This repertoire kept being used throughout the centuries well into the period of colonialism and it makes itself felt even today. We have seen that a legitimate way to speak of Europe and the Muslim world is by reference to the medieval history of mutual perceptions between the Orient and the Occident. A history of perceptions, of course, is a history of history writing and thus a critique of historiography. One brilliant example of such a critique of history writing is Patrick J. Geary’s The Myth of Nations about the medieval origins of Europe.6 In the context of his criticism of ethnic national historiography, particularly with the ethnic strife in the Balkans during the 1990s in mind, Geary points out that: The categories by which Europeans attempt to understand the differences among social groups are inherited from both Classical and biblical Antiquity. Briefly stated, there were two sorts of ‘peoples’. The one was constitutional, based on law, allegiance, and created by a historical process. The other, standing largely outside the process of historical change was biological, based on descent, custom, and geography. Crudely, one can characterize the difference as ‘us’ and ‘them’; ‘civilised’ and ‘barbarian’.7

Originally, the term ‘barbarian’ stems from the ancient Greek word βα′ ρβαρος (barbaros) which meant someone whose first language was not Greek. The word was onomatopoetic, representing the impression of random babble produced by hearing spoken a language that one cannot understand, similar to ‘blah blah’ in modern English.8 Originally, the term is empty of content beyond ‘not Greek’. Later, however, ‘barbarian’ acquired the meaning of ‘standing outside the process of human history’. Like animals and plants cannot be said to have history, people who are classified as barbarian, or primitive, equally do not partake in history. They are perceived as self-identical in a sense transcending history, as being subjected to the laws of nature and thus not part of what is supposed to be the realm of culture, which alone is subject to history and therefore the subject of historiography.9 Geary unmasks the civilised/barbarian dichotomy as a persistent myth that pervades European historiography from antiquity to the present day. The contrary, ‘civilised’, comes to mean ‘being part of’ what Hegel has named ‘World-History’.10

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The root of the dichotomisation into ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘civilised’ and ‘barbarian’ and ‘European’ and ‘Oriental’ lies at the very origin of historiography. The first European historiographer and ethnographer, Herodotus, himself a Greek living in Asia Minor under Persian rule, in his attempt to trace the processes that drove Europe and Asia into deadly collision in the wars between the Greeks and the Persians, still maintained a fairly neutral stand, describing the people of his age with equidistance.11 Every people, he observed, would no doubt find their own customs the most excellent, and he did nothing to dispute such a perspective.12 He was, however, scorned for this neutrality by his successors in Greek and Roman antiquity, particularly after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Thereafter, Greek authors would be part of an imperialist cultural tradition. Their interest in the ‘other’ would be intimately connected with a concern for dominance, a perspective naturally inherited by Roman imperialist authors … This refusal to denigrate the customs of others earned him the epithet of ‘philobarbarian’ from later writers … these critics used his material to attempt to prove the excellence of GrecoRoman tradition over all others, especially of the ‘East’.13

In this connection, Geary points to a mechanism that we can still find at work today in all essentialist descriptions of Islam and the Muslim world. Instead of using differences as markers to describe and distinguish different cultures, cultures are being reduced to these markers. Thus, features that started out as descriptive tools of ethnography become reified and are attributed to their very nature. It is then forgotten that neither Europe nor the so-called Muslim world are homogeneous entities or rock-hard realities. Instead, they are man-made conceptual constructions based on risky generalisations. Much more went into the making of the Arabicate civilisation than a single religion. It has absorbed Hebrew and Greek cultures, Indian and Persian civilisations and Egyptian and other African cultures. The ensuing civilisation enabled dialogue and exchange within its umbrella for a period of several centuries.14 Words bear witness to the interaction of cultures within the Muslim world from al-Andalus in the West to Indonesia in the East, witnesses that pre-date the worldwide expansion of Western civilisation in the times of colonialism, imperialism and globalisation. Even today, in India, the ‘stranger’ is called ‘ajnabi’ (Arabic for stranger/foreigner). Likewise, white people are called ‘firanghis’ in Urdu/Hindi, a word stemming

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from Arabic ‘al-Firanğ’, which evokes the ‘Frankish’ crusaders. Similar cases could be made for other indicators of exchange within civilisations in terms of artefacts and narratives. This only helps to demonstrate that what is meant by Arabicate civilisation cannot be captured by reference to Islam as a religion. Likewise, the Arabic language is only the indicator of the extent and intensity of cultural exchange.15 ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ are used, here, as tags to a civilisation, not as denoting its essence. In much the same way, Herodotus used to attribute to: Each people … its complex of traits, including customs, origins, region, and political form, but while these traits served to identify and distinguish them from their neighbours, they did not constitute the peoples as such. Later authors, such as the Roman polymath Pliny the Elder, turned this system on its head. These traits, along with geographical boundaries, became the determining factors in ethnic identity, not simply characteristics of those belonging to a particular group.16

An account like this one needs to be aware of the danger of taking the accident for the substance, thereby essentialising Islam and the Muslim world, bereaving it of their potential for change and development and depriving it of their historicity. It should not be guilty of the same mistake that Geary attributes to the historians of ancient Rome: Romans categorized their neighbours, enemies, and subjects according to a system that imputed objective and immutable criteria. Thus, other ‘peoples’ had no history, since their origins were lost in the time of myth, and membership was determined by birth, not by choice. They only became part of history when they entered the sphere of Roman existence.17

In the remainder of his book, Geary observes how historians tend to model their way of depicting history after these old predecessors. As in fiction writing, certain formal principles recur according to genre. In an analogous way, the literary ‘genre’ of historiography follows patterns that find their models in the writings of Plinius and Caesar, Tacitus and other Roman authors who in turn have modelled their historiography on their Greek precursors. One formal principle of representation in Western historiography is the afore-mentioned dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and ‘civilised’ and ‘barbarian’. This representative principle is used by historians throughout the ages till the age of colonialism, where people newly ‘discovered’ by European conquistadors and traders were

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pressed into the schema of ‘us’ and ‘them’—the superior and the inferior races—the civilised and those subjected to the ‘civilising mission’ of the white man. Apart from this dichotomy, Geary makes out another major source from which Western historians, since the rise of Christianity, drew formal principles of history writing. That is the biblical tradition with the history of the people of Israel forming the paradigm. The Judaic tradition distinguishes between the people of God and other people. The chosen people, am, are defined by their common genealogy, but more so by their covenant with God through Moses on Mount Sinai. The other people, goyim, are simply defined by their descent from common ancestors. The dominant trope in the history of the chosen people is their migration from Egypt into the promised land, a trope later used symbolically by Christians, such as the Pilgrim Fathers with reference to their promised land New England. Geary demonstrates through the example of a Belgian historian writing the history of the Zulu people of South Africa how the expectations of the Christian European readership induced him to impose the trope of migration onto the history of the Zulus.18 Similarly, historiographers in the times of nationalism in the 19th century have used the trope of migration to represent the history of their preferred people and have named the formative period of European people the period of the ‘Great Migrations’. Thus, for French historians, their ancestral people, the Franks, migrated from eastern Germania to the Western side of the Rhine and formed the stock of the French nation. Others take the Gauls as the ancestral people of France and ascribe to them a migration from the Danube into France. Geary shows how these tropes are misleading and how much historiography was and still tends to come under the spell of such very basic but ill-founded schematisations of how to represent ‘the other’ and ‘oneself’. Geary distinguishes three major tropes which are relevant for our purpose here: (i) the trope of the constitutional people with an existence founded in politics and history, (ii) the trope of the barbarian people with an existence founded in nature and mythology and (iii) the trope of migration (including the topoi exodus, covenant, promised land and chosen people). The difference between (i) and (ii) is largely one of perspective. From the internal perspective, the observer tends to note the complexity, heterogeneity and historic contingency of the people to which she/he belongs. Viewed from outside, these dimensions may escape the observer and she/he may emphasise the simplicity, homogeneity and predictability of a people, thus modelling it after natural phenomena that

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obey laws of nature rather than following the contingent path of history. A people viewed from outside tends to be depicted as an immutable biological entity. Its own conception of history is easily perceived as a myth, whereas from the inside perspective one’s own foundational myths are taken for history. As an illustration as to how historiographic tropes are transmitted from people to people without being perceived as myths, one can think of the trope of Aeneas fleeing the burning city of Troy, migrating to a new place with his followers, and forging a new ‘people’ by amalgamating his retinue with the aboriginal people of the newly found place. This trope has been recounted by Virgil as the foundation myth of ancient Rome. It recurs in the foundation myths of Germanic people such as the Franks. The Grimm Brothers recount the ‘origin of the Franks’ as follows: The lineage of the Franks is closely related to that of the Romans, both of their ancestors stem from old Troy. When the Greeks had destroyed this fortress in accordance with God’s verdict, only few Trojans escaped, travelled the world for a long time. Franko with his son came down to the Rhine and sat there; then together with friends he built a small Troy in the memory of his heredity and he called the adjacent stream Santen, after the river in their old land. The Rhine they took for the sea. And thus the Frankish people developed.19

And the Franks were not the only ones trying to give themselves a history that was similarly glorious and ancient as that of the Romans. Geary mentions other ‘barbarian histories’20 from the 6th to the 12th centuries that brought their people into the ambit of Greco-Roman civilisation, drawing for this purpose on Roman history/mythology. These examples show another mechanism that seems to be at work among people at the periphery of the Roman Empire. The so-called barbarians began to mould their self-perceptions in accordance with the systems of classification common among their Roman neighbours whom they sought to emulate. ‘Far from rejecting the facile images of ethnicity elaborated through centuries of classical writing, they [the Romanobarbarian elites] internalised them, accepting the characteristics that Romans had long projected onto barbarians as reality.’21 Processes of acceptance of ascribed identities and shifts in power relation between the populus Romanus and the barbarian people began to obliterate the old semantics of civilised versus barbarian, populus versus gens. With the Roman Empire crumbling away and barbarians coming into positions of hegemony, they began to define themselves as constitutional people and the Romans as a gens.

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Until the emergence of Islam as the new external ‘other’ with respect to which Europeans began to define their own civility, a new and internal ‘other’ already emerged. When in Visigothic Spain, after the renouncement of Arianism for Catholicism in January 587 CE by King Reccared (ruled 586–601), the conversion of the populus Gothorum to Catholicism facilitated its merging with the populus Romanorum into a single people of Spain, an important part of the population and an integral part of Roman citizenry since 212 CE was left out: the Jews. Through the course of the sixth century, Jews progressively lost their Roman identity, as orthodox [Catholic] Christianity and Romanitas became ever more closely linked. They were thus forced into an ethnogenesis of their own, one that created them as a despised and persecuted people in the eyes of their Catholic neighbours.22

Terrible pressures were brought to bear on Jews, who were faced with baptism or brutal punishment. Jewish travel was restricted and placed under the supervision of Christian clergy; adherence to Jewish dietary laws, circumcision and proselytising were punishable by flogging, scalping, mutilation and confiscation of property. But even while these efforts were intended to bring about conversion, royal legislation implied that even converted Jews remained enemies of Christianity. Ultimately, anti-Jewish legislation reached the point that King Ervig ordered the enslavement of all Jews, whether converted or not.23 These early instances of state-sponsored anti-Semitism were paralleled by similar processes in the Byzantine Empire.24 The Jews of Spain must have cheered the advent of Islam in 711 CE. For the stabilising barbarian polities of emerging Western Europe, the world of Islam acquired the role that Barbaria had performed for the Roman Empire. Interestingly, by that time, the term ‘barbarian’ had changed its meaning for those formerly so labelled. Germanic ruling elites had laboured long enough to forge a new model of a civilised people based on Roman Law, Catholicism and the Latin language in combination with the military ethos of the Germanic ruling elite, sacral kingship and common law. ‘Peoples had become once more what they were for Pliny: territorial units of geographical and political organisation, not social or cultural groups.’25 Classical ethnographers, even while deeply aware of the heterogeneous nature of their own societies, readily projected these quasi-organic biological images [Frank, Lombard, Goth] onto the ‘other’, the ‘barbarian.’ … from the fourth century on, military bands appropriated these labels and

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used them as rallying cries for concerted action. The names of peoples were thus less descriptions than claims—claims for unity under leaders who hoped to monopolize and to embody the traditions associated with these names. At the same time, these leaders were appropriating disparate traditions and inventing new ones in the form of the royal and sacred genealogies, legendary battles, and heroic events of these peoples … social and political groups with widely differing pasts, values, and cultures accepted the victor’s right to articulate for them a common past. Myths of common descent and a shared history … masked the radical discontinuity and heterogeneity that characterised Late Antiquity.26

The Franks in Gaul, the Lombards in Italy and the Visigoths in Spain ceased to view themselves as barbarians. ‘Thus the term barbarus began to take on a new meaning: that of foreigner, and increasingly, pagan foreigner.’27 That included the Muslims or the Saracens as they were called at the time. From the 8th century on, emerging western Europe— or Latin-Christian civilisation as it expanded from Charlemagne’s Empire into the eastern, northern and western corners of Europe—saw itself faced with a twin ‘other’: the Saracen as the outer enemy and the Jew as the inner foe. The two newly emerging stereotypes stood in the tradition of the civilised/barbarian distinction but they also developed their own and mutually enforcing characteristics. This is the story that Andrew Wheatcroft captures in his extensive study on the ‘antagonism between the Western Christian and the Mediterranean Islamic worlds’.28 Wheatcroft finds that this relationship is characterised by reciprocal ‘malediction’, some of which resurges in times of crisis between the two civilisations as in the present day. Maledicta [words of hate] is the name I have used to describe the traditional and historic system within which ‘Christendom’ relates to ‘Islam’ … Maledicta are about cursing … about formal and purposeful imprecations … in both Christendom and Islam the pronouncement of a formal malediction was a most solemn act, replete with dire consequences.29

The purpose of creating an awareness of the long history and the different shapes that this malediction took in the course of history is of course to elevate to the level of consciousness the conditions that make those sharing in the tradition prone to certain behaviour towards the ‘other’. Creating an awareness of one’s propensities and where they come from can be a first step towards overcoming them. The first imprecations against Islam were already invoked by early Christian contemporaries of Muhammad and they have been condensed

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in the earliest names given to the adherents of the new belief. Muslims themselves believed that they were descendants of Ishmael, son of Abraham and Hagar. In the Qur’an, Ishmael is considered to be one of the prophets. He and his mother are believed to be buried beneath the Kaaba. Christian contemporaries stressed the doubtful nature of Hagar, whom they believed to be an Egyptian maidservant or slave of Abraham’s wife Sarah, and Abraham’s concubine. Christians, by contrast, were said to have descended from Abraham’s lawful son Isaac. Worse still than the stain of bastardy, an even darker curse hung over the people of the east. Christians inferred that … Muslims were the lineal descendants of Cain … Between the children of Cain and the other descendants of Adam, there could be only mutual slaughter and revenge for the primordial crime of fratricide.30

In fact, Arabs as a people seem to have had a similar ethnogenesis as we have encountered with the ‘barbarian’ people at the fringes of the Roman Empire. They were tribesmen squeezed between two empires, Byzantium and Persia, and utilised by both as auxiliaries or foederati in the defence of their border provinces and towns. The same laws would have applied to their leaders as to any European or Central Asian tribal leader: In order to unite the greatest possible number of warriors for successful raids into the wealthy provinces of Eastern Rome and Persia, they had to provide just enough cohesion without curtailing their aggressive energy and vigour. Just like Alboin, king of the Lombards, who conquered Italy with a multi-tribal army or Attila, multicultural king of the ‘Huns’, Arab leaders managed to forge military alliances out of disparate tribes, who used to be arch-enemies years before, with the promise of larger gain if they were to direct their appetite for booty towards the outside, more wealthy world of empire rather than devouring each other. The charter of Medina that Muhammad brought about in 622 united the Meccan and Medinan tribes—many Jewish tribes among them—in an alliance against Mecca which was still primarily defensive in nature. Nevertheless, the process that Muhammad had started off with the unification of the tribes at Medina lead to a rapid process of ethnogenesis, which was sustained by ever larger and more profitable raids and conquests, until within less then three generations from his death Islam ruled from Spain to India. There remained profound tensions between conflicting loyalties to tribe and the service to the larger purpose, but the system worked in spite of its inherent contradictions.

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The sudden rise of Islam in most of the known world must have had a stunning effect on those Christian contemporaries who did not come to enjoy its liberating results. Many of the Monophysite Christians, some of them Arabs themselves, who suffered persecution from Eastern Rome, were better off under Arab rule than under Byzantium. But for those remaining under Christian rule, the perception of the Arab was that of a ferocious barbarian ( ferox).31 Thus, in a way to be analysed in the following pages, the new concept of the ‘other’, the ‘infidel’, was modelled on the earlier concept of the ‘barbarian’. In many important ways, however, the image also changed. One important feature that did change over time was that of the uncivilised brute. In the process of empire building, the Arabs acquired not only land and booty but also the sophistication of the age-old civilisations of Rome and Persia. While Western Rome deteriorated economically, cities depopulated and an urban, money-based economy was replaced by a primitive bartering economy, urban culture, monetary economy and long-distance trade continued unabated in the realms of Islam. With the process of acquiring the knowledge and the ruling skills of their imperial predecessors, the new Romano-Arab and PersianArab elites also inherited the Greco-Roman habit of dividing the world into civilised and barbarians. Thus, they would in turn project the barbarian image onto the representatives of the emerging Latinate civilisation whom they would encounter in the form of crusaders and reconquistadores. But more important than the claim to a higher form of civilisation (urbanism, law, morality and cultural refinement) was that to true religion. True religion could be claimed by the sophisticated urban dweller as well as by the tribesman on the fringes of the emerging Arabicate civilisation. The difference was marked by the non-believer, not by the non-civilised. The same would hold true on the other side. True religion would seemingly unite the European lord at the upper echelons of society and the peasant on the lower scale of the feudal hierarchy, even though neither of them may have been very civilised in the early Middle Ages. In a way the harsh distinction drawn in antiquity between the civilised and the barbarian was also mediated between the emerging Latin and Arabic civilisations by the fact that both were making use of the same mythological repertoire taken from the Hebrew Scriptures. Thus, there was a much larger common ground on which these two civilisations encountered each other than say between the Roman and the Germanic

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tribal world. The larger the common ground the fiercer the contestation over how exactly to relate to the set of stories offered by the Hebrew Scriptures and to its main figures: Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and so on. But these controversies should not prevent us from seeing the extent of the consensus that existed between Islam and Christianity. Both shared a conception of historical time as limited and unidirectional (as opposed to unlimited and circular). Both shared a belief of human action being subject to divine judgement on the day of resurrection. Both shared a fear of eternal damnation versus a hope for paradise and eternal bliss in the times after time. Both shared a concept of eternity after historical time would have drawn to a close. The controversies over the right path to salvation were fissuring the world of late antiquity, and also Christianity, from within and from without. They marked the context into which Islam was born and they have found their explicit mention in the Qur’an and the Sunnah. When Arabic holy scriptures speak of Christians and Jews, Jesus and Maria, and so on, they take a stand in these debates, presupposing on the other hand the many commonalities with Christians and Jews. In a way one may be inclined to postulate on the basis of these shared references to the world of the Hebrew Scriptures to speak of only one civilisation, an Abrahamitic civilisation, uniting the whole world of late antiquity in one large sphere of discourse. From this perspective, Christianity and Islam are but two variants of the same theme, which is true devotion. And this is the perspective that the Christian and Jewish contemporaries of Muhammad and Muhammad himself seems to have shared. Hagemann32 recounts the year 615 in which some of Muhammad’s followers had to flee to Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Muhammad is said to have recommended them to the Christian emperor of Abyssinia as true devotees of God in a sense that did not discriminate between a Christian and an Islamic faith. Only later, when Muhammad had already united the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula did he begin to stress the difference between Christianity and Islam and to mobilise his forces against the Christian world.33 If religion is to mean a well-defined set of beliefs in opposition to other well-defined systems of belief, then the controversies raging in the Eastern Mediterranean during these centuries were not about which religion was right but about what was true religion. Christianity or Islam in this well-defined sense did not yet exist. Instead, what was true religion was contested by everyone who called himself a truly devout person (the meaning of ‘Muslim’). Thus, a Jew and a follower of Christ

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could call themselves ‘Muslim’ just as well as a follower of Muhammad. To use a metaphor from profane life: The controversy was not between Italian pasta or Chinese noodles but about how to cook long strings of dough in the tastiest way. Only after controversies lead to insurmountable differences, followers of certain schools began to end the debate, form systems of Orthodoxy and enforce them with the help of state-like institutions. Thus, came about the different schools of Orthodoxy (Trinitarian Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Orthodox Judaism, Orthodox Islam) and various deviant schools (Monophysite, Arian, Nestorian, non-orthodox Judaism, Sufism, and so on) that could not always rely on state protection. In this context, it is not surprising that early Christian contemporaries of Muhammad mistook him for a Christian heretic. Islam as an institutionally recommended way to salvation had not yet been established. Thus, in the understanding of the Christians of this time, it did not form another full-fledged religion comparable to established Christianity (in its Trinitarian or Greek Orthodox form) but looked rather more like one of those heterodoxies that lay claim to true religion, without, however, enjoying the support of any major state power like Rome or Byzantium. Such state power was also about to coalesce with the emerging faith into a new Islamic Orthodoxy. Within a year of the Prophet Mohammed’s death all the main tribes of Arabia had been cowed and notionally united under the banners of Islam. Apostates and renegades were hunted down and slaughtered. Those who had stood on the sidelines now submitted. The new faith prohibited war between Muslim brothers, so the raiding culture of the desert tribes turned outward, beyond the Arabian peninsula.34

The first Christians to encounter this thrust were the eastern Christians within or in the bordering areas of the Byzantine Empire that controlled today’s Arabic world from Syria and the Levant to Mauretania in the West. ‘For some Orthodox scholars Muslims were … the flail of God and a hellish instrument of Divine Vengeance on a failing Christendom, … a hot poisonous wind … the Fourth Beast of the Apocalypse “like a flying eagle”.’35 They described Islam as ‘a step backwards’, a ‘retrogression’ in religion and Muhammad as ‘the son of the father of lies’.36 A liar, however, is assumed to consciously obliterate the truth of which she/he is well aware.

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Thus, calling Muhammad a liar proves as to how close to Christianity he was perceived. He was thought of having learned of the gospel but wilfully ignoring or distorting it. These allegations are mirrored by similar charges against Christians and Jews in the Qur’an (9.30): The Jews call ‘Uzair a son of Allah, and the Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah’s curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!

The reciprocal allegation of dissimulation and fraud demonstrates how in the Eastern Mediterranean relations between Christians and Muslims started off almost like a sectarian struggle within a single cultural world the fundamentals of which the feuding parties shared. An important source of that period is John of Damascus (al-Mansur by his Arabic name), a Byzantine bishop in the mid 7th century. John was brought up in Damascus where his father was the head of the Syrian tax department under caliph Abd al-Malik. John used to be the playmate of the caliph’s son who was to become caliph Yazid later on. After the death of his father, John held a public office in Damascus until hostilities against Christians ended his career. The example of John’s father shows how the conquering Arabs made use of the skilled men of the Roman administration instead of disposing of them after their conquest. As in the case of the early Germanic kingdoms in Europe, the Arab’s success depended on how they were able to come to terms with the populations residing in the territories they conquered and whether they could avoid antagonising the civil elites in their new domains. This depended largely on the readiness to learn from the local elites and to mingle with the autochthonous population, which required a certain degree of tolerance towards their religion. Where this flexibility was lacking, as in the case of the Vandals in North Africa, imperial rule was short lived.37 A rupture in John’s career may have been one of the reasons for his dislike of Islam. He condemned Muhammad as the Antichrist. Yet, for his Christian contemporaries at the Council of Hiereia he was still too ‘“Saracen minded”, and too sympathetic to Islam’.38 One of the most persistent legends about Islam till today is the legend of the Christian monk, supposed teacher of Muhammad, and alleged source of the Qur’an. Even today’s debates around Luxenberg’s theses

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seem to perpetuate the view that Islam is actually nothing but a Christian heresy.39 The legend was around from the very inception of Islam. Even the Qur’an mentions it and guards against it. Thus, God speaks through Muhammad: ‘We know indeed that they say, “It is a man that teaches him.” The tongue of him they wickedly point to is notably foreign, while this is Arabic, pure and clear.’40 For John of Damascus, this mysterious man was a heretic Christian monk. In later accounts, he is sometimes called an Arian, a Nestorian, a Monophysite, an Apostate, in some accounts he is even claimed to be the author of the Qur’an.41 The chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, originally in Greek, was translated into Latin by Anastasius Bibliothecarius in the 9th century and thus became the main source for this legend throughout the Latin Middle Ages.42 For the first time in the Latin West, Petrus Venerabilis (1094–1156), abbot of Cluny and initiator of Islamic Studies in the Occident, mentions a Nestorian monk with name Sergius as Muhammad’s source of information in a letter to Bernard of Clairvaux (around 1090–1153). He claims that Sergius had denied the divine nature of Christ and had won over Muhammad to his opinion.43 The legend sedimented and inspired popular fancies about Muhammad and Islam until well into modernity. Its purpose was to discredit the authenticity of the Qur’an as a divine revelation and to make it look like but a repercussion of a Christian heresy. Muhammad began to appear like the poor cousin of Christ. This fact was reflected in the names associated with Muslims for the Christians of that period. Muslims were ‘Agarenes’, that is, sons of Hagar, or ‘Ishmaelites’ to mark their descent from the illicit son of Abraham and his ‘Egyptian concubine’. By contrast, in Islam, Ishmael is known as the first-born son of Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic) from his second wife Hagar. Here Ishmael was the first legitimate son of Abraham and it is asserted that he and not Isaac (Iss’haq in Arabic) was the one nearly sacrificed—minor differences, indeed! In this context, it seems curious that the most common name for Muslims during the Middle Ages should become ‘Saracens’, that is, sons of Sarah, the legitimate wife of Abraham. Wheatcroft explains this as follows: … the word was used to describe the inhabitants of desert Arabia, and then by extension, the Muslims. One theory propagated by Saint Isidore

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of Seville was that these were ‘Syringae’—Syrians—and Saraceni was a simple misreading. Another was that the word first related to one Arab Bedouin tribe, the Bani Sara, and later was applied to all Arabs.44

What we have seen so far concerns the fist encounters between Christians and Muslims still within the ambit of the decaying Roman Empire and its successor states. With the emergence of the Medieval Latinate civilisation in the West and with the conquests and incursions of Muslims into territories that are considered part of Europe today, a new chapter begins. In that chapter, however, we will see how Latin polemics against Islam were raised upon the framework initially elaborated within the few decades of first contact between Christians and Muslims in the East. Islam continued to be assimilated to the existing paradigms of evil in the Old and New Testaments. ‘These primordial ascriptions were repeated in later scholarly discourse and went unchallenged for centuries.’45

Notes 1. To mention only a few recent publications on the issue: Ludwig Hagemann, Christentum contra Islam. Eine Geschichte gescheiterter Beziehungen[Christendom versus Islam. History of a Failed Relationship] (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999), John V. Tolan, Saraceus. Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) and Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels. The Conflict between Christendom and Islam 638–2002 (London: Viking, 2003). 2. For the emergence of western Europe from the expansion of Latin Christendom, see Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 3. Margrit Pernau, Bürger mit Turban. Plurale Identitäten der Muslime in Delhi im 19. Jahrhundert [Citizens Sporting a Turban. Plural Identities of Muslims in 19th Century Delhi]. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008). 4. Said, Orientalism, 70 (emphasis in the original). 5. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung. Der Ansatz der Histoire croisée und die Herausforderung des Transnationalen,” [Comparison,Transfer, Entanglement. Histoire croisee Approach and Challenges of the Transnational] in Geschichte und Gesellschaft (History and Society) 28 (2002): 607–36. 6. Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations. The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 7. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 42 (emphasis in the original). 8. Related onomotopoetic forms are found in other Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit barbara (stammering).

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9. For a discussion of the terms ‘culture’ versus ‘nature’, see my “Study of Migrant Identities through Migrant Literatures,” in German Studies in India. Aktuelle Beiträge aus der indischen Germanistik/Germanistik in Indien [Recent Contributions from German Studies in India/Indian German Studies] ed. Dorothea Jecht and Shaswati Mazumdar (Munich: Iudicium, 2005), 81–116. 10. Subaltern historian Ranajit Guha takes issue with the Hegelian concept of Worldhistory for reducing the course of human history to the record of great men of state, empires and clashing civilisations and that renders invisible the quotidian experience of ordinary people. See Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 11. Herodotus, The Histories (London: Random House, 1992). 12. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 47. 13. Ibid., 47. 14. For the concept of a civilisation or culture as a ‘field of discourse’, see Jamal Malik, ed. Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History 1760–1860, vol. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 15. Just as in medicine, radioactive markers can serve as indicators of the veins of communication in an organism without, however, contributing much to their explanation. 16. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 48. 17. Ibid., 50. 18. Ibid., 157ff. 19. Grimm Brothers, eds, “Deutsche Sagen” [German Tales] Chap. 423 in Herkunft der Franken (Origin of the Francs) (Munich: Artemis & Winkler, 2002), 389 (my translation). 20. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 61. 21. Ibid., 60. 22. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 134. 23. Ibid., 135. 24. Ibid., 134. 25. Ibid., 151. 26. Ibid., 155f. 27. Ibid., 140. 28. Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels. The Conflict between Christendom and Islam 638–2002 (London: Penguin/Viking, 2003), xxxi. 29. Ibid., 324 (emphasis in the original). 30. Ibid., 5. 31. Ibid., 40. 32. Hagemann, Christentum contra Islam [Christendom versus Islam], 7f. 33. Ibid., 8. 34. Ibid., 41. 35. Wheatcroft, Infidels, 53f. 36. Thus, Nicetas Byzantinos, see Wheatcroft, Infidels, 48. 37. Geary, Myth of Nations, 109f. 38. Wheatcroft, Infidels, 48. 39. For a review of the debate, see Sabine Kebir, “Die Nacht der Aufklärung” [The Night of Enlightenment] Freitag. Die Ost-West-Wochenzeitung [Friday-East West Weekly] 15: April 9 (2005). Available online at http://www.freitag.de/kultur/0515revolution (accessed October 30, 2009).

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40. Qur’an 16: 103. 41. Hagemann, Christentum contra Islam [Christendom versus Islam], 17, under the names Sergius, Nestorius, Georgios, Nikolaus or Johannes. 42. Ibid. 43. Hagemann, Christentum contra Islam [Christendom versus Islam], 18 (translation: MD). 44. Wheatcroft, Infidels, 54. 45. Ibid., 55.

Islam in Western Europe: Al-Andalus AT THE HEIGHT OF THE ISLAMIC expansion, Muslim armies had

conquered and dominated the Hispanic Peninsula from roughly 720 to around 12001 and Sicily from 828 to 1300 and had made incursions into Sardinia, some regions in Peninsular Italy and some parts of France (Narbonne). The new rulers, few in number, called their Hispanic dominion ‘Al-Andalus’, land of the Vandals. Like the Visigothic ruling class before them, they provided only a thin layer over a largely Catholic population. However, during Roman times, many Jews had migrated into Hispania and after being forced into Diaspora by the destruction of their temple in 70 CE and their expulsion from Jerusalem in 136 CE. Some were engaged in long-distance trade, which was facilitated by the fact that both Christianity and Islam prohibited profitable banking activities.2 Christians living under Muslim rule were known as Mozarabes. They were descendants of the inhabitants of Roman Hispania or the Visigothic kingdom. During the first three centuries of Islamic rule, many converted to Islam. They were called muwallid in Arabic. But distinct communities of Christians and Jews remained, preserved their customs and lived by their own laws.3 Mozarabes and Jews adopted Arabic as their language, and superficial differences in outward appearance between the three communities diminished.4 Although ‘convivencia’ (living together peacefully) seems to have worked for the most part, it was not without tension. Prejudices about the other community were often symmetric. A prominent feature entering the discourse of reciprocal malediction is the insinuation of sexual debasement in the respective other. Alluding to the fact that Muslims were allowed to practice polygamy and Muhammad himself had many wives, Christian polemics portrayed Muslims as perverse, and Muslims apparently did the same with Christians. Wheatcroft quotes the ‘regulations in twelfth-century Seville, under the influence of the austere North African Almorávides’, stating that women: … shall be prevented from entering their abominable churches, for the priests are evil-doers, fornicators, and sodomites. Frankish women must

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be forbidden to enter the church except on days of religious service or festivals, for it is their habit to eat and drink and fornicate with the priests … 5

‘While Christians and Jews might be tolerated in Muslim lands, they were nonetheless to be shunned.’6 The same regulations prohibited that Muslims do inferior work for Christians or Jews such as massaging, disposing of their garbage or cleaning their latrines. It was assumed that ‘The Jew and the Christian are better fitted for such trades, since they are the trades of those who are vile’.7 Although Wheatcroft admits that ‘[w]e cannot be entirely sure how Muslims, Christians and Jews regarded each other’, he argues that: … certainly, statements of enmity predominated, but these may not represent the reality of everyday life. But all the evidence suggests that even when there was no active antagonism the communities wanted to remain separate … The negative views each group held about the others were often reciprocal. Muslims believed viscerally in the other castes’ unbridled sexuality.8

The emphasis on sexual perversion—Muhammad was accused of being sexually promiscuous and having committed incest—may be echoing Christian polemics against the pre-Christian emperors of Rome and the lifestyle of the late Roman elite.9 The wildly aggressive rhetoric was a reflection of Christian leader’s fears of loosing too many of their followers to Arabic sophistication and the Muslim faith. In the great cities of al-Andalus, Arabic replaced Latin as the language of culture while an amalgam of Arabic, Romance and Berber became the vernacular. Wheatcroft cites a rich young Cordovan who deplores a deep sense of loss in Latin-Christian culture. My fellow Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the works of Mohammadan theologians and philosophers not in order to refute them, but to acquire correct and elegant Arabic style … Christians have forgotten their own tongue, and scarce one in a thousand can be found to be able to compose in fair Latin to a friend.10

While some Christians recognised the superiority of Islamic cultivation and sought to benefit from it, others created the myth of a demonic enemy to sustain their resistance. In the manner of modern dissident and revolutionary groups, they took to the propaganda of the deed. In the 9th century, within a period of nine years, 48 Christians

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deliberately chose martyrdom at the hands of their Muslim rulers by insulting Prophet Muhammad.11 By bringing the authorities to react with firmness and brutality, they forced them to contribute to the perpetuation of the myth of habitual Muslim cruelty. ‘Violation of virgins, destruction of altars and holy books, and wanton slaughter were crimes all on a par. The commission of one implied a propensity for all the others.’12 Over time, these myths accumulated into a complex image of a lustful but fearsome alien power built upon biblical prophecy. In this mythopoeia, the events—the Muslim Conquest and the martyrdoms—are added like new meat to a stockpot. They strengthened the mixture, blending, and eventually merging, into the simmering. The tales of the martyrs long after their sacrifice, were one of the most potent elements in the spiritual armoury of the true believers.13

After a while, the martyrdoms began to threaten the status of the Christian minority in Cordova. The Muslim authorities began to strictly enforce the traditional limitations on the dhimmi (religious minorities to be tolerated by Islamic law) and even resorted to collective punishments against Christian groups. Christians were forced to wear distinctive dress. They were removed from government offices and some of their Churches were demolished on grounds that they had been built or altered after the conquest. In 854, a group of Christian community leaders in Cordova formally denounced the martyrs as heretics to avert more pressure on the Christian community. On the other side, such zealotry reconfirmed the Muslim’s sense of cultural superiority. Muslim critics of these events were sufficiently acquainted with the tenets of the Christian faith to know that Jesus had never recommended suicide as a pious act. Their image of the Christian ‘Franks’ as uncivilised and irrational creatures would be reinforced. Wheatcroft cites a study by Eva Lapiedra Gutiérrez on the terms used by Arab historians from the 9th to 14th centuries to describe Christians. According to Lapiedra Gutiérrez, in Spain ‘Frenk’, ‘Frenj’ or ‘Ferinj’ applied to Christians in general, whereas in the East only Western Christians were named that way (Greek or Syrian Christians were called Nasrani). The terms expressed degrees of hostilities towards Christians. They were called adûw Allah (enemy of God), kafir (infidel) or ily (uncivilised). The Franks, thus the contention, were the disadvantaged dwellers of the northern climates where excessive cold had ruined their manners and hardened their hearts. Like beasts they cared only for war, combat and hunting. Even their manner of writing was against

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nature, being from left to right and thus away from the heart and not towards it. Christians were described as dogs or pigs, both animals especially despised in Islam. Franks were labelled as unclean, filthy and contaminating.14 The Christians in Spain coined their own terms to describe Muslims in an exactly symmetrical way. The term most common in Spain was Moor.15 The purported origin of the Moors is explained in the Castilian Book of the Estates: Long after Jesus Christ was crucified, there arose a false man named Muhammad. He preached in Arabia, convincing certain ignorant people that he was a prophet sent by God. As part of his teaching he offered them wholesale indulgences in order that they could gratify their whims with excessive lust and to an unreasonable extent … They had seized lands belonging to Christians. That is why there is war between Christians and Moors … and there will be until the Christians have recovered the lands that the Moors took from them by force; but there is no other reason either because of their faith or the [false] sect … they belong to that there should be war between them. Jesus Christ never ordered anyone to be killed nor that anyone should be pressured to accept the Christian faith, for He does not wish any forced service.16

In the subsequent ‘reconquest’ of Spain by the Christian rulers of the North, Muslims came under Christian rule and were called Mudéjares, which is a Medieval Spanish corruption of the Arabic word mudajjan, meaning ‘those who accept submission’. The revulsion against all those who were not Christian included the Jews and in the minds of many Christians, the two, Muslims and Jews, were linked together as enemies, existing only because of the benevolence of the Christian majority community. If they had not been killed immediately, it was for the same reason that Muslim invaders of Spain had not killed the Mozarabes. They were often people with useful skills one could hardly afford to do away with. As soon, however, as Christian rule consolidated, Jews and Muslims would be expelled from Spain. But not only Muslims and Jews would be persecuted, even those who had converted to Christianity were mistrusted. During the 15th century, a view developed according to which infidels were deficient not only in their belief, something that could have been mended by conversion, but also in their biological substance. Thus, ‘no convert of Jewish or Muslim stock could ever carry the True Faith purely, as could someone of “untainted” Christian descent’.17 Old Christians described themselves

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as ‘pure’ and the assumption was that the converts were impure and coarse. As a consequence, laws to maintain the purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) were instituted to constrain converts, the paradox being that according to Christian belief baptism and repentance purged all sins. Not so in the case of the Jews and the Moriscos, those forcibly converted to Christianity in the 16th century, who were subjected to this early form of racism.18 Although the limpieza de sangre laws were primarily directed against Jews and although it was well known that Islam had developed centuries after Jesus’ death, a strange kind of logic lead Christians to believe that Muslims too had an ineradicable taint like Jews ( Judíos). Jewish converts to Christianity were also called Marranos (pigs).19 Many Christians believed that Muslims, just like Jews, worshipped the Antichrist and had despoiled the Holy Land. From the 1480s, official policy towards non-Christians, both Jews and Muslims, began to harden. Ancient edicts concerning dress and restrictions on trade were enforced. Morerias (ghettos) were constructed outside towns or by blocking off streets and filling in doors and windows.20 From 1481 to 1488, thousands of non-Christians ( Judíos and Mudéjares) or ‘false Christians’ (Conversos and Moriscos) were relinquished to the state by the Spanish Inquisition and burned at the stake. Those who survived were expelled from Spain by the two Catholic kings (Reyes Cathólicos), Ferdinand and Isabella: first the Judíos and Conversos in 1492 and later the Mudéjares and Moriscos in the years between 1608 and 1614.21 Of course not wholely the image of the ‘other’ was negative but there was a mutual recognition of chivalry between the Saracens and the Franks, which found their expression in the ‘border ballads’ of al-Andalus. An example of a chivalrous Muslim appearing in a Christian text is Avengalvón22 in the Lay of the Cid:23 They came unto Molína where Avengalvón was lord. Bishop Jerome, a Christian worthy of his deed and word, Escorted the three ladies whether by day or night, And he led a good charger with his armour on his right. And he and Alvar Fañez rode aye together thus. They have entered in Molína the rich and glorious, And loyally Avengalvón the Moor has served them there. Unto the height of their desire, nothing they lacked whatever: He even bade men strike for them the horseshoe from the steed. Minaya and the ladies, God! he honoured them indeed They got them upon horseback when the next morning fell.

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Unto Valencia loyally he served them all and well. The Moor spent of his own estate, for naught from them took he. With such honourable matters and mirth and revelry They came nigh unto Valencia, that three leagues off doth stand. To my lord Cid who in good hour had girded on the brand, In the city of Valencia the news thereof they bore.24

Avengalvón was noble but not innocent like the new-found savages in the Americas (later on he slays two Christian traitors). The conquest of new territories in the Americas brought new pagans into the purview of the Europeans. But these were not Muslims or Jews. Those knew about the gospel but refused to believe it. These pagans, by contrast, had never heard of the Christian God. As a consequence, the Christian view of the ‘other’ had to be differentiated. Wheatcroft refers to Cardinal Tomás de Vio Cayetano who in 1517 developed a novel doctrine of degrees of infidelity. There were those infidels actually under the jurisdiction of Christianity, of whom the Muslims in Spain were the classic example. There were those who by law but not in fact were under Christian rule, like the inhabitants of North Africa or the Holy Land; and there were those who like the Indians of the Americas had never been under Christian rule. While it was legitimate and laudable to coerce the first two categories, it was not legitimate to enslave and punish the natives of the New World. They were ‘to be sent good men who by their preaching and example would convert them to God’.25

The reality, however, was gruesome and cruel. Missionaries and Christian armies forcefully converted the native ‘Indians’ and destroyed their temples, libraries and by virtue of diseases previously unknown to their whole populations. Nevertheless, the image of the Muslim was defined by way of contrast with the image of the innocent wild man of the New World. While the Muslim was characterised—sometimes by nobility and chivalry, more often by violence, lack of self-control and unbridled passion—the innocent savage of the Americas earned attraction and revulsion, longing and hatred at the same time. The positive component was to become a major ingredient of later century’s romanticism and exoticism. The new savage could be a good savage to the extent that she/he became a topos for what is naturally good in man. The Muslim was never good, even when he was chivalrous; he could be respected but never identified with. Scores of young Europeans emulated the ideal of the noble savage

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from Rousseau to the Hippies. Noble savages could be converted to Christianity; Muslims hardly ever.26 This fact is proven by the centuries of unsuccessful missionary efforts in Muslim lands. The Spanish methods of forcing Muslims to convert proved disastrous. In spite of nominal conversion and years of severe persecution, the Moriscos continued to practise their religion, in secret if necessary. The tensions preceding their eviction from Spain were aggravated by the appearance of a new menace from outside: the Ottoman Turks. This had repercussions on the situation of what was perceived to be the inner enemy: the Moriscos. New features were added to their popular image: that of high treason for conspiracy with the outer enemy.27 The internal threat was aggravated by the fact that the Moriscos seemed to be increasing in numbers faster than the Old Christians. Their growth was attributed to their inherent lustfulness. Even virtues like industriousness gained a negative connotation. ‘They worked hard, but only because they were avaricious: gaining money and never spending it except in their own community.’28 Moriscos in turn gained parity in the game of malediction by calling Spanish priests ‘wolves, merciless thieves, characterised by haughtiness, vanity, sodomy, laxity, blasphemy, apostasy, pomp, vainglory, tyranny, brigandage, and injustice’.29 Thus, Spanish Churchmen pondering the ‘solution’ of the Morisco question for Spain abandon all hope of conversion and assimilation and suggest that each Morisco should be enslaved, branded in the face with a mark and set to work. If they grew too great in numbers, ‘some should be selected for castration’.30 Bishop de Salvatierra deliberates that it would be: … too dangerous to allow the Moriscos, this ‘evil and pernicious people’, to go to North Africa, where they would only reinforce Spain’s enemies [the Ottomans]. The better answer was that all Moriscos, men and boys and all grown women, should be gelded or spayed, and then they could be taken to empty zones of the New World and left there.31

The perception of the renitent Moriscos collaborating with the Turks in North Africa was real enough. Ottoman contingents had supported their guerilla warfare in the Alpujaras. But the threat perception of a conspiracy between Jews and Conversos in Spain and their Jewish counterparts in Constantinople was a mere phantasm. In the realm of myth, the two conspiracy theories merged into one as Bishop Segobre lumps Jews and Moriscos together as ‘people resisting the holy spirit’.32

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As Cervantes has a character in one of his novels say, the Moriscos ‘are the slow fever that kills as certainly as a raging one’.33 To Pegro Aznar Cardona, Moriscos were: a pestilence, vile, careless and enemies of letters and the sciences; they bring up their children as animals without any education; they are dumb and crude in speech, barbarous in language and ridiculous in dress; they eat on the floor and live on vegetables, grains, fruits, honey and milk; they do not drink wine nor meat unless it is slaughtered by them; they love charlatanry, stories, dancing, promenading and other bestial diversions; they pursue jobs that require little work such as weaving, tailoring, shoemaking, carpentry, and the like; they are peddlers of oil, fish, paste, sugar, eggs and other produce; they are inept at bearing arms and thus are cowardly and effeminate; they travel in groups only; they are sensual and disloyal; they marry young and multiply like weeds (malas hierbas) overcrowding places and contaminating them.34

The fear of doom on the Christian side was matched by complementary prophesies on the Muslim side. Some Muslims believed that eventually, ‘All the Spanish towns in Africa would fall to them [the Muslims], and then … a bridge made of copper would appear at the straits of Gibraltar, and they [the Muslims] would pass over, and take all Spain as far as Galicia.’35 Eventually, the decision was for expulsion to North Africa. On marches in bad weather, tens of thousands died on the road.36 ‘Altogether, it is estimated that the number of exiles was about half a million, although there is no general agreement upon the exact number.’37 Thus, a new unitary Christian culture was created, Judaism and Islam officially abolished. But the spectre of the Muslim threatening Spain and Christianity was revived on multiple occasions and even today the presence of Muslim immigrants leads to a revival of perceptions of threat that are reminiscent of these earlier versions of Islamophobia. On the other hand, some Muslims dream of a ‘reconquest’ of Andalusia. Wide tracts of land have been bought up by wealthy Muslims and the Andalusian autonomy movement has received support from various Islamic countries.38 The Spanish experience may not be representative for all of Europe. But, it is here that the basis is laid for a particularly hostile representation of Islam. The repertoire created here is later used in other parts of Europe. Wheatcroft traces the itineraries of images of Muslims and Moriscos from their origin in al-Andalus into the pan-European pool of Islamo-phobic stereotypes. These paths lead from the street language of loathing and

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disgust through learned treaties written in Castilian into the canon of pan-European learned writing. ‘Spain disseminated ideologies that purported to have a universal application but that were often rooted in the particular preoccupations of Iberia.’39 One such path is marked by the evolution of the concept of ‘holy war’ that was used to justify the violence of the crusades and the Christian reconquest of al-Andalus.

Notes 1. For a general account of Islam on the Hispanic Peninsula, see Richard A. Fletcher, Moorish Spain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992). 2. John Merriman, A History of Modern Europe. From the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Norton, 1996). 3. For an account of the legal pluralism in Muslim Spain and in the Christian lands after the reconquest, see Fletcher, Moorish Spain. 4. Wheatcroft, Infidels, 72. 5. Ibid., 73. 6. Ibid., 73f. 7. Ibid., 74. 8. Ibid., 75. 9. Ibid., 87. 10. Ibid., 80f. 11. For a detailed account, see Wheatcroft, Infidels, 81–86. 12. Ibid., 81. 13. Ibid., 79. 14. Wheatcroft, Infidels, 102ff., for these paraphrases from Eva Lapiedra Gutiérrez, Como los musulmanes llamaban a los cristianos hispanicos [How the Muslims Called the Spanish Christians] (Alicante: Instituto de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert, 1997). 15. Spanish moro, inhabitant of Mauretania, derived from Latin maurus/Greek µαγρω, ‘obscure’. 16. Ibid., 100. 17. Ibid., 104. 18. Ibid., 105. 19. … from Arabic muharram, a participle of haram, ‘forbidden’. 20. Ibid., 106. 21. Ibid., 138ff. 22. Corruption of Ibn Ghalbun, a Muslim governor of a Frontier Province in Medieval Spain. 23. Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (1040–1099), nicknamed ‘El Cid Campeador’ from Arabic al-Sayyid, ‘sir’ or ‘lord’. 24. R. Selden Rose and Leonard Bacon, trans. and eds, The Lay of the Cid (Project Gutenberg). Available online at www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8lcid10h.htm (accessed 30 August 2008) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1919). 25. Wheatcroft, Infidels, 136.

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26. The reciprocal attempts between Karl May’s characters Hadschi Halef Omar and Kara ben Nemsi to convert each other to Islam or Christianity, respectively, remained unsuccessful, whereas the last words of the dying Apache Winnetou read: ‘Schar-Iih, I believe in the Saviour. Winnetou is a Christian.’ 27. Wheatcroft, Infidels, 145. 28. Ibid., 144. 29. Ibid., 149. 30. Ibid., 152. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 153. 33. Ibid., 154. 34. Ibid., 154f. (emphasis in the original). 35. Ibid., 153. 36. Ibid., 151. 37. Anwar G. Chejne, Islam and the West, the Moriscos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 13. 38. Hagemann, Christentum contra Islam, 28. 39. Wheatcroft, Infidels, 157f. In the Renaissance courts of Europe, there was a frenetic and uncontrolled dance that came to be called the Moresque or ‘Moorish’ dance. Wheatcroft also calls attention to Erasmus Grasser’s ‘Moriskentänzer’ [Moorish Dancers] in the Stadtmuseum of Munich [City Museum of Munich] (160f.; see www.stadtmuseum-online.de/morisk5g.htm [accessed 28 August 2008]).

Encounter in the Levant: The Crusades

THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF HOLY WAR had its origin in Augustine’s

interpretation of Luke 14:23 ‘Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled’ (my emphasis), which was taken to justify ‘robust missionary practices’1 among the pagan Germanic and Slavonic tribes. Then the theory evolved as a justification for the ‘pilgrimages in arms’ that were later called ‘crusades’2, and for the reconquista of al-Andalus. The ground for the crusades was prepared and accompanied by a pictorial propaganda, of sorts, as Claudio Lange suggests in his documentation of anti-Islamic medieval art in southern France, Italy and Spain.3 According to Lange, a veritable ‘artistic media revolution’ took place in the 11th and 12th centuries in the form of expressly anti-Islamic statuary. These statues reveal a … sustained effort to portray Muslims as unrefined, materialistic, primitive and sexually perverse. Beginning in 1060, statues depicting naked and often grotesquely gesturing Muslims appeared on the exterior of Romanic churches. Many of the statues functioned as column stumps or as parts of decorative drainage systems, stressing the Muslim defeat and subservience to the might of resurgent Christendom.4

Lange’s main thesis is that Latin Europe, which at that time was marked by excessive feudal strife, hunger and disunity, gained a sense of common identity and purpose through turning against an external enemy: the Muslim world. The first stirrings of what later should become Europe was the propaganda for the crusade … The Occident has developed only as an opponent to the Orient … Only this enemy-concept justified its continuance … Columbus not only had the sails of his ships marked with crosses. He also carried a letter of his king to the Khan of the Mongols with the purpose of drawing up an alliance against Islam in case the Earth should unexpectedly turn out to be round.5

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According to Lange, Europe forged its identity by being anti-pagan in general and anti-Islamic in particular. Other heathens like Saxons, Scandinavians, Slaws or Hungarians were eventually subdued and converted to Catholicism. They merged into the budding Latin civilisation. Only the Muslim world offered resistance long enough to serve as a counter bearing for an extended process of identity formation. Much like Muhammad who stopped infighting among Arab tribes and turned the violence, which was devouring them, towards the outside world, Pope Urban II united Europe for the first time in its campaign to drive out the Saracens from the Holy Land. Earlier attempts at pacifying Europe had failed. The ‘Peace and Truce of God Movement’ (pax et treuga dei), an attempt to curb violence between feuding parties and to stop assaults against the poor and defenceless—at least on certain days of the week—made the Church very popular and it should have become the starting point of a more civilised and orderly Europe; but it failed. No central secular force existed in Europe at that time to maintain order and unity. In these circumstances, diversion of attention to the external enemy, Islam, promised a reduction of violence at home. In the decades before the first crusade, Lange recalls, tens of thousands of new Churches were built and adorned with something that hardly any contemporary had seen before: depictions of animals and human shapes cut in stone, for the art of sculpting had virtually died out since the Roman days. Lange has investigated a particular genre of sculpture that can be found on many corbels, consoles and capitals of Romanic Churches in southern Europe and that depicts Muslims and Islam in degrading or obscene fashion. Many of these sculptures were affixed at the outside of buildings where they could be seen not only during mass but also on market days. The sculptures and reliefs that Lange documented reveal an interesting iconography of Islam at this crucial juncture (pornographic depictions of infidels copulating, masturbating or chained together, holding up a column, almost being crushed by it). Muslims are discernible by their gestures, dresses or features (Islamic salutation, call for prayer, turban, thick lips, moustache).6 By calling for ‘a pilgrimage in arms to free the Holy Land from the infidels’, Pope Urban II solved three problems at once. He reduced hunger and starvation by getting rid of some of the hungry (many died on the long marches east from where of the 7,000 who left for the first crusade only 2,000 returned). He reduced violence at home, which was rampant in western Europe, by sending the warring parties abroad, and

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he forged a political unity of some sort, which was based on common faith and common purpose. All this would later enhance the hegemonic position of the Church over Latin Europe and its kings and princes. When the crusading armies from Latin Europe arrived in the Levant, Arabs and Seljuks realised that these men were not like the Byzantine Christians whom they had known before. Soon in Arabic literature, an image began to surface of the ‘Franks’ who hailed from French and German speaking lands and all other parts of Roman Christian Europe. They were seen as huge clean-shaven men carrying plump lances with heavy spearheads and they seemed reckless and foolhardy.7 To Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Levant, the Franks appeared like hungry beasts. One can imagine the horror that must have befallen the inhabitants of a recently conquered town when the crusading troops, tormented by starvation, ‘cut pieces of flesh from the buttocks of the Saracens lying there dead. These pieces they cooked and ate, savagely devouring the flesh while it was insufficiently roasted’.8 Ibn al-Qalanisi from Damascus called them infidels and God forsaken. His complaint was that they solemnly concluded agreements and then broke them at will. ‘At the town of al-Ma’arra, “the Franks, after promising [the inhabitants] safety, dealt treacherously with them. They erected crosses over the town, exacted indemnities from the townsfolk, and did not carry out the terms on which they had agreed.”’9 Muslim chroniclers related many acts of treachery within Islam, but there was something different about the Frank’s behaviour. These chroniclers noted example after example of their orgiastic violence. At Antioch, when the crusaders had captured the Muslim camp, they did not enslave the women they found there, as Muslims would have done, but ‘drove lances into their bellies. Then all in exultant voice blessed and glorified God’.10 When Jerusalem was finally captured, the crusaders treated this holy city like any other place that had offered resistance. They killed men, women and children lest they side with the relief army advancing from Egypt. In ‘The Deeds of the Franks’ (Gesta Frankorum) a Christian chronicler writes: Such a slaughter of pagans no one has ever seen or heard of … The city was filled with corpses and blood. The Jews of the city were confined to their synagogue, which was then set alight. All died … On the third day after the city fell, the leaders of the conquest decided that all remaining prisoners, men, women, and children, should be killed.11

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In the eyes of the inhabitants, the crusaders violated all acceptable standards of propriety in ways unthinkable to the locals, no matter whether they were Muslims, Christians or Jews. The 12th-century Muslim warrior Usamah ibn-Munqidh recounted the corruption and impropriety of the crusaders’ behaviour. Even in their Holy Land, they were ‘without any vestige of a sense of honour and jealousy’. He relates a story of a bath keeper, whose establishment was frequented by the Franks. One day a Frankish knight came in. They do not follow our custom of wearing a cloth around their waist while they are at the baths, and this fellow put out his hand, snatched off my loin cloth and threw it away. He saw at once that I had just recently shaved my pubic hair. ‘Salim!’ he exclaimed. I came towards him and he pointed to that part of me. ‘Salim!’ It’s magnificent! You shall certainly do the same for me!’ And he lay down flat on his back. His hair there was as long as his beard. I shaved him, and when he felt the place with his hand and found it agreeably smooth he said, ‘Salim, you must certainly do the same for my Dama.’ In their language Dama means lady. He sent his valet to fetch his wife and when they arrived and the valet had brought her in, she lay down on her back, and he said to me, ‘Do to her what you did to me.’ So I shaved her pubic hair, while her husband stood by watching me. Then he thanked me and paid me for my services.12

What must have perplexed Usamah was the apparent inconsistency of not feeling any shame when exposing the intimate parts of his wife to another man, which against the backdrop of his culture meant that the Frank had no sense of honour at all, and the vigour and courage that these men showed in fighting, which to any local could only result from a very strong sense of honour that needed to be defended to the finish. For Muslims, the Crusaders, by breaking the bounds between the forbidden (haram) and the permitted (halal), disrupted and destabilized not only their own lives but also the entire world around them. In Muslim eyes, the Franks created a constant and highly visible desecration.13

Even the omnipresent Christian cross created a sense of defilement in the eyes of the Muslims. It violated their sense that God was immaterial and transcendent. To compare God to any creature was a taboo, not to speak of likening him to a man who was polluted by a low birth and material existence, and a shameful death. Not only God was subjected to this seeming impudence, but the Franks treated the holy sights of

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the Muslims with the same brazenness. They slaughtered in the holy precincts of the city, they stabled their horses by the Mosque of Al-Aqsa, they built a Church on the Dome of the Rock, they adorned it with bells, statues and pictures that showed pigs, bottles of wine and, of course, crosses.14 During the period of the Christian occupation of Jerusalem from 1099 to 1187, the trope of defilement and the consequent need for purification grew dominant among Muslim writers. In tone, if not in content, it was similar to the Western reactions to the Muslim occupation of Jerusalem in the years just before the conquest of 1099, and again in the centuries after the loss of the city in 1187.15 The uncivilised behaviour of the Europeans in the Holy Land offended not only the local people but also some of the clergy back home.16 Churchmen took exception to the exuberant lifestyle of the fighters who indulged in carnal pleasures and seemed to turn the cities of the Levant into whorehouses. The responsibility for this behaviour, however, was cynically passed on to the Oriental women who were maligned to have lured Christian men away from the righteous path of chastity. Hence, the image of the seductive Oriental woman who turned the pure Frank away from the path of virtue. The stronger the belief in the purity of the Frank, the stronger the complementary belief in the impurity of the Oriental woman. The more the Christian had to be represented as pious, the more the evil force of the Oriental women had to be represented as overwhelming and superhuman, to the degree that she was taken for an instrument of the devil himself. These mutually reinforcing representations were as phoney as they were seductive. The pious man falling prey to the unfailing erotic attraction of the Oriental woman was excused on grounds of force majeure. He could then afford to do every possible wrong to that woman and claim a sort of state of emergency. Later European imperialists used the trope of the Oriental woman as a metaphor for the Orient itself and thereby as a justification for dominance over and exploitation of their colonies. Wheatcroft sums up the encounter of Franks and Arabs in the Levant as follows: During their confrontation in the East, Muslims and Western Christians developed much more complex and roughly symmetrical views of each other … Christians regarded Muslims as inherently cruel and violent; Muslims felt the same about the Westerners. Christians developed wild imaginings about the sexual proclivities of Muslims. Muslims regarded the Franks … as little better that animals in terms of sexual propriety. Equally, they could initially appreciate heroic and noble qualities in the other. The Sultan Saladin was portrayed in many Western accounts … as more just

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and honourable than many Christian rulers. Likewise, Muslims had no difficulty in recognizing the military skill and bravery of their opponents at the same time that they described them as ‘accused’. Nor did negative attitudes prevent many forms of political and economic connection between enemies even in times of war and rancorous propaganda.17

Notes 1. Hagemann, Christentum contra Islam [Christendom versus Islam], 20. 2. “The wars to rescue Jerusalem long antedated the word ‘Crusade’, which was first coined in Spain in the thirteenth century as cruzada, a generation after the loss of Jerusalem in 1187” (Ibid., 187, emphasis in the original). 3. Claudio Lange, Der nackte Feind. Anti-Islam in der romanischen Kunst (The Naked Enemy. Anti-Islam in the Romanesque Art.) (Berlin: Parthas, 2004). 4. Elisha Fishbane, Jewish and Islamic Hermeneutics as Cultural Critique. Report of the Workshop ‘Scripture beyond the Written Word’, 13–15 June 2002, at the OrientInstitut der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft [Orient Institute of the German Oriental Society] in Istanbul. Available online at http://192.55.244.191/index. php?id=233 (accessed 30 October 2009). 5. Claudio Lange, “Ich hasse, also bin ich,” Freitag 51—Die Ost-West-Wochenzeitung [Friday-East- West Weekly], 51: December 14, 2001 (my translation). 6. See viadrina.euv-frankfurt-o.de/~lange/claudio/thesen.html (accessed August 16, 2006). 7. Wheatcroft, Infidels, 179. 8. Ibid., 182. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 183. 11. Ibid., 185. 12. Ibid., 190 (emphases in the original). 13. Ibid., 191 (emphases in the original). 14. Ibid., 192. 15. Ibid., 193. 16. Ibid., 195. 17. Ibid., 202.

At the Gates of Vienna: The Ottomans in Europe T

HE OTTOMAN EMPIRE CAME INTO EXISTENCE in 1299 when Osman the first declared the independence of the Ottoman territory (beylik) after the collapse of the Seljuk state in Anatolia. At the height of its power in the 16th and 17th centuries, its territory included Anatolia, most of the Caucasus, the Levant, North Africa and the Balkans. Europe felt constantly threatened by its steady advance through Serbia, Hungary and the southern part of Poland-Lithuania, not to mention its sovereignty over the Mediterranean. Ottoman armies invaded central Europe on several occasions. They lay siege to Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683, but they were finally repelled by a great coalition of European powers at sea and on land. The Ottoman Empire was the only non-European force to seriously challenge the growing European influence worldwide between the 15th and 20th century; eventually, it became an integral part of European balance of power politics, which somewhat blurred the distinction between Europe and its Asian antagonist. To a certain extent, images of Muslims and Islam did not change under the impression of the Turks. Turks were depicted with symbols like swords, bows and spears reminiscent of danger and violence like in the centuries before. Sometimes depictions suggested sexual excesses and perversions. Like in the early caricatures of Muslims on the corbels of Romanic Churches, Muslims were still believed to be sodomites and pederasts, thereby reminding Europeans of the savagery and lustfulness of their enemy. The image of cruelty was confirmed by their alleged devotion to impalement, suggesting both unnatural sex and excessive cruelty.

At first few European artists had any notion of how to draw a ‘Saracen’ … Gradually … Saracens were differentiated from Christians by the stylised scorpion emblems on their shields … dark features, flowing robes and heart-shaped shields … The view of the Islamic world in the West was largely imprinted during the two centuries after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This period coincided with the development and spread of the printed word and image in the West. By the late seventeenth century, what the infidel looked like, and how he behaved, had become common knowledge.1

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A gradual change in the response to Islam, however, is epitomised by Martin Luther’s response to the Turks.2 Luther distanced himself from the rhetoric of crusade that predominated the discourse on Islam in Europe since the 11th century. ‘Christians should not go to war or resist the evil.’ This was Luther’s exhortation in his text Vom Kriege Widder die Türcken (On War Against the Turks) of 1529.3 Here, he interprets the Turkish threat as a divine punishment and a trial. He did not argue, however, that Europe should surrender to the Ottoman armies. But he refused to give a Christian blessing to a war that for him was a purely temporal affair. War, according to Luther, was legitimate only under two conditions. First, it had to be fought in the name of the secular powers, that is, the princes and the emperor, and not on behalf of religion or in the name of the Pope. Second, war was restricted to self-defence, and that too was only for the protection of the subjects of the domain under attack and not only of their ruler’s interests. Before a Christian could go to war against the Turks, Luther wanted him to repent his sins and make peace with God and certainly not misuse the name of God for a military campaign. He should go, not as a Christian or in the name of Christianity, but as the subject of a worldly ruler. Luther thus distances himself from the medieval concept of the Christian warrior that had been the ideal of medieval knighthood. This strict differentiation of roles—a worldly role where the individual had to obey the temporal ruler and the role as a believer where the individual, ruler or subject, had to obey his conscience—coincides with the beginnings of modernity and its differentiation of social spheres, political and religious and secular and spiritual. In his Heerpredigt gegen die Türcken (Army Sermon against the Turks) of 1529,4 Luther attempts to find out ‘what the Turk be and for what he should be taken according to the Holy Scripture’.5 Like medieval scholars before him, Luther interpreted Islam as somehow linked with the Antichrist. However, in contrast to the received view, he did not identify with the Antichrist Islam or Muhammad but the Pope. Islam or Muhammad was only the messenger of the Antichrist. The Turk, writes Luther, is ‘Pope-like’ for like the Pope he believes in salvation through deeds (and not through good intentions) and he does not believe it to be sinful to unsettle Christ, to devastate authority and destroy marriage. Only he does all this not through hypocrisy but through violence.6 And I do not take Muhammad for the Anti-Christ. He is doing the job too crudely and he has got the distinguishable black devil, who can not be defeated by faith nor by reason. He is like a heathen who pursues

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Christendom from the outside like the Romans and other heathens have done it … but the pope here is the real Anti-Christ for he has got this high, subtle, beautiful, shining devil who besets Christendom from within.7

Luther’s writings stand in a long tradition of heretical writing against the Pope. He uses Islam only to derogate the Holy See. Luther is also not the first to criticise the concept of the ‘holy war’ as underlying the Crusades. There is also a Christian tradition of critique directed against the Crusades (mainstream as well as heretic). According to Luther Muhammad is not the Antichrist but only devil incarnate.8 He believes that Islam could spread only by the use of force and not by conviction because for Luther it is evident that Muhammad’s preachings are falsehoods. As a consequence, Islam has to be confronted with force and not with words.9 Unlike his medieval predecessors who took Islam for a Christian heresy—that is a distorted faith, but a faith nevertheless— Luther seems to suggest that Islam is no religion at all and that it can thus not be countered by preaching the true religion but only by force.

Notes 1. Wheatcroft, Infidels, 276 (emphasis in the original). 2. Hagemann, Cristentum contra Islam [Christendom versus Islam], 81–95. 3. Martin Luthers Werke. Gesamtausgabe [Weimarer Ausgabe]. Weimar 1883ff. [shorthand: WA 30/2], 107/9. 4. WA 30/2, 160–97. 5. Ibid., 162, 1. 6. Ibid., 129, 1–5. 7. Ibid., 394, 31–395, 5 (my translation). 8. Ibid., 124. 9. Hanemann, Christentum contra Islam [Christendom versus Islam], 88.

The Reformation: Ushering in the Modern Era LUTHER AND THE TIME OF REFORMATION coincide with other major

developments in Europe such as the ‘discovery’ of the New World, the emergence of modern science and technology, all of which lead over to what has come to be called the modern era. From the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ends decades of religious war in Europe, the modern state system emerges. In different European countries and with different speed, the modern state evolves with a political and public sphere that gradually emancipates itself from religion. This process is not completed even today as the many different kinds of church–state relations among European countries bear witness. However, in Europe, unlike in any other region of the world, the disconnection of most spheres of discourse from the framework provided by organised Christianity has been most far reaching. This process was accompanied by a parallel historical process that transformed the symbolic frame of reference of organised religion itself. A medieval Christian and a contemporary Catholic or Protestant have very little in common. Even in the minds of religious people today, religion does no longer provide the all-purpose tool for dealing with questions of human existence. Correspondingly, the threat posed by an alternative faith that calls into question the very basis of one’s own orientation is not felt so severely as it may have been felt by medieval men and women. Nevertheless, reciprocal stereotyping between ‘Orientals’ and ‘Westerners’ continues. It may acquire new connotations, which are less exclusively linked with questions of faith but are more likely to refer back to the Antique civilised versus barbarian binary. But what accounts for the persistence of these stereotypes? How can they survive even major civilisational ruptures like the turn from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, the turn from the Middle Ages to modernity or the French Revolution? With present day Islamist perceptions of the West, the parallel to medieval maledictions is striking. Especially remarkable is the attempt to defame the ‘other’ by pointing out his alleged obscenity. Islamist terrorists and so called ‘honour killers’ agitate the members of

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their community against the West that is seen as compromising what they believe is the ‘Islamic’ tradition. ‘Honour killers’ are Muslims who kill female members of their family—daughters, sisters—who have violated the code of conduct that these families deem ‘Islamic’. The Western lifestyle that these women engage in is seen as promiscuous and therefore dishonorous for the family.1 Thus: … the woman in the West is but a fisher for glances, a fishing net with thousand lifelessly floundering eyes slammed shut, and thus she learns that it is good and without alternative to offer her body for the law commands that nakedness pays off in any case … there’s civil war between man and woman and I observe how they betray and cheat each other, how they beat and lie to each other, and how they sell each other down the river … nowhere have I seen such baseness huddled together as in the love … between man and woman here in the West.2

On the other hand, there is also the fascination with the West, its technology, its symbols of power and wealth and its sexual permissiveness. The resulting love–hate relationship follows its own logic, which shall be explored in the following chapters.

Notes 1. Necla Kelek, Die Fremde Braut [The Foreign Bride] (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005). 2. Yücel, the Islamist, in Feridun Zaimoglu, Kanak Sprak. 24 Misstöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft [24 Odd Voices from the Fringes of Society]. Hamburg: Rotbuch, 2000, 138ff, (my translation).

Part II

The Global Condition: Modernity and Its Critics

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THE FOLLOWING PART ATTEMPTS TO CAPTURE the principal patterns

of ‘perceiving’ and ‘stereotyping’ the ‘other’ in the context of modern politics. Modern politics is driven by mass mobilisation as opposed to decisions taken in cabinets, which are closed to the public as it was in earlier times. One means to achieve this end is the mobilisation of people on grounds of identity. Therefore, various forms of identity politics have emerged and proved quite successful. The term is often used in the context of minority politics within a nation-state.1 In contrast, the meaning given to identity politics here includes and even emphasises nationalism as a form of identity politics.2 Nationalism was a driving force in international politics since the ‘long nineteenth century’ (Hobsbawm). It accounts for the creation of new polities and the emergence of new states in the international arena. Most of these processes have been, and still are, accompanied by excessive violence, internal strife as well as inter-state wars. The latest example of this could be witnessed on the Balkans,3 and certainly in South Asia, identity politics is a major factor.4 In the context of modern politics, the ‘other’ does not appear in front of us in an unmediated fashion. Rather the representation of the ‘other’ is mediated through public discourse, mass media, and so on. Often such mediated representations of the ‘other’ are tools that serve the purpose of wielding a sense of identity of one group (‘us’) as against a stipulated other group (‘them’). The conscious formation of identities of ‘us’ and ‘them’ through influencing public discourse is henceforth referred to as ‘identity politics’. Often identity politics aims at the creation of an adversary relationship between a stipulated ‘us’ and a stipulated ‘them’ with the aim of mobilising public support for collective aims and purposes. This can have positive effects, that is, when identity politics is used as a political tool to advance the interests of members of a group in response to the perception that certain elementary rights have been denied to them. However, identity politics can also have negative effects, namely when it is meant as political action by a majority group attempting to exclude a minority from political influence by infringing on its elementary rights or even by denying basic human rights to them. In that sense, genocide is an extreme form of identity politics.

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Notes 1. The controversy between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth in Umverteilung oder Anerkennung [Redistribution or Recognition] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). For a brief account of the history of use of the terms ‘identity’ and ‘identity politics’, see also Nina Clara Tiesler, Muslime in Europa. Religion und Identitätspolitiken unter veränderten gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen [Muslims in Europe. Religion and Identity Politics under Changed Social Conditions] (Berlin: LIT, 2006), 132ff. 2. Thomas Meyer, Identitätspolitik. Vom Missbrauch kultureller Unterschiede [Identity Politics. The Misuse of Cultural Difference] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002) and Identitäts-Wahn: Die Politisierung des kulturellen Unterschieds [Identity Mania. The Politicisation of Cultural Difference] (Berlin: Aufbau, 1997). Furthermore, Heiner Keupp, “Identitätspolitik zwischen kosmopolitischer Euphorie und fremdenfeindlicher Ausgrenzung,” [Identity Politics between Cosmopolitan Euphoria and Xenophobic Exclusion] in ... die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht [… those in the dark one does not see] (Herbolzheim, Breisgau: Centaurus, 2005), 280–98. 3. Sabine Riedel, Die Erfindung der Balkanvölker. Identitätspolitik zwischen Konflikt und Integration [The Invention of the Peoples of Balkans. Identity Politics between Conflict and Integration] (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2005). 4. Christian Büschges and Joanna Pfaff-Czernecka, eds, Die Ethnisierung des Politischen. Identitätspolitiken in Lateinamerika, Asien und den USA [The Ethnicisation of the Political. Identity Politics in Latin America, Asia and the USA] (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007); Boike Rehbein, Jürgen Rüland and Judith Schlehe, eds, Identitätspolitik und Interkulturalität in Asien. Ein Multidisziplinäres Mosaik [Identity Politics and Interculturality in Asia. A Multi-disciplinary Mosaic] (Münster: LIT, 2006); Tanika Sarkar, Frau, Gemeinschaft und Nation. Eine historische Entwicklungslinie hinduistischer Identitätspolitik [Wife, Community and Nation. A Historical Trajectory of Hindu Identity Politics] (translation Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2004); and Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence. The Illusion of Destiny (London: Norton, 2006).

Culture and Identity in Modern Politics AS AN EXPLICATION OF MAJOR TENETS of modernity, I am referring to the sociology of John W. Meyer and his collaborators.1 This new institutionalist approach reckons with three categories of modern actors: individuals, organisations and states. According to Meyer: Modern culture emphasizes a social world made up of bounded, purposive, and rational actors and gives preference to entities conceived and constructed in this way—particularly individuals, nation-states, and formal organisations. This de-emphasises other sorts of social units (tribes, clans, families, ethnic groups, communities, and the like).

Modern actors gain legitimacy and orientation from behavioural patterns and norms provided by the cultural reference frame, which also determines what is to be taken as the real character of the world, which things exist and which do not, what is to be reckoned with in terms of natural laws, social conditions, and so on. Meyer proposes that ‘individuals derive their identities and interest from some perceived natural order and create legal systems [and other institutions] to reflect these higher “Platonic ideals”’.2 Meyer does not advocate or subscribe to such ideals himself, but he sees the modern state and legal system as being, in good part, organised around them. ‘Like God in an earlier era they become the centre of action and interests in the modern world … Law is important for its linkage to perceived universal principles and as a source of identity for individuals and, importantly, nation-states.’3 Meyer sometimes speaks of the modern cultural reference frame as ‘Western’ and of the world polity as permeated by Western principles. Arguably, however, the use of modern instead of Western would be more sensible in the context of intercultural dialogue as it would be less antagonistic to scholars from non-Western societies who do subscribe to principles of modernity but reject the West’s exclusive claim on them. In a recent book, Amartya Sen admonishes that: … the limited horizon of the colonized mind and its fixation with the West—whether in resentment or in admiration—has to be overcome. It

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cannot make sense to see oneself primarily as someone who (or whose ancestors) have been misrepresented, or treated badly, by colonialists, no matter how true that identification may be … To lead a life in which resentment against an imposed inferiority form past history comes to dominate one’s priorities today cannot but be unfair to oneself … the nature of this ‘reactive self-perception’ has had far-reaching effects on contemporary affairs. This includes (1) the encouragement it has given to needless hostility to many global ideas (such as democracy and personal liberty) under the mistaken impression that these are ‘Western’ ideas, (2) the contribution it has made to a distorted reading of the intellectual and scientific history of the world (including what is quintessentially ‘Western’ and what has mixed heritage), and (3) the support it has tended to give to the growth of religious fundamentalism and even to international terrorism.4

The debates surrounding ‘Western Science’ versus ‘Eastern Spirituality’,5 ‘Western Values’ versus ‘Asian Values’,6 ‘Western conceptions of human rights’ versus ‘African’7 or ‘Islamic human rights’8 all point to the same phenomenon: an excessive fixation with the West and, consequently, a propensity to define one’s post-colonial identity reactively as ‘anti-Western’. The problem with this attitude, according to Sen, is that it confounds the genesis and the validity of the concept of human rights and other allegedly ‘Western’ concepts. Nobody would deny the usefulness of the trigonometric concept of ‘sine’ and ‘cosine’ and of the decimal numeral system including the number zero in mathematics even though they are of Indian origin.9 Likewise, it would be quite harmful to deny the usefulness of the concepts of individual liberty, democracy and progress even though they may have originated in the West. This is not to deny that standard precepts of modernity such as the nationstate, justice and progress10 gained global hegemony11 in the process of colonial expansion, and later imperialism, of the European nations and that these processes were accompanied by great injustices and sufferings on the part of the colonised subjects. But to attempt to revise this history in the name of anti-Western resentment or in the name of a largely imaginative pre-colonial innocence would, in its fixation with the West, actually be reconfirming the grip that the West still has on the mind of the post-colonial subject. With Meyer and Sen, we can thus speak without euphemism of modernity as a ‘world culture’ and of world society, however unjust it still be, in terms of a ‘world polity’.12 Meyer’s approach is therefore often called ‘world polity approach’.13 As the global cultural reference frame defines and characterises the natural and the social world for actors, it also determines the potential threats that can arise from both—the natural

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and the social world. The cultural definitions of threat that can arise from the social world are encoded in the cultural reference frame. For the actors, these patterns predetermine and limit what can be perceived by the actors as a (potentially threatening) ‘other’. As we have noted in the first part of this book, patterns of ‘perceiving’ the ‘other’ can show a remarkable persistence over time. Their ideological character, that is, their resistance to empirical falsification and to analytical scrutiny renders them almost immune from critique.14 Often they are particularly persistent in places where hardly any instance of the assumed ‘other’ can be found. Thus, anti-Semitism is strong even in those areas where the likelihood of anyone meeting a Jew approaches zero. Xenophobia thrives even in those social milieus that are least likely to directly interact with the perceived strangers. Anti-Islamic sentiment is strong even among those who have never talked to a Muslim in their lifetime. This observation can be sustained by a look at the history of relations between Europe and the Muslim world. Wherever Christians and Muslims interacted on an everyday level, there was at least a chance to break the spell of prefigured modes of perceiving the other as a potential threat, that is, in Moorish Spain, the ‘Holy Land’, the Balkans.15 Similar observations can be made with respect to the encounter of Muslims and non-Muslims in the Indian context.16 The results were inter-religious marriages, hybrid religious practises, back and forth conversions, and a vexing blur of limits and borderlines—vexing particularly for those back in the power centres who had an interest in maintaining difference.17 Maintenance of difference and the cultivation of threat perceptions is therefore often a matter of ideological and political exigency and not of experience or analysis. Since patterns of ‘perceiving’ the ‘other’ are cultural constructs, they can be empirically challenged and analytically deconstrued. Thus, while the cultural reference frame includes stereotyped patterns of ‘perceiving’ the ‘other’, the system of culture production also provides the means to critique and limit them. From a sociological point of view, one would suspect that it would be in the spheres of science and academia that such critique and deconstruction take place. The focus is therefore on science as a social system. The aim is to investigate the ability of science to critically question the adequacy of cultural patterns of ‘perceiving’ the ‘other’ that may serve conflicting parties to rally their followers around exclusivist definitions of identity. An example of how science as a social system succumbed to perpetuate stereotyped ‘perceptions’ of the ‘other’ as essentially inimical were pointed out by Edward W. Said in his critique of Orientalism.18 Nowadays, reverse Orientalism,

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or Occidentalism offers another example.19 The debate following Said’s critique of Orientalism as an academic discipline, however, also shows the ability of science to outgrow the circumstantial predilections of its representatives.20 The focus on science is justified not only with reference to the intrinsic function of science as a critical force in society but also with respect to Meyer’s findings about the make-up and function of the global cultural reference frame. Meyer and his team have observed that under the aegis of global modernity, the degree in which ideas gain cultural legitimacy and global hegemony increases to the extent that they appear to be founded in science. Since the influence of science on the global cultural reference frame is so eminent, paradigm shifts taking place in this system radiate into other subsystems of the world polity such as global media, international politics and law. Thus, the cultural reference frame may influence science—limiting its critical potential as in the case of Orientalism or Occidentalism—but also the opposite is true: the cultural reference frame is largely under the influence of science. For a deeper understanding of these coherences, we need to take a closer look at Meyer’s world polity approach.

