[Appeared in Making sense of the Secular: Critical perspecitves from Europe to Asia (Ed. Ranjan Ghosh), Routledge, 2013, pp 111-130] The relation between religion and politics remains one of the…
Read moreEditor’s Note: This article appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy. Authored by SN Balagangadhara and Jakob De Roover. For an alternative research programme (paradigm) for studying India, Indian culture…
Read more[Originally published at cultivasian.org on Feb 2007] We all agree that events like the Gujarat riots are tragic and terrible. But what is the role of intellectuals in avoiding similar…
Read moreSasheej Hegde in his EPW article says: “A theory of secularism in the sense of a theory about possessing the concept ‘secular’ is quite distinct from a theory about how…
Read moreThe 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 more[Published in Economic and Political Theory, 37(51):5142-5142] A text like my article on the secularism debate (EPW, September 28, 2002), is something more than a sequence of sentences. This is a…
Read more[Published in Economic and Political Weekly, 37: 4047-4053] On the Indian Debate and Its Western Origins The rise of Hindutva has often been interpreted as a threat to the secular state.…
Read moreIn the last few decades, “secularism” has become the subject of caustic debate in the Indian media. The dispute about the value of this idea to contemporary India is no…
Read moreI want to go deeper into the claim of my earlier post that Shabnum Tejanis and Neera Chandhokes of this world do not think but merely talk. In other words,…
Read more1. Consider the thought that ‘meanings’ (leave aside the distinction between words and sentences on the one hand and concepts and categories on the other) do not exist outside historical…
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