Hijabs, Turbans and the Secular
1. Let us suppose that some school or another in India also prescribes uniform to its students. A Sikh boy and a Muslim girl enroll. They wear the colors of…
Read moreSecular State and Hijab
1. We can all accept the fact, I suppose, that some thing or another is a religious symbol to someone when s/he belongs to that religion whose symbol it is.…
Read moreIntercultural exchange of categories
What is wrong with the intercultural exchange of categories? Throughout one gets the impression that there is something “fundamentally wrong” with categories shifting in meaning over time or with the introduction of categories…
Read moreIs laukika-adhyatimika distinction same as secular-sacred distinction?
The theories (and discussions) about secularism constitute a test case for the claims advanced in ‘The Heathen in his blindness: Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion’ about the…
Read moreBankruptcy of postcolonial intellectuals and their defense of secularism
We have developed partial explanations of why the secularism debate in India takes such peculiar forms and why otherwise intelligent people talk nonsense here. But we don’t do so by…
Read moreFallacy of Equivocation: Indian Secularism
While reading Shabnum Tejani’s Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History (2008), I ran into the same weird point that Neera Chandhoke also tried to make at the RRI platform…
Read moreReview of Amartya Sen’s Argumentative Indian—S.N. Balagangadhara
[Original Dutch version is here.] Today, there are multiple images of India current in the West. There is the mystic India, an image that the German Romantics created and the…
Read moreIs the distinction between ‘secular’and ‘religious’ neutral? –S.N. Balagangadhara
The question appears to be: need one accept certain premises of Christianity (whether Protestant or Catholic varieties) in order that the dominant understanding of, say, the secular state and the…
Read more