Notes 1. John W. Meyer, Weltkultur. Wie die Westlichen Prinzipien die Welt durchdringen [World Culture. How Western Principles Permeate the World] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). 2. Elizabeth Heger Boyle and John W. Meyer, “Modern Law as a Secularized and Global Model. Implications for the Sociology of Law,” in Global Prescriptions: The Production, Exportation, and Importation of a New Legal Orthodoxy, ed. Bryant G. Garth and Yves Dezalay (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 65–95, 66 (emphasis in the original). 3. Ibid. 4. Sen, Identity and Violence, chap. 5 (West and Anti-West), 88f. 5. Partha Chatterjee’s discussion of the ‘material-spiritual divide’ in the context of anti-colonial nationalism in The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6. 6. Michael Hill, ‘Asian Values’ as Reverse Orientalism. The Case of Singapore. Working Study Series, ed. National University of Singapore Department of Sociology (Singapore: Select Books, 2000). 7. Josiah A. M. Cobbah, “African Values and the Human Rights Debate: An African Perspective,” Human Rights Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1987): 309–31. 8. Conseil Islamique, ed., Déclaration islamique universelle des Droits de l’homme [Islamic Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man] (London: Islamiah, 1981). Critically,

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

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Abdullahi Ahmed AnNa’im, “Human Rights in the Muslim World,” in International Human Rights in Context, ed. Henry Steiner and Philipp Alston (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). Amartya Sen gives an account of how the term ‘sine’ derives from the Sanskrit term ‘ardha-jya’ introduced by the mathematician Aryabhata in the 5th century CE, Sen, Identity and Violence, 129. John W. Meyer, John Boli and George M. Thomas, “Ontology and Rationalization in the Western Cultural Account,” in Institutional Structure. Constituting State, Society, and the Individual, ed. George M. Thomas, John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez and John Boli (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1987), 12–38. I am quoting from the German translation: “Ontology und Rationalisierung im Zurechnungssystem der Westlichen Kultur”[Ontology and Rationalisation in the Imputative System of Western Culture], in Weltkultur. Wie die Westlichen Prinzipien die Welt durchdringen [World Culture. How Western Principles Permeate the World], ed. John W. Meyer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 17–46. My use of the terms ‘dominance’ and ‘hegemony’ correspond to that of Antonio Gramsci as in Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977). If justice were to be made a prerequisite for us to speak of something as a ‘polity’, then there would be no polity whatsoever to speak of. The existence of the world polity can therefore not be denied with reference to the fact that the world society is still too unjust to allow us to speak of it as a polity. John W. Meyer, Encyclopedia of Sociology (London: Blackwell, 2006). Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels. The Conflict between Christendom and Islam 638–2002 (London: Viking, 2003). Ibid. Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes. Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). Wheatcroft gives examples of European clergy calling on crusading knights to keep their distance from the ways of the Saracens. We know of similar examples form India, that is, Aurangzeb abandoning the religious tolerance of his predecessors; the British East India Company trying to keep its employees from ‘going native’, and so on. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). Hill, ‘Asian Values’ as Reverse Orientalism. For a summary of the debates on Orientalism, see Alexander Lyon Macfie, Orientalism (London: Longman, 2002) and his Orientalism. A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).

The World Polity Approach∗ THE WORLD POLITY PERSPECTIVE HELPS TO combine empirical findings

from the social sciences with findings from culture studies, ethics, discourse theory and other disciplines of the humanities. It emphasises the role of institutionalised cultural models (rules, norms, patterns, scripts) in the definition and legitimation of social actors (individuals, organisations, states). It is common sense to understand organisations and states as institutions. Less commonly, however, the modern, autonomous individual is analysed as a social institution. Just as collective actors, however, even individual actors follow specific cultural models. These models are part of a semiotic reference frame that defines who can legitimately call himself a person and an actor. Institutions such as professional organisations, interest groups and the family, all follow commonly accepted patterns that define their purpose and the way to achieve it. These patterns imply certain rules and norms as well as certain assumptions about the real world. Meyer and his team claim that other sociological theories cannot explain the worldwide isomorphism between institutions like state bureaucracies, political agendas, elections, civil rights, professional and interest groups and their claims, school education systems, teacher’s education, didactic methods, and so on. ‘Bottom-up’ explanatory modes base the analysis of collective actors on the behaviour of the individuals that partake in it. These, however, face a huge variety of circumstances and should, correspondingly, come up with an equally huge variety of modes of collective action. This prediction, however, is falsified by experience, as the Meyer team has pointed out.

Note ∗

The following is based on Meyer et al., “Ontology and Rationalization”. For an introduction, see Theresa Wobbe, Weltgesellschaft [World Society] (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2000).

Institution INSTITUTIONS, ACCORDING TO MEYER, ARE CULTURAL patterns that

give collective purpose and meaning to actors and actions and integrate them in a larger framework. They define what can be a possible actor and give legitimacy to certain of his actions and delegitimise others. They are constructs in that they are part of the social imaginary, which means that they are not natural and unchangeable. But also they cannot be changed at will by any single person or group of actors since they owe their force to their general acceptance in the society. For the most part, they are so much taken for granted that a considerable effort would be needed to make one aware of their operations in the background. This is the task of a reverse cultural anthropology that from the vantage point of a hypothetically (or really) ‘different’ cultural frame of reference studies the ‘strangeness’ of our own world.1 History offers one way of stepping out of the seemingly natural to realise its collectively imaginary character. An imaginary journey into some other cultural world, real or fictitious can have the same effect. When Meyer takes actors and actions as social constructs, he opposes rational choice theories that take individuals and their self-interest as natural, almost as givens of human nature and part of the human condition. This may be an adequate description of some aspects of the human condition in modern societies but it misses out on the contingent character of modernity itself. We can easily think of societies governed by very different paradigms. In many traditional societies, actions of individuals are dictated by the role the society provides for them and not by their rational self-interest. In fact, even the definition of what is in the best interest of the individual (in its respective role) is governed by the tradition (and by the guardians of tradition such as families, clans, casts, ethnic or religious groups) and not by any individual choice, rational or irrational. While traditional cultural reference frames tend to take the social structure as basic that ascribes roles to each individual according to age, gender, family, profession, caste, class, tribe or religion and the individual as secondary, the modern cultural reference frame reverses this order. The individual is taken as basic and all other institutions

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(marriage, family, association, state) are construed as based on the free consent of the individuals engaged in them. It is by reference to the individual that the roles of these collective institutions are defined and not the other way around. It is no longer the collective that defines the role of the individual. Instead, every collective is gauged by reference to the benefit that it gives to the individuals that partake in it. These benefits, Meyer reminds us, are normally expressed in terms of justice and progress. If a collective does not stand the test of justice, it needs to prove at least that it progresses in the way justice prescribes. If it proves to be stagnating or even regressing, it looses its legitimacy in the eyes of those subscribing to modernity as a semiotic frame of reference. Progress in the way of justice is normally translated into expansion of equal liberties of all individuals. This principle of liberty was expressed by Kant as the first and only human right.2 It also informs Rawls’ first principle of justice, that is, ‘each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others’3 with the added notion that a deviation from the principle of equal liberty has to be justifiable before the least advantaged in society. The normative individualism underlying the modern reference frame is reflected even in the way we understand, for example, the economy as the result of individual decisions regarding investment, consumption or choice of profession. Accordingly, the political system is construed as the result of individual citizens’ decisions in elections and party memberships. Religion and culture are construed as based on individual choices regarding beliefs and values. While a methodological individualism seems to be fully adequate on a normative level, Meyer finds this problematic when it comes to the empirical level. We may perceive ourselves as modern, autonomous individuals. But the fact that only our modern semiotic frame of reference legitimises us to do so, and contingently so, usually escapes our attention. The fact that it does escape our attention is reassuring, for it proves how much we take for granted the institution of the individual as an autonomous agent, which in itself is an expression of its stability. But this does not prevent the social scientist from gaining an awareness of the fact that the hegemony of this modern semiotic framework is based on a choice, which is implicit in the self-understanding of the modern individual. When the modern individual thinks that because of its autonomy it has the right to choose its consort, profession, domicile, and so on, it normally understands this autonomy as a natural fact. For the social scientist, however, this autonomy is grounded—not in

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nature—but in culture, that is, in society and its institutions, and these in turn rest on implicit choices made by a majority of individuals all the time, but unconsciously for the most part. Methodological individualism—on the factual level—is also inadequate in other ways for it tends to uncritically read the normative ideal into the empirical reality. Modern politics should be based on the individuals’ choices, with every individual counting for the same. But this must not prevent us from seeing that in fact very often it is not. Instead, the myth of democracy should be seen as what it is. It is important to stabilise a society on the way to democracy but it should not delude its members into thinking that they have already achieved their goal. Credit is due to Meyer for having brought to mind the contingency of regulative ideals such as the autonomous individual upon the cultural reference frame under which we are operating. Its logical complement is the ideal of non-coerciveness in social relations. The historical impact of this regulative ideal cannot be denied. It can be gauged, for example, if we look at the history of the legitimisation of the use of force in society from the times of feudalism till today. Only very recently have we reached a stage where the use of force is a no-no for all collectives vis-à-vis the individual. Even between spouses, vis-à-vis children, in schools and religious institutions, physical punishment is now banned in almost every developed nation except for those that still use torture or practice capital punishment. It would be fatal, however, to loose sight of the fact that there is nothing inevitable in this normative ideal.

Notes 1. Here, the historian, the anthropologist and the political scientist can be of help (as has been demonstrated by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). 2. That is “[das] Recht zu thun, was ihm recht und gut dünkt” ([the] right to do as he deems right and good). (Kant, Akademieausgabe Vol. VI, 312 [Rechtslehre]) and “Einschränkung der Freiheit eines jeden auf die Bedingung ihrer Zusammenstimmung mit der Freiheit von jederman”[Limitation of Freedom for any single person through the condition that this freedom has to agree with the equal amount of freedom for everyone else]. (Kant, Akademieausgabe Vol. VIII, 289f. [Gemeinspruch] Proverb). 3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 60.

Decoupling P HILOSOPHERS LIKE JOHN RAWLS AND JÜRGEN Habermas have explicated and interpreted the normative aspects that are implicit in the modern cultural reference frame. Sociologists like Meyer have traced its factual impact the world over. This impact is not equally strong everywhere and in all spheres of the world polity. An important notion in Meyer’s theorising about modern principles pervading the world polity is therefore that of ‘decoupling’. He and his team have demonstrated how in many instances norms and patterns available from the modern cultural reference frame have been adopted formally. But their actual impact on the ground is often minimal, sometimes even counter-productive. Actors like states and organisations gain legitimacy as agents from a formal adherence to modern principles but they do not always put them into practice. Sometimes they only cover up the continuation of older, or alternative ‘new’ ways. To cite one example one may think of the adoption of the BA/MA structure in the curricula of German universities in the Bologna process. This sometimes reduces to a formal adoption of the names ‘MA’ and ‘BA’ as new tags for the old ‘Magister’ curriculum. It has to be conceded, though, that even if adopted almost entirely ritualistically, the BA/MA system is likely to have modifying effects over time.1 Decoupling is due to the fact that modern patterns are not always easy to emulate before the backdrop of locally still prevalent cultural reference frames. Often they meet with the resistance of strong local actors who try to adopt and twist these models to suit their particular interests. Moreover, world culture keeps in stock its favoured models in variants that are not always compatible. Nation-states pick and choose bits and pieces from different and incommensurable models, which can lead to difficulties in their application. The fact that the application of the most favoured global models in national contexts needs to be negotiated with local actors and locally prevalent ways of doing things has led Meyer and his team to another interesting observation. Often it is precisely those nation-states that are economically weakest that are least in a position to adapt and modify global models to their local circumstances but have to accept them wholesale, which can lead to comic results, as Meyer points out

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(that is, teachers and pupils attempting the impossible by schooling in a language none of them knows). Global models formulated to be ideal models can be very hard to implement. The result can be a partial implementation but also dialectical reactions, hybridity, syncretism, and so on. The resulting incongruence with local traditions can lead to decoupling. Often, however, global models are implemented with brute force.2 Economically, better positioned nation states are more likely to be able to shield themselves from global influences. If they refer to global models, they do so in a more qualified way and are better positioned to amend those patterns to suit their own traditions. Thus, Germany, until now, was able to guard the idiosyncrasies of its three-tier education system from global pressures to adapt it to the globally predominant system of joint school education till standard 9.3 The example also shows, however, that economic strength can be an impediment for development.

Notes 1. I am indebted to John W. Meyer for his comments on this point. 2. Thanks to John W. Meyer for his discussion on these points. 3. The globally predominant model follows a 6 + 3 + 3 formula (six years of elementary school + three years of junior high school + three years of senior high school. Meyer, Weltkultur [World Culture], 149).

Actor and Action COLLECTIVE INSTITUTIONS LIKE ORGANISATIONS AND STATES are

conventionally explained as the results of rational human actions. Against this common understanding, Meyer and his team draw our attention to the fact that actions themselves gain their representativeness for the respective institution that they help to constitute by the overall cultural reference frame to which both the institution and the action implicitly refer. Thus, the actor (individual, organisation or state) and the respective action are mutually constitutive of each other within that larger semiotic reference frame. The cultural reference frame legitimises both, the actor and the type of action that is exemplary for it. Meyer speaks of a ‘reciprocal tautological process’.1

Note 1. John W. Meyer et al., Ontology and Rationalization, 31.

Rationality and Rationalisation IN THE CONTEXT OF THE GLOBAL cultural reference frame and with reference to Weber, Meyer speaks of rationalisation in terms of the structuring of everyday life along standardised, impersonal rules that orient the social order towards the collective goals of justice and progress. These rules are typically represented as universal. Human rights or the laws governing economic growth are sometimes represented as if they were natural laws holding true at all times and everywhere. This reference to nature is a heritage from the Enlightenment period when philosophers spoke of ‘natural’ reason and ‘natural’ rights as being the same for every human being irrespective of his/her social status, estate, station in life or the society he/she lives in. Enlightenment philosophers in turn drew from the cosmopolitan legacy of stoicism for which the natural was also the morally sound. The reference to nature, thus, was an emancipatory lever against the traditional social order that was represented as morally corrupt, inhuman and therefore unnatural. With the rise of science and technology and the new wealth created by industrialisation, reference to nature and its inherent rationality became more and more convincing. Explanatory modes taken from natural science were carried over to social and cultural phenomena that became modelled after natural phenomena as in positivism, social Darwinism, ‘scientific’ racism, and so on. Today, the flaws of these aberrations have been exposed and the ‘naturalness’ of reason is considered with more modesty. Consequently, ideas such as human rights have a harder time to retain their quasi-natural and therefore uncontroversial character. More often nowadays, universal human rights are parochialised as Western in essence and Asian, African or Islamic alternatives are conjured up as ‘authentic’ responses from non-Western cultures. This in itself is ambiguous because in turning universal human rights into Western, African or Asian human rights, still the need is felt to speak of human rights at all. In a way therefore, a queer recognition of the idea of universal human rights is still contained even in its rejection as a Western notion. Universal human rights can therefore still claim hegemony over much of what structures the sphere of international law, supranational institutions and international regimes.

Religion and the ‘Religious’ I

N THE TRANSITION FROM THE MIDDLE Ages to the modern age, natural law and natural rights take the place of the sacral in the semiotic context of older reference frames that were conceived as equally universal by the religious authorities (Church, ulama). I would, however, not go as far as Meyer to call the idea of human rights, for example, ‘religious’ in the same way as the idea of the God (or Gods) as former guarantors of social and legal order.1 I would like to restrict the term religious (in the literal sense) to those attitudes, beliefs and actions which (purport to) relate to the supernatural, the transcendent, to which humans refer in praying, offering, cursing or the like actions. Such actions imply a ‘magical’ outlook on the relationship between the immanent and the transcendent, that is, effects in this world are sought not by this-worldly actions (involving causal links between the body and the environment through physical movement or speech acts) but by symbolic actions that invoke other-worldly powers. Human rights, by contrast, are not normally the subject of such religious actions.2 Such actions would lack their addressee, as human rights do not represent any transcendental power that could possibly grant wishes, receive thanks, transmit the implications of curses or the like. From an ethical point of view, human rights may have a similar regulative function within the semiotic reference frame of modernity as God’s will in the pre-modern set-up, but they are still very different. The difference is that the modern reference frame rejects the magical view according to which there could be a direct link between certain inner states of the individual (wishing, thanking, and so on) and the physical world.3 This difference should not be obliterated by calling both regulative ideals ‘religious’ in the same, literal sense (one may still call it ‘religious’ within quotes as a manner of speaking). Of course, Meyer also draws this distinction when he speaks of the spheres of the divine, of morality and of nature as being radically disconnected in the logic of the modern reference frame.4 It has to be emphasised that the concepts of modern secular and traditional magical reference frames are ideal types. In reality, there is no clear divide but a continuum of various modernities mixed in with various traditions with their respective religious strands and magical outlooks. The result can be amusing, as Meyer points out. Pupils and their parents pray for good grades. Teachers read aloud from textbooks, so that God may also

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hear what they are saying, and so on.5 Such actions may be legitimate in a traditional, religious reference frame but they would find no sanction through the modern reference frame. People do, in such actions, refer to both reference frames at once. They refer to the modern reference frame by appealing to the modern notions of schooling, and they relate to the older reference frame in their invocation of higher powers to watch over the schooling process and to lead it to a success. Sometimes, among social scientists, religion is reduced to ethics and the magical component is thereby lost. They define religion as a reference frame lending ultimate legitimacy to values and value-guided actions. It should be asked why culture, but not religion, as a symbolic system has to be seen as standing outside the social system. Semiotic reference frames, cultural or religious, and the meanings attributed to individual signs, symbols and symbolic actions, are very much social in that they provide rules for communicative activities and appropriate responses (see sections on culture and language further below). In the perspective offered here, semiotic reference frames comprise culture as well as religion. They guide action and provide legitimacy to actors. They do this through patterns of accepted behaviour that can have an institutional character. These patterns are subject to change by the producers of the semiotic reference frame, that is, the individuals, just like all institutions are subject to processes of social change. Religions, in this perspective, are seen as historically older cultural reference frames, with less differentiation into autonomous spheres of knowledge as in modern reference frames. Just like the villager in older times had to be proficient in many crafts (such as building, making of tools, farming, hunting), religious reference frames attempt to offer wholesale packages that include bits of knowledge about the transcendent, the immanent world, ethics, law, society and politics, all interconnected in a comprehensive magical world view. Modern reference frames, by contrast, attempt to separate different spheres of knowledge and watch over the maintenance of their difference. In modern frames of reference, dealings with the transcendent follow a different rationality than dealings with the physical world. No intermixing of these rationalities is possible without calling into question modern science, secular ethics, secular law and democratic politics. The villager, as it were, has become a city dweller. She/he can no longer afford to be a jack of all trades but has to focus on his/her profession. Likewise, religion has to restrict itself to providing expertise on dealings with the transcendent and refrain from interfering in the spheres of knowledge, society, ethics, law and politics.6 That way, relations with the transcendent become the

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proprium of religion, just as ethics becomes the proprium of philosophy and nature becomes the proprium of natural science. In the ethical view of religion by contrast, the ethical and the transcendent are unduly conflated. This comes out clearly in the wrong etymology given to the Latin word religio, which according to this view means ‘ultimate linking with values beyond dispute’. This etymology has been disproved by Hans Kippenberg. In the late Roman Empire, the Latin term religio has undergone an interesting shift in meaning as Kippenberg has observed. When Christianity began to spread in the Roman empire … the pagan authors Pliny the Younger … Tacitus … and Suetonius … who all wrote in the brief period between 110 and 122, CE agreed that the new religion was not a religio, but a superstitio which offended the gods … The decisive criterion here might be soothsaying, a foreign provenance, or harmful rituals. Before long, Christians were claiming to be the true religio. Tertulian laid claim to the term religio for Christianity, and reversed the categories, saying that Roman cults were superstitio … The Christians went so far as to reinterpret the etymology, falsely deriving religio from religare (‘to bind [to God]’), rather from relegere (‘conscientious ritual behavior’), as would have been correct.7

It seems that the ethical view is following this fallacious derivation of the term religio, which besides reducing the religious to the ethical would burden his approach with an unwarranted Christian bias. Notes 1. John W. Meyer, Weltkultur [World Culture], 38ff. 2. … unless they are misunderstood as a religion, which would lead to comic results as Meyer has pointed out variously. 3. This view of religion is influenced by Ernst Tugendhat’s essay “Wem kann ich danken? Über Religion als Bedürfnis und die Schwierigkeit seiner Befriedigung” [Whom can I thank? On religion as a need and the difficulties of satisfying it.] Neu Zürcher Zeitung, December 9, 2006, and his Egozentrizität und Mystik. Eine anthropologische Studie [Egocentricity and Mystic. An Anthropological Study] (München: Beck, 2006). 4. John W. Meyer, Weltkultur [World Culture], 39f. 5. Thanks to John W. Meyer for his comments on this point. 6. The Pope’s 2006 Rengesburg lecture can be interpreted as an attempt to blur one of these borders, namely the one between the rationalities of faith and those of science; see Michael Dusche, “‘Europe’ and ‘The Islamic World’—Perceptions and Stereotypes,” in Forum for Postcolonial Studies ed. Anil Bhatti (Munich: LMU, 2007), available online at http://www.goethezeitportal.de/fileadmin/PDF/kk/df/postkoloniale_studien/dusche_ europe_islamic.pdf (accessed 30 October, 2009). 7. Hans G. Kippenberg, “Europe: Arena of Pluralization and Diversification of Religions,” Journal of Religion in Europe 1, no. 2 (2008): 133–55.

Progress and Teleology THE GENEALOGY OF MODERNITY IS UNDOUBTEDLY Western, as Meyer

argues convincingly. To understand this process, all the stages are important: the medieval concentration of all authority in one ‘High God’, the corresponding supranational authority of the Church, the Enlightenment notion of the absent God, the increasing independence of the rationalities of politics, religion, morality and science (corresponding to the growingly autonomous spheres of state and religion, culture and nature). Often this process has been described as following an inner necessity, as if modernisation was an evolutionary process governed by natural laws. This, according to Meyer, may have been a necessary myth for modern man to believe in, in order for modernity to unfold. It is a myth nevertheless as more recent critiques of modernisation theory have revealed. The actual path that societies take when they adopt the semiotic reference frame of modernity in one of its variants diverges greatly and is contingent upon the altercations between modernity and tradition in the respective context. Paths to modernity (and away from it) may thus vary greatly, which has given rise to the idea of multiple modernities.1 In modern frameworks, the spheres of history and morality are strictly separated. Therefore, the fact that the modern semiotic reference frame has evolved in the West is independent of the question of its value in Western and/or non-Western contexts (just like light bulbs fulfil their function everywhere in the world even though they were invented in the West). The value of modern precepts may be contingent on the traditions prevailing in the context in which they are applied but their transferability or lack thereof should remain an open question and not be discarded beforehand on grounds that because of their Western-ness, modern precepts are in conflict with some sort of essence of non-Western cultures. In fact, they were very much in conflict with the ‘essence’ of Western culture as well (and for some they still are). Within the Western context, Germany offers a good example for this ambiguous relationship with the West and with Western ideas of modernity and democracy. The German historian Heinrich August

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Winkler pointed to the resistance that parts of the German society offered to the ‘Westernisation’ of Germany after 1945.2 Similar points could be made about Russia and other follower states of the former Soviet Union and their ambivalent relationship with the West.

Notes 1. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2005). See also José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) for the implementation of modern precepts of secularity in different contexts. 2. Heinrich August Winkler, “Erzwungene Demokratisierung? Deutschland nach 1945 und was sich daraus lernen lässt” [Forced democratisation? Germany After 1945 and What Can Be Learned From It]. Eurozine, June 29, 2006. Available online at eurozine. com/pdf/2006–06–29-winkler-de.pdf (accessed August 30, 2008).

Principal and Agent∗ MEYER AND JEPPERSON COUCH THE RELATIONSHIP between the

actor and the principles that legitimise that actor in terms taken from economics: ‘principal’ and ‘agent’. Like in a principal–agent relationship, actors gain their legitimacy from the rules of the cultural reference frame to which they implicitly refer. These rules function like the principal in a principal–agent relationship. Both principal (rules) and agent (actor) gain their legitimacy through the semiotic frame of reference that forms the cultural context of their relationship. The principal lends agency to the actor by permitting (or compelling) him to act on his behalf. To begin with, this terminology is a good candidate to being universally applicable.1 We can construe social relationships in Western and non-Western, traditional and post-traditional societies in analogous ways. Individuals or groups gain agency from the rules that are implicit in their respective cultural reference frame. Such rules may legitimise Arjuna to kill his Kaurava cousins as an agent of the rules prescribed for people of the warrior caste and as expounded to him by Krishna in his lecture on dharma.2 Here, the cosmic ethos, dharma, is the principal giving legitimacy to Krishna and Arjuna. The rules of the cultural reference frame may legitimise parents to act on behalf of their children in arranging their marriage as in many traditional societies. The same principal delegitimises the children to take their marriage into their own hands. Rules of yet another traditional reference frame legitimise a particular person to speak as God’s representative on earth and delegitimise others to do so as the Pope in the Catholic scheme of things. In all such instances, the principal is understood as being external to the sensible world. The rules of dharma, the rules determining ∗

The following is based on John W. Meyer and Ronald Jepperson, “The ‘Actors’ of Modern Society. Cultural Rationalization and the Ongoing Expansion of Social Agency,” Sociological Theory 18, no.1 (2000): 100–20. I am quoting from the German translation “Die ‘Akteure’ der modernen Gesellschaft. Die kulturelle Konstruktion sozialer Agentschaft,” [The ‘Actors’ of Modern Society. The Cultural Construction of Social Agency] in Weltkultur. Wie die Westlichen Prinzipien die Welt durchdringen [World Culture. How Western Principles Permeate the World], ed. John W. Meyer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 47–84.

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how a good Hindu or Muslim boy or girl should be married, the rules legitimising the Pope to speak as God’s representative on earth are all anchored in a sacral world. The semiotic frame of modernity, by contrast, pulls the principal down into the profane world. Human rights are seen as natural rights. They are portrayed as self-evident and not in need of any further foundation in some other world. In the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, Jefferson wrote: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …’.3 Later, he refers to ‘the Creator’ but the point is that God, or divine reason, is no longer understood as a principal here. Rather it is some sort of Cartesian evidence, that is, human reason.4 In the modern schema, the principal as well as its agents are grounded in theories of justice and progress, which in turn are grounded in science (moral and legal philosophy, political theory, law, economics) and therefore human reason. As society is meant to progress towards ever more justice (equal opportunity, democracy, prosperity), its rules and those acting on their behalf are legitimised without further ado about other-worldly entities or forces.5

Notes 1. Meyer raises the objection that some hunting and gathering societies may not construct much agency. This would be an interesting anthropological question to pursue further. For the purpose of this study, this issue may remain as a prima facie observation. 2. See the Bhagvad Gîtâ chapter in the Mahabharata: Richard Garbe, Die Bhagvadgîtâ [The Bhagavad Gita](Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978). 3. Jürgen Brand and Hans Hattenhauer, eds, Der europäische Rechtsstaat. 200 Zeugnisse seiner Geschichte, UTB für Wissenschaft [The European State of Law, 200 Testimonies of its History] (Heidelberg: Müller, 1994), 72ff. 4. … which may be consistent with divine reason as the present pope maintains in his Ratisbon speech, see Joseph Alois Ratzinger, Gesine Schwan, Adel Theodor Khoury and Karl Lehmann, ed. “Benedikt XVI,” in Glaube und Vernunft. Die Regensburger Vorlesung [Benedict XVI. Faith and Reason. The Ratisbon Lecture] (Freiburg: Herder, 2006). 5. Here the question arises as to what would be the consequences should society stall in its progress. If modern society should persistently fail to keep its promises of bettering people’s lives, it could be in trouble. The modern frame of reference would loose its legitimacy and people would possibly turn to other frames of reference.

Scientific Rationality ONE OF THE MAIN SOURCES OF legitimacy for principal and agent in

the modern reference frame is science and its particular rationality. This includes, first and foremost, a methodological scepticism with regard to all non-observable entities or forces (that is, entities and forces whose postulation cannot be falsified as a matter of principle) like ancestral spirits, demons, angels, devils, Gods and esoteric forces (zodiac constellations, crystals, chakras, witchcraft, and so on). It is a matter of decoupling, as explained earlier, that most modern individuals hold true a mixture of scientific and non-scientific beliefs. This is not derogating the normative force of scientific precepts in public rationality.1 As Meyer and Jepperson observe, such private belief systems do not form an adequate basis for the attitude of a proper, rational, modern actor. Whosoever wants to be taken seriously in front of a court, in parliament or in the public square would have to justify his position in accordance with scientific rationality. Anyone in a public capacity justifying their actions or positions by reference to palm reading or astrology would arouse some irritation even in those who may privately believe in such things.2 Social systems like science can hardly be labelled as ‘actor’, but they exert an eminent influence on the world polity and the models it has to offer to individual actors like nation-states, organisations and individuals. Experts advise individual actors as to who they are, which goals they should pursue and which means they have to employ to achieve them.3 All these experts appeal to theories that are taken to be globally applicable, if not universally valid. Moreover, science as a system not being an actor but operating only as a source of legitimacy exempts scientific innovators to bear the costs and the risks of innovation. While science can freely alter the cultural reference frame to which actors have to refer, it is the actors who bare the economic burden of change and the consequences for failure.4 The older religious elites have, for the most part, given up the claim that they can show the path to ‘salvation’, the scientifically informed experts, by contrast, form the new ‘religious’ elite, which consists of professionals, researchers and intellectuals who show the path to progress, which is the secular equivalent to salvation.5 Nowadays,

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even an agent of religion, like the present Pope appeals to science and the scientific validity of theology to make it appear like a discipline among others at the modern temple of the university.6

Notes 1. For the concept of ‘public reason’, see also John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 212f; also Michael Dusche, “Experts or Mediators? Philosophers in the Public Sphere,” Ethical Perspectives 9, no. 1 (2002): 21–30; online available from TRANS—Internet Journal for Culture Studies. Available online at www. inst.at/trans/0Nr/dusche0.htm (accessed August 30, 2008). 2. Meyer, Weltkultur [World Culture], 54. 3. Ibid., 111f. 4. Ibid., 123. 5. Ibid., 131. 6. Ratzinger, “Benedikt XVI.”

The Modern Self SCIENTIFIC RATIONALITY NOT ONLY INFLUENCES THE normative basis

for the legitimacy of principal and actor but also furnishes the modern cultural reference frame with things to be taken as real. The ontology of the reference frame has evolved to include formerly unknown things like childhood, youth or the self as an object of scientific observation. The acceptance of each of these as natural phenomena has consequences on the normative level, that is, in law and family policies, but also in health care, education, and so on. The self is thought of as being complex, structured, capable of illness, reification or alienation. It is taken as the unmistakable expression of the person, the residue of its authenticity, dignity, conscience and abilities. It is made the true sovereign and the yardstick of everything social. Kn owing one’s self, therefore, is a duty for every modern individual. The self is in need of cultivation and the individual needs to ensure its inner consistency and the coherence of its actions, sayings and beliefs. Since law, politics and every social institution is justified, ultimately, with reference to the many selves that form society,1 the individual selves have to be placed in a position where they can bring to bear their responsibility for the whole of society. To fulfil this role, the modern self-needs to be brought up, educated, prepared, authorised and capable of checking and balancing itself. The self, therefore, becomes a task unto itself—and it becomes its own principal. The modern actorindividual can be thought of as sovereign, that is, as principal and agent in one, which is just another way of expressing the modern idea of the autonomous, responsible individual. As a principal unto itself, the sovereign individual has a share in shaping the norms governing society whose legitimacy ultimately rest on the collective consent of all individuals taken together. As an agent, in turn, the modern individual is bound and legitimised by these very norms. Since the responsibility for the norms governing society (and by implication the responsibility for the justice of its institutions, the fairness and efficiency of government and the damage caused by progress to non-actors like plants, animals, children, handicapped and future generations) ultimately rests on all individuals taken together, every responsible individual can also claim

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to act on behalf of all these instances. These instances (the state, its government, the environment, future generations) thereby become intermediate principals for the actor-individual and a service to its own coherence, consistency and share in collective sovereignty. The civic and ethic responsibility of the sovereign self and its personal interests, private needs and secret desires may at times conflict. This conflict has found its reflection, as Meyer and Jepperson note,2 in the classical dualisms of psychology (‘super-ego’ and ‘id’ in Sigmund Freund, ‘me’ and ‘I’ in George Herbert Mead). The ego, self or personal identity is the result of the dialectical mediation between the claims of society represented to the self through the generalised other (super-ego/me).3 This mediation is never perfect since individual claims to self-expression always exceed the recognised patterns of conduct available through the cultural reference frame. The result is a struggle for recognition where new patterns are fought for and the range of available models expanded.4 A similar constellation of externally available models and internal raw interests is repeated in collective actors like organisations and states when they form their collective identities or ‘selves’ as institutions.5

Notes 1. Meyer, Weltkultur [World Culture], 79 (logic of collective agency). See also the concept of ‘collective hermeneutics’ introduced in Dusche, Philosoph als Mediator [The Philosopher as a Mediator] (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2000), §3. 2. Meyer, Weltkultur [World Culture], 70. 3. Michael Dusche, “The Study of Migrant Identities through Migrant Literatures,” in German Studies in India. Aktuelle Beiträge aus der indischen Germanistik/Germanistik in Indien, ed. Dorothea Jecht and Shaswati Mazumdar (Munich: Iudicium, 2006), 81–116. 4. Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung [Struggle for Recognition] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992); see also Lothar Krappmann, Soziologische Dimensionen der Identität. Strukturelle Bedingungen für die Teilnahme an Interaktionsprozessen [Sociological Dimensions of Identity. Structural Conditions for Participation in Interactive Process] (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1969). 5. As Meyer and Jepperson point out taking as an example the university as an institution. See Meyer, Weltkultur [World Culture], 69.

The Liberal System Globalised THE STATE CORRESPONDING TO THE SOVEREIGN self is necessarily a

liberal one. Corporatist ways of organising society with compulsory associations assuming a mediatory role between the individual and the state or the utilitarian risk of sacrificing the rights of some individuals for the greater common good of the other individuals would be inconsistent with this idea of the self.1 Where corporatism or utilitarianism still prevail, the idea of inalienable individual rights, as an expression of respect for the sovereign self, limit, and in case of conflict overrule their precepts.2 After World War II and under the impression of the terrible crimes and aberrations of Nazi Germany, this system gained hegemony the world over. This hegemony enabled the building of supranational institutions and regimes along the lines of the liberal model and it rendered relatively uncontroversial the idea of universal human rights. With time, the liberal model came to supersede all traditional cultural reference frames everywhere on the globe through international human rights regimes, World Bank, United Nations Organisation and suborganisations, and so on. This is the basis for Meyer’s idea of a world polity. As evidence, Meyer and Jepperson cite the strong isomorphism of patterns appealed to by collective actors worldwide, which could not be explained by a bottom-up approach alone. Everywhere after World War II, collectives chose the model of the nation-state to organise their polity (and not that of an empire, a tribal confederation or a Caliphate, for example). Pervading even the bounds of its alleged cultural autarky, patterns of internal organisation are astonishingly isomorphic throughout. Everywhere nearly the same ministries can be found and policies are often widely similar.

Notes 1. Interestingly, however, Germany is faithful to the corporatist model in its attempt to organise its Muslim minority into a public law institution. See Michael Dusche, “Asserting Religious Identities in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in Assertive

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Religious Identities: India and Europe, ed. Satish Saberwal and Mushirul Hassan (New Delhi: Manohar, 2006), 415–37. 2. For a discussion of group rights versus individual rights, see Michael Dusche, “Multiculturalism, Communitarianism, and Liberal Pluralism,” in Religious Pluralism in South Asia and Europe, ed. Jamal Malik and Helmut Reifeld (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 120–44.

The World Polity∗ THE CENTRAL THESIS OF THE WORLD polity approach is that many

features of the modern nation-state are derived from global models than in turn are produced and propagated through global processes in which cultural and academic organisations play a major role. These global models are oriented towards general modern goals like equality, socio-economic and human progress. These processes are highly rationalised, articulate and capable of universal acceptance. The argument in favour of the existence and actual influence of the world polity on national processes is again and again the demonstrable isomorphism of developments taking place on the national plain but almost uniformly across nations in spite of their very different cultural backgrounds. Meyer et al. cite example over example regarding education, birth control, the opening up of educational institutions for women, human rights, environmental protection, economic policy, welfare, medicine, definition of illness, and so on.1 Even in their outward appearance and their goals, nation-states follow similar patterns. Most of them subscribe to similar ideas about progress and development. Traditional collective goals like augmenting the fame of the dynasty, pleasing the sight of God, expanding the realm of true faith and enlarging the empire are delegitimised, and the use of force as a legitimate means of international politics, in spite of appearances to the contrary is shunned. Former war ministries are now called ministries of defence.

Notes ∗

For the following, see John W. Meyer et al., “World Society and the Nation State,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 1 (1997): 144–81. I am quoting from the German translation “Die Weltgesellschaft und der Nationalstaat,” Weltkultur. Wie die Westlichen Prinzipien die Welt durchdringen [World Culture. How Western Principles Permeate the World], ed. John W. Meyer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 85–132. 1. Meyer, Weltkultur [World Culture], 96f.

Diffusion THE FACTOR OF SUCCESS AS A basis for the diffusion of forms of

institutionalisation is mentioned by Meyer and his collaborators in connection with the example of Japanese just-in-time production. It has appealed to many organisations (companies) due to the fact that it was successful in Japan and it could be made successful in other contexts as well.1 Today’s discourses about the best way to maintain the national welfare system under the pressures of a globalised market economy are equally looking out for the best example to emulate (Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden). Other factors may be ‘world opinion’, which may engender lip service to international human rights standards, for example. A third factor may be local resources and culture, which may be strong enough to divert the direction of change if not altogether reverse it. There may even be local movements that explicitly challenge the hegemony of global models on grounds that they are undermining local identities, which these movements have sought out to be more fitting for their country or region. Meyer and his team, however, point to the fact that often these movements are emulating global models themselves, namely those models that the global cultural reference frame has in store for social movements. Most religious fundamentalist movements, for example, may be anti-modern in their outlook but very modern in their strategies and forms of organisation. Even their goals are often in conflict with tradition. Often, they are anti-modern and anti-traditionalist at the same time.2

Notes 1. Meyer, Weltkultur [World Culture], 120. Of course, what diffuses is always translated and interpreted thereby changing its character in the process. Thanks to John W. Meyer for pointing this out to me. 2. Ibid., 110f.

The Statelessness of the World Polity IT IS ONLY SEEMINGLY PARADOXICAL, THAT the hegemonic influence

of cultural models prevailing in the globalised modern reference frame coincides with a situation where on a global scale no state-like power can directly dominate the cultural sphere. Meyer admits that the global cultural reference frame is under the direct influence of dominant actors but he denies that processes of institutionalisation and change in the world polity are the sole result of purposeful actions of single actors (like the USA) or powerful groups of actors (like the ‘West’). In the contrary, Meyer and his teams point out that the statelessness of the world polity is a precondition for the hegemony of its prevalent ideas and models. Ideas and models gaining hegemony are based on the fact that they are widely taken for granted in the global public sphere. Meyer draws our attention to the fact that the hegemonic ideas governing our Western liberal-democratic polities are not in fact only products of these societies. They are part of a translocal semiotic reference frame that originated in the West and has spread to almost every corner of the world. Although Western colonial expansion and today’s hegemony of Western powers may have helped spread these ideas, the hegemony of ideas in any given cultural reference frame cannot be explained through processes of direct exertion of power (dominance) alone. On the contrary, conditions, which are marked by the absence of imperial or state power, may be exceptionally conducive to the spread of ideas, their acceptance and attainment of hegemony. Meyer refers to the conditions of statelessness among the North American colonies before the formation of the USA that were very conducive to the spread of ideas of democracy, for example, but other contexts may be cited. Thus, the spread of a Hindu-Buddhist civilisation and later Islam in South-east Asia was not the outcome of imperial expansion.1 Ideas gained hegemony because they were adopted more or less voluntarily instead of being directly imposed by a would-be imperial elite. Meyer’s ‘World Polity’ approach offers a globalised perspective on the conditions of rule in various national contexts. In each of these

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contexts, globally hegemonic legal-ethical ideas of liberal democracy and secular politics are challenged by local elites, which want to denounce the implicit consensus governing those polities. Even the way this is done cannot be understood in isolation but each context bears globally similar traits. Of course, the hegemony of certain ideas in certain contexts is not an expression of a fair and democratic consensus. Local and translocal power disbalance does, of course, find its reflection in the hegemony of certain ideas over others. But the causal link is rarely a direct one. Those ruled have a share in the legitimisation of those who rule by accepting, for complex reasons, the cultural framework that lends legitimacy to the rulers.2 Certainly, this is not to say that everyone has the same amount of influence on the global cultural sphere. The global cultural sphere is by no means equitable or democratic. It reflects the disbalances in the world regarding military power, economic development and access to resources, material and cultural. Thus, the acceptance awarded to globalised concepts of modernity is not to be taken for an expression of free and rational consent of the ‘citizens’ of the world. Instead, it is probably a mixture of opportunism, lack of alternatives and acquiescence into the seemingly unavoidable. This, however, is not only a characteristic of the global cultural reference frame. The widespread acceptance, even among the disadvantaged, of monarchy, feudalism and clericalism in Europe and elsewhere before the French Revolution, is another example. Only when the idea of the possibility of an alternative system of governance took hold of people, were they able to bring about change. Earlier, conservative revolts rarely challenged the old reference frame. They were mostly intended to remind the lords of their duty to uphold peace and justice, thus reconfirming the old reference frame of patron and client. There must have been something in that reference frame that appealed to people. A promise of justice, the prospect of peace and eternal redemption. Today this promise is held out by the idea of the nation-state. What is it that appeals to people today to make the worldwide acceptance of the model of the nation-states possible? What influences the diffusion of globalised cultural models into local contexts? One major reason for the diffusion of institutional models is success. To a large degree, the nation-state has been able to base politics on a new footing. Even before participatory democracy became the preferred model of governance, the idea of belonging to a nation gave people a sense of sharing in a collective enterprise. Modern politics in the context of the nation-state

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has helped to bring about a strong identification of the citizenry with the collective project of the nation. The link is strong enough to create a form of solidarity that allows a polity to guard its borders and secure peace within. The idea of equality before the law satisfied the need for justice better than earlier models that were based on patron–client relations. This became only more accentuated with the advent of participatory democracy. Symbolic participation became in a sense more ‘real’ through representative democracy and justice as equality became more palpable for greater numbers of people. Modern politics is therefore inextricably linked to the nation-state. This is surprising in view of the fact that this model is not always a success story. The security that could be created within national borders by the institutions of an effective nation-state was often forfeited when nations went to war against each other. The more masses of people were drawn into politics the more were also drawn into war. Aggressive nationalism accounts for the two World Wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It accounts for endless wars and killings in every part of the world. The successful diffusion of this model in spite of its obvious failures is therefore in need of explanation. One factor, perhaps, is a lack of alternative models. Philosophers have conjured up globalised state-like institutions over and above the individual nation-state. But so far these ideas have not caught the imagination of people. It is still the emancipatory promise of the nationstate with its almost absolute sovereignty that attracts the fascination of people worldwide. Many, including Meyer, have pointed out that in some ways modern national politics has taken the place of religion. Salvation is sought here and now and by this-worldly means. But this only begs the question as to why this particular form of this-worldly ‘religion’ attracts so many people. One possible explanation may lie in the correspondence between individual and collective identity that is being highlighted by the nationstate. In the context of the nation-state, being oneself and being part of the nation, emancipating oneself through the means of emancipating the nation and the interlinkage of self-identity and national identity, carries a powerful symbolism, a promise of self-aggrandisement, liberation, power and wealth, and security and prosperity in this world, powerful enough for people wanting to kill and die for their nation. The nation almost becomes an extension of the individual self. A threat to the nation becomes almost like a threat to oneself, a threat justifying extreme actions, exempting from extreme guilt, calling for extreme sacrifice.

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Notes 1. Maurus Reinkowski, “Islamische Konversionskulturen in Asien” [Islamic Cultures of Conversion in Asia] in Identitätspolitik und Interkulturalität in Asien. Ein Multidisziplinäres Mosaik [Identity Politics and Interculturality in Asia. A Multicultural Mosaic], ed. Boike Rehbein, Jürgen Rüland and Judith Schlehe (Münster: LIT, 2006), 25–54. 2. Nandy describes the entanglement between the rulers and the ruled—in psychological terms (identification with the aggressor) as well as cultural analytical terms (hegemonic cultural consensus versus ‘discovery’ of an alternative frame of reference)—see his The Intimate Enemy. Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

Inclusion and Exclusion THE BASIS OF THIS IDENTIFICATION IS what was introduced earlier as identity politics. The following chapter is therefore exploring some of the psychosocial and sociolinguistic preconditions of its phenomenon. However, to be able to talk of identity politics, one needs to contrast it with a different concept of politics. This alternative concept of politics may not be real. It may not even be realistic. For the purpose of this book, it serves as a contrastive device to expound the merits and flaws of identity politics. I shall call the alternative concept of politics ‘inclusive politics’. Inclusive politics is defined as non-hierarchical and peaceful, whereas identity politics is marked by a tendency of being exclusive and potentially harmful. Inclusive politics is defined as rational and goal oriented. Here, political power is generated to meet a well-defined purpose. Identity politics, by contrast, means the generation of political power as an all-purpose means. The respective identity formula normally excludes certain classes of peoples. The power thus created is frequently directed against those excluded. Identity politics introduces a hierarchy between the ‘self ’ and the ‘other’. Often its dealings with the ‘other’ take a violent shape. To justify exclusion, injustice and violence in dealings with the ‘other’, identity politics resorts to or creates myths about the inherently inferior ‘nature’ of the ‘other’ and the ‘naturalness’ of the ‘self ’. These myths are often based on stereotypes that are the basis of would-be perceptions of threat with respect to the ‘other’, which in turn justifies the exceptional way the ‘other’ has to be dealt with.

Identity T

HE INTERACTIONIST APPROACH IN IDENTITY THEORY , which is underlying the present analysis, emphasises the social dimension of personal and collective identity formation.1 This is based on the insight that human beings normally thrive under conditions of mutual recognition,2 that is, they cannot form stable personal or collective identities without ‘others’ recognising them. This becomes apparent if one considers the fact that human language itself is an imminently social phenomenon. Considering that language gives us the most sophisticated tools to express who we are and considering that language, too, has to rely on commonly accepted patterns of communicative interaction, the symbolic representation of our identity is in need of common acceptance among the users of the language. The linguistic representation of our identity in discourse can be a name or a definite description. In any case, it relies on commonly understandable ways of reference to a person. Commonly understandable ways of representing a person in discourse, however, rely on a limited number of patterns that are in turn connected with socially accepted roles and their ensuing expectations. Individuals will not always find these models fitting. Thus, there is an irresolvable tension between the pragmatic constraints on the symbolic representations of identities and the desire of those so embodied to be represented in ever more appropriate ways. As a matter of principle, there are limits to the reconciliation of this desire for a comprehensive symbolic representation and the practical exigencies of communication. Hence, there will never be a final agreement between the individual, on one hand, who seeks to express his/her identity and the collective (society, community of speakers of a language, participants of a culture, and so on), on the other hand, that offers the symbolic tools to do so. Therefore, symbolic representations of identity are never stable. Instead, they are in constant need of negotiation—in the communicative situation itself, and more generally in the larger framework of society. To be successful in these negotiations, the individual has to walk a fine line between yielding to the expectations of the collective, on one hand, and insisting on its distinctiveness, on the other. Failing to assert itself in an acceptable way the individual becomes vulnerable to identity

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ascriptions by others. By losing control over its symbolic representation, however, it also partly loses control over its life. Others will represent him/her as they wish without any consideration for how she/he would like to be represented. Having to live with an identity imposed by others, the liberty of the individual is severely restricted. In learning how to conform to the expectations of a collective, the individual is confronted with expectations that are impressed on it with the prospect of reward or punishment. A person can either try to live up to these expectations and earn recognition or rebel against them and earn banishment. The expectations of the collective, however, are themselves subject to change. This change, in turn, is induced by the individual, not in its singularity, but in numbers large enough to force the collective to amend its rules and expectations. The demands of the collective and the conflicting expectations of sizable numbers of individuals are interlinked in a dynamic fashion. They form the two sides of a dialectical entanglement in which the individuals and the collective negotiate their identities through a circle of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.3 In this dialectical process, the collective, which precedes the individual ontogenetically, forms the thesis in terms of its expectations regarding the individual’s behaviour. The antithesis is offered by the individual that is constantly in need of defining itself in a qualified opposition to collective expectations. This relationship is an unbalanced one as long as we look at only one individual facing the collective alone. As soon as we allow for a greater number of individuals with similar non-conforming tendencies, these individuals may be able to force the collective to renegotiate the demands that it imposes on the individuals. This process may lead to homogeneous development involving the whole of the collective. Then, the demands of the collective change uniformly for all its members in response to the pressure of one group of individuals. The collective arrives at a new synthesis, that is, it reintegrates on the basis of a new consensus about its expectations vis-à-vis the individual. Here, the dialectical process has come full circle. We may think of civil rights movements, for example, that start out from the demands of a minority and arrive at a new set of norms to govern the whole of society. The women’s liberation movement, for example, has started with a few women not willing to conform to society’s expectations with respect to gender roles. Meanwhile, it has effectively changed the established patterns of expectations that society imposes on all men and women. An alternative to engaging the whole of the collective in a dialectical process of social change would be to break up the collective into parts,

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where some stick to the old rules and some progress along new lines. Here, the outcome is social differentiation in groups, classes, casts, tribes, subcultures, and so on. Even after the individual has settled questions of personal and collective identity by being or not being part of certain social groups and affirming and conforming to their expectations and established patterns of social behaviour, its problems of maintaining its identity do not end. Still, while largely accepting and behaving in accordance with group norms, individuals are bound to have needs and desires that would lead them into conflict with group expectations if they were to be followed. Thus, individuals constantly negotiate with the group about the interpretations and implications of norms that they generally accept. In particular circumstances, individuals negotiate the ‘meaning’ of a certain norm. This negotiation, to a large extent, ensues in the medium of language. It is the linguistic representation, and even legal codification, of social norms that attempts to limit the range of possible interpretations (particularly in legal language) and at the same time offer a tool for rewording and reinterpreting their underlying intention. Even in the domain of politics, arguments often take the form of a struggle over divergent understandings of semantics. We may think of the struggle over the term ‘secular’ in the Indian polity over the past ten odd years as an example.4 Since language as a social phenomenon is also the medium in which each individual negotiates within himself/herself its own identity across time (diachronic perspective) and different social roles that she/he has to master (synchronic perspective), personal identity cannot be separated from collective identity. Personal identity is thus not less social than collective identity. Finally, in order to understand what shapes the identity of a person or a collective, we should also be able to say in what sense a person or a collective can fail to have an identity. One suggestion would be that a person fails to have an identity when she/he fails to maintain a certain amount of coherence and consistency within her/his belief system and in the way her/his actions confirm or betray her/his professed beliefs. The strictness that we should impose on the coherence and consistency of beliefs and actions should, however, not be exaggerated. As a person cannot have an identity except by responding to social demands and since these demands are often incommensurable, a person often cannot help incorporating these inconsistencies into himself/herself. It would

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be too much to ask for a well-integrated personality where the social circumstances are full of contradictions.5

Notes 1. For an introduction, see Lothar Krappmann, Soziologische Dimensionen der Identität. Strukturelle Bedingungen für die Teilnahme an Interaktionsprozessen [Sociological Dimensions of Identity. Structural Conditions for Participation in Interactive Processes] (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1969). The interactionist approach stands in the tradition of George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). I am also relying on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s pragmatist account of meaning and language: G. E. M. Ansombe, trans., Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953) and on Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action: Thomas McCarthy, trans., Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 and 1987). 2. Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung [Struggle for Recognition] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992). 3. The different responses to the expectations of the collective are reflected in Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, conception of the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ as two faculties of the self that are in constant disaccord with one another. Mead’s ‘I’ represents the disposition of the individual to assert itself sometimes even against social expectations. The ‘me’ represents a part of the self that conforms to social expectations much like Freud’s super-ego. Sigmund Freud, however, mentions the term ‘identity’ as a synthesis of the faculties of the ‘id’ and the ‘super-ego’ only once in his work; see his collected woks (London: Imago, 1955), vol. 14, 111–205. 4. Brenda Cossman and Ratna Kapur, Secularism’s Last Sigh? Hindutva and the (Miss) Rule of Law (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), an essay that ‘explores the contest over the meaning of Hindutva and secularism in the legal arena’ (xvi). 5. Thus, Adorno even finds that ‘the aim of a well integrated personality is despicable’. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Zum Verhältnis von Sociology und Psychoanalyse,” in Sociologica. Frankfurter Beiträge zur Sociology. Band 1 [On the Relationship between Sociology and Psycho Analysis] (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955), 11–45 (my translation).

Language SINCE A LARGE PART OF THE negotiation of personal and collective

identity takes place in and through the medium of language, a word on semantics is in place. Semantics, traditionally, is the theory of meaning of any formal or natural language. For the purpose of this analysis, I follow a pragmatist account of meaning as outlined by Wittgenstein in his later work.1 Wittgenstein rejects the traditional conception of meaning that he identifies with Augustine, and according to which each word of the language corresponds to an entity that is its meaning.2 ‘Meanings’, according to Wittgenstein, do not have to be conceptualised as entities at all. Thus, Wittgenstein says: ‘The meaning of a word is its use in the language.’3 The use of an expression, of course, cannot be conceived outside the domain of social interaction. Thus, ‘to mean’ something is to intend and expect to be understood in a certain way and to elicit the appropriate response in terms of behaviour, linguistic or other, from the interlocutors. The noun ‘meaning’ is thus only to be understood as the nominalised form of the verb ‘to mean’ just as ‘throwing’ is the nominalised form of ‘to throw’ without necessarily implying that there are such entities as ‘throwings’.4 According to Wittgenstein, understanding the use of an utterance amounts to knowing how to respond appropriately to a type of linguistic behaviour. Linguistic behaviour being only a part of the whole range of social behaviour, we might as well say: Understanding an instance of intentional human behaviour (both linguistic and non-linguistic) means knowing how to respond appropriately to the corresponding behavioural pattern. This knowledge comprises two things, (i) knowledge of the relevant pattern and (ii) the ability to recognise a token behaviour as an instance of a pattern type. We have seen how language offers only relatively coarse tools for the representation and expression of individual needs and desires in socially acceptable and comprehensible ways. In this general sense, language itself becomes a system of social norms with the corresponding demand on the individual to conform to collective expectations as to how to express herself or himself. Again, the same dialectics is at play here as in the case of any relation between individuals and collectives. The individual’s

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particular needs and desires are a constant challenge to the collective’s identity, and the collective will have an interest to control these. If the dissenters become too numerous, however, that is if needs and desires change on a social scale, either the group’s norms will be adjusted, then the group’s identity changes—or the group breaks up and differentiates into subgroups. The same applies a fortiori to languages, which can be seen as an expression of a group’s linguistic identity. Linguistic identities change and thus languages break up and branch out into variant uses of language (dialects, sociolects, jargons, youth and professional). Ultimately, new languages emerge. The social processes that led to the evolution of Hindi and Urdu as two almost separate languages are an interesting illustration of this idea.5

Notes 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen [Philosophical Investigations]. In Werkausgabe, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984). 2. ‘That philosophical concept of meaning has its place in a primitive idea of the way language functions. But one can also say that it is the idea of a language more primitive than ours’ (Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, §2). 3. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, §43. 4. In saying this, I do not wish to contest the possibility of a theory of meaning that uses entities such as propositions, intensions, extensions, or interpreted logical forms as semantic counterparts for linguistic expressions. For certain purposes, the stipulation of ‘meanings’ as entities may be useful. For other purposes, semantics may be reduced to a form of syntax and for yet others, semantics and syntax may reduce to lexicology. In fact, it seems that, with certain limitations, each domain of language can be represented in every other domain and each such representation may be useful for different ends. Wittgenstein seems to do the same when he takes pragmatics as basic and then models meaning on the concept of the ‘use’ of language. For a more detailed account, see Michael Dusche, “Signification in Opaque Contexts. Interpreted Logical Forms as Attitude Contents,” in Signification in Language and Culture, ed. Harjeet Singh Gill (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2002), 161–94; a shorter version: “Interpreted Logical Forms as Objects of the Attitudes,” Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 4, no. 4 (1995): 301–15. 5. Salil Misra, “Transition form the Syncretic to the Plural: The World of Hindi and Urdu,” in Religious Pluralism in South Asia and Europe, ed. Jamal Malik and Helmut Reifeld (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 268–97.

Culture ACCORDING TO SOME, THE SPHERE OF culture is defined by reference to symbols, metaphors or symbolic actions with characteristic meanings, and not by reference to rules governing human behaviour. Dipankar Gupta suggests the term ‘root metaphor’ for the basic beliefs underlying each cultural sphere, for example, the belief in purity and impurity underlying the South Asian conception of caste. Such deep-rooted beliefs control the interaction of individuals in a very elementary and pervasive sense—often subconsciously.1 Wittgenstein, however, has taught us how ‘meaning’ (also the meaning of metaphors) can be translated back into ‘social practice’. What Wittgenstein observes about language is essentially true of everything that involves intentionality—whether this be human actions, speech acts or even rituals. Knowing the meaning of something in this broader sense, as we have seen, is equivalent to understanding and knowing how to respond appropriately to patterns of human behaviour, linguistic and otherwise. This understanding can be implicit and subconscious or explicit and conscious. Even beliefs can be construed as actions involving a conscious or subconscious decision of ‘holding something true’. Belief systems lead to characteristic ways of interaction among individuals and collectives that can in themselves be seen as spelling out what the respective beliefs ‘mean’ for a collective that shares the corresponding cultural sphere. All communicative interaction is marked by intentionality. Intentionality, in this construction, would be tantamount to the expectation of appropriate responses in the partners of social interaction. In this sense, the intention that makes for the communicativeness of an action would be nothing more than the expectation that partners would respond appropriately. An act lacking intention would carry no such expectation. The point of explicating the semiotic reference frame that constitutes a culture, and that comprises all accepted rules of social behaviour, is to draw attention to the following distinction: In a very broad sense, what distinguishes culture from nature seems to be that cultural phenomena follow rules, whereas nature follows laws. Natural laws are different from social rules in that they do not permit exceptions. Natural laws always

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hold true or they are not laws at all. Thus, the day apples fail to fall to the ground, Newton’s law of gravity will no longer be valid. Social rules, by contrast, hold only generically true and they do allow for exceptions. Thus, the fact that there are instances where people do not abide by the rule that they should not cross a road if there is a red light does not mean that the rule is not generally valid. Natural laws are universal and precise and rules of social practice are generic, vague and fuzzy.

Note 1. Dipankar Gupta, Culture, Space, and the Nation-State (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000).

The Political

AS MOST PEOPLE WOULD AGREE, THE political is about bringing people

together to make collectively binding decisions on issues that are of concern to them all. Politics is thus about making collectively binding decisions. Collective decisions, in turn, are based on the choice made by those who participate in the political process. The choice may be controversial and based on majority decision. But then the rule of whether to take decisions by simple (or qualified) majority constitutes a choice that precedes the decision. To avoid an infinite regress, such higher order choices regarding the appropriate decision-making procedures for certain types of collective decisions have to rest in an original choice, counterfactually made by literally all the individuals concerned, including future generations. From a normative perspective, therefore, we are led to the idea of a silent background consensus that constitutes and upholds a polity.1 This may constitute its political identity. Nonpolitical identity labels, in turn, need not be based on personal choice, that is, they can be collective but they are not collectively binding,2 or can be based on ‘natural’ properties of individuals which these have not chosen, such as sex, skin colour, primary socialisation, and so on. Personal identity can thus be seen as the unique way in which a number of collective identities, political as well as non-political, intersect in a single person at a certain point of time. In a diachronic perspective, of course, some of the elements of this intersection are more constant than others. Nevertheless, the identity of a person is never fixed. One could say, with Wittgenstein, that the coherence of the single thread that constitutes personal identity is not characterised by a single fibre running through the whole of its length but by the way fibres of different lengths are intertwined and spun together.3 Political identity labels are connected with issues that bind people together for some time until the respective controversy is resolved. They develop into more constant characteristics if the political controversy is not resolved over a long time. Through the political, people form temporary alliances that can become the basis of (impermanent) political identities. A degree of permanence is provided by the fact that people, in order to avail themselves

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of the possibility of collective decision making, need to create institutional mechanisms through which they can achieve this purpose. The nature of the background consensus that constitutes and upholds the polity (which can be a rural patriarchy, a council of village elders, a tribal confederation with a warlord at its head, an empire, a monarchy, a republic, a representative democracy, and so on) is likely to become an integral part of the political identity of those who participate in it, directly, indirectly or merely symbolically. This political identity can become overwhelming. In totalitarian regimes, the political claim on a person’s identity is near complete. Modern democracies fend against the tendency of the political to become totalitarian by setting limits to the degree of political communitarisation. The role of human rights can be seen as defining and limiting the scope of the political and singling out issues that are barred from at least the simple decision-making procedures. Thus, it would be considered illegitimate if the political collective were to decide on an individual’s life or physical integrity by a simple majority decision. Such decisions are barred by the human rights to life and physical integrity.4 Equally, questions of conscience can never be made a political issue (freedom of conscience).5 A political collective cannot legitimately overrule an individual’s conscience by imposing the faith of the majority on the whole of the polity, by asking people to profess the faith of the king, the ruling elite or the majority, or otherwise suffer disadvantages, discrimination, punishment or death. In the liberal tradition, these caveats against the political have found their expression in the principle of liberty as it has been articulated in various declarations of human rights such as the Virginia Bill of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence. Correspondingly, Article IV of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 reads: Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man has no bounds other than those that ensure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights. These bounds may be determined only by Law.

The principle of liberty was Kant’s only human right and it informs Rawls’ first principle of justice. Since most modern democracies try to follow these precepts, the limitations on political communitarisation also limit the extent a polity is permitted to pursue collective goals. The collective goal of a polity is limited to provide the security and assistance necessary for individuals and associations of individuals to

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pursue their individual or collective ends. It is not to interfere with the right of individuals or associations to set their own goals freely or to opt out of any communitarian enterprise. This maxim rules out that a state prescribes any virtues to its citizens except for those considered indispensable for the upholding of the polity.

Notes 1. Dusche, Der Philosoph als Mediator [The Philosopher as a Mediator], 70 (Hintergrundkonsens). 2. For example, if one person chooses to be agnostic, the other person does not have to be an agnostic, too. Thus, the choice of being agnostic is not political. 3. ‘[We] extend our concept […] as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.’ See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §67. 4. See Articles 6 and 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 2(2) of the German Basic Law [Grundgesetz]. 5. See Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 4 of the German Basic Law.

Inclusive versus Identity Politics

IN ITS INCLUSIONARY FORM, POLITICS IS a notion clearly circumscribed

by the rational purpose of the collective. In other words, the purpose comes first and the power generated to pursue it by wielding a common political identity comes second. Politics thus conceived is based on collective choice and not on nature or destiny. The powerful, however, are often tempted to conceal this fact by pretending that power entails destiny. They transfigure their dominance into foundational myths of ancestral families or ‘peoples’, in mythologies of collective purpose and theological mission. In forging their power base, they take given prepolitical identities that promise to unite a powerful enough crowd and transform them into political identities by adding a seemingly collective goal. In all these instances, the purpose is similar: It is to create power before the purpose, power that then becomes an all-purpose instrument in the hands of the mighty. In inclusionary politics, the purpose precedes the power. In identity politics, power becomes an end in itself. The concept behind this notion is much older than the name. Towards the end of the 1940s, Theodor W. Adorno observed what he called a ‘ticket mentality’.1 This holds true of majoritarian as well as emancipatory identity politics. Identity politics in the name of the emancipation of disadvantaged groups with respect to gender, race, class, ethnicity or religion runs the risk of perpetuating the same pattern that is responsible for the exclusion of these groups.2 Moreover, the solution attempted by the discriminated minority often involves its own form of identity politics towards an even smaller minority. Examples abound. Thus, Albanians oppose the identity politics of the majoritarian Serbs in greater Serbia by carving out a separate territory, Kosovo, for themselves. In Kosovo, however, they victimise the Serb minority with their own Albanian identity politics, and the Kosovan Serbs in turn victimise yet smaller ethnic groups, and so on, ad absurdum.3 It turns out, therefore, that even in the benign form in which it is propagated by multiculturalists, identity politics risks being contaminated with the same problems that infect majoritarian identity politics. This calls for an overall critique of the phenomenon.

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Politics can be characterised in empirical terms as well as in normative terms and both notions are relevant for the purpose of this analysis. Empirically, politics is about the eligible members of a polity taking collectively binding decisions. As we have seen, for this to work, a background consensus about the ways collective decisions are made is required. This background consensus, which empirically enables and normatively legitimises any such decision-making procedure, forms the subject of political theory. It informs (and is informed by) the legal frameworks of societies, their written or unwritten constitutions above all, and it is implicit in the way the judiciary interprets and applies the law. Since the political theory underlying societal practice is for the most part implicit, with the exception of positive law, only a hermeneutic examination can bring it to light. Of course, what is truly the ‘political theory’ underlying a societal practice at any given moment of history is a matter of interpretation on which no two political theorists are likely to agree. The most influential exposition of the political theory underlying most Western societies, however, was offered by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice in 1971 and in his later work.4 Rawls offers what ranks among the most sophisticated explications of theories of justice and political legitimacy available today. For the German context, the most influential thinker is Jürgen Habermas whose influence, of course, stretches far beyond the Germanspeaking world. Both Rawls and Habermas take recourse to various Enlightenment strands of political philosophy with Immanuel Kant as a major figure. This tradition is commonly referred to as liberal, although today’s political liberalism is no longer the same as the liberalism of Locke and Kant. Today’s liberal-democratic theory has absorbed various democratic, republican and socialist traditions as well as the ideas of the rule of law and the universal validity of human rights. The result is a political theory based on the cornerstones of equal liberties (and their ‘fair value’)5, popular sovereignty and the legal guarantee of human rights. Politics within this framework takes place within a wider legal-ethical framework that defines it. This definition excludes certain issues from the process of simple collective decision making as well as designates certain means by which a collectivity can legitimately reach agreement. The topics excluded from simple decision making are first and foremost those implicit in the idea of human rights. Human rights define precisely what can never be the subject of a simple majority decision. Moreover, they limit the means that can legitimately be used by political parties to achieve their political goals (for example, they ban the use of force).

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The background political theory also defines which interests can legitimately be articulated, or excluded, and by whom. Typically, interests would be excluded, if articulated by groups that attack established political institutions and that question the political theory giving legitimacy to these institutions. In this sense, every political community has a legal-ethical identity, which is defined through a notion of ‘us’ as against a notion of ‘them’.6 The important thing to note here is, however, that the notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the liberal-democratic framework are not defined with recourse to any pre-political categories such as gender, class, ethnicity, religion, culture, (primordial) nationality, ethnicity or the like. The dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’ does lead to exclusion (through territoriality, citizenship, and so on) but this exclusion is not based on pre-political identities. The boundaries between those included and those excluded are not fixed by ‘nature’, that is, by essentialising categories of race, class, gender, religion or ethnicity. They are open for negotiation within the political process itself. Examples include the abolition of class-based suffrage in Germany, the abolition of race-based political participation in the USA and South Africa and the introduction of women’s suffrage in Europe (a few European stares like Finland and Germany introduced women’s suffrage already after World War I, most other European countries introduced it only after World War II). As a consequence, descent-based citizenship laws are on the retreat and people of various ethnic and religious backgrounds are eligible to receive citizenship status if born in a particular country. Likewise, the political identity of the EU is, in principle, open enough to include countries with a majority of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christians and possibly even countries with predominantly Muslim populations such as Kosovo, Albania and Turkey, the criteria being adherence to constitutional principles and not ethnic or religious identity.7 In contrast, identity politics does resort to such primordial distinctions in order to define political collectivities. The delineations of these concepts tend to be fixed by loyalties that do not necessarily have any bearing on matters fought over in the political process proper. Fights over identity can thus be called non-political. Nevertheless, identity politics as a discourse strategy plays an important role in modern political controversies. A political controversy couched in the non-political terminology of ‘our’ and ‘their’ identity absolves the contender from conceding that the political opponent may in fact be articulating legitimate

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interests that can be discussed on a par with his/her own interests until a fair compromise is found. Instead, the adversary is depicted as essentially without legitimate political claim. This can be useful if the aim is not a fair political compromise between equals but the domination of the adversary. Identity politics is thus about establishing a hierarchy between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This is what distinguishes identity politics from inclusive politics. The goal can be to reverse an existing hierarchy that is perceived as unjust. This is often the purpose of communitarian or multicultural enterprises. In this case identity politics can be emancipatory. But the aim can also be to establish a majoritarian hierarchy. In that case, identity politics turns out to be undemocratic. In times of peace and stability, the legal-ethical identity of a given polity is not normally problematic to its members. It forms part of the silent background consensus that constitutes any given society. Its members are normally not aware of its operation in the background. Political controversies are couched in political terms and political adversaries describe each other equally in political terms (the Right versus the Left, conservative versus progressive, and so on). This requires the construction of political identities (‘us’ versus ‘them’) but these identities are not hierarchical. The dichotomy so constituted is among equals and it is issue bound. Members of different parties can fight over a number of issues and still respect each other as members in good standing of the same polity. Thus, political identities can be antagonistic but need not be hostile with respect to each other. Identity politics, by contrast, calls into question the very basis of this silent background understanding. The aim of identity politics is to subvert a given legal-ethical background consensus and change the constitutive nature of the body politic. To be sure, the legal-ethical identity of any given polity is grounded on hegemonic ideas and thus marks a power relationship between those included and those excluded from processes of political deliberation. Thus, identity politics can be a way for those excluded to question the hegemonic legal-ethical framework on grounds of justice and a way to change the constitutive rules of the polity in order to get themselves included (that is, the civil rights movement in the USA, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, feminism). More often, however, the aim of identity politics is not to achieve an inclusion into a larger and more equitable legal-ethical framework but to establish an alternative framework where new groups of people are excluded. Here, identity politics is employed by groups, which are already favoured by circumstances and which, from a position of relative strength, impose

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a framework on those already disadvantaged that bereaves them of their status of formal equality. Thus, when Hindu supremacists in India employ strategies of identity politics in order to change the secular Indian polity into a Hindu polity it is not because Hindus were excluded from, or disadvantaged within, the legal–ethical framework of the Indian polity. On the contrary, political Hinduism seems to use the Hindutva ideology to legitimise their supremacy. A combination of other factors contributes to the fact that a nation based on a Hindu identity appears as an attractive idea to Hindus. One factor may be that an emerging Muslim merchant class should be denied its fair share in the growing economy.8 Another factor may be the relative lack of reach and therefore ineffectiveness of the Indian state. State ineffectiveness may encourage the dream of a more homogeneous polity based on the dominance of the majority faith. The failure of the secular Indian elite to deliver better governance is interpreted as the failure of secularism in the Indian context. The victims of this redrawing of political boundaries along Hindu identitarian lines, however, are not the secular elites but Muslims (as well as Christians and other minorities). The creation of a scapegoat is often the welcome by-product of identity politics, the best-known example being the identity politics of National Socialism that targeted the Jews as scapegoats instead of addressing those parts of the German elites that were in fact responsible for the disaster of World War I, the crisis of the German economy in the interwar period and the subsequent failure of the Weimar Republic. All this eventually led to the rise to power of Hitler and his accomplices. Today it seems that identity politics is not an isolated phenomenon but follows a global trend. This flows logically from the idea propounded in Meyer’s world polity approach that the hegemonic background consensus in individual polities depends on globally hegemonic patterns available at the level of world polity. As identity politics is an indicator of social forces questioning and attempting to change the hegemonic ideas governing societies in the world polity, the occurrence of identity politics worldwide can be interpreted as a challenge to established norms of secular modernity and democracy. As identity politics is an attempt to question the framework of legitimate political expression, it tends to employ discourse strategies that attempt to settle political controversies in non-political registers (religious, moral, aesthetic, scientific). An example would be the depiction of a political controversy as a religious one and the depiction of the political antagonist as adhering to a different, if not

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inferior, religion.9 Correspondingly, identity politics tends to resort to essentialising and stereotypical visions of ‘us’ and ‘them’, thereby inflating political controversies into moral, religious, naturalistic or even cosmic dimensions. Thus, in Turkey, secularism in the form of an allegedly laïcist state is under siege by Islamists while its defence often takes an ethno-nationalist shape, which implies a governmental identity politics against ethnically non-Turkish minorities. In Israel, the secular vision of the founders of the nation are being called into question by religionists invoking the cosmic dimension of the project of a Jewish state in ‘Eretz Yisrael’. Thus, Roger Friedland points out that: … religious nationalist Jews understand their settlement within a redemptive historicity, one in which the land taken is promised by God to the Jews as an eternal patrimony, in which the settlement of the land is taken to be an indicator and a means by which the messianic movement of history is to be realized … For them the collective return to God, like the original turn, is a miracle, something not assimilable to natural law, to the temporality of progress, to the machine logic of rationalization. [In contrast] Labour Zionists … evaluated settlement by its contribution to state power and economic autonomy.10

Where politicised religionists resort to violence, Friedland suggests they express the extraordinariness of a divine force in which they ‘not only believe but participate’.11 This holds true, as Friedland mentions, not only of militant religious Zionists who ‘understand themselves to be preparing the “footsteps of the Messiah”’ but also of militant Shi’ites who ‘actively emulate the model of Imam Hussein in Karbala’, of Sunni militants who take the suffering of their enemies as ‘indicators of Allah’s intercession’, of Christian fundamentalists who ‘understand history as a struggle between Christ and the anti-Christ, through which the latter seeks the erosion of American sovereignty’. Thus, for Palestine, the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s secular vision of an independent Palestinian state12 is challenged by Muslim fundamentalists. In India, the secular Nehruvian state is besieged by Hindu nationalists who historicise the coming of their Gods, seeking the modern-day restoration of Ram’s mythical kingdom. They derive their legitimacy from alternative semiotic reference frames that remake the world according to their own codes. And in Europe, the conditions for a deepening and expansion of the union are increasingly being discussed

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not in secular political terms but in the para-political terms of an allegedly Christian identity. For religious identity politicians to make their ideas matter and literally have them materialise, holy places and holy lands, such as Jerusalem’s Temple Mount versus Dome of the Rock, Ayodhya’s Ramjanmabhumi (birthplace of Ram) versus Babri Mosque, Eretz Yisrael versus Palestine, Bharat Mata versus Hindustan, the Christian Occident (Abendland) versus secular Europe, must be created as instances and referents by attributing specific meanings to their material substratum.13 Where the different ontologies conflict, people, often violently, do the same. Since identity politics is rarely non-violent and has a large propensity to lead to conflict, with genocide lurking at its extreme end, an acute awareness of this trend is called for. The trend is to question the basic tenets of modern secular politics. As Friedland rightly points out, not just distribution or access to power but different understandings of reality are at stake.14

Notes 1. Theodor W. Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950)—German: Studien zum autoritären Charakter (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1973). Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1971), 183. 2. Tiesler, Muslime in Europa [Muslims in Europe], 139 and 141; see also Dusche, “Multiculturalism, Communitarianism, and Liberal Pluralism.” 3. Another recent example is to be found in Iraq; see Preti Taneja, Assimilation, Exodus, Eradication: Iraq’s Minority Communities since 2003 (London: Minority Rights Group, 2007), available online at www.minorityrights.org/?lid=682 (accessed August 30, 2008); Michael Dusche, “Human Rights, Autonomy, and Sovereignty,” Ethical Perspectives 7, no. 1 (2000): 24–36, for an account of ethnic versus political nationalism. 4. Eric Schwitzgebel’s account of the most cited Moral/Political/Legal Theorists in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy where Rawls ranks first (available online at schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2006/11/most-cited-ethicists-in-stanford.html). 5. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 224ff. and the restatement of the first principle of justice in Rawls, Political Liberalism. 6. That is ‘liberal-democratic regimes’ versus ‘authoritarian regimes’. The underlying notion is implicit in Sternberger and Habermas’ concept of ‘constitutional patriotism’. See “Staatsbürgerschaft und nationale Identität” [Citizenship and National Identity], in Faktizität und Geltung [Facticity and Validity], ed. Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992); Dolf Sternberger, Verfassungspatriotismus [Constitutional Patriotism] (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1990). 7. That is the criteria of the European Councils of Copenhagen (1993) and Madrid (1995).

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8. Thus, the predominant explanation of the pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat in spring 2002. 9. A recent and prominent example is the present Pope’s Regensburg lecture in which he resorts to age-old stereotypes about Islam as a violent religion, thereby masking Christendom’s own history of violent conversion and genocide in the name of religion; see Dusche, “‘Europe’ and ‘The Islamic World’ ”. 10. Roger O. Friedland, “Institution, Practice and Ontology: Towards a Religious Sociology,” in Ideology and Organizational Institutionalism, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, ed. Renate E. Meyer, Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson, Marc J. Ventresca and Peter Walgenbach (Binglet: Emerald, 2009), 45–83. 11. Ibid. 12. Dietmar Herz, Palästina. Gaza und Westbank. Geschichte, Politik, Kultur [Palestine: Gaza and West Bank. History, Politics, Culture] (München: C. H. Beck, 2003), 50. 13. As a geographical focal point for Europe the shrine of the St. Jacob, the ‘Slaughterer of the Muslims’ (in Spanish ‘Matamoros’) in Santiago de Compostella would be a good candidate. 14. Friedland, Institution, Practice and Ontology.

Identity Politics in Europe THE TERM ‘EUROPE’ CAN BE UNDERSTOOD to refer to a blurred

geographical notion with fuzzy borders, especially towards the East. It can also be understood to refer to an area where a particular semiotic reference frame (civilisation) evolved out of the debris of the western part of the Roman Empire, an emerging Latinate Christianity and some Germanic legal and military traditions.1 This process was accompanied by mutually reflecting perceptions of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. The ‘other’ in this interplay was often heathendom, more often and more specifically Islam (the external ‘other’) and Judaism (the internal ‘other’). The emerging reference frame informed a social system that ostensibly focussed on a specific form of Christianity but which was not exhausted by its reference to Catholicism.2 Beginning with the Frankish Empire as its crystallising point, Western Europe emerged as a separate entity out of the world of antiquity. The latter which was centred on the Mediterranean basin, which included Western Asia and North Africa, in a shared space with common reference points in Roman law and a variety of coexisting religious beliefs. This common space was lost when the Roman Empire fell apart. It was only recaptured when trade with the Levant picked up and Renaissance humanism re-established the link to Hebrew, Greek and Roman antiquity. In the meantime, however, Western Europe had constituted itself as Latin Christendom during the intervening period of the Middle Ages. Today, Western Europe has bowed out of its self-representation as Christendom. Instead, it has merged with a society of states commonly referred to as ‘the West’ that defines itself with reference to the cosmopolitan values of democracy and human rights. To a certain degree, this Western world has also included Turkey since the modernisation process that was initiated and forcefully driven through by Mustafa Kemal Pasha and his followers. Turkey’s membership with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is only an outward expression of this integration with the West. Nevertheless, relations between Europe and the Muslim world in general, and Turkey in particular, are still marked by mutual stereotyping and latent hostility. This has also rubbed off on some migrants from predominantly Muslim countries living in

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Europe. Recent debates in Germany about the accession of Turkey to the EU, the ‘integration’ of Muslims into mainstream society, and about a possible European identity suggest the following alternative. Either Europe admits its Christian identity (one connotation of the German term ‘Abendland’ [the Occident] which is often used in these debates) or it affiliates with the tradition of the European Enlightenment, which in its globalised form rests on secular traditions drawing from republicanism, civic nationalism, democracy, liberalism, and so on. The proponents of the former option emphasise Europe’s alleged Christian identity. As a welcome by-product, they exclude Turkey as a possible EU member and they call into question whether Muslim immigrants can ever successfully integrate into Western liberal society.3 Thereby the political (and juridical) question of whether Turkey does or does not conform to the Copenhagen criteria for accession to the EU and whether immigrants (individually) do or do not pay heed to German constitutional norms and respect the laws of the land is cross-graded into a question of identity and the problem thereby elevated to a level where its resolution seems principally impossible. Even the European constitutional debate is tinged with this light. If for reasons of their identity (which for some contenders seems to be something very deeply rooted if not innate) Muslims can never form part of any Western society and Turkey can never be part of the EU, this would lead to the stipulation that their identity, presumably equally deeply rooted and quasi-natural, would be a Christian one. Identity discourses like the one just mentioned are reminiscent of 19th century-European ethno-nationalism.4 After the democratic revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th century failed to make good on the promise of popular sovereignty, which was nurtured by the American and French Revolutions, Europeans turned to national identity as a surrogate for political participation. Sharing the magnanimity of their nation was a compensation for most Europeans for the disenchantment of their dreams of political freedom that had fuelled the many liberaldemocratic revolutions until 1848 in France, Italy, Germany and the eastern European countries within the ambit of the Hapsburg Empire. The result was the aggressive ethnic, even racist, nationalism that lead to imperialism, the two World Wars and the Holocaust. By leading the debate about the future constitution of Europe as a discourse on European cultural or religious identity, its advocates cloud the second option which would be a constitution of Europe based on real, not only symbolic, political participation. Proponents of a merely political

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conception of Europe, however, are disadvantaged when the debate is about identity because they cannot plausibly express what is specifically European about the liberal-democratic supranational polity that they envision. A discourse revolving around the concept of European identity seems to require a specification of Europe in opposition to other, equally liberal-democratic states or associations of states. The advocates of a merely political identity for the EU, however, seem to miss just that point. They are thus less likely to be heard in a debate resounding with age-old European battle cries such as ‘Christendom’ (or ‘Abendland’ for those who speak German). From a merely political perspective, the regulation of membership and the delineation of the EU’s borders will always appear arbitrary. The only conceivable solution to the puzzle would be to embrace this arbitrariness as a positive thing. Europe could be seen as a laboratory in which the unfinished project of modernity is carried one step further as an experiment with implications for a world order in which the aggressive potential of the nation-state system is securely fenced-in in a supranational legal enclosure. Thus, the potential for Europe as an example for the successful solution to the paradox of civic nationalism—that is, the realisation of liberal-democratic values on an arbitrary territory at the expense of the exclusion of people declared non-citizens5—lies in including citizens and non-citizens (that is, citizens of other countries) in a higher order polity. This would also guard against aggressive competition between member states and help secure minority rights within member states by upholding a supranational legal order with a supranational form of citizenship (that is, direct access for individuals to supranational courts). Carried to its logical conclusion, this project would lead to an institutionalisation of liberal-democratic norms on a global scale through a world order along the lines of the European enclosure of the nation-state. In this sense, Europe would indeed ‘appear as the place where the aspirations of mankind, and not only of Europeans, could possibly materialise’.6 But as things are standing now, the term ‘identity’ has become central to the debate about the future constitution of Europe, and so the more cosmopolitan and liberal minded who champion a more instrumental and less exclusive concept of Europe seem to have nearly lost the competition for intellectual hegemony. It thus can only be a question of a protest from the margins if one replies to Wehler’s declaration that Turkey could never be a part of the EU—and Muslims could never be integrated into a European country—‘that’s because you don’t want it’. Like anyone

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else, many Muslims are not necessarily primarily interested in religion in their everyday lives or in politics. Like others, they are primarily interested in their well-being and the well-being of their families. They want to be treated like anybody else and often strongly identify with the country they, their parents, or their grandparents, chose as a destination in their quest for a decent living.7 But if Islam is not their primary political concern, neither can it be the prime obstacle for Muslims to integrate well into their respective host societies. Problems that do occur are often not specifically related to Islam but more generally to patriarchy, which is a barrier shared by many Islamic as well as non-Islamic ways of life, including Western ones. This is not to say that many Muslim ways of life are not excessively patriarchal. But why blame Islam and alienate all Muslims, no matter how patriarchal they may be as individuals, instead of blaming patriarchy directly.8 The reason why Islam and Muslims are specifically targeted must lie somewhere else. For one, focussing on Muslim patriarchy spares one the hassle of dealing with the residues of patriarchy in one’s own ‘self ’. For another, the arbitrariness of the focus on Muslims may just be a resonance of the age-old prejudices against Islam that are still prevalent in Europe. There is thus a tendency to fall back on religious stereotypes even concerning one’s ‘self ’—thus the re-emphasis on Christendom (Abendland) in the debates on European identity.9 One cannot afford to be arbitrary against Jews, however. That is why some bashfully add a ‘Judeo-’ before the ‘Christian’ identity they have chosen to adjure for Europe as if centuries of Christian anti-Semitism never existed. Europeans lapsing back into a pre-modern Christian identity form a stark contrast to the expectations that some people even from the so-called Muslim world still have when they think of Europe today. To them, Europe still holds out a promise of modernity, liberty and democracy, which their own governments fail to deliver.10 Thus, Jacques Derrida reminds us that the real task at hand is to remember what was once promised to the world in the name of Europe.11 Many people from the so-called Muslim world still look upon Europe as an example of cosmopolitanism, progress, justice, liberty and respect for the individual. They would be surprised if Europe were to revert back to a self-image dominated by religion. What follows from all this for the interface between religion and politics? Of course, one would want to grant that religious people may unite to pursue political ends. They may have legitimate interests to pursue within the wider context of a pluralist society. These may be

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reasonable goals,12 as would be taking care that the wider polity not infringe on the right to practice religion—provided the practice does not violate the fundamental rights of anybody within or without the respective community. Such religions may be represented in society in the form of religious associations with a certain political identity, which is determined by the legitimate goals that these associations may pursue such as the defence of their members’ free practice of religion within the bounds of the principle of liberty mentioned as earlier. Members’ understanding the practice of their faith may compel them to do all sorts of good for the whole of society, such as charitable work. Thus, the larger society may grant them certain privileges such as the status of a non-profit organisation or the public law status that Christians and Jews, but not Muslims, enjoy in Germany. The limit of their doing good to people not belonging to their community, however, is marked by the liberty of people outside that community (religionists of other faiths, agnostics, atheists) who, to a reasonable extent, have the right to be left unaffected by the activities of the said community. Missionary activity, for example, is legitimate only when those targeted also have the option not to be bothered by the solicitations of the agents of faith, if they so wish. This fact also sets limits to the presence of religion in the public square. Religionists may profess their faith publicly and advertise its merits on the religious marketplace and they can expect to be respected by wider society provided they pay the same respect to adherents of other faiths or people of no faith. This is the price any believer has to pay in a pluralist society in exchange for the liberty to practise and profess her/his religion. Failure to comply with this rule would give larger society the right to withdraw its privileges or even restrain such a community. Thus, if one religious association questions the legitimacy of another religious association, the larger society would be justified in withdrawing public law or non-profit status from that association. All this shows that religious communities can have legitimate political interests and they should be permitted to pursue them within the limits of public ethics. Public ethics, however, forbids the exploitation of religion for political games where power becomes an end in itself. This includes the tendency of institutions, such as temples, Churches or mosque organisations, to maintain their influence and status for its own sake, in spite of an eroding popular support. Even Churches become mere instruments of worldly power if they cannot legitimise their existence by catering to the explicit needs of those whom they

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can legally call their members. With membership numbers dwindling, the Church is developing a tendency to indulge in identity politics by pretending to speak even for those individuals who have opted out of any institutionalised form of religion (believing without belonging)13 or for those openly non-religious. Importunateness is but a mild form of the political exploitation of religion. Like tempering with voter ballots, it is a pretence to representation without a mandate. Identity politics is the more severe form. In identity politics, a political interest is ascribed to a religious community irrespective of prevailing circumstances and irrespective of the choice of its members. The interests, however, that the members of a religious community adopt for themselves are dependent on the circumstances and their choice. Political interests cannot, as such, be written into the script of a religious community. This applies a fortiori to the attempts to make a religion the constitutive basis of a polity. A polity constituted around a religion is bound to violate the liberty of those who choose not to adhere to it. It would place the respective nonbeliever at a disadvantage or even exclude him/her from deliberations on issues that nevertheless concern him. A polity defined by a religion is therefore necessarily illiberal and undemocratic. From this, it follows cogently that India as a political union cannot legitimately be defined by its heritage in its Indic religions. Likewise, Europe as a political union cannot legitimately be defined with recourse to its Christian heritage. Mention of any religion or ‘God’ would have no place whatsoever in any future constitution for Europe.

Notes 1. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 2. Bartlett draws attention to the case of Ireland in this connection, which is interesting because although Catholic from the very beginning it was still subject to a similar process of colonisation as other parts of Europe during the expansion of Latin Christendom. 3. Prominently, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Muslime sind nicht integrierbar” [Muslims Cannot be Integrated], Die Tageszeitung, no. 6849 September 10, 2002: 6; “Das Türkenproblem” [The Problem with the Turks] Die Zeit, no. 38 (September 19, 2002). 4. I am using ‘ethno-nationalism’ as a counter term to ‘civic nationalism’. The former is a form of identity politics that was used by national movements of the 19th century to forge new states based on the principle ‘one state for each nation’. Civic nationalism,

Identity Politics in Europe

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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in contrast, has emerged from the political transformation of an already existing state (as in the French case). Here questions of inclusion or exclusion were not, initially, debated along ethnic, linguistic or religious lines (although in the case of France they would be eventually)—see Will Kymlicka, States, Nations, and Cultures, Spinoza Lectures, October 1995, University of Amsterdam (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1997); review by Michael Dusche of States, Nations and Cultures by Will Kymlicka, Spinoza Lectures, October 1995, University of Amsterdam, Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1997 in Ethical Perspectives 5, no. 3 (1998): 227–29. For a more detailed discussion of the different forms of nationalism, see Dusche, “Human Rights, Autonomy, and Sovereignty”. Dusche, Der Philosoph als Mediator [The Philosopher as Mediator], §VII. von Bogdandy, Europäische Verfassungspolitik als Identitätspolitik [European Constitutional Politics as Identity Politics], 121. Dusche, “Study of Migrant Identities through Migrant Literatures,” 81–116. The same holds true for the unfortunate headscarf debate: Why blame a piece of cloth for which there may be many reasons to wear it and not what it stands for—if indeed it stands for the submission of women in patriarchal society. The latter, however, has to be demonstrated by independent evidence. The wearing of the headscarf is no sufficient indication. See “Die europäischen Bischöfe und die Neu-Evangelisierung Europas” [The European Bishops and the New Evangelisation of Europe] (Bonn/St. Gallen: Sekretariat der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz/CCEE Sekretariat, 1991); “Die Krise der europäischen Kultur ist die Krise der Christianlichen Kultur” [The Crisis of European Culture is the Crisis of Christian Culture], Ansprache des Papstes an die Teilnehmer des 5. Symposions des Rats der Europäischen Bischofskonferenzen in Rom am 5. Oktober 1982 [Papal Address to the Participants of the 5th Symposion of the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences, Rome, October 5, 1982] and “Die kollegiale Verantwortung der Bischöfe und Bischofskonferenzen Europas in der Evangelisierung des Kontinents. 5. Symposion des Rats der Europäischen Bischofskonferenzen in Rom vom 4–8. Oktober 1982” [The Collegial Responsibility of Europe’s Bishops and Bishop’s Conferences in the New Evangelisation of the Continent. 5th Symposion of the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences, Rome, October 4–8, 1982] both in Stimmen der Weltkirche [Statements by the Universal Church] 16; all cited after Alexandra Lason, “Desecularisation in Europe: The Vision of the ‘Abendland’ as a Return of the Politicisation of Religion” (unpublished ms.); see www2.uni-erfurt.de/mobilisierung_religion/en/individual%20projects/3_4.htm (accessed October 22, 2009). The West and the Islamic World. A Muslim Position (Stuttgart: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, 2004). The West and the Islamic World is a report prepared as a part of the forum “Dialogue and Mutual Understanding”. “Alors le devoir de rappeler ce qui s’est promis sous le nom de l’Europe.” [Whence the task of remembering what was promised in the name of Europe]. See Jacques Derrida, “Mémoires, réponses et responsabilités” [Memories, Responses and Responsibilities], Le Monde, September 29, 1990; available online at www.litt-andco.org/citations_SH/a-f_SH/derrida_l-autre_cap.htm (accessed August 30, 2008). In the sense elaborated by John Rawls; see Rawls, Political Liberalism, 212f. (reasonable comprehensive doctrine; idea of public reason). Any doctrine that deserves to be called

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reasonable has to take into account the mere fact that there may be other reasonable but incommensurable doctrines and accept mediation from the point of view of public reason. Since normative theory is necessarily indeterminate, normative decisions remain the domain proper of the political and cannot be delegated to experts (theologians, ethicists, and so on) outside the political process; see Dusche, “Experts or Mediators?” 21–30. 13. This is the subtitle of Grace Davies’ book Religion in Britain since 1945 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994).

Identity Politics in India W

E DO NOT HAVE TO LOOK far East to find horrifying examples of identity politics. At Europe’s own south-eastern flank, we find the bloodiest examples resulting from the politicisation of ethnic and religious identities in the course of the recent ‘invention’1 of the people of the Balkans. An analysis of identity politics in this context confirms the worst apprehensions.2 The world-embracing discourse about identity (national, ethnic, communitarian, religious, cultural and multicultural) can be interpreted as indicative of these processes of fermentation that stir the global economy of ideas. John W. Meyer has given us some clue about how ideas, norms, models and patterns of social and political order gain hegemony in an increasingly global cultural reference frame. Learned discourse plays a special role in these processes. What ‘science’ in the widest possible sense pronounces is likely to be placed right at the top of the scale of the hegemony of ideas. Thus, it is in and through learned discourse that challenges to the pre-eminence of ideas, models and patterns of globalised modernity are most likely to be successful. A focus on the debate around the secular nature of the Indian state versus Hindu pretensions to create a ‘Hindu’ nation can be instructive; therefore, even from a global perspective. India, as well as Europe, offers examples of the extreme threat that identity politics can pose to human life and dignity.3 The focus of this section, therefore, is on the role perceptions of the West—particularly Europe—play in India’s learned discourses about nationalism and communalism. Here, as in other contexts as well, world polity norms are often identified as ‘Western’ ideas, generally, or more specifically ‘ideas of the European Enlightenment’. Thus, in their preface of Creating a Nationality,4 Ashis Nandy and his co-authors write about the conflict about Babri Mosque and Ram temple in Ayodhya: ‘… the conflict is not the climax in a series of grand crusades between Hindus and Muslims, but one more desperate attempt to make the two communities deserving citizens of a global order built on the values of the European Enlightenment’.5 The quotation reveals a tendency to identify modern ideas of political and social order with their origins in the West, particularly in Europe. The function can be explanatory and has to be seen in the context of

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decolonisation and the need to cope with the trauma of the colonial experience. However, after 60 years of independence, identifying modernity with the West can also serve the purpose of discharging local responsibilities and finding a scapegoat in ‘the West’, ‘Western imperialism’, ‘Westernised middle classes’, ‘Western modernity’, ‘secularism’, and so on, on which to blame the difficulties people have in local contexts to implement those ideas now prevalent in the world polity. On the other hand, there are those like Amartya Sen who caution against throwing the baby out with the bath water. For Sen, the fault lies not in the inadequacy of globally hegemonic ideas of progress and modernity but in the inadequate adaptation of modern patterns to local traditions. With Amartya Sen and Ashis Nandy, we have identified two major players in South Asian learned discourse about identity politics in India and the role of ‘the West’, ‘Western’ ideas and ‘Western’ influences. While Sen characterises his approach in terms of development as freedom,6 Nandy’s approach could be called freedom to non-development. While Sen stresses the ‘liberty of all to participate in deciding what traditions to observe’,7 Nandy stresses the ‘oppression which grows out of ideologies of egalitarianism and progress’,8 the ‘forces of oppression, backed by the powerful ideology of modernity’,9 and the violent onslaught caused by ‘another civilisation that had once gate-crashed into India’.10 While Sen insists that modernity is a universal condition, Nandy insists that India be ‘neither modern, nor anti-modern but only non-modern’11 and that it recovers or preserves its ‘culture’s unique gestalt’.12 However, against appearances to the contrary, Nandy’s project is not supposed to be just another ‘neo-romantic ideology of the irrational, the mythic or the renunciatory’.13 Like Sen, Nandy is aware that a simple insistence on providing an antithesis to the West will not suffice but will in fact bind the East even more irrevocably to the West. Nandy insists that ‘India is not non-West; it is India,’14 and he exhorts that both, the West and the simple opposition to the West, tend: … to absolutize the relative differences between cultures. Both seek to set up the East and the West as permanent and natural antipodes. Both trace their roots to the cultural arrogance of post-Enlightenment Europe, which sought to define not only the ‘true’ West but also the ‘true’ East.15

Instead, Nandy calls for a ‘critical traditionalism’16 in the Gandhian style and for a vision ‘outside modernity’.17 Nandy’s anti-Utopia emerges out of a psychoanalysis of both the object and subject of colonialism and their psycho-social entanglement in a ‘dialectic of master and slave’.

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It is inspired by the hope that in the Schwejkian habitus of the ‘slave’ lies buried an alternative universalism that has the potential of saving not only the slave but also the master from ‘ Western’ pretensions to creating a universal culture of humanism and attempts to impose ‘Western’ humanism on the East.

Notes 1. Riedel, Die Erfindung der Balkanvölker [The Invention of the Peoples of Balkans]. 2. ‘Identity politics is constituted through interested actors. It serves the retention of their power and often leads to political instability and violent conflict due to competition between self-interested elites.’ See Erhard Forndran, Preface to Riedel, Die Erfindung der Balkanvölker [The Invention of the Peoples of Balkans], 12, 15. Riedel observes that identity politics with its ‘static concept of ethnicity is not fit to account for the permanent alterations of, and the mutual influence and overlap between, different subjective identities. Therefore any order that structurally links political institutions with religion or ethnicity will sooner or later cause societal conflict’ (my translation). 3. See the Gujarat carnage of February 2002 to May 2002; and in this connection Narendra Modi’s infamous speech of 28 February 2002 where he alluded to Newton’s famous phrase ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’ to give the killings a ‘naturalistic’ explanation. For an account of the carnage, see the two volumes published by the Concerned-Citizens-Tribunal, Crime against Humanity. An Inquiry into the Carnage in Gujarat (Mumbai: Anil Dhakar for Citizens for Justice and Peace, 2002). 4. Ashis Nandy et al., eds, Creating a Nationality. The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and Fear of the Self (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 5. Ibid., ix. 6. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). 7. Ibid., 32. 8. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 40, in an affirmative interpretation of George Orwell. 9. Ibid., 84. 10. Ibid., 75f. 11. Ibid., 74. 12. Ibid., 73 (emphasis in the original). 13. Ibid., 113. 14. Ibid., 73. 15. Ibid., 73f. 16. Ibid., 43. 17. Ibid., 36.

Freedom to Non-development IN HIS PREFACE TO THE INTIMATE Enemy, Nandy acknowledges that

‘Western’ modernity carried the hope into the East that the break-up of traditional hierarchies would ‘open up new vistas for many, particularly for those exploited or cornered within the traditional order’.1 But the reality was rather different, he says. To Nandy, modernity visited the effects of two World Wars, Vietnam, genocides, ecodisasters and ethnocide in the ‘third world’ that it created. For him, all this is just ‘the underside of corrupt sciences and psychopathic technologies wedded to new secular hierarchies, which have reduced major civilisations to the status of a set of empty rituals’.2 Consequently, Nandy looks ‘askance at the old universalism within which the earlier critiques of colonialism were offered’.3 These were largely ‘the products of the imperial culture itself and, even in opposition, [anti-colonial] movements have paid homage to their respective cultural origins’.4 The absorption of cultural codes common to colonisers and colonised is a product of what Nandy psychoanalytically calls ‘identification with the aggressor’,5 thereby relating it to other oppressive situations like a child’s dependency on overpowering adults. The cultural transfer taking place in this constellation included ‘Western’6 concepts of masculinity, adulthood and responsibility. Correspondingly, there developed a homology between ‘Western’ ideas of ‘childhood and the state of being colonized’.7 Nandy stresses the ‘isomorphism of oppression’ taking place within the West— against women, children and men who did not conform to the stereotype of the aggressive and masculine adult white male (that is, because they were homosexual and/or cherished more feminine values)—and between the West and the East. Naturally, the West would not spare the East where it did not spare itself. This apparent mutuality enforced, however, in a situation of dominance elucidates why the same situation could appear as if between equals (for the West) and as between master and slave (for the East). The fact of domination was less transparent for the coloniser than for the colonised. Consequently, the West could believe in the universality of its ideas of masculinity, adulthood and responsibility while for the colonised East the same ideas were hopelessly steeped in bad faith. The asymmetry in the relation between the ruler and the ruled leaves

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the ruler in partial darkness, in spite of his dominance. Consequently, Nandy can estimate (with Orwell), … the full meaning of the continuity between the oppressor and the oppressed [which lay in the fact that] the subjugation of the ruled also involved the subjugation of the ruler [and] that the subjects in the colonies controlled their rulers as surely as the rulers controlled their subjects.8

The victim of colonial domination can be ‘passive-aggressive, effeminate, and fight back through non-cooperation, shirking, irresponsibility, malingering and refusal to value face-to-face fights’.9 He can be ‘hypocritically spiritual while being shrewdly materialistic, violent and self-interested; neither a dedicated counter-player of the West … nor clearly Oriental … neither a person who meets the norm of civility in the West, nor openly a noble savage’.10 As an illustration, Nandy quotes J. Duncan M. Derrett’s saying: My Indian brother … has learned to move around in my drawing room, and will move around in it so long as it suits him for his own purposes. And when he adopts my ideas he does so to suit himself, and retains them so far and as long as it suits him.11

According to Nandy, Indian culture protects itself—against cosmologies which are proselytising, hegemonistic and committed to some secular or non-secular theories of cultural evolution—by projecting the idea that the Indian is compromising; he has a fluid self-definition, and he is willing to learn the ways of his civilized brethren unconditionally, provided such learning is profitable.12

He attributes to it an, … ability to live with cultural ambiguities and to use them to build psychological and even metaphysical defences against cultural invasions. Probably, the culture itself demands that a certain permeability of boundaries be maintained in one’s self-image and that the self not be defined too tightly or separated mechanically from the not-self.13

The cunning triumph of this attitude is illustrated by Nandy by drawing a parallel between the reaction of some 15th-century Aztec priests to a Christian sermon and a reaction that he thinks a corresponding group of Brahmins would be likely to show. The Aztec priests, when they

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heard from the Christian invaders that their Aztec Gods were all dead, preferred also to die and were killed. Under the same circumstances, a group of imagined Brahmin priests, according to Nandy, would prefer to split their selves into two rather than be martyred. The splitting of their personality is interpreted by Nandy as a psychological defence mechanism against forced conversion and other types of humiliation, physical and mental. To them, the conversion and the humiliation would be happening to a self, which is already seen and felt as somebody else or as somebody else’s. This is a self from whom one is already somewhat abstracted and alienated. Such splitting of one’s self, to protect one’s sanity and to ensure survival, makes the subject an object to himself and disaffiliates the violence and the humiliation he suffers from the ‘essence constituent’ of his self. It is an attempt to survive by inducing in oneself a psychosomatic state which would render one’s immediate content partly dreamlike or unreal.14

Challenging Nandy, however, one could ask whether the same mechanism that ensures physical survival and relative mental sanity15 in the victim of colonialism could not also turn against the victim even after their liberation from foreign rule. Since for centuries the place of authority in society was occupied by an invader, this place could not easily be incorporated into the ‘self’ of the invaded. Since independence, India has been formally occupied by representatives of this ‘self’, that is, a government elected by ‘the people’, an administration and a judiciary controlled by ‘the people’. Still, a post-independence South Asian state such as India, for example, has had and still has to struggle to whitewash itself of the negative connotations that the modern state acquired when it was first set up by the British. The state has remained suspicious in the eyes of ‘the people’. As a consequence, the people remain united in their impression of a continued tutelage by the state even though the state is now effectively ‘theirs’ and they could take charge of it and feel responsible for it. Anybody with a sense for such a responsibility, however, would be seen as a traitor of the people’s ‘self ’, which is still largely defined in opposition to the state. The consequence is the acquiescence of the people in a collective state of irresponsibility. The inability to live up to the basic conditions of free agency, which would engender the required sense of collective responsibility for and through the state, is described by Akeel Bilgrami in terms of the postcolonial subject’s first- and third-person perspective.16

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Understanding a phenomenon is something that occurs in the third person. And, of course, we do often take such a third-person stance toward ourselves. But to allow such a stance to develop into defensive and reactive commitments is to rest with a third-person conception for ourselves. It is to deny the first-person or agent’s point of view … On the lips of sympathetic others [‘This is how things are with them’] these remarks are the only stance to take. But on our lips … they cannot be the only remarks we make unless we treat ourselves as objects, unless we think of our future as we think of our past, as something that we cannot make a difference to. The philosophical malaise is quite simply that in allowing the third-person point of view to dominate our political responses we are failing to live up to the basic conditions of free agency.17

Further down Bilgrami exhorts: A failure to overcome the defensiveness, a failure to acquire the firstperson perspective, will prove a point of bitterest irony. A failure to come out of the neurotic obsession with the Western and colonial determination of the Muslims’ [read: the post-colonial subject’s, MD] present condition will only prove that that determination was utterly comprehensive in the destruction it wrought. That is to say, it will prove to be the final victory for imperialism that after all the other humiliations it has visited on Muslims [read: the colonised, MD], it lingered in our psyches in the form of genuine self understanding to make self-criticism and free, unreactive agency impossible.18

Nandy, however, seems to reject such aspirations of living up to the conditions of agency in a modern, self-governed polity. To Nandy, such aspirations are just another expression of ‘Western’ concepts of adulthood and masculinity and they are doomed to failure in the post-colonial context. He therefore rejects modern forms of electoral politics and the modern egalitarianism that goes with the new, secular hierarchies, which are based on competition and clear-cut assertive selfhood. To appreciate the capability to survive, individually and collectively, under conditions of oppression, as something positive may be a crucial step in regaining self-confidence after independence. But should this process never end? Nandy has highlighted the need for a reversal of values by demanding that the post-colonial subject be proud of ‘those who lost out and fought rather than those who fought out and lost.’ He has his readers consider that ‘it might be sometimes better to be dead in somebody else’s eyes, so as to be alive for one’s own self ’.19 But after this ‘other’ has given way to self-rule, the ‘self’ should perhaps also be allowed to liberate itself from the charm of prolonged infancy, externally induced,

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at first, but now largely self-inflicted. Perseverance in opposition, now to a state owned by the people and to external influences coming from global developments that are interpreted as ‘Westernisation’ in South Asia may not be enough. To halt ongoing developments, whatever their benefit or blame, or to shield India from them is not possible anyhow. Instead, a positive engagement with these processes may offer the only possibility of exerting some influence on their direction. This would be more like Sen’s approach.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, ix. Ibid. Ibid., x. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 7. British concepts, more specifically, in the context of the British Raj. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 11. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 107f. (emphasis in the original). The same mechanism of splitting one’s personality is known from studies on child abuse (see the work of Alice Miller; here her home page and bibliography: www. alice-miller.com/index_de.php [accessed August 28, 2008]). These studies inform us about the price these halved personalities have to pay for their survival and relative mental stability. Their defect sometimes even gets transmitted into the following generations and can lead to repetition compulsion not only in the victim but also in the victims’ children. I take it that Bilgrami’s study has to be read as an analysis of the post-colonial psyche in general and not to be restricted to the Muslim’s psyche; Akeel Bilgrami, “What is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity,” in Identities, ed. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 198–219. Bilgrami, “What is a Muslim,” 213 (emphases in the original). Ibid., 218. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 111.

Development as Freedom I

N CONTRAST TO ASHIS NANDY’S APPROACH, which was described as freedom to non-development, and which could alternatively be characterised as critical traditionalism, Amartya Sen advocates a sort of critical modernism. Nandy’s traditionalism was critical in that it was qualified by the observation that traditions themselves do carry the potential of oppression and exclusion. It is, however, not clear by what standards these oppressive states of affairs should be assessed if these standards are not to be modern standards of equal individual rights. Sen’s modernism, in turn, is critical in that it does recognise the value of tradition, provided those subjected to these traditions have a say in whether they want to continue to uphold them or not. Thus, Sen grants that ‘economic development as we know it may actually be harmful for a nation, since it may lead to the elimination of its traditions and cultural heritage’.1 But he also addresses the problem of the sources of authority and legitimacy with such traditions.

There is an inescapable valuational problem involved in deciding what to choose if and when it turns out that some parts of tradition cannot be maintained along with economic or social changes that may be needed for other reasons … it is the people directly involved who must have the opportunity to participate in deciding what should be chosen … the liberty of all to participate in deciding what traditions to observe cannot be ruled out by the national or local ‘guardians’—neither by the ayatollahs (or other religious authorities), nor by political rulers (or governmental dictators), nor by cultural ‘experts’ (domestic or foreign).2

This is a problem that is conspicuously ignored in Nandy’s approach. The central ideas and patterns available in the world polity from the global cultural reference frame are not constant but are in permanent flux. Modernity, progress and justice are defined differently in different centuries, even decades. Critics of modernity and secularism have to take this into account. Often they target not the last version of these guiding ideas but the second to the last ones. If the writings of Rawls and his followers are central to getting an up-to-date idea of what the notion of ‘justice’ entails today, Sen’s development as freedom approach can give an

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idea of what the latest notion of progress could mean. If progress is to be a policy-guided development along the lines that enhance the well-being of people in an equitable way, then Sen’s notion of progress stands out as one in which this concept of well-being is the most developed. For Sen, the idea of freedom is central for the notion of development, for enhancement of freedom is the main aim as well as the main instrument of progress. The ‘basic idea [is] that enhancement of human freedom is both the main object and the primary means of development’.3 Sen received the Nobel Prize for establishing that ‘political freedom in the form of democratic arrangements helps to safeguard economic freedom (especially freedom from extreme starvation) and the freedom to survive (against famine mortality)’. Famines do not occur in democratic countries.4 Thus, the safeguard of civic liberties is not only an important parameter for evaluating progress but also an essential means for achieving development (from a mismanaged, famine-ridden country to a better managed, famine-free country). Other basic liberties, cited by Sen, that are each an essential parameter as well as instrument of development, include health care, education, transparency and political stability.5 What is required is the fair value of political liberties, which implies adequate physical- and educational-enabling conditions including adequate health care, literacy and economic security. Judged by these parameters, a relatively poor state (by economic standards) such as Kerala fares far better in terms of progress than in others because of its success in education and health care.6

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Sen, Development as Freedom, 31. Ibid., 31f. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 38ff. Ibid., 47, Figure 2.1.

Identity Politics and the Ramjanmabhumi Movement THIS BOOK IS INTERESTED IN THE way identity discourses challenge

the global hegemony of the so-called ‘Western’ ideas by resorting to construed identities of ‘us’ and ‘them’. We have learned from John W. Meyer that ideas do not gain hegemony due to the direct and planned feat of actors—whether they be individuals, organisations, states, associations of states or state alliances. The processes through which ideas, norms and patterns of social and political order gain hegemony in a cultural reference frame—local or global—are complex and cannot be controlled by a single actor or group of actors, however powerful. If there should be a conspiracy at work, it certainly is a conspiracy between the dominant powers and those lending legitimacy to their dominance. As we have learnt from Nandy, no power can prevail in a dominant position for a long time without the complicity of those dominated.1 Equally, no idea can prevail in a hegemonic position without it appealing to a great many people locally as well as globally. The appeal an idea has, and which renders it hegemonic over a certain period of time, is, of course, not based on free exchange of beliefs and intentions under the absence of domination as Habermas’ communicative action approach would demand it.2 Dominant groups throw their prestige into the balance and if they support an idea, others are likely to follow. Thus, local and global power imbalances play an important, albeit indirect, role in the raising of an idea to hegemonic importance. Learned discourse plays a special role in these processes. What ‘science’ in the widest possible sense pronounces is likely to be placed right at the top of the scale of the hegemony of ideas. Thus, it is in, and through, learned discourse that challenges to the pre-eminence of ideas, models and patterns of globalised modernity are most likely to be successful. The world-embracing discourses about identity can be interpreted as indicative of these processes. As we saw earlier, identity discourses offer the opportunity of bypassing political discourses by ‘naturalising’ the political problem. If identities are rooted in differences that find a basis in nature, then they are placed before and outside the realm of politics

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and, thereby, outside the scope of rational political contestation. At the same time, the appeal to nature offers the advantage of legitimising one’s differentiations by an appeal to (natural) science. Modernity in the West has progressed with the help of the same strategy. The appeal to ‘natural’ rights, ‘natural’ law and the state of ‘nature’ has placed the corresponding matters outside the realm of debatable ideas. They are simply not debatable, neither axiologically nor politically, and they have even served to justify the ‘natural’ superiority of the West, the white, the Protestant and the male over the non-West, the non-white, the non-Protestant and the female or ‘effeminate’. Their disputability on scientific grounds was conveniently blinded out, there being no scientific ground to justify an ontological distinction between the East and the West, no scientific ground for racism either and no scientific grounds to favour the Protestant and the masculine over the non-Protestant and the feminine. Until the post-World War II era, sociologists believed they could root the legitimacy of social differentiation in ‘general laws about society and its institutions … in the manner of the natural sciences’.3 Today, such ‘scientific’ aspirations are widely disputed and we are in a position to see through the discursive plot. André Béteille points out that ‘comparative sociology, with all its limitations, has succeeded in revealing the ‘artificial’ character of most of what is or was considered ‘natural’ in non-Western societies, and also to some extent in Western society before the modern age’.4 What is true for the pre-modern age from the point of view of modernity has become equally valid for the classical modern age from today’s point of view. Thus: … perhaps we are today in a better position to recognize that the distinction between the state of nature and the state of society, or between nature and culture is not merely ambiguous, but inherently so. The difficulty lies not so much in getting at the facts as in the very act of conceptualising man’s nature independently of his culture.5

The modernist’s strategy against the hegemony of ideas that gave legitimacy to the feudal order in Europe was to unmask the allegedly ‘natural’ social order of a pre-industrial society as ‘unnatural’ and oppose it on grounds of a more ‘natural’ equality between all men (and later women). Subsequently, all social differentiation had to be legitimised, not based on descent, but based on merit and competition, preferably a fair one.

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If the aristocracy with its ‘unnatural’ and hence ‘immoral’ lifestyle was the great bogeyman of the emerging middle classes of the 18th and 19th centuries, the bogeyman of emerging economies east and south of Europe seems to be ‘the West’, ‘Western’ imperialism, ‘Western’ modernity, ‘Western’ secularism, ‘Western’ debasement, ‘Western’ capitalism and a globalisation fuelled by ‘Western’ neoliberal thinking. The legitimising idea of a ‘natural’ equality of opportunity for individual men and women today is challenged on grounds of an even more ‘natural’ equality of collectivities of men and women, whose national, ethnic, communitarian, religious or cultural identity obtains a quasi-‘natural’ status. The redrawing of the boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in the European Enlightenment era prepared the ground for the American and French revolutions. Today’s redrawing of the boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in turn pose a serious challenge to the globally hegemonic ideas of the European Enlightenment and democracy. What gets articulated through ‘natural’ identities is not simply ‘reactionary’ or ‘counter-revolutionary’, to use the old-fashioned terms of political radicalism, but forms an integral part of modernity from the beginning. After the failure of the European revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, ethnic nationalism, promoted through the idea of a ‘natural’ identity of people belonging to one primordial nation, became a surrogate for the political participation that political nationalism had failed to offer. Along with ethnic nationalism came a lot of old, reactionary ideas such as patriarchy, religious and racial discrimination, exclusion and even genocide. But it did not bring back the Ancien Régime. Likewise today, communitarianism and the aspirations of invented primordialities that express themselves in the language of identity politics carry with them gender discrimination, ethnic or religious exclusivism, communal violence, pogroms and again genocide. But they will not bring back traditional community life as it may have existed in basically stateless rural societies. Learned debates on India versus the West are manifold. As an illustration, therefore, we will now take a closer look at debates surrounding the Ramjanmabhumi Movement—that is, the movement by Hindu nationalists to erect a Ram temple in Ayodhya, on the site of a former mosque built by Babur in the 16th century, as a symbol of Hindu supremacy in India. Nandy and his collaborators give a detailed account of the movement till the mid 1990s. Meanwhile the conflict was exacerbated until it culminated in the 2002 Godhra incident and the subsequent pogroms in the state of Gujarat where an estimated 2000

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Muslim men, women and children were killed in a concerted action by Hindu supremacists who were assisted by the state’s administration and police, and backed by the then chief minister of the state, Narendra Modi who in turn had the backing of the central government.6 These events are interesting in themselves because they give an example of the extreme consequences that identity politics can lead to. But this is not the main focus of this section. Instead, this section is interested in the way the cited example of identity politics has been, and is still, discussed in learned circles in the country. There is a tendency in these debates to blame these home-made Indian problems on the ‘West’ as can be seen in the preface to the otherwise excellent study. The ‘them’ targeted there is ‘western scholarship’ that has helped to conceptualise the world and its conflicts in categories altogether inappropriate for the South Asian context. These concepts include ‘fundamentalism’, ‘nationality’, ‘“proper” modern nation’, ‘conventional ethnic majority’, ‘proper ethnic minorities’ and ‘well-behaved nationalities’. Thus, the authors admonish that, while to many these terms are essential in conceptualising worthwhile goals: … unfortunately, for a world defined by the concepts of progress, development, secularism, national security and the nation-state, these goals have to be achieved in a society where the borderlines of communities and cultures have not been traditionally defined by census operations or electoral rolls and where traditional ideas of community life and inter-community relations survive. For others, therefore, even the partial achievement of these goals is a minor tragedy, for its consequence cannot be anything but ethnocide in the long run.7

The implicit reference to the ideals of modernity, anchored, according to Meyer, in the semiotic reference frame of the world polity, is obvious. The target is thus not really the West but scholarship insofar as it continues to lend prestige to conventional ideas of ‘progress, development, secularism, national security and the nation-state’ without paying attention to their applicability to non-Western contexts. In contrast, the South Asian ‘us’ is characterised as ‘a salad bowl of cultures’ in which ‘the ingredients retain their distinctiveness’, their ‘primordial identities’, as the ‘individualistic assumptions and anticommunitarian bias’ of the Western models would not predict them to do.8 Of course, the idea of ‘distinct and ‘authentic’9 primordial identities’ has a particular legacy in Western scholarship, which dates back to Herder and the German romantic movement. But this is not the point.

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Romantic ideas of primordial cultural or ethnic identities have been erased from the catalogue of internationally recommended models after the excesses of German ethnic nationalism and the ethnic cleansing, which accompanied World War II. The ‘a state to each nation’ principle, which was still very popular at the time of the League of Nations in the interbellum has been replaced by models of individual rights and democracy in multinational settings. The current international law regime knows of no legitimate way of nation formation. Nations once formed, mostly in violent processes, are recognised only post factum by the ‘international community’. International law does not generally recommend segregation or the break-up of multinational polities into ethnically defined nation-states.10 Thus, again it is not ‘Western scholarship’ which should be the target but the present global reference frame. To target, the West must be convenient for reasons not mentioned in the said preface. Furthermore, the ‘European Enlightenment’ is blamed for encouraging an ‘evolutionist’ view of the history of civilisation according to which non-European traditional societies are destined to repeat the European experience including the aporia of the nation-state, which unfortunately entails ‘old-style conflicts of nationalities’ whose surfacing in ‘Mother India’ are in turn interpreted as a confirmation of the evolutionist theorem. The remedies the West has to offer are ‘the law-and-order machinery of the state, given adequate political will’.11 According to Nandy and his co-authors, neither the theory predicting the evolution of developing societies into modern polities under the paradigm of the nation-state nor the remedies customarily offered to buffer the unwanted side effects of such an evolution are adequate in the South Asian context. The ‘European Enlightenment approach’ is being accused of a ‘kind of “principled” forgetfulness’ regarding the ability of ‘everyday Hinduism or Islam’ to resist violent conflict without the help of modern state institutions. This is because ‘modern secular scholars’ who are allegedly biased against religion from the outset are not willing to grant that religions are ambiguous in that they can be used not only to fuel violence but also to help maintain communal peace. The point may be well taken but to identify the culprit with a ‘class’12 of Western, secular scholars smacks of identity politics. Another kind of ‘principled’ forgetfulness seems to be at work here. The preface looks like a manifestation in the old Leftist spirit, only in a new spiritual idiom. The authors replace the old-class enemy, the USA and its vassals, with the ‘class of Western, secular scholars’.

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And in a strange inversion of the former constellation, the old contempt for religion, formerly a prerogative of the radical Left, is now attributed to the former class enemy, the capitalist West, or, in today’s terminology, the modern, secular West. Thus, in this construction of ‘them’ as an antagonist to the ‘us’, the anti-Western stereotypes of the old Left are strangely blending into the new anti-Western sentiments of the victim of the modernisation process, the traditionally peaceful community life of South Asia. This book is not concerned with the answer to these questions or to the specific question posed by the authors: ‘Does the future lie only in the impersonal checks of institutions and ideas such as the constitution, democratic elections, and human rights?’.13 The question is legitimate and the answers are far from obvious. But the culprits for the processes of modernisation and globalisation sweeping South Asia are not to be found in ‘the West’ or in the ‘Western secular scholar’ alone. They may also be found at home in Bharat Mata. Possibly even members of those celebrated traditional communities embrace modernity and the opportunities that come with it because their traditional life has not always been as idyllic as its advocates want us to believe. There may be tradeoffs between traditional life, which may have been more peaceful but also more oppressive (certainly for lower castes, Dalits and women), and modernity, which may be more unruly but bears the potential for social and economic liberation, and it is far from obvious what would be better in the end—modern or traditional life. The strategy of construing a notion of a ‘global order built on the values of the European Enlightenment’ and an ‘imperial West’ which is fighting ‘another great proxy battle … through its brain children in the Southern world’,14 that is, through a ‘class’ of ‘Westernised secular scholars’ only diverts from the task, which would call for a joint effort of scholars from the East and the West, in making modern predicaments not only bearable but even beneficial for people in non-Western environments. To denounce the readiness of well-meaning Western scholars, independently of their governments, to share the responsibility of amending European Enlightenment notions of good and just selfgovernment in their application to non-Western societies could be interpreted as a sign of bad faith, which may in fact stem from a third ‘principled’ forgetfulness, that is, the Eastern scholars own indebtedness to Western scholarship. The denial of this debt may be due to increasing pressure from within South Asian societies, which tempt their scholars to prove their loyalty by denouncing the West. As a result, Nandy and his

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co-authors present us with a story about the Ramjanmabhumi Movement that knows of ‘no villains’15 from within Indian society, but only from without, namely from the West and the European Enlightenment. This may be very comforting for the Indian reader but it will not help India to better cope with global processes that it probably cannot avoid. It would be high time for a global republic of letters—a new West-Eastern Divan, that refuses to play the game of identity politics. There is no denying that ‘the social pathologies in this part of the world [i.e. South Asia] will have to be grappled with on the basis of the inner strengths of the civilisation as expressed in the ways of life of its living carriers’,16 and Western scholars will have a lot to learn here. But there is no need for these learning processes to exclude Western scholarship. On the contrary, such an exclusion, according to Sen, would only demonstrate an excessive fixation with the West. In terms of discourse theory, the cited preface presents itself as a counter-hegemonic discourse against the standard Orientalist17 and modernist discourse. An analysis of the binaries used in Nandy et al.’s preface shows that in offering an alternative to the dominant Orientalist discourse mostly the same binary oppositions are used as in the hegemonic discourse. Only the pluses and minuses are swapped. What is represented as normative in hegemonic discourse becomes marked in the counter-hegemonic discourse and vice versa.18 The strategy has both benefits and drawbacks. Among the prime benefits is that Hindus and Muslims do not appear as adversaries as in hegemonic discourse, whose main proponents in India are identified as the Indian middle classes, including scholars. Instead of taking the manifest conflict between politicised Muslims and Hindus as primary, a deeper level of reality is discovered on which Hindus and Muslims both appear as victims of a much larger conflict—that between the imperial West and the exploited South. In this light, the carriers of hegemonic discourse—Indian scholars and middle classes—appear as the beneficiaries of a collaboration with the imperial West in which the undivided Indian people are sacrificed for the class interests of the collaborators. The benefit for the undivided Indian people is that the first responsibility for their internal quarrels comes to lie outside their own ‘self ’. This is also—and has always been—a way of ‘creating a nationality’, as the title of the book suggests. The drawback is obviously that by outsourcing the responsibility, the undivided Indian people are also externalising the means to come to terms with the problems they face. Because their causes are located beyond their borders, the remedies are also outside their command. This will heighten their sense of being at the mercy of forces that they do

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not control. Since these forces are identified with the West, this discourse strategy heightens the sense of dependency of the West instead of increasing a sense of agency in Indians. We have seen how Amartya Sen suggests an alternative strategy. Sen’s strategy is not to deprive Indians of the benefits of modern scholarship with its universalist aspirations by branding it as ‘Western’ and thereby implying that it is part of an imperial conspiracy against the South. Instead, Sen emphasises that the knowledge available globally today is a shared product of Eastern and Western scholarship and that its honour and benefit is everyone’s, whether he/she belongs to East, West, North or South. Another drawback of Nandy et al.’s discourse strategy is that it involuntarily exempts those from their responsibility vis-à-vis the undivided Indian people, whom these authors accuse of being implicated in the alleged conspiracy of the ‘imperial West against the South’—that is, the Indian middle classes. It is from those Indian middle classes that the country draws its functional elites and it is in these functional elites that the country’s hope for the delivery of better government and a containment of communal violence lies. The failures of the country are first and foremost the responsibility of this elite and their burden should not be lessened by pleading, in favour of them, some sort of force majeure in view of an allegedly overpowering Western conspiracy. In the face of such an overwhelmingly powerful ‘other’, the own ‘self’ becomes proportionately very small and no one would expect from such a small ‘self’ that it could possibly do something about its own fate. All that remains for the Indian ‘self’, thus minimised, is to acquiesce and to accommodate itself in its position as a victim, innocent though it may seem. Strangely, thereby the apparently counter-hegemonic strategy only reconfirms the stereotypes fuelling the hegemonic discourse. In the end, ‘the Orient’ remains what it has always been in the eyes of its beholders: weak, effeminate, fatalistic and incapable of running its own affairs.

Notes 1. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxist Interpretations of Literature and Culture: Limits, Frontiers, Boundaries, ed. Larry Grossberg and Carry Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 2. Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns [Theories of Communicative Actions], vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987).

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3. André Béteille, “Religion as a Subject for Sociology,” in Anti-Utopia. Essential Writings of André Béteille, ed. Dipankar Gupta (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 53–68 (emphases mine). 4. André Béteille, “The Idea of Natural Inequality,” in Anti-Utopia. Essential Writings of André Béteille, ed. Dipankar Gupta (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 257–80 (emphases in the original). 5. Ibid., 263. 6. Concerned-Citizens-Tribunal, Crime against Humanity. 7. Nandy et al., Creating a Nationality, vi. 8. Ibid., vi. 9. Ibid., viii. 10. One exception being the Kosovo where an international community assists in its secession from Serbia. 11. Nandy et al., Creating a Nationality, vi. f. 12. Ibid., vii. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., ix. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., xi. 17. Said, Orientalism. 18. See the Appendix.

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Part III

Intellectual Elites and Normative Orders in India, Israel, Palestine and Turkey

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Introduction: Survey and Interviews T

HE PURPOSE OF THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS was to develop a theoretical framework within which to analyse framings of conflict between different religious, ethnic or national groups within a country or transnationally. While the present volume focuses on India, the project from which this work emerged was laid out as a comparative analysis of four countries: India, Israel, Palestine and Turkey.1 In each of these countries, interviews were taken with scholars from humanities and social sciences on issues relating to perceived threats that might be seen to emerge from ethnic or religious identity politics. Palestine of course is not an independent country. As an occupied territory, it falls under the jurisdiction of the victor. In many ways (communal politics, culture, language, history, and so on), however it does represent a separate entity. In including interview partners from the occupied territories, the survey tries to do justice to this fact. In focussing on what these interview partners have to say about the established normative order of the state under whose jurisdiction they fall, the study tries to accommodate the fact that the country lacks independence. A central analytic notion to the investigation is the concept of normative order. Normative order is understood here as a system of rules and norms governing the cooperation of actors in a society. The notion bears some resemblance to John Rawls’ notion of the ‘basic structure’ of a society.2 Rawls’ interest, however, was in distributive justice, whereas the term ‘normative order’ is focussed on relations of power and questions of legitimacy of rule. Also, Rawls’ interest was normative, whereas the use of the term ‘normative order’ in this context is descriptive. The system of norms de facto governing the cooperation of actors in a society is called ‘established normative order’ for the purpose of this study. The most fundamental of these norms are frequently laid down in a state constitution. The less fundamental ones form the body of

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laws and their interpretation as part of the legal tradition of a country. Moreover, there is a host of informal norms implicitly governing the behaviour of actors in society. They form the mores of the land. In each country, the question which norms do form part of the established normative order and which do not is controversial. But usually there is no controversy about the fact that such systems of norms exist. Alternative and conflicting explications, however, are always possible. They form the basis of disagreement with the established normative order. Those in disagreement develop what is called alternative normative orders in this study. Generally, their proponents would try to mobilise mass support in their favour. Such mass support can be generated with the help of identity politics. The following section represents a first attempt at evaluating the interviews taken in India in November 2007, as well as in Israel and Palestine in February 2008 and in Turkey in March 2008. The evaluation gives special attention to the aspect of established normative order, which may be seen by the interviewees as challenged by alternative normative orders advocated by religious or ethnic socio-political movements or through influences stemming from the global cultural reference frame. The evaluation encompasses the whole set of 59 interviews taken in the three countries. Those interviews taken in India are printed here in full length. The interviews taken in Israel, the Palestinian occupied territories and Turkey will be published in a subsequent volume. The following is a brief summary of the research design and the preliminary results.

Choice of Countries All four countries—India, Israel, Palestine and Turkey—were relevant for the investigation for a number of reasons. First, they stand with one leg in the so-called Muslim world. Then they take a firm step into modernity with the other one. Each has its own way of confronting modernity. India stands for an evolutionist model of adapting modern requirements to traditional ways. Turkey, in contrast, stands for a revolutionary break away from traditional forms of social order and governance, whereas Israel and Palestine stand for a more or less unmediated side by side of Western-style modernity (Israel) and traditionally Islamic or Christian ways of life (Palestine). Second, all three countries have their own issues with Islam. Their involvement with Islam takes place against the backdrop of normative

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conceptions of order that are historically derived from western Europe. In the case of India, the established normative conception of order is of a liberal-democratic kind with a positive approach to religious freedom.3 In the case of Israel, the established normative order is a secular Zionist conception with privileges for the religious Orthodoxy. In Turkey, the established normative order follows a republican, ‘Kemalist’ conception with the state holding a monopoly over religion. In Palestine the established order is that of the occupying power. Third, all of these countries have their own struggles with modernity before the backdrop of seemingly older conceptions of order that purport to be rooted in an age where ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ were yet to be defined. Those who are making these historic references are nevertheless thoroughly modern. They try to create a normative order centred on Hinduism, for example. Their Hinduism, however, is a remake of a past that was construed to meet quite contemporary ends. In the case of Israel, a similar move seeks legitimacy from a Jewish past construed either to delegitimise modern Zionism, as among the ultraOrthodox, or to carry it to excesses, as among the radical settlers. In the case of Turkey, traditionalist movements use Islam as a legacy to attempt to reconfigure the normative order of the laïc state. A forth aspect brings in a warp that runs right through the main fault line. In each of the countries, minorities seek to split away from the state and establish their own polity. In India, there are many such provinces in the north-east, and in the north-west a secessionist movement would like to establish an independent state of Kashmir (or join Kashmir to Pakistan). Since Kashmir is considered a province lost for dar al-Islam, this issue has repercussions in the wider Islamic world. In the case of Israel, Muslim and Christian Arabs want to establish an independent state of Palestine, either replacing Israel (Hamas) or alongside Israel (Palestine Liberation Organization). In Turkey, Muslim Kurds want to break away and establish an independent Kurdistan in south-east Anatolia and neighbouring territories. Table 1 illustrates the main fault lines of these conflicts. Table 1 Fault Lines of Conflicts over Normative Order

India Israel/Palestine Turkey Source: Author.

Dominant identity

Subdominant identity Non-identity

Secular-Indian Zionist-Israeli Ethnic-Turkish

Hindu-Indian Biblical-Israeli Islamic-Turkish

Non-Indian (Kashmiri) Non-Israeli (Palestinian) Non-Turkish (Kurdish)

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Each of these identity constructions determines the inclusion or exclusion of certain sections of the population through notions of territoriality, citizenship, ethnicity or religious affiliation. Thereby, the identity of the state governs access to power and resources. Both, the dominant groups and their contenders, use identity politics to secure their claims, except for two. Neither the secular Indian nor the secular Palestinian conception of order requires identity politics to uphold its claims. In all other cases, some form of identity politics is used to mobilise support on the basis of religion or ethnicity (or both) and to create a sense of cohesion. A well-tried means to generate cohesion is the suggestion of an external threat. In this study, the focus is on perceived threats from ‘the West’ (or Europe) and ‘Islam’ and the role that these topoi play in the domain of identity politics in these three countries. Often the suggestion of an external threat is meant to generate cohesion within. In the case of India, identity politicians sometimes suggest that Islam, Islamic countries (Pakistan) or Islamic movements (that is, Kashmir)4 pose a threat to the predominantly Hindu society. The aim is to wield a common front of ‘Hindus’ and to antagonise Muslims within the country and without. In the attempt to generate cohesion, the differentiation between those (Muslims or non-Muslims) who really pose a threat to the country and those who do not is blurred. Similarly, in Israel, the perceived (and real) threat to the Jewish community emanating from Palestinian Arabs is sometimes utilised to stabilise the otherwise quite centrifugal Jewish identity as well as to justify a politics of expansion into occupied territories. In Turkey, threats from political Islam as well as Kurdish irredentists are sometimes used to rally the ‘true’ Turks around their flag. ‘Turkishness’ thereby becomes an exclusivist ethos rather than an inclusive territorial notion as sometimes suggested by liberal Kemalists. At times the drive for cohesion can outdo the purpose of self-defence against (a real) threat. Then such rallying cries for common identity and unquestioned loyalty can become aggressive. There is always the danger of apocalyptic visions becoming self-fulfilling prophesies. By focussing on academics and intellectuals, the study aims at possible relaxations to such closures. The intellectual elites of a country are best equipped to see through the demagogy in discourses of threat and loyalty. It is thus from those groups that a muting effect on agitations can be expected, provided that these intellectuals have a free hand. Freedom of

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speech and academic freedom are thus important boundary conditions to be kept in mind while evaluating the interviews. Academic freedom and freedom of speech were restricted in some countries (Turkey and Palestine). In others (India and Israel), there were hardly any restrictions.5 But even where freedom of speech and academic freedom are not restricted, intellectual elites may feel that they have to exert a certain amount of self-censorship so as to not spoil their special relation with the ruling elites. According to Eisenstadt,6 ruling elites and intellectual elites are engaged in a relationship of mutual dependence while each at the same time attempts to maximise its autonomy. Thus, ruling elites can equip intellectual elites with resources and prestige, and they have the power to withdraw them. Intellectual elites, in turn, bestow legitimacy to the ruling elites and their policies. And they can also withhold it. Therefore, this study is interested in how modern science, with the leading role that modernity assigns to it, deals with challenges to its autonomy coming from actors who invoke pre-modern, mostly religious, frames of reference in order to question the role that science is designed to play in modern life. The expediency of the problem has been emphasised by none other than the ‘wisest man of India’7 himself, André Béteille, who worries about ‘the ease with which nationalist sentiment can be exploited in India or proposing alternatives to modern systems of knowledge’.8 ‘The social sciences’, he writes: … are more difficult to insulate from ideology and popular prejudice than are the natural sciences. Modern social sciences with its roots in nineteenth-century Europe, is a target of attack not only from traditionalists but also from post-modernists. Indian social scientists are very conscious of being latecomers in their fields. Again, they are easily demoralized by the fact that even their genuine contributions are largely ignored outside India. And of course they have never produced a Raman, a Saha or a Bose. The attack on post-Enlightenment modernity may not always have the intention of reinforcing atavistic nationalism, but it is bound to have that consequence.9

The attack on post-Enlightenment modernity comes not only from atavistic nationalists but also from post-modernists who in the words of Béteille: … may not know what they are for, but they know what they are against. The traditionalists are against the same sort of thing, and they do know

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what they are for: they are for a return to the wisdom of the past. That wisdom has had some attraction for modern social and political theorists in India, several of whom believe that the kernel of their science may be found in the Hindu Shastas. The late Professor Kewal Motwani, who greatly admired Manu, maintained that Dharmashastra was the Sanskrit word for sociology. The threat to modern knowledge from astrology and alchemy can be bypassed more easily than the threat to it from Manuvad.10

The Survey Social sciences may be particularly vulnerable to ideological misuse or popular prejudice, but they are also particularly equipped to take cognisance of these tendencies and reflect on them. Hence, the assumption that social scientists in particular would be sensitive to attempts from nationalist quarters to question the role that science plays in modern life and secular politics. Interviews were taken with 59 representatives of the academic elites of the four countries—India, Israel, Palestine and Turkey. With few exceptions, they were from the humanities and social sciences (anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, philosophy, history, and so on). These academics were affiliated to prime research institutions and universities of their countries. Often they were also ‘public intellectuals’ in the sense that they had a regular presence in the media (print, TV, radio, Internet). Furthermore, about 20 interviews were taken with independent intellectuals such as writers, peace activists and human rights activists. The questions were as follows: 1. Today, many perceive (some) religion as a threat. What is your personal experience in this regard? 2. How is the perception of (some) religion as a threat being reflected in your academic environment? 3. Many perceive the West as a threat. What is your personal experience in this regard? (How do you perceive the role of Europe in this connection?) 4. How is the perception of the West (Europe) as a threat being reflected in your academic environment? 5. Do you think we are moving towards a closer-knit world society or do you think that world society is disintegrating?

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The first question is aiming at the possibility of threat—in general and to modern science in particular—that is perceived to arise from the sphere of religion (Hinduism, Christianity and Islam). Sometimes, a question was added to inquire about the role of alternative sciences in India and their impact on the understanding of scientific rationality altogether. This was motivated by the fact that while the Bharatiya Janata Party ruled for the third time from October 1999 to May 2004, there have been attempts at introducing astrology and other Vedic sciences in the universities (Béteille).11 In this regard, the interviews taken with Dhruv Raina and Anil Bhatti prove particularly interesting. The same period witnessed an intensive debate on the ideological misuse of history school books. Thus, typically an interview partner from the field of history would be prompted to comment on these debates (see for example the interview with Ashok Acharya). A standard assumption in theories of modernity is that the differentiation of society into different subsystems, each operating according to its own logic, would have its respective representatives defend the autonomous rationality of their social system. Thus, one would expect that modern Indian scientists, particularly social scientists, would guard against such intrusions from the religious or ideological spheres. Of course, science, particularly social science, cannot function without any normative and ideological presuppositions. Generally, social scientists share the standard ideological premises upon which the society in which they find themselves operates. In India, this would be the normative presuppositions of a liberal democracy with the state giving equal importance to all religions. One would expect that attempts to introduce curricula in state-run schools, colleges and universities that are geared to one particular religion only would meet with stiff opposition in secular academic circles.12 Perceptions of religion as a threat can arise from the attempts made by Hindu supremacists to alter the normative order of the Indian polity. The world over, Islam is depicted as a threat and in India this perception has a particular trajectory that precedes the terrorist attacks of Washington and New York and the bombings in London, Madrid and Mumbai. Many respondents have narrowed down the range of possible interpretations of the question to mean only Islam as a possible source of threat. This was to be expected and it is in keeping with the layout of the analysis in a context of East–West relations and mutual stereotyping. In India, often modernity and globalisation are identified with the West and Westernisation. Sometimes, these processes are perceived as

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a threat to traditional ways of life, to the Indian joint family, to established gender relations and to the diversity of life forms prevalent in India. Sometimes, this critique takes the shape of an anti-capitalist argument as against an all-pervasive consumerism. Sometimes, it is grounded in an anti-imperialist conspiracy theory. Multinational companies (MNCs) moving into India after the End of the License Raj are seen as neo-colonial enterprises, in fact furthering US-American interests. They are paralleled with the British East India Company that took over sovereign functions much before the formal establishment of the British Empire in the aftermath of 1857/58. The third question was to prompt interviewees to respond to such tropes. The not so obvious intention thereby was also to prompt interviewees to take a stand on modernity and the particular form it takes in India. As the underlying assumption of this study is that the actual controversy is not between the East and the West, or between the Muslim world and the West, but between a globalised modernity and traditional ways of life. The fourth question asks about the reflection of these discourses in the Indian academia. The interest was to see to what extent academics themselves fall prey to stereotypical visions of the West as the source of the evils that have befallen the Indian society and to what extent they are critically aware of the discharging function of such an ideologeme. The fifth question was meant to check on the assumption of a globalised condition of modernity that finds expression in the concept of a world polity as conceived by John W. Meyer. Each interview partner was asked to respond freely to this set of questions. Variations in the wording occurred. They are a tribute to the goal to keep the conversation as natural as possible. Often additional questions were asked in order to bring in topics for which the interview partner had a special expertise. The interlocutors were prepared for the problematic of identity and politics with a paper that was sent to them before the interview took place.13

Results Hardly any of the 79 interview partners in the three countries, India, Israel (and Palestine) and Turkey, considered religion (especially Islam) in itself a source of threat. Only two interlocutors indicated to the interviewer that Islam being an immanently political religion, Muslims had

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a hard time accepting politics as being completely separated from religion. In this, most of the interviewed conformed to the expectation that no legitimisation of any political mobilisation of religion was easily forthcoming from the academic elites of these countries. Also, ‘the West’ as such was not considered a source of threat. Most interviewees differentiated between USA and Europe and they had a rather positive perception of Europe. Critical voices were mentioning the material disparity between the West and the developing world as a main hindrance for the coming about of an (equitable) world society. Thus, even in this point, the expectation was met that intellectual elites do not easily grant legitimacy to discourses that thrive on ‘othering’ in this case of the West. Such discourses seem to be more typical of subdominant groups and their intellectual leaders. Therefore, the question arises as to whether the discourse of the academic elites simply mirrors the dominant discourse of the ruling elites. Those can, for the most part, afford to abstain from identity politics because of their comfortable power position, which necessitates less of mass mobilisation than what political movements would require in order to achieve their ends. Although normative conceptions of order put forth by ruling elites may deserve criticism, the mutual dependency of ruling elites and intellectual elites prevents the latter from totally disengaging with the normative conceptions of the former. The interviews printed here, and also those taken in Israel, Palestine and Turkey, illustrate this fact. Only in Israel do we find a sizable number (five out of 20) of intellectuals who voice strong criticism of the normative conception of order that dominates the country. They all belong to the secular Left. None of the critics represents subdominant groups such as Jewish Orthodox, anti-Zionists or ultra-Zionist settlers.14 Their stance resembles secular-democratic positions, voiced everywhere in the world, about the neutrality of the state vis-à-vis religion and the democratic equality of all citizens, irrespective of creed or ethnicity. These instances may therefore be indicative of the influence of the modern global reference frame as put forward by John W. Meyer (Shmuel Eisenstadt speaks of a ‘civilisation of modernity’).15 The present sample of 59 formal interviews (22 in India), plus 20 informal ones, is not big enough to warrant any judgement of statistic correlations or causal explanations between the dependent variable (attitude of interviewee vis-à-vis normative conception of order) and the independent variables (freedom of speech/consistency of normative conception of order). However, the results are an illustration of

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the theoretical reflections that have lead our investigation. Further investigations would have to determine whether it is the perceived inconsistency of the normative conceptions of order (to be a democratic state and yet discriminate citizens according to religion and ethnicity) that leads some intellectuals in Israel to disengage with the dominant discourse or whether it is the extraordinary degree to which freedom of speech and academic freedom are honoured in this country. In India, the case seems to be the reverse. While the independent variable freedom of speech/academic freedom ranges comparatively high, the amount of intellectuals uttering fundamental criticism of the dominant conception of order is close to zero. Whether this is due to the fact that the normative conception of order is felt to be very consistent would be the subject of another, much broader investigation. In the case of Turkey, the high amount of moderately critical positions (12 out of 17) is striking. Given that the variable freedom of speech/ academic freedom rates low in Turkey, it was to be expected that few, if any academics, would voice any strong criticism of the dominant normative conception of order. Further investigations would have to determine whether the relatively numerous moderately critical voices are to be taken face value or whether they reflect any dissatisfaction with the inconsistencies of the dominant normative conceptions (favouring Turkish ethnicity and Islam in spite of claims to inclusiveness and laïcism).

Notes 1. For details, see Michael Dusche, “Wissenschaftliche Elite und herrschende Ordnungsvorstellungen in Indien, Israel, Palästina und der Türkei” [Academic Elite and Established Normative Order in India, Israel, Palestine and Turkey] 2009, (unpublished ms, available online at www.mdusche.de/news (accessed October 30, 2009). 2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7ff. 3. See the debate on the specificities of Indian secularism in Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), part IV. 4. On Islamic and/or independence movements in Kashmir see David Devadas, In Search of a Future. The Story of Kashmir (New Delhi: Penguin, 2007). 5. Human rights activists refer to the US Department of State reports on these countries: US Department of State, “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.” Available online at www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2007/index.htm (accessed January 26, 2009). 6. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Theorie und Moderne. Soziologische Essays [Theory and Modernity. Sociological Essays] (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006).

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7. Ramachandra Guha, “The Wisest Man (Still) in India,” in Ideology and Social Science, ed. André Béteille (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006), xi–xxii. 8. André Béteille, “Alternative Sciences,” The Times of India, July 31, 2001, reprinted in André Béteille, Ideology and Social Science (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006), 5ff. 9. Ibid., 8. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. See for example, Aditya Mukherjee, Mridula Mukherjee and Sucheta Mahajan, RSS, School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008). 13. Michael Dusche, “Identity Politics and the Politicisation of Religion in Europe and Beyond,” in Plurality and Representation: Religion in Education, Culture, and Society (unpublished ms. Available online at www.mdusche.de/news[accessed October 13, 2009]). 14. Eisenstadt, Theorie und Moderne [Theory and Modernity], 446. 15. Ibid., 55.

Ashok Acharya∗

Many these days perceive of religion as such, or a particular religion as a potential source of threat. What is your experience in this regard? I don’t take it as a threat. I just think that the expressions of religion have just found a new voice, a new way of finding its feet in the world today, which was denied for quite some time. That’s my view. While finding a voice in the interstices of modern life, it comes into friction with lots of things but it’s a voice which we all have been wanting to listen to and we brought it in the first place and religion is also trying to fight its way into expressions that are acceptable to the demands of the time. This does not seem to be threatening at first sight, but there are certain forms that this can take that are in fact threatening, if we look at religiously motivated extremism, and so on. And there are extremists in every religious camp who use religion to legitimate violence. This obviously gives rise to the perception that it may be something rooted in that religion which causes people to take up this path? Both yes and no. Yes, because the world over we perceive a certain kind of religious expression to be a threat to civilised life. That sort of threat comes with a strident and very exclusivist kind of a world view. And it is that expression that tries to elbow out room for other possible ways of existence. There is also a sort of claim over people, the sources, territory and all that. There is also a peculiar way in which it also responds to a certain kind of a global capitalist movement and flow, but that’s a responsive side. That comes later. In certain ways, certain religions have been trying to find a voice. Some of them have found it attractive to strike those deep cords of exclusion and elbow out those other possible ways of existence. And when we try speaking this language, probably, we would be talking about one or two kinds of religion, but historically ∗ The following interviews were taken in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata in November 2007 except for the interview with Dhruv Raina, whom I met in the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin Institute for Advanced Study) in December 2007. Raina’s interview is not following the usual schema but it has a direct bearing on the question of interdependence between intellectual elite and established normative order in the modern state, which is given here in the first place.

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this could have been true for many. We see one face of one or two religions, probably, in the present day world, doing it this way, and this could be reactions to history, to certain forms of modernity. One thing that stands out as a unique thing is this resurrection of what I would call an Orthodoxy or a resurrection of going back to the roots, as it were, by the world view of which you are intolerant of other possible ways of existence. So I think we are unfortunately witnessing that kind of an expression also, along with other forms of expression, which are more inclusionary in nature, so I would agree. How do you perceive the social sciences in India in their dealing with religion? Social Sciences in India generally have just had a skin deep analysis of the phenomenon. We as social scientists usually examine these questions with blinkers in front of us. We are already steeped into a certain kind of category of thinking, of certain kinds of concepts that blind us, and do not help us to look into the ways in which people lead their lives. As I have been speaking to some communitarians in the past, although I do not myself believe in communitarianism, in many ways they have been able to touch on those aspects of our social life which many of us social scientists have loathed to touch upon. Call it in the name of secularism or a kind of secularised social sciences, we have treated many such deep issues with a kind of a disdain. However, the same would not hold for those who practise humanities. Unfortunately, social scientists have not engaged even the scholars in humanities as much in India, or, I would guess, elsewhere too. That I think is one of the undoing of the social science research in any context, but more so in the Indian context. There’s a lot more that needs to be done. When I teach political theory in the class, we talk about all these different concepts, but there is this one thing that we don’t wish to theorise—because we all have these moral blinders in front of us, about equality, justice and all that—is about human nature: what is it, how does it exist in its different forms, in the ways in which people lead their lives. Unless we get to know a lot more about this we will always be doing a skin deep research on such issues, thinking and pretending that we have found the right answers. Let us look also at history as an academic discipline, which is always a very embattled field among ideologues of any camp, not only communitarian religionists. Especially in India there have been these school book debates and there is this debate about the Aryan invasion theory, and so on. There it seems that science and scientific methodology becomes itself a victim of these battles, or it is called into question at the

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very least. How do you see the academic community in India responding to such challenges to the ways to do science? This is a phenomenon for which, I think, mostly at fault are the American social scientists who are perennially quarrelling about methods—what are the right methods, forget about what you are getting at and things like that. In the Indian context, I think much of the most serious discussions in social sciences have taken place in history, and yet, I would say, you are right about it, that much of the debate has centred on how do we interpret particular events and within what sort of a framework, and what kind of political message issues out of it depending on the framework we have adopted. So when history writing becomes a political vocation, it is a little bothersome. However, I do not completely rule out the fact that people may not be guided by a certain moral vision of things. However, that moral vision needs to be a thinner one, not a thicker one, which clouds your own findings and conclusions. That’s my view, because if I’m reminded of much of the historical research, including the very fluffy post-modern, vintage kind of research, I’m reminded of where is that good old meat and potato kind of research that has been taking place in history, where you collected a lot of data, and interpreted some, but not coloured it completely with your vision and then allowed others, more hopefully other social scientists, to feed on it and then to extract whatever meaning that they could. A lot of recent history writing has been more about certain groups falling in tune with each other, and responding to each other’s works and each other’s methodologies, giving a disproportionate amount of attention to the cognisance, not to the content of the research. I think that’s my take on this. By this I’m not trying to dismiss the very important work that many historians have done, but if I were to ask my daughter, what history books she should study, I would point her to a non-historian like Jawaharlal Nehru. Let us move, now, to perceptions of the West in India and discourses on the West as a possible source of threat, in various ways, politically, economically, culturally, through whichever means, direct assertions of power or indirect control through international institution or even more indirectly through cultural hegemony, which can be perceived by some as a threat to their cultural identity, their economic viability or national autonomy. What is your experience in this regard? This kind of a thinking was held more true in the 1960s and 1970s. I don’t think that kind of a perception is any longer present with the ordinary Indians, and let me be very specific: with the ordinary Indians,

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this kind of a perception no longer holds. It is the imagination of a few. Those who seek to mobilise the public opinion, and these days they fail to do so in the name of a threat from the West. This kind of a boogie is swept up again and again. I don’t think it exists any longer. If you walk with people and you speak to them, in the railway stations, on the streets and in different public places, I don’t think anyone is any longer bothered by what kind of threat the West may pose. Of course, by this I do not mean to say that people may not have concerns, but no longer is it a threat perception. It could revolve around certain concerns. For instance, certain farmers may feel concerned, and very deeply aggrieved, about the incursion of foreign capital goods in the market. But they wouldn’t rue the fact that those goods have come in the first place, they would, however, rue the fact that what kind of distributive strategies does the state hold vis-à-vis that intrusion and the farmers’ entitlements. It’s a complaint about that neutral empire—if you still call the state a neutral empire—which is at stake here, that is, what are the kinds of ground rules that the state puts forward. For instance, here I am reminded of how in many ways people attribute the whole phenomenon of the farmer suicides to globalisation, as if the farmers were making an excellent living before that, which is not true. Whenever we make these kinds of strong statements, we also need to be checking out on the counterfactual. What was the situation before globalisation happened? Did the farmers have enough, did they produce enough? I do not dismiss the fact that globalisation may not have affected them, but not to an extent that they are kind of forced into a state of penury that drives them straight away to suicide. I think there is a lot more of explaining that needs to be done, about the role of the state governments in those provinces and the centre and their negligence, and so on. So, the farmers’ concern is one kind of concern. There could be other sorts of concerns. For instance, some people might worry about the kind of cultural influences that invade their bedrooms via the television, for instance, and they might call it as a threat from the West. I do not deny that there is one kind of a culture that is more a reflection of the metrolife, which is somewhat removed from the rural life, and in the metro-life, you would have the youth switching on to the MTV channels, or to the V channels, those are beamed constantly, what you call the Western music or dance. My own daughter does it, and I don’t mind it. But to say that they are kind of hooked onto it, may be far fetched. That’s the metro-life. On the other hand, I think, in most parts of rural life, this is not so. Now, the question is, what if they also had access to

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the same kind of things, would they also be affected? And if they were, would we call it a threat from the West, as it were? I don’t think so. I think what is very notable about 21st-century life is the kind of fusion of the different cultural lifestyles that we are all experiencing, not just in the metro-life but also in the villages in different ways. There are many things that we learn from each other. A person who has lived his entire life in the cities at times gets to appreciate what happens in other parts of the world or other parts of his or her own country. So that media link-up also brings him closer to his own neighbours through the global satellite, than he had ever to imagine. You know, somebody who is in Delhi would get access to what is happening to the artisans in Bahadurgarh through a BBC news channel. So it’s not a black and white thing. There are many aspects of our own society that we get to know through a globalised media network. You know, the more the merrier. But even about what some people call the immodest flaunting of bodies and language on the TV. I think as a mature democracy, which I can call India now, the youth are learning to, and should learn to come to terms with these kinds of issues. In any case, in India, there is already a hot discussion about sex education being introduced in schools, and so on. So the more the exposure, it is better for them, because they would learn to live, to grow up to live in a world where they can adjust with the different cultural lifestyles. However, that being said, my own view is that this is not a threat from the West. All these different influences are not to be seen as a threat from the West, and ordinary Indians do not in any case see it that way. And my own view is that it has to be seen as a sort of a fusion of horizons, if I may borrow Gadamer’s phrase, which is actually taking place. I wouldn’t be pushed to that corner of that antiglobalisation bandwagon to call names for all such intrusions as threats. I wouldn’t want to call them intrusions in the first place. Do you see tendencies of a world society emerging or do you see tendencies for its disintegration? Neither. I do not know what a world society would look like, and I do not know what the implications of the term disintegration are. However, if by that we mean that we are increasingly being divided from each other and that we are falling into our own cocoons, into our own communities and going further away from centralised structures, I would say that’s now a better way of redefining ourselves in terms of what we call that centralised structure. More and more people realise that they can be uniquely—here I use a nationalist example—Indians now feel that

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they can be uniquely Indian in their own Marathi way, Bengali way or Tamil way, and many do not mind describing themselves by their own religious affiliations, which they loathed to do, say, decades back, because that carried certain labels with them. Somebody can be as good an Indian as a Christian, as a Muslim. I don’t see, essentially, when people evoke these kinds of identities, I don’t think they are actually divided about how they unite. I rather think that they are finding the terms of the unity in a much more honourable way. But if you call this disintegration, then that’s a problem with our language. I don’t think that would be a true reflection of the reality that is taking place. In different ways, people who try to find their roots in a much deeper way are also able to connect themselves with the rest of the world in a very cosmopolitan way. Many Indians, without realising, are taking a leaf out of Gandhi’s ideology here. Gandhi once said: ‘I open the windows of my house and I allow the fresh breeze to come in without uprooting myself from where I am.’ I think many Indians are recreating this Gandhian conception of the self where they stand rooted and yet do not find themselves at danger with winds blowing in from outside. Do you see a special role for a politically united Europe within the West as it confronts India or vice versa or as they are interlinked in a global sphere? I think a more unified Europe will have much to do by way of homework on its own home side, for a couple of decades more, before it even tries to engage other regions in the world, but that is my reading. And the reasons are pretty obvious, because here we are talking about a host of countries that are members of the EU and even they find it at times very difficult to come to terms with what should be the issues on which they should be united. And I think once that unified Europe comes into the picture, their first engagement has to be, and that will be a little harsh one, in trying to reconcile the role vis-à-vis North America, before they seek to engage with the rest of the world. I’m probably reading too much into the future, but the unified Europe is already thinking in terms of competing with North American interests for seeking different spheres of influence in other parts of the world. To some extent, it could be successful, and in many ways it won’t be. The ways it will be successful is because I think there are no designs here on the rest of the world. As Europe is itself struggling to unite, the best thing that would come out of this unified Europe, and I think it will also turn a new leaf in human history, is to give the rest of the world a few new lessons on how to unite on the basis of equality, dignity and without affecting the

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unique identity of each. I think that’s asking for too much, but it’s very well worth a try. And that, I think, holds out a golden leaf for others, to think about, to emulate and only when the others also, without any biases or without any temperamental hassles of any kind, think that this is a good example to follow, many other regions also need to be doing the same, as for instance in South Asia and South-east Asia, connecting with the rest of the world. So the united Europe, which is not yet a finished, complete project, tying up with the rest of the world will also depend on how the rest of the world sees itself, besides seeing Europe as a united one. In any case, there will also be some kind of competition between the North American interests and the EU, especially in the economic realm. In other realms, clearly, the united Europe is a winner over the North American Union, I think. In terms of finding a common ground in spite of deep-rooted differences in cultural identity and language, India is an example. India has already achieved political unity to a degree that Europe might never reach. What do you think Europe could learn from the Indian example? India’s record is not that unblemished, let’s put that straight away, but if I think India has to offer any lesson to Europe, the first would be to go slow, not to try to solve problems through institutions. However, on a balance sheet, I would say, there have been very large success stories. The first lesson would be to go slow, not try to solve problems through institutions. Institutional design is not going to take you very far. Institutions work best when there is a change in attitudinal disposition of people. People learn to live in a system over a period of time, and then they understand the institutions. They first need to learn to live with each other, and it’s only then that institutions come into play. Their role is to maintain certain checks and balances between different people. This settling in of attitudinal dispositions is something that takes time. And this settling in of the attitudinal dispositions is something that takes time, and the one lesson that the EU can take from India is to go slow. Another thing is that, one of the reasons why the Indian story was a success was that clearly, at the founding moment of the Indian republic itself, there were certain visions that were laid out, and the founders, as it were, said come what may, we shall not deviate from these founding visions of our nation. So I think if the EU could do something like that. Of trying to unite those different people, those different cultures and languages, into one political unit. Then there has to be a founding vision that gives equality to all, and not super-eminence

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to this or that country, this or that culture or this or that language. Easier said than done, I know, especially when some of these identities have been so strongly crystallised as they do in the 21st century. The Indian experience started in the mid 20th century. It was still malleable. A lot of this fixing up that political unity was still thought to be doable, and the identities were in a malleable state. And then India also had this real opportunity to define its own founding moment and then declare for others their founding vision and then finding people and getting them to be malleable enough to accommodate the founding vision. So time plays a role, and time is not on the side of the EU. However, I think that the political will is, and I think that most Europeans also want to be part of that. So, these are the two lessons that I can think of. Some sort of an institutional flexibility could be a third thing that I could think of, a kind of an institutional flexibility, not a rigidity in what must apply across the entire European continent. I think there has to be some room for being flexible about certain cultures and their languages. By flexibility, I would also say accommodating these different groups that constitute Europe at the moment on their own terms. And this can also come about, as it did happen in the Indian context, when all these groups speak for themselves, and to the Union, that is to the rest. This would probably be the best frame of reference for our coexistence. I think these three things: go slow, allow changed attitudinal dispositions to soak in and the second is what I call having a founding vision of certain principles, of equality, dignity, and so on, but in a very loose way, and then having an institutional flexibility to back it up with. In the Indian case, how much do you think the idea of an Indian identity was instrumental in the creation of the Indian union? I’m afraid I can not answer this question completely to your satisfaction, because I wish I could know more about what happened in the minds of the founders then. All I know is that there was this huge great nationalist movement, and in the course of the movement, many things happened. The initial motive must have been to free India, and India that was a kind of an imagined, or in any case, an idea that the Indians themselves inherited from others. So, to free India from the hands of what they would call the colonial masters. And in course of time, the logic and the dynamic of a movement is such that, even in our everyday struggles, we forget, if the struggle is long, what the struggle started out with, and where we are going. In many ways, this must have been the motive. But if that identity question was so large, then why could it not

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be defined successfully as to what that Indian identity meant by many of the founders who were foundering on trying to say which territory belongs to whom, and the ways in which there was this whole division of the territory into India and Pakistan. I don’t think people had very defining views about what constitutes an Indian identity. Though, I have gone through the entire constitutional assembly debates and I have found it interesting and instructive that in the clamour of those different voices, as if from the Tower of Babel, I would say that on the one hand there were people who were staunch loyalists to the Congress Party saying that India is one, we must keep united, these are the institutions that we must have, these are the institutions that we must not have. For instance, they voted against separate electorates and all that, all in the name of political unity. This sort of rhetoric usually slipped into a kind of a language which said that we will not tolerate, as Indians love to call it, fissiparous tendencies among our countrymen, that we all are Indians first and anything else later on. On the other hand, there were these other representatives from different parts of the countries who were true representatives of their own communities, and they were talking in a different language altogether. At times, I thought that the language that they evoked was more about by what terms can we, belonging to these different communities, come together and define the Indian identity through a contract. That the Indian constitution is actually a contract between the different communities. That’s the kind of language that I once detected among some of these representatives. On the other hand, there would be some, who would be more interested, and I thought quite justifiably so, to say that all those who are talking about India, do you at all know what India is? Do you know the ways in which we lead our lives, have you thought, before declaring prohibition, a ban on drinking, how tribals in Chhattisgarh and in Bihar lead their lives and why it is a part of their ritual life itself. Before we even take up the so-called normative architectonic of a Gandhian way of life, have you even bothered to examine our different folk traditional ways of life that we live. So some of them were actually, on the floor of the house, instructing other Indians to say, first let’s know who the Indians are that we are talking about before we fix a political identity that we can stamp on the foreheads of all Indians and say, well, this is an Indian and that’s an Indian. Ashok Acharya is professor of Political Science at the University of Delhi.

Imtiaz Ahmad

What is your experience in regard of religion (general or particular) as a source of threat? Well I don’t think that religion per se is a threat. All religious traditions are kind of omnibus in that they say many things and it is open to the followers to pick and choose according to the situation in which they find themselves. And I think this has been happening in all of the religious traditions recently, that some of the people who have more radical views, and their radical views are for other reasons than religion, pick on that part of the text which is convenient for them. The same text may contain other things that would be quite opposed to the interpretation that is placed on the part of the text. They ignore that. So in fact, there is a process of selection involved, in which people are choosing from religion and from religious texts what is convenient and suitable for them. And to say that is not to say that religion per se can be a threat, because religion can also be a great asset, and in different times of history it has been an asset. So I think the explanation why religion today is perceived as a threat or why religion is critical to understanding the present scenario, we must take account of the context and the context is what determines people’s choices. If the context is one where they think falling back upon a more radicalised reading of the text is to their advantage, they tend to fall back upon the radicalised text. If on the other hand, they find that their context makes it possible for them to fall back upon a more liberal, a more open kind of interpretation, they would do so. And in so far, as the question of Islam, in which I suspect you are more interested, is concerned, I would say that if you take a long historical view, the political responses were always diverse. When the external context has suggested that there is a threat to the tradition, religion or its believers, then the responses have been most radical. I think the best example is the expansion of colonialism, when many Muslim groups around the world, particularly in Egypt and India, took to open rebellion as a response to the expanding colonial domination, and they perceived threat to their religion, tradition and way of life. Where that has not happened, where the perceived threat is not one of annihilation or total elimination, the Muslim responses have been more towards Islamic movements of

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various kinds. You have the Islamic Brotherhood Movement in Egypt, similar Wahhabi movements in this country in the 19th century and similar movements elsewhere. These are movements that basically invoke Islamic identity, but have some kind of social and political agenda. This agenda may include any number of things; it may even include denial of opportunities for some groups. It may involve a highly liberalising trend within the regime. I mean, the response to Nasser arose from the fact that Nasser was trying to reform too much too quickly. It also sometimes takes the form of these Islamic movements, because groups that are marginalised fall back upon religion as an instrument to push forward their own case of inclusion. I think the case of the Islamic Brotherhood Movement again is a case in point, where the leadership of the movement was really from these specific areas, which were in fact marginalised in the overall Egyptian society. Where in fact a degree of social democracy exists, and I would cite among these countries, let’s say Turkey. Turkey is an Islamic state anyway, but there is also a very strong modernising tendency there. I will take India, I will take Nepal, I will even take Sri Lanka. In all these countries, there are Muslim populations, but because there is some form of social democracy and some constitutional arrangement by which the identities of these groups are assured. It is assured that they can preserve their identity as Muslims, the preoccupation is really some kind of a mild concern with issues of identity. And the struggles therefore are not in the form of Islamic movements or open rebellion, but in the form various movements that seek to reinforce that identity. So identity becomes a crucial element in this, there is a mild concern for identity issues, but the overall assurance of the political system as a social democracy does not aggravate that, there is no aggravation of this identity into either an Islamic movement or an open rebellion. There is a fourth response, which I would refer to, and that relates to countries where Islamic identity is assured. Pakistan is a good case in point. Once Islamic identity has been assured, then in fact, Islam is divided, and therefore, in Pakistan, radicals versus liberals, Shi’ites versus Sunnis, and various kinds of new religious movements that have come up are competing against each other. So the struggle is really not between the state and a group, not against hegemonic power and the identity. It is really with groups within so that Islam becomes tremendously divided, when Islamic identity is assured. Now there are exceptions in this region. I think, one good exception is the Maldives, where radical groups have come up. But that is because many of these radical groups assume that their identity as Muslims is not assured, and of course the constitution

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of the Maldives recognises religion as a criteria for citizenship. So in some of these you have movements, and these are also movements that have been sponsored from outside. So, basically, I would say that religion becomes an issue, not per se, not because inherently there is anything in religion that makes it possible to play that role, but religion becomes relevant, it becomes instrumental, in promoting and pursuing other interests, which are dictated by the context in which the group is living. If the group is living in a non-democratic country, it may throw out one response, if it lives in a democratic country, it may throw out another response, as I cited with the case of India, where Muslim preoccupation is really with questions of identity and not anything else. So broadly I would say that in a way there is a basic problem with the way social sciences have evolved. Social sciences have generally evolved with the notion that there is a causal relationship, that there is a dominant variable, and there is a recessive variable. In this scheme of things, religion is seen as a causative factor, in many things, economic development. Religion is a variable of economic development where religion is assigned a primacy. My argument is that religion is an intermediate variable. The factors that cause a certain effect may intervene through religion, but the explanation for that may be elsewhere. Muslims may not be planning their families, not because religion says so, but because of other reasons, and then they may use religion as an instrument of asserting that it doesn’t allow. Over many years, I have seen and I have argued that there is a basic problem in our social science theory that we begin with religion by assuming that religion is a determining variable, which it may or may not be. There may be areas of life where religion may be a very determining variable. But there may be areas where religion is not a determining variable but it is only an intermediate variable that people use to justify action or renounce action. People are not, for example, in the present days, hostile and active against Taslima Nasrin because of her religion. It is because they are using religion as an instrument in order to pursue other political goals, which may be Nandigram, which may be Muslim isolation, which may be exclusion of Muslims in the West Bengal system of governance, and so on, and so forth. So the religious factor is only serving as an instrumental factor rather than the central determining variable. Are these processes of instrumentalisation of religion for political ends critically reflected in the academic world through the social sciences or can the social science community also become a victim of this ideological way of thinking?

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Good point, I have recently written on this question. Particularly in the specific context of India. You know for over about 114 years we have had in this country a certain rhetoric, which took its roots after the establishment of British rule. The British government actually decided that it had worked somewhat high-handedly against Muslims in the aftermath of the mutiny, or the war of independence, whichever you would like to call it, and then it was for them to correct it. So they set up an enquiry commission that would improve the state of affairs of the Muslim community. And there were reasons, that might be responsible for Muslim decline after the establishment of British rule because of the British land policies, and so on and so forth. But for 114 years, the dominant Muslim rhetoric has been that they are very backward and left behind, and that it is the responsibility of the state to do something to rectify the situation. This rhetoric has had a tremendous influence on the way we have examined Muslim issues. Even the academics tend to take on this rhetoric as the starting point of their research and therefore they never formulate hypotheses that might contradict that. You know, I’ll cite three or four. Muslims are one. That’s one of the premises for the argument that the state has left behind Muslims or that Muslim backwardness is because of the state attitude. These are taken as givens in terms of which then subsequent analysis is framed and pursued. And this results in blocking out against possible formulations of hypotheses that might contradict, so that if Muslims are economically backward, then the presumption is that they are economically backward, because of the state patronages that were denied to them. One never looks therefore at historical, sociological and other explanations. I would argue that in this country Muslim backwardness could be accounted for by a number of things. The Mughal rule was not keenly interested in promoting Muslims, except some Muslims who were from the elite classes, so they kept them where they wanted them, precisely because they needed their services. There are community preferences for certain kinds of jobs. People will ignore all this in social analysis because taking cognisance of these various factors would be fused from the major thrust of the argument that Muslims are a disadvantaged minority and that it is the burden of the state to rectify that. So as far as the study of Muslims in India is concerned I’m absolutely sure that the rhetorical positions that have evolved in the course of history as a result of this instrumental use of religion continue to influence the way we frame hypotheses, the way we frame our research projects, what we look at. I’m very fond of citing this example. Very often I get

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theses for examining and theses about social stratification and women. Now I see the thesis is really dealing with women in a small town in Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh. The first chapter of it is ‘Women in Islam’ and the second is ‘Women in Arab Society’. It is because of the burden of the rhetoric that the scholar feels obliged to refer to what is Islam, what is the position for women in Islam, what is the position in Arab society, and therefore the part that deals with Gwalior or Lucknow is very thin. I would say that in fact it is a very interesting question that you are asking, the question that does rhetoric around identity impinge upon the academic process, and I would say, in the case of minorities, and especially Muslims, it has acted very strongly. I might cite the case of the Sikhs. After all, the Sikhs are followers of Guru Nanak and I was thinking of Sikhs as an ethnic group. Now, I was once asked by a Sikh group to come to a conference where they wanted me to read a paper. And you know they came forward and told me, we’d like you to argue that Sikhs are a minority. So you see how public rhetoric is impinging upon how people either are doing it themselves or being required to structure their analysis in terms of the political. I mean, Sikhs may not be minority, or may be, but if I am not willing to see Sikhs as a minority, then my respondents would want me to write about Sikhs as a minority. This is much more so in the case of Muslims. And as I said, one of the reasons why good research on Muslims has not come up is that every subsequent publication is only an attempt to reiterate the public rhetoric on the Muslim cause. That is a bit surprising because is there not a strong counter-discourse promoting a different perspective, a Hindu majoritarian perspective, for example. That has happened, in my own work, which essentially was aimed at challenging some of that, but then I said you can’t really be talking in the air all the time. And you go back and you do ethnographic research in the countryside, villages and towns, and then you find that Muslims are deeply embedded into their environment, which consists not only of Muslims but a whole lot of other people and their daily interactions. And then you’ll find out that Muslims are in fact in some respects better off than the others. But where you have a dominant public rhetoric then what happens is that either if you call up these facts they are not taken notice of, they’re ignored, because that will challenge, or you frame your analysis itself in such terms that they are a reinforcement of the dominant rhetoric. I think more and more in India, what is happening is

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that research themes are being so formulated that they reinforce Muslim identity, Muslim deprivation, Muslim denial, and so on. Some see the West as a source of possible threat. What is your experience in this regard? You see, I am inclined to reject the clash of civilisation thesis because there is a process of homogenising the West and homogenising the East, or homogenising the Muslim world. So you essentialise the West, represented by Western civilisation, and you essentialise Muslims, inspired by Islamic civilisation. But neither the Western civilisation, nor for that matter the Eastern civilisation is a monolithic core. We in the Muslim societies find so many differences, from Indonesia down to India, and not to speak of the Arab world. I feel like a foreigner in Indonesia even though I’m a Muslim. And I feel much more at home with the Hindu in my neighbourhood because his cultural ways are very similar to mine. I don’t feel at home with a Muslim in Kerala, because his cultural ways are entirely different form mine. If this happens in a country like India it should happen more in the global society. So, first, I’m not inclined to take the position that the West or the Muslim World constitute monolithic entities. Second, the civilisations generally have their own historical moment. Certain critical ideas and thoughts emerge in certain civilisations that are taken to a culminating point. If there had been no Renaissance, Western civilisation would have probably not been there. That we have not had a Renaissance does not mean that we must have a Renaissance of the Western type. We’ll grow in a different direction. So the patterns of growth are different. And there, if clash develops, it develops not because the two have evolved into different directions. The clash develops because one civilisation might want the other to develop along the same lines. And this could happen to the Muslim world or the Western world. It happened after all in Spain. Muslims who at that time had a more developed civilisational pattern wanted to impose their civilisation in Spain, and there were retaliations. So the intervening variable here is one of power and not one of civilisations. Third, the question of East and West conflict. Your question was, how do you respond to the Western civilisation? I don’t regard Western civilisation as a monolithic core. But insofar as you can essentialise, and you have to essentialise, I think the reactions are not so much to everyday concerns of these civilisations. The reactions are to what might be called the power hegemonies, or power interplay, that might crystallise as a result of a number of factors, economic success,

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scientific development, cultural forms, and so on and so forth. I think the reaction in the Muslim world, and particularly in India, to the West arises from the fact of a common perception, which is not entirely wrong, that the West understood by its two leading manifestations in America and Europe is out to impose its own culture on us, that it is therefore a cultural struggle. It is a political struggle because in the power system I am powerless and the West enjoys power. There must therefore be a resistance against that. This will manifest itself in local versions. But when Bush was coming to this country there was an opposition to Coca-Cola. It was a symbolic expression to carry forward the anticipated intention of Bush to dominate us or, for that matter, the Eastern world. Pre-eminently, I do not subscribe to the formulation that there is an inherent basis for conflict between the East and the West because both civilisations have developed along their own independent axis. The clash, or the conflict, tends to sharpen itself and becomes crystallised in a context of power equations. Do you see a special role for Europe in this picture? I think many of the countries in Europe have gone through a kind of experience, which is our own, which is this experience of living with pluralism. I’m very vociferous about this, that—let me elaborate this a little—by the process of its historical development the basic tribal structure of Europe was transformed into a state structure and the state became such a powerful instrument. We remain and continue to remain tribal, and tribal in the broadest sense. But the Indian state now wants those tribal elements to be excluded, to be exterminated as it were, so the salience of the state is acquired. And while we are on this journey, you have had a different tangent, because of socio-economic reasons. You became diverse countries with different immigrations, with people coming historically from different parts of the world. And therefore many countries of Europe today are mini-microcosms of India. I mean, you are having to deal with diversity almost the same way that we are dealing with diversity. And therefore your perspectives, European perspectives on the current political scenario, are shaped by their own indigenous demographic and historical situations, which is now to see the world in pluralist terms. No longer can a European say that I will see it in monocultural terms. You have to see it in pluralist terms and market forces and everything is leading into that. As a result of that what has happened is that the European effort even to promote their cultural elements has been relatively moderate as compared to some

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other Western and American. This makes for a substantial change in the sense that you’re dealing with problems that we are dealing with. You do not have such a monolithic view of Western society, you have a more diverse view. That Europe thinks that the power equations have to be a process of negotiation. Power doesn’t flow unilaterally in one direction but there has to be a considerable interchange, accommodation. In this, of course, my argument has been that Europe itself has to learn a lot from us in terms of how to handle the diversities because my contention has been that Indian diversity has been handled rather well. Which is why I have for now more than two decades or so argued that India’s political interests really lie in political alignment, or political cooperation, and social and cultural cooperation with what I would call intermediate powers rather than a hegemonic power like the US. Because it is there that you have a better chance of being heard and of being able to shape the international order through negotiations. That is a problem that most people don’t understand because they see the West in essentialised terms and therefore fail to make a distinction between the US and Europe. Europe is a different cup of tea than the US. There may be common interests that tie them up, there may also be divergences that are also a part of the social reality. Would you say that we are moving towards some kind of a world polity or would you see tendencies of disintegration or diversification in world society? Both, and I think this is likely to happen in many years to come. In one sense, there is an emergence of what I would call a kind of a global society. The global society is being shaped and formed, among other things, by frequencies of travel, frequencies of communication, the net, and now a toy which everybody carries in the form of a cell phone. So long as you were tradition bound, we in the East could keep our women under our thumb. The moment we give her a cell phone, we open the vast expanses of the world to her and her interactive processes can no longer be controlled. So today everybody has access to a global culture and global world which didn’t exist before. This is substantially leading to cultural adaptation and assimilation. So you may be carrying yourself in a Burkha but underneath you are wearing jeans. I did see this in Afghanistan when I went there after the war. I saw Afghan women using all the Western cosmetics, going about in jeans and shoes, but having a Burkha on top. So this is the spread of global culture. Global culture comes in a variety of different ways. Earlier it came from travel. Today it comes from travel. The frequency of travel to the different parts of

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the world has increased. Look at the transformation in cuisines. As an ordinary everyday experience, many middle class or low middle class families are preparing either a pizza, which is Italian, or a Thai soup, or perhaps Fish-n-Chips. So cultural tastes are transformed through this process of interaction and interchange. But along with that there is another thing happening and that is what I call the regionalisation. In this process of regionalisation, the more the global culture really impinges on ours, the more conscious, acutely, we become of our own cultural heritage. So we are now projecting, and not only projecting but in fact becoming attached to some of our regional trades and cultures in a way that didn’t happen before. It is not only that the centre is now reaching the periphery but the periphery is also reaching the centre. Recently, there was a debate in our newspaper about cricketers. Traditionally, cricketers came from metropolitan cities. Now, our present captain is from a small town. So what has happened is that now the small town is making a bid for the centre too, and some of this regionalisation will become incorporated as national or even international. So I would not be surprised if 10 years from now, or five years from now, you have Jharkhandi cuisine in a German restaurant. It will happen. I think the process is not really one way. It is a two-way process where what is parochial is becoming universalised and what is universalised is penetrating into the local and the parochial. But in this process, one of the most interesting things is that traditional societies as they have existed are in fact transforming. In this transformation, the Purdha may become more important, but in this transformation women’s own freedoms are also becoming more important. Men’s own attitude to religion may become transformed. Women, once they have access to the cell phone, are making independent contacts and relationships. That is something that is disturbing for the radical elements because they are inclined to think that all such developments erode into the monolithic community that they want to create. Particularly for identity purposes, they want to create a monolithic community. The concerns of the radicals everywhere in the world is to generate and create monolithic communities, which are the rallying point for political purposes. That process will get aggravated as this change continues. Imtiaz Ahmad is a retired professor of Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Anwar Alam

For quite some time now, there is a huge discourse on religion and it seems that for some people religion as such or any particular religion can be perceived as a source of threat. What is your experience in this regard? I don’t know whether there is a universal agreement on this issue that religion is perceived as a common threat to human civilisation. I would like to speak from the Indian experience. In India, we never had any problem with religion being organised and existing in any form as long as it does not question the loyalty to the state or as long as it does not claim to be the sole principle of constructing the nation. If we understand religion essentially in terms of personal piety, then religion does not become a threat. As long as Hinduism did not claim itself to be a principle of the construction of the nation, it never became a threat. That is why Hinduism has been classically defined as a very tolerant kind of religion. But the moment it assumed a political character, you do find it to become very intolerant. This happened in a phase when the Indian nation would like to become modern in the way Europe has defined modernity. Europeans conceived of the nation in a much more homogeneous sense that the case of India would suggest. Striving for such a homogeneous concept of a nation, Hindu nationalists formed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other Hindu nationalist organisations, which becomes a problem not only for the people who have a secular opinion but also for those who belong to minority religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam. This, however, is not a question of any particular religion. All religions have this inherent political element, no matter whether it is Hinduism, Christianity or Islam. All these religious traditions at some point of time do exercise political power. Maybe it varies in form. Maybe Hinduism cannot assume the form of a state. Maybe the clergy in Islam will not assume the same form as in Christianity. But then you have the Iranian example and there are other historical examples of the remarkable relationship between Islam and the state going together and making Islam something very different from all other religious traditions. This may not be as a matter of principle but then you have these examples, thus as long as religion is practised and

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internalised as something very personal, it does not pose any problem, but the moment it assumes a political form and it would like to see the world in that direction, it does pose a problem. We are exactly interested in this politicised form of religion, in the mobilisation of religious identities for political purposes. And this is certainly also happening in India, as you have just pointed out. How do you perceive the academic community in India reflecting on that? In India, as far as the dominant discourse on the issue of the relationship between religion and politics is concerned, the emergence of Hindu fundamentalism is perceived as a challenge, a set of fascist organisations which have to be fought. But unfortunately, the Indian scientific community is very silent on Muslim fundamentalism for they tend to perceive this to persist among Indian Muslims quite naturally because of their material deprivation, educational backwardness, poverty and unemployment. Unlike Hindus, Muslims are a minority, and they are thus not seen as posing any serious threat to the existence of the nation. Because Hindu fundamentalism appears to be the relatively bigger threat, Muslim fundamentalism tends to get neglected. This concerns, by and large, the secular academic intelligentsia. But there are many intellectuals who are working on the assumption that Hinduism and the Indian nation are synonymous and their position is that if Hindus constitute 80 per cent of the population, naturally its idioms, symbols and norms would be reflected at the national level and the state should be more sensitive to Hinduism than to any other religion precisely because they constitute the majority. These intellectuals do not see the BJP emerging as a threat to the secular fabric of the nation but rather they say that for a long time the Hindu majority has been suppressed by the secular state. This can be seen as a kind of backlash in times of globalisation where the question of identity has come in a big way. So these are the two larger trends which you find operating in the Indian academic life. I am not sure about the other religious traditions but I do see a problem with Islamic traditions. Invariably, Islam will exist in a politicised form. You can’t help it. The only difference is that sometimes it is overtly political; sometimes it is so in a hidden fashion. Take Jamaate-Islami Hind. It overtly claims that it stands for the Islamic state. But there are many Islamic groups who do not claim such a thing openly but rather say that they stand for Islamic values and for the Islamisation of society. Nevertheless, the element of the political is the project and

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this project is grounded in a remarkable historical legitimacy. The entire imagination of Islam bares on the experience of Prophet Muhammad and his life history. Take the Tablighi Jamaat. Their position is that first the Prophet propagated Islam, raising the Islamic consciousness, and then he succeeded in having the Islamic state. Jamaat-e-Islami says no, first the prophet created the Islamic state and then Islam is spread. So the state becomes an instrument for the creation of an Islamic order, whereas for Tablighi Jamaat, the moment the society will be Islamicised, the Islamic state is the logical outcome. So in both schemes, you find that this political project is very much alive. In fact, politics must not be understood in the narrow sense, only with reference to the state, but also in the sense of the organising principles of society and in terms of the power discourse. Hence, the Islamic tradition is heavily loaded with the element of the political. That’s the position I would like to take. Is this a very singular position in the Indian academia, or perhaps more narrowly defined, among the Muslim intelligentsia in India? Well, if you interview the Indian Islamic clergy who are deeply involved in the Islamic traditions of learning, they might not be in a position to tell you where religion ends and politics begins, but you can draw the inference that in their religious cosmology, politics has a certain place. They might not take the position that Islam is very political because political and social for them are all aspects of Islam. So even if these ulama claim that they are not interested in the political but only in Islamic order, my understanding is that, even if it is invisible, the political is part of that order. From my experience, if you are working in an institution that has a connection with Islam, no matter whether predominantly or not, such as an Islamic university, for example, you always feel constrained that you are not free to express your opinion. And there really any religious tradition appears to me a threat. Take the example of Taslima Nasrin. A bunch of Muslims under the All India Minority Front made a protest and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M) that rules Bengal for the last 30 years saw the gate to Taslima Nasrin. This form of religion is particularly problematic in that it defines certain boundaries in which you have to live (and which Nasrin apparently had crossed). This is a very political form of religion. I have seen that the religion which has been practised and propagated by those who are essentially trained in a scholastic manner and in a very highly personal piety they would allow you to express any opinion. There is absolutely no

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problem. But those who see that there is the limit, there is this boundary, and Islam has to be respected, faith has to be respected, then it becomes a threat. Very good point. We could elaborate on this much further. But let us move on to our second block of questions, which regards how people in India perceive the West as a possible source of threat. I am particularly interested in the perception of Europe in this connection? Europe does not really pose a major threat. On the one hand, Europe appears to me remarkably democratic, in terms of the practice of its values, existing human rights regimes and the way the individual emerges as the centre of every discourse of the state. I can also see a remarkable human sensibility and cordiality. But on the other hand, what I fear is the European assimilationist project, which appears to me as a threat to my existence, a member of a third world country and also as someone coming from a different religious and social background. Europe is still not willing that there also lie values in the other traditions and that they need to be explored. Europe is still very convinced of the success of the logic of modernity. Europe still wants to see the expansion of this modernity on a universal level because they are essentially convinced. I think this is the one area where they are not in a position to have any kind of dialogue with the Islamic civilisations, and partly because of the way the religion has emerged essentially in the form of Church and its association with the Dark Ages and through which the Islam has to be understood. Multiculturalism has come in a very big way. But it also has very assimilationist roots. It is not multiculturalism in the sense that Europe is prepared to give an equal respect or equality to the other cultures because they always say that there is this boundary, this limit and this national law within which we have to practice your culture. No matter, the majoritarian culture becomes the national culture. Whereas in India you do find that there is the entire notion of equality, the way it has been practised here, the domain of equality has been extended to the notion of difference. In the European context, the domain of equality is still very much within the notion of sameness. Therefore, the domain of difference has really not emerged and has not been accommodated within the domain of the notion of equality. That is why Europe appears to me threatening in that sense and also in the sense that Europe is still unwilling or hesitant to experience heterogeneity. Europe has experienced that homogenisation and development can go together.

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But they are still not sure whether heterogeneity and development can go together. This fear seems to be concerning the Muslims living in Europe. But what about such perceptions in India? How is the West, or how is Europe being perceived as a potential threat in India and how is this reflected in the academic community in India? In general, while many countries might perceive Europe as a threat, in India this perception is missing. Other Muslim countries might perceive Europe as a threat precisely because they see Europe as an obstacle in the project of Islamisation of the world order and also because of the global dimension of the Muslim society and the Western society. Once upon a time, the Muslims were the dominant powers everywhere and they were replaced by the Europeans. The Muslim world really operates in the name of Islam. It’s a Muslim world. It is plural. But their imagination is very much similar. They would like the world to be in a similar fashion like the West would like to be. And that’s the point of contention between the two because on the one hand those who are really champions of the Islamic cosmology, they are very much convinced of the model established by the prophet. Equally, Europe is very much convinced of the model established by the modernity from the 13th century onwards and the material success that came through the project of modernity. In the case of India, what is remarkable is that the pluralisation of the life process has been part of the academic life. This entire logic of unity in diversity and of diversity in unity is a part of practiced social reality. It doesn’t come essentially from variety of cultural, religious, linguistic and caste identity and traditions that exist here and therefore this unity in diversity essentially becomes the operational principles to hold the nation together but it essentially comes from diversity as living experiences. Therefore, in the popular psyche, the Muslim rule has never been looked upon as a threat to the Hindu civilisation until the Hindutva forces invoked it. Or, for example, for the average Muslim, the rule of Shivaji or wherever the Muslims live or, for example, till recently there were many Muslims who really did not view the BJP as a threat to their identity except that there is a danger for the communal riots. So there is a danger for the life and the property and the other things but not in terms of threat to the identity, you do not find, remarkably. So, therefore, you’ll find that within India cutting across the various social groups Europe, for example, really does not emerge as threat and despite the history of

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the colonisation you do not find the kind of the enemy perceptions in fact that exist in other parts of the world. Also, the perception of Europe as an enemy is profoundly lacking among the Indian Muslims, unlike you find in many parts of the Arab world. This is precisely because the way the plural, diverse life experience has been practised and taught, and in fact it has become the part of value system here. So no matter, it was Maududi who first invoked the notion of jahiliya that was later picked up by Sayyid Qutb but it becomes the common philology in the Arab world, it could not become here. So, somehow, I see that Europe does not emerge as a threat in this sense here. I don’t know about other South Asian countries. There are Islamist experiments going on in Bangladesh and Pakistan. If pluralisation of identities is going on, it is going on only in India and precisely because the state also has practised this, because the state has never embarked on the homogenisation path unlike, for example, Sinhala Buddhism in Sri Lanka or with Islam in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Instead, the Indian state has conceded many of the identities, for example, most of the states were created on the basis of their linguistic identities. It conceded what is called personal laws to the Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, tribal communities and others. So India as a state has really practised the secular laws and the personal laws and there is not usually any conflict with the judiciary and if there is any problem, the Parliament can annul laws; all kinds of possibilities exist here. The West has never emerged as a threat for us. It certainly makes us sad the way the West is dealing with the question of Palestine and the way the West is dealing with Iraq really makes us sad. But you do not find any Indian going and bombing and blowing himself up fighting the West. This is a stupid thing. On the global level, it seems, you are suggesting that there is a competition taking place between two concepts of social and political order, which would be the Western liberal-democratic one on one hand and the Islamic one on the other. So what do you think are the prospects of some kind of a world society emerging? My hunch is that the world is disintegrating. I don’t see any hope for a peaceful kind of coexistence despite the slogans of a dialogue of civilisations. That all looks nice but there is no relativisation in either of the two philosophies. The whole problem is that neither the Islamic world nor those who essentially wield the influence on the state level or the social level, they are somehow essentially so convinced of that model. So fine, the West is morally bankrupt, economically prosperous, fine,

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we are economically bankrupt but we are on very high moral ground. And Inshah Allah we will also achieve the economic miracle. And for the West the Islamic world actually appears as a theoretical challenge. Because according to their principles and ideas concerning development of democracy, it doesn’t appear to happen in Muslim world, while it happens in the other parts. India can manage its democracy despite all its poverty, brutality and corruption. And according to the classical understanding of democracy, you need a minimum of education, civil society and secular values, which in India is utterly lacking, but it is a functioning democracy, remarkably. But if you look at almost the entire Muslim world, democracy hardly exists. Maybe you find elections here and there but we all know it’s all a farce. But it does not mean that there is chaos in that society. If there is no democracy it does not mean that there is a chaos. And there is this underdevelopment. That’s the point of contention. I have interviewed many Islamic theologians and scholars. They said what is the problem with the monarch? If the monarchy can distribute its resources and build the roads and the hospitals, what is the problem? Why do I want democracy? What is this the people’s participation in the decision making and this and that? For the West, the modernity is also part of the value system and that would also be reflected in the human behaviour in terms of what they see as the ideal relationship between the citizen and the state that has emerged there. And similarly, the Muslim world, the Islamic world, essentially they feel that they are essentially superior in terms of the cultural, they are essentially convinced that the kind of the polity which was imagined by the prophet which was golden rule should be established to the other parts of the world. They essentially feel that they are more democratic than the West. So for me the problem is that both are not in the process of relativisation and unless and until that take place, I am really afraid that the world is not a very healthy place. Rather I do see that there are more possibilities of conflicts happening in fact. That’s my hunch and I hope that my hunch proves wrong. But I can’t tell you. Anwar Alam is professor of Political Science and director of the Centre for West Asian Studies of Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi.

Rajeev Bhargava

Many people these days perceive religion—religion as such, or any particular religion—as a potential source of threat. What is your experience in this regard? I think there is a need to make a distinction between three different forms taken by religion. (i) Religion may be seen as faith, and more particularly as piety, (ii) Religion can also be seen as a cumulative tradition, and therefore as cultural heritage and (iii) Finally, religion is also an identity marker which can be linked to nationalism, on the one hand, and with all kinds of demands on the state, on the other. Given that the state is always seen to have limited resources, a situation of conflict arises when people, with a particular religious identity make demands on the state that resources be distributed justly. This is subsequently viewed by all other groups as a demand not just on the state but indirectly on them too. When religion is spoken of as a threat, it must be viewed in each of these three different ways. Take, for example, faith. I think for a lot of people particularly in the West, religious faith is a threat to public reason. If a particular policy is to be justified on the basis of faith seen to be beyond reason, then it might be claimed by some that this is a threat to public reason and to a common ground accessible to everybody and in terms of which we could reach, if not a complete agreement, at least a certain unstable agreement or an agreement on the terms on which we could agree or disagree. In India, for example, the conflict between faith and public reason arose at the time of the Babri Masjid controversy where one political party actually claimed that this was a matter of faith and that Ram was born on the precise spot where Babri Masjid stood and nowhere else. They claimed that they were not obliged to provide any other justification. Others including many secularists countered this by saying that to be publicly acceptable, the claim of the believers must be grounded in some evidence or arguments. So this conflict between faith and reason is not confined to the West or to one particular religion but is a widespread phenomenon. It happens in Israel, among evangelists in the US and in other places too. This is one aspect of the threat. Then there is the question of heritage which appears to be the least controversial. Every country can claim that although religion isn’t important all that is being asked is recognition of the cultural heritage of

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their society. This claim can even be made by lapsed believers on the ground that they seek legitimate recognition of their cultural heritage. For example, Christianity in France can be seen by many not as religion, but as basic part of their cultural heritage. Here too, a number of interesting cases come to mind. You know that this was a major issue in the EU and it remains an issue in Germany. I am referring, of course, to the headscarf controversy. As you know, there was no law on whether school teachers could wear the headscarf or not. But very quickly, several states enacted laws and as far as I remember, in Bavaria, a law was enacted banning school teachers from wearing headscarf. At the same time, putting a cross on the walls of the classroom was made mandatory. The argument for this differential treatment was that the cross was not only Christian but part of their cultural heritage. And in fact, not just a part of their cultural heritage but a very important constituent of democracy and human rights. Thus, a constitutive link was established between Christianity, democracy and human rights. It was made to appear that democracy and human rights could grow only out of Christian civilisation and that was bound to generate a conflict both with secularists and with adherents of other religions. There are still deeper issues involved here. What is the relationship between Christianity and Judaism? In America, people have long been talking about the JudaeoChristian tradition, seeking some kind of a reconciliation and trying to find common ground between Judaism and Christianity. And there are still others who talk about the Abrahamic traditions, which includes Islam. So instead of a conflict between these two heritages, people are thinking of a common heritage. I don’t think there are very many buyers of this idea. There are so many issues which show that Islam is viewed much more suspiciously and not seen as part of a common heritage. It is very clear in the EU debate over whether Turkey is to be included or not. This too is a matter of conflict and is not that straight forward. In India, a fierce argument exists between ultra-Hindu nationalists who claim a common Hindu heritage, not in terms of faith but of culture, while others believe that Hinduism, even as a way of life or culture cannot claim to be a common heritage. This is a very complex, multilayered, multifarious and multivalent heritage, which comes not just from Hindus and the Hindu way of life but also from Islam and Buddhism, to which Zoroastrians and Christians have also contributed. Indeed, the Hindu way of life can be seen much more broadly, because we are talking about very complex philosophical systems here, which in some ways have the status of religion, but in fact are non-theistic.

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So we have a much more complex heritage in India, and there’s a real issue to debate here. There are groups which are saying: ‘Ram should be everybody’s heritage’ but they are reducing a way of life not only to religion but also to a particular strand within that religion. Other people are making a much more complex case for what this heritage is. I think all of us have to recognise how much of us is actually made by cultural heritages which we do not see as part of us, and identify as not only distinct but opposed to us, but we are all in some way shaped by them and I think this is going to be a big debate in the future, it’s not going to go away that easily. You know, Huntington’s clash of civilisation thesis is just one instance of how this debate may go. Let me come to the third threat. As I said, religion as an identity marker is often coupled with nationalism. And in all religiously diverse societies, this coupling is bound to be exclusivist. I believe that no society, neither today nor in the past was religiously homogeneous. Although there had been periods when it had become largely religiously homogeneous, it is hard for me to conceive, or to disregard the historical evidence, if you look at the longue duree, that societies always had a diversity of faiths, and a diversity of what began to be called religions. Therefore, if nationalism is going to be bound up with one particular religion, it’s either going to lead to the exclusion of some people or if people are going to resist that exclusion, to the creation of more conflict. This was a very important issue in India, of course, with the two-nation theory. One mustn’t see the two-nation theory as the sole cause of the partition of the country. It is absurd to think that this alone was the historical reason because a much more complex historical process actually resulted in the partition of the subcontinent, but nobody can deny that it played an important role in it. So that’s one. The other is again something which we in India call communal. And on this, I’m now beginning to rethink the whole issue. Per se, I don’t see anything wrong in people organising themselves around their religious identity and making claims on the state, which are not just about religion but also about other material resources. We’ve always condemned it as communal, and I think that there’s one part of me which says that this was right. However, there is another part of me, which has now begun to rethink, and I wonder if it’s always the case that this is communal in the bad sense. I would now be much more contextual about it, and I would look at the ground conditions before taking a decision on whether this is something intrinsically bad or not. The mere fact that people organise themselves around religion making demands on the

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state seems to me not at the root of the problem. Suppose that injustice has been done to a religious community in the form of religious exclusion or persecution or that people are not given jobs because they belong to a particular religious identity (in places like India in any case religion and culture are hard to distinguish) and if they were only rectifying this injustice, and were forced to mobilise on grounds of religion or make claims on the basis of religion, then I don’t see anything wrong with that. So the real issue is justice and fairness, and I think this other issue is secondary. If people are willing to make a fair and reasonable demand, and if the state and other people can recognise that this is a fair demand, then what’s the problem? In Europe, this is going to be an issue, more and more so. I mean, sometimes it’s going to be only about religion, and sometimes it’s going to be about jobs, economic welfare and a whole lot of other things. This is true of religion generally everywhere, but there is a perception that it’s more true of Islam, that religion matters to them a little more than it matters to people of other faiths. I think, if you look at the surface and what is happening right now, maybe this claim is true. But again, I would say that we have to look at the larger processes at work here, which makes it incumbent on people with a particular faith, Muslims, to highlight their religion more. Then why is it that this is happening to Muslims and what is feeding into it? Is it something of their own making, or is it of the making of a whole lot of other people? Is it that perceived injustices have been given a Muslim colour, whether it is Iraq or before that, problems in the Middle East? Of course, we cannot forget that there has been an older, larger civilisational issue which feeds into it, which goes all the way back to the memories of what happened in Spain and Constantinople. These are issues which invariably come in here and I don’t think they can be easily dismissed. There is an ‘interesting’ sibling rivalry which feeds into it in many ways. But really, I think in France and perhaps in Germany as well, if one community, for whatever reason, is not able to do as well as another community, it will hang on to something. And in the case of Muslims today, this is probably religion, but we must recognise that it is not just something that they are doing to themselves. It’s certainly not the case that there is something intrinsic about their faith. You can equally say that about Christianity, the evangelists in America and certainly Jews. You can say that about many Hindus in India and Buddhists in Sri Lanka. I don’t think you can generalise and say, this is something intrinsically the case about Islam. But I guess there’s something in

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the public discourse which makes people believe, including Muslims themselves, that religion is at the heart and centre of everything and I think something needs to be done to displace it. One way of conceptualising this would also be to see religions as having evolved in a pre-modern, traditional mindset where they were the outward expression of a civilisation which included not only faith but also cosmology, ethics, law and a whole set of human issues that had to be decided within the religious framework. Now, modernity has tried to overcome that and in many ways one can perceive of some of these instances of mobilisation of religion as a reaction to modernity and to processes of modernisation, and as such they can become ideological. On both sides, actually, modernity can be used ideologically and religion and tradition can be used ideologically. This sometimes poses a challenge to science as a basis of the modern reference frame. Do you see a possibility of this reference frame being displaced or how do you see the academic community in India responding to such challenges? I am going to say two things, which don’t address this issue directly, but indirectly it does. For one, I think today we are much less confident about the claims of modernity than we were, say, 25 years ago. I think the smugness with which we used to assert claims on behalf of what we perceived to be modernity must go. Let me just talk about myself. I cannot talk about this on behalf of many other fellow ‘modernists’, but a lot of us had a pretty black and white picture of modernity and it’s other, and we bought wholesale the ideology of modernism and the belief that it was an unambiguous good and, everything it was breaking from was an unambiguous bad. I’m not a post-modernist or a traditionalist in the sense in which a lot of people use this term, but I realise that there was an unreflective ideological moment in my own defence of modernity. This is a position that I’ve taken now for 15 years, at least. Even as early as 1991, I’ve been talking about a critical, modest and self-limiting modernity, and I stand by that. So that’s one point I wanted to make. The second point is that I am a little more conscious now about belief systems or forms of knowledge which haven’t been sufficiently explored. If we still stick to the important distinction between mere belief and opinion on the one hand and knowledge on the other and not reduce everything to either belief or knowledge, then I think, there are belief systems which have been insufficiently explored or examined. It is important that we became more conscious of this and begun to work more seriously on these other belief systems, not in terms of

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the natural sciences—maybe there are bits there as well, which could be useful, but I’m much less confident about that claim. I don’t even want to make that claim, actually. We can look at the contribution of various belief systems to what we now call the Western sciences. The contribution of the Middle East, the contribution of South Asia to the construction of what we have identified as the Western modern sciences. But I think that modern Western science, with all their limitations, drawbacks and technological pay-offs which we don’t like such as the nuclear weapons, is established as, superior. I mean, people don’t like to use these terms any more, but I would say it is. Ethics is another issue altogether. When we come to ethics, ways of living and good/decent life, we should be more sober and sanguine about our responses. We should be much more careful and far more willing to learn from the past as much as we wish to learn from the present and our hope for building a better future should really take inspiration from a number of experiences and histories and not be confined to what we have defined as the modern. Here we need more exploration. Yoga is only the tip of the iceberg, really. Everybody is so hung up on Yoga. All sorts of people do Yoga. They get a kick out of it and get lots of benefits. Modern science gives it an authoritative seal. There are Yoga centres in hospitals in the West, and so on. But really, it’s much more than just Yoga. I’m talking about a radical challenge that many ways of living pose to the modern way of life. I don’t think we should dismiss that challenge, as we used to do at one time. And certainly in ethics, I’m a pluralist. I don’t believe in ethics where there’s one way of life that is the best, or ‘the’ good way of life. I’m much more contextual about this. There’s no one right way of doing things. There’s no right way of living one’s life. There’s no right way of being a friend. Look at our understanding of Plato and Aristotle, for example. Look at the early Greek tradition and the way we understand the Greek tragedies. Our attitude to all this is persistently positive. We have always tried to make them live, even if they’ve been dead, and I think we owe the same courtesy at the very least, to many other civilisations in the past. I’m dying to start the work on Mahabharata, for example, in the spirit of what I said. And I would be very happy to work even on the great cultures of what we now call the Middle East, except that I don’t have the expertise to do it. But I’d be very happy to join up with people, who are doing work on this. And I mean African cultures. There’s so much to learn. We’re too smug about what we value in our own parochialness.

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Does ethics come for you in the field of knowledge or in the field of belief and if in the field of belief, is it tied up with religion or is it autonomous? For me, ethics also comes in the field of knowledge. I’m a realist in ethics. But I don’t think that there is a vast difference between what we believe to be right, ethically speaking and what is right, except that I don’t think that there is just one right distinction between right and wrong. The distinction between right and wrong and good and bad is still there, except I don’t think that there is just one right answer or one unique good. I think there is a distinction between good and bad, but there are many goods. Often ethics is claimed by religion and people say if you dismiss religion, you dismiss ethics and you become basically an immoral person. I don’t believe that, I don’t think so. I think in fact that religion is a source of many ethical wrongs. One only has to look at the way Hinduism has treated its own people in the most humiliating and degrading manner. They claim to worship stones and animals, but they had no respect for other human beings. We know that. And there is no religion in the world, which has been ethically fair to women. Two very obvious examples of how religion and ethics are not quite the same thing. The internal ethics of most religions has been very discriminatory and degrading to lots of human beings. Many religions have a very ordinary view of other humans. Many religions are ethically monist and even profess a cognitive monism and if there is a case for internal reform, then that is one very important element of reform within the religions which claim to be ethically and cognitively monist. Anybody who claims that they have the right answer and the ultimate truth or are the chosen people should get their belief systems examined by a collective psychoanalyst. And lots of religions are like that. And thank God for secular ethics, which distanced itself from all these religions and tried to do something about it. But of course, secular ethics is not God’s own word, it too has many problems of its own. That is the point that I was making, that there is something to be examined by the cosmic psychoanalyst in every system of ethics and one will find that there are many things that have gone wrong in each of our traditions. The good visions which were created by extraordinary people and communities at a certain point of time have gone or can go bad. The pursuit of power, wealth and fame blinds us to certain things. And ethics and morality are the first casualty when this happens.

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Some perceive the West, westernisation or globalisation as a threat to traditional identities. What is your personal experience in this regard and how does this get reflected in the world of academic in India? For me, there are always at least two ‘Wests’. My idealist self is completely captivated by one West and my non-idealist self used to be ambivalent, but now it is becoming far less ambiguous and becoming very sceptical of the West. No doubt, events in the last 10 years have played a very important role in this. What have not many Western societies done just for self-aggrandisement, power and self-interest? The foreign policy of Western countries is just so ruinous to everybody, what’s happened in Iraq, the double standards in everything that they say. It goes back to Vietnam or, much earlier, the disastrous wars, WW I and WW II, and the bomb. The double standards about nuclear arsenal, including the lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction (in Iraq, MD). Everybody gets away with it and nobody is accountable. No religion can stop it, no ethics can stop it, it just goes on. Globalisation is another such issue. Though it is an attempt to usher in that new form of colonialism, a neo-colonial enterprise. So I think economic liberalisation, globalisation are all nice terms to cover up something that is more sinister. And although I’m not a believer in conspiracy theories, you don’t really need to add a belief in conspiracy theories to see through some of this. So, that is the West that I am getting very critical of. I don’t write about it that much, because it doesn’t really fall within my domain of study as much as it could, but it really hurts me, it does. I don’t express an opinion on it, because I don’t see myself as an opinion maker in this narrow sense. A piece here or there to let everyone know my stand on X or Y, I don’t do it. I don’t want to wave my flag saying that I am for this or against that, unless I have something substantially different to say than what others like myself are saying. I think others are doing their job pretty decently and I don’t merely want to add my voice to it. But I can tell you, I am pretty disgusted. But let me talk to you about the second West. It is a West that’s always fascinating, inspiring and full of emancipatory potential. Some of the great ideas and cultural systems emerge in the West in the works of philosophers, artists from the Renaissance, Enlightenment and even many aspects of the romantic movement. Of course the great movement against Christianity as it existed at a particular point of time, the movement against monarchy, against the Church, these were terrific, very admirable and very inspiring in some ways and I have no hesitation in

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claiming that I am Western in these respects. But I guess as you mature, you realise that things are much more complex, always, and you realise that you were not able to properly see some things, because you were dazzled by them. So that’s certainly what has happened over the years. The other aspect of it is the hegemony of Western civilisation. I think what was wrong with many of us—at least I can speak for myself— is this kind of obsession with the West at the cost of others. It was not until the early 1990s that we even began to notice the South-east, I’m just taking an example, and that is what is worrisome. And this links up to an earlier point that I was making. We should not have been obsessed in this way. Admiration and respect is one thing, but we have this unfortunate obsession, which was obviously partly the seductive powers of the Western and partly due to our colonial experience. Within the global political picture would you carve out a special role for Europe? First, let me come back to your earlier question regarding the Western academia. I think the Western academic world—on the one hand—is a source of inspiration for many of its achievements. On the other hand, it’s very sad that even today, our research agenda is being determined by universities abroad. All the finance we get—it is our fault as well, our own budgets are shaped in a completely unenlightened way, we don’t want to spend money on some of the things that we would like to work on. Unwittingly and unintentionally, Indians and South Asians are part of a certain financial system. One after another, we pay the price for it at some other point of time, but I think our agenda is largely determined by what’s happening outside or what the demands of the Western academia are. I think we’re all part of it, I’m not saying that some people are freer than others and we need to be conscious about it. Not because it is going to necessarily do us only harm, but I think we are not able to pay enough attention, and with the urgency that it requires, to many of our own issues and problems. I will give you an example from political theory. Take for instance affirmative action. India has been one of the pioneers in affirmative action, but in political philosophy and in the debate in political theory in the world, nobody or hardly anyone looks at the Indian case. The entire issue is dominated by what happens in the US. Why is it, that on the issue of religion, language and politics, we don’t look at Belgium and Switzerland? Why is it that we are constantly looking at America and France, and at best Germany? There are some countries which have taken centre stage, and we’re

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just not able to shake them off. Europe for us is confined to England, France and Germany and may be Holland in that order. The rest of it is forgotten. Europe is just a few countries, and we are not learning enough from others. The intellectual interest of Europe in India is virtually non-existent. Occasionally, you get somebody like Michael or Margaret. Of course, there will always be some exceptional people, who are fascinated and attracted. But in the university system, what difference do we make? Europe plays a very important part of our curriculum, but what influence does India play in the European curricula? (It figures in) Area Studies. May be it will change with the growing economic importance, but that’s a sad state. May be it has changed because we are a nuclear power. What lessons do other countries draw from it? You must first become a military power, that’s the only way you’re going to be noticed. That’s what the Indian foreign establishment says, that’s the only way you are going to be noticed—the realist argument. That’s a very pathetic state of affairs. Sad commentary on the Indian academia and Western academia. On Europe I am again ambivalent. On the one hand, Europe is something that we hope will tame the Wild West, the Bushes of the world and the Neocons and I hope that Europe can restraint all of them. At the same time, I’m worried about the inability of Europe to recognise its own heterogeneous heritage. I’m worried about two things. One is that I am a little sad that so quickly, some of the new ideals that were developed to recognise and to try and integrate immigrants, who are very often immigrants because of colonisation in the past have been given up. It’s not a personal choice that anybody has just gone wherever he or she wished to go. Only certain kinds of people go to France. For instance, Indians don’t go to France, they go to Britain. Turks go to Germany, and certain kinds of Africans or Muslims go to Holland and not to other countries. There is a connection between Holland and Indonesia. There is a connection between Britain and India, between France and the Maghreb. The policies that were devised to integrate them are withdrawn. And then the first signs of a little bit of crisis, and everybody is willing to abandon the whole experiment and on how their ethos is being disturbed. There’s no willingness to patiently negotiate. I’m not saying that the other side is entirely blameless, but it’s not as if European leaders have shown great strength of character or worthwhile ambition. I think the case of Holland is very worrisome with all the initial multiculturalism it suddenly packed up. Maybe there’s some rethinking going on again. And this is the good thing

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about democratic societies. But let’s not forget that democratic societies can also become majoritarian very easily. So I’m worried about that. I think on foreign policy issues, Europe can restrain Mr Bush and the likes of him, but Europe has its own problems which they need to worry about. Thank God that there cannot be a Gujarat-like pogrom in Europe, but the mentality of a lot of European societies can be very much like what was and is still going on within sections of Gujarat. Well if you include Yugoslavia, we in Europe had our own Gujarat, and on a much larger scale. So, keeping all that in mind, what according to you are the prospects of some kind of a world society emerging, or even a world polity? I think it’s a very premature idea. We’re not able to make our international organisations impartial, the few that we have. We cannot have the United Nations (UN), or the International Court for Justice function in an impartial way. Western powers control them, manipulate them. So a world polity would just be a new form of imperial control in the current set-up. … it need not be an equitable world polity but a world polity nevertheless … Well, that we have even now. There is a world polity, an international system, with America at the head which everybody recognises. There’s one single power. There’s a whole power system here, and those who are out of it, are going to be punitive and legal measures are to be taken against them. There’s war against the people. There’s punishment going on, and nobody can say anything. In that sense, of course there’s an international system, and you can say that a world polity exists even now. Look at the UN, the whole general assembly or the Security Council, it’s archaic from our point of view. Roughly six to seven countries have got veto power, and it’s completely undemocratic, and the Americans can get away with murder, as and when they please and decide. If anything goes against the interests of Mr Bush or whoever, the Neocons, they withhold or restrict the flow of funds and the whole system virtually collapses. I think there has to be a lot more collective resistance, and Europe can play a very important mediating role. I mean, the enlightened Europe, the Europe that believes in fairness and justice. There are such people in America too, but I’m more sceptical about them as they are too few in number. All this is about crude assertion of power by violent means but all this apparatus needs a source of legitimacy which is more soft, although also hegemonic and

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maybe inequitable or coercive. And this legitimating framework, some kind of a theoretical-political reference frame, this is something which cannot be forced upon people. People have to buy it, they can criticise it, and there is a whole metabolism going on in the global cultural sphere to which also countries in the periphery can contribute provided that there is some kind of a solidarity possible across the globe which can even resist illegitimate ideas. Do you see chances for this to happen? I like to believe that egalitarianism is far too entrenched now, and nationalism also is a form of communitarian egalitarianism. There is something good and something terrible about global culture and civil society. The good is less and the terrible far more, in my view. The good part of it is that much that lives in the name of the nation is horrific so that global questioning could be very useful. But the terrible part of it is that if you don’t encourage internal questioning but do the questioning from outside, and then try to impose solutions from outside then what you end up doing is something much worse. You can see that in Iraq. I feel that somehow a way needs to be found where nation-states are neither completely insulated from one another and have unchallenged suzerainty. At the same time, solutions have to be found within the framework of the nation-state, because nation-states ensure that there is equality among people. That’s the big hope here. We’re not a single world but are very heterogeneous, different from one another with different languages, traditions and religions. It’s a truly pluralistic world and for any state to imagine that there can actually be a world government to control all this, I think is just too difficult, nearly impossible. … there could be a world polity without a world state … If you talk about principles, I don’t deny that. But if you talk about institutional mechanisms, then I completely disagree with you that there can be a world polity without a state. The moment you set up an institution, you actually set up state-like structures. We haven’t really imagined anything which is a polity but not a state with institutions. I think that is like setting up all international bodies. I’m in favour of setting up institutions at the international level, but as I said, I want to do it within the framework of the nation-state, because that is the source of equality among real, particular people. And there should be international institutions to which we could appeal for justice. If that’s what world polity means, I’m all for it. Let there be some international institutions which are truly impartial, where nation-states can go with their grievances and say look, something unfair has been done by

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some other nation-state, and we want to repair it through some mechanism on which we all agree. Sure, if that’s what world polity means, then yes. I’m not for giving up the UN. The UN is good, and so is the International Court of Justice and are other international organisations. They should be strengthened and more such institutions should come up. As long as we remember that they need to be democratised, and we need more and more countries, particularly those which are powerless, to have a say in their functioning. Rajeev Bhargava is senior fellow and director at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. He is currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin Institute of Advanced Studies).

Asoke Bhattacharya

Many these days perceive one or the other religion, or maybe religion as such as a potential threat. What is your experience in this regard? My view is that more or less this is a Western perception. Of course, at one point of time, we in the East had that kind of notion where Hindus thought that the Muslims were a threat and the Muslims thought the Hindus were a threat. But we have come almost 50 years since 1947, and now we do not think that religion per se can be a threat. It is when some people use religion that it becomes a threat. That way I think the motif should be separated from religion as such. So I don’t think any religion is a threat: Christianity, Islamism or Hinduism. But for our own benefit, we in fact victimise religion, and this is threat, forming a political, and in many cases this is personal, and then institutional. We try to influence people to perceive religion as a threat. That is my idea. Can you think of an instance? Yes, suppose Islamism. Some people say that it is a clash of civilisation. And when did they say that? They did not say that before 9/11. When in Afghanistan, the Western forces went over there to drive away the Russians, then religion was not a threat. Over the last 50 years, when Pakistan has been given arms and ammunition and everything including ingredients to move against India, then religion was not a threat. When it backfired, then religion became a threat, so I think this is a very recent phenomenon and it will die down with these politics dying down. There is agreement on the ground level concerning these processes. How do you perceive the academic community dealing with this subject? I think the academic community is not immune to what is happening on the ground level. They are also affected by what is happening. The academic community in the West maybe more involved in identifying religion as a threat. In our country, I would say, we used to have this perception, even in the academic community. For example, the literature of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is produced by academics. They tried to answer these questions pointing to Islam and those who profess Islamism as a threat to Indian nationalism, Hindu nationalism, and so on. There are certain sections of the academic community, particularly

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in India, who definitely are also influenced by that. But Bengal is a little different. Here the academic community is not that way involved in seeing religion as a threat. But I cannot say that academic community is absolutely immune to this. In Bengal it is less, in northern India it is more, in Western India it is more, maybe in southern India it is more. Some perceive the West as a threat. What is your experience of this? I think the question is wrongly placed. I don’t think anybody in the Oriental societies see the Western society as a threat. I fully agree with Dr Sain that we don’t think the Western society is a threat. But definitely there are areas in which the Western societies, particularly those who rule the Western societies depict things in such a way that we find those things a threat. Suppose an American General, or American President, or some of his Associates, even after 9/11, telephones to Musharraf and says: ‘Either you join us or you will be bombed to Stone Age,’ I think in that case you can think differently. It’s not religion that way. I think it’s Western societies, particularly the rulers in some of the Western societies—we should differentiate—for their own very parochial reasons want to have a very big band wagon. And if we refuse to go into that band wagon, we are depicted as a threat. That is my belief. How do you say that Europe has fared in the Eastern perception? I think Europe has fared quite well, after the decolonisation in the end of the 1940s. Europe has fared well, because they thought that they had to leave. For instance, the English had made their Commonwealth and all that, whatever Imperialism or colonialism they had before, they tried to have the economic and cultural interest. Not by posing a threat to, but by consolatory moves, so that they could benefit through trade, education and commerce. We are definitely not at a less advantaged position so that they can take advantage of that. We don’t think Europe to be professing those very strong and, let’s say, anti-Eastern views. Do you think we’re moving towards a world society? It will take a very long time. I have been to many places in Europe, and whenever we go, we try to compare what Europe is with what we are. I would say that we are almost 75–100 years backwards compared to Europe, in many ways, in our ways of life, in the industrial regeneration, definitely we are almost 75–100 years behind. I was going to a big exhibition in Denmark, about an old city, and I was looking at those exhibits which they put from the old city some hundred years back. I would

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find the cobbler who is mending—is there—the milk man—is there: we are little by little moving away from the milk man to a modern dairy system! From that angle, we find that the remnants of the old city in Denmark has very much similarity to what we have right now in India. I have calculated that we should be 75–100 years, maybe 50 years in some cases behind: In some cases, we are at par of course, for instance computers, and so on. It’s a very complex thing, of course, but I think we are definitely lagging behind in industrial development. We can be part of the global village or global society when we are at the same level as the West. In Western societies, people are very polite and modest. They’re talking about the great development of India and China. But if you scratch the skin, you will find, that when they show all these things in BBC or CNN, they will immediately show how people live in the streets and their wretched living conditions in the village. In fact, for their own economic benefit, they wanted to lift us up, as the great Indian phenomenon, but only for trade and commerce. Inside their own consciousness, they don’t perceive neither India nor China nor any other countries at par. Individuals are absolutely different. I am not taking individuals into account. But the societal perception is this. Until we make those progresses, I think a global village or global society is a really far-fetched idea. Do you think there is a growing awareness in India of being part of a human species and sharing especially also common challenges such as the climate change. Aren’t we all threatened in the same way, or at least we are all affected? Had it not been so, neither Gandhi nor Tagore would have been appreciated. That is always there, we always like Tagore. We always think of Western society in terms of two different, broadly distinct divisions. One division, one section of the society is very reasonable and enlightened. They look at the human society as a whole, not the segmented society in the West, and that is definitely also there in our countries. From that angle, when the whole human race is being confronted with these problems of, let’s say, gender discrimination or global warming, or such things, which is threatening all the societies, then we find the right thinking people and they’re coming together. And in one voice, they’re protesting or prescribing something. So that way definitely. Asoke Bhattacharya is professor of Adult and Continuing Education at Jadavpur University, Kolkata and member of the governing body of the Institute of Mass Communication and Film and Television Studies, Kolkata.

Anil Bhatti

Many these days perceive religion (either religion as such or any particular religion) as a source of threat. What is your experience in this regard? It depends on how religion is used. If you stick to the classical formulation that religion should be part of the private sphere, and the public sphere is a place on which religion does not necessarily impinge, then the question of threat does not arise. But the threat does arise when you feel that certain areas of transcendence or personal feelings of a religious kind are being used in order to obtain some political goals which are not immediately recognisable as purely religious goals. So I would say that the main problem of this threat perception is the feeling that religion, whichever religion in whichever society, is no longer merely a question of a relationship between the individual and some form of transcendence but is a social factor which influences the structuring of society. Not only in Europe, but also in India, there is a lot of discussion about these topics in the academic world. How do you perceive these discussions? Is the academic community in India doing its job in analysing, representing or criticising these discourses? Well, both in Europe and in India there is a considerable amount of discussion about this. In France there are debates about the question of laïcity. In other parts of Europe you have discussions about various other problems with migrant communities and religion in politics, and so on. In India we have debates around various kinds of fundamentalism affecting the basic secular structure of India. So these problems are there. But I see a specific difference between Europe and India in this area in that the problem of secularism and the place of religion in the public sphere in India is strongly conditioned by the anti-colonial struggle, and the need to establish a constitutional framework for India in which there is a separation of some kind or the other between those areas that are legitimately part of religion, and those areas which are legitimately part of politics and society. And on this as you know, there were always two specific opinions on this. There was one opinion which wanted a homogenised community in terms of religion, specifically; and another opinion which wanted a more heterogeneous structure of society.

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You could call them by other names, social scientists can use very different names, but the basic difference was between two different visions of the kind of social order which is desirable. Either a structure that is characterised by diversity, and then to affirm this diversity and to opt for a heterogeneous order, or, as opposed to this, to say that there is some factor which homogenises—it could be religion in the Indian case—and that we should opt for maximum homogenisation in order to have a viable political state. You see, the question was what the viability of the political state is. Now, I don’t see it happening that way in Europe, because the diversity of Europe and the historical development of Europe took a different course. Diversity in Europe does not arise out of an anti-colonial struggle. Europe has a different trajectory. So diversities both in Europe and in India are factually there, but their configuration has to be seen in their historical terms in a different way. So this is one aspect which always strikes me, that whenever we compare Europe and India, we can see that there are many factors that are very similar to each other as factors of comparison, but their historical emergence and their localisation as factors of analysis are often very different and this is particularly true of the question of religion. Today in Europe, when you have these problems of religion linked to the migrant communities, then the question of what a secular Europe is going to be like is a very different order of question than what you would have in India, which for many years is threatened by fundamentalist divisions, and in which the question of the secular principle is posed every day. These are two very different orders of discussion. How do you perceive the reflection of these interfaces between politics and religion as being reflected among the Indian academic community? Are religious ideologemes influencing the way social sciences or humanities are being practised. Not directly. I would say that this is a kind of hermeneutic question which you could pose with regard to ideologies of any kind. I mean you could ask in Europe whether a specific ideology of one kind or the other is structuring the discourse in the social science, and then you could say ‘yes, of course, it is!’ The only question is, how conscious are you of this ideology, and how explicitly is it formulated or whether some social scientist is struggling against an ideology in order to affirm some sort of critical standpoint. So in that sense every ideological framework and every cultural and religious framework certainly do affect any kind of scientific activity in the social sciences, and I would say that is also true of India. But the criticism I would level is that there is too often

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a tendency to say that in India debates are being, or can be, influenced, mainly by the religious question, whereas very often this is not the case, and they are being influenced by certain other factors. Conversely, one underplays the fact that in Europe, many discussions are influenced by religious questions, whereas this is not brought out in the open. So, I don’t want to say that religion is a factor which is, as it were, Eastern and non-religious factors are Western, and then say that ideology influences the West and religion influences the East. On the contrary, I think there is a tremendous overlapping of both aspects in both areas. My question was actually targeted at something more at the basis of scientific methodology. Science in the modern framework plays an eminent role in giving legitimacy to modern cosmologies and modern ways of thinking about politics, ethics, nature and human beings, which replaces older systems of ‘knowledge’ in mostly religious frameworks. So in Europe as well as in India, some people try to question that. I am thinking of attempts to establish a centre for yogic studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University ( JNU), or astrology, which is not normally seen as a science within this modern framework. So do you see this as a potential threat to modern conceptions of science? Some are also advocating post-modern alternatives of doing science. No, I don’t see it that way—by the way, there was never a question of accepting a Centre of Yogic Study in JNU. That was never the case. For instance, consider that here we do not have a faculty of theology, and the whole notion of ‘Religionswissenschaft’ doesn’t exist here. But that exists very much in the West. In Germany, it is still a very important subject. The scientific study of religion is actually something which emerges out of the West and very notably also from Germany. So I don’t see this threat coming in so obviously. I think what happens is, that, there is always, to use a good old-fashioned term, a certain degree of ‘Erkenntnisinteresse’, and also political interest, in every kind of investigation every scholar takes. And I only see the difference between those who know about it and make it explicit and those who don’t know about it and prefer not to speak about it or those who are ignorant, which is the worst case of all. But these are distributed almost, as it were, in a fairly even manner between West and East, so you would have ideologues of all kinds meeting together without much reference to the nationalities, and you can distribute them all well. So, in my opinion, the division lines are completely different than between the East and the West. This is also linked up with what you said earlier about diversities and comparisons between the West and the East. It has always struck me that Europe and India are

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diverse, a taxonomy of diversity, would give us a very illuminating table in which there would be a great deal of similarity regarding diversities. But the actual explanation of these diversities often takes completely different routes and directions. Can you think of an example? Take for instance the question which is bothering Europe right now, the question of language and multilingual questions and all that. Since you have lived in India for a very long time, you know that the question of living in many languages is not an issue for most urbanised Indians who, irrespective of which strata of society they belong to, have a more or less flexible attitude towards multiple languages and their uses. So the question of which becomes a major language for them is often linked to some form of choice under specific circumstances. This applies also to creative writing. As you know, many people are bilingual writers, they write different genres in different languages and they choose their languages, so there is a strong element of choice involved out of a large framework of language possibilities. Obviously, for historical reasons, you do not have that in Europe. You have largely a mother tongue-oriented attitude to language, and as it were, giving language a substantive meaning in philosophical terms, so that in a sense, language has a greater, philosophically substantive value for you in the formation of your world view, your wishes, which I don’t see happening here in India in that way. Now, suppose you tell me that Europe is becoming a multilingual entity, and it is comparable with India as a multilingual structure, I would say this is a formal, surface point of view, because the entire historical trajectory would be completely different. If in India today, there are fundamentalist positions which want to homogenise society, and say: ‘Okay, in the classical sense we need one religion, we need one language, we need one reference point in history as the ideal formation of society’, then they are coming from an existing framework of loose diversity, which is not strongly theoretically articulated, which they wish to negate. Whereas in Europe, if you are moving from monolingual situations to multilingual situations, you are moving from strongly articulated positions to even more strongly articulated legitimisations of value and this causes tensions of a completely different order. And these two things are always there, that you have a taxonomy which is very similar, but with explanatory roots and directions, which are very different, and this makes the comparison of course much more fruitful and interesting.

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And this is true also in questions of religion, social structure and modernity. On the surface, they are often very similar in Europe and India, but actually the historical paths are very different. We could elaborate on this much further, I believe, but I would like to move on to a second block of questions, now, which are more about perceptions of the West in India, Westernisation, the West being a challenge or even a threat and modernisation being a challenge or even a threat to perceived cultural identities. What is your experience in this regard? Well, you see, the West was always present in at least the urban, Indian middle class world, the so-called ‘educated’ world. In this world, you knew more about the West in India than was the case conversely. For instance, it is not normal for a middle class person, shall we say in Germany, to know so much about Asia, whereas almost everybody you meet in Indian universities knows more about Europe, or at least about a Europe filtered through England, let’s put it this way, because of the English language education. There is more knowledge about English literature, English customs or politics, and so on, in India. So the debate about West and East in India again has a different configuration than if it were taking place in Europe. Supposing we were sitting in Berlin and discussing this, then the question of how the East or the Orient becomes a factor of knowledge in a university student’s life is a completely different question. Consider the discussion about whether it is a threat, for instance, shall we say, to have Turkish influences in Berlin, or whether we should say that horizons are opening up, we’re becoming more liberal or cosmopolitan; whether it is something to be welcomed, or we say no, this is a threat to our traditional value systems, social norms, especially with regard to male–female relations and other such sensitive areas—there are sharp divisions from the point of view of the people who are discussing this these days. Now these have a completely different configuration from the question of what’s considered a threat here, or not. In India what we have with middle class students is that from a knowledge of the West—they bring this from their schools with them—they are now supposed to take a position regarding changes which are taking place in their Indian society as a result of an explosion of knowledge and awareness through globalisation and technologies, which are forcing them to rethink these West–East issues. And for most people, the obvious point, which I think they always make very clear, is that they are very comfortable with both worlds, except that when they have to articulate it, they find that they have to make

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choices, which are not so easily definable and explainable even when they talk about it. But you must have noticed that basically, the question of overlapping of West and East is a part of Indian society. So, if, for instance, the West is perceived as a threat, then it becomes a conscious attempt to deal with an existing overlapping situation in order to have either a political goal or some other kind of a goal. If the Indian students you came across look on the West as a threat, then it is a conscious way to try to position oneself in a concrete power-oriented situation, and if they think that the presence of the West must be defended, it is also more or less the same kind of situation. In big cities like Bombay, Delhi, and so on, the urban landscape, even visually, is such a mixture between West and East. It goes from clothes to food, to the bookshops, to what you read, to what you see, the newspapers you read, and so on, everything is some form of a mixture without being an amalgam. So this mixture without being an amalgam can become a terrain which becomes contested if the person who’s involved, say your student, wants to position himself in this, for some other reason. Although outwardly the situation may be similar in multicultural situations say in Berlin, the positioning there is completely different. In both cases, you might have a student who is worried about the fact that there’s suddenly so much happening. But the student in Delhi comes from awareness that India is a result of an overlapping between West and East, whereas the student in Berlin does not usually come from a similar kind of consciousness of overlapping. For him it is a question of either welcoming diversity or feeling that he must guard himself against the possible threats of diversity and the disintegration of some values that he has been brought up on. Except if he’s a student who is himself a result of an overlap, say of German and some migrant community … … yes … … with a Turkish background, for example. Now, suppose our fictitious Indian student is not a student of European languages then for him the West would be more or less identical with America. So what would be the perception specifically of Europe for such an average student? For my generation, the West, if at all, would have been filtered through England and continental Europe, and not America. America came later in the perception, and I think that is still the case. Europe was always present, but which part of Europe played a role differed from area to

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area and discipline to discipline. France always played a very important ‘cultural’ role in certain circles, but Germany also played a certain role in philosophy, indology and technology. Germany was certainly very much a figure within the university milieu because people knew about the Second World War, and this goes back to the days of the freedom struggle and Nehru. People of that time were strongly involved in perceptions of Europe. And in Nehru’s early writings, especially in his popular writings, Europe has a strong role to play as something which is not identical with England. But clearly, this Europe is usually then France, Germany, to some extent maybe Italy, and Switzerland also. But then we must not forget that the West is also Russia in many ways, and increasingly, as a result of the Soviet Union and the post-Second World War developments, the knowledge of what the West may mean also in some sense meant looking at Russia’s ambivalent relationships with Western Europe. We must not forget also that the East European countries, for instance Hungary, played a very important role in the consciousness of many people after 1956, and the same was perhaps also true of some other East European countries. So I would not say that a student today only looks at America, and identifies it with the West and doesn’t look at Europe. If you want to put it in a slightly pragmatic way, I would say that his perception of the West depends on where the opportunities lie for him. If he wants to look at the world or study further or if he is interested in getting a job, then his perception of the West will be usually America, because that is where the job opportunities are greater. But there are significant number of people who go to France and Germany regularly, and England is always a reference point for many people; it depends on how much they establish themselves. And then it differs from discipline to discipline also. I think it is still the case that a large number of students of science and technology, when they think of Europe, think of Germany, and students of humanities think of France, and that sort of stereotyping takes place, which is of course historically very puzzling, because philosophy, and so on, are now increasingly becoming popular here, and there we have a lot of German reference points too. One last question. Some advocate the notion of an emerging world society. Supposing such a phenomenon exists, would you think that it is integrating or rather disintegrating? That, I think, depends. This is a very complicated question. World system, world literature, world society, all these are visions of the 19th century and I think this is recognised. Ultimately, a world society is

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undoubtedly desirable, provided it is a society in which the question of power equations and power lines are adequately settled or made evident. A world society without an equalising order is a contradictory term, so I would prefer to say that the world society should remain always a kind of Utopian goal towards which we move by diminishing the power lines that exist, wherever it is possible, as a desirable goal. I would certainly be against a reverse movement towards a minimalist kind of tribal orders. These need not be genetically conditioned or through blood relations and all that, they could be also communities of choice, but I would still be against a tribal view of the world and prefer a world society, but I would also say that to talk of a world society we need to first talk about the existing power relations. Anil Bhatti is a retired professor of German Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Roma Chatterji

Today, many people think of religion as such, or a particular religion as a threat. What is your personal experience in this regard? It depends on what you think of religion. I don’t think religion is a threat in that way. I would possibly want to reformulate the question. What is probably a threat is identity politics. The way that identities get defined, religion may be used as a particular feature in the definition of identities as opposites perhaps. I suppose it becomes a threat when it becomes a diacritical mark. But questions of ideas and faith, and after all atheism, could also be a form of religion. I wouldn’t think that anyone would consider it a threat today. So it depends on what you mean by religion, I suppose. And certainly that’s not the way sociologists have ever looked at religion, when I think about it. How has this perception of religion been reflected in your academic environment? In my academic environment, I suppose, we lead a fairly sheltered life. We are, after all, a central university. So I don’t think we would perceive it in the way that, for instance, the University of Kashmir would perceive it. I assume that it could be an experiential sort of threat that we carry with us all the time. But again, as I said before, I think it’s more a way of distinguishing different groups. And clearly, when it begins to be articulated only as a way of distinguishing certain groups rather than in any other way, then religion is a threat. Here in this department, in fact, it’s a non-issue. Whether this is good or bad, I really don’t know, but it really is a non-issue. So, I think, more than anywhere else it’s in University departments where the separation between religion and the rest of life takes place, where it is considered as being part of your private sphere, not public at all, which you might say is at once removed from the rest of the society. Some perceive the West, Western modernity or Westernisation as a threat in India. How do you relate to that? I think the West is a term that is used very rhetorically. Again, it is not one that I use ever myself because I have actually done fieldwork in the

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West as an anthropologist, in the Netherlands, and I have a fair amount of knowledge of the US because I visit reasonably frequently. They’re so different. Just think about the role of religion. It is kept— at least it used to be, because I was looking at the welfare state in the 1980s—to the private sphere in the Netherlands. Church membership had fallen. It was a function of age. Now, if you go to the US and if you see how important religion is as part of the public sphere it’s quite different. I would say it’s far more visible in the lives of middle class people in the US than in India. So in terms of the role of religion in people’s lives, it depends on whether you mean a kind of religion of display or spectacle. That is certainly on the rise in the way that it defines public space in different kinds of ways. But other than that, to think about it as being something that is being threatening again, this question needs to be fleshed out in different ways for me. The West as a category, as far as I am concerned, doesn’t exist. It is often used as a way of taking issue, it’s used as a kind of stick, to beat somebody else up. After all, even categories like Hinduism are Western, these are certainly non-Indian categories. This word did not exist, and even now, if you go to different places, at least in my own fieldwork, you find that it is not necessarily an experiential identity. It may be a political identity, but not in other walks of life. You might be worshipping one personal God, you might have another personal God—at the level of folk belief that’s normally the case—you wouldn’t necessarily categorise yourself as an animist, or a Hindu, or a Muslim necessarily. Certainly not if you were a Hindu, whatever that means. It’s a little difficult to know, even now. But I suppose politically it’s more important than in any other sphere. Is there a special perception of Europe in the context of discourses on the West? I think Europe is driving the discourse more than the US right now. There has been such a sea change that has taken place in Europe. The last time I visited the Netherlands, I didn’t recognise quite a lot of it precisely because of the sudden defensiveness and great fear. People in the so-called third world of previous times have been facing such threat perceptions for much longer periods. So I found that was probably the result of a sense of security that recent history had put Europe through. After all, Europe in the 19th and early 20th century was very different. But I think right now what Europe could do is to learn from other parts of the world rather than vice versa. Suddenly religion has become very uncomfortable. Hence, the threat perception of religion, rather than perceiving it as something that is used in so many different ways is like

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the word ‘power’. You can use it to mean just about anything you want it to mean, which is why it’s not a very useful word. For instance, it could be used to persecute a particular group of people, to prop up your own ideologies and to separate yourself from these kinds of identity politics. Eastern Europe would probably be very different because after all you had very old Muslim populations there who were not recent migrants. But the fear was there in spite of the fact that these were neighbouring groups. It didn’t lead to less violence. Not that it didn’t help in restraining violence when it took place. I guess the point now especially for countries like Germany and the Netherlands would be to see what are the everyday ways of interacting. Britain has probably been facing it much longer. So they realise what the difficult issues are. At least in some countries in Europe, threat has been faced by people for whom religion seems to be very important. For instance, the idea that you have to pray five times a day or that you need to celebrate something publicly, as with the Hindus, is seen as a way that threatens a kind of lifestyle where you have tucked away things in certain pockets, in certain times. So maybe one needs to think about all this in a less hyper or hysterical kind of way. Because even though there is so much violence around religion in every part of the world right now, the fact remains that still people who consider themselves fairly Orthodox Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists are able to sustain their religion without too much of a questioning of their beliefs. Our kinds of people have always studied religion in everyday life, but somewhere other ways of thinking about religion in non-threatening kind of ways all seems to get washed under, suppressed. Which is why I think that we need to divorce religion from identity politics in a big way. We have to do it in our own writings because, clearly, the politicians are not going to do it. I’m not thinking about religion in terms of diacritical marks. Do you think the academic community is doing their job well in doing precisely this? Probably not, but again, I suppose, as academics it’s our job to be free from the idea of relevance because I think you produce best when you really do what you’re interested in. But the problem with some of the academic community now is that you go where the funding is. And of course there is a lot of funding on religion and politics. I think we’re doing what we can and some of us too are caught up with the fact that at one time, probably, there was a far greater sense of the value of what we were doing. And now that’s gone. So we feel threatened and that we have to go where the money is. I think we probably could do

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more critical thinking. Somewhere we also go back to being citizens, or members of our own nation-states, and absorb some of the threat perceptions that maybe as academics we should be more rational about. Do you think we are moving towards a closer knit world society or is the world society disintegrating? Disintegrating, definitely disintegrating. I think idea that we are moving towards a close world society was probably a myth. This world society would have anyway been restricted to very few people. It was something that was characteristic of the Renaissance. The intellectuals always formed a world society. And maybe the early 20th century had that idea for some groups. But today that’s clearly not the case, is it? There are major areas of non-understanding especially in subjects like sociology. We forget how so many of the concepts of general sociology that we study actually emerged from the West. Most of the great sociologists came from those societies and we didn’t necessarily question the cultural aspects of those concepts. Rationality for instance. We never remember that Weber was a German after all and so many of the great thinkers that we study are from western Europe. This is not a point of criticism. The point is to recognise that there are inescapable differences. And then, maybe, we can do something about crossing those kinds of bridges, recognising that maybe we need more universalistic concepts. With the 19th century, you have a certain set of societies that dominate the world and they all come with similar sorts of ideas, even though there are great differences in style and other things. From outside Europe, there was nothing to oppose it with. It is only when you do fieldwork in the West that you realise that there is a context to certain ideas. And of course when we use them, which we do because ideas travel, the context may be different, as with the Nandy kind of way of talking about religion, modernity, and so on. The private–public distinction does not necessarily work here, the religion–secular division does not necessarily work once you move it into other kinds of societies, and the political consequences will be very different. It would be interesting to have more of an exchange among academics the world over on how different ideas apply or fail in different cultural contexts. Do you see such an exchange happening? Exchange is happening. But given the way we function here, we are not really capable of good teamwork. I think those are the kind of constraints

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that seem to go against developing a functioning collaboration between Indian and European scientists. This is not necessarily due to colonisation. Our disciplinary approach and training are very different. So, first, you need to figure out what are we really talking about. And this needs a sustained dialogue over many years. I don’t think the effort has really been enough yet. I did fieldwork in the Netherlands but I don’t think I collaborated with any scholars because the way I was doing research was completely different. I was working in a nursing home, in a Verpleeghuis, a home for people with very severe disabilities, psychogeriatric care, and so on. I made a big effort to explain why participant observation was the way to go. What I was interested in wasn’t something that was generally studied by people doing fieldwork, not by sociologists and social anthropologists. It was studied more by social work kind of people, more applied oriented. Non-sociologists could never figure out why I was doing it because clearly I was not coming in a problem-solving mode. And my experiences were not going to offer me solutions for India because I was very clear to explain that the local system was much expensive and we could never afford it in India. And our age group was different. For us, old age begins much earlier than it begins there, given our age statistics. With the sociologists and social anthropologists at the University of Amsterdam, participant observation was not something that they associated with looking at things like nursing homes. I mean everyone is aware that you can’t study Africa in the way that Evans-Pritchard did or the way Malinowski would have looked at Melanesia. There was, however, some appreciation once I had done it. And our work has been read. It was read, interestingly, by people in the health sectors, not by people in our own disciplines. Moreover, there were two Indian colleagues who were working in different areas. One was working in an old-age home and another in a Dutch village. I think he had the toughest time. I had the easiest time because where I worked people were very aware of differences. When you’re working with people suffering from dementia, many of the presuppositions of what is normal everyday life break down, so people were very tolerant also of my reactions. They were remarkably generous. There, as in America then, anthropologists never studied their own society. If they did, they would go to Surinamese communities, or to Muslim immigrants, but they would never look at mainstream Christian Dutch people. Mine was a Catholic home, in Arnhem. It was largely noncolonial. They were all mainstream Dutch people. The one big problem I had was that everyone wanted me to do a reverse of what they assumed

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that they had done to us, which means to estrange us. Now, estrangement is a very important tool for analysis, but it doesn’t mean that I turn you into an exotic subject. When you’re studying people who are dying, this would be horribly to do. You must first concentrate on the humanity of it. So that was the one thing I was trying not to do, to represent death as strange, as exotic. I think that is something our history is most uncomfortable about, as a discipline, and especially social anthropology. I was associated with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. They would talk more about things like demographics, how do you define ageing, those kinds of issues, not really touching very central issues that come up for the anthropologist, like how do you interact with people who are dying. And in that case, is it fair to talk about empire strikes back as an Indian. First, you are assuming that you are a representative of India, and certainly, as a social scientist; I’m not going to do that. On the other hand, there is a huge amount of guilt and bad faith among Europeans, which frankly I don’t share the burden of, even though I’m a member of the same discipline and you could say an elitist and a coloniser in my own way, but frankly, that’s not what I’m doing. That’s the burden of your guilt. You figure it out for yourself. It’s not my problem. So I think they had a huge problem about the fact that there were moral issues and why wasn’t I judging them. I said I didn’t have the right to do so. If you want to judge yourself, judge yourself. Don’t expect me to do it for you. So I think that was a big issue. None of the health professionals had that problem. They were people like doctors and social workers rather than people from my own discipline, but I had very rewarding intellectual discussions with them. In seminars, I got very emotional question, or ones that were comparative. Like how would you do it in your society? I said that’s not the issue. You didn’t bother to ask Evans-Pritchard how Oxford or Cambridge handled their politics. Don’t expect me to answer those questions. Where would you find common ground for a common humanity, and where would you feel an estrangement? Especially, when I think about the early time, I think the one thing that was very difficult to accept was the front stage, as Goffman would say, the fact that everything looks so well set up. You’ll find hair-dryers like in a beauty salon, everyone is well dressed, the institutions function very well, there is a level of civility, which is wonderful. But on the other hand, it’s a surface that covers so much. That was very difficult to accept.

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And these were Catholics, so, I think, probably closer to what I’m used to than if I was in a Protestant home. Trying to maintain that façade of appearance was the most difficult because here in India, I think, and maybe it is a stereotype, but somewhere, what you see is what you are. Our institutions are horrible. You will be treated terribly. People have to be constrained, which can seem very cruel. In the Netherlands, by contrast, there is a huge amount of fear in approaching the physicalities of illness and death. It’s dirty. You’re washing someone’s shit. Initially, it was scary. The social workers kept talking about the spiritual aspects of death, the Orient and the East, and it was hell. I was actually death counsellor in the first month, which was probably a bad thing. But they felt because I was an Indian I was probably the right person to do it. In India, you offer comfort by touching someone. That was the worst thing I could have done. The lady I was counselling hated being touched. On the one hand, she was very open talking about her dying but on the other hand she was really angry about it and I knew that I was doing everything the wrong way. So it was really a very difficult time. It was a learning experience. I think it’s the fact that you separate the surface cleanliness from all the dirt and the messiness and everything that’s beneath it. If you could accept illness and death as being necessarily messy and that you have to live with this messiness, you might achieve some pragmatic solutions. But if you think that everything has to be ordered, you have to find the perfect solution where everyone will be happy. In fact, you know nobody will be. It’s this order that really got to me. I was really waiting to come home, after three years. I can see for you it’s also very difficult because it’s in your face all the time. It must be hell. But I can understand fully what you must go through because that was the one thing which I never got used to. I’m an Indian. We see people dying here and there and in our own families you have to take care of the dead body. I remember going to Rotterdam where they had a special euthanasia program, a very enlightened place. I was talking to the person who was in charge of the euthanasia programme and she said in a very cheerful voice, ‘Shall I take you to the mortuary?’ And I said, ‘Yes, of course.’ Then she immediately said, ‘Are you sure?’ When we were going there she said, ‘We can at least see the picture painted outside,’ and then we kept going. I was getting really scared because I was not sure what I was going to see. And she kept asking, ‘Are you sure, are you sure?’ Very bright and cheerful. ‘I encourage my children to face these things,’ she said. It was the most frightening

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experience that I had. And then it was just a dead body. It was of course perfectly kept, the burial would take place in a couple of days, it was all wrapped up in tissue paper and things. The thing is, you don’t really see the body much. You never see it moving. You don’t even see the coffin moving. I have worked a little bit with undertakers, which was very important, because otherwise I would have developed the same fears. The hearse is kept inside the car. Invisibly it’s come and put in the Church. And then it goes down smoothly. There’s something wrong with all of this. It enhances your fear than if you see the dead body jerking around a little. That’s why I think the pall bearer idea is probably better. The way it’s done now is too orchestrated and smooth. In an intercultural encounter, of course, what startles one as different is always more prominent, but sometimes you must have had experiences where you could relate to these people and say ‘Wow, this is like us?’ Oh, absolutely. For instance, I used to take classes in conversational English, so I could interact with people in a non-nursing situation. I would tell them stories about my grandparents. They were the same age group. And interacting with normal old people was very important for me. In the very first days, I interacted with a lady whose husband had been in the colonial administration and I think we became friends very soon. I was in a very elite’ish nursing home. You never see those kinds of Dutch people normally. They don’t occur any more. There was something in me that she recognised. She had lived a long time in Indonesia, before the Second World War, while it was still a colony. I remember I used to go down—I lived in the attic—to her apartment and I could recognise a lot from my grand parental generation. I think they had that world education in common. They had far more in common than people of our generation do. Maybe it was a very small elite. I could see the kinds of letters her husband would write, and remember, this was the war generation, the economy of not wasting paper. My grandfather used to write in the same horrible crammed handwriting on thin paper and he’d fill in every little corner. I could understand the way he would begin with a general subject. You began with discussing politics, then culture, then the weather and then you talked about your personal things. It was the same thing. People of that generation all knew many languages. So did my grandparents. They were really cosmopolitan. With that lady I never sensed a problem or a barrier. I could talk to her. With other people I had to explain that I come from this kind of

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culture where we do it this way. With her I never had to. And I think somewhere we forget that the Netherlands was a very class-based society till fairly recently. More than the fact that it encouraged inequalities, it allowed you access to an education that was truly humanistic. You can see it. These are gymnasium-trained people. It sounds terribly elitist, I know. I remember once there was someone who’d come for an interview, a patient from a Dutch-Indonesian background, whom we didn’t finally take, and I was at that point a stagiaire with the social worker from the psycho-geriatric side, so I went along to that nursing home. This lady was clearly demented. She offered a packet of open biscuits. Her daughter just passed it around. Nobody took any except for me. And she just looked at me. At the end of the day, the social worker asked, what did we do wrong? I could see something. And I said, look, you refused hospitality, you were visiting her, you must never do that. She didn’t realise. Of course, I went back and told Mw. Kohlhaas, you know, they were the Kohlhaases of the shipping family of Rotterdam whose ancestor set up the theology department of the University of Leiden—this lady, who was my friend, she said, this has nothing to do with culture. She should have known. You see, this is a class thing. After all, you don’t know what this lady has touched, she was after all incontinent. It was perfectly normal to refuse and none of our generation would have even thought about it. But she still had a sense in which this was her home. She was the hostess and she was offering hospitality and it was refused. So you know, it’s little things like that. The one nice thing, I must say, was that there was a lot of learning on both sides. No one was on the defensive. And I think somewhere in academics we get defensive because we immediately jump to issues, the way I immediately jumped to the issue of power. I think that kind of interaction, where you forget that I belong to a different culture and a different system, and you belong, you know, to those kinds of issues. Some of this humanistic education survives in Bengal? It survives in Bengal yes. It even survives, I guess, in our kinds of universities, where we still try and teach non-relevant things like these ‘forms of religious life’. And it has to survive, I think, for our mental health. And that’s probably the reason why you and I can talk. Otherwise we wouldn’t. Otherwise, you would have been a specialist on India and we would have been talking about caste and things like that. I would say it’s absolutely crucial. Old people who never treated you like an

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Indian, they first thought of you as here is someone, and we would be talking about, let’s say, medieval painting, and no question like do you also know about these things in India? Those questions never became an issue. That was nice. Of course when you’re demented nobody looks strange to you or at least I didn’t look any stranger than anybody else. That was very good. Roma Chatterji is a professor in Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.

Asghar Ali Engineer

Today, many perceive either religion as such or some particular religion as a threat. What is your personal experience in this regard? Religion can never be a threat. Religion comes into existence for spreading good. If you take all major religions in the world, they appear at very critical junctures when humanity needed to combat evil and bloodshed and war. So religion (i) does not spread hatred and (ii) it is not a source for conflict but a source of peace. It is not a threat to anyone but a source to stabilise the world. After saying this, I should also say that like anything else religion can also be misused. But for that we don’t have to blame religion as such. There are powerful Western interests. They hijack religion and misuse it for their own purposes. And since in Europe for a few hundred years the Church dominated and misused religions for its own power and tried to suppress anyone who questioned the authority of the Church—and they were severely persecuted—so rationalists and secularists saw religion as a threat. And they could not distinguish between misuse of religion and religion itself and that is why they became anti-religion and secular ideology emerged in Europe. Rationalism emerged in Europe, which became highly critical of religion. And this rationalism persists among certain elites, particularly in urban areas. But vast masses of people continue to believe in religion. And this battle has been going on between religion and anti-religion. And recently the threat of terrorism. Now Islam is being blamed for that. Islam in no way can be blamed for terrorism. A few Muslims, yes, extremists, who are again misusing religion for their political purposes, or certain people who are quite intolerant towards others. Again, according to me, intolerance is not due to religion. Intolerance is also a very complex psychological phenomenon. Certain interests again develop certain intolerant visions of religion. Because they see their interests in that. For example, Saudi Islam is very intolerant—not because of Islam per se, but because that is their political need. They entered into alliance with ulama—Islamic theologians—and the ulama are helping the political rulers, the king and his family, and they in turn listen to the ulama. And this is how the intolerance emerges. Their leadership depends on their being right and others being wrong. Unless they assert that, they

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think who will follow us? So these ulama denounced all other sects of Islam, all other versions of Islam, and particularly Sufi Islam, which is highly tolerant and open. But they see it as a threat to their leadership. So this intolerance has grown there again. And it is this Islam that is taught in schools and in madrasas, universities, and syllabi are drawn up by ulama and politicians. The Saudi king keeps on saying that when pressure comes on him for democratisation, he takes refuge in Islam again. He says our constitution is the Qur’an. We don’t need any other constitution, because he doesn’t want any control by civil society. If a constitution is developed, he will have obligations to follow. So he takes refuge in the Qur’an and in saying that ‘our constitution is the Qur’an’. And he seeks the ulama’s support. So that is how this intolerant version has developed. And I would say that terrorism is also not due to this intolerant version of Islam. It is a very complex phenomenon again—what the US does in the Middle East, what policies it follows, how it supports Israel, how it destroys Iraq for its own interests. Now as Saudis and certain Muslims misuse Islam to serve their purpose, the US are misusing democracy to serve their purposes. Because in every breath, Bush keeps on saying ‘I am doing this for democracy and freedom and democratic values’. In fact, what Bush is doing is to serve the interests of the American business class. They need oil, they need energy. This is why they are in the Middle East and they follow these policies and because of that terrorism is born. How are these perceptions being reflected in your academic environment, especially among Muslim academia in India, in universities and madrasas? With madrasas it depends on who runs them. Madrasas being run in North-west Pakistan, in the North-west Frontier Province, they were established, to begin with, by the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). They gave armed training to those students there and they wanted them to fight Russia. Those madrasas were highly misused for political purposes by those Western interests. Now, madrasas run by Saudi money, they teach a very intolerant version of Islam. They are the cause of many problems. The Saudis are putting a lot of money in madrasas, in financing Islamic Studies, in building mosques, to increase their influence in the world, because they want to control as many Muslims, intellectually, as possible. And because they have big money, many Muslims who would otherwise not be intolerant, have to cater to the needs of their financiers. That is why certain madrasas become centres

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of intolerance and they are causing problems not only to other Muslims but also to non-Muslims. But there are other types of madrasas also. Basically, there are two types of madrasas. There are those madrasas where students are taught to recite the Qur’an, how to say prayers, what suras from the Qur’an are recited for prayers. They have to learn the Arabic script to be able to recite the Qur’an. These are very elementary kinds of madrasas. No ideology plays any role there. Only rituals. How to offer prayers, how to recite the Qur’an, and so on. But then there are madrasas where higher Islamic Studies are taught, and ideology comes into play there. There it will depend on who is running the madrasa and whether these madrasas are run by public donations or Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or any such countries. Also much depends on the political situation in the country where the madrasas are being run. A very good example is India. India is a multi-religious country. Now, Dar ul-’Ulum Deoband, the biggest Islamic learning centre in the whole of Asia, probably second only to Al-Azhar in Egypt, which is the biggest, now, there are Wahhabis, I mean the kind of Islam that is being propounded by the Saudis, but you see the difference: Saudi Islam is highly intolerant because they want to rule politically, they are the masters, whereas in India they cannot afford to be arrogant, they are not rulers, they have to live in pace with other religions, so their attitude is totally different. It is Wahhabi Islam adapted to the Indian situation. Now, this madrasa in Deoband, which is known as Dar ul-’Ulum, is opposed to Jinnah’s two-nation theory. They condemned it as un-Islamic. And Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani, who was then chancellor of Dar ul-’Ulum, wrote a book condemning Jinnah’s two-nation theory. They wanted accommodation with Hindus in this country. They were much more tolerant than the highly Westernised Jinnah, who had nothing to do with Islam. Yet, he grossly misused Islam to realise his political objectives and those who were supposed to be Orthodox and intolerant, they played a very constructive role adjusting with the Indian situation. So it also depends on the political situation to which you are responding. Do you see Wahhabi influence threatening the academic independence of Aligarh Muslim University or of Jamia Millia Islamia? In Jamia Millia Islamia, no. In fact, there was a power struggle there in the 1990s, I think, but those who wanted to control it were Congress politicians, not narrow-minded bigots, but even they did not succeed and that time Mr Bashiruddin Ahmad was vice chancellor and Mushirul

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Hasan, who is now vice chancellor, was pro-vice chancellor. Now, both are very progressive and enlightened, and a Muslim Congress leader who is alleged, did not like it. Mushirul Hasan was asked questions about Salman Rushdie and he said ‘I am against banning any book’. And then there was a big revolt in the university by students. They became violent and the university was closed. Essentially, it was a power struggle to out this pair of vice chancellor and pro-vice chancellor. They failed, ultimately, and the same person came back as vice chancellor, Mushirul Hasan, who is known to be Leftist. He is pro-CPI(M). And he is a prominent historian also. He has done a lot of work on partition. So Jamia Millia Islamia University is free from that influence. Aligarh Muslim University, yes. The influence of the Tablighis and Jamaat-eIslami has increased a great deal. And particularly in West Asian Studies and Islamic Studies, they have established their stronghold there, and it is unfortunate. At one time, my friend, Professor Mahmood ul-Haq was director of West Asian Studies and Maqbul Ahmad was director of Islamic Studies. He was also very progressive and enlightened. In both Islamic Studies and West Asian Studies, progressive Muslims were influential. But now it has changed completely and Tablighi Jamaat and Jamaat-e-Islami have increased their influence. At one time, the Left was very strong in Aligarh Muslim University and prominent progressive writers of Urdu, most of them, came from Aligarh Muslim University. That was the tradition. But today it is very unfortunate. Irfan Habib is retired but he is still associated with the Centre for Advanced Studies, Department of History at Aligarh Muslim University. He was a very enlightened person and did very seminar work on the Mughal period in India, and yet, he was humiliated at the end. They tried to make unfair accusations against him and he was not given extension as a professor, whereas third-rate people keep on getting extension there. It was a great tragedy that an eminent scholar like Irfan Habib could not get extension. Anyway, he is still associated with that centre and he is doing a lot of work together with Professor Shirin Moosvi and a few others. Many perceive the West as a threat. How is this perceived in India according to you? After what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, Indian Muslims are definitely anti-West. You call any anti-American rally and thousands will participate. The situation became much worse with Bush. The second war against Iraq. Anti-Americanism is very much present.

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Do you see a special role for Europe in this constellation? There may not be any animosity against Europe because they are not involved in that kind of aggression that America is involved in. But one thing is there in the final analysis. Europe goes behind America as far as Israel is concerned. The West is united in its support for Israel and no voice is raised in support of Palestinians. Israel is always perceived as defending itself and Palestinians as terrorist, aggressors, and what not. Whereas Israel kills them with impunity, and no protest from even Europe, so Muslims think that ultimately they are one, at least in supporting Israel. They may not have the hostile feeling that they have towards America. And as I said these hostile feelings are especially after what Bush did, but about Europe also the undercurrent is this that ultimately they are united in supporting Israel, because Israel is seen by the West as the only country which they can depend on in the Middle East and which can control Arabs and get oil. This perception is there. How is the perception of the West, or Europe, as a threat being reflected in your academic environment? In India, the academic community is divided. There are some who are pro-Left, there are some who are Rightist, pro- Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A large section of academia is also pro-BJP in this country. Now, they face a dilemma. They want to support liberalisation and globalisation. But at the same time, they are strongly supporting the Hindutva cause, which is very traditional and tradition bound. And liberalisation destroys that, weakens that. For example, the Shiv Sena on Valentine’s Day will destroy shops selling those gifts that young couples use to express their love. Every year this problem arises. They attack those shops, they attack couples expressing love for each other. So on one hand, they are very traditional. But they also want liberalisation. And that’s why the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) started this Swadeshi movement. Now, everyone knows that the swadeshi is a big farce, I mean during the 1988 period, that is when the RSS was supposed to have maximum influence and the Indian government followed policies of liberalisation openly and RSS just protested nominally, just to show that they are against liberalisation, they are pro swadeshi. But everyone knew it was a big farce, that ultimately they are all for liberalisation. But it is in a big wave denting on traditional culture. Especially the younger generation. There was not a single mall in this city just five years ago. And today every street has a mall. Thousands are flocking there.

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Does the lifestyle change? One would believe that young Indians would embrace the liberty that this can bring to them like breaking free from family obligations. Yes, I mean certain traditions one must fight against. I am also involved in fighting against certain traditions. But that does not mean that you should break all bounds and your culture to be swept away and one uniform standardised Western culture to be everywhere. That cannot be acceptable. Do you think that is possible in India? Very difficult. Because even during British rule, you see, our women stuck to their dresses. They never took to skirts. They stuck to sari, and the rural masses, of course, dhoti and Punjabi. But men in urban areas they did take to shirt, pant, or suit, in middle classes or upper middle classes. Particularly women. And also our music, our food, they persisted. If you go to the Philippines, you see the change. In the Philippines, the native culture was totally destroyed. Their music, their dresses, their food, everything is Western. This did not happen in India. So, India has its own strength, no doubt about it. But with this onslaught of consumerism, the middle classes, the MBAs who are getting fat salaries, how far they will be able to resist that is an open question. So for the younger generation, I am worried. Now, in middle class families, every child has a mobile. The moment they are 8–10 years old, they require mobiles. They sit before computers, and take on how to check websites and all that. So, culture is definitely changing. Now, because large sections of the Indian population in rural areas are still poor, they cannot afford such things and they are more traditional and less conservative. That is the only saving grace one can say. But in urban areas, it is very powerful. And that’s why some fundamentalist movements are becoming stronger. Because they see this onslaught of globalisation. They are being worried and launch such movements. At least since Kant, for more than 200 years, some philosophers dream of a world society, a world polity. Do you see this developing or do you think there is more of a tendency of disintegration in the global arena? The centre of gravity might change with China and India emerging as new powers. But still technologies, modernity as it has come to be accepted, would deeply affect traditional cultures. So, I mean, if by modernity we mean empowerment of women, democratic rule, basic

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freedoms, encouraging science, scientific attitudes, yes, I’m all for it. But if modernity means Westernisation, then I am not for it. You are going to interview Ashis Nandy. He has been assailing modernity very strongly. He sees modernity as an evil. But we got also used to talking of multiple modernities. Do you see a different way of modernity emerging in India? Well, as I said, Indian people did successfully resist Westernisation. But with this new onslaught, I doubt how much they will be able to resist. Because Westernisation, especially with that sort of technology that is coming from the West. That is such a powerful pattern of domination that its hegemony has been established and to challenge that hegemony will be difficult. Multiple modernities in the sense that certain strains might develop and India may not be entirely Westernised as the Philippines has been. China will never be Westernised in that sense. But whether they will ever become hegemonic, I have doubts about that. So far, the West has the hegemony. Bollywood could become an example for an Indian contribution to world culture. But then Bollywood again is the result of Westernisation. One cannot deny that. Well, the music is Indian, one can say, and perhaps that will not be dented seriously. But the style of life in all big budget movies, the kind of lifestyle shown in that is entirely Western. There is nothing indigenous about it. Certainly, the boy will not touch the girl until they get married. They would love but maintain a distance because otherwise those movies will not be popular in India. The masses of people, Bollywood cannot alienate them. Even kissing is not permitted. They would just almost touch but again separate. So in that sense I can say it is very much Indian. Because in the West kissing and even showing the act may be the in-thing. That is out of question. There are certain traditional bounds, no doubt about it. But lifestyle, the modern technology, the modern instruments, all that is very much there and visible. And what these malls are selling? Not traditional art and craft of India. Only Western goods. People flock there for these things. Not anything indigenous. So Bollywood may be a hit in Europe—and let you not forget, there is a large population of Indians in Europe. It is they who are hungry to see those films. I go to Far East and South-east Asia. There also Indian movies are very popular. They remember Sanjay Dutt,

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Shahrukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan. They memorise dialogues and they repeat those dialogues. That’s true. But I don’t think that means hegemony. Hegemony still remains with the West. These are few cultural artefacts. They do not go long way to establish hegemony. Asghar Ali Engineer is the director of the Institute of Islamic Studies and of the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism in Mumbai.

Anjan Ghosh

Many these days perceive either of a particular religion or of religion as such as a potential threat—have you got any personal experience of this independently of your academic life? I’ve never experienced any personal threat in terms of religious beliefs, and since I’ve studied in multicultural/multi-religious contexts—I’ve been through Catholic institutions and central universities in India, which is a very multicultural, multi-regional context and JNU—for me it was the opposite. When I went to JNU as an early postgraduate in its formative stage in the 1970s, for us it was a revelation in terms of being able to witness the variety of Indian people from many different backgrounds, regions and religious backgrounds come together. That was a very interesting and very chastening experience because one began to get a sense of what Indian diversity meant. And within that kind of a fold one had a very, I should say, secular understanding. India has been experiencing political mobilisation on religious grounds for all the time it’s been there, since the 19th century and Bengal also had its share in the Partition and in the 1984 riots, and so on. What is your experience in this regard? In this regard, I have only witnessed one communal riot in Calcutta— when I was a child in 1964, which I don’t really remember. After that, there has been as far as I’m concerned no communal rioting in Calcutta. The only time was after 1992 after the Babri demolition. I was not present at the time—I was in the US—so for me communal mobilisation has not really been an actual experienced reality, but I have been very active in the human rights movement, civil liberties movement and against any kind of communal mobilisation. Since I was not present during the 1992 riots, I only read and heard my friends talk about it. I chose to do my research on communal conflict in Bengal and Bangladesh and my research was precisely on how rumours instigate, or fuel, communal conflicts both across the border in Bangladesh or here in West Bengal. So I can only claim to have an indirect experience through my own research and through the telling or listening of narratives of people who experienced it at first hand, or through vague memories of communal

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conflagrations, which reminds me of Amitav Ghosh’s book The Shadow Lines—the way he talks about 1964 riots as a school kid going to school and listening to the inchoate sounds of the rioters, the noise, the cries of the mob … But you do have a direct experience as a participant observer of the academic world and of how the academic world dealt, and still deals, with these issues—how they have been reflected and digested in Indian academia, of course, especially in Bengal. Yes, in Bengal, because of its Left traditions, there has been an apparent, I would say, antipathy towards communal mobilisations—I use the word ‘apparent’ very consciously because I think there has always been present in a subterranean fashion an incipient communalisation that has continued since partition and that is still very much embedded in the memories of Partition victims, people who migrated during Partition or who had first-hand experience of partition riots. They have transmitted to the future generation a certain kind of a communal sensibility, which has not been totally erased, even in later communal mobilisations. It may or may not have had religious colouring, although I would say religious colouring did remain a strong sort of sub-stream in Bengali middle class’ emotions. It can be witnessed in the topography of the city how these exclusions have manifested themselves, in terms of ghettos. There are particular Muslim ghettos even now and it is very difficult even now for Muslims to find housing in non-Muslim areas where they do not predominate. Second, there is this compounded fear of this association of Muslims with terrorism and various terrorist attacks. We did witness in Calcutta some years ago an attack on the US information services building and so there is manufactured fear, apprehension, of the Muslim presence as the other in Bengal too, in spite of a very strongly secular heritage that we have inherited through the Left movement, which has staved off any kind of communal conflagration since 1964 in Calcutta. We did not have anti-Sikh riots in 1984 despite the fact that it was a North India phenomenon. We did not have any major rioting prior to the Babri demolition but after the Babri demolition there was rioting and I must say there were certain strains of earlier communal conflicts, which were re-invoked during the 1992 riots. Would you say that these stereotypical sub-currents that exist in Bengal, without being publicly acknowledged, affect the academic community itself? Like the perception of Muslim academics?

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It’s very difficult to decipher this from public engagements except when you look at some of the facts and figures. If you take account of the very faint presence of Muslim academics in the academic world in Calcutta, it is only then that you begin to understand how the exclusion has worked. This is now clearly represented in the report on minorities and the Muslims. The Sachar Committee report demonstrated very categorically the very faint presence of Muslim academics in West Bengal and Calcutta. That immediately brings to the fore that we hadn’t noticed this, we hadn’t been conscious of this, why? Does this involve other subgroups, castes? Yes, it does. How many Dalit individuals are there in the academic world? It has been very categorically demonstrated that their presence is also very faint, very small, especially compared to their proportion in the population, they are hardly present—Muslims more so. I’m coming now to a second block of questions, which is about the perception of the West or of globalisation as Westernisation and the process of urbanisation and modernisation as Westernisation in India, and particularly in Bengal. What is your perception of this? Well, Bengal was one of the regions, which was exposed to colonialism and Westernisation de facto much before any other region. Because of that the West has in a sense been integrated into the Bengali sensibility. So much so that we’ve had intellectuals and public personalities talking about London as if it was a very familiar territory for them without having ever visited the place. You can find resonances of this in, say for instance, the works of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, in his well-known book A Passage to England. You can find resonances of this in Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines where he talks about this person who knows about London without having visited London before. So in a sense, the West is imprinted in our collective memory. We have some idea but I would not say that the idea we have is undistorted. But it is sort of refracted through the colonial situation and, consequently, it has all the lures of the dominant power. I would say that the West is very much, in the words of a recent writer—Pankaj Mishra has written a book called Temptations of the West—the West seems to be a lure. It seems to be a lure not only in terms of intellectual ideas and social ideas but also in terms of material well-being and standard of life—the kind of lifestyle that we would aspire for and that itself is very counter-productive right now because if

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we were all to imitate the Western style of life, the Western lifestyles, in the post-colonial world let us say, we would be in deep trouble because that kind of consumption is simply not sustainable. In colonial times, it was Britain that was standing pars pro toto for the West, for much of Bengal I would suppose. Later it became America. So my question would be: What role within the general perception of the West would you attribute to Europe these days? Well, I think that even though the lure of lucre, that is money and wealth and well-being has attracted many professionals to America, I still think that for the Bengalis, the intellectual foundations of modernisation are still very much embedded in Europe, much more so than in America. One can talk about this in terms of one’s notion of democracy. Where does our notion of democracy come from and how is it perceived? It can also be talked about in terms of various notions of republicanism, from France, and their attitude and perception of religious differences in France, which has a very different connotation than multiculturalism in America. I would say that the intellectual foundations of modernity are still seen to be very much embedded in Europe, in European civilisation, arts and culture, and literature. America is much more of a recent notion of the West, it’s much more of an instrumental understanding of Westernisation, in terms of the kind of well-being that America can provide, and the other thing is education. Educationally, America is seen to be a much more hospitable destination than Europe. This sounds very positive—the perception of Europe in the academic world in Bengal is according to you still largely positive—but there have been debates, which challenge notions of modernity as being Western and therefore not suitable for other local contexts—are such debates going on in Bengal? Oh yes, very much so. I meant my earlier statements to be in terms of the general middle class notion of Western modernity and distinctions within Western modernity between Europe and America—I did not mean them to be the general perception of the Bengali intellectuals. The Bengali intellectuals have been involved in this debate about the post-colonial situation, trying to figure out how, for instance, colonialism gave rise to a very distinctive colonial modernisation in Bengal and India and its problematic legacy—how it has completely detached us sometimes from our own traditions and how it has implanted Western spectacles over Indian eyes, therefore resulting in a very skewed evaluation

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of our actual situation. Colonialism did not only have a beneficial effect but also have many detrimental effects and we are still labouring under that legacy. It has certainly not vanished and is not at an end. There are some radical critics of modernity, like Ashis Nandy and Gandhiji, of course, who would rather have a traditional rural set-up for India. Do you see the debate in Bengal moving in such a direction? No, I wouldn’t say that Bengal has taken very kindly either to Gandhi or to Ashis Nandy, in a larger sense, not only in the writings of a few intellectuals. In the larger sense, as you know very well, Gandhiji was not the revered figure in Bengal. It was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and the Bose–Gandhi conflict made Bengalis tilt much more towards Bose than Gandhi. And again the debate between Gandhi and Tagore … you know, Gandhiji was not the favoured figure in Bengal and Gandhi’s non-violent movement did not cut much ice with the Bengali nationalists, who went for militant extremism. Notwithstanding that, I must say that there is a Gandhian tradition in Bengal. There is a Gandhian tradition of grass-roots level Khadi Ashrams and Gandhian sort of ashrams being set up, which were mobilised and maintained as a kind of alternative strand of technological development in the districts. But, having said that, I must say that Bengal has been much more indoctrinated by the Nehruvian legacy of modernity, and it has always held, in a strange way, that modern industrial development was the cornerstone of modernisation, and it has emphasised industrialisation and the industrial way of life, in spite of the fact that 70 per cent of our population still lives and works in rural areas. Urbanism, or urbanisation, was not such a strong force outside the metropolis of Calcutta. Industrialisation was and there were places, which were industrial corridors and which were seen to be the seedbeds of modernity in Bengal like the Asansol–Durgapur area, where a large number of industries were set up during the Nehru area. Similarly, before that, there was the colonial legacy of traditional industries, which were based on both sides of the Hooghly river, adjoining Calcutta. What this means is that Calcutta has been imbued with a certain notion of industrialisation; an industrialism, which has made it very antipathetic and very hostile to traditional attributes like caste, religion and superstition, in spite of its presence in the population. Obviously, from this, you can understand that there is a gap between the intelligentsia, the elites and the rural masses, and this disjunction is present in our reckoning of modernity. I mean, we, the intelligentsia

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and the elite of Bengal, want the rural masses to be modernised, and by modernised we mean industrialised. They have to be brought within the ken of industries. Industrialisation will bring about a secular, rationalist, modern understanding of the world—this is the Bengali elite’s, intelligentsia’s, perception. The Bengali intelligentsia is very much working within a notion of modernisation, which has come to be criticised in other places. One last question and then you are released. There is not even agreement about whether such a thing as a world society exists but supposing it is emerging, would your hunch be that it is integrating or that it is disintegrating? It’s a difficult question to answer because we hear a lot of rhetoric about global civil society. We are all now participants in global civil society, insofar as we use the Internet. As far as we are part of the World Wide Web, we are part of a global civil society. But beyond that, and thinking of integration with the Internet, means that you acknowledge the digital divide, which still exists very tangibly in India and in West Bengal certainly. What is the conception of a global civil society or a global world? The conception is confined to spaces of multilateral organisation. Let’s say you have the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing and that becomes kind of a tangible manifestation of global civil society or the environment meet of the UN in Nairobi becomes the tangible face of global civil society, or the World Social Forum which held its meeting in Bombay. That becomes the face of the world in India. That is one kind of global society that you can see in India. But I would say that with regard to this notion of global society there is a basic divide within India. I would classify that in terms of a transnational middle class, which is comfortable with the idea of a global civil society and which can participate in it, which can travel abroad, which participates in international meets, or international gatherings, or international institutions, and are familiar with the language of global civil discourse. On the other hand, you have within the middle class a distinct entity, which I would call the vernacular middle class, which is not so comfortable with this discourse of global civil society simply because they are often handicapped in terms of their linguistic skills to participate in this, you know, because participation in the Internet or international meets requires one to be able to use an international language, whether it be English, which is mainly true for India, or any other language used in international forums. The vernacular middle class still finds itself constrained by its lack of

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facility with English. That is why there is this, on the one hand, comfort level of an enclave zone of a transnational middle class, and on the other hand, the constrained acceptance of globalisation, which is impinging on our lives in different ways, through the media, consumption, trade and employment, and so on, but to which the vernacular middle class still does not have easy access. Anjan Ghosh is fellow in Political Science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.

Qutub Kidwai and Shirin Huda

For many in the West, but, as I believe, also in India, either some particular religion or religion as such has become equivalent to a threat. How would you respond to that? Q: I would say that in India, if you see the history, it’s been very much a pluralist society, earlier, even now, it’s very much diverse and plural. But even now, the aspect of religion in politics has really brought a kind of insecurity in the minds of people belonging to the majority community. It goes back to the period when the British started their Divide and Rule Policy and then consequently the partition of India and Pakistan. At present, since we are dealing with this issue and trying to bridge the gap between the two communities by developing more trust and understanding, but again, religion is a very sentimental issue for Indians here. And anything related to it is taken as a threat, especially when it comes to safeguarding the rights of minorities. They often accuse the government of appeasing the minorities or being lenient to the minorities, it happens like their opportunities and rights have been curtailed, because they want to appeal to minorities for their own electoral interest. I would say religion in politics has intensified after independence, because the whole game of partition of tragedy was based on religion, however the fact is, it would be different, it was not religion, but for the common masses still it’s very much in their mind, it’s religion that actually caused the partition, they want Muslims to go to Pakistan, because Pakistan is for Islamic people and India is for Hindus. S: Religion was always used as a tool for dividing people. Always seeds of communalism have been sown through religion. The whole idea is like, the people who are playing the role of politicising religion, they want the power. So, in the garb of religion, people are using it for power, and it’s in the interest of the people. Those people are not religious minded, but they’re just using religion to divide the people for their own personal benefits.

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How are these communal issues reflected in the academic world of India? Q: That’s a very complex issue, I would say. I can give you my own example. We have been trained through our schooling, the whole college and university, even after our graduation, we were not made aware of the actual cause of partition, and we are still not knowing that Mughal rulers were invaders, they were aggressors, the Muslim rulers, it was not even termed as Mughal rulers. Especially in the medieval history. Actually, the whole thing revolves around medieval history when it comes to the communal issue in India. So the dynasty is not focused as Mughal dynasty or Ashoka dynasty or Maurya, it’s focused as Muslim rulers, Hindu rulers, Buddhist rulers. I see the textbooks of my nephews, even now it is so distorted, especially some historical figures like Aurangzeb, he is considered as the most aggressive ruler in India, and has converted many Hindus to Muslims, and so on. In the academic field, I would say, it’s not merely the textbooks, but even the attitude of the teachers, professors, because they have this preconception in their mind, some prejudices, which is a part of their socialisation, it’s not like they have learnt from some university or school. Because even me being a Muslim, even I had some prejudices about the Shia community or the Hindu or the Christian community, it is a part of our socialisation. But in the academic field, no doubt, after the communalisation of religion, since the 1980s, it has really aggravated to much extent, and that’s how the textbooks started changing, and now you see, they have their regional heroes. Earlier, it was the whole history of India that was portrayed, but now, if you go to Rajasthan, they have their own regional heroes, Maharashtra has their own, Delhi has their own. Regional heroes are being more glorified and portrayed as patriotic symbols. In another sense, I would say, in schools and colleges, we often had these programmes with school and college students, we do give them some question, and when we get their replies, we actually get an idea about how it has been taught in schools about a particular religious community. Very often children say that Muslims are anti-social because they are involved in underworld activities, they are more into criminal activities, it’s a history that says that Muslims are always against the nation, against community or against the people whom they are living with. So I think there is a great harm done through these textbooks because these young minds, when they become youth and get into profession. In bureaucracy also they are all prejudice, the Rajinder Sachar Committee Report has exposed how they have discriminated against the Muslim community by implementing

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certain plans, because this bureaucracy, the administration, the whole structure, having this insecurity about certain minorities, and they say: ‘we should not give them the opportunity, because in course of time they will overrule us, and we will be left out’. This is all because while in army, while in police, they have this notion, it’s just because their training manuals, their textbooks, all these carry such kind of communal biases. Q: I don’t think history here is taken as a science as such. It is projected as something next to religion. You have to be proud of your history, so you have to have certain things that will insure that you are the original inhabitant of this country and you have the whole right against others. We are expecting the academic community to defend the truth. And they all agree that what is being done is wrong. But to come out openly and to really say that we need to change, that is not done so far. And the central government is keeping quiet on all this. This is something that really goes against the constitutional rights, human rights, and certain things which are really degrading the minorities, certain lessons which are given in these books. There should be a pressure built up by academics and human right activities but to some extent they fail. In some states, the textbook issue is promoted by the state and they change the textbook syllabus as per their agenda. But it’s not like the central government is inactive, but central government thinks there are other priorities to work on if you really want to upgrade the status of minorities. So they think that this is something which could be done by the academicians, it is given a secondary status. S: I very well agree with Qutub that the kind of education is also communalised, the textbooks have been distorted and the facts of history have been distorted. One more thing I can remember from my own experiences in the school about how the child has been brought up in the school. Most of the times in universities or schools when we have some functions, we always start the function with some Hindu rituals. We light a lamp or we draw a Rangoli or something but never any time in my life I have seen starting a function with some verses from Qur’an or verses from the Bible, and that doesn’t give the environment of multiculturalism or pluralism to the student, and then it’s very much centred to Hinduism or Hindu culture. School, university level. In all of our functions in India, we always think of starting with lighting a lamp and saying a Hindu bhajan or something. But never we have thought of

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saying a verse from Qur’an or verse from Bible. It’s not intentional, but unconsciously done. It’s just imbibed in the mind of the student. The multicultural environment is not given to the students. So how does one feel as a Muslim girl in a school where this happens? Q: We used to be, you can say ‘ignorant’, we were not aware of our rights. Since it’s a secular institution, other religions have been included. We never thought about it, exactly, and nobody asked, why it is not. S: We didn’t feel alienated. My thought was that this is India, and India is a Hindu nation, and that’s why all the culture should go like how it goes in a Hindu tradition. Is the West being perceived as a threat in India? Q: I don’t think the West is being a threat to India. It’s only to a particular community, I would say, say Muslims, especially. I think Muslims all over the world have this notion that the West is always against Islam, which is not completely a fact. But in India, in general, I would say globalisation and liberalisation actually affected some of the processes here, some of the employment schemes and education standard has changed, and there are certain other courses coming up, and middle class Indian cannot afford to have that kind of education. The West as a threat, I would say, is not related to some religion or such, it’s just an economic one, all MNCs are coming and they’re trying to take our ‘techies’, it’s a brain drain kind of thing. And of course, labour rights are a main concern, and the special economic zone, which is the latest issue. I think it’s only at the economic level, it’s not something that’s related to social or religious or something with a cultural name. I don’t think the cultural identity is threatened, because first, it’s not about accepting something but about adopting. Accepting and adopting are two different things. If you accept (uncritically), then it might threaten your original cultural identity, but if you adopt Westernisation … the whole world is a global village, and if you just say that my culture is this and my identity is this … there is some element of adaptation you have to have. No Hindu is pure Hindu, no Muslim is pure Muslim in India, because we have multiple identities related to language, culture, ethnicity, and so on. So what pure identity are you asking for? It is the same with the Western world also. If what you are wearing is Western clothes, it’s not threatening your

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identity, it’s something you’re comfortable wearing. In Delhi, people have this very political consciousness, ‘our identity, our existence’ but I don’t think that’s a threat for us, in general what we go around with in India, in Bombay, among youth, is not a threat actually. S: People may see the change, maybe in terms of values, like respect for parents or maybe in earlier days it was joint families and they are now breaking up into nuclear families, and all these kinds of cultural changes are coming in India and maybe that’s why people are saying that it’s been adopted from the West. Globalisation has definitely affected the lives of farmers in India, and they are likely hurt, that’s true. But that means that in an economic sense, it has been affected. Do you see a special role of Europe in this? Q: Europe as such is not a culprit, in Indian people’s thinking. It is either the US or the UK. The US is always portrayed as something that is trying to have hand on all the resources all over the world. I think among Indians, Europe has got a sound name. There are many Indians settled in Europe. In the 1960s, if you see the emigrants from Asia, they selected European countries to settle in. And in the late 1980s they started shifting to the US. So US, since its interference in politics in other parts of the globe and its interference in economics and other aspects, that has been taken as something questionable by most of the Indians here. And it is true. When bilateral issues between India and Pakistan are seen: ‘what does the US think about any decision?’ It’s like always people looked up for US to nod their head whether it’s correct or not. It’s not bilateral issue between two countries, it becomes third-party interference. So now people are aware, they want other governments to be aware of this. Because India is one of the growing economic countries, they want India to have its own decision rather than seeing towards US. Europe, I don’t think it’s much of a trouble maker here. What does Europe stand for, for Indians? Q: If you see the history, the Europeans have colonised most of the countries in Asia and South-east Asia. But now, at present, after globalisation and liberalisation policies, that image is getting diminished. They’re no longer taken as colonial countries. Now, they have completely changed. I don’t think that, apart from that, we have any other image. It’s like only, we were the colonies of some European countries.

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Are we moving towards a world society or is it disintegrating? S: We are definitely moving onto something like a world society, because now we see so many people migrating from one country to another. So many Indians migrating to US, UK, New Zealand, Canada, all these places. So definitely, the world is getting smaller, and I don’t think it is disintegrating. We are coming much closer, and there is much exchange of cultural ideas, and people have to learn to live in pluralistic societies, and there are multi-ethnic and multicultural people around you and people do live in harmony with each other. Q: I agree with her that we are becoming a world society, but my concern is that, whatever migration, or whatever for better perspective people move from one to the other end, I feel it’s a false displacement in a way. I feel it’s a polarisation between the developed and the underdeveloped countries, which is getting more and more. And that is the reason why people are forced to migrate to other countries, where they can have better living standard. I don’t think that’s their own choice, but their circumstances, their social, economic and political situation is such that they have no other option but to migrate to some better country. So it’s an unjust world society but nevertheless a world society. Exactly, it’s an unjust world society, of course it’s a society, but the polarisation is getting wider and wider. How do you conceive of the gender politics issue in the context of India? Q: I have done my research on uniform civil courts, which was one of the most controversial issues related to personal law and implementing uniform law for all the Indian citizens. It started with the objective of creating national integration, but in the 1960s it moved towards demanding for gender rights, equal rights for women from all the communities and gradually the whole motto changed to communalisation of uniform civil code. In the 1980s, they started demanding it’s like Muslims who are reluctant to change and any reforms in their law and they would not want to be a part of mainstream law. In the 1980s, a case of one lady, Shah Bano, that was a turning point, where the whole communalisation of the religion and its personal law took place. In the late 1980s, these Rightwing elements stated gaining their ground on such issues like ‘Muslims are not really loyal to the country because they are not accepting uniform

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civil code’. Uniform civil court was taken as a threat for Muslim minorities’ identity. This personal law board thought that they are going to gradually wipe out the community from the country in the name of uniform civil court. All these issues were misinformed by the media. Certain issues were highlighted so much by Muslim lawyers who claimed that a uniform civil code was degrading for women, it’s antiwomen and anti-progressive. All these things made it look like Muslims are very backward and very conservative and they are not for any reforms. But that was not the true picture. The other side of the coin was that, since it got so much communalised, Muslims started feeling this threat that they might wipe the whole community out of India. In the 1990s, after the demolishing of Babri Mosque, the whole communal propaganda by the Right-wing elements started to say that women are actually the cause of all insecurity of any community. Say the Gujarat riot, you must be aware of it, this was completely a planned sexual violence against women of the minority community. In India, women are considered as a symbol of honour for any community, family or whatever. So to harm a woman, to target a woman means you are demoralising the whole community. And since women are most vulnerable, it’s very easy to target them. Muslim women are battered in both ways, being a part of the minority community, and within the community, being a woman. Since the communalisation is so threatening, they make their women more confined and more into hijab and all this sort of things. You have to protect yourself for the sake of community. Or you have to give up your rights for the sake of community. That’s how in one sense gender identity is a big issue these days. And we are really working hard on it, and we are trying to assert our rights and also trying to bring certain laws which will actually safeguard … because the Muslim personal law board says that if we even think of bringing some reforms, that means we are inviting the communal elements to attack us. So they are reluctant in that sense, and women are losing their rights especially in family issues. In communal violence, you must have come across how they are being victimised. That is one reason. S: Certainly, yes women are always being … like is said that if you dishonour the women, you dishonour the whole community. So women are targeted during communal riots. And also as she said about the Shah Bano case, it was totally politicised, and always like for Muslim women, the Right-wing party, they always do the propaganda that among Muslims there exists polygamy, how they harass their women. But the fact is that

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polygamy is more existing in non-Muslims than in Muslims. They always use the Shari’a law, the personal law, and they just politicise the things, whether it is a fact or not. Even during the resolution of the Muslim Marriage Act, when it came, most of the Muslims were coverting to Hindus because they were not getting divorce, so the Muslim marriage dissolution Act was introduced. Q: After this, there was no initiative taken to reform Muslim law. Sometimes in Hindi films one finds the topos of the Hindu male taking another wife. But is this still happening? I mean, is there really polygamy among Hindus? Q: Yes, surveys show that Jain community is the most polygamous and Hindu community comes third and Muslim community comes at sixth or fifth place. It is not at all permissible in Hindu law to have second wife. In case of Muslim, even he marries second, that second wife and her children has the right on property and share. But in case of Hindu, even if you are married you are considered as illegal and the child is considered as illegitimate. Many times it happens, you know, Hindu male, they convert, they become a Muslim for one day and night, they marry, and then they again go back to their own religion. Just to assure the validity of the marriage. There is this Maitri Karar1 among Hindus, but that is not considered as a valid marriage system. … very interesting! There is also the reverse case of polyandry. You have this in the Mahabharata where Draupadi is wedded to the five Pandawa brothers, you still have it somewhere in the hills. I have recently learned from one of my students that in some villages in Hariyana … … among tribals, yes … … but even in the majority society. In Himachal Pradesh, for example, the malefemale ratio is so bad—there are less then five hundred women on a thousand males—so they have to marry two brothers to the same wife … … exactly, that’s because they have this female foeticide very much in Hariyana and all these places and we are campaigning with one of the groups there against female foeticide. That is again a traditional practice. And that’s the reason the ratio is so much disproportionate. I don’t think polyandry would be the solution for it and no Hindu man would like to have a polyandrous relation, a wife having more than one man.

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They would prefer to marry some woman from another caste or some woman from another region. There must be some few cases. But among tribals it is there. Matrilineal tribals, they have this practice still. Identity politics can have an emancipatory aspect to it—this is what we normally associate with gender identity. But then among feminists there are also different kinds. How do you see the scene developing in India? Q: There are many women rights activists who do want to call themselves as feminists because it’s Western terminology. Especially me working among Muslim community, if I tell them like I’m more feminist and would want to work for rights they’ll say ‘yeah, she’s influenced by Western ideology and she would talk about bodily rights and all this to give secular laws to be implemented’. Here the scene is different. Here I would say the family law, which the Muslims are practising, it has got its source in Qur’an and Sunnah and Hadith and all this. So we cannot ask them to discard all this things and to demand for a secular law. When I go and have discussions with some activists here, most of them demand secular law saying that Qur’anic law, Islamic law is subverting women’s rights. When they speak this language the result is that the common Muslim women are not so supportive with the cause and they might say ‘yeah, it’s okay, whatever kind of rights we have is fine, but we will not go against Qur’an or Sunnah, and we will not follow your ideology of secular law’. So things are different here in India. There are groups who are promoting religious … like say … Muslim activists, now they have started reading and researching on Qur’anic rights and all, so that people should be aware. And also to talk with the ulama, like what is the reason, why can’t we have a reform and all this. So the trend is changing and now they are accepting religion. Religion in the sense that the scripture which actually gave some rights to women. Of course there are some radical feminists as well, but I don’t’ think they are much more popular here. Because when you are working at a community level, you have to see the mentality of those women. You can’t just go and ask you give up your religion and come with us if you want to have rights. I mean you have to speak the masses’ language. Is it more about right interpretation of the tradition? Exactly! And right interpretation in the sense like we know it’s been completely distorted. We know, it’s simple, it’s nothing to be interpreted

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in a more scholarly manner. Especially with the family related issues like marriage and divorce. Like even if a child sits and interprets and tries to understand, the translation is the same, the interpretation is the same but there are few words which are misinterpreted in such manner, and it’s made to look as if it’s very complicated. No common Muslim can understand. Leave it with the ulama, leave it to our job. It’s not like that. Can you give an example? For example, we have this ‘wadribuhunna’—that means ‘you can beat your wife’. OK? This is a very funny one. Last year a domestic violence bill had come up. The ulama started saying that this is interfering with Shari’a, Shari’a allows us to beat our wife. So that particular term has got hundred of meanings in the dictionary. If you see the language of the pre-Islamic period, like what tribals used to have, it has a completely different meaning. It’s like he can go or she can go. The whole verse if you see in context it says like if she rebels against you, warn her, than you leave her alone at home in the bed. And if she repents you go towards her. That’s the main thing, wadribuhunna. But here, wadribuhunna taken as like you need to beat your wife if she rebels against you. Again, the word ‘rebel’ doesn’t mean like she is rebelling like if you’re asking her to do something, and she says no I won’t do that or I’m not keeping well so I will not do this work. That doesn’t mean rebel. There it means that if she’s having extramarital affair. That is the main intention. If she’s having an extramarital, then also like you have to be very lenient with her. I mean you just can’t go and kill her. You have to bring her home, leave her alone on the bed, make her follow the right path, even if she doesn’t do that and if she reconciles or whatever like she becomes good then it’s fine. But then, it’s also taken like you have to obey your husband if your husband asks you to go there, without his permission you cannot go. That is all wrong interpretation they have done. So even this triple divorce, oral divorce is a major issue there. … you mean the triple talaq … … it’s un-Islamic, it’s not a part of Islam … … achha? … yeah, that’s what …

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… talaq is not part of Islam? … especially oral triple divorce. Divorce is there, but there arbitrators are appointed, three-month period is given, like how we have in our modern law. But this oral triple divorce is such, like where even if you are in a state of intoxication, in anger, or even if you have dreamt like saying you have given talaq, that it is considered as valid and it’s only practised in India. There is no other country having this kind of talaq, which is un-Islamic, pre-Islamic practice. But what do you make of things like the value of a female witness in court being only half as much as a male witness? Q: Again the whole thing is so clear, if you really go through those verses. It says in financial transactions. And it is a contextual one. It’s not some norm that gives you principles like you have to follow even after thousand years. In those days, women were not educated, not aware of certain financial transactions. So in that case you need to have two women. And in one interpretation, where Maulana Mumtaz Ali Khan very well writes saying it’s actually a privilege for a woman because if one gets pregnant, or if one is ill or something like that, the other can come and give the witness. That is one of the reasons. But it is said only in case of financial transactions. But what if some woman is a manager in a bank you know or in some financial institution, will their witness not be considered as valid? In recent days, women are educated, well aware, they know what is right and wrong, so that cannot be applicable at present. That was very contextual. I would very much agree with you that one would have to take into account the historical context. But what would you consider the trans-historical, never-changing basis of Islam if you take away the historic shells, like if you peal an onion, what comes at the core of it? Q: The central value is equality and justice and the whole things revolve around that, whether it’s social, economic, political or whatever. So when prophet tried to bring these reforms in that tribal society, in the system, he first worked for women and the slaves. He wanted to upgrade their status saying they all are equal, all are human beings. Many a times it happened prophet consulted the local people, like what is your belief and tradition and that’s how he worked with them and gave certain laws and commandments. But ulama says that what is said is said, and it

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is divine and we cannot change it, that is wrong. Because Prophet himself was so humble. He did not considered himself a perfect human being and he consulted even a tribal, even a farmer, and also a person who was Jew or Christian. He consulted even these people about certain practices. So why can’t we do it now … but that whole misconception of divine is, you know, getting problematic. So what is the divine? Q: Divine is something which gives you value. A principle, like I mean which is transcendent. Like if I say you have to be compassionate. So even if you live thousand years ahead, that value will remain the same. Of course, the form will change, how you try to behave. Some people open up charities, some try to be involved in some charity work, some, like treating ailing people or something like that. The form will change, but that value, transcendent values are divine, and these values are divine in all the scriptures, all the communities have their revelation … … even in other religions it seems … … of course! You won’t believe, Michael, even Qur’an says that you have to believe in earlier revelation, earlier prophet. That means then only we are complete Muslims. So you have to accept the revelation of Moses, Jesus, Abraham, everything … … what about Buddha? Yeah, Buddha is also being said as one of the prophets, because it is said that 136,000 prophets are sent in earth so Buddha or Ram could be one of them because India being such a vast country and without any prophet, I mean, that is something unimaginable, so Buddha is also a prophet, can be considered as a prophet. But again, to speak all this in front of a so-called ulama or something its like you are a kafir. Are there female ulamas in India? Q: Not as such, but you know one female qazi is there, but she is not an alim. There are other female alims, but again, they are those Orthodox, conservative ones. In women’s madrasas, what they teach is the same, and they will not bring any change. In fact, they are the ones who enforce more restrictions on women.

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S: Here again it’s a male dominated thing and to safeguard their own power they interpret the things as they want. So, you know, even if in the Qur’an it is given that four marriages are allowed, but there are some conditions levied. It’s like this verse had come during the time of a war when so many men were killed and there were many women and orphans left behind. So it was said that if you can do justice to the other women then only you marry her. If you can’t do justice, then you can’t marry. You know justice in a holistic manner. It is very much impossible for a man to do justice in all the matters. Maybe in money matter you can do, but not in love or giving time or something. So it’s like this has been misinterpreted and half of the part the conditions are levied those are totally distorted and it’s only given that a man can do four marriages—to keep that power in their hand. If the woman, if they can say that a woman can lay all these conditions the power will go from their hands. So again here the role of power is coming into consideration. Again the media over here, if you see like during the case of Imrana, during a case in Orissa a person had divorced his wife in an intoxicated state, so even the husband and the wife had not consulted the ulama for a fatwa and the media person had been going to the ulama for a fatwas. I mean here the media is also playing a very important role. When it comes to any Muslim family issues, they will run to the ulama and the ulama will give a fatwa and the fatwa is not that it’s been any judgement, it’s just an opinion, and the media will project it in such a manner that it has been a judgement that now the couple has to stay separately, it’s a divorce. But no, it’s just a fatwa, it’s just an opinion of that ulama. Q: In one point I don’t agree. Qur’an permits polygamy. I said Qur’an in fact restricts polygamy. That was contextual what you said during war it happened but there is one verse even if you desire to do justice you cannot do so you better have one wife but that verse is completely ignored and it is projected like it is permissible. So we need to reinterpret certain things in the Qur’an. S. And the pro-women verses are totally ignored. They’re not in the picture at all. Q: You know Michael, all the verses for men is duty based and for women it’s right based, but in the practice it’s all topsy-turvy: men it’s all rights based, women it’s all duty based.

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S: In the Qur’an it is given that if the mother does not want to nurse her child then she can do it. Q: If she doesn’t want to breastfeed her baby then husband has to provide a mid-wife and pay for the maintenance or whatever. But he cannot force his wife to breastfeed the baby. S: But here we are seeing that even after divorce the husbands are not ready to pay for the maintenance (laughs). Q: But things are difficult in India because law is not codified, you know that. We don’t have a codified law. It’s Anglo-Muhammadan law which is being taken as Shari’a law. So we are trying also for the codifications, at least for polygamy and triple divorce. The rest will all be fine. But that’s a long procedure. So meanwhile what we have started, I mean, we have started preparing a model Nikanama, a standardised Nikanama, which will actually have all those provisions, which will guard her from triple divorce, polygamy and whatever. Like she can stipulate conditions there. It’s a marriage contract. Yeah, marriage contract, but ulama has not yet come out with that. Because we don’t have a standard certificate. Every Jamaat, every community and groups have their different marriage contracts. But you can always marry under the special marriage act. Even Muslims can marry in the special marriage act. But you know, Muslims are not so educated and aware of all the rights. Only in case of inter-caste marriage people go for special marriage act, otherwise they stick to their traditional marriage contracts. S: In fact there is a component of ijtihad which people don’t use at all. It’s like you can make amendments in law according to the present circumstances. But that component is totally banned and it’s being believed that the Shari’a, which is given so many years ago, whether it is relevant or not, there cannot be any amendments and it is the final last divine word that everybody has to follow. Again a male self-glorification. Q: In India it’s more like a feudal mindset and the whole patriarchal ideology revolves around it.

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So who in India would be a proponent of the reopening of the gates of ijtihad? Q: That’s what, you know, we are so unfortunate. There are alims who really say they support us but nobody … they used to speak like we can sit and do ijtihad. The main thing is the Wahhabi kind of Islam which is spreading all over. That is actually creating more problems for the people who are working for women’s rights in particular. In general, it’s for all Muslim masses. But Salafi kind of Islam which actually is so intolerant and you know you cannot question, or you know, you cannot think of any reform or change. And that actually has influenced so much here in India and we have the whole Tablighi movement, which is again a big hurdle. Qutub Kidwai is executive director at the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism (CSSS) in Mumbai. Shirin Huda is presently pursuing post-graduate studies at the University of London, UK. At the time of the interview the two were in charge of the Muslim Women’s Newsletter.

Note 1. In Hindi ‘Friendship contract’ or ‘declaration of good will’, not legally enforceable but giving a sense of security to the married man’s ‘other woman’.

Gurpreet Mahajan

Many people nowadays perceive some religions or religion as such as a threat. What is your personal experience in this regard? Religion has to be dealt with at two fairly different levels. One, as a matter of belief, and this involves the individual at the private level as well as the social level. Religion forms a system of beliefs on the basis of which you act, an input into the way you perceive yourself, project yourself, and the way other people perceive you. So it is a basis of your personal identity and social interaction. The second element of course is the presence of organised religion in the form of religious groups/communities. While religious communities exist in the social world, their presence is felt most strongly when they come together and get mobilised in pursuit of some shared concerns and agendas. These agendas may involve religious and cultural issues but they may also raise social and political concerns of the group. Mobilisations take different forms, from public gatherings, sit-ins, to marches and confrontations with the state personnel. Some of the issues raised by religious communities are relatively easier to accommodate than others. In some cases, a religious community may feel that its concerns of equal treatment and respect has not been sufficiently attended to in a democracy; at other times, a democratic polity may feel that the articulated community concern violates a central principle of liberal life, and hence cannot be accommodated. So, religion (or more precisely, religious community mobilisations) may be perceived as a threat for different kinds of reasons. In India, for instance, it is not a given religion or its doctrine that it is seen as a threat. It is religious organisations, community mobilisations that are considered to be a source of possible threat. In particular, it is the mobilisation of religious communities for political goals and aspirations, for creating group solidarities and vote banks, that is a cause of concern. So, religion per se is not usually seen as a source of threat. For most, it is a mode of positive affirmation of a set of ideas and beliefs. As one important basis of one’s personal identity, it is often valued positively and treated as a moral resource that you can rely on. The distinction between religion as a set of beliefs and religious organisations and religious communities is not always easy to maintain.

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Almost all religions have an institutionalised form and we encounter others sometimes as individuals but sometimes as members belonging to a religious community or organisation. When religious communities and organisations are assertive and highly mobilised, it is difficult to isolate the two dimensions of religion and under such circumstances people tend to be suspicious of religion itself. This was certainly the attitude that the Enlightenment philosophes expressed in western Europe and it has some support even in India. But most liberal democracies today give considerable degree of religious liberty to their citizens. India is no exception. In fact the Constitution of India not just recognises the presence of different religions but also gives individuals the right to observe their distinct religious practices. You have mentioned institutionalisation or organisation of religion in the Indian context. What do you have in mind there? Almost all religious groups have some organisational structures which are involved, among other things, with the administration and control of religious places of worship. In the case of Hinduism, a single hierarchy or chain of religious authority is absent, nevertheless different sects and groups have a recognised religious leader and source of authority. In India, since matters of family are governed by community personal laws, religious communities also have institutions that are engaged in defining and implementing the laws, and quite obviously, the actions of these institutions play a critical role in the life of the members of the community. In addition to it, there are political parties that claim to represent the voice of the community; they often work in close association with the recognised religious leadership/authority in the community. Then there are religious organisations, engaged in a range of social and cultural activities, and they have the potential of becoming the agents of religious community mobilisation, something that religious leadership or the religious political party can draw upon to assert its claims vis-à-vis the state, other communities and also vis-à-vis the members of their own community. With this network of affiliates, religious communities can lay down the norm, exerting formal and informal pressure upon individuals to act in particular ways, thereby restricting their ability to make independent choices. When it is the majority religious community that gets mobilised in this form, it not only threatens the autonomy of its own members but also has the potential of homogenising the population, or pushing for that agenda. This can be threatening to other religious communities in the polity.

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This is why religious communities and organisations are seen as some sort of threat for they tend to restrict individual choices. Understandably, there are liberal anxieties about this. But threat is perhaps a strong word. The assertion of a majority community may be seen as a threat as it can impact the nature of the political community and its character as a plural and diverse democracy. But having said this let me add that the term ‘threat’ should be used with some caution as it is not a continuous state of being. There are long periods of time as well as many regions where different religious communities coexist side by side and interact with each other in different walks of life. But independent India has witnessed several, even if sporadic, incidents of inter-community violence. In recent times, we have also witnessed conflicts, including violent clashes, between sects (or what are different denomination-like groups within a religious identity). It is inter-community conflicts that pose the most serious threat. The capacity of the victims to resume a near normal life after such conflicts depends critically upon the manner in which the state and its various apparatuses deal with the situation and ensure that the vulnerable groups do not feel continuously threatened. How is the perception of some religion or religion as such as a ‘threat’ or as a restriction of choices being reflected in your academic environment, that is among scholars who deal with these issues on an academic basis, as a theme of academic research, of conferences, and so on? India always saw herself as a plural and diverse society. In the first few decades, there were concerns that demands for self-governance and recognition of linguistic diversity through re-organisation of state (regional) boundaries may result in further fragmentation of the polity. Since most Western scholars writing on India had predicted such fragmentation, and at the time of independence the country had been portioned to accommodate religious identity concerns, questions of unity and fragmentation loomed large over the polity. There were considerable anxieties in this regard. Questions of what should be accommodated and in what form preoccupied the leadership. But since the 1980s, there is a growing confidence that India is a political community even if there is no strong cultural anchoring of that community identity. This is reflected in the academic work that was undertaken on the nature of Indian democracy. However, even today there are differences, as there must always be in a vibrant democracy, on this issue. Although the linguistic re-organisation of state boundaries did not lead to the territorial fragmentation of the

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country, there are scholars who feel that accommodating diversity through a system of special rights poses a threat to Indian democracy. There are also deep anxieties about the use of religion and mobilisations of identities on religious grounds in different parts of the country: a fear that discontent arising out of lack of development may be used to mobilise some identities against others. Since the 1990s, academics and intellectuals have been overwhelmingly concerned with the threat posed by the rise of, what may be called, religious or cultural majoritarianism. There has therefore been considerable discussion and writing on this subject in relation to secularism. There is also an ongoing concern about ‘what would be the best possible way of accommodating different communities on an equal basis?’ Although some scholars link both these questions with secularism, my own view is that we need to make a distinction between different kinds of concerns here. Sometimes, the Indian academic community refers to ‘protection of diversity’ interchangeably with ‘creation of a secular state in which all communities and groups are treated equally’ and no one is discriminated against. I think there is still need to do more work on this issue of equality and social justice. We (the academic and intellectual community) need to differentiate between different patterns of discrimination, and different sources of disadvantage. While there can be a parallel coexistence of different projects aiming to end discrimination, not all discriminations really require same policies; nor do all forms of disadvantage create the same anxieties so we need to differentiate between them. Besides, all these different concerns and agendas should not be bracketed under the concept of secularism. To my mind, secularism deals much more specifically with religionbased discrimination and this form of discrimination can be of various kinds: of one community by another, of religious believers by nonbelievers, non-believers by believers, and so on. Each of these specific kinds of religion-based discrimination needs to be addressed separately, and often through different policies. But religion-based discrimination is only one kind of discrimination. Diversity-related concerns go beyond religion, to other spheres also of cultural existence. Since religion is a source of certain cultural codes, there is an overlap yet there is also a distinction, and we need to maintain that. And then there are other forms of social, caste-based and other kinds of, discrimination, which are entirely different and need to be disaggregated and analysed along different lines. I think that in the academic community—because these are issues which impact on everyday life of very large numbers of

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people—these boundaries tend to get blurred I would like to see some of these distinctions to come through the emerging studies and analysis. Many perceive the West as a threat. What is your personal experience in this regard? The easy answer of course would be to say that the West is not a homogeneous entity, and there are differences between them. But that apart, I think the West has come to symbolise a range of different agendas, political and economic. As a previously colonised country, there is tremendous concern about being subservient to the interests of another power, so when it comes to agendas, or even concepts and categories through which we think and analyse the social reality, this remains a major concern. However, in my view, politically by now India is quite confident of her independence and her democracy, and she can set aside anxieties that emerge from its past. There are two issues here, which we need to be conscious of. One is that Western post-Enlightenment rationality enunciated a notion of liberal democracy and the ideas that go with it: namely, equal liberty for all people, which implies both the pursuit of equality and liberty, and a commitment that all persons, whatever be their caste, religion or gender, will be treated as equals. As a democracy India also endorses these ideas which, even in the West, came with post-Enlightenment (although there were periods when these elements were not recognised in many emerging democracies in the West). So if by ‘West’ we imply post-Enlightenment rationality and include the ideas that come with post-Enlightenment rationality, then certainly they have a very important place in our lives in India and elsewhere. The second issue is that democracy is to some extent a near-universal aspiration today. If democracy implies not just self-governance through free and fair elections but also ways of organising society, where discrimination on the basis of socially ascribed identities are eliminated or at least minimised, then this is an aspiration that is very widespread, and India has incorporated it. If we were to resist everything in the label of the West, it would mean that we would be rejecting many of these aspirations, or alternatively, trying very hard to find in some distant past elements which resembled these ideas and institutional structures. I think we need to recognise an encounter with Western modernity brought to us notions of a free and equal society that is democratically organised, but at the same time realise that the manner in which the notions of liberty and equality have got concretised in India is quite distinct. The social and political struggles over the last two centuries at least have

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shaped the political imagination here and given a determinate form to these ideas in India. The Constitution of India gave centrality to the concerns of equality and liberty, however, as I said earlier, it interpreted and institutionalised these ideas in ways that do not simply replicate the experience and thinking of the West. So, it would be erroneous to label our framework as Western but it would be equally mistaken to ignore the influence of the West. There is another level at which we need to bring the West back in. The categories with which we as social scientists and as citizens make sense of our world and democracy have been articulated more systematically in the writings that have come to us from western Europe or America. Even critiques of the liberal tradition that have come from there are invoked not only to make sense of our own personal lives but also to make sense of the state and its various actions. Therefore, an agenda where we just have an ‘ethno-social science’, where India is to be studied and understood only in categories which are indigenous, would be very restrictive. In fact it would inhibit our ability to make sense of the multiplicities that coexist in a changing democratic society like India. How do you perceive the role of Europe in this connection? I think Europe has to recognise that people in any country, and in India also, carry with them a part of their past, but they are also open to a range of influences that have come from various places. So the self here is constituted through a mix of categories that have come from the past, but also very much from Europe. These categories, as I explained earlier, have been used and developed in ways that are unique to India. What needs to be recognised is that you cannot understand India merely by studying its past. This has to be emphasised because in some parts of Europe, the tendency was to understand and represent India through the purity of her tradition, and through the study of the classical texts. These studies and this form of analysis do not give us an adequate picture of contemporary India. Not only because India is changing and transforming but because the colonial past—forget anything else—has brought us face to face with a range of new categories. And that experience has been absorbed and it has become part of what India is and the manner in which we think of ourselves. There is also a second element that Europe needs to recognise. Liberalism, which became a dominant tradition in much of Europe, developed around the notion of the individual. But that notion of the individual actually evolved in a national context which was defined by

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homogeneity of a certain kind. Individualism really grew at a time when there were strong restrictions on religious differences and diversities. So the presence of religious homogeneity went hand-in-hand with individualism. This was the kind of paradox with which liberalism has grown and developed in Europe and I think this has marked the institutions and the experiences of Europe, the confidence as well as the notions of threat and fears that it has. Today, when it accepts greater degrees of diversities, it is compelled to experiment with ways of life, forms of institutionalisation that must recognise collective entities other than the individual. I think in India, for a variety of different reasons, partly historical, partly cultural and political, we never had a similar situation of cultural and religious homogeneity in which individualism could flourish. The relative neglect of the individual and her liberty is a weakness that marks even contemporary India: But on the other side, we (in India) are very cognisant of different forms of collective identities, the possibilities they hold for enhancing freedom and peaceful coexistence as well as the dangers that they pose to individual liberty. Our institutions were created keeping in mind these multiple kinds of identities and solidarities. So I think this is a time when we need perhaps a greater degree of dialogue and discussion between India and Europe because there are these complementary ‘blindnesses’, or limitations of sorts. We need India to move towards regimes which are more perceptive and mindful of individual liberty and I think a lot of Europe needs really to recognise that certain forms of collective life, and some expressions of it, are not necessarily threatening. Accommodating them need not generate liberal anxieties. Since these gaps and perceptions have emerged out of two fairly different historical experiences we need to have a much more sustained and detailed discussion, dialogue and exchange of views. I think through such an interaction we would each be able to look back at our traditions and address its seeming limitations and concerns. This is the need of the hour: Europe needs to engage with India and India needs to engage with Europe at this moment. Do you think we are moving towards a closer knit world society or do you think that world society is disintegrating? I think as democracy becomes a kind of aspiration of larger and larger numbers of people, there will be things that connect people together. At one level, differences will not appear to be as striking as they may have been a 100 or 200 years ago, so there will be a sense of affinity; and there will also be a sense of identity with others. As economic patterns

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of organisation change, and new technologies link the world, there will also be similarity at other levels, such as, personal lifestyles as well as the way we organise our cities and urban spaces. These things will become similar, and maybe moving from one place to another will not appear to be a difficult or disorienting experience. The way markets are developing and integrating, we are likely to share experiences with people living in places fairly distant from our own. Fluctuations in the market in parts of the world are likely to affect the lives of people in another part of the globe, and cultural and artistic icons may well become global in nature. People struggling in one part of the world might find allies in the civil society of another country. But, this does not mean that all forms of differences will disappear. What is likely to happen, and get consolidated, is that instead of marked cultural differences between one country and another, differences will become more visible within each country. This just means that we would probably have to rethink our notions of what it means to be a democracy. Politically, we may begin to look more and more like each other, in terms of organisation of public spaces, but internal diversities, of cultures and lifestyles, will persist. So transcending the nation-state and forming a world society of sorts may appear to be possible but the nation-state may not entirely vanish. More importantly, new kinds of pluralities may emerge and seek accommodation and this would pose new challenges to existing democracies. Do you see a particular role of religion in this? It’s very difficult to answer this question, but let me say this. We were talking of something like a world society, of being a world citizen—an idea associated with cosmopolitanism of a certain kind. For a cosmopolitan, one major issue is—‘why should we have a sense of responsibility to people far, far away, with whom we have nothing, or very little in common?’ We could give an abstract answer, like we owe others something as we ‘belong to the same humankind’. This notion of being part of a single unity, the humankind, would be seen by many as an idea deeply rooted in a religious ways of thinking. In a Christian world, for instance, we would be children of the same God; in some other religions, it would be said that ‘we are all creatures, of the same creator’. This is a deeply religious thought. So in one sense, this notion of an underlying unity, and the accompanying humanitarian sentiment may have a religious basis. So as we explore, the possibility of a more cosmopolitan order or global justice religion may offer a positive input, and be a moral resource.

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If, however, we reject the notion of a creator of any kind, and begin simply with the idea of human beings, well then religion would not have a positive role of this kind. Religion would not, however, vanish. Its presence would raise a different set of concerns. Indeed in most societies, religion surfaces in a different way: it prescribes or sanctions a particular social ethic and social code of behaviour. It constitutes, in other words, the basis of visible differences, shaping the habits, concerns and agendas of its members. These differences of belief, thought and action are not always compatible with each other and some religious believers assume the superiority or rationality of just their own way of life. So we have histories of conflict and contestations between religions and religious groups. Today, most Western democracies are coping with the challenge of accommodating a range of religious diversity in their public life. Shared past experiences and at times shared present social and cultural practices have created solidarities within each country. These collective entities cannot be ignored entirely. Indeed the assertion of religious differences has compelled most democracies to reflect more carefully on what they considered habitually as reasonable and acceptable; to see if their prevailing rules and laws reflect merely their distinct religious or cultural orientation; and whether the existing set of norms can be applied to members of other religions without disadvantaging them. I see religion and cultural religious groups raising issues of this kind, where states and liberal democracies will have to be much more self-conscious about their laws, compelling them to interrogate their own reasoning and defend it publicly. I do not know if this should be seen as the role of religion for religion was not intended for this task. But the presence of religion cannot be ignored and as democracies find ways of dealing more fairly with people of different religions it is likely to get strengthened and deepened. Gurpreet Mahajan is a professor of Political Science at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Shail Mayaram

Many, these days, perceive some specific religion or religions as such as a threat. How do you experience this in your personal environment? There are many aspects of religion, I think, that one needs to differentiate between. There is certainly a politicised mode of religion. That’s quiet apparent in the politics of the Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the demolition of the Babri Mosque that we’ve lived through; the minoritisation of Muslims and Christians, Gujarat 2002, and so on. What’s coming out now in the media are the testimonies of people in Gujarat who were involved directly in violence. This is something one has known but to have it down in black and white and the graphic use of language is something that really shakes you—to confront this politics of hate. So that’s one aspect of religion. The other is the return of the sacred, a turn towards religion. You see it all over, in the huge statues, the building of new places of worship, processions, the making of new pilgrimages and the growing turnout in pilgrimages. All of this, of course, also has strongly commercial aspects. One of the things I have been looking at is the Kanvariya Yatra. This is a pilgrimage, which takes place in the season of the monsoon. It involves people from the villages, primarily young men. Increasingly in the last couple of years, we have seen the participation of women, but this is something new. Most of these are people who come from backward castes and the Dalit castes. They carry these standards on their shoulders. They walk from their villages to Delhi and then they bring back water from the Ganga in those pots carried at the two ends of the standard and the water is consecrated at the village temple after which they are allowed to go home. This process takes place almost over a month. I’ve written a piece where I’ve asked the question whether this is a Hindu Hajj in the making. Because it’s taking on that form and it’s huge. This is emerging as a kind of premier pilgrimage of the Hindus and the Hindu world genuinely didn’t have one major pilgrimage, but instead a whole multiplicity of pilgrimages. During the Kanvariya pilgrimage, the state machinery assists them, often holding up traffic for them on national highways. Sometimes no trucks can pass. Occasionally, there’s the occurrence of violence. In one case, a truck ran over a Kanvariya pilgrim who died

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and then there were attacks and arson—the burnings of buses. This is disturbing. There’s a kind of violent energy. And it’s taking on all kinds of new manifestations every year. This year, for instance, it was noticed by one of my students working on the subject that there’s something called the truck Kanvariya. So it’s become more than just a pilgrimage on foot. Now you have a kind of relay so that there’s an entire group of people who are carried on a truck and then each of them does a relay and then either jumps down and takes over from a person who has been walking or running. This is funny because it’s a kind of mechanised version of the walking pilgrimage. Recently, I was in Bhopal. This was the period of the Ramadan fast and I went to the old city and all around the Jama Mosque. Now, Bhopal is a city which prides itself on its history of relations between Hindus and Muslims, which has been peaceful and there’s been a lot of interaction between both communities, they’ve lived together. Suddenly, I see almost encircling the Jama Masjid are three sets of ritual events taking place, which have Hindu sources, Hindu priests as participants, with Hindu images, all the chanting and speeches are on the loudspeaker. On one side, there’s a katha performance, the narration of a religious text, something else going on at the other side. It’s almost like being encir-cled. And just before that I was in a town called Vidisha, which is close to Bhopal, and this was on the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi, which has never been an important festival for Madhya Pradesh, but now there are Ganesh jhankis, as they call them all over. These are what you have in Christmas also—the child Jesus in a crib in the manger. It’s a sort of nativity scene. So there are images, all kinds of lights and tinsel and glitter and everybody seems to be heading towards these Ganesh jhankis and there’s a whole lot of activity going on. They’re hosted by so many temples. This is something very new. Similarly, I’ve worked on a community of Muslims. Their mosques keep getting grander and bigger with those shiny tiles. There is obviously money coming in from different sources, both for Hindus and Muslims. So, there is a politics of competitive religiosity, it seems to me, especially because of Hindus being in a majority there tends to be this sense of display. And then here is a third aspect of religion distinct from the political and the popular, which is far more spiritual, which doesn’t have to do with this kind of display. It’s a quest for inner peace. To me this is represented very centrally by a number of Tibetan Buddhist practitioners. There are monks and persons who are really serious about

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spreading techniques of meditation, helping people, which is not oriented towards any kind of religious conversion of any kind. It’s just about enabling people to live a deeper, more meaningful life, to find peace within. A few days ago, the Dalai Lama had got this major American award and there was a function to felicitate him being held at the India Habitat Centre (IHC) and suddenly there’s an order issued by the cabinet secretary to all the ministers not to attend that particular function. And just the next morning, there was this front page picture of Dalai Lama and Kapila Vatsyayana, a very beautiful photograph. Later, she told me about the Dalai Lama’s speech and about how beautiful this speech was and she was saying that there were different people also from different religions and there were also Muslims there and they presented him a saropa, you know, it’s a ceremonial garment of honour, and then someone presented him a sword. And then he looks at the sword and he says that what am I going to do with a sword? And then he says, Manjushri, the bodhisattva, had a sword of wisdom, and so the sword is the sword to conquer yourself, so he is turning the interpretation of the sword. This is akin to an argument about the true meaning of jihad, the greater jihad. So there is also this happening. In his speech, the Dalai Lama spoke about China and Tibet and also that he was concerned about the ecological situation, what was happening to the Brahmaputra, and the demographic modernisation of Tibet, very important ecological and demographic concerns. Also in Islam, I think, there are these trends. Take Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, for instance, who is often called a BJP-maulana but I think there is much more to be said in terms of his own journey because he was once associated with the Jamaat-e-Islami and later with the Tablighi Jamaat and somehow he has come around to have a somewhat independent position. He represents the voice which stresses interfaith dialogue with all its limitations. I don’t deny that there are very important limitations of this. So it’s a complex scenario. So the subject religion obviously is very complex and multilayered and one cannot reduce it to either a threat or a boon. It is probably both in some ways, but in this project we’re focusing on the dark side of it. There are other projects that are focusing on the more delightful sides of religion, but we are interested in the misuse of it. We are not actually even looking at how religion lends itself to this misuse but we’re looking at it from the outward perspective, on how, from the political side, from the side of mass mobilisation, religion is being used and people are being stimulated with these very strong religious sentiments … and symbols …

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… yes, so one ad hoc response to this would be that the antidote would be Enlightenment, science, so one would imagine that the scientific community, the academic community, would try to assert its critical function in a society where these processes take place and this is what you’re doing here. Especially regarding the Ramjanmabhumi Movement you have written a wonderful analysis of how this is being carried out and there are a number of other essays. But in the overall perspective for India, would you say that the academic environment is doing its job in that sense, or not? Yes, I think it is doing its job, but here are also limitations of the job but let me first address the question about science. Often the scientific establishment is also complicit in the discourses of the violence and I mean notions of Western science, the Enlightenment was certainly, and they are often deployed. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for instance, stands for ‘true secularism’. So, it’s a political stand and it’s an institutional framework, which is as scientific and as enlightened as you would have it. And the RSS stands for equality. They are training Dalit priests, and in this sense similarly jihadists are trained by or are often socialised into Islamic ideologies of violence by people who are trained in Western academies and are into Western science, so I don’t think there’s any kind of gulf between the knowledge establishment which is ‘enlightened’ versus the traditionalist which is violent. I want to avoid that sort of a dichotomy. It’s true, there are scholars in India who are working on this question. They have done work on conversion, very important work, on secularism, on the question of whether there is an alternative Indian secularism, whether there are alternative modes of nationalism and they are asking questions also about Christian conversion, the multiple kinds of Christian conversion. There’s not just the conversion which is coming as result of some kind of selfrevelation, there’s also conversion where you’re really told that the forces of darkness will be with you unless you turn to the light. And this is often being done in a very scientific way. If you look at missionaries in various kinds of religions, they use a lot of techniques drawn from anthropology, techniques of documentation, archiving … … is it science or pseudo-science? … well, science lends itself to these uses. They’re good anthropologists, if you look at right from the 18th century they have left very detailed records … so they are using science.

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I’m reminded of the attempt to establish a centre for yogic studies in JNU when I was there as a teacher. So we had these discussions about is this, science? Does this have a place in academics, or about astrology, is it science or is it humbug and it shouldn’t be in the university? These are the kinds of discourses one would expect among the scientific community in India. The problem is also in India that we haven’t given traditional knowledge a platform in the sense that they are completely marginal in the university system. Take Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. It’s one of the three eminent Shastras, and similarly there is a whole series of Shastras on ethics, aesthetics, and so on. But on the whole, the modern educational establishment has really downgraded traditional knowledge, so that what happens is that they’re brought in from the back door. There is a general sense that there is a neglect of, say, Sanskrit and Sanskrit-based knowledge and its practitioners. Basically, it’s a failure of the secular Western educational establishment, including the academy, for having done this and it has to do also with the ways in which in the last 60 years the Left secularist establishment completely dominated the Indian academy and fellowships and jobs were given to people who belonged to this particular framework. Anybody who represented another discourse was actually blacklisted. So there was no money available for them. In a sense the rise of the BJP also has to do with this. There was a very serious feeling that certain issues were being suppressed and silenced and were not to be spoken of in public arenas. I think it’s a very serious problem. The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) therefore has stood for a politics and an academic position which is critical of the Right, but it’s also critical of the Left. On the whole, many academic establishments in India, which are anti-Right generally tend to be Left oriented. So there is a political correctness, which is very problematic. We are one of the few institutions (CSDS) that has scholars who have tried to develop a third space intellectually. This would explain why in the secularism discourse in India one sometimes has the impression that secularism is equated with the pursuit of the state to actively counter religion, which would be the equivalent in Europe with what the socialist states have done, like the German Democratic Republic(GDR), but that is not the general understanding of secular. The Left has also in a sense changed. The Left took a simplistic antireligious position for many years, but recently, after the Ayodhya movement, they have seen the power of religion and now they look at what

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is good in religion, good Hinduism, good Islam, so it’s ‘Sufism is good Islam’. This again is very problematic and simplistic, you know, Sufism has been many, many things. We’re a little pressed for time, so I want to move on to another block of two or three questions which are concerned with the perception of the West in India. There is a discourse about Westernisation, globalisation as Westernisation, Westernisation as being a threat to cultural identity, and so on, and, of course, the Left would rather frame it in an anti-imperialist way: Western globalisation driven by capitalism, capitalism being geared to America and its interests. So, what would be your experience with this discourse? Well, globalisation is a very complex process and there are also alternative voices now emerging in the larger global order. It’s not just American hegemony, which is what the Left insists on, but there is also India and China becoming major players, Latin America, and so on. I mean, the world is not as multiple as we’d like to see it, but there are signs that America’s not been able to play the global policeman although the Afghanistan problem continues, Iraq continues. And there are also many grassroots movements, the World Social Forum is one of them, one forum for a complex set of constellations, and these are also globalised. Also the Islamists represent another kind of globalisation. So does Hindutva which is strategically located in the US, the UK, and so on. So, there are very complex constellations of globality I would say. Would you agree that this could be called a negative response to modernity. The impulse may be anti-modern but the means used and the ways of organising these networks across continents would be very modern and even the content of these movements are sometimes not Orthodox in any way. That’s right, yes, so there’s a complex play between the traditional, the fundamentalist and the modern and the Western. But the West is perceived as a threat in these movements. Yes, the West is, because it is seen as identified as a particular source of morality. But if one forgets the American notion of democracy, which is a checklist version, you know, you have elections and that’s democracy. But I think also within Muslim societies there are notions of democracy at play. One of my colleagues and friends, Asef Bayat, writes of post-Islamism and the ways in which there is an impetus towards

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democracy also in Muslim feminist circles. So there is a complex negotiation with Western ideas, notion of rights, notion of democracy, which is not the American statist understanding of democracy but there are also critical processes, which reflect critically on their own regimes, which aspire for a different kind of a political order. Turkey would be an example. Not only Turkey but also Morocco and Lebanon. Morocco is a very important example, and important changes have been made by recent law combining gender and Islamic law. In Iran, there are important debates among feminist circles, Islamist as well as non-Islamist circles, liberal moderate reflections. I think in Egypt much less so, but in Lebanon certainly. So, there are many countries where there is a democratisation impetus and this is going to increase. I mean, this century is going to see these debates increase. If one thinks of the West as a threat would one include Europe in this or what a role would Europe play from an Indian perspective? Well, Europe is a complex set-up and one has to disaggregate Europe. Europe has historically played a very imperial role if one looks at the French in Algeria or the Dutch in Indonesia or the English elsewhere. Britain continues under Blair to side with America, which was viewed very negatively elsewhere and Britain is now coping with its own Muslim question in a big way. I think this is also related to the internal dynamics of European societies and the fact that France has a big Muslim minority. The future clash within France is likely to be between Christians and Muslims and there is considerable Christian backlash against Muslims, with debates over integration, the headscarf flares up again and again. This creates a dynamic in terms of Europe’s affiliations with non-Europe, especially with Muslims in non-Europe. The question as to whether Turkey should become a member of the EU and debates have taken place around this, Why should Turkey not become a member? Because ‘they gave Christians such a hard time’—even well-known scholars have taken such a position. I’m coming to my last question. I don’t know if you would subscribe to the notion of an emerging world society, but if one would assume that such a thing exists, would you tend to belief that this is developing to become more closer knit or is it rather disintegrating?

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Well, there’s this whole Kantian aspiration for a cosmopolitan future of democracy and civil society and what David Held has called the cosmopolitan global order, and so on, but, look at the institutional modalities. I mean, you had the League of Nations and now you have the UN, which is generally seen as a fairly weak body. What has it been able to do in terms of stemming the tide of American power? The world is extremely fragmented, I mean, the nation-state form is a form, which itself fragments sovereignty. Sovereignty is based on a notion of political community, but national sovereignties themselves disaggregate the world. And even religion. It might sometimes work to unite, but more often then not religion has failed to actually unite people. Just look at the Muslim societies. How many Muslim societies actually went to the aid of the Palestinians? Look at the way the Palestinians are treated within Muslim societies. Lebanon has Palestinian camps where Palestinians have no right to employment and no political rights, it is difficult to get a passport. So there are all kinds of problematic questions there. The world is a dark place and it’s really getting darker still. I mean, look at the politics of armaments and the supply of those armaments. There’s this insatiable appetite for arms and, after all, the producer of armaments have to sell their products. There is this sort of vicious circle which constantly needs suppliers. I think that says that we’ve been not able to work at all towards a world society—there is no conversation about disarmament today. Shail Mayaram is a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

Deepak Mehta

Today many perceive religion as such or some particular religion as a threat—what is your personal experience in this regard? Well, I think that the way we begin to think of religion in the first place needs to be rethought. I think that there is a return of the religious in all sorts of ways but we have to be very careful about whether this return is of an Orthodoxy, polar dispensations or all sorts of notions of tradition, especially given the new media and the pervasive power of all sorts of global circulations of particular sorts of information. I think that their impact on religion has been exceedingly powerful but relatively unacknowledged. I know that there is some work done in Islam, and so on, global jihad and those kinds of things, but from my fieldwork and my reflections on Muslim societies in north India, I think that we have to be sensitive to the contexts under which, and the political compulsions under which, we are thinking about the impact of religion in the formation not only of individual subjectivities but also of large groups. And I think that it’s now possible to move to a particular kind of analysis where you begin to look at the interface of religion and the media. And I think that much of this interface takes place through this notion of religion being formulated through mediatised forms of special effects, so that there is a certain kind of way by which you begin to think of say, for example, miracles as a kind of special effects. And I think there is work coming out on this. One has to begin to chart the ways in which certain sorts of documents and certain sorts of lectures that are available on the net come home to roost. Now as far as certain groups of Muslim people are concerned in Delhi, for instance, what you are getting is that there is a very interesting move away from actual congregations to the idea of a virtual congregation. Part of this move has been formulated through mediatised forms of what constitutes the true essence of Islam, and so on and so forth. So you get this kind of a development of a kind of virtual congregation—which is not to say that the actual congregation is not there—it is, but it is now always seen through the lens of what a virtual ummah would mean, for example. So you have to chart the specificities of that requires that one be attentive to mediatised forms of information as well as the way in which such

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forms of information enter into the intimate lives of people. Now, I have a number of case studies, which actually show that the adoption of particular sorts of religious symbols, specifically Islamic symbols if you want, have been culled from the media—they are not necessarily the product of particular sorts of preachers or proselytisers of one sort or the other, but they circulate in a particular sort of medium—which is not to say that the effect of the actual community or the actual congregation does not exist—it does. But I think that we need to begin to look at the intersections between these two forms. So I would imagine that we would have to begin to ask different sorts of questions and actually open two registers, which were formerly thought to be mutually exclusive. On the one side, there is this register of public discourse and the idea of a public sphere, which is supposed to be neutral and rational, and so on and so forth, and the other, which is this sphere of the religious which doesn’t, or if it does intersect very tangentially with the public sphere. So I think what we are getting now is a very profound interpenetration of the two as a result of which it becomes very difficult to sustain a broad circulation between the affective and the rational. And I think that once you begin to look at the new religiosity or this kind of re-emergence of the religious, you have to chart it in terms of its power to generate particular sorts of affects, as much as work those affect in a rational language, so we need to explore this. I think sociology worldwide has taken cognisance of that and many social scientists have reverted from this maybe artificial way of separating secular and religious worlds and are taking religions into account. Also sociology as humanities and other sciences are a formative part of the public sphere. So, do you see such interpretation also within the academic field of social sciences? In very many ways, and very different ways. First off, what I think is that this kind of inattentiveness to this kind of religiosity allows one to transect particular sorts of disciplinary boundaries so that if one is attentive to this kind of religiosity, then you are going to actually be able to transect disciplinary boundaries, and it is not only that one sort of looks at what is happening within the discipline of sociology but that you are able to move, say, between sociology, philosophy obviously, but also information sciences. So you are able to transect those sorts of boundaries and then begin to look at the technicity that is involved in this mediatised form of religion. So yes, there are exciting possibilities as far as the world of knowledge is concerned to begin to resituate and understand this kind of religion …

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This sounds a bit like the difference between object of study and the metalanguage is maintained but at some points one may even fear or think of an interpretation of another kind where the methodology of science is called into question by religionists, even among scientists, who would question certain kinds of academic rationality and would want to move to pre-modern forms of rationality or religious forms of rationality—religious hermeneutics displacing what has been considered common sense in science. Yes, I agree with you entirely over there only that together with this kind of interrogation of a particular methodology whether this is part of the social sciences or other sciences, I think that what you’re also getting is the potential to generate a new kind of language. By language I mean not in its full-blown detail but that you are able to begin to see certain sorts of combinations, which I suppose modernity had thought it had resolved once and for all, for example, one can now begin to really ask ourselves very seriously the question of a politicised religion and a sacrilised polity. And it’s entirely possible through the return of the religious to begin to open these sort of registers and in the process also, I think, not only mount a challenge to the scientific view of the world but to begin to rethink our notions of science in relation to the sacral. I think that these possibilities certainly exist. Only, I don’t think it would be entirely fair to start from a position of the primacy of scientific knowledge over and above whatever else. I think this sort of primacy needs to be—at least at the level of the groups—this primacy needs to be interrogated, disseminated and perhaps resituated. As an empiricist, obviously you take a descriptive, explanatory position vis-à-vis these phenomena but science also has a certain normative framework. So normatively speaking, how would you expect sociology or social science to respond to this development? I’m not sure I’m exactly an empiricist. I would, on the other hand, subscribe to the view that there is a certain kind of a rational debate that one is sort of entering into and one is part of. But equally what one is just asking for is a critical reflection and a critical reflexivity on the grounds of this sort of rationality, especially in terms of its normativity. What seems to me to be interesting is not that there are norms but that there are various sorts of challenges that are posed to it under conditions of possibility under which particular sorts of norms are prised open. That seems to me to be the interesting point. What seems to me to be interesting is not that people are believers but what are the limits of belief

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and what are the grounds by which one can begin to mount a challenge. Now, science seems to provide one sort of ground but equally, to be fair to people who believe in a particular sort of way, one must be able to mount a similar challenge for science itself and begin to see the limits under which science operates. I can understand the scope by which science operates and how it constitutes and carves out particular objects of knowledge. But equally, I think that it’s very important now to begin to understand the limits of that carving out. And I think that the return of the religious allows one to ask those questions in a very specific sort of way. I am coming now to a different block of questions where the reverse perspective is focussed upon. Many perceive the West, or globalisation as Westernisation, or Western Imperialism being launched through the process of globalisation as a threat. What is your experience in this regard? Two quick responses. One, that I think there is an enormous danger in a reverse Orientalism and I think that one of the hidden subtexts of the question that you are asking is that one blames the West for all one’s ills and one’s despair, and so on. I think that one needs to move away from that kind of discourse which just seems to me to replicate old and perhaps discredited devices. Now, I’m not too sure that globalisation is entirely Western or Eastern or whatever it is because I think that any kind notion of the global necessarily—and I am following Rorty I suppose over here—is parasitic on the local. It needs the local to fill itself out. What we say are the falsehoods of globalisation is to my mind largely conditioned by the way in which particular local configurations of culture, norms, social structures, practices begin to intersect with particular sorts of mediatised forms of the flows of capital, and so on and so forth. So I would imagine that globalisation is not entirely Western and I would imagine that it’s not entirely Eastern; I would imagine that it is global and that we all have a stake in it and that there is a very powerful inflection on the local and the local itself has an agentive capacity to rework what it thinks are global configurations on its own terms to maximise its own interests. Do you see a special role of Europe in this discourse? Well, of course, in the sense that what is happening is that—more specifically I think that what you’re getting is a certain kind of prevalence of a particular kind of language of scholarship and I think that language

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of scholarship in one way or the other, I think Europe claims to have authored that particular language, its modes of philosophising, its reliance on facticity, and so on, and to the extent that Europe claims to author I’m in no position to counter this kind of thing. I think that European discourses, and I would imagine that these would be discourses in the plural, would always have a bearing on how we begin to constitute and reconstitute the global. Now that raises the question of what happens to notions of the global and to these sorts of discourses in places such as India, in third world countries—do we have a perspective? I would imagine so—I would imagine that there is a perspective but is this perspective as salient and as persuasive as that which is being developed in European academies? I doubt it very much in terms of the capacity for this kind of discourse to be cited outside of its particular cultural areas. I doubt it but I think we are moving in a particular direction where it is possible to see that there will be a profusion of discourses and points of view, which are not necessarily only European but Europe would certainly be an important contributor. Do you think we are moving towards a closer knit world society or do you think world society is disintegrating if it ever existed? On the one side, there is through a variety of forms, areas of entertainment, technologies of dissemination, and the speed at which such dissemination occurs, we are beginning to think of—you know, obviously you’re getting a collapse of spatial–temporal horizons—and to the extent we are able to rethink notions of simultaneity and synchrony, and so on. But on the other, there is a profound and I think disquieting reemergence of notions of the enemy and this kind of re-emergence rests on perceived implacable differences and I think that in a sense maybe a particular kind of discourse needs to continuously invent an enemy to fill itself out. And by discourse, one means not only discursivities but also material practices that are generated though such discourses. So I think that there is almost a kind of need to invent an enemy—and of course we know that Islam is the enemy, both real and imagined, and as far as I can see in large part this is a fictive enemy. There is some kind of strange monster, which has been homogenised under that name of Islam, which is then seen to be an enemy. To this extent, I think that there is a very sharp divide in any notion of a global discoursing community—there is a huge divide. But on the other, there is a remarkable transgression of various sorts of boundaries so there is a doubleness that is built into this.

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India has a much longer experience of integrating and living together with large Muslim constituencies, which is a two-way thing. What do you think Europe can learn from the Indian experience? The Indian experience is hugely complicated—the truism is whatever you can say about India is right and its opposite—so you get a doubleness over here too. The only thing one finds over here is that there is a certain kind of multiplicity of Islamic forces. There is not Islam in the singular over here and that’s been the historical experience. Now, assuming that there are native inhabitants, how does one begin to learn to live with difference? India offers a kind of paradigmatic case of learning to live with difference but also learning how not to live with difference—I mean it is both. So you get this doubleness that is built in. Can Europe benefit from this? I don’t know but it is a question of learning to begin to ask questions where we are able to find certain sorts of minimally reliable explanations of why is it that you get such an incredible diversity over here and how do you begin to negotiate diversities. Previously, there were all sorts of terms that were used—unity in diversity, composite culture, plurality, and so on. I think that these are all symptoms of a particular kind of condition of everyday life. We really have not begun to look seriously at the everyday life of large groups. Once we are able to do that, we will be able to ask what plurality and diversity means on the ground. I think that it is possible to learn, not necessarily in terms of benefits, but it is possible to learn that there is a certain kind notion of diversity and differences which is not based on apartheid, which is not based on separate development, which is not based on complete ghettoisation—that is the important thing one could begin to learn from. Deepak Mehta is a professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.

Salil Misra

Today, many perceive of religion as such or of any particular religion as a threat. What is your personal experience in this regard? Before I get to this question, Michael, let me make a couple of observations on this question of religion and its relationship with identity politics. One issue, which engages and puzzles most of us here, is that there is something very universal and global about identity politics and the question of identities and yet there is something very unique and specific about it. So is this question part of the unique and specific or is it part of the generic? In India, there is a tendency to relegate the question to some kind of Indian exceptionalism, according to which certain things are treated as if they’re very uniquely Indian, as part of Indian exceptionalism. On the other hand, the thesis of Indian exceptionalism, Indian uniqueness or uniqueness of any society does not clearly hold because these are trends and patterns that are visible in large parts of the country over the past two centuries and more. So, I think that on the question of identity politics, the important question is what is it about the modern world that has imparted a salience to this question? The dividing line that needs to be drawn is not between this society and that society, that community and this community or that type of politics and this type of politics—these divisions may be significant but there is a much larger dividing line between the pre-modern world and the modern world or that elusive grey zone when the world begins to make a transition from some kind of pre-modern formations into a very unique homogeneous, integrated, nicely hierarchical, modern world. While this transition is on, something happens in which the question of identity acquires tremendous centrality. It acquires a certain sharpness, teeth and strength and it becomes very biting. There are any number of people who are prepared to die and kill for it. So what is it about this transition that makes identity politics into such a salient thing? Something has happened at a global level. Something has happened at the level of the world. And then, of course, there would be different stories—all societies will have their uniqueness. There is Indian uniqueness and I will talk mainly about India because that’s the society I am familiar with. That’s one question.

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The second question is that identity politics obviously takes many forms, but it is very illusive and deceptive for this very reason that I have just talked about, the pre-modern and the modern. All the raw material, which identity politics uses, is obviously not modern, be it language, ethnicity, religion, and in the Indian case, be it caste, or it can also be tribe and so many other formations. These are all distinctly non-modern as raw material. And yet when they come into the orbit of identity politics, they are clearly not the same, they get transformed into something very different altogether. It is very important for use to make a distinction between the raw material of identity politics and its finished product. There is nothing modern about caste system in India but casteist politics in India is distinctively modern. There is nothing modern about community for instance, communities have lived for God knows how long, but when you have an identity politics based on community, that is distinctively modern. There is nothing modern about language—people have spoken languages and communicated with one another since prehistoric times—but when we talk about ‘linguism’ or linguistic ideology or linguistic chauvinism or an identity politics or identitarian claim made on behalf of a language, that is distinctively modern. So there is this modern/pre-modern divide which affects everything about our collective social life. It is important to recognise that the raw material in all forms of identity politics is definitely pre-modern, yet the form that identity politics takes in all such situations is distinctively modern. So there is this interesting distinction between general raw material and specific form it takes. It takes a whole range of forms—caste, religion, gender and language ethnicity. All of them constitute the raw material of identity politics. There is, however, another crucial component of identity politics, which is very deceptive. I am now talking about nationalist politics, which is such an important part of the modern world. Or, rather it is an important part of the process in which the pre-modern world gets transformed into modern. Nationalist politics is identity politics par excellence. I had just now said that the nationalist politics is the most deceptive form of identity politics. Let me explain what I mean by it. Its deceptiveness (or its deceptive character) can lead us into two types of traps. First trap is to assume that since nationalism is a modern phenomenon, it is not a part of identity politics because unlike caste, ethnicities, speech communities, there have been no nations in history. The second trap is to believe that since identity politics is based on primordiality, and since nationalism is a form of identity politics, nationalist politics is ipso facto,

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based upon primordiality. The first position may treat nationalism to be modern and therefore unfit to be considered a part of identity politics. The second position stresses upon the primordiality of identities and therefore may see nations as the raw material of pre-modern world. Now both the positions get a partly right, but only partly. It is therefore important to recognise that nationalism is part of identity politics and that it is distinctively modern. Of course we have had no nations in pre-modern (or rather pre-industrial) times. Nations are a modern product. It would be a mistake to look for nations in pre-modern times. So whereas other raw materials of identity politics—ethnic communities, religious communities, caste communities, speech communities—did exist in the past, national communities (or nations, if you like) did not. Nations are a modern product. That is why I say that nationalism is the most deceptive form of identity politics. It follows a very different trajectory from the raw material to the finished product. Or, to put it differently, between the element (the thing) and its ideology. The general trajectory is that the thing (or the element) exits first and then creates its own ideology. Caste communities have existed for long but under certain impulses engendered by modernity, they create their own ideologies, of casteism. Likewise, religious communities create communalism, and speech communities create linguism or linguistic chauvinism. The unique thing about nationalism is that no such national communities have existed as an a priori reality. These national communities (or nations, if you like) are created by nationalism. So in the case of nations, it happens actually the other way round—not from the thing to the ideology but from the ideology to the thing. Nations don’t create nationalism; nations don’t exist in the first place to create nationalism. It is actually nationalism that creates its own nation. To apply this framework to the Indian situation, it would be incorrect to say that an Indian nation created the ideology of Indian nationalism. It is important to realise that a nation of Indian people simply did not exist prior to modern times. So the appropriate thing would be to say that the Indian nation was created by Indian nationalism (of course, along with other objective factors). Of course this point cannot and should not be stretched too far. You can always counter it by saying that if a nation did not exist on an a priori basis, how could nationalism exist independent of, and prior to, the nation? Well, the riddle can only be solved by looking at the exact relationship between the two as that between the chicken and the egg. It is difficult to say which existed prior to whom. But we can say with certainty that the two (nation and nationalism) feed into each other and constantly reproduce each other.

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Nationalism flourishes by constantly putting forward special demands on behalf of the nation. The special demand is that this particular nation should have its own state. That is the ultimate nationalist demand. This demand actually defines nationalism. So nationalist politics is also in the end a form of identity politics. So talking about India, we have had a whole range of identity or identitarian politics and movements. The four major categories that I can single out in the Indian case would be language, caste, religion and nation—four major types of identity politics. Now, if we were to use binary categories of parochial and universal, narrow and emancipatory, inclusive and exclusive, then identity politics has been both. Let us take the Indian National Movement as an example. Indian nationalism, or the Indian National Movement, was basically inclusive in its spirit, both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, the leaders of Indian nationalism declared that all the people living in India—all Indians in other words—irrespective of religion, language, caste and religion, were one nation and as a nation it was in the collective interests of all to overthrow the alien British rule and replace it with a state that was representative of the Indian people. This really was the essence of Indian nationalism. In reality too Indian National Movement was very inclusive but for a number of reasons Muslims as a group were inadequately represented in it. For many social and political reasons, many of these Muslims got organised under the banner of an exclusively Muslim party—the Muslim League under the leadership of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The Muslim League initially put forward demands—to both the British and the Congress—for a better representation of Muslims (in various legislative bodies) on the ground that Muslims were in a minority. In other words, they practised minority politics. However, for various reasons, this minority politics did not become very successful and so from the late 1930s the minority politics began to be dramatically transformed into an alternative nationalist politics. Now this was a major conceptual and political breakthrough and it had many implications for the future of identity politics in South Asia. From arguing that Indian Muslims were a minority entitled to special treatment, representation and weightage, Muslim League argued from late 1930s onwards that Indian Muslims were a separate nation in themselves who should have their own state! This was also an explicit repudiation of the claim made by Indian nationalists that all Indian people constituted one nation, irrespective

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of differences pertaining to region, language and religion. This came to be known as the two-nation theory, as against the one-nation theory preached and practised by Indian National Congress. Thus, an entirely new identity was imparted to Indian Muslims. This politics of religious nationalism practised by Muslim League contained some inherent structural contradictions. There was actually no substantial piece of Indian territory that could be called exclusively Muslim. A substantial proportion of Muslim population was distributed in four provinces (Bengal, Punjab, Sindh, North-west Frontier Provinces) as the majority community. The remaining Muslims were scattered in all the other Indian provinces as minorities ranging from a numerical strength of 5 to 14 per cent. The Muslim majority areas were concentrated in the east and north-west, geographically separated from each other by nearly a thousand miles. The Muslim majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal, the two most important provinces, contained significant minorities of Hindus (nearly 44 per cent in Bengal and 31 per cent in Punjab) and Sikhs (around 11 per cent in Punjab). Quite apart from the geographical spread, Indian Muslims were also characterised by considerable internal cultural and linguistic diversity. In other words, all the general geographical and socio-cultural factors were working against the possibility of Indian Muslims being constituted into an internally standardised and externally differentiated national unit. These were significant contradictions in the alternative nationalist politics of the Muslim League which had implications for the future of identity politics in India. The demand for a separate Muslim state drew its justification from the fact of Muslims being a minority in India and therefore likely to be at the mercy of majority (Hindus) in independent India. But the geographical areas that were demanded for this Muslim homeland were those areas where Muslims constituted a majority (for example, Punjab, Bengal and Sindh) and hence most unlikely to be persecuted by the majority! This really was the contradiction of Muslim League politics: the ideological justification for Pakistan came from the minority status of Muslims in India, yet it was Muslim majorities that were included in the proposed Pakistan. In other words, Pakistan was being claimed for those Muslims who needed it the least, if minorityness was the yardstick. This then was the new identity, which was being put forward by the leaders of the Indian Muslims, the Muslim League and Jinnah. It was very deceptive in the sense that it was really multifaceted. It was based as much on religion as on nationality. Religion was actually made the

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base for nationality. In some ways, religion and nationality were fused together. Along with religion, language was the other thing that was invoked. The leaders of Muslim League started arguing that Urdu was the language of all Indian Muslims. Now empirically this was far from the case. The Muslims of Punjab, Bengal, Sindh and the southern parts of India spoke their regional languages. Urdu was the language of very few Muslims (mainly of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar) but was projected as an exclusively Muslim language. The underlying idea was that a nation should have its own language. Hence, Urdu was pressed into service. Thus, a new identity was created as an alternative to the already existing identity of Indian nationalism. It was in this manner that Muslim League created an ideology of alternative nationalism. Or you might call them different types of nationalisms—one that is territorial and one that is ethnic or religious. The conflict between the two was inevitable. The two identities were bound to come into clash with each other. And they did. The important thing to remember is that two broadly similar identities can also come into conflict with each other. The conflict of identities is not generally between two different types of identities but between two variants of the same identity. Within the same identity, be it the national identity, the linguistic identity or the religious identity, you can have a situation of conflict, claims and counter-claims—claims being made and claims being denied. So this conflict between Indian nationalism and let’s say Muslim nationalism in the 1940s was interesting because, on behalf of Muslim nationalism, the claim was made that Muslims are not a part of the Indian nation—they are a separate nation in themselves. Now, this claim was denied by Indian nationalism, which asserted that religion was not the basis of nationality, territory was, and therefore Muslims, along with others, formed a part of the larger Indian nation. This was the essence of contest. Now what happened in this was that for a whole range of reasons, the presence of an alien state, British Imperialism and the presence of Hindu communal forces, this demand became successful and led to the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Here the point is not whether the claim made by Muslim nationalism, was empirically justified or not. That is not very important. I mean that is not very important for the success of the movement. It could be empirically justified and yet not succeed. Likewise it could be empirically unjustified and yet succeed. This is what happened in the end. So its eventual success had nothing to do with the justness or otherwise of its claim. What is important is that this claim did lead to its fulfilment, it achieved success,

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and in 1947 a new nation-state of Pakistan came into being and the basis of this new nation-state was religion. This, now, ties up with the question that was raised by you. It ties up with the question in the sense that in India, all questions relating to religion and politics go back to the history of the 20th century. I’m just trying to explain a certain situation so that all the questions pertaining to religion will acquire some clarity. So, what happened in India around 1947 was that Muslims in India who constituted 25 per cent of the total population were reduced to an even smaller minority of around 12 per cent. So a proposed solution of the minority problem turned out to be the accentuation and deepening of the minority problem in India. The curious thing is that those who made the demand for Pakistan and fought for it were aware of it, or at any rate should have been aware of it. When Pakistan came into being as a separate nation-state of Muslims, that Pakistan consisted only of those pockets where Muslims constituted a majority—the Punjab, Bengal, Sindh, the North-west Frontier Provinces—about half the Muslims or a little more—which meant that the remaining Muslims in India, who had also contributed to the struggle for Pakistan, were doomed or destined to remain within India as hopeless minorities. So Muslims, who before 1947 constituted a minority of about 25 per cent after the making of Pakistan were reduced into a minority of about 12 per cent, which is an irony. The irony here was that the Pakistan movement was originally meant to solve the minority problem. But the movement, as it was made, actually accentuated the problem, it made the problem more serious because a 12 per cent minority was much more vulnerable than a 25 per cent minority. That was one. Second problem was that this minority (consisting of those Muslims who stayed behind in India) was also stigma ridden and haunted by persecution. It was a suspected minority. It was a minority, which was not trusted very much in 1947 and 1948. The dominant impression was that these Muslims who had stayed behind in India had not declared their allegiance to the new Indian state. They had actually declared their allegiance to the Muslim state, Pakistan. Now there is this curious logic about the functioning of newly created nation-states. Purely on the face of it they create a dividing line—not between majority and minority but between citizens and aliens. These nation-states are based on the direct membership of their citizens and demand nothing less than the total and the unmediated loyalty of their citizens. These nation-states can be very brutal in the absence of this promise of loyalty. As a result of all this, the situation became particularly unfortunate for those Muslims

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who chose to stay back in India. And the fact is that most of them stayed back as a matter of conscious choice. The remaining in India should have been seen as an expression of loyalty to the new Indian nation-state. This was proof enough. No extra proof was required. But there was another problem in all this, which complicated the issue further. You see, during the course of the nationalist struggle, the territorial nationalism of the Congress was one type of nationalism, there was also another extremely brutal, nasty and intolerant kind of majority nationalism that had been developing. You may call it Hindu communalism. I think we should stick to the word Hindu communalism. It had its own ideologues, own spokespersons and own organisations; in other words, it had all the infrastructure that you need in order to perpetuate and play out a certain kind of identity politics. Now, the philosophical assumption of this identity politics was that India belonged to its majority. India belonged to all but all were not meant to be equal. It practised what may be called a vertical membership of India, with the religious majority at the top. And the religious majority in India, in other words Hindus, was defined in such a manner so as to exclude the Muslims and the Christians. The leader of this organisation V. D. Savarkar wrote a book in 1923 in which he tackled the question of who may be called a Hindu. Now this was not an easy question. Given the tremendous diversity of Hindu faith it was not easy to find a common denominator that would tie all the members of the faith together and demarcate them from non-Hindus. So Savarkar came up with an interesting criterion: All those whose ancestral sacred places (Savarkar used the word Pitrabhumi) lay within India were Hindus. Now this definition had the merit of including Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains within Hinduism and it excluded Muslims and Christians. This was precisely what the ideologues of political Hinduism wanted. This definition of Hinduism provided them with a ready-made justification for their communal politics. So very crudely and simplistically put, this organisation said that Hindus constituted the bulk and the core of India, and their special status in India should be recognised. The crux of what they said was that India belongs to its majority and Hindus constitute the majority. They blamed the Congress for agreeing to the partition but they basically blamed the Muslims for the partition. So if Indian nationalism, basically being territorial nationalism, created the consciousness of a sacred Indian territory, Hindu communalism told us who were the villains who had violated that sacred territory.

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So, in a peculiar sense, the partition also ended up vindicating the politics of Hindu communalism. The leaders of Hindu communalism acquired a—I had warned you so—kind of righteousness. This made the conditions of Indian Muslims even more unfortunate—those Muslims who had stayed back in India. Now, this is the historical background. It is important to remember this background because it explains to us a lot of the prejudices which prevailed in India in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s on the question of religion. I am trying to argue that these prejudices were also historically constituted, they also had a history. And this is also my point that prejudices do not just live in vacuum. Prejudices are not just a product of psychic dimensions, they are not just a product of the mind. They may be, but much more than that they are also, rooted in a particular kind of history. That is why Indian distinctiveness needs to be kept in mind, Indian history needs to be kept in mind. So for us this question became very important. Muslims in India were not just a minority in a simply technical and statistical sense. They were an excluded and a persecuted minority. Muslims were not only the victims of the prejudices of the society they also began to be discriminated by the state. In the early years of independence, most of the developmental projects were undertaken by the state. The government was actually seen as the main agent of social and economic transformation. So a large number of new jobs that were created belonged mostly to the state and much less to the market. As I had said just now that for the effective functioning of the system all nation-states insist on a direct, unmediated loyalty of the citizens as a precondition. They generally do not like to take a chance. I have a feeling that Indian Muslims also became victims of this tendency in the 1950s and 1960s. This I think is the general background, the overall climate, the backdrop against which the identity politics was played out in India. This background also gave the identity politics in India its particular character. Now what was the first question. Can you just repeat the question? Well, I think you have answered my first question. Now in my second question I would be interested in how these processes are reflected in the system of social science, in academia, which is taking up these issues, trying to enlighten us about these issues, trying to be critical of these issues but sometimes also falling prey to ideologies that are promoted by identitarian politics. What is your experience in this regard? Our academia consists of scholars drawn mainly from the middle classes, also from upper classes, but very largely from the middle classes. This has been a major question for our social scientists, thinkers, and so on,

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and there are mainly two or three types of responses. I would say the most mainstream response within the academia, social sciences, is that of secularism. Our intelligentsia has tended to be very secular, sometimes ruthlessly secular, sometimes insensitively secular, but nonetheless very secular. The consensus is that problems of religious prejudice, discrimination, discrimination by actors in society but also discrimination by the state—all these problems can be handled by creating a secular climate in the country, a secular climate in the academia but also in the larger country. You see, because the major problem for our intellectuals and social scientists was that when we made the constitution in 1950/1951, it was in fact one of the more progressive and forward-looking constitutions. It was really a constitution, which tried to minimise the possibilities of discrimination against the minorities. And it also favoured the idea of protective discrimination for certain low-caste groups, scheduled castes, and so on. Some naïve people might have hoped that this problem had therefore been solved—because if the constitution is the blueprint of the modern social order and a framework of running the society, then the society should be run along these civil libertarian, emancipatory, forward-looking lines. But that did not really happen because the constitution can only provide an outline and that’s not enough. Any constitution has to be rooted in the social structure and history of the society even as it tries to transform the social structure. Certain prejudices come from history and these prejudices do not only belong to people but also enter the state systems, and the nation-state can also become the carrier of those prejudices. This is quite irrespective of who occupies the nation-state. The nation-state may be occupied by the best of minds, as was the case in India, you know. The Congress Party in the 1950s consisted of many extremely forward-looking and progressive and secular leaders, led by Nehru above all. So the irony was that we had a secular constitution and a secular state, but it was also a democratic and a representative state. It had to represent not just the best but also the worst elements in the society. An unrepresentative secular state would have been desirable but ineffective. On the other hand, a fully representative state would be vulnerable to pressures from sections of society. Many communal prejudices had been inherited from history and society and the Indian state found it difficult to neutralise those prejudices and keep them out of the decision-making areas. Nehru was aware of the gravity of the problem and he actually ended up making more concessions to those prejudices than he might have wanted to.

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For these reasons, it’s possible for the state system to be run by extremely secular, broad-minded, progressive people and yet that same state system being gripped by certain prejudices because those prejudices are also historically constituted. They are not only constituted by history but also constituted by the very make-up of a nation-state. Modern nation-state must demand the total allegiance—unmediated, unconditional—of its members. And those members whose loyalty, whose allegiance is even slightly in doubt as a result of history, then they become the victims. So our intelligentsia understood this question and for them the way out was secularism. But how was this secularism to be practised? And there I think our intelligentsia was, and to some extent still is, fairly sharply polarised. One form of secularism was to display some kind of antipathy towards religion and this was the Marxian stream. Our Marxist believers, Marxist intellectuals, Marxist social scientists and historians saw religion as the source of many such prejudices. And above all communalism because in our society communalism was, and still is, a major problem. By communalism, I mean a politics which tries to transform a religious community into a political constituency and then puts forward claims on behalf of that community. Communalism is not just religion’s entry into politics because in our history we have seen Mahatma Gandhi who was an extremely religious person and yet practised the highest form of secularism possible. And quite often politics entered his religion. It coloured his symbols. So he talked of Ram Raj. For him the ideal society was one in which religious people had the freedom to practise their religion. So he was a very religious person and being a very religious person politics did enter his religion but not in a communal manner in which religious communities are transformed into political constituencies. So communalism is a huge problem with us. And these secular people identified religion as the source of these problems. Their idea was that if religion could not be banished—because they also discovered that it’s not possible to banish religion from minds and attitudes. You can separate Church from state. You can make the state very neutral in religious matters, but how do you separate a religious attitude from a political attitude? How do you banish religion from social life? This was a much greater challenge. They realised that it was not possible. Some of them realised that it was also not desirable. Nehru is a great example of this. But this question maybe I come to later. So one dominant meaning of secularism was some kind of antipathy towards religion and the organisation of social life around modern secular principles.

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There is another strand among the intelligentsia. This other form of secularism was extremely pro-minority. These social scientists tended to be pro-minority because they did not see only religion as a problem. They saw religious discrimination as a problem, discrimination which was being meted out to minority religious group. Now this religious group in India meant Muslims in the main, but in the 1980s also other religious groups and religious minorities. So within social scientists, academia and the university life, secularism still is a fairly dominant ideology. I am not saying all of them are secular but most of them would practise secularism as an affirmative ideology but some of them may just practise secularism by default, by not being overtly religious or communal about it. There are some communal elements also but our mainstream social science life is secular but the major dividing line is on the definitions and understandings of secular. One group sees religion as a problem and so it is insensitive to all religious claims. They sometimes seem very anti-minority because as it happens the majority group takes its religion for granted. So it does not have to make too many claims. It is only the minorities who feel their religious practices, institutions and rights are in some ways under attack. So they need to therefore defend those rights. When they defend those rights, they want their religious rights to be defended. Now when they make a religious claim, a purely secular person may not be very sympathetic towards it because he looks upon a conceding of religious rights as some kind of an endorsement of religion and religious claims. So, within academia among social sciences, the conflict is not so much between secularism and communalism but between two different strands of secularism, two different definitions and understandings of communalism. One understanding, which looks upon religion as the source of evil and is antithetical to religion and the other one, which sees the persecution side of religion and therefore tends to be pro-minority. The first group can sometimes seem anti-minority and the second group pro-minority. So these have been the responses, on the major religious questions in our society since the 1980s—the most important one being of course the Babri Masjid and Ramjanmabhumi issue, but many others, uniform civil code and so many others too. On all such issues, the major conflict has been between two types of secular intellectual responses in India, rather than between communalism and secularism. Isn’t there a third type of integrative secularism that is trying to make its way into academia which blurs the lines between Hinduism and secularism saying that Hinduism is actually secular and everybody is actually Hindu?

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Yes, what happens is, sociologically, that quite often religions, all religions have a certain self-image and face value. Now this self-image is perpetuated and validated by people inside, by the religious people themselves, or people who are broadly aligned to these religions. And quite often these self-images are then implicitly also taken over by people like us. Let me take an example. The two standard lines, which are taken to define Hinduism would be toleration and plurality. It’s said and readily accepted in a very uncritical kind of manner that Hinduism is tolerant and plural. These are considered to be two major features of Hinduism. It’s not said so much about Islam. What is said about Islam is that Islam is egalitarian. Hinduism is not considered egalitarian even by people inside, and Islam is not called very plural even by people within Islam. They would like to project Islam as egalitarian. Plurality would not go down well with a textual view of Islam, with its self-image. The Islamists would like to believe that since all Muslims’ lives are governed by one book, all Muslims must be leading similar lives, irrespective of geography and culture. Now if we were to examine these arguments and self-images from outside, they can be proved to be totally false and untrue. You know at one level Islam is more plural than Hinduism. There is so much of diversity within the Islamic faith being practised in let us say, North Africa, Central Asia, West Asia and South Asia. And this diversity is so visible not just in the area of language and cultural styles but also in the area of faith and rituals. So purely sociologically speaking, Islam can be demonstrated to be much more plural than Hinduism. But you would never hear this being said about Islam by the insiders. They would stress homogeneity much more than plurality. They would like to celebrate oneness rather than diversity. Though you would hear diversity and plurality being associated with Hinduism. It’s obviously untrue to say that Islam is egalitarian. There is nothing inherently egalitarian about Islam. You can find a whole range of inegalitarian practices within Islam, for instance between early Muslims and late converts, between Muslims from the holy lineage and others. The high and doctrinal Islam of scholars look with contempt at the low Islam of the Sufis, peasants and the artisans. So there has been, and still is, a well-established hierarchy within the world of Islam. It has its notions of superiority and high and low. It’s just that egalitarianism is rooted in the normative universe of Islam. It’s just that those who are interested in perpetuating a self-image of Islam, its face value, they would like people to believe that Islam is egalitarian and

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it’s not very plural. So they don’t want to celebrate diversity, they want to celebrate the similarity of Muslim life. Therefore, nobody says that Islam is plural. They would say that Islam is egalitarian. By the way it’s very necessary to point out here that we are treating all these categories in as neutral a manner as possible. We don’t want to attach any value or special meanings to categories like plural, diverse, single, egalitarian or inegalitarian. Now, Hinduism is obviously a different type of religion. There is no doctrinal centralisation. There is no one book, and so on, therefore it is not the similarity that needs to be celebrated, it is the diversity that is upheld and celebrated. So these things are part of the self-images of a religion. Christianity will have its own face value or self-image. Now, what happens when self-images become part of the general common sense? Then these categories also tend to be accepted by people who are not from within. So there are many people who are not formally within the Hindu faith but who would like to treat these categories as some kind of uncritical valid statements. So when many people, many sociologists and social scientists, construct modern life or when they look upon modern life and the normative standards of modern life—normative standards of modern life are civil liberties, plurality, diversity, multiculturalism, respect for diversity—and when they, quite by accident, find that some of these features are also contained within Hinduism then they tend to conflate the two. But by the way, it does not only happen to Hinduism but can happen also about Islam because the normative, textual Islam, which is considered to be egalitarian, it may contain certain features which would coincide with normative features of modern life. So it would be said that Islam contains certain features of modernity. If you go one step ahead, then it would say that this is Islam’s gift to modernity—egalitarianism. Or plurality is Hinduism’s gift to modern life. So I think you’re right. There is a third school, which practises this type of conflation of Hinduism with secularism. And this conflation comes out of this group’s very suspicious attitude towards modernity and by default a celebration of traditions, by posing the question tradition versus modern. They associate modern life with brutality and displacement, which is certainly one side of modernity. It is horribly brutal. In some ways, it is much more brutal than traditional life. The brutalities of traditional life were inherent in the social order and were in some ways inevitable. They were certainly not a part of human design and choice. People just died. You would find plenty of

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death and starvation and deprivation in traditional life but not brutality as consciously practised as a part of an ideology. Modern life practises brutality as part of its ideology. And so what is the answer to these brutalities of modern life? Answers are often found in the traditional life which tends to be idealised in this perception. And tradition is constructed in a particular manner. Obviously, nobody knows what tradition is. Traditions are borrowed, they are invented, but I would go one step ahead and say that traditions are also manufactured in a very careful manner in which certain things are included and highlighted, certain things are excluded and forgotten, and so on. It is always possible to celebrate this ‘invented/ manufactured’ tradition. And then when tradition is manufactured, and manufacturing can be done by any one, people can manufacture tradition in any manner, so it is always possible to conflate, then, secularism, or decency, not secularism, because this group which damns modernity also damns secularism and sees it as part of the modernity package. This group that damns modernity also damns secularism. Because secularism is seen as a part of the modernity package. So if modernity is to be damned, if modernity goes, so does secularism. But tolerance, plurality and civil liberties, all these good things remain, and they can be easily found to be in Hindu tradition. Because, after all, Hindu tradition is what you make of it, how you invent it, how you manufacture it. So you’re right, there is this third group also in this spectrum of social science intellectuals that I just described. Many perceive the West as a threat. What is your personal experience in this regard? This also ties up with the point that I made earlier that a lot of these perceptions—whether they are correct or not, whether they are true or not is not the point—many of these perceptions are also historically constituted and it is always important to go back to that history before we try to understand the nature, let alone the justifiability of that perception of threat. The historical reality is that for most of the non-Western world, capitalism, when it comes, it comes as a part of a package that also includes Imperialism, which is political control, colonialism, economic control and economic domination. Therefore, it would appear that capitalism has two faces, two manifestations or rather two sides to it. One is the Western side and the other is the non-Western side. For the Western side, of course, capitalism meant growth—economic growth, cognitive growth, literacy, mobility, strong tendencies towards egalitarianism, and so on, also alienation, injustice, brutality and

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displacement—but all in all some kind of a happy story based on the idea of growth. For the non-Western world, the capitalist arrival, or the capitalist intervention, was not endogenous, it was exogenous. It was brought by the conquerors from Europe. Therefore, for this part of the world, capitalism was part of a package, which also included colonialism and Imperialism. As a result of which, there existed strong tendencies against it. So, many national movements in these countries were also anti-capitalist by implication because they were anti-imperialist. For these nationalist political actors, this became a very crucial challenge. In India, this dilemma was resolved very innovatively by the leaders of the Indian National Movement by drawing a dividing line and by making a distinction between Enlightenment on the one hand and Imperialism on the other. Going back to our anti-modernity friends today, they tend to conflate all these values, Enlightenment, domination and Imperialism. So Enlightenment is seen in the same spirit as Imperialism and domination. But our National Movement leaders made this very important distinction—they borrowed or practised all the values of the Enlightenment. Reason, rationality, universalism, democracy, secularism. To take an example of Gandhi who generally carries the image of a very traditional, anti-modern type of leader. And it’s true that Gandhi was opposed to many aspects of modern industrial life. But few people know that he used to refer to his contemporary times as ‘the age of Reason’. He antagonised many religious leaders by declaring that all religions have to be put to the test of reason. In a way he was asserting the superiority of reason over faith! To come back to the point, all the major values of the Enlightenment were not abandoned by the nationalist leadership, they were not all thrown away, yet the leadership was able to take a completely anti-imperialist stance. So, our leaders of the National Movement were able to throw the bathwater and retain the baby. Whereas in a lot of other situations, either the baby and the bathwater were both retained or both were thrown away. By throwing the baby with the bathwater, I mean that as Imperialism was rejected so was Enlightenment and so were the values of Enlightenment. In their perception, Enlightenment was not seen as a human heritage but as something, which emanated in Europe. Europe was the dominant power, and so all that emanated in Europe formed one whole. The ideas of the Enlightenment were seen at the service of domination and as justifying that domination. So Enlightenment was conflated with Imperialism, capitalism, domination, conquests, and so on. In India, the leadership of the national

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movement was able to retain the baby, that is Enlightenment, and throw out the bathwater, that is Imperialism. But what about capitalism? Is capitalism a part of the baby or part of the bathwater? There was a conflict. Economic development they wanted certainly, they wanted the modern economic development, based on modern science and technology. Gandhi of course, was not so much in favour of it but the mainstream of the leadership wanted it and that was the path that was adopted in 1947. However, a strong anti-West attitude has persisted in most of these ex-colonies and it continues to persist even today. Sometimes it takes the form of being anti-modern. This anti-West attitude takes two or three forms broadly. The first is one of rejection—rejection of West, modernity and cultural accompaniments of modernity. Rejection of globalisation happens almost automatically because it’s part of the package and they see no need to disentangle one element of the package from the other components of the package. So, many people see in globalisation a threat of the return of colonialism, and so on. So, they equate globalisation with colonialism, they can also take a blatantly anti-technology stand. So, anti-West, anti-colonialism, anti-modernity, anti-technology, anticapitalism, also anti-globalisation—that is one position, which is extreme but it exists and in India also it has its advocates. The other stream, somewhat saner, is one which sees the exploitative aspect of colonialism and Imperialism but the strong developmental aspect of industrialisation and industrialism as a part of capitalism. For this stream, an important break occurred in 1947. That was when Indian society and people got rid of Imperialism and colonialism and they were able to embark upon a path of industrialisation and modernisation under the political leadership of Nehru. For them, there is a problem with Imperialism and colonialism but there is no problem with modernisation, development, and modern technology, science and technology, and so on. Now, for this group, which can be further divided into two types of elements, first are the people who feel that under Nehru, a march towards industrialisation and development had begun. India was marching slowly but smoothly along the path of economic development and this was somehow halted or reversed by globalisation. So, they see globalisation not as a reversal but as a kind of a compromise with certain priorities for the Indian society. For them, globalisation is a reversal of Nehruvian principles and it is taking place under the diktats of the main leaders of globalisation, which is America, and they are against it. For them, it ties up with this anti-West attitude, anti-West, anti-capitalism, though it’s not anti-modernity. They feel that India should evolve its own path

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of modernity, which is to develop itself, develop its own economy and industrialise itself in an endogenous, independent kind of manner. But globalisation is seen as an artificial intrusion by the forces of globalisation for their benefits. These people are anti-West because the West is seen as the agents of globalisation and globalisation is seen as something, which is destroying not just the economy but also the culture of India and there are ideological questions between the Left-wingers and Rightwingers. The Left-wingers see globalisation as damaging the economic independence of India, but the Right-wingers, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and others, also see globalisation as destructive of our culture and traditions. So, both our extreme Right-wingers and Left-wingers are opposed to globalisation in principle but from different vantage points. For Left, it’s economic independence, the fear that India would become some kind of a semi-colony of America, for Right-wingers it is the cultural fear, the fear that India’s cultural traditions and cultural diversity will be destroyed by the forces of globalisation. There is another group of intellectuals that does not make a basic distinction between the Nehruvian phase of Indian economy and the opening out of the Indian economy in the 1990s. They see both these as different stages of one single pattern of economic development, not two entirely different patterns. They look upon globalisation as just the continuation of the agenda, which was started after 1947. So, how will this group look at globalisation and the threats or opportunities engendered in the process? They would say that under the leadership of Nehru, India embarked upon a path of economic development under parliamentary democracy. It was a unique experiment because no experiment like this had ever been tried out before that for a colony. Nehru was trying to combine parliamentary democracy and industrialisation and accumulation of capital. It was a formidable task. No theory existed or model existed, it was a novel experiment and was unprecedented for a colony. There were two features of this model of economic development and these two features were a product of the Indian condition, the Indian situation in the 19th and 20th century. One was democracy and the other was economic sovereignty. In this economic model, it was important that these two values should not be sacrificed or compromised—values of democracy and political sovereignty. Values of democracy because it was seen to be very important to India. The Indian National Movement had always practised democracy. So economic development had to be combined with democracy. This was against the model, let’s say the

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South Korean model, in which it is seen as all right if democratic values were compromised somewhat to obtain better economic output, also the Japanese model in which democracy was in some ways subordinated to the imperatives of economic development. Our leaders were sure that democracy was not just an instrument for economic development but exists on its own. So if the insistence of democracy slows down the economic development, so be it. Democracy is an independent value in itself. And that, by the way, is pretty obvious and clear now. Our democracy is important but it has a price tag; we pay a price for it. Our economic development slows down. We cannot build a consensus on economic issues. There are many things that Indian society cannot do although it would like to because of the lack of democratic mandate. So it does slow down the economic development. But the thinking was that democracy is a value in itself—it is not an appendage. Second was national sovereignty. Sovereignty was very important because India had been a colony and for Indian people the concrete exercise of sovereignty was very important. This was unlike the Latin American model in which economic development occurred under conditions of semi-colonialism. In fact this has been called neocolonialism. Both these models of economic development were considered not fit for India. In India, both the national sovereignty and democracy were considered integral components of economic development. This was the Indian peculiarity according to which India was to be industrialised using modern science and technology and applying them to production processes while keeping in mind these two priorities. The group of intellectuals I am talking about will argue that these priorities still remain. So globalisation is seen as an opportunity for the Indian people and that there is really no possibility of India becoming a semi-colony of America, or of India’s cultural traditions being submerged under this great wave of globalisation. Some amount of loss of tradition is inherent in capitalism. India’s USP (Unique Selling Position, MD) is that India is able to modernise without really sacrificing or dismantling its traditions, whatever they are. So this group would argue that what has been happening in India since 1991 onwards is not a reversal of all that Nehru did and stood for; it’s in some ways a continuation of the policies that were started in the 1950s. It’s like the next logical step. Because the times are different, therefore, one needs for the same principles and same priorities, a change and shift of policies. So on the attitude towards the West, there is a range available and the various positions can be seen as different points on the spectrum. There

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are different types of attitudes but they are related to preferences for the type of economic development. At the extreme end is the attitude that rejects everything. It is not only anti-West but also anti-modernity, anticapitalism, anti-globalisation, anti-industrialisation, anti-everything that comes from the West, anti-Enlightenment also. In between are a whole range of attitudes. Our Left, for instance, is not anti-democracy or anti-Enlightenment but it is certainly anti-globalisation because it sees globalisation as a force that will undermine India’s economic sovereignty and India’s economic independence. They do see a possibility of some kind of colonialism returning (though I don’t personally subscribe to it). The Right-wing reservation is on the grounds of culture and loss of traditions. They see globalisation, economic development, as something which would lead to the erosion of the local roots of culture and tradition and therefore they are opposed to it. So there are different types of oppositions and those different types of oppositions are based upon very different types of assumptions and understandings of the nature of economic development. In imperial and colonial times, European powers were dominant and standing for the West as a whole; now it would be America that is seen as such. What role would you attribute to Europe in this East–West divide? That’s an important question. We used to jocularly say that America acquired the white man’s burden without quite realising it at the end of the Second World War. It’s a frivolous point but maybe not all that frivolous a point. Within European countries, there was this strong streak of white man’s burden, the civilising mission, and some people believed in it with all sincerity and earnestness. They were kind of global social reformers and they felt that world needs to be socially reformed and it has to be reformed by someone so who else but them? So there was this streak, which of course did not persist for very long due to what happened at the end of the Second World War. The 20th century has been called an American century, and for very good reasons, it is marked by tremendous American domination. People sometimes forget that American domination is not something that has started 20 or 30 years ago. It has accompanied all through the life of the 20th century: the American support for the European countries, during the Depression, the nature of the American economy at the time of the Second World War—in fact, America’s economic control over the world is much less today than it was at the end of the Second World War statistically speaking. So the 20th century has been the American century. At the time

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of the Second World War, of course, there was a great transition. Many of the imperialist powers were relegated into some kind of second-rate superpowers, England in particular. America emerged as the major country after the Second World War. So America in a way inherited the white man’s burden without quite realising that it had. Also, politically, a certain separation or disjunction did occur between America and Europe. The agenda of dominating the world was no longer a European agenda. It was an American agenda. Let me put it slightly differently. Let’s say at the beginning the 20th century two important things happened. The traditional empires were dismantled. It’s interesting that the First World War relegated all the empires to the dustbin of history. They don’t survive. Nation-states have replaced the empires. The new political masters, units and the categories are the nation-states. Yet, an empirelike passion persisted in the 20th century—the passion to dominate the planet. This is a very important part of the baggage that we inherited from the 20th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were as many as six superpowers, each with an agenda of dominating the world, three of them were European powers, England, France and Germany, then there was Japan, the Russian Empire and the USA. Now these six powers, in various combinations, went to war. At the end of the First World War, as a result of permutation and reconfiguration, three separate superpowers emerged with a very similar agenda—the agenda of dominating the world. We may call it the triple ideological division of the world. So there was a liberal-democratic world, there was a fascist, extreme Right wing world and there was a socialist world. All three were kind of equidistant from each other but they shared the same passion and the same agenda of dominating the world. Therefore, they had to get into a war. But three people cannot go to a war. War has a kind of a dividing line in which two people go to war. Here fascism was seen as a great threat by the other two. So the other two, who had nothing in common with each other, but they got together to dismantle the third enemy and fascism was dismantled. And then the other two powers, the liberal-democratic world and the socialist world, because their pact was completely opportunity driven and short term and not really rooted in any kind of basic commonality, the pact fell apart. So they virtually divided the world between themselves. They divided the world, as countries and also cities among themselves. Since the horrors of the Second World War and the First World War had become clear, they decided to fight it out not through a ‘hot war’ but through a Cold War. Thus, there followed a phase of the Cold War. The results of the Cold

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War began to manifest themselves by the 1980s, and by 1991 the result of the great contest was clear to everybody. So from six superpowers, we had three ideological powers, then two superpowers and finally we have one superpower. Now what are the implications of all this for European countries? I have a feeling that in a way it has worked to their advantage. It works like this: Europeans do see themselves as the carriers of the legacy of the Enlightenment and would like to see the Enlightenment as their gift to the rest of the world. But they are no longer the superpowers that they used to be in good old times. They no longer dominate the world directly. But some kind of a domination is also a precondition for this legacy to spread to the rest of the world. So in a way there has been this division of labour between Europe and America. And this division has worked to the advantage of the European countries because now they are in a position to relive, rework or reinvent their Enlightenment heritage and legacy though through a different route. Because they have been delinked by history, forces and circumstances, they have been divested, dethroned of the responsibility of being the superpowers. Let America do the dirty job! And, in a way, this has worked to the advantage of the European powers because they can now see the spread of modernity to the rest of the world with the help of American domination without themselves having to do the unpleasant and unpalatable job of entering and invading other countries. That is why you will find that the European powers do not practise the old type of domination, but they never go out of their way to criticise America for Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran. In a way they do see all this as the unfinished tasks of the white man’s burden! Certain things have changed irreversibly in the modern world. Domination by consent has now gone for good. The fact is that superpowers cannot be the leaders. The status of superpower can only be maintained through imposition. People do not like to emulate and follow a superpower. Everybody might want to do trade with America. Everybody might want to do a pact with America. But the people in all these societies have tremendous resentment towards America because of America’s superpower status, also because of its policies and activities. This disjunction between America and Europe might actually be to the advantage of the European countries, but also to the advantage of the rest of the world, because a type of alliance might develop in which the rest of the world might look towards European countries for the implementation of some of the Enlightenment principles and values, and in that process a kind of an anti-West attitude might subside or be

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diluted a little bit. If globalisation gets equated with America, then in a peculiar sense Europe gets rid of the traditional baggage of the sin of having dominated and conquered and perpetrated brutalities of all kind. Then the softer side of European life might become more manifest, also in these countries, and in these countries they might look upon European countries, especially the old civilisational societies of England and France and you know other societies, and then some of the Enlightenment values might retrieve their earlier charm and their desirability through this process. How is this perception of the West and Europe in particular being reflected in the academic environment? Our academic life is developing strong linkages with Western academia. At one level, there is much greater dialogue, reciprocity, much more sharing so the East–West attitudes, we versus them and prejudices that existed are on the way out and have lost their sharpness. With much greater travelling, people go to international seminars, and they really see that their understanding of Western societies or academia in Western societies was somewhat stereotypical and not quite real. Stereotypes create counter-stereotypes but when stereotypes weaken, so do counterstereotypes. So, I think with more dialogue, communication, travelling, interchange of ideas and communication due to technology, the prejudices are on their way out, they’ve gone down a great deal and there is much more sharing, of ideas, platforms of disciplines, and so on. So, that’s a healthy trend that’s on. On our moving towards a more interconnected world, I think the answer is twofold. Of course because of globalisation, communication technologies and the communication revolution, of course we are becoming a more closely knit society. But precisely because of these influences, there is also a tendency to create cultural cocoons. I think many groups are tending to reinforce their cultural boundaries, so cultures are not dissolving easily and, as we are moving towards a much more integrated world, the cultural diversities of the world are being preserved and new cultural diversities are being created because people are developing strong incentives, passions and vested interests in retaining and maintaining their cultural boundaries, because people do not want to give up their culture and if they see any tendency, any force, that is leading towards a dilution of their culture, they would, through quite artificial means, tend to reinforce that culture and tend to construct boundary walls around that culture. So, at a time when the

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world is becoming more interconnected, we are more closely knit and are travelling much more, at the same time in societies like India, I think the cultural diversities and distinctions are becoming sharper and people are creating more and more boundaries around their culture. This is also leading to conflict of different kinds. So both the things are happening: the globe is becoming more interconnected, but cultural diversity is also being preserved and sometimes becoming much sharper. Salil Misra is a professor of History at Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), New Delhi.

Ashis Nandy

Many these days perceive religion as such, or some particular religion as a threat. What is your experience in this regard? Every religion can be a threat and every religion can be a protection against a threat also. The perception of threat is sharper these days, because increasingly, religion is seen in a large part of the ‘civilised world’ as something which only the poor and the powerless have. The fear of religion is part of a fear of the dispossessed. Unfortunately for many, the poor and the powerless are increasingly finding voice, and they’re articulating their displeasure sometimes in a human and sometimes in an inhuman fashion, through the language of religion. This has made us even more nervous about what religion can do or cannot do. That’s the crux of the problem. Do you see this as being rooted in the religious traditions themselves or is this part of what one could describe as an instrumentalisation or a politicisation and of religion? Both. It is rooted in religion in the sense that the potentialities were there for some people to exploit it, but that also means that the same religion can be used in a different way in a different setting, by a different person or community. The use of Buddhism by the Sri Lankan monks who have supported, endorsed and nurtured Singhala chauvinism in Sri Lanka is not the same Buddhism which the Dalai Lama has used to fight the cause of Tibet. Both are political causes. It is not that the Dalai Lama is doing something apolitical and therefore he doesn’t have to tap that part of Buddhism that the Singhala monks do. He has shown what the potentiality of Buddhism is as a protest against authoritarian regimes and domination. And I’m not surprised that he is also taking interest in those Buddhists who are fighting the Burmese military junta, with which many other regimes, including China and India, and Japan, are colluding. There are creative potentialities in every religion, as well as destructive potentialities. It depends on what you tap and how you deploy it. The Christianity of Martin Luther King is not the same as the Christianity of Dick Cheney or George Bush.

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Even in India we have seen a large mobilisation on the basis of religion in Hindu camps and Muslim camps. This could possibly also be described as a form of resistance to modernity, as religions are much older than the phenomenon of modernity, it can be used as an expression of, or a struggle of, local traditions against some universalised form of modernity. Would you agree with this description? As a critique of modernity, yes. But it depends on what you mean by modernity. If by modernity you mean a specific time and a specific phenomenon, something that has grown out of the Enlightenment vision, of course! But I may point out to you that every such phase in the life of humanity has been seen as universal and permanent. Medieval Christianity, for example, saw itself as universal and permanent. It did not last. Post-Enlightenment modernity also sees itself as universal and permanent, but already there are signs that its lifetime is limited. Within the modern scheme of things, science plays a special role in giving legitimacy to all sorts of things regulating our human lives, including politics and economics. Do you see the resistance to received forms of modernity also as challenging science or how do you see the Indian academic world responding to this challenge? The Indian academic world is to some extent a derivative world, more so in the domain of science. There are believing scientists, in the sense that they are given to religion and religious rituals, and there are believing scientists, in the sense that they have gulped uncritically Francis Bacon’s concept of science as power. The received forms of modernity and the mainstream culture of science here are in perfect harmony. Critiques of modernity and critiques of science are both in short supply. For instance, even a serious scholar has argued that Marx’s idea of science has little to do with the British empiricist tradition of science, and the English translation of the German works of Marx to that extent are limited by the dominant English concept of science, which sees science as permanent, irrefutable from outside science, and not determined by either time or space. This is of course absurd. At the moment, the dominant presumption is that only the context of science is determined by politics, culture and human psychology. But I don’t think there is any thought police guarding the borders between the context and the content of science; I think the content also is contaminated by the context. Do you see alternative sciences making inroads into established academia of India? No. Modern science has already made deep inroads into modern India since the 19th century. In fact, science has become the ultimate arbiter

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of many things. Many of the blunders and cruelties of the world have been perpetrated in the last 100 years in the name of modern science. India is no exception. I mean alternative sciences like sciences which would not follow the paradigm of the … They are not often alternative sciences. They are the sciences embedded in the culture and experience of this country. And to the extent that India has a very diverse configuration of cultures and knowledge systems, that have acted as each other’s critics and each other’s complement. It is like the way each Indian is accustomed to speak in a number of languages. Even rickshaw-wallahs of Bangalore, writer and thinker Ananta Murthy once pointed out to me, speak five to six languages. But as they get educated, they speak a lesser number of languages. At most three, often two. Similarly, with various healing systems of India. There are hundreds of them, including half a dozen major ones, and most people use them the way they use grocery stores. Sometimes they take Ayurveda, sometimes they take modern medicine, sometimes homoeopathic medicine. Sometimes they take all! It’s exactly like the way they use languages. They are accustomed to such mixes. That gives them a certain distance from, and a certain built-in, healthy, robust scepticism about the claims of each of these traditions of knowledge. With the dominance of the modern medical system, you’ll increasingly find that those golden days of ‘irrationality’ are past. Now they are rejecting those traditional healing systems as superstitious and useless. Then they find that they cannot afford modern medicine system, and that they are neither here nor there. The kind of herbal antiseptics available to them earlier. They no longer have any respect for them, but they cannot afford the modern antiseptics either. So there is this problem and it is a general problem all over the world. It is partly a product of the arrogance of modern science and the blind trust in modern medical systems also has not paid the dividends to many Indians that were once expected to pay. Things are, however, different with the well-heeled Indians. If you go to any South Delhi clinic, you will find that 90 per cent of the women who go for childbirth have Caesarean section. The estimate is that 9 per cent of women need it. Even in the West, the data are not very reassuring. In North America and Western Europe, 27 per cent of women get Caesarean section, whereas, there too, 9 per cent need it. It’s mostly unnecessary. Doctors just don’t want to spend time with an

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expectant mother and wait till 2 o’clock at night to deliver her baby. They would rather have a Caesarean section and think their duty done. This seems to be a good example that explains how branches of sciences can fall prey to certain ideologies of modernity by becoming too narrow in their perspective … … out of greed. It is partly the greed of modernity, the attempt to corporatise modern medicine and the health delivery system. This is also true of the US. If you read the works of Manu Kothari, you will find that the American researchers have themselves noticed that an average American doctor prescribes for himself and for his own family grossly fewer medical interventions than he or she prescribes for the other patients. I’m also interested in the social sciences and how they are either critical of ways of conceiving of history, of society in ideological terms and in which way they can also fall prey to that. I am thinking of the debates around religion and mobilisation of religion for political purposes, which has either given rise to a whole branch of science in history or in … I don’t think that this is a serious problem either in India or for that matter or in any other country. There is only a small percentage of people trying to make a history out of, say for instance, ideas, persons and events. … think of the debate around the Aryan invasion theory … … among the Hindu nationalists and fundamentalists, yes. It has not gone very far. They are desperately looking for intellectuals who would prove the Aryan invasion theory wrong, but they have not produced effective scholars who would do so. I don’t think their intellectual tradition can produce the knowledge they seek. Don’t forget that they are committed to modern knowledge systems, modern science in particular. Traditional scholars are not that committed to modern science or modern history but Hindu nationalists invariably are. They only claim that their history is truer than that of others. I also want to emphasise that this is also not the way the past was constructed in our societies. Here, the past was also open, like the future. History narrows the past and freezes it. An idea of an adequate history, a proper history, a politically correct and objective history is a relatively new entrant in this part of the world. In many ways, this has produced

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interesting results, but in many ways, it has absolutised the past. Until recently, half a dozen temples claimed to be the birth place of Ram, and all of them enjoyed equal sanctity and competed with each other. Now controversy centres around one. That is the contribution of history, archaeology and scientism. I am coming to a second block of questions, which is about how the West is perceived as a possible source of threat, first in a general perception of yours and then how the academic world of India deals with it. I don’t think the academic world is particularly concerned about that. I mean they are mostly nationalistic, and that nationalism is framed by categories and concepts of the West, including the idea of nationalism in the present form. My personal view is this. I never talk of the West without qualifying it in some way, for instance, by calling it the ‘modern’ West, because everything has its spatial and temporal limits. And the modern West as a civilisational entity, I suspect, has exhausted its potentialities to some extent. This is recognised not only in this part of the world, outside the West, but also in the West itself. And many of the recent movements in the West are attempts to break out of the grid of conventional modernity and its vision of human future. Second, the perception of the modern West is heavily shaped by the political and economic dominance the West exercises, and by our colonial past. Because much of the non-West is now trying to emulate the West—they are trying to fight the West by internalising categories of the Western way of looking at public life. The non-Western societies also want to have nation-states, nationalism and nationalities, even though these have led to large-scale devastations in many societies. The Indian problem is clear. It is not an accident that the founders of both the Hindutva movement and the Muslim nationalism—Savarkar and Jinnah—were non-believers. They were not in love with Hinduism or Islam. In fact you can detect in them a touch of contempt for ordinary believers, if you read their biographies or look into their writings. Savarkar, for instance, never hid the fact that he considered it superstitious and stupid to believe that the Hindus should not eat beef, even when there was no other option. He also felt that the Hindus should study Western science, technology and political theory, and not Hindu religious texts. I can give you many such examples. Jinnah too was not a practising Muslim. Both were products of India’s colonial experience. They had internalised the categories that dominated the colonial world view and they thought that the only way they could get justice in the

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contemporary world was by building a nation-state. Building a nationstate involved building a nationality and, in South Asia such nationality had to be built on culture and faith. It had been so in Europe and they had internalised that history and they wanted to replicate the same. They wanted to live according to European history, not according to India’s past. You cannot produce for me a single country which has become a proper nation-state without massive violence. And after that, only after very carefully reducing their minorities to a peripheral presence in the polity, and establishing the dominance of a nationality they, with great generosity, talk of equality before law, secularism, democratic rights, human rights, and so on and so forth. This is the history of France and the Huguenots. This is the history of Germany and its efforts at state building under Bismarck. And it’s the history of Britain, where the Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalisms were ruthlessly repressed. In Ireland, it went to the extent of genocide through famines that were at least partly man made. In India during colonial times, the British made it obligatory to classify everyone from Britain as English. Officially, in British India, there were no Scots or Irish or Welsh. But now, in what you might call their benign, post-colonial phase, they offer a different kind of agenda. And two tacit, contradictory messages for the Southern world emerge from that agenda. One, ‘you conform to the ideas of human rights and treat your minorities well and give full run to the democratic process’. And the other, ‘you can be like us only if you make the same sacrifices that we made. And you impose that sacrifice on your own’. It’s a bifocal message. This is very much true of the real history of Europe, including France, which in the ideal world of political theory stands for an alternative of this ethnic or cultural nationalism. The idea of a civic nation was once conceived during the French revolution as a political entity barring all kinds of primordial identities. Of course in fact that never worked. The French language was not universal, so it had to be made universal, in southern parts of France, and so on. But this idea as an orientation point seems to have worked rather well in the India case. I mean this kind of homogenising nationalism has never really caught hold of India. There are people … … they think it’s a handicap. They think it’s a handicap that accounts for the backwardness of Indians. It makes them miserable that Indians do not have this homogenising nationalism. If you look at the data, you

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will find that Indians are the most nationalistic in the world. The Pew 44 countries study1 would show you that. But Indians are not happy with that. They think Indians are the least nationalistic in the world. The second most nationalistic country in the world is Bangladesh. India and Bangladesh are more nationalistic than the US and Europe. But that’s no consolation for them. They continue to feel that they are not nationalistic enough. Partly because of the nature of India’s freedom movement, which did talk of nationalism but didn’t go by the standard concept of nationalism. Gandhi, for example, said that armed nationalism was the same as Imperialism. At least one Gandhian freedom fighter, Achyut Patwardhan, refused to be the President of India because he would also have to be simultaneously the head of the Indian army, symbolically. As a Gandhian he couldn’t accept that. So India has a different kind of experience behind it. But it has now become more militaristic and jingoistic. And the standard form of European nationalism has percolated deep into the Indian middle classes, which seek nationalist glory in everything from cricket to scholarship. In the Hindutva version, this nationalism of course has a very restricted view of India and what is Indian but it seems to me that on the whole, and in spite of a huge disagreement about what Indian identity really is, India is not in need of a well-defined identity. That attitude was previously widespread, but I think it is attenuating every day. Indians now feel that they know what proper nationalism is and how they should behave. I have distinguished between nationalism and patriotism specifically in one of my lectures, published in Economic and Political Weekly.2 I think Indians are patriotic. Most people are patriotic, patriotic in the sense that they are territorially grounded. That is a species characteristic. Not only human beings are territorially grounded and love their territory cats and dogs do so too. Even birds. But nationalism makes other kinds of demands. It’s not a state of mind, but an ideology. And that ideology has certain implications, like all other ideologies. First of all, it has contempt for those who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the ideology. So Indian nationalists actually hate Indians for not being nationalistic enough, masculine enough, organised enough, and so on and so forth—all the qualities they impute to the modern West. And to Islam as a subsidiary, proxy West. There is another part of the story. The Hindu nationalists feel that only the Hindus do not have it, the Muslims have it. And the Muslim

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nationalists feel that the Hindus have it, the Muslims don’t. Both positions are influenced by the invisible, mythic presence of the ‘Western man’ as idealised by South Asian, South-east Asian and East Asian popular cultures. And there are some common features in that concept of the Western man, partly introjected on the basis of Western colonial and post-colonial self-definitions. The Western self-definition has also changed because of colonialism. People talk of how colonialism changed the rest of the world, particularly Africa and Asia, but they don’t usually talk about how the colonial experience in Africa and Asia changed the West. Some of the problems the West is currently facing are direct products of the colonising identity they developed over 200 years and they have to pay the cost. Their history has also not ended despite Francis Fukuyama. So it seems that the West in the perception of many Indians is not so much a source of threat but a point of identification. No, it’s a threat also. The perception is that the West has left you behind. Because of its superiority in crucial aspects of statecraft, development and technology of warfare, which we should now match. That’s the Chinese position. That’s the Indian position. That’s the position of militant Islam. Militant Islam is as much Western as it is Islamic, let us not forget that. Fundamentalism might have been associated with violence earlier but the particular form it has taken now is obviously derived from the 19th-century concepts of the nation-state and the experience of domination, which survives in the entire world. Would the average Indian intellectual distinguish within the West between Europe and the rest of the West? Is there a special place for Europe in this perception? I don’t think so. Technically, the American presence now dominates, but previously, the British presence dominated in this part of the world and the French presence dominated in others. But now they all are an amorphous mass. Now, let us come to the last question before this battery is over. There is much talk about some kind of a world society emerging. Do you see this happening or do you see tendencies of disintegration? No, I don’t see a world society emerging, but I don’t see tendencies of disintegration either. In fact, the world is getting over-integrated, that’s

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my conviction. I also think this process of globalisation started much earlier. It didn’t start in the 1990s. Globalisation of financial capital might have started in the 1990s, but the global mindset was probably a contribution of the 18th century. The first really global venture was the Atlantic slave trade. If you can trade in live human beings and the trade can touch four continents, then that is not any less globalised an affair than many of the multinational corporations in the world today. It is not an accident that three million Africans died in the Atlantic slave trade, and you can imagine the scale of the enterprise and the venture capital involved from that. Its full contours are only coming out now. So that was, I think, the first. The market emerged as the ultimate arbiter having priority over human beings. Colonialism was the second major effort to globalise. The sun never set over the British Empire, it is said. But I have talked enough about that in any case. Ashis Nandy is a senior honorary fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

Notes 1. Nandy refers to a poll conducted in 2002 by the Pew Global Attitudes Project and called ‘What the World Thinks’. The study is based upon 38,000 interviews from 44 countries (available online at www.people-press.org [accessed August 28, 2008]). 2. That is the Economic and Political Weekly, India’s most widely read journal in economics and the social sciences (available online at http://epw.org.in/epw/user/userindex.jsp [accessed August 28, 2008]).

Aditya Nigam

Many these days perceive religion as such or some particular religion as a threat. What is your experience in this regard? Could you specify your question? Well, I guess the widest currency in this regard has been reached by perceptions of Islam as a source of threat where Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism is somehow directly linked to Islam. So religion becomes a source of threat because it is being causally linked to certain manifest threats or even to imaginary threats. In Europe, these perceptions of Islam are accompanied by an Islamophobic discourse that would speak of the danger of an Islamic takeover of Europe. In India, there are threat perceptions from both sides. You have a threat perception from the minority side with respect to the Hindu majority and you have the inverse also, that is, the minority threatening the majority, Indian Muslims being accused of maintaining loyalties across the borders, Indian Muslims multiplying in larger numbers than Hindus, and so on. I would use the term ‘identity politics’ as a more general category and not one that applies across minority–majority issues. Since a lot of what goes on in the name of majority and minority politics is actually related to ‘nationalism’, I would like to distinguish between ‘identity politics’ in general and nationalism. Identity politics can of course spill over into nationalist politics and vice versa, but I think nationalism acquires a specific resilience or salience only within a ‘majority’ or more correctly, ‘majoritarian’ context. So in that sense I would reserve the term ‘identity politics’ for minority issues alone—inadequate and loaded though the term is. This kind of politics becomes evident in situations of besieged minority existence. The second question is actually the more important—the one you have raised with regard to Islam, and our experience here links to this point. I wouldn’t agree with the general Western Islamophobic perceptions, partly because our connections with Islam have been at the very least over a thousand years—in fact almost 14 centuries old. The first contacts go back to around the early AD 7th century. Much of that contact was through trade—and mainly in the

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South, especially Kerala. Then later we had a series of aggressions, which are subsequently rendered as ‘Muslim conquests’. But as a matter of fact, they were either Turkish conquests or Afghan or Mongol conquests, just as British colonisation was not a Christian conquest. Which does not mean that like their predecessors, British rule was unconcerned with religion. Likewise, Islam did certainly provide the organising principles of rule under the Sultanate and the Mughals. So we have a period of about 800 years, roughly from the 10th to the 18th century, where the rulers were Muslims. Now, in this period, you don’t really see the kind of conflicts and conflagrations that you see in the last 100 years. The first serious conflagrations, riots or recorded riots, were not really before the 18th century. And even those early Hindu–Muslim conflicts, which could be very bloody, never went beyond the local level. So as historian Gyanendra Pandey has underlined in his work, this sense of being a self-conscious part of an all-Indian or a global community, whether it is Hindu or Muslim, is actually more a product of certain colonial governmental technologies. But that’s a separate issue. What I’m trying to point out here is that if you look at recent accounts by Indian historians, they have by now produced a vast body of writings and accounts—of crucial moments of communal conflagration, which are today presented as sort of originary moments of the present crisis: demolition of the Ram temple by Babur’s forces or the sack of the Somnath Temple, for example, we get an interesting picture. Contemporary accounts actually don’t seem to refer to these supposedly apocalyptic events, irrespective of whether they are Hindu accounts or literary/poetic writings. This is not to say that this ‘proves’ that such events did not take place, but it can be said, at the very least, that they were not considered important enough to be recorded either in literary or in nonliterary writings, which means that it was far away from contemporary consciousness. It probably mattered much less to people then than it does to people now, which I think says something about what you call identity politics. My sense is that much of this has to do with the idea of nations, nationalism, and so on. And it is only when something like a territorial nationalism comes in to being that you have actually certain demands put in place, in the service of the production of a homogeneous national culture. And then you have the logic of popular mobilisation, elections and of course, the creation of a ‘popular will’, democracy … I must say that I’m increasingly sceptical of this almost blind faith that we seem to have in democracy. It is possible to critique everything else

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but democracy is something that you don’t critique. And I think that probably modernity’s journey begins with the quest for democracy and the quest for popular sovereignty, which transmutes into ‘majority’, initially conceived of as political majority but eventually sliding into an identitarian, ethnic majoritarianism. An accusation that you’ll increasingly encounter in India with respect to Islam and Muslims (and also Christians) is that they have no territorial loyalty to the country because their holy places lie outside India and so their loyalties are divided. This is particularly pronounced in Hindu nationalist discourse but has much wider currency. In fact Locke’s writings, I understand, talk in much the same vein about Catholics whose loyalty lies in Rome. Their loyalty is always suspect because they never form part of the nationstate. The very need to identify a majority culture as the centre piece of the nation, leads in the event, to the production of ‘unassimilated’ and ‘unassimilable’ minorities. So in fact this mindset is something, I suppose, crucially linked to modern politics and to two of its most important artefacts, nationalism and democracy. I’m not arguing for an anti-democratic political structure but for ways of being more self-critical and aware about the possibilities of sectarianism present within its framework. With regard to Islam specifically I think what has happened in more recent years, and I would place this no further back than till the mid-to-late 1980s, there’s definitely some kind of resurgence of what one would call—fundamentalism is not the right word—some kind of radical political Islam. But that I think ties in more specifically with the way in which ‘mainstream Indians’ perceive Hindu–Muslim relations because actually, if we look at the 40 years of independence, we find the increasing disappearance of Muslims from governmental positions and educational institutions. Practically, you have 3–5 per cent of Muslims in education and government employment. Increasingly, in the name of some kind of secularism, you are actually pushing what is a very important and big minority into a ghetto. And this is not just the physical ghetto, it’s also in a larger sense because then what else does the community has to look forward to? You will then only have community-run schools, community-run newspapers, and so on. So actually, in every sense, the experience of this secularism has been not very helpful. Sometime around the late 1980s this resurgent political Islam starts getting connected with a global resurgence, which I date back to two events of the late 1970s: One being the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which had a very big impact inside India also. It tied up

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in a sense with a sense of deeply felt resentment within the community towards the state. The other was the Islamic revolution in Iran, which again, had a deeply anti-Western edge because of what the USA backed Shah regime was. The rise of Khomeini’s radical Islam is inseparable from the history of the Shah regime and its relationship to the US. This is interesting and this is something new to me also because I didn’t know that in the early years after independence, while there was not much debate about religion and Islam and the state portrayed itself as neutral, pro-minority, yet there was kind of a hidden bias, which lead to the withdrawal of many Muslims from the public sphere, as you say. So it seems that the Hindutva and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) phenomenon is just speaking out loud what has been a silent consensus all along? Let’s put it this way. It’s not actually a consensus in that sense because BJP does it in the name of the Hindu majority and the threat that they perceive from Islam. What Nehruvian secularism did was entirely a result of its commitment to a certain modern universalism where to think in terms of community, to bring in questions of minority rights, and so on, was anathema. It’s a bit like French secularism (though Indian secularism was far more accommodative). Which is why a state like West Bengal, which is ruled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M) for 30 years, has the worst record of performance in terms of initiatives towards the Muslim community’s advance. The fact that you actually need to take extra affirmative action steps in order to draw in communities, which are otherwise marginal, requires you to come out of this colour blind universalism. There again, I would say, we should look at French secularism and ask why the weekly holiday should be Sunday, coinciding with the Christian Sabbath? We know that the weekly holidays of some other religions are not on Sunday: The Jewish Sabbath is on Saturday, the Islamic on Friday. But those will never become the rule. In that sense, in India also, a modern secular universalism deployed all the symbols of an essentially Hindu society and functioned in a way that’s unjust. So we see that is not quite a consensus, just that both—Hindu nationalism and secularism—in different ways work to entrench the culture and therefore, the power of the majority, making it the norm. Would you hold the ideology of secularism responsible for that or is it the way a majority has secretly interpreted this ideology to its own benefit?

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No, I think it’s the ideology itself in the sense that the idea of secularism in this sense is premised on the idea of formal equality. On that the Hindutva forces also have absolutely no problem. Their insistence on referring to secularists or people like us as ‘pseudo-secular’ should not be seen as a simple rhetorical move. They seriously believe in a kind of secularism, which would be truly neutral. Their position is that Indian secularists are not true to the principles of secularism (for example, when they defend the continuation of personalised civil codes or personal laws). If you’re actually true to the principles of secularism you should have a uniform civil code. You should have one law across the country. The problem with the old secularism was that it aspired to a uniform civil code but the logic of governmentality, the logic of accommodation, and so on, actually held them back. Ideally, it too would have wanted a uniform civil code—that was initially a secular demand in the Constituent Assembly. What such a uniform code would have been is anybody’s guess. The difference with the Hindutva forces of course is crucial in one respect. One can easily imagine an authoritarian Hindutva state, that will actually ram it down the throat of the minority and produce a single law, applicable across communities. The Nehruvian state could not do that due to some regard for democratic conventions, but its aspiration certainly was towards a uniform civil code. Take gender as another example. Of course in Europe for many years, in some countries until the 1960s, there was no suffrage for women voters. So at that time one could have said, modernism, modern secularism, modern democracy is intrinsically biased against women. Now women have raised this issue and today they have enforced their agenda to a large extent. We have now universal suffrage, in some places we have affirmative action programmes to include women in educational institutions, in parliaments, and so on. So from today’s perspective, it would be wrong to say that women’s discrimination was the fault of secularism. It was just the wrong way to practice it, maybe, or it was the way it was dominated by males that lead to this bias. It could have and it was repaired and why couldn’t it be repaired with respect to other identitarian demands like Muslim inclusion? I’m not sure to what extent this intrinsic bias can be repaired. I think it’s still within the logic of formal equality that everybody gets the voting right. And Muslims in India have the voting right as much as women in the West have voting rights. That, in itself, does not alter their substantive conditions at all. Does it actually transform the situation from within in terms of what French feminists call ‘parity’? The parity concept is

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also, it seems to me, problematic but French feminism and the French republican tradition are a separate matter and I don’t want to go into that. But if you look at our own context here women had voting rights from the very beginning but for the last 78 years or more, we have seen serious, passionate contestations for the women’s representation in different levels of the legislature. A mere voting right—an instance of formal equality—does not ensure parity in representation and decision making. What I am trying to say is that the demands of ‘inclusion’ will always place serious strains on the universalist faith that seeks to ‘include’ without recognising difference, or recognising it within certain limits allowed by liberalism. In other words, so long as secularism remains tied to the idea of the individual and formal equality, it remains a flawed idea. That’s one part of the problem. That’s not the entire issue. I’m not going into a larger critique of secularism because that’s a separate issue. Scholars like Ashis Nandy have already provided a more comprehensive critique, some of which I agree with, some of which I don’t. So the alternative would be a kind of a state-administered inequality, which would allow, for example, for personal laws of various denominations? It is part of the legal set-up of the Indian state that you can have such a thing, which is unique, I think, in the entire world. Personal laws in Europe after the Middle Ages are inconceivable, even in the late feudal and absolutist era. It is much admired by some, it also has its problems, of course, because of internal injustices within the community. On the one hand, you can have a better position for Muslims if they form a category and they have reservations, but then how do you deal with internal injustices within the Muslim community? I am not a great fan of state-administered inequality. The category that I would emphasise is not the state. The state is not the agency that has any legitimacy left to carry on any reform, and that’s where I think I disagree with a lot of other positions on the secularism debate here in India. The state cannot substitute for what is essentially a question of internal struggle and internal reform within communities. The minute the state takes on the mantle of reforming communities, it actually produces a polarised situation. This is especially so in the context of a state identified largely with majority culture. So it requires a very different kind of effort and intervention. The fact is that these are personal laws, which have been in existence for a very long time and are part of the community’s self-definition. There certainly are very strong issues related to gender equality here and there are very strong feminist critiques of personal laws

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in India and elsewhere. But in India today, I think, increasingly feminist positions have moved away from uniform civil code, which was a more or less a unified feminist position before the 1980s. Today there’ll be very few feminists for instance to stand up for the idea of a uniform civil code. Most of them would opt for some kind of reform of personal laws, which is largely a process of internal struggle where you can actually seek state support and intervention in limited and more strategic ways, rather than provide the state the authority to simply legislate matters. We need to think of specific ways to find such alternative strategies. I think the ‘right to exit’ that has been occasionally talked of, could be an important means through which the state could simply guarantee that those struggling for the democratisation of their communities get some protection and if need be, leave the fold of the community without jeopardising their lives. This is a very interesting topic which we could go on talking about for a long time. But now I would rather move on to a second block of questions. So far we have kind of stayed at the object level. But how do you see these discussions on identity politics being reflected in the academic world and how much is the academic community itself caught up in these ideological debates, being complicit with certain ideologies, be it modernist, communal, communitarian, multiculturalist, and so on? An overwhelming dominance of positions in the academia has been that of the high modernist kind. There do also exist more untheorised, unarticulated positions, which you won’t normally find expressed in these debates. But I would say they’re probably expressions of the nonacademic personnel in the academia—not everybody who teaches is an academic. There is just certain scepticism about the possibilities, the potentialities of this kind of secular outlook. The communal outlook certainly has substantial presence, but so far it has not been really vocal. It has become vocal only in the last 10–15 years or so. And there again, the thing is that most of these people in the academia are not actually being taken seriously by anybody as academics. They’re sort of propagandists or ideologists rather than serious academics. The serious academic debates are still conducted largely within the modernist framework. The communitarian position is actually a very small group, which has emerged in the last, again I would not put it to more than a decade back. Scholars like Rajeev Bhargava and others stand for a kind of communitarian position, which sort of remains within a liberal universe. It’s relatively small but it’s there. The more interesting critical positions, in my view, come from people who have been influenced by subaltern

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studies, post-structuralism, feminism, and so on. These actually provide more interesting takes on these issues, though they may not have a ‘ready-to-serve’ recipe of action. It seems there’s no real threat to the eminent importance of science in a wide sense, including social sciences, as a source of legitimacy in this modernist reference frame that we are all operating under, or do you see a possible displacement of science through other reference frames like religious reference frames? No I don’t think so. I think increasingly there is an opinion building up, which would argue for a more critical, a more self-reflexive practice of science. But the Ashis Nandy kind of position, which would debunk science, is not actually very popular, not in the academia. Eventually, in terms of academia, in terms of institutional decision-making bodies, and so on, only a position that advocates critical practice matters. Institutions and practices cannot entertain critiques like Ashis’. Outside the academy, I would say, a position like his might in fact be more popular. Let us move to the next couple of questions, which are not so much related to religion but to the West as a source of threat, and within the West, what is the role that you attribute to Europe? Perceptions of the West, here, are largely dominated by the perception of the US. I think that old colonial relationship with England dissipated quite rapidly. England is not seen as a threat, nor France or Germany. If anything they might be seen as more benign powers. But because the West is in some sense identified with the US and in some sections, probably, Europe is still seen as acting under US hegemony, I don’t think the perception of Europe as an emerging singular entity is still that strong. Largely, it’s the US and there is a very deep anti-US sentiment that runs across, except for the vocal globalising class, which is completely into the American dream. It is not a small section. It is in India quite a big section. And of course it finds itself in positions where it rarely allows any other critical voice to be expressed. Especially after the invasions into Afghanistan and Iraq, I think the anti-US feeling, which was broadly waning for a brief period after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, went up again and not just among Muslims. I may be wrong but I think Europe is seen as a relatively more benign entity. With accelerated processes of modernisation and opening up to global markets, India is undergoing a rapid change and people may identify these processes with the West.

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This may be welcomed as opening up new opportunities for some but it can also be seen as a threat by others to their cultural identity or ways of living? That kind of a reaction—of globalisation as threat—is more pronounced in a small political elite of both the Right and the Left. But actually nobody is buying that. You’ll find this kind of reaction among the Hindu Right organisations and you can find it among the Left wing organisations, those, which are officially leftist. There is a third group, which shares this feeling to some extent and is the emerging regional elite in some states of India. This is largely a regional language-based elite, that has generally had little access to power till recently. However, precisely for this reason, this group has a sizeable section that possibly feels that globalisation/liberalisation has been empowering of regional elites, has given them a greater voice. State/provincial governments today certainly have much greater power today to take decisions regarding industrial and other kinds of development than they had in the pre-liberalisation days of central control. So that is one kind of reaction. Otherwise, at an everyday level, I don’t think ‘globalisation’ is actually that serious an issue. Ordinary people simply take these developments as they come—without recourse to some larger narrative. Yes, globalisation can become serious an issue in very specific ways, for example, where power of the Western countries is concerned—on issues of environment, biodiversity, genetically modified crops as panacea for food crises, and so on. But those are actually very specific issues. They don’t necessarily broaden into an anti-Western or anti-European sentiment. They may in fact have acquired a more anti-corporate than anti-Western dimension so that the Reliance outlets or Tatas might be as much targets of attack as would be a state-run institution or an Enron. How do you see these threat perceptions, if they exist, being reflected in the academic world? Well, yes, in the academic world it’s the dominance of the Left and the Right. The dominant voice in the academia is mainly the Left, some shade of the Left. Right-wingers aren’t necessarily good academics but they are there, professionally academics. But even there I would imagine the larger section of people are those who are not into this ideological camp kind of thing. There are a lot of new possibilities here, if one takes an all-India view. Earlier, for example, the route to the Western university would be through New Delhi. Now, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, maybe even smaller towns, can and are establishing

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direct relations. Delhi’s academic power is being challenged. Academics from these other cities have direct ties and connections. So there’s much greater access, intervention, and so on. I remember student debates where a kind of bogey man was being created out of the West. Well that’s the Left. That’s the standard Left discourse. Sometimes, on specific things, it makes sense. This might have happened when you were there in JNU, around the time of the Nestlé debate. There I would have said OK because I would not like to see subsidised university land and university property being given out to Nestlé at a subsidised rate, when there is pretty good Indian coffee, which I find any day better. Anyway, I have had Nestlé coffee. It is absolutely third rate (laughing)! The point is actually less whether it’s Indian or Western. The reason why we have a problem with this was because earlier the universities had Indian Coffee Board’s coffee houses, which spawned a different culture and were very cheap. So the point of subsidising them, giving them cheap leases to open their coffee houses, was also that the subsidy was passed on, in part, to the customer. You could actually get very cheap coffee, you could sit for hours and discuss and talk and chat, which is not possible for the customer in these kinds of places because of the price of that coffee. The price of that good remains as high as anywhere else in the city and you are expected to just come, have your drink and move to make place for the next customer. I think it’s the culture of the university and how you see it which is important. However, in the way the debate was set up on the Nestlé issue, the whole thing again became basically a ‘foreigner’ issue. I think that was the unfortunate part. In principle, I think, had it been presented as a question of corporate culture it would have been more interesting. One last question. Some people believe that there is something like a world society emerging. If there should be such a thing, do you see tendencies for a larger integration or rather disintegration? First of all I don’t see it emerging (laughing) and if it were emerging I would see it as sowing more seeds of disintegration. If you ask me, actually, the greater the forced integration, the greater the logic of disintegration. So, much of what we see today in terms of identity, what you call identity politics, whether it’s the former Soviet Union or former Yugoslavia, whenever the logic of the nation-state has worked ruthlessly,

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the reaction is bound to come out. So if you replicate the same logic at a global level, you are not going to be helping matters. Even after two centuries, Scotland gets its own parliament, the Welsh demand a separate state, Belgium is under a lot of stress to break up, and so on, and not because of Muslims (laughing). It’s the unravelling of their own national identities. So I don’t see anything like a global society or government leading to any salutary result. Maybe in the long run one might see a different kind of a post-national arrangement but it would have to be predicated on something else, not on institutions of governance. It has to be horizontal communication, solidarity or some such thing that will probably lay the basis of a new globalism. However, it can’t be global governance. Aditya Nigam is a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

Devdutt Pattanaik

You are an expert on Indian religion and you are also a public intellectual who has published prolifically on Hindu mythology and Hindu religion. Within the context of this project, we are less interested in the positive aspects of religion but in its potential for misuse in political contexts. In this connection, religion is perceived by some as a possible source of threat—either some specific religion or religion as such. What is your experience in this regard? I see that religion is a powerful force to mobilise people and therefore it can be misused for political reasons. Sometimes, innocently, without realising what one is doing. The split between the religious and the non-religious is relatively recent. In Europe, it is perhaps about 300–400 years old, in India at a very grass-roots level, the split is far more recent. You can’t separate the secular from the religious in most of India, except perhaps in a few urban pockets. It’s just the way you are. You are religious, everybody is religious. They’re not even aware that they’re religious unless someone comes and defines them to think of as religious. Also the nature of religion in India is very different from the nature of religion in Europe. In India, there is for most people no documented form of religion. There are caste pockets, linguistic pockets, groups of people who follow a particular way of living, by and large these are community groups which are linked to each other by a set of beliefs that can be loosely termed as ‘religious’. They don’t know why they’re connected, but they realise this when someone comes and tells them you know you are following a religious practice and then they become aware, sensitive and over time that becomes a political identity. So in India, I feel that, for example, the caste identity: is it a religious identity or a non-religious identity? Because in India caste exists even among Muslims and Christians, which many people find difficult to handle. Some of the Muslims and Christians have come from various linguistic or caste groups and they would like to marry within that linguistic group, within that caste group. And there are Christians who would like to marry within the linguistic group. So the identity comes at various levels, there is a religious level, a linguistic level and a caste level. In India, the caste identity is perhaps the strongest identity which has roots in the local indigenous landscape. So at a very negative level, these divisions

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are being used nowadays as vote banks, as a way to mobilise people’s votes, because we live in a democratic world where votes define power. So when one wants to get votes from a particular group of people, one lever that is readily available is religion, because religion arouses a lot of emotions and irrational power. Some people use caste, some use religion, some language, so it’s one of the many forces used to generate power within the political space. You are a freelancing public intellectual, so you have a privileged stance vis-à-vis the academic community in India. How do you perceive this academic world in dealing with this particular problem of mobilising religious identity for political purposes? I think the academic world is trapped in many ways. You can easily see that there’ll be one group of intellectuals who would want to deny any religious affiliation. They want to be seen as scientific and objective, and in the process of being scientific and objective they become irreligious, sometimes even anti-religious. So any religious word is attacked by this group of people. So there is a whole group of scholars who almost froth and fume at anything religious. That in itself makes them subjective—they lack objectivity in their dissertations, because they don’t respect a powerful force of the community—there’s no empathy in their writings when it comes to religious members. But then there is this other group, which is highly religious, often, but not always, as a reaction. So there is this Muslim lobby of academicians, Hindu lobby of academicians, Christian lobby of academicians, there is a not so insignificant Jain and Buddhist lobby, and there is a caste base, the Dalit writers, which implicitly is religious, not overtly religious, but it is within a religious framework. So I think, somewhere along the line, academicians have to admit that objectivity is lacking. For example, how do you talk about social history? I’ve seen some of the historical writers when they write about religion. They use documentary evidence, and they just ignore the religious subtext to some of the behaviours and beliefs. For example, the majority of the people feel that if a Saint has performed Samadhi, which in popular belief means that he has transcended his body. These words like ‘transcended’, ‘soul’ don’t make historical sense, so how does the historian write it? ‘He committed ritual suicide.’ And that is not the truth of the people. It is the academician’s truth. The academician’s truth is seen as correct because it is objective and he presents it in a paper, but the people read it and say that this is not our truth and they can actually attack it. And those who attack it

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will immediately be branded as religious fundamentalists. So who’s provoking the fight? Is it the academician in his apparent objectivity, which I would consider as lack of sensitivity? I see these two forces: this secular bunch, who is anti-religious and the reactionary highly religious group, which is overly religious, therefore they cross the line and refuse to be objective at all. So you have these two polarised segments and there is nothing in the middle which is seeing both sides and understanding each one’s perspective. Each one comes with their own political discourses. For example, the non-religious group is very influenced by communist ideology, which is anti-religious, and very Left wing. Everything is economic. For them all things are economic. Everything revolves around exploitation. If they read the Bhagavad Gita, for example, it will become a caste document of exploitation. If they read any religious document, it turns into Brahmanical domination. The words and the language which will be used is very Left wing, and very communist. On the flip side: When the religious scholars look at any religious scriptures, they refuse to see any exploitation. The truth is somewhere in between a spiritual ideology and a material economic reality. But sympathy is lacking in the academic space. I deal with a lot of students. A commerce or science student, while he is very clear and he wants to make money and to join the engineering school, and so on, there is more innocence. But when I see students in the social sciences and arts and history, from universities like Delhi, they’re aggressive, political and lack empathy. I see people who do mass media and who are very clear. They want to take a job and to make money. But when I talk to them about religion, there is a complete wide-eyed innocence, they want to know more and understand. There’s no aggression and innocence. But when I talk to students with an arts or literary background, they’re extremely opinionated, and they come with words like ‘exploitation’. When you ask them: ‘please define exploitation’, they don’t know the answer, because they never sat down and asked themselves that maybe they are as much the victimisers of the victims. They refuse to. And I’ve seen the anger, and I’ve seen them very khadi1 clad and suddenly going to the farms, with very ideological and idealistic and theoretical notions of power which is born in the university campus over a cup of coffee with 10 academicians who have never gone out there. And once they go out, they’re disillusioned because they see a real world which doesn’t really bother: The exploited is also an exploiter. These realities are hard hitting, especially when maturity is lacking.

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They’re indoctrinated into the systems of thinking by their teachers. So I feel universities are becoming scary intellectual ghettos. To be a good academician you must be in the centre. You must accept people’s prejudices, because we as human beings have prejudices, and it is okay to have prejudices, because I don’t see anybody that doesn’t have a prejudice. It is important to understand the context of the prejudice, even not agree with that prejudice; it is important to acknowledge that even I have prejudice and we all have prejudices. And some prejudices benefit us and some don’t benefit us. I think that empathy is lacking in academics. Look at the nature of an academic paper. It’s confrontative. A point of view is presented, and the point of view is challenged. There’s no warmth in the academic discussion. It is very: ‘you are wrong, you are right’. While this is possible in a strong way in a scientific space like biology or chemistry where there are chemical formula, and so on, in social sciences it’s not so easy. There’s no clear truth defined. Textual evidence is not evidence in countries like India where texts never mattered, it is stories that mattered. I give an example of how in mythology, people will always look at the women, and how women were ill-treated. If you wear the lens of ill-treatment of women in India, it’s very easy; if you look at the scriptures, they constantly talk about it. But nobody has talked about how the system itself stripped men of choices too. The system basically was geared to deny you choice. It’s not that a man had a choice. The Brahmin could not eat beef. The choice was not there. Just because he was a man, he didn’t get the freedom to eat beef. If he ate beef, he would be ostracised. Now, if you come with a feminist perspective, everything looks like there is a patriarchal society. The evidence is there in front of you. But if you wear another lens and say: ‘has this country given choices to people?’ you’ll observe that it’s very different. It is a social fabric where everyone has duties but no one has rights. Rights is seen as self-indulgence. I see that academic papers have never discussed it at that perspective, because perhaps feminism is the dominant trend, communism and Left wing politics is the dominant trend, Right-wing politics is the dominant trend. But nobody sees it from a humanist angle: ‘How have societies treated men? How have societies treated children?’ While women have been exploited— which is a horrific truth—it does not mean that men have not been exploited. It doesn’t mean women have not been exploiters. And the ability to see the entire panoramic perspective is something I don’t see in the academic world.

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This is very nicely leading over to our second block of questions. It seems that offering choice would be one major thing promoted by modernity in an ideal sense. The modern world is offering choice to people who may remain traditional, by choice, they may change their tradition, based on choice, or may chose to reject tradition. These processes in which India adapts to the modern condition, or choosing this modern condition for herself, are often portrayed as processes of Westernisation. And then the West becomes a threat to cultural identities, do received traditions. I think in the new world order, being modern has become a new religion. If you look at it, it functions like a new religion, you have people who propose it, and if you are not modern, you are penalised for it. So you have a new order, which is no different from a religion, which tells you how to behave, think, eat, walk and sit. It is based on a certain objectivity and logic. And I think to be in the modern world is the new religion, which threatens the old order. And the old order therefore submits and surrenders to it, stands up against it defiantly or tries to find the middle ground, which I think most people do. I’m a strong believer in the middle ground. I believe about 90 per cent of the world is in the middle ground and 10 per cent is at the two extremes. And I feel the way the West is coming in, for example, in India, everything which is new, is seen as Western, or whatever people are not familiar with is seen as Western. So when you see women getting more vociferous, it’s Western. If men are challenging the traditional roles, it’s Western. Sexual identities, people are talking about, is Western. Divorce is Western. Basically, what has the West given? It has given people the right to choose. I think that’s the greatest freedom in any civilisation is where you can choose. I think, in fact to me, the measure of civilisation is choice. How much choice do you get. You will be surprised how even the most advanced of civilisation curtails the choice in subtle ways. Modernity challenges everything. Especially in the capitalist society where everything is negotiable, every choice is negotiable. I can submit to a choice or I cannot. And I think our discomfort with this is that there are people who want freedom to be in bondage, and it is this which is being denied by modernity, a denial which is contrary to the spirit of true modernity. So I want to be free to wear a scarf, to wear a particular traditional costume and eat in a particular way and behave in a particular way. In other words, I want to submit to a lifestyle which modernity feels is not acceptable. But modernity is supposed to give me the freedom to choose whatever I want, is it not? Somehow modernity has pre-decided what is appropriate choice. It assumes that anybody who’s in an apparently coercive

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lifestyle is actually in bondage. And I think that’s where the conflict arises. I think that is why there is a refusal to accept modernity or democracy. Both appear as new religions, which, like all religious orders feel that they are rational, and superior, that they are the answer to all of life’s problems. As far as India’s attitude towards the West is concerned, I think that in many ways India is identified through the outsider’s gaze, constructing the identity called Hinduism, the identity called the caste-based identities, the sex-based identities. You know the way in the West the White Protestant Anglo-Saxon Male is penalised—if you’re white, heterosexual, protestant and rich, then you’re penalised. In the same way in India, the English-speaking Brahmin, male, who’s heterosexual is penalised. So we have created our new scapegoats with modernity that challenges traditional borders and frameworks, making it no different from any religion. Any religion, modern or otherwise, creates its own scapegoats. For convenience we speak of ‘the West’ as if it were a homogeneous entity but if one digs a little deeper one would probably have to make distinctions between the West as America and the West as Europe. Would you say that there is a specific role that Europe is playing today or that it could be playing in the future? Currently, I think if Europe is playing a role, it is not very evident. America seems to be representative of the new Pax Romana. Once upon a time, Rome ruled the world, then the British and now the Americans rule the world. And I feel that in many ways, the traditions are inherited from the Romans, through the Hapsburg families, British monarchy and America. West seems to be this ‘What the East sees’. You know, the further away you go from the mountain, you don’t see the fine hills, you just see the big mountain out there. It’s only when you come closer that you realise that the hill has so many little variations, and that parts of the hill is green. The further you go away, it becomes this great big white. It’s only when you start going closer that you realise that it is not just one homogeneous mass. Today, I feel, there is a domination of the American way. Maybe among the educated elite, there is an awareness that there is an European identity which is very different from the American identity. I have friends, for example, who when they go to holiday—they would rather go for a holiday in Europe, because they feel people are far more courteous, they’re not brash and loud. They distinguish the European from the American. But at the end of the day, if you ask ‘where would you go for a job?’ They would likely go to

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the Americas. Where do they want to go to study? They would like to go to the Americas. Would they like to go to China and Singapore? Not as much. The white-skin fascination is still there. I don’t see Europe currently, maybe it will emerge eventually—it will, it’s a logical process—but with America’s military might, and media might everything else is overshadowed—that’s the big thing, America has a huge mediamight—so it silences everybody else with its Blitzkrieg. Europe is neither heard nor seen by people far away in the East. How do you see the Indian academic community dealing with processes of Westernisation, Western influences, Western Imperialism it is sometimes said? By opposing it. I think opposition is the easiest form of intellectual expression. I oppose. You can oppose anything. I think the question one has to ask is, is there an alternative to this academic position? Is there an Indian identity? Let’s look at the clothes we wear, the food we eat and the language we speak. We speak English and wear Western clothes, but we’re very comfortable in that. We don’t think that we are Western, just because we speak a Western language and wear Western clothes. This is the nature of being Indian, the nature of Indian identity is about absorption, we just absorb and assimilate in a very interesting way. Very few people have noticed that the caste system is one of those interesting tools used to accommodate and yet distinguish. So I can make you part of my village but I’ll say you will drink water from a different well. So while I have accommodated you by saying you can stay in my village, I have distinguished you by saying that you will not eat from the same plate. That’s one of the reasons why Muslims thrive in India. They were seen as yet another caste, you can stay at the village, you can do a profession but we will not eat with you, sleep with you and grant daughters to you in marriage. So it’s a very clever social engineering line. I think that’s what is going to happen in the academic sphere a new form of casteism, where you will be accommodated, but you will be kept separate. You will support each other when it’s necessary, but you will also keep these little silos, the new caste: ‘You are the Western scholars, you are the Left-wing scholars, you are the Right-wing scholars’. So caste system continues to thrive in India, always, redefining itself each time. And it will never go away. The final question would be rather hypothetical, a question geared to an emerging world society. Will it eventually develop? Is it already developing? Or is it just a discourse without any substance to it?

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I find it hard to believe that a world society is coming. In many ways, if I may be provocative, I think somewhere, there is this deep belief in this monotheistic ideology of one homogeneous way of being. I believe such ‘one way of being’ thoughts are not Indian. In India, diversity has always been the way being—there are different types of flowers, vegetables, people, caste, gods, goddesses—everything is different. You cannot be unified, in fact that is destruction, when everything becomes one large homogeneous mass. It is the end of civilisation, because there is no identity. The global society, if it one where there are silos, where there are different groups of people with different thoughts, who synergise with each other, compete with each other—if that is the global village we’re talking about, then yes. But if we are looking at the global village as a monolithic, homogeneous entity, then no, I don’t think it will happen. Humans will not allow it to happen. It is our nature to not align. Everybody will not align to a viewpoint. It is the nature of the human psyche to oppose, contest and change, which is unfortunate, because they will have the extremes of violence but also wonderful because it gives you the hope of differentiation and love and affection, because you can never fall in love with yourself. You always fall in love with something which you are not. Or you are looking for what did you lack, and you try to complete that. So I think in the global village, there are many castes (laughing). But with not so rigid boundaries, smoother movement between them, not ghettoisation. That’s the way forward I mean. Devdutt Pattanaik is a freelance author, speaker, illustrator and mythologist. He lives in Bombay.

Note 1. English: ‘homespun’ (Khadi is the simple textile that Gandhi propagated in his noncooperation movement against Britain. It refers to nationalism, simplicity and selfsufficiency.)

Dhruv Raina

… there is an intense period of engagement with and legitimating modern science in society which begins from 1870–80 and carries on till the 1950s, at least amongst sections of the scientific community. This engagement takes the form of interrogating traditional science and Western science. And the way out of this interrogation is by neutralising the notion of the ‘Western’ in science, and asserting the existence of modern science, and not Western science. So by neutralising the cultural import in modern science, you then legitimate the uptake of science as morally beneficial and economically worthwhile activity. It’s a wrong way of looking at history, but this period can be seen as a sort of preparation. This is not to suggest that all trajectories of thinking about science and society were leading to the Nehruvian era, no, but there are continuities with the Nehruvian discussion. I would suspect that if you call science a universal project to which the Western tradition has contributed, those engaging with Western science at that stage, from the 1870s onwards, would have looked at Indian sciences from the same perspective, as a contribution to a universal project. They would not have denied that tradition. Exactly, there was an attempt to see science as a cultural universal. The project of seeing science otherwise does not become evident till the 1950s. Already in the Vienna circle, there is an inkling of it, in the late 1940s. There is a feeling that finally, this is where their reflections on the universality of science might lead, and they hold back. But I don’t think, till the late 1950s there was any such feeling that science was a socially and culturally embodied entity, that feeling was not there, it was a bit to soon for that. Maybe the German thinker Ludwik Fleck had a inkling of it in the 1930s and the 1940s, and there is an idea of social conditioning of mathematics in the work of Spengler. In Mannheim also, there was a social determinism. But Mannheim leaves science and mathematics out. Towards the end of his life he changed his view about science, but he still left mathematics out. Of course even Western science has taken an extreme stance in this Viennese positivism which also didn’t survive in the Western part of the world.

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Yes, it didn’t survive, but it turned out to become a kind of orthodoxy in the United States. From today’s perspective, we can understand why some of the members of the Vienna circle—and here I’m trying a social epistemological explanation—took the kind of positions they did. Quite a few of them were not just physicists and mathematicians, but were also Viennese Jews, they certainly had an inkling of what was coming, and they were actually striving hard to create a notion of science that could not be contaminated by metaphysical or cultural prejudice. So probably, they desired a sphere of intellectual life that could not be contaminated, which was sort of universal. They strived hard for it, deep down. That’s my feeling. That’s an aspect which mostly goes unnoticed especially with those who are very critical of positivism and who don’t understand positivism for the most part. Exactly, I agree with you. When I teach philosophy of science to my students, I say, you know, we use positivism as a pejorative term, but I think we are seeing it from today’s perspective. We must also understand positivism as to what it meant in the 19th century, and we have to understand why the logical positivists and the members of the Vienna Circle thought the way they did in the 1920s and where did it all come from. We have to understand that. I think it becomes extremely important to situate other narratives and our narrative practices. How do you characterise the Indian engagement with positivism? The Bengal Positivist Society was founded sometime in the 1860s; there is a discussion about it in a book by Geraldine Forbes. Positivism arrives in India through a different route. It arrives with the British positivists, people like Richard Congreve and others. But it appears that the first generation of Bengali positivists were inspired by the positivist religion, more than positivism as a philosophy of science. That’s something which also, in a different way, unfolds in Brazil in the 19th century, where they create ‘l’église positiviste’. So if you take people like Jagdish Chandra Ghose and others who were part of that positivist society, they saw in it a kind of reassertion of the caste system with the Brahmins on top, sitting and conjuring up these universals of science and philosophy, a kind of commitment to theoretical reasoning, and then below that you were stuck with the mundane tasks. That was the initial idea, since ideas move around and undergoes transformations from one cultural context to another.

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But in India of the 1820s, an average educated Indian citizen, would not have known of the great Indian scientists of the past, unless he was an astronomer or a practicing mathematician. He may not have known who Aryabhata was or who Bramhagupta was. But in the 1890s, if you were an educated person or an astronomer, then—thanks to the work of the Orientalists and others—a new kind of historical consciousness is at place, and then suddenly what happens is that Bramhagupta or Aryabhata become transformed into Indian Galileos. You work through correspondences, through homological affinities. You have a trajectory of the evolution of Western sciences and then you have another trajectory of Indian science. This can be very misleading, I suppose. Yes, but it is effective as an instrument in legitimating science. What colonial education really suggests, in the 19th century at least, that we the colonizers are superior to you because we have science, and you don’t have a scientific imagination. And suddenly somebody comes along and says no, but we do have science, we do have Aryabhata and so on. So how do we transit from there to modern science? Did any of this old Indian science survive in any practiced form till the 19th century? It had survived but it had become marginal by the end of the 19th century. If you look at some of the new work of Sheldon Pollock and even Sudipta Kaviraj’s paper on the sudden death of Sanskrit it looks like the Sanskrit ecumene came crumbling down in about 70 years between the 1750s and 1820s or 1830s. But it continued to survive, but then in the interstices. What is the cause of this? I don’t know, I don’t think anybody really knows. It is interesting because it corresponds to the European Age of Enlightenment. Yes it does. You see, the standard explanation would be that the patronage for these kinds of institutions of learning was gradually withdrawn, the Mughal Empire had declined and the support seems to have been withdrawn. But that is only one part of the story; we don’t have a substantial explanation as to why the systems came crashing down. The older account seems to have been that the decline had set in before

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colonialism, and the new history rejects this claim, on the ground that the Medieval Ages were also ages where Sanskrit, Persian and vernacular scholarship thrived. There was a great deal of scientific activity that did not proceed on lines along which the West had moved, but within its own paradigm a great deal of work was done, in aesthetics, in medicine, in astronomy, too. So the kind of questions historians of science would later ask would be why for example didn’t Jai Singh, who knew the modern astronomers, affect the transition to modern astronomy? That’s a weird question since his intellectual and astronomical concerns were different, so why should he move towards modern astronomy. The question presupposes that there is just one path for the development of science. Maybe in Europe, it helped that there was somebody to wrest the truth from the Church who had monopolised it for centuries, and established an independent ground for truth outside the church. In India, by contrast, there was no strong counterpart like the Church in Europe. Yes, sure. But Singh saw his own task as perfecting the astronomical tables of Ulugh Beg: that’s the way he saw his own task for he believed that Ulugh Beg was the greatest astronomer so who is this Jonny come lately called Newton? Perhaps that is probably the way he thought. Many nowadays perceive religion as a source of threat. This can be related to any particular religion in a certain context or even to religion as such. What is your experience in this regard? The middle class in India is quite divided on the issue. Within the middle class, there is a technocratic middle class as well. For this technocratic middle class the sphere of religion can be separated from their technocratic practices. And for them religion is under threat. Religion seems for them to be something that sort of binds communities together. From that point of view there is an attempt to consolidate their identities around religion. For example we observe this among sections of the Indian diaspora living in the United States, for example, that includes engineers, doctors, and so on. I’m not saying all of them. These sections, for a variety of reasons, find it difficult to assimilate into American society. Given the nature of pedagogy in India they are also exceedingly technocratic in their thinking. The financial support for Right-wing Hindu politics comes from these ranks as some reports suggest and the crystallisation of a new Hindu identity may be witnessed in some

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of their writings available on the Web. So, religion is a threat and religion is under threat. For the secularists religion is a threat because it tends to collapse a variety of identities and polarise them around a few dominating ones. Either through the influence of the media, or on account of the rise of the backward castes, and so on, the upper castes identities have now been reinforced through the creation of new kinds of coalitions and pan-identities. Consequently, the secularists see religion as a threat to social instability, a return to some kind of primordial reorganisation of society, far from what the trajectory of modernity has brought us. On the other side is the side the fundoos (fundamentalists) who speak on behalf of their communities exhorting their members to assert their identity. They see this as a moment of reckoning, of saving religion before it is overwhelmed either by the rise of other religious forces or by the schemes of the secularists. So this is religion under threat but also these are the people who would portray the Muslim minority in India as a potential threat even much before September eleven. Oh yes, it started a long time back. But it was really in the 1990s that these perceptions and associated movements came into the foreground. Some of the roots can be traced back to the 1860s and the 1870s. They were located around the politics of language and identity that was propagated through the expansion of the colonial education system in which a particular version of history percolated down through textbooks into schools. There is a conjuncture of a variety of factors: the politics of language and identity, the appearance of denominational universities. Standard interpretations of ‘Indian history’ began to stabilise. In the history of science writing, for example, clearly, one of the standard tropes is that during the period of Muslim rule these great sciences of India went into decline since the scientific institutions were ravaged by Muslim invaders, who destroyed and pillaged India’s great scientific heritage and sent India reeling into the Dark Ages, an analogue of the European dark ages. Nehru and Gandhi and their colleagues changed the language of Indian politics from the 1920s to build an anti-colonial nationalism on different lines. But the anti-Islamic sentiment remained, perhaps covert. Even the Congress contained elements who shared these views—possibly suppressed in the sense that it was part of the underground within the Congress. The ascent of such sectarian ways of thinking commences from the 1980s onwards, a period that corresponds to the opening up of the Indian economy. This is the era of a kind of globalisation. There’s a sense that India’s making it. The character

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of the Indian middle classes began to change in the 1980s, sections of which appeared to subscribe to the position that India possessed a great tradition and its image has been soiled for a variety of reasons. Following the agitations over the recommendations of the Mandal Commission in the early 1990s and then the demolition of the Babri Masjid there was a consolidation of the Hindu upper castes. They became far more aggressive and targeted their anger against an identified enemy, the Muslim community. This sentiment resonated with similar anti-Islamic sentiments in the West, particularly after the first Gulf War, and provided legitimacy in turn to the anti-Muslim campaign here. But while these Hindu nationalists would like to put various legitimatory discourses at their service, also ideologically twisting them, would you say that something similar is happening to certain disciplines of science, being drawn into the service of ideology. In a way what you could say is that more or less globally a new kind of social contract is worked out between science and the state from the end of the 18th to the 19th century. The price science has to pay for the kind of relative autonomy it acquires from the state and the resources it requires from the state, is that science has to find solutions to societal problems. But science has become what somebody has called the great legitimator, it also provides legitimacy to the programmes of the state. In India when you speak of science you by and large mean the natural sciences. I would see it broader than that, including even History as an academic discipline, which is very vulnerable to ideology. In terms of the hard sciences or the exact sciences I don’t think the political sphere managed to really interfere too much with the practice of any of the disciplines. There was a short period when more funding was available for a particular kind of research, which was research of strategic importance, which was during the five years of BJP rule. There was more money available for that. But if you wanted to do other kind of work, there was enough funding available for the purpose. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) view of science is modernist and very technocratic; being more reoccupied with technology than with science. However, it is the school textbook that is the most important vector for ideological indoctrination. In a typical school science textbook the beginning of a section will be accompanied by a boxed in area that

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provides a brief historical background to the theory or the scientists proposing a theory or making a discovery. This is to introduce the student to the human side of the sciences. Now in addition to scientists from the West you’ll probably have a box about Aryabhata or about Brahmagupta or emphasising India’s notable contributions to mathematics. These assertions are absolutely harmless in themselves but could acquire a different tenor. Similarly, the history textbook proper is where new representations of the past were now purveyed. A great deal has been written on the subject and I shall not elaborate upon what others with greater familiarity with the subject have discussed. What about perceptions of the West as a source of threat? The early part of that discourse also dates back, like everything else, to the 19th century. The colonial regime was seen as encroaching upon indigeneous culture or marginalising tradition. It was also seen as a source of economic expropriation. But amidst this response was that of the critical assimilationists. Amongst the late 19th- and the early 20thcentury Indian scientists there were those who argued that while there was much that was valuable within tradition there was as much to be disbanded with. In like manner they argued about knowledge from the West. If you study the Indian response to evolutionary theories you find that Social Darwinism was rejected but there was never any problem with theories of biological evolution. So that’s the kind of critical assimilation at work. One of the ways of neutralising the cultural import of Westernisation, as several others have pointed out was to partition the world into the inner and the outer realms. And the inner realm was the realm of spirituality, Indian philosophy and ancient psychology. The outer world is the world addressed by the sciences, which had been mastered by the West. For most scientists the need to reconcile the two realms did not arise. Thinkers such as Aurobindo Ghose would argue that the external realm was enveloped within the internal; the external world was just one element within the inner. Several strategies were developed to cope with the West. David Kopf and others have proposed a classification of Indian responses to Western modernity in the 19th century. I find it as an interesting heuristic, because you can see it in several other societies. The first response he calls revivalist, wherein everything worthwhile already exists within Indian culture. … like Arundhati Roy once said: ‘If you look hard enough you will even find the recipe for Coca Cola in the Vedas …’

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… absolutely (laughing). All that remains to be done is to go back and reinterpret traditional texts and find answers to the problems of contemporary society. The second is ‘status quoist’, that requires continuing with things as they are. The third is ‘Westernisation’, according to which tradition has not only outlived its utility but hinders the achievement of progress and the way forward resides in proceeding with Westernisation. The last response Kopf calls ‘revitalist’, and a number of historians of ideas and sciences have found it suitable for studying the process of critical assimilationism. This critical assimilation takes a particular turn in the 1930s towards a kind of modernism. It is in the 1970s and 1980s—as happened in other parts of the world—that the concept of modernity and development along ‘Western lines’ begins to be seen as increasingly problematic. The civilisational critique of the West as articulated by Nandy, Uberoi and others indicated that there were several trajectories of modernisation and the West finally embarked upon one premised on dualisms between fact and value, inside-outside, mind-matter. Suppressing its other modernities, Uberoi argued that the logical culmination of this choice was Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Auschwitz and Treblinka. This critique was linked up with a larger critique of modernity and development. … even in the West this is when the green movement starts … … yes, and the environmental movement, the anti-vivsectionist movement. This critical turn was construed by many as anti-modernist and anti-science. As far as India is concerned this critique was framed as a kind of neo-Gandhian response to several decades of modernisation and development that had gone awry. This prompted reflection upon even academic disciplines, even the sciences and the structure and priorities of science in the country. The Indian Left too recognised this crisis and made sense of it within their own conceptual framework. Last question. Do you think there is a world society emerging or is it disintegrating? Both the things are happening together. We don’t know which way it’s going. But there is a kind of a world society appearing but there is also disintegration, possibly. I mention India, in the first instance, and then use that as an analogy to talk about the world. If you talk about India you can say that well in the 1950s India was a collection of several nations. Today India is more connected than it was in the past. So while India might display centrifugal forces given that development is uneven within

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and across states yet, society has also changed, in the sense that these are not as separated as before. People are connected through jobs, ties of marriage, property and, these act as countervailing forces against these centrifugal tendencies. This is probably true for other parts of the world as well. Perhaps more so in the United States than in Europe. Familial ties which extend not just across states but countries and continents. Beyond familial ties we have to factor in the movement of professionals across national a boundary that in turn has resulted in the formation of hybrid communities, with new tastes commitments and preoccupations. These could well be the forces of consolidation of a world society. I don’t know how much of Europe is part of this process and whether Europe has moved out of Europe. On the other hand the barriers obstructing the movements of people from Asia and Africa are becoming increasingly impervious. This amongst other things possibly has to do with threat perceptions that are prevalent within parts of Europe. Islamophobia is a very real issue that Europe has to find a way of overcoming. These are the factors that would impede the formation of a world society. But these are issues beyond my competence. One could safely say that if globalisation produces more victims than beneficiaries then the forces of disintegration will prevail over those of integration. Dhruv Raina is a professor of the History of Science at the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Ruby Sain

Many, these days, perceive religion as such, or some particular religion, as a source of threat. What is your experience in this regard? Regarding specific religion, we all belong to one particular religion. It may be Hindu or Islam or anything else. But we are born in the religion. No body exists without religion; everyone is born within one particular religion. We have religion unlike the animals. But everybody, that means the whole world, lives within one religion. So religion is like our blood. Religion is like our base food, or anything, whatever you can tell. Within this work, I have seen the most populous religion, what I think is Hinduism, is in the fourth rank. First Christianity, second Buddhism, third Islam and fourth is Hinduism. This classification is in the context of population. The whole world is classified among these four concepts. China has a different religion, Confucianism, along with Buddhism. Not everybody obeys that cult. More or less, they are Buddhists, this is what I think. So, threat is a political issue, not an issue of common people. In our project we are interested in ways of mobilising people on the basis of religion for political purposes. So you want to know about Indian religion. In India, we have so many religions. Here we are intermingled with all religions. Everybody thinks that his religion is the best. The Muhammadan thinks his religion is the best. Actually, in each group, we are in conflict. If we are within one religion, we are OK, but if we are in four or five religious groups, we get in a conflict. It is a constant conflict since the inception of religion of today. If you go back, before the age of the Vedic period, religion existed even then. But that religion was also Hinduism, as you know. Since Raja Manu, that is, the first king of India, we say that politics started in India. Within this religion, he divided the people into four groups: Brahmin, Kshratriya, Vaishia, and Shudra. Manu taught that the Brahmin is at the top of the ladder within Hindu religion. So the other thinkers, those who were not Brahmins, were in constant conflict since their inception in Hindu community. This is a matter belonging to 500 BC, 600 BC or 1000 BC. But if you come to this era, that is, 2007, politics regarding

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religion, based on Hinduism and Muhammadan perspectives, has emerged, and you know very well what Bin Laden had done (laughing). He’s forcing everybody to embrace Islam. ‘Whole world will be ruled by Islam’ (laughing). It is his opinion, not ours (laughing). If you see the behaviour pattern of people, it sometimes differs on the basis of politics, because political leaders utilise religion for the sake of their vote or any personal interest. But I think, as far as my research goes, I have seen that even within Muslim community people are good, OK, good behaviour, they have a very good behaviour. Within Hindu community, I have seen very good persons also. Nobody thinks about ruling over that community or this community. There is no competition at all within these groups. But if you go to leaders, especially political leaders, it then takes a different shape. This is when conflict arises. That time it is a matter of identity politics as well as identity crisis. Then we think if we are Hindus, we have an identity and politics of religion, or if we are Muslims, it is another identity. From that emerged Hindutva; you know very well how Hindutva emerged. Because our political leaders of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) think that if we motivate people regarding Hindutva, then people will be Hindus, and they will call on them because it is the land of Hindus. But it is the land of secularism. It is a secular country because our principle of constitution was the unity and assimilation of all religions. I think, at the time of independence or just after independence, our leaders were not thinking about politics of religion too much. What I think is it was not then, but now, after the start of the era of globalisation that we are dividing our people into groups. In Hindu religion, we are a ‘We-Group’. Since he’s in Muslim religion, a Muhammadan, he’s ‘They-Group’. So We-Group and They-Group are constantly fighting, which I think, sociologically, is not desirable at all but our society is constantly changing. Before industrialisation there was another society. Before Christ there was yet another society. We have so many phases of our society. In every society, there is some change and this time, we see that religion is at the base point of that change like in previous eras. If we constantly fight with these religions, because the rate of this conflict will grow, and if it increases if we always fight, then after 100 years there will be only two or three surviving persons, because everybody will die as a result of that continuous fight. What is the necessity of our/their religion if there is no man. How do you perceive the discussions on this issue in the academic world? Actually, in our academic field, educated people don’t bother about this religion. Some are prejudiced, they think about it, but others don’t. It is

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not their subject matter. Religion is not at all any subject matter. We don’t have a department of religious studies. Actually, I want to introduce one course on the sociology of religion. I was the head of the department but now I am not.... In our academic field we never think about someone belonging to this particular religion or of another religion. We never bother about religion. Because if Ashok-da is Muhammadan I never think of him as Muhammadan. If I am Buddhist he never thinks of me as Buddhist. We have no difference regarding religion. How many Muslims do you have among your colleagues? Here, they comprise a very little percentage. Within this department, we actually have no Muslim colleagues, but within the University, we have a few Muslim teachers. Actually, educationally, here, only 1–3 per cent people are Muslims, who are academically sound, which means they can go up to that level. But I think, other than this university, we have Muslim friends and Muslim neighbours. I know several Muslim teachers. We have no discrimination based on religion. I have a friend, Ansar ar-Rahman in Kalyani University, West Bengal. I know him very well but I never think that he’s Muslim or that I am Hindu. We never think any differences when we talk together. Human mind is same everywhere and at every place of this planet. Your answer was about your personal experiences. How about taking up this issue from a sociological point of view? Does this happen in this university? This university has no politicisation of religion. Nobody is studying this subject. Actually, we are thinking of beginning one course on the sociology of religion. We are thinking that we will start one centre for the study of religion. It will be a collaborate programme, within one or two years. Because the whole world is now thinking about religion, that’s why we think religion is a good subject and we should take care of this. Because religion is our social matter. This subject does not exclude person, and person is the subject matter of sociology. How do you think is the West perceived through the eyes of people at this or at any other Indian university? Is the West perceived as a potential source of threat or is it perceived as an example to emulate? What would you say? Actually our education system as well as life pattern is based on the Western society. Raja Ram Mohan Roy was the first founding father of education in this country and he brought this education system

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from West. So our system of education is based on the West. We never thought of this as English education. Before Raja Ram Mohan Roy we read Arabic, Farsi, Pali, Sanskrit, and so on. Raja Ram Mohan Roy first brought this English education. Everything comes from Western society; we follow Western society. What is possible in Western society, we try to follow that within our capacities. So everything is based on Western society and we can’t go without it. The Brundtland Commission is based on what happened in 1948. We are based on that commission. We are just imitating the Western society. One thing is that we have various problems. We have no good infrastructure. If we could have good research infrastructure, we could do some good research. It is not possible, because financially we are not so capable. So we are following the West for all things, even for technologies, ideas and what we are reading. Suppose we are reading that phenomenology or ethnomethodology is concept of that Herbert Blumer or Peter Blau and not xyz’s (Indian) concept. If we study functionalism in Indian society, we follow Durkheim or Auguste Comte, if we study conflict perspective, we follow Marx. So everything is based on Western context, not Indian. So we are dependent on our Western society and we try to do the good things and avoid the bad things. Is the West conceived as America? What is the perception of Europe in the academic community? No. One thing I think is that Europe is a very broad concept. What I think, in Europe, if they are Christians, they think everybody should come under Christianity. If we go to China or Japan where people are Buddhists, they try to keep it within Buddhism. So the whole world is not broad regarding the religious perspective. We are broad in technology and other perspectives. Materially, Europe is very broad, from goods, commodities, consumerism, and so on. From this perspectives, Europe includes all countries. You know, there are 213 countries in this world. I don’t know the exact number, but as far as I know, in this world, we have only 213 countries. So the West, especially the USA, Canada or Europe, they are quite interested to include all these 213 countries within this one community, which we call the global village. We are always now talking about this global village. This global village means that these 213 countries will be on one platform. It is not in religious term, it is in materialistic term, of course, this is what I think.

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Is there such a thing as a world society emerging or is it disintegrating? It is integrating in one sense, I told you, materialistically. Because every country has some interest for intermingling all of these countries. I am giving you just one example. The West is producing many better things but they have very little population. Suppose who will use this car/things? I am giving you just one example. In that sense they have to intermingle all the other countries. They have to integrate all countries for selling that car because they are producing hundred thousand cars per day, but they have only hundred thousand population in the whole Germany. So who will take/purchase that car? In this sense I am telling materialistic perspective for selling goods or giving this all goods among all persons and for betterment of their population, for betterment of their economy, they are integrating. Not in the sense that they are integrating people on the basis of religion. They are integrating these people on the basis of materialistic goods. In that sense it’s global village but not from religious perspective. If I say are you interested to be a part of Islam faith? What you will say? No, no, no. I was thinking of a social integration. Like a global civil society, political interests getting expressed globally like in the global Social Forum, like in the women’s conference in Beijing, and so on. Do you think this is sustainable? If you talk about global warming, we are all on the same platform, because global warming will affect not only the Western countries but also nonWestern countries, so it’s a matter of our whole human species. We have to survive. If the ice melts, then it will seep into this land. Then how will we interact? So if you say for all purposes regarding global warming or any other things, we are integrating. But if you talk about religious matters, we are not assimilating at all. I told you by birth we ascribe the status of a particular religion. We are born in religion, we die in religion, we live in religion. You can’t even say that I will be not in this particular religion. It is like blood which circulates in the whole body without which mankind cannot survive; similarly, religion encompasses the whole of the individual which is the basic unit of society. Ruby Sain is Professor at the department of Sociology at Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

Zeenat Shaukat Ali

Many people these days perceive either some particular religion or even religion as such as a potential threat. What is your experience in this regard? Religion can never be a potential threat but the politicisation of religion and the people who use and misuse religion for their own purpose and for their own benefits, that can become dangerous. That perception can be rightly said to have become very dangerous. Today, because of identity politics and the crisis of identity, the media is used to spread these kinds of perceptions. These are definitely making dividing lines and I think that the stage has come for people like you and me to try and overcome this because definitely there is a crisis. Can you think of concrete examples in your personal environment in Bombay, that would exemplify this? Yes, take the Hindu–Muslim divide in India. There is this great divide that has taken place between two communities. To look at it dispassionately, you have to go back into history. Take the way history has portrayed the entry of Muhammad bin Qasim into India. His entry was for political reasons and not for religious reasons as is sometimes said. It happened because the Caliph of Arabia had a pact with the Dahir, who was the king of the Sindh, to freely use their waters. Now, a ship of the Arabs was attacked by the people of Sindh and Muhammad bin Qasim was sent to punish those people. So he came to India. There was this little battle and he wanted to leave. But the Afghanis persuaded him to stay, because they were Buddhists and they were being oppressed by the Hindus. Now he stayed on because he found it interesting, and, of course, he also wanted to make a little bit of money, I suppose, so that was the reason more of his coming than coming here to convert people. Of course, after that Muslim rule was established very gradually. After him you have the slave kingdom, then you have the Tuqlaqs and the Mughals. Now what happens in historiography, these conflicts are exaggerated and friendships subdued. Going back to Muhammad of Ghazni’s barbarous invasion of the temple of Somnath. Of course, it was barbarous for anyone to raid anyone’s sacred territory. But it is never

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mentioned that there were 700 Hindus in that army and the objective of getting into that temple was that it was a very wealthy temple. So it was wealth more than religion. But historiographers turn it over to religion and therefore religion becomes the enemy. In fact, however, religion was never the enemy. Religion never taught you to raid people’s temples. Religion taught you never to break hearts. Religion taught you to mend relations. Religion taught you truth and kindness and never taking somebody’s property. But political leaders claim this to influence people. Islam came to India from the South, which had trade relations with the Arab world. During the prophet’s lifetime, Perumal, then king in Kerala, heard about this man, Muhammad, who preached believing in one universal God. So Perumal set sail and went to Arabia. He invited Arabs to come and settle and do trade with Kerala. And there were intercaste marriages. That is how some people converted. Some remained in their religion. And there was a group of mixed people. Now many people say that Perumal met the prophet. Some say that he converted. Some people say that he did not convert. Whatever he did, it had nothing to do with the spread of Islam through the sword. And coming to that perception, let’s go back to the crusades where this perception really comes from. Islam was never spread through the sword but in spite of the sword. This unfortunate rivalry that came up between Islam and Christianity, these two Abrahamic religions, it was never meant to be that way. And if you study the life of Prophet Muhammad, you will discover that he was never the aggressor. He was aggressed against. He never stifled freedom of speech. His speech was stifled because all he said is that whether you believe or not—‘la ikraha fi ad-din’—let there be no compulsion in religion. And he said Islam means peace. And he said believe in one universal God and do good. And then of course the methods of prayers that he adopted were absolutely Abrahamic. If you look at the religion of Islam, the prophet never introduced anything else, even as a religion. The Hajj was as Abraham had performed it, except for a few changes after almost 5,000 years. In Abraham’s time, people circambulated the Kaabah (Kaaba) in the nude. The Prophet Muhammad changed that. But the basic understandings and the rituals were absolutely incorporated and adopted. The methods of prayer, or what you call ‘salat’, were what all religions accepted. You pray standing. You go on your knees. You go on genuflections. All ways were accepted. Ramadan was always a month in which people fasted. He didn’t introduce anything new. There were just a few changes perhaps in eating and in timings that were looked into. And similarly

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with the concept of sharing with the needy, ‘zakat’, which he introduced. When you have something, share it with others. Whether it’s a kind word if you don’t have the wealth, a smile or helping a man to cross the road. Every part of it was considered to be charity. So Prophet Muhammad did not introduce anything new. And my entire study of his life has never shown me a day of aggression, rude talking, backchatting or unkindness shown even towards those who opposed him completely. He understood the opposition because he felt that opposition was because they could not understand this perception of a universal God. That their rights were violated, their wealth was just concentrated in the Kaabah and it had become the economic centre point of activities, all these points he understood but what he said was what I am asked to deliver to you I am delivering now for you. To accept or reject it is not the issue. It’s not my issue. It’s between God and you. I’m giving you the message and that’s it. Now people say that Prophet’s exit from Makkah (Mecca) and his migration to Madinah turned the tables around. He spends 10 years of his life in Madinah. He makes the constitution of Madinah. He creates an Ummah, which is universal. Ummah was never meant for Muslims alone. These words have been inverted and perverted by the Muslims themselves and by others. He makes a community of people who have Jewish origins, the Aw’s and the Khasraj. The thing that binds them is the language. They had one language. No temple was raided. No church or synagogue was brought down in 10 years. Look at the story of Cain and Abel, Habil and Qabil as we call them. They offered a sacrifice to God. One’s sacrifice was accepted and the other’s was not. One was internally and essentially pure in his motives and his intentions and the other was not. So God blessed Abel and he accepted his sacrifice and he did not accept the sacrifice of Cain. And Cain immediately said that I will kill you. So what did Abel say? Abel said that you may kill me but I will not raise my hand against you because that is not what God loves. God loves the sacrifice of the truthful. I will not raise my hand against you. And so Cain killed Abel. Now look at this story, this ‘kissa’ as we call it. How many Muslims are looking at it and how many non-Muslims. And what is this teaching you? This is teaching you when the aggressor is coming to you, even with a bad intention, allow that. And you know Edward Said interpreted these verses and he gave the example of Abu al-Ghifari, the Hadith that came from there, that when Muslims were turning to kill Muslims, the Prophet said, ‘why are you raising your sword?’ If somebody comes, he was asked this

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question, he said ‘if someone is coming to kill you, then the intention of that man is wrong’. And of course you give yourself self-defence. But if he hurts you then the crime is on him. But if you kill him the crime will be on you. So don’t kill. It is better to be killed than to kill. Of course you defend yourself. I’m not saying that you don’t defend yourself and you allow someone to just come and kill you. I’m not saying that. But don’t hurt the person. So you see these are historical facts. These are also ahadith, which I’m relating to you. Why are they not spoken about today? There are several verses in the Qur’an where it is mentioned very clearly that if you save one human being it is as if you have saved all mankind and if you kill one human being it is as if you have killed all mankind. I’ll give you a dozen verses on the prophet’s non-aggression, his peace building. There was a time when a group of people who hated, disliked him, came to him and said you know you’re so and so. And Ayse was sitting there and he said ‘may your face be blackened’. This is the kind of abuse. Ayse stood up and said ‘may your face be blackened, may you do this, may you do that’. But what did the Prophet do? He said ‘Ayse, be gentle. This is not the way for you to talk.’ Why is this Hadith not related? You look at the time before the Prophet became a prophet, before he received the bahir, there was a black stone in the Kaabah, which fell down. Now you’ll see how the Prophet resolves conflict. And each one of the tribes wanted to pick up the black stone and put it back in position. And you know how violent the tribes of Arabia were. Forty years they fought over a she-camel (the tribes of Bakr and Taghlib in the war of basus). So killing each other was no big deal for them. Then they said let us ask Muhammad because he was always known as Amin, the truthful, somebody who did not lie, who would not cheat. That was what they respected him as. So they told Muhammad that this is the problem and what did he do? He said take the black stone and put it on a sheet of white cloth. Each tribe should hold part of the white cloth and you bring it over there and then one person can reinstall it. So they said you, Muhammad, you reinstall it. So see what I am trying to say is that in a conflict situation, in any situation of conflict, can’t we come together so that all tribes joined hands together so there will be no killing. Isn’t that an act of pacifism and non-violence? So in the Prophet’s life, what did he say to the Christians. You know that great pact of Jerusalem. You shall not hurt the Christians. You shall not hurt the bishops. You shall not force them to convert. You shall allow them to have their temples. And what did he say to the Christians?

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He drew a line and he said ‘the difference between your religion and my religion is no greater than his line’. So you see, conflict resolution comes out of accepting people, not rejecting people. These are the values and issues that are completely overlooked. This reconciliation and forgiveness is also very much part of Islam. If somebody hurts you, you can hurt the person to that degree. But it is much better that you forgive. ‘Bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahmim’, gracious and forgiving, one hundred and how many times is it used in the Qur’an, in each and every beginning, to each and every surah. So here you understand that the prophet himself was never an aggressor, was always a peace builder and yet history has distorted itself. It was never mentioned, people of the ‘books’. It was always mentioned people of the ‘book’. Why? Because Judaism, Christianity and Islam have one principle. There are only a few additions made as time goes on. And Muslims stand to say that Christians distorted the Bible and the Jews say that Christians distorted this scripture. These are all ridiculous kinds of arguments. You look at the Jewish laws, which became very tight and rigid. They were opened out by Jesus. You look at the Ten Commandments. They’re always there and Moses is the prophet. But the rigidity with which they were interpreted. Jesus said why should this rigidity exist? Now how and what became of that? All three religions are known to be monotheistic. Through the Trinity also, the Christians believe in one God. This is the expression of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. But ultimately it goes into God. The Jews and the Muslims believe in monotheism. And look at the conflicts between us. We have gone into such petty discrimination, such petty matters. We are interested in how these processes of mobilisations and politicisations of religion are being reflected in the academic community, among public intellectuals, among scholars, who should be taking a critical stand at overly simplistic or overly concrete and tight interpretations of religion itself but of course also its use in politics. How do you see that happening in India? I think it was Ali Shariati who drew a triangle and he said at the helm of affairs is the king, the ruler, the prime minister or the president or whatever whoever is the powerful political leader. At the second end you have the religious head and at the third end you have the businessman, the person who churns the money. Now all three join hands and in the middle are people like you and me … … and where’s the scholar?

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The scholar? Very good question. The scholar, I think, fits nowhere in the scene. For the religious people you have religious scholars. But the people who are liberals are jammed in this triangle. They’re jammed in this triangle because the king will use the religious head, the scholar, the teacher. And how many honest scholars do we have in this world? When Aristotle defined democracy he said it was for the happiness of the people, of the good men. And what is democracy today? It’s become a laugh. Has it become a ‘demonocracy’ or what? A few people holding the power, no transparency. What is going on you don’t know. The press is really being used. So today you have these kinds of reflections that are dividing ordinary people like the Britishers did, like all Western colonialists did. They divided communities and they had a ball because the communities were foolish enough to start talking about their own differences to the extent that they forgot the larger good. And that is what is happening today. So when we look at this situation it is not very different because religion is politicised. Take Islam. On the basis of very weak traditions, the essence of Islam is submerged. The essence of Christianity is also submerged. I don’t see too many Christians like Christ would have seen them, nor do I see those Hindus as were perfectionists, idealists, the great thinkers and honest people. If Europe is dominated by Christians, the Christian card must be used. If the Arab world is dominated by Islam, then the Muslim card will be used. And what if India is dominated by the Hindus? India was never like that but the politicians are learning through bad example and they are using their card. So they point out the differences and never talk about the common good. Those talking about the common good, their voices are never heard, media never talks about them, nobody hears about them, so we are talking to ourselves. Basically, we are only communicating and talking to ourselves. Muslim leaders in this entire rigmarole narrow down Islam as an interpretation. This is your identity. Only go to these schools. This is where you live. Your life is at stake. The Hindu identity will be established. The Christian identity will be established in the same way. There’s no affection, love and humanity. You see we have to have human beings first, whereas now human beings are last. This is my observation. Of course, there is a group of very secular Hindus, like secular Christian voices and secular Muslim voices also, but are these voices heard? You and I am talking to ourselves. What’s the difference? Ultimately, we’ll go to other 10 scholars who are going to hear about

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us and what difference are we going to make to the world. By the time we make a difference, God knows, the third world war takes place. We don’t know but we will know. For that influence and understanding, we need the media, you need people to talk about it and for the word to spread. When I’m talking about the media, it’s not in terms of your and my popularity, because the less popular we are, in that sense of the word, the better. But of getting the word, the thought across of … The politicians must understand that even if you have the rule of the dynasty, it can’t last long. Religion is used and misused for those kinds of perceptions, to draw lines, create ‘you’ and ‘me’, ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ and ‘we’ and ‘them’. Actually, it all boils down to that ‘we’ and ‘them’. The value of religion is lost because even wrong becomes right as long as you preserve your identity or you preserve your political power. Now let me come to a second set of questions, which is about the reverse perception. From an Indian perspective, the West, as maybe including America, Europe, other countries, can be, or has been, perceived as a threat in certain ways—I’m thinking of discourses such as globalisation as Westernisation, as a threat to traditional identities in the subcontinent. What is your experience with these debates? I mean America, if you really look at what we’re talking about, the Western threat, OK, now let me talk to you very personally about this. A couple of years ago, I was in the US, again on a state programme, and I met some very wonderful Americans, I met very good Catholic, nonCatholic, and other priests, and you know the questions that were raised were should Iran have a nuclear bomb. I’m looking at myself not as a Muslim. I am just a human being, who has gone to a school and a college, who thinks she has her own mind and is thinking. So the first question I raise is of course Iran should not have nuclear bomb. But then nobody in the world should have a nuclear bomb. Because why should you say that one nation should not have a nuclear bomb and the other nations have a nuclear bomb. I don’t understand that. So the next question put to me was ‘don’t you think it’s ruled by a bunch of crazy Ayatollahs who are sitting at the helm of affairs? And therefore if they are given the nuclear bomb they can use it at anybody else?’ I said, I thought to myself, and the answer that I had, was yes, I don’t agree with the reign of the Ayatollahs, I don’t think they’re all mad but I don’t agree with a reign that starts with the Ayatollah because Islam is democratic according to me, my understanding of it. But to say that Ayatollah will use the bomb, whereas the Western world, which is very sophisticated and very clever, and so on, will never use that nuclear bomb, brings me

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to this question, is that who used the bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Was it the Ayatollahs or was it the very sophisticated Western world? That’s my question number one. After this nuclear arms race that went on in the Cold War, the postCold War period is the period of the greatest violence between communities. Today Islam is perceived as a socialistic movement. That means now that socialism and communism have been subdued, Islam is the next movement and the uprising has to be subdued. Now these kinds of thoughts must have some ground. Are the ground realities based on religion and values or are the ground realities based on political understandings? The West has been developing their arsenals. Semi-nuclear weapons have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan. On what basis are you talking with the Ayatollahs? Who are the crazy guys here? It’s a simple question. There are wonderful Western perceptions, that they are liberal, they are broad minded, think wonderfully and have some of the best educational institutions in the country, undoubtedly they are forward-looking, leading and the leaders in science. You cannot compete, it’s a fact. But at the same time, this is what is happening also. So there are all these fears and phobias. Look they’re Christians, attacking, have attacked Japan, have subdued the prices and want to make a nuclear deal with India. So the best thing is to form your own group. And the moment you put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, you become ‘Westoxified’. This is how it is looked at. A person like me, how am I looking at the West? I have nothing deadly against Mr Bush. But if I were to take just Mr Bush and look at him as a man—forget that I’m a Muslim, forget that I’m an Indian— I am just looking at what he is doing, what do you expect me to think of him. What do you expect me to think of Mr Blair. What do you expect me to think of the world that is subduing one group of people on the most flimsy grounds. How am I supposed to rectify the situation? Am I supposed to become defensive and say no no no no I’m wrong all the time and no no no no you’re right all the time. Am I supposed to go into serfdom, intellectual serfdom. Am I supposed to go down onto my bended knees and apologise for the past? What am I supposed to do? Is there a differentiation being made between Europe and the rest of the West, leaving out Blair maybe, the British Islands maybe are closer to America, politically than continental Europe. Right. Yes. You’re right. That distinction must be made, between Europe and the rest of the world, the rest of the West. The stance taken especially

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by Germany also and even by France to some extent had been very different from the stance taken by Mr George Bush’s government and, you know, the Americans as a whole. I completely endorse that. But Europe, if given the choice between America and the rest of the world, it would go to America. This is how I look at it. And look at the first, second and the third world as we have termed it. Who has termed it? The great Western powers. Who says we are the third world? What do you mean by a third world? That’s always because of the domination of colonialism and the exercise of power. When I read Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’, I think it was in the preface that he mentions this and I never forget this example, you know, it was in Egypt and there was this vendor selling goods, a Muslim man, very poor and then this white rich Western woman goes to him. She’s wearing this very low-cut blouse and a very short skirt and she’s got the money, which she’s putting before him, and she’s bending before him very low to buy that good, and in his mind he feels that this woman who’s so alien to my culture is ruling me because she has the dollars, or because she has the power, whatever, whatever, and that makes him recede and it was just one example that he quoted and that example stuck with me. If we look at this and try to understand each other I think we would make some headway by acknowledging. Personally, I have never faced rejection from the Western world but I’ve found many others who’ve faced that rejection. And they may not have been Muslims. It’s not Muslim. It’s culture. So culture is being used and misused to draw lines. These lines which are drawn are now widening. You’re making two worlds. You’re going to slice yourself into two halves if you don’t take the steps at the right time. And you know this Westoxication theory by the Muslims is wrong. I don’t fall in line with it at all. Nor do I fall in line with what the Westerners are doing to this part of the world, intellectually. If you read Fukuyama’s The End of History, you read today The Green Peril, you read Bernard Lewis, you read the other Western intellectuals, you’re being trapped. That’s why, where is your Western scholar? How are Indian academics countering that? This Orientalism debate has been going on in India also, this debate about new forms of Western-driven colonialism or economic dependencies? They’re countering it to some extent but they haven’t taken it on full handedly, you know what I mean. There is a sociologist, a professor attached to the Rajiv Gandhi University in Delhi, Ayazi, what was his

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name? Professor Ayazi or something like that, who was writing about it, who disagreed with Orientalism. What are we talking about in terms of globalisation? What is globalisation? Is it going to leave borderlines? Is it going to leave political borderlines? I mean you know these are simple questions for a country. If there is free trade between two countries and one country violates the other country’s trade. What are the rules that are going to be applicable? You see because old rules have changed. Have you formulated the new rules? You see how are you going to translate? Is it simply wiping out your borderlines? Now the propelling arms of globalisation are not going to stop, not going to cease, and we don’t want it to cease. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the roller-coaster, a big roller coming and wiping out other thoughts, other cultures, shall we say delicacies? The monopolisation of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and food centres and that kind of fashion centres. I love Western-style fashions myself, within propriety, you know. Now the strength of economics, ultimately, is going to take over. Then ultimately what? What are we looking at? Are we looking at democratisation? Liberal democracies? Yes, I agree with liberal democracies but are democracies today, direct or indirect, presidential or parliamentarian, drawn on the lines of true democracies. I agree with democracy. I’ve done a paper on democracy and Islam and I think the prophet had always the voice of the people. The battle of uhud gives you that example. But at that time there was transparency. There were smaller groups of people. Today where is the transparency? Media has become an arm of the government. You look at the David Kelly case. Professor Kelly who was killed because he said the Iraq war had no Weapons of Mass Destructions (WMDs). He was the first person to come out with that and he goes for a walk and he comes back dead and people said it’s a natural death. But then the BBC got into it, investigated it, and thought that it was not a natural death and raised a debate on it and the chief of staff had to resign. So what did it show me? It showed me that until and unless you’re not going to voice the opinion of the leading group, the ruler group, you’re going to be out. That means isn’t it an arm of the government? It may have hard talk. But you see, the lies that are coming in cannot be denied. When I was living in America I had Fox TV, I was horrified to see what they were saying about Islam. It’s not that they’re living in the Dark Ages. They’re living in the 21st century and they’re talking nonsense. And it’s not that the Arab world is doing any better. The Arab world has no voice at all. You show me one decent television channel that they have in English

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or other languages. Maybe we could understand what they’re saying. They’re so involved with Arab politics and in love with themselves that they don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the world. And there is no Arab world because a lot of them have Western affiliations. You look at Saudi Arabia itself. You look at the 9/11 bombings. When I saw Michael Moore’s film, and I watched it in Europe because the Indian version was absolutely censored. I saw it only in pieces and I said is this the movie Michael Moore has made, but when I saw it in England and it was shown to me by the priests, mind you, the European priests were toppest class, very honest, and I said I wanted to watch that film and they showed it to all of us, I was totally horrified. I am an ordinary Muslim in a city like Mumbai, who is not involved in politics and I’m watching a film like this, what am I going to think? These perceptions create dividing lines. Media can be used to do a lot of good things. I’m not saying that you don’t speak the truth. But give the other side of the coin, raise those voices. Where are those voices? You see what happened in the Lebanon war, you see the aggression that is coming in and yet the Muslim world is being pushed and blamed. I’m not saying that they’re spot free but put both sides of the coin together. Wisdom Foundation is seeking to establish a dialogue with the Jews. I have many good Jewish friends. There’s a lady here. Her name is Siloni Parek. She’s a Jewish lady married to a Hindu man who’s been a dear friend for years. I’ve never visited Israel. I’m looking forward to going there. I’m looking forward to meeting the people. I’m so tired. I’m exhausted of these great lines: ‘He’s a Jew and I’m a Muslim, he’s a Palestinian and I’m an American etc.’ These lines are spoken about with so much anger you know. One final question: In spite of these differences and dividing lines, do you think we’re moving towards a world society or do you think there’s rather a tendency for that to disintegrate? That planet earth is one and we are one people and, like Armstrong said when he was returning from space, ‘only when I came close I saw these geographical boundaries and there was such a wonderful, beautiful earth’. That is what we have to look at and, yes, there will be a minuscule group of people who will be drawn towards a common world society with respect for individualities, with respect for individual religions, with acceptance. But larger groups have to be drawn into it. Today we are doing everything to reject, we are not doing anything to accept. That quality of acceptance has to come from us. All Americans

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are not bad and all Arabs are definitely not good. First we have to get our history clear. We have to get our facts clear. We have to get our figures clear and we have to learn to trust each other. Conflicts cannot be dissolved or halted without trust. Trust building and bridge building are two very essential factors in today’s world. We are not all that different. Today we are in a village. And we are humans. We should say ‘human beings first’. Zeenat Shaukat Ali is a retired professor of Islamic Studies at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai and founder director general of Wisdom Foundation in Mumbai.

Virginius Xaxa

My first question is related to your observations on how religion is perceived by some people as a threat, either religion on a whole or any particular religion. What is your experience in this regard and how is this being reflected in the academic world? I think believers, particularly those who belong to a dominant religion such as Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, do see their religion as under threat especially at a collective level if not at a personal or an individual level. Perception of threat is, however, of different order depending on whether one belongs to majority or minority religious group. Minority religious groups like Christianity and Islam have primarily been seen as religions engaged in conversion to increase numbers to their faith. The Hindus who represent the majority feel that if this process is not put to check they will in course of time be reduced to minority in their own land. Perception of threat of the majority thus comes from the fear of being minority in their own land and losing social and political space in the process. Such a perception has largely been responsible for the emergence of religion as the basis of political mobilisation. Such a development has become more pronounced in recent years. This is not to say that religion earlier had no place in political processes. I think there is a need to make a distinction between religion as a critical basis of social and political mobilisation and religion as having general influence on other aspects of social life by virtue of being an integral part of social structure. There is therefore always a space for religion to influence the social and political process such as voting behaviour in favour of certain individual/individuals or party/parties in the electoral processes at the local, regional and national level. In fact, there has been lack of mobilisation, let us say, in the 1950s and 1960s, on the basis of religion. And yet the Christians and the Muslims, or even the tribals and Dalits, rallied predominantly around the Indian National Congress. They really turned out to be a vote bank for the party without religion being the axis of articulation. So though there was no religious-based politics at the time, religion did have a role to play in the sense that it influenced political behaviour, particularly in the elections. They saw the Congress as a party that did not represent any particular religion. However, in the last one decade and more, religion has become an important ground of

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articulation and mobilisation of the people. Two major religions that play a crucial role in this politics are of course Hinduism and Islam to some extent, as far as India is concerned. A certain amount of violence has emerged out of this kind of politics. Such politics in the context of other religious groupings such as Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism are generally not very evident at least at the national or regional levels. But this does not mean that there is no religious identity articulation among them. There is an identity kind of politics even among them but its manifestation is somewhat different. The Sikhs did mobilise themselves for some time around their religious identity but this was more to do with separate homeland, namely, Khalisthan than to do with religious threat. If we take the Christians, we find traces of identity articulation, for example, in the form of demand for reservation for Dalit Christians. There is again much cleavage and tension between the Christian groups and the Right wing Hindu nationalist political party and its various affiliate organisations like the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) or Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Bajrang Dal, and so on. Although the Right-wing Hindu nationalists and the Christians haven’t really had a kind of confrontation with each other that we find between Hindus and Muslims, nevertheless there’s a very strong cleavage and also some mobilisation. Of course, Christians do not mobilise themselves openly in political domain. One of the reasons perhaps could be that they constitute a very tiny minority at the national level and even at regional levels barring some exceptions like Kerala. Hence, probably there is thinking that such a move is not viable. Probably there is also a feeling that violence is not an answer. Therefore, Christians have been on the whole averse to taking recourse to violence even when they face problems at the local level. Rather, they articulate their identity more in terms of peaceful march/rally, dharma, submission of memoranda to the government, and so on and so forth. Their way of asserting themselves is relatively peaceful, democratic, legal and constitutional. For example, before the Godra incidence in Gujarat, there had been violence against tribal Christians in South Gujarat and that went on for quite some time. Christians felt really grieved but the way they expressed their discontent and disenchantment were of a kind just referred to earlier. To that extent they do in a way articulate and assert themselves as Christians. The other thing that we find is that Christians, though numerically very small, are strong and powerful in the field of education and health. Most of the best educational institutions in the country are run by them. Children of high and elite social background study in these institutions. So they do find

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space in terms of which they network with people at the helm of affairs and address their grievances. Often it works and misfires, because some of those educated in Christian missionary schools or colleges have turned out to be one of the most hostile critics of the Christian institutions and Christian missionary work. Arun Shourie, who wrote a book on Christian missionaries in India, may be taken as a case in point. There are many in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other related organisations, who have in certain sense connected with the Christian institutions either as a student or in some other capacity. By having been a part of Christian institutions they tend to think that they know a lot about those institutions and their religion. Sometimes they use that as a basis for attacking Christian institutions. Many still believe that conversion is going on in these institutions, which to my mind is far from true. I think that at this stage of the Indian society, there is really not much of conversion taking place in educational institutions. To say that conversion is the agenda in institutions like St Stephen or St Xavier’s is to my mind ridiculous. In the interior of Orissa and Chhattisgarh, there may be something of this sort but not in institutions situated in metropolitan city. In this kind of cleavage between Christians and the dominant religious groups, Christians also often stand to be blamed as a number of sectarian Christian organisations by making open proclamation of winning souls for Christ make things quite difficult. I think that that’s really not required. That is not the way to live in a society or country, which is characterised by multilingual, multi-religious features. Christian religious organisations, which have been well-established in India and have been in existence for the last several hundred years, are much more sound, discerning and careful and understand the consequences of living in a multi-religious society. However, religious sectarian groups which have emerged of late are fanatical. To a great extent the problems which have emerged between the Christians and non-Christians especially the Hindus are the result of this kind of propaganda and mobilisation which are unnecessary. Now all this doesn’t mean that Christians don’t have a problem with Muslims. If one goes to the interior where there are Christians and Muslims one finds that there is also a problem but surely not of the type we see obtaining between Christians and Hindus. Even there is a cleavage between tribals who follow their traditional religion and the Muslims. Tribals, whether, Christians and non-Christians, share a lot of stereotypes about Muslims, which are similar to those shared by the Hindus. How has this come about or to what extent it is a part of

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the propaganda made at the regional or national level, I can’t really be sure? Such an image eventually leads to suspicion, distrust culminating in conflict between set of communities at the local level. The local could be a village or maybe a conglomeration of villages. Who is doing that? Where do they come from? I don’t know. However, I have been hearing that a number of smaller Christian sects have emerged in recent years who are aggressively active in preaching and praying. I don’t know how these groups have suddenly come up and from where they get the financial support for their work. They seem to be active too in tribal areas like South Gujarat and Orissa. In my view, they can’t really pose a threat but in terms of their pronouncements and statements they send a very wrong signal. But what I’m trying to convey is even Christianity is not a homogeneous religion. A few zealous and evangelical groups bring bad name for the Christianity as a whole. Indians on the whole have a very poor understanding of what Christianity is. They don’t understand the nuances and the diversity among them. Therefore, irrespective of whether one belongs to this group or that, they tend to think them all as the same and posing a sort of great threat to the dominant religious group namely the Hinduism. Dominant Hindu religious groups still think that there is a process of conversion going on. Conversion is a very important agenda as far as the Right-wing Hindu nationalists are concerned. At the same time, the agenda of these newly emerging Christian sects seems to be primarily one of conversion. They seem to be more interested in conversion than anything else. It seems that some of the mobilisation for inclusion of tribals and Dalits has been through the churches. But, as you have pointed out, a large number of tribals follow traditional religions, animism, ancestor worship, and so on. Do they have an avenue to express their demands? Because I imagine this must be a very fractured world where every tribe follows their own religion. Yes. There are two contexts in which this issue can be discussed. Dalits and tribes constitute an important segment of the Christian population. Christian Dalits for quite some years have been fighting for their share in reservation provided for Dalits among the Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists (to Sikh and Buddhist Dalits it was extended later). Christian churches belonging to different denomination and sects have been from time to time held dharma, organised rallies and submitted memoranda to the

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governments. It is a different matter that the demand, so far still remains a distant dream. They argue that although a large chunk of Christians are Dalits, they are nevertheless denied the facilities meant for the Dalits. Reservation demand for Christian Dalits by the Christian churches in my view is indeed just. After all if Dalits within Buddhism and Sikhism have been extended such facilities, there is no reason as to why Christian and Muslim Dalits be denied such facilities. After all, they have all been Dalits. Denial of such facilities to Christian and Muslims tends to take the form of discrimination based on religious affiliation. After all, Christian Dalits do suffer untouchablity, segregation and discrimination both within their religious organisation and in the larger Indian society. At the same time, I think it is important that the Christian churches keep their houses in order. After all, segregation and discrimination exist within the Church. Christian Dalits openly make claim of such discriminatory practices within the Church itself. This morally weakens the stand of the Church. I think the Christian churches do have a point but in order to make the point stronger and sharper, I think it is important that they set their house in order. Let’s now take the case of the tribals. If any tribal community has made a dent into the economic, political and social space of this country, it’s largely because of the contribution of the Christian missionaries. Look at the whole of the North-east. Nagaland has over 80 per cent Christian; Mizoram over 90 per cent, Meghalaya may be approximately 70 per cent. Now because of the very strong presence of the Christian missionaries’ work, we find a high spread of literacy and because of the high spread of literacy we find larger number of people going for higher education, which in turn has made it possible for them to enter into modern occupations more extensively than tribes who did not have such exposure. So we find a strong presence of the middle class among the Nagas, Mizos, Khasis, Jaintias, and so on. Because of the presence of this middle class, they could articulate, conceive and understand the kind of exploitation, oppression and discrimination that has been at work with the movement of the population from other places into their land and territory. It is due to context such as these that they began making demand for greater and greater autonomy for themselves. I think in north-eastern region, the more intense articulation is in terms of autonomy and greater political space which has been largely due to the presence of the middle class and the presence of the middle class is largely because of the presence of the Christian missionaries. There’s no doubt about that. So if we look at the tribal India today, we find that the Christian tribals are much more articulate and have been doing

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much better than their non-Christian counterparts. We also find that they are much more conscious and better able to mobilise. Wherever there is an absence of the Christian missionaries, tribals on the whole are lagging behind others in regard to education, health or political mobilisation. Tribals in Rajasthan, Gujarat or Chhattisgarh may be taken as a case in point. Mobilisation here is mainly done by external agency such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or other civil society organisations or political parties or other organisations like the Naxalites. That is a different thing from people themselves mobilising themselves. We find in one place an external agent mobilising them such as NGO, civil society organisation, political parties or other organisation like the Naxalites. Also look at the Jharkhand. Jharkhand to some extent is an exception in Central India. We find there a very strong presence of Christian missionaries for almost over 100 years. That’s why we find there a tiny, coherent and articulate middle class making a demand for the separate state of Jharkhand for almost over nearly six decades. This kind of struggle we don’t really find elsewhere in Central India. So what I’m trying to say is that the role of the Christian missionaries has really been very important in political awakening. They may not be directly involved but by virtue of the large number of educational institutions they opened up, they could also produce large numbers of educated people. That has really helped in the long run. Even in government or bureaucracy, it is the presence of Christian tribals which is dominant. So there’s no denying the fact that if the Christian missionaries were not there, the kind of visibility that tribes have today would not have been there. Because of the prominence occupied by Christian tribals due to taking better advantage of reservation facilities available, non-Christian tribals, especially the educated ones, do feel discriminated and disadvantaged vis-à-vis the Christian tribal. This has led to cleavage and tension between them. As a result, the nature of their demand has at times moved in somewhat different direction. One of such demand, for example, by them has been the demand for withdrawal of reservation facilities for Christian tribals. In this they have often been aided by the Right-wing Hindu organisation and leadership. Of late there has also been demand by them for distinct recognition of their traditional religion than their identification and description as the Hindus as has been the case so far. The Right wing nationalists and organisation are not happy with such a movement. In India, we primarily articulate and reflect around the major religious groups. But there are

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other people who follow a somewhat different religion but who do not represent what is known as world religions. In fact they are completely overlooked or ignored. Look, for example, the case of the tribals. If they have accepted Christianity or Islam, they are primarily identified by their religious affiliation. However, very large numbers of tribes have not embraced Christianity or Islam. Their distinct religious identity is often not even recognised. They are described as either Hindus or Hinduised. But these tribals identify and describe themselves differently than the one described by others. A large number of them would say that they have different religion. But the Indian state does not give them chance to identify and describe so, when it embarks on census enumeration, for it gives space only for the major religions. So if one is a Christian, Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, one has a space for enumeration but if one does not belong to any of these major religions, one does not have space for separate enumeration and identification. Smaller groups like the tribals, practising their own religion, by virtue of the fact that they are not Christians or Muslims or other major religions, are clubbed into an open-ended Hindu category, which they are not. There was no protest against this initially. But since a decade or so there have been strong protests against being overlooked in terms of their own distinct religious identity known differently among different tribes and regions. During 2001 census enumeration, in many places in Jharkhand they protested and did not enumerate themselves. Thus, for the purpose of state administrative practice, there seems to be no place in their scheme of things for people who are small people. This is being now contested and challenged. I find this interesting, as for almost 40–50 years people didn’t bother about it. But now suddenly they find this as wrong. They argue that they may not have a religious book or religious scriptures but nevertheless they have very distinct religious ideas and practices. So that would be a very positive example of mobilisation which was not actually directly linked to identity issues but it was kind of an assistance to articulate themselves for their own purposes. And a negative example of course would be the Naxalites that you also mentioned. They seem to make large inroads into Bihar and other states. I think it would be wrong to say there was no presence of identity. But what is important is that it went beyond mere issue of identity. There was certain ideology and ideology was one of self-determination howsoever we may define. The focus was on the issue of freedom, equality and social justice in terms of which tribals suffered at the hand of the

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dominant religious, linguistic and communities. As far as the mobilisation by groups like Naxalites is concerned, there is much in common with the issues tribals have also been raising like social justice or equality. However, whereas tribes have been raising it more in terms of self-determination of the tribes within the constitutional framework, Naxalites primarily mobilise along the lines of class and aim to establish a new social order by overthrowing the existing state structure. However, since tribals suffer from exploitation and social injustice, Naxalites do find support from the tribals. In view of kind of things happening in tribal areas, I think the presence of the Naxalites is inevitable. One of the problems that tribals are confronted with in last 60 years after India’s independence is they are completely losing control of their lands and other kinds of resources. Most of the development projects that have come are in the tribal areas, whether it is Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa or elsewhere. At the same time, the benefits of these have not really gone to the tribals. Rather where such projects have come up, people from elsewhere, from a more articulate and dominant community, better exposed to the modern world moved into these areas and took up all kinds of jobs made available by these projects. In this process, tribals found themselves completely uprooted from their own land and territory. Resettlement and rehabilitations remained a distant dream for them. The growing proletarianisation became their life experience. Hence, there is an increasing questioning of the paradigm of development by the tribals. And in this they find the Naxalites as their ally and alternative. So that would be a good ground to mobilise on the grounds of justice. Exactly. They are mobilising themselves around the fact that they are losing control of their land, their forests and their livelihood. How do they do this? Do they form parties or caste organisations or … ? In a place like Jharkhand, I think people are on their own because, as I said, educated middle classes have come up and they are able to mobilise themselves on the basis of tribal identity. I think that when we talk of tribals, we need to keep in mind that it is a general category. Whereas this is so at the general or wider level, for example, at the level of the country or state or region, at the grass-roots level they actually organise and mobilise more on the fact that they are ‘Oraons’, ‘Mundas’, ‘Santals’, and so on. Tribals have been invariably territorially based. Hence, if

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the dam is built, then one finds that it is a particular tribal group that is going to be the most severally affected. And so the question of identity of the tribals is surely there. But underlying this identity is the identity of being Oraons or Santhals and it is this that becomes critical in view of displacement from the projects. Take, for example, the Netarhat Field and Farming Project in Jharkhand, under which nearly 300 villages with more than hundreds of thousands of people were to be evicted from the area and this was being done very secretively. It was only because of the presence of educated tribals in the bureaucracy that tribals of the region came to know about it. And once people came to know about it, they started organising themselves and mobilising protests, meetings, dharnas, and so on. They began their protests in 1993 and have continued through the years and have been so far able to stall it. Thus, a project of the government of India, which was going to displace more than 100,000 people from over 300 villages have been able to stall without any support from elsewhere. Where such class is absent, resistance, where initiated, has generally been carried forward with support from civil society organisations, NGOs and activists. An example in place is of Dongria Kondhs in Lanjigarh, Kalahandi, Orissa, who have been agitating against the Aluminium Refinery and Mineral Project, which is going to displace them from their land and territory. With support of civil society organisations, some of the Dongria Kondhs even went to London to protest against the project at the annual general body meeting of the shareholders. That is how they made people and shareholders at large aware of human rights as well as violations of the rights of indigenous people. On this basis, the Norwegian government which has invested its pension fund in Vedanta, the company executing the project in Lanjigarh, made an independent inquiry and eventually withdraws its funds for violation of human rights by the Vedanta. That was one of the big stories in Orissa in the last 2–3 days. And yesterday there was the news that the Supreme Court has denied permission to mining of the Niyamgiri Hill Range. So that is an important achievement. The Dongria Kondhs in India are considered as a primitive tribal group. There’s hardly 6 per cent of literacy but we find that with the support from civil society organisations and activists, they have been able to take on their struggle. One brief question that will bring us back to the academic world. We have brought in the tribals when we noted the general oblivion of their religious traditions in the context of mobilisation on religious grounds. How do you perceive the Indian academic world reflecting on these processes?

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When we talk of the academic world, we are talking of people who have been writing, thinking and reflecting on the tribal people. The discipline of anthropology had its genesis in India in the study of tribes. With the growth and expansion of universities, there has also been an expansion of the department of anthropology. Correspondingly, a vast amount of literature on tribes has been produced. The coming of the research institutes and government bodies like the Anthropological Survey of India or Tribal Research Institutes has given further boost to the study of tribes. The Anthropological Survey of India has been engaged in surveying and documenting the situation of tribal communities in different regions of the country. Notwithstanding that the impact they have made on improving the quality of life of tribal people has just been negligible. However, there have been anthropologists who had great insights and understanding of the tribal societies and their problems. Not only that but also they had genuine concern and sensitivity for the tribal people. Anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and Nirmal Kumar Bose even went to the extent of thinking and reflecting policies that would improve the quality of life of the tribal people. Leaving aside those, I’m not really very sure if there have been others as good as they. It is sad to see that despite the presence of Anthropological Survey of India, Tribal Research Institutes and Anthropology departments in the universities and correspondingly a large number of anthropologists in the country, neither the quality of life of the tribal people has seen much improvement nor has there been much improvement in the quality of the academic work except for the fact that they have produced a large number books which no one takes seriously. That explains as to why anthropologists today are hardly taken seriously in the academic world. Among academic disciplines other than anthropology, there has not been much interest in the study of tribal society. One of the reasons is of course the disciplinary boundary. But even within that tribes could be an interesting area of study and of late historians and political scientists have begun to show interest in the study of tribes. However, such are more of exceptions than rule. As to why academics in general are not interested in tribes is to do with the subject matter itself. Tribes are small communities. Hardly do they matter in the larger political schemes of the Indian society. The Indian intelligentsia and the Indian academic world are hence hardly interested in their world. Neither are they sensitive about it since they do not see them as part of their own social, cultural and linguistic community. They are the outsiders. Hence, not much interest in them. After all, academics come from the dominant regional and linguistic communities such as Bengali, Oriya,

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Gujarati, Punjabi, Assamese, and so on. Hence, for all practical purposes, tribes fall outside of their academic consciousness. Forget about consciousness, they have even no clear conception of who tribes are. Dalits they have, as they are seen as integral part of the Indian society. There is now a bit more space that the tribals are gaining in the academic world. One of the reasons for this shift is due to the fact that tribals today have become important in the world of activists and civil society organisation because of their struggle and resistance to new liberal development agenda and paradigm. In fact, it is these groups and not professional anthropologists, who have brought tribals in the so-called mainstream debate and discourse. Historians, political scientists and cultural studies’ scholars have thus begun to show increasing interest in the study of tribes. They are adding new perspectives and insights into the study of tribes. In fact, though anthropology may be producing more work on tribes, it is the kind of work being produced in history, political science and cultural study that is drawing greater attention in the academic world. Of course often it falls short of in capturing the intricate situation. A case in point is the use of the category Dalit to describe tribes. In doing so how tribals think and look at their own reality is often missed. It is a fact that tribal do not consider themselves as Dalits; it is not their perception and consciousness. The consciousness they have of themselves is that of the Adivasis. There is one historic example that was trying to mend this cleavage, which is the Visva Bharati University that was founded by Rabindranath Tagore in Shantiniketan. Tagore’s personal design was to include the Santal tribals … Bengal has of course been the seat of the intelligentsia, if not today, at least not in the distant past. But ask an average well-educated Bengali about tribals. They cannot go beyond Santals living in the vicinity of South Bengal although a large number of other tribal groups live in different parts of Bengal. It is not so much different with the intelligentsia either. There is on the whole a lot of ignorance about the tribals. If this is so in Bengal, one can visualise the state of affairs prevailing elsewhere. Is the West perceived as a threat among the Indians, especially the tribals? The Right-wing Hindu nationalists do think that the presence of the West in the form of the Christian missions is a threat to their identity because they are obsessed with the idea that the Christian missions spread over the length and breadth of country and are engaged in the

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business of conversion of the large Indian masses especially the segment that is marginalised, suffers from illiteracy and that is numerically small. They think that by extending education, health and other facilities, they take advantage of these simple people and convert them to Christianity. If this is not stopped, then people will increasingly get converted to Christianity and to that extent there will be a serious threat to the religious identity of the Hindus. So there is a perceived threat. I don’t think it’s really going to happen but there is this perception that is quite strong among them. Equally important to note here is the fact that Right-wing Hindu nationalists question the loyalty of the Christians (this is also the case with the Muslims) to India since this is a religion not born in Indian soil. Tribals per se don’t consider the West as a threat. I think they do not have a clear perception of what is West. However, those who have come under the influence of Right-wing Hindu nationalist thought do consider Christianity and Christian missions as representing the West and in the process posing a threat to tribal identity. The other kind of threat perception that we find, particularly in the context of the tribals, comes more from the context of development paradigms. This is a more recent development. With liberalisation and globalisation of the economy, there have been in recent years flooding of the private sector and MNCs in tribal areas for investment in mineral exploitation and industrial and infrastructure development. A general feeling among the radical social and political activists and groups is that this kind of development initiated under the new liberalism is a threat to India and is a sort of new colonisation of this part of the world by the West. Tribals do tend to share such view and see such developments as a threat to their identity. However, they see the threat not in terms of the West but in terms of development paradigm that would throw them off from their land and other resources. They have been displaced for over last five decades from their land due to large development projects and they will continue to suffer this if such developments are not put to a halt. Is there a link being made between Christianity and modernity. Some say that conversion to Christianity for some is not only a conversion to a new religion but also a conversion of sorts to modernity itself. To some extent yes. But depends again on what we mean by modernity? This is an important question. People think that once we are becoming educated and taking up modern occupations we are becoming modern. And since Christianity in India is associated with these new

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developments, people in a way do tend to link it with the issue of modernity. And so has been the case with the Christian population even in the context of tribes. Indeed this has led to divide among the tribals between the Christians and the non-Christians leading to cleavages and tension between them. Often the Hindu extremist organisation like the RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal have played and worked their mobilisation on this cleavage of access to the fruits of modern developments. Much of the benefits accruing from modernisation process have been cornered by the Christians because of the edge they have so far enjoyed in respect to access to modern education and other related resources. In that sense, Christianity is to some extent seen as representing a sort of modernity. However, modernity cannot be confined to mere education. It goes beyond and if one goes beyond one may find that Christianity does not necessarily give rise to modernity in all domains of social life. After all, the whole notion of modernity is rooted in a kind of ideology or kind of values or principles, which are quite different from the principles on which Christianity is based. Reason and rationality in modernity is of a quite different order than the reason and rationality at work, let us say, in theology. Isn’t it (laughing). So there seems to be real run on the tribal areas by missionaries of all sorts like the RSS people doing trishul dikshas, and so on. Yes, yes. RSS and its affiliates have moved into tribal areas in recent years in a big way because they believe that if they don’t move then the whole tribal world will become Christian. Their entry is primarily geared to counter the Christian missions. So they are now modelling themselves exactly on the same lines as the Christian missions do. But probably not including educational institutions or charities and the like. Well actually health and education is one into which the RSS has really moved in a big way now. The kind of training they impart is of course somewhat different. It’s more rooted in the Hindu religious traditions. There is another difference. Christian institutions unlike in the past are manned by the Indian themselves. Not only that but these are also manned by tribal themselves. Further, Christians today engage themselves in human rights issues. They engage themselves in issues of displacement as well as issues pertaining to rights over their, forest and other resources. They are also engaged in issues of promoting language, traditions and customs. There is much more concern for protection of

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tribal rights and tribal interests. In the process, they have become a part of the tribal ethos and tribal identity. But that’s not the case with the RSS and its affiliates. The articulation of control over land, forests, water as well as the question of tribal identity stands in direct contradiction with the interests and ideology of the RSS and its affiliates. Christians’ mission has put these issues at the forefront of tribal articulation. This is what that has sharpened the tension between the Christians and Right-wing Hindu articulation. The Right-wing Hindu organisations hardly raise the issue of alienation of tribal land and forest, or the issue of development induced displacement, discrimination against tribals in employment market, and so on. They don’t raise the issue of domination, exploitation and discrimination. They restrict themselves primarily to social welfare programmes and hardly raise the basic issues affecting tribal life. And that is the main problem. That explains as to why Christians are able to make a dent among the tribal people. So the aim of one seems to be helping to self-help, the aim of the other seems to be the instrumentalisation of these people for their own purposes. Yes, yes … Christian missionaries, particularly Jesuits, are also reputed of having recorded, for centuries, the languages of aboriginal people all over the world, often devising their first written grammars. The first Sanskrit Grammar in German, I believe, was written by a Jesuit at the court of Akbar. Yes, even the first non-Indian grammar of the Tamil language was written by a Jesuit. Is this happening now also? Yes, I think the Christian clergy, particularly those who have been through the university education, are increasingly engaged in this kind of research and training. They are also engaged in mobilising people on rights-based issues. I think these are important developments. Also in the conservation of the languages? Missionary work has been largely through the local languages. Yes, yes, Khasi, for example, has become an important language with literature in the state of Meghalaya because of that. Today in Jharkhand, there are a number of tribal groups that bring out magazines in their

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own languages; in this the role of the missionaries has been important. Take the case, for example, of the Oraons, Santhals, Mundas, and so on. In these magazines, they portray their history, social and religious festivals, culture and customs as well as about problems experienced by their tribesmen in different parts of the country. One last question. There is a lot of talk about an emerging world society. If there is such a thing as a world society, would you say it is integrating or disintegrating? I am not very sure if a world society is really being created. Surely the world has in terms of accessibility become much closer and smaller. Even if one goes to the remote village today, one finds that people use mobile phones. Communication has become so well linked and easy that one feels more at home now. While being in Delhi one can constantly keep in touch with the kith and kin in far distant places and even monitor day-today happenings in case of an emergency. There is a sort of the emotional closeness, even when one is physically very far away. Even physical connectivity has been greatly bridged. One can travel to any part of the world now fast and with ease. There is much more intense interaction among people of different parts of the world now than in the past. This interaction is visible in different areas and aspects of societal life. To that extent, the world has become like a village. But I think alongside one also finds dimensions of domination and exploitation. Whereas there are countries or regions or people who are powerful and enjoy privilege, others suffer from deprivation and disparity. They are unable to access the benefits accruing from liberalisation and globalisation. So whereas we are really becoming a kind of global, within the society, there is disparity and iniquity giving rise to seeds of cleavage, tension, conflict and violence. We can see this not only at the global level but also at national, regional and even at the village level. Look at, for example, the situation at Nandigram, Kalinga Nagar or Kashipur. So the challenge for the future seems to be the question of how to create solidarities that are not kind of self-defeating like identity politics often is. You create a solidarity that is a little bit artificial but then it backfires. Yes, with globalisation many positive things are also happening. Surely there is an increase in identity politics. But today identity is not seen as something negative. About 15–20 years ago, anything articulated on the basis of primordial grounds was always thought as undesirable. But I think today there is much more acceptability and tolerance to this.

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And largely so because we find that identity politics to a great extent converges with the fact that these groups of people also suffer from discriminations, oppression and exploitation; and that’s why I think identity politics today is thought in some positive terms. I think the identity politics in itself is problematic but when it is tied to issues such as the issues of human rights or the issue of discrimination, exploitation and domination, I think it tends to become acceptable. There is now, for example, the UN declaration of the rights of the indigenous people. How could this happen and how do we explain this? To a great extent in my view, this is to do with the issue of exploitation, domination, discrimination and not merely with their distinct identity based on history, territory, culture or combination of one or more of them. However, identity politics of this kind has its own limits. Even when it is tied to the issues of domination, oppression and exploitation, more often than not it goes beyond and takes aggressive forms leading to conflicts and violence even to ethnic cleansing. In a sense then identity politics has its own limits. Virginius Xaxa is a professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi and currently Rajeev Gandhi Chair for Contemporary Studies at North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Shillong.

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Appendix: Binary Oppositions in Counter-hegemonic Discourse1

Unmarked (positive, normative)

Marked (negative, deviant)

Resilience of traditional communities in South Asia (v) Traditional resistance to violence (v)

[Rapid change in modern Western societies] Assembly line violence in modern ethnic conflicts (v) [Abstract modern rationality] [People uprooted by modernity] Cultural attack (v) [Addicted to change] [Deplorable]

Robust commonsense (v) People living ordinary lives (v) Social inertia (v) ‘Cussed’ refusal to change way of life (v) Rarely heroic (v) [actually heroic considering the odds] [Personal] community life (v) [Personal] local politics (v) [Pre-political community] Borderlines between communities not defined (vi) [Traditionally blurred boundaries between faiths] Traditional conceptions of community life and intercommunity relations (vi) Salad bowl (vi) Individuality transcended through presence of others (vi) Communities retain their distinctive identities (vi) [Eastern traditional knowledge] [Natural, not artificial, not crafted] [Organic society] [Consensual decision making, counselling procedures] Lived world of Hinduism (vii) Traditions of social healing (vii)

Impersonal political processes (v) Impersonal forces of organised mass violence (v) ‘Proper’ modern nation (vi) Conventional ethnic majority [Hindu] (vi) Proper ethnic and well-behaved nationalities (vi) Progress, development, secularism, national security, the nation-state, census operations (vi) Melting pot (vi) Individualistic assumptions (vi) Anti-communitarian bias (vi) European Enlightenment (vi) Statism, state building, nationalism, nation formation (vi) Law-and-order machinery (vii) Game numbers in competitive politics (vii) Standardised religion (vii) Fever-pitch pace of cultural engineering of Hindus (vii) (Appendix Continued)

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Unmarked (positive, normative)

Marked (negative, deviant)

Rereading, cauterising and healing of traumata (vii) Principled forgetfulness (vii) Multilayered primordialities, open-ended self (vii) [Traditional ways of exchange]

Ravages of modern historical consciousness (vii) [Compulsory self-awareness] Ravages of impersonality and massification (vii) Modern economic and political market (vii) [Suppressed] underside of modern individualism (vii) Unawareness due to ‘principled’ forgetfulness of the class of modern, secular scholars (vii f.) Monopoly of secular categories backed by state power and statist propaganda (viii) Repression of awareness that the ideologues of religious violence represent the disowned other self (viii) Western scholarship (vi) [Bias of] South Asia’s modernised middle classes (viii) Impersonal checks of institutions (viii) Ideas such as the constitution, democratic elections and human rights (viii) Imperial West (ix) 19th-century social evolutionism [Victimiser of] proxy battle the modern West fights through its brain children in the Southern world (ix) [Hindus and Muslims divided by the ruing West] Global order built on values of European Enlightenment (ix) [West is true villain, external enemy against which Hindus and Muslims should unite] Smug, Westernised Indian middle-class complicit in the Ramjanmabhumi stir (ix) [the enemy within] Frightened species facing extinction (ix)

[Wholesome, embedded individuality] Awareness of resistance to violence from everyday Hinduism and Islam (vii) [State-independent scholarship]

[Religiously self-aware scholarship]

[Eastern scholarship] [Scholarship committed to the whole of the population] Authentic primordialities (viii) ‘Normal’, lethargic, easy lifestyle … distinctive mix of the petty and the sublime (viii) Indian civilisation (ix) Core organising principles of Hinduism (ix) [Victim of] proxy battle the modern West fights through its brain children in the Southern world (ix) Hindus and Muslims united in victimhood (ix) [Local order built on principles of Indian civilisation] [Innocent] ‘villains’, carriers of messages they themselves cannot read (ix) [The Indian people]

Inner strength of the [Indian] civilisation as expressed in the ways of life of its living carriers (xi)

(Appendix Continued)

Appendix Unmarked (positive, normative)

353

Marked (negative, deviant)

Resilience of traditional communities in South [Rapid change in modern Western Asia (v) societies] Traditional resistance to violence (v) Assembly line violence in modern ethnic conflicts (v) Robust commonsense (v) [Abstract modern rationality] People living ordinary lives (v) [People uprooted by modernity] Social inertia (v) Cultural attack (v) ‘Cussed’ refusal to change way of life (v) [Addicted to change] Rarely heroic (v) [actually heroic considering [Deplorable] the odds] [Personal] community life (v) Impersonal political processes (v) [Personal] local politics (v) Impersonal forces of organised mass violence (v) [Pre-political community] ‘Proper’ modern nation (vi) Borderlines between communities not Conventional ethnic majority [Hindu] defined (vi) (vi) [Traditionally blurred boundaries between Proper ethnic and well-behaved faiths] nationalities (vi) Traditional conceptions of community life Progress, development, secularism, and intercommunity relations (vi) national security, the nation-state, census operations (vi) Salad bowl (vi) Melting pot (vi) Individuality transcended through presence Individualistic assumptions (vi) of others (vi) Communities retain their distinctive Anti-communitarian bias (vi) identities (vi) [Eastern traditional knowledge] European Enlightenment (vi) [Natural, not artificial, not crafted] Statism, state building, nationalism, nation formation (vi) [Organic society] Law-and-order machinery (vii) [Consensual decision making, counselling Game numbers in competitive politics procedures] (vii) Lived world of Hinduism (vii) Standardised religion (vii) Traditions of social healing (vii) Fever-pitch pace of cultural engineering of Hindus (vii) Rereading, cauterising and healing of Ravages of modern historical traumata (vii) consciousness (vii) Principled forgetfulness (vii) [Compulsory self-awareness] Multilayered primordialities, open-ended Ravages of impersonality and self (vii) massification (vii) [Traditional ways of exchange] Modern economic and political market (vii) [Wholesome, embedded individuality] [Suppressed] underside of modern individualism (vii) (Appendix Continued)

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Unmarked (positive, normative)

Marked (negative, deviant)

Awareness of resistance to violence from everyday Hinduism and Islam (vii)

Unawareness due to ‘principled’ forgetfulness of the class of modern, secular scholars (vii f.) Monopoly of secular categories backed by state power and statist propaganda (viii) Repression of awareness that the ideologues of religious violence represent the disowned other self (viii) Western scholarship (vi) [Bias of] South Asia’s modernised middle classes (viii) Impersonal checks of institutions (viii) Ideas such as the constitution, democratic elections and human rights (viii) Imperial West (ix) 19th-century social evolutionism [Victimiser of] proxy battle the modern West fights through its brain children in the Southern world (ix) [Hindus and Muslims divided by the ruing West] Global order built on values of European Enlightenment (ix) [West is true villain, external enemy against which Hindus and Muslims should unite] Smug, Westernised Indian middle-class complicit in the Ramjanmabhumi stir (ix) [the enemy within] [Rapid change in modern Western societies] Assembly line violence in modern ethnic conflicts (v) [Abstract modern rationality] [People uprooted by modernity] Cultural attack (v) [Addicted to change] [Deplorable]

[State-independent scholarship]

[Religiously self-aware scholarship]

[Eastern scholarship] [Scholarship committed to the whole of the population] Authentic primordialities (viii) ‘Normal’, lethargic, easy lifestyle … distinctive mix of the petty and the sublime (viii) Indian civilisation (ix) Core organising principles of Hinduism (ix) [Victim of] proxy battle the modern West fights through its brain children in the Southern world (ix) Hindus and Muslims united in victimhood (ix) [Local order built on principles of Indian civilisation] [Innocent] ‘villains’, carriers of messages they themselves cannot read (ix) [The Indian people]

Resilience of traditional communities in South Asia (v) Traditional resistance to violence (v) Robust commonsense (v) People living ordinary lives (v) Social inertia (v) ‘Cussed’ refusal to change way of life (v) Rarely heroic (v) [actually heroic considering the odds] [Personal] community life (v)

Impersonal political processes (v) (Appendix Continued)

Appendix

355

Unmarked (positive, normative)

Marked (negative, deviant)

[Personal] local politics (v)

Impersonal forces of organised mass violence (v) ‘Proper’ modern nation (vi) Conventional ethnic majority [Hindu] (vi) Proper ethnic and well-behaved nationalities (vi) Progress, development, secularism, national security, the nation-state, census operations (vi) Melting pot (vi) Individualistic assumptions (vi)

[Pre-political community] Borderlines between communities not defined (vi) [Traditionally blurred boundaries between faiths] Traditional conceptions of community life and intercommunity relations (vi) Salad bowl (vi) Individuality transcended through presence of others (vi) Communities retain their distinctive identities (vi) [Eastern traditional knowledge] [Natural, not artificial, not crafted] [Organic society] [Consensual decision making, counselling procedures] Lived world of Hinduism (vii) Traditions of social healing (vii) Rereading, cauterising and healing of traumata (vii) Principled forgetfulness (vii) Multilayered primordialities, open-ended self (vii) [Traditional ways of exchange] [Wholesome, embedded individuality] Awareness of resistance to violence from everyday Hinduism and Islam (vii) [State-independent scholarship]

[Religiously self-aware scholarship]

[Eastern scholarship]

Anti-communitarian bias (vi) European Enlightenment (vi) Statism, state building, nationalism, nation formation (vi) Law-and-order machinery (vii) Game numbers in competitive politics (vii) Standardised religion (vii) Fever-pitch pace of cultural engineering of Hindus (vii) Ravages of modern historical consciousness (vii) [Compulsory self-awareness] Ravages of impersonality and massification (vii) Modern economic and political market (vii) [Suppressed] underside of modern individualism (vii) Unawareness due to ‘principled’ forgetfulness of the class of modern, secular scholars (vii f.) Monopoly of secular categories backed by state power and statist propaganda (viii) Repression of awareness that the ideologues of religious violence represent the disowned other self (viii) Western scholarship (vi) (Appendix Continued)

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Unmarked (positive, normative)

Marked (negative, deviant)

[Scholarship committed to the whole of the population] Authentic primordialities (viii) ‘Normal’, lethargic, easy lifestyle … distinctive mix of the petty and the sublime (viii) Indian civilisation (ix) Core organising principles of Hinduism (ix) [Victim of] proxy battle the modern West fights through its brain children in the Southern world (ix)

[Bias of] South Asia’s modernised middle classes (viii) Impersonal checks of institutions (viii) Ideas such as the constitution, democratic elections and human rights (viii) Imperial West (ix) 19th-century social evolutionism [Victimiser of] proxy battle the modern West fights through its brain children in the Southern world (ix) [Hindus and Muslims divided by the ruing West] Global order built on values of European Enlightenment (ix) [West is true villain, external enemy against which Hindus and Muslims should unite] Smug, Westernised Indian middle-class complicit in the Ramjanmabhumi stir (ix) [the enemy within] [Rapid change in modern Western societies] Assembly line violence in modern ethnic conflicts (v) [Abstract modern rationality] [People uprooted by modernity] Cultural attack (v) [Addicted to change] [Deplorable]

Hindus and Muslims united in victimhood (ix) [Local order built on principles of Indian civilisation] [Innocent] ‘villains’, carriers of messages they themselves cannot read (ix) [The Indian people]

Resilience of traditional communities in South Asia (v) Traditional resistance to violence (v) Robust commonsense (v) People living ordinary lives (v) Social inertia (v) ‘Cussed’ refusal to change way of life (v) Rarely heroic (v) [actually heroic considering the odds] [Personal] community life (v) [Personal] local politics (v) [Pre-political community] Borderlines between communities not defined (vi) [Traditionally blurred boundaries between faiths] Traditional conceptions of community life and intercommunity relations (vi) Salad bowl (vi)

Impersonal political processes (v) Impersonal forces of organised mass violence (v) ‘Proper’ modern nation (vi) Conventional ethnic majority [Hindu] (vi) Proper ethnic and well-behaved nationalities (vi) Progress, development, secularism, national security, the nation-state, census operations (vi) Melting pot (vi) (Appendix Continued)

Appendix Unmarked (positive, normative)

Marked (negative, deviant)

Individuality transcended through presence of others (vi) Communities retain their distinctive identities (vi) [Eastern traditional knowledge] [Natural, not artificial, not crafted]

Individualistic assumptions (vi)

[Organic society] [Consensual decision making, counselling procedures] Lived world of Hinduism (vii) Traditions of social healing (vii) Rereading, cauterising and healing of traumata (vii) Principled forgetfulness (vii) Multilayered primordialities, open-ended self (vii) [Traditional ways of exchange] [Wholesome, embedded individuality] Awareness of resistance to violence from everyday Hinduism and Islam (vii) [State-independent scholarship]

[Religiously self-aware scholarship]

[Eastern scholarship] [Scholarship committed to the whole of the population] Authentic primordialities (viii) ‘Normal’, lethargic, easy lifestyle … distinctive mix of the petty and the sublime (viii) Indian civilisation (ix) Core organising principles of Hinduism (ix) [Victim of] proxy battle the modern West fights through its brain children in the Southern world (ix)

357

Anti-communitarian bias (vi) European Enlightenment (vi) Statism, state building, nationalism, nation formation (vi) Law-and-order machinery (vii) Game numbers in competitive politics (vii) Standardised religion (vii) Fever-pitch pace of cultural engineering of Hindus (vii) Ravages of modern historical consciousness (vii) [Compulsory self-awareness] Ravages of impersonality and massification (vii) Modern economic and political market (vii) [Suppressed] underside of modern individualism (vii) Unawareness due to ‘principled’ forgetfulness of the class of modern, secular scholars (vii f.) Monopoly of secular categories backed by state power and statist propaganda (viii) Repression of awareness that the ideologues of religious violence represent the disowned other self (viii) Western scholarship (vi) [Bias of] South Asia’s modernised middle classes (viii) Impersonal checks of institutions (viii) Ideas such as the constitution, democratic elections and human rights (viii) Imperial West (ix) 19th-century social evolutionism [Victimiser of] proxy battle the modern West fights through its brain children in the Southern world (ix) (Appendix Continued)

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Unmarked (positive, normative)

Marked (negative, deviant)

Hindus and Muslims united in victimhood (ix) [Local order built on principles of Indian civilisation] [Innocent] ‘villains’, carriers of messages they themselves cannot read (ix)

[Hindus and Muslims divided by the ruing West] Global order built on values of European Enlightenment (ix) [West is true villain, external enemy against which Hindus and Muslims should unite] Smug, Westernised Indian middle-class complicit in the Ramjanmabhumi stir (ix) [the enemy within] [Rapid change in modern Western societies] Assembly line violence in modern ethnic conflicts (v) [Abstract modern rationality] [People uprooted by modernity] Cultural attack (v) [Addicted to change] [Deplorable]

[The Indian people]

Resilience of traditional communities in South Asia (v) Traditional resistance to violence (v) Robust commonsense (v) People living ordinary lives (v) Social inertia (v) ‘Cussed’ refusal to change way of life (v) Rarely heroic (v) [actually heroic considering the odds] [Personal] community life (v) [Personal] local politics (v) [Pre-political community] Borderlines between communities not defined (vi) [Traditionally blurred boundaries between faiths] Traditional conceptions of community life and intercommunity relations (vi) Salad bowl (vi) Individuality transcended through presence of others (vi) Communities retain their distinctive identities (vi) [Eastern traditional knowledge] [Natural, not artificial, not crafted] [Organic society] [Consensual decision making, counselling procedures] Lived world of Hinduism (vii) Traditions of social healing (vii)

Impersonal political processes (v) Impersonal forces of organised mass violence (v) ‘Proper’ modern nation (vi) Conventional ethnic majority [Hindu] (vi) Proper ethnic and well-behaved nationalities (vi) Progress, development, secularism, national security, the nation-state, census operations (vi) Melting pot (vi) Individualistic assumptions (vi) Anti-communitarian bias (vi) European Enlightenment (vi) Statism, state building, nationalism, nation formation (vi) Law-and-order machinery (vii) Game numbers in competitive politics (vii) Standardised religion (vii) Fever-pitch pace of cultural engineering of Hindus (vii) (Appendix Continued)

Appendix

359

Unmarked (positive, normative)

Marked (negative, deviant)

Rereading, cauterising and healing of traumata (vii) Principled forgetfulness (vii) Multilayered primordialities, open-ended self (vii) [Traditional ways of exchange]

Ravages of modern historical consciousness (vii) [Compulsory self-awareness] Ravages of impersonality and massification (vii) Modern economic and political market (vii)

Note 1. Page numbers in round brackets refer to Ashis Nandy et al., eds, Creating a Nationality. The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and Fear of the Self (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Inferred propositions and terms are set in square brackets.

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Index

369

Index

Abrahamitic civilisation, 19 Acharya, Ashok globalisation, 147–48 historical research and studies, 146–47 Indian identity, 150–51 perceptions about religion, 144–45 religion, as a threat, 144 scientific challenges in Indian academic environment, 146–48 social sciences in India, 145 unified Europe and impact on West, 149–50 on world society, 148–49 Adorno, Theodor W., 95 Ahmed, Imtiaz freedom, 161 Muslim identity in India, 156–58 religion, as a threat, 153–55 role of religion for political ends, 156–57 role of unified Europe on West, 159–60 West as a threat to India, 158–59 on world society, 160–61 Alam, Anwar Europe as a threat to India, 166–67 Hindu fundamentalism vs Muslim fundamentalism, 163–64 Islamic traditions of learning, 164–65 modernity, 168 religion, as a threat, 162–63 role of religious identities for political purposes, 163–64 on Tablighi Jamaat, 164 West as a threat, 165–66 on world society, 167–68 Ali, Zeenat Shaukat academic community and religion, 327–28 academic environment in the context of Europe, 330–32 perception of Europe, 329–30

religion, as a threat, 322–26 West as a source of threat, 328–29 world society, 332–33 American Declaration of Independence (1776), 69–70, 93 Andalusian autonomy movement, 33 A Passage to England (Nirad C. Chaudhuri), 213 Arabic civilisations, 18–19 Arabic language, 11–12 Arianism, 15 Article IV, of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, 93 Avengalvón, 30–31 Aztec priests, 115–16 Barbarian polities, 15–16 Belief systems, 90 Berlin, Isaiah, 9 Béteille, André, 122 Bhargava, Rajeev cultural heritage, 169–71 on ethics, 174–75 Europe, role in Indian academic environment, 178 global culture and civil society, 180 modernity in the context of religion, 173 perception of Europe, 178–79 religion in the context of nationalism, 171–73 religious faith and public reason, 169 West as a threat, 176–77 Western academia, 177 on world polity, 179–81 on world society, 179 Bhattacharya, Asoke academic community and role of religion, 182–83 perception of Europe, 183 religion, as a threat, 182

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West as a threat, 183 Western society, 184 on world society, 183–84 Bhatti, Anil academic environment in India, 185–86 basis of scientific methodology in religious studies, 187–89 perception of Europe, 185–86, 190–91 religion, as a threat, 185 religious ideologies, 186–87 West as a threat, 189–90 on world society, 191–92 Biblical tradition, 13 Bilgrami, Akeel, 116–17 Casanova, José, 6 Catholicism, impact on Jews, 15 Chatterji, Roma academic environment and religion, 193, 195–96 common ground for common humanity, 198–200 functioning collaborations in academics, 196–98 humanistic education in Bengal, 201–202 intercultural interactions, 200–201 perception of Europe, 194–95 religion, as a threat, 193 West as a threat, 193–94 on world society, 196 Christianity vs Islam, 19–21, 53 anti-Islamic movement, 36–37 conversion and policies against converts, 29–32 in Cordova, 28 degrees of hostilities towards Christians, 28 doctrine of degrees of infidelity, 31 Islamic expansion and impacts, 26–27 religious tolerance, 26–28 role of missionaries and Christian armies, 31–32 in Spain, 29, 32–34 Civilisation ‘Anglicate,’ 9 Arabicate, characterisation of, 5, 9, 12

civilised/barbarian dichotomy, 10–11, 16, 18 dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ 4, 11–13 and globalisation, 9 and history of the chosen people, 13 and interaction of cultures, 11–12 Latinate, characterisation of, 5, 9 modern age, 6–7 pre-modern, 6 rise of Christianity, 13 semiotic reference frames of, 4–5 Civilised/barbarian dichotomy, 10–11, 16 and Arabs, 18 Collective identity, 85–86 and language, 88–89 political, 93 Collective institutions, 58 Colonial domination, 114–15 and India, 116 and reversal of values, 117–18 Critical modernism, 119 Critical traditionalism, 119 Crusades anti-Islamic movement, 36–38 armies under Pope Urban II, 37–38 basis for, 36 crusaders’ behaviour, 39–41 in Jerusalem, 38, 40 in Levant, 38 Luther’s writings on, 43–44 Culture and beliefs, 90 collective framework, 57–58 cultural models, 56 defined, 90 global cultural reference frame, 52–53 institutions, 57–59 and interaction with civilisation, 11–12 modern cultural reference frame, 51, 57, 60, 64–65, 67 rules of the cultural reference frame, 69 science as a social system, 53–54 traditional cultural reference frames, 57–58 Western concepts vs Eastern concepts, 52

Index Decoupling, of modern principles, 60–61 Derrett, J. Duncan M., 115 Development, essential parameters for, 120 Diffusion, of institutionalisation, 78 Engineer, Asghar Ali academic environment in India, 207 Bollywood, 209–210 lifestyle changes in India, 208 multiple modernities, 209 Muslim academia in India, 204–205 perception of Europe, 207 religion, as a threat, 203–204 Wahhabi influence on Muslim Universities, 205–206 West as a threat, 206 on world society, 208–209 Enlightenment period, 63 Europe, perception of other religions, xi–xii antagonism between Europe and the Muslim world, 4, 16 anti-Islamic sentiments, 36–37 categorisation in geographical versus religious terms, 4, 10 depiction of Turks, 42–43 dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ 4, 11–13 imprecations against Islam, 16–17 Israel, 3 and modern processes of secularisation, 6 notion of Latin Christendom, xii–xiii and rise of Catholic Christianity, 14–15 Turkey, 3, 103–105 European Enlightenment era, 104, 123, 125–26, 179 European historiography, 10 Exclusive politics, 83 Forgetfulness, ‘principled,’ 125–26 Freedom, idea of, 120 Friedland, Roger, 100 German romantic movement, 124–25 Ghosh, Anjan Bose–Gandhi conflict on tradition, 215–16 Europe, perception of, 214–15 global civil society, 216–17

371

Indian academic environment, 212 modernity, 215–16 Muslim academics, perception of, 212–13 political mobilisation on religious grounds, 211–12 religion, as a threat, 211 West, perception of, 213–14 Global culture, 160–61 Global models, 60–61, 77 Godhra incident, 123 Habermas, Jürgen, 60, 96 Hapsburg Empire, 104 Hebrew Scriptures, 18–19 Heerpredigt gegen die Türcken (Luther), 43 Herodotus, 11–12 History writing, principles of, 13, 24n10 European historiography, 10–11 historiographic tropes, 13–14 Holy War, Christian concept of, 36, 44 Honour killers, 45–46 Huda, Shirin academic world of India, 220–21 female ulama in India, 230 gender politics issue in the context of India, 224–25 polygamy, 229–31 religion, as a threat, 218 special marriage act, 231 West as a threat, 222 world society, 223 Human rights, 64 declarations, 93 Huntington, Samuel P., 7 Ibn-Munqidh, Usamah, 39 Identity basis for formation of, 86 ‘Christian,’ 106 and the individual, 85 legal-ethical, 98 of the majoritarian Serbs, 95 and medium of language, 88–89 symbolic representations of, 84–85 of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ 4, 11–13, 49, 97, 116 Identity politics, 49, 83, xiv as a discourse strategy, 97

372

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in Europe, 103–108 in India, 111–13 of National Socialism, 99 and Ramjanmabhumi movement, 101, 121–28, 351–59 Inclusive politics, 83 vs identity politics, 95–101 India, portrayal of Muslim, xiii and interaction of cultures, 11–12 Indian culture, 115 Institutionalised cultural models, 56 Islamic Orthodoxy, 20 Islamic world, xi Christianity vs Islam, 19–21 imprecations against Islam, 16–18 Islamic expansion, 26 Luther’s conception of Islam, 44 names associated with Muslims, 22 Western perception, xii Israel–Palestine conflict, xii Japanese just-in-time production, 78 John of Damascus, 21–22 Judaic tradition, 13 Kidwai, Qutub about Buddha, 229 academic world of India, 219–21 concept of divine, 229 female ulama in India, 229 feminist movements and Muslim women, 226–28 gender politics issue in the context of India, 223–24, 228 historical context of Islam, 228–29 Islam in modern India, 232 perception of Europe, 222 polyandrous relations, 225–26 polygamy, 229–31 polygamy among Hindus, 225 religion, as a threat, 218 West as a threat, 221–22 world society, 223 Kippenberg, Hans, 66 Lange, Claudio, 36 Latinate Christianity, 5, 9, 103 Liberal-democratic theory, 96

Liberties, 120 principle of, 93 Linguistic behaviour, 88 Linguistic identities, 89 Mahajan, Gurpreet academic environment and religion, 235–37 Europe, perception of, 238–39 religion, as a threat, 233–34 religious groups in India, 234–35 West as a threat, 237–38 world society, 239–41 Mass politics, xiv Mayaram, Shail academic environment in India, 245 Europe, perception of, 248 modernity, 247 religion, as a threat, 242–44 scientific community in India, 246 secularism, 246–47 West, perception of, 247–48 world society, 248–49 Meanings, connotation of, 88 Mehta, Deepak academic field of social sciences, 251 European discourses, 253–54 Europe in the context of Indian experience, 255 impact of globalisation, 253 rationality of religious forms, 252 religion, as a threat, 250–51 on social science, 252–53 world society, 254 Methodological individualism, 58–59 Meyer, John W., 51, 56–60 cultural models, 56 decoupling, of modern principles, 60–61 factors of success, 78 global cultural reference frame, 79 global models, 60–61, 77 God concept, 64–65 idea of a world polity, 75, 79–80 modern actors, 51 modern cultural reference frame, 51, 57, 60 modernity, 67–68, 124

Index principal–agent relationship, 69–70 rationalisation, 63 role of institutions, 57–59 science as a social system, 53–54, 71–72 scientific rationality, 71–72 self concept, 73–74 type of action and actor, 62 Western concepts vs Eastern concepts, 52 Misra, Salil about identity politics, 256–57 academic field of social science, 264–67 Enlightenment and imperialism, 271–72 Europe, perception of, 275–78 globalisation and Indian economy, 273–74 Hindu communalism, 263–64 Indian nationalism, 259–60 Muslim nationalism, 261–62 nationalist politics, 257–58 national sovereignty, 274 religious nationalism, 260–64 secularism, 268–70 West as a threat, 270–75 Western academia, perception of, 278–79 Missionary activity, 107 Modern actors, 51 Modernity, 57, xiv and civilisation, 6–7 in the context of traditional society, 7 ideas of, 122 multiple, 67 Nandy’s views, 114–15, 117 Sen’s views, 119 Modern politics, 49 cultural models, 56 decoupling, of modern principles, 60–61 global models, 60–61 modern actors, 51 modern cultural reference frame, 51 role of institutions, 57–59 Western concepts vs Eastern concepts, 52 Modern state, in Europe, 45 Modi, Narendra, 124

373

Moriscos, 32–33 Mozarabes, 26, 29 Mudéjares, 29 Muslim minorities, xi Muwallid, 26 The Myth of Nations (Patrick J. Geary), 10 Nandy, Ashis Aryan invasion theory, 283–84 Europe, perception of, 287 field of social sciences, 283 globalisation, 288 Indian academic world, 281–83 Indian identity, 286–87 modernity, 281 nationalism, 285–86 religion, as a threat, 280 role of religion for political ends, 280 West as a threat, 284–85, 287 world society, 287–88 Nationalism, 49 aggressive, 81 Indian, 259–60 Muslim, 261–62 religious, 260–64 Nation-state, idea of the, 80–81 Natural equality, idea of, 123 Natural laws, 90–91, 122 Nigam, Aditya academic environment, 297–98 academic field of science, 296 gender politics, 293–94 identity politics and academic world, 295–96 ideology of secularism, 293 internal reforms within Muslim community, 294–95 Islam, as a threat, 289–92 role of religion for political ends, 291–92 West as a source of threat, 296–97 world society, 298–99 Normative order, concept of, 133–34 counter-hegemonic discourse, 127, 351–59 evaluation of, in countries, 135–38 survey and discussion, 138–40. See also specific names

374

IDENTITY POLITICS IN INDIA AND EUROPE

North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), 103 Orientalism, 53–54 Oriental woman, 40 Orthodoxy, 20 Ottoman Empire depiction of Turks, 42–43 power and expansion of, 42 Pattanaik, Devdutt academic environment, 301–303 Europe, perception of, 305–306 Indian academic community and Western influences, 306 religion, as a threat, 300–301 West as a source of threat, 304–305 world society, 306–307 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 45 Perceptions, of Islamic world, xi post colonialism, xii of threat, xii Pernau, Margrit, 8 Political identity, 92–94 of the EU, 97 religious, 101 Political theory, 96 Power based on mass politics, xiv Pre-modern civilisations, 6 Progress, Sen’s notion of, 120 Public ethics, 107 Raina, Dhruv aspects of modernisation, 315 Hindu nationalists and ideologies, 313 History as an academic discipline, 313–14 Indian sciences, perspectives, 308, 310–11 Muslim community in India, 312–13 on positivism, 309–10 religion as a threat, 311–12 West as a source of threat, 314–15 Western science, perspectives, 309 world society, 315–16 Ramjanmabhumi movement and identity politics, 101, 121–28 dichotomy of of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ 124

in terms of discourse theory, 127–28, 351–59 in terms of semiotic reference frame, 124 Rawls, John, 60 Reformation, time of, 45–46 Regensburg speech, of Pope Benedict XIV, xi Religion, as a reference frame, 65 ethical view, 66 modern, 65 Religion, as a threat Aditya Nigam, 289–92 Anil Bhatti, 185 Anjan Ghosh, 211 Anwar Alam, 162–63 Asghar Ali Engineer, 203–204 Ashis Nandy, 280 Ashok Acharya, 144 Asoke Bhattacharya, 182 Deepak Mehta, 250–51 Devdutt Pattanaik, 300–301 Dhruv Raina, 311–12 Gurpreet Mahajan, 233–34 Imtiaz Ahmed, 153–55 Qutub Kidwai, 218 Rajeev Bhargava, 169–73 Roma Chatterji, 193 Ruby Sain, 317 Salil Misra, 256–64 Shail Mayaram, 242–44 Shirin Huda, 218 Virginius Xaxa, 334–37 Zeenat Shaukat Ali, 322–26 Roman history/mythology, 14 Root metaphor, 90 Said, Edward W., 8, 53–54 Sain, Ruby academic field, 319 global civil society, 321 Muslim community, 319 perception of Europe in the academic community, 320–21 religion, as a threat, 317 role of religion for political ends, 317–18

Index West as a source of threat, 319–20 world society, 321 Semiotic reference frames, of civilisation, 4–5, 7, 56, 65, 90, 124 modern, 58, 69 Sen, Amartya, 51 Shadow Lines (Amitav Ghosh), 212–13 Social rules, 90–91 State ineffectiveness, Indian context, 99 Symbolic frame of reference, of religion, 45 Tertium comparationis, 4 Theophanes, chronicle of, 22 Theory of Justice (John Rawls), 96 Ticket mentality, 95 Universal human rights, idea of, 63 Venerabilis, Petrus, 22 Virginia Bill of Rights, 93 Vom Kriege Widder die Türcken (Luther), 43

375

Wehler’s declaration, on Turkey, 104 Western lifestyle, 46, 67, 114 Western Orientalism, 45 Edward W. Said’s critique, 8–9 Wheatcroft, Andrew, 16, 27–28, 40 Winkler, Heinrich August, 67–68 World polity, idea of a, 119 Meyer, John W., 75, 79–80 statelessness of, 79–81 Xaxa, Virginius Christianity and modernity, 345–46 Christian missionaries and RSS movement, 346–48 developing solidarity, 348–49 Indian academic world on religious grounds, 342–44 religion, as a threat, 334–37 tribal mobilisation, 337–42 West as a source of threat, 344–45 world society, 348

About the Author

Michael Dusche holds a PhD in Philosophy and International Relations from the University of Frankfurt am Main . His thesis is published as Der Philosoph als Mediator (The Philosopher as a Mediator) (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2000). From 2000 to 2005, Dusche held the position of a senior assistant professor and DAAD lecturer at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. From 2005 to 2009 he held research positions at the University of Erfurt, Germany and F.H. Jena, Germany. Since June 2009, he has been a fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.