Author: Shabnum Tejani
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253058325
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Get Book Here
Book Description
Many of the central issues in modern Indian politics have long been understood in terms of an opposition between ideologies of secularism and communalism. Observers have argued that recent Hindu nationalism is the symptom of a crisis of Indian secularism and have blamed this on a resurgence of religion or communalism. Shabnum Tejani unpacks prevailing assumptions about the meaning of secularism in contemporary politics, focusing on India but with many points of comparison elsewhere in the world. She questions the simple dichotomy between secularism and communalism that has been used in scholarly study and political discourse. Tracing the social, political, and intellectual genealogies of the concepts of secularism and communalism from the late nineteenth century until the ratification of the Indian constitution in 1950, she shows how secularism came to be bound up with ideas about nationalism and national identity.
Author: Anuradha Dingwaney Needham
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822338468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this timely, nuanced collection, twenty leading cultural theorists assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India.
Author: Sameena Dalwai
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789386397553
Category : Ayodhya (Faizabad, India)
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Secularism
Languages : en
Pages : 516
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Bidyut Chakrabarty
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communalism
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Neelam Srivastava
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113414220X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Get Book Here
Book Description
This study explores the connections between a secular Indian nation and fiction in English by a number of postcolonial Indian writers of the 1980s and 90s. Examining writers such as Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, and Rohinton Mistry, with particularly close readings of Midnight‘s Children, A Suitable Boy, The Shadow Lines and The Satanic Verses, Neelam Srivastava investigates different aspects of postcolonial identity within the secular framework of the Anglophone novel. The book traces the breakdown of the Nehruvian secular consensus between 1975 and 2005 through these narratives of postcolonial India. In particular, it examines how these writers use the novel form to re-write colonial and nationalist versions of Indian history, and how they radically reinvent English as a secular language for narrating India. Ultimately, it delineates a common conceptual framework for secularism and cosmopolitanism, by arguing that Indian secularism can be seen as a located, indigenous form of a cosmopolitan identity.
Author: Katherine Lemons
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501734784
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Get Book Here
Book Description
Divorcing Traditions is an ethnography of Islamic legal expertise and practices in India, a secular state in which Muslims are a significant minority and where Islamic judgments are not legally binding. Katherine Lemons argues that an analysis of divorce in accordance with Islamic strictures is critical to the understanding of Indian secularism. Lemons analyzes four marital dispute adjudication forums run by Muslim jurists or lay Muslims to show that religious law does not muddle the categories of religion and law but generates them. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in these four institutions—NGO-run women's arbitration centers (mahila panchayats); sharia courts (dar ul-qazas); a Muslim jurist's authoritative legal opinions (fatwas); and the practice of what a Muslim legal expert (mufti) calls "spiritual healing"—Divorcing Traditions shows how secularism is an ongoing project that seeks to establish and maintain an appropriate relationship between religion and politics. A secular state is always secularizing. And yet, as Lemons demonstrates, the state is not the only arbiter of the relationship between religion and law: religious legal forums help to constitute the categories of private and public, religious and secular upon which secularism relies. In the end, because Muslim legal expertise and practice are central to the Indian legal system and because Muslim divorce's contested legal status marks a crisis of the secular distinction between religion and law, Muslim divorce, argues Lemons, is a key site for understanding Indian secularism.
Author: Jeff Redding
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780295747071
Category : Domestic relations
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Islamic law's relationship to secular governance is a fraught one in contemporary discussions. Whether from the perspective of Islamic law's advocates, secularism's partisans, or publics caught in the crossfire, many people see the relationship between Islam and secularism as antagonistic. Moreover, the relationship between Islamic law and secularism seems increasingly discordant, with recent developments in the United States (e.g., calls for "shari'a bans" in U.S. courts), Western Europe (such as legal limitations on headscarves and mosques), and the Arab Middle East (such as conflicts between secularist old-guards and Islamist revolutionaries) indicating that unsteady coexistences are transforming into outright hostilities. This book's exploration of an Indian non-state system of Muslim dispute resolution-formally known as the dar ul qaza system, but commonly referred to as a system of "Muslim courts" or "shariat courts"-challenges conventional narratives about the inevitable opposition between Islamic law and secular forms of governance, and the impossibility of their coexistence. Moreover, it demonstrates how secular law and governance in India does not and cannot work without the significant assistance of non-state Islamic legal actors. For example, the conciliation-oriented Indian family court system is insufficient for handling divorce petitions brought by Muslim women seeking to unilaterally disassociate from their Muslim husbands. This volume shows how in these situations and others, Indian state secularism needs the Islamic non-state-so much so that this intense need often erupts into a complicated set of love-hate politics towards India's Muslims"--
Author: Donald Eugene Smith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400877784
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 539
Get Book Here
Book Description
Throughout India's history, religion has been the most powerful single factor in the development of her civilization. Today, despite her religious tradition, India is emerging as a secular state. In this book, Donald E. Smith explores the origin of the concept of secularization as it is found both in Indian culture and in the example of the western nations. He emphasizes the important role of secularization in India’s total democratic experiment and points out that the degree of its realization will undoubtedly affect the eventual character of democracy in India. In addition, the success or failure of the secular state in India cannot fail to influence the attitudes of her neighbors. Professor Smith considers the many aspects and implications of India’s attempt to secularize her government. Originally published in 1963. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Abhinav Chandrachud
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
ISBN: 9353057531
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Get Book Here
Book Description
How did India aspire to become a secular country? Given our colonial past, we derive many of our laws and institutions from England. We have a parliamentary democracy with a Westminster model of government. Our courts routinely use catchphrases like 'rule of law' or 'natural justice', which have their roots in London. However, during the period of colonial rule in India, and even thereafter, England was not a 'secular' country. The king or queen of England must mandatorily be a Protestant. The archbishop of Canterbury is still appointed by the government. Senior bishops still sit, by virtue of their office, in the House of Lords. Thought-provoking and impeccably argued, Republic of Religion reasons that the secular structure of the colonial state in India was imposed by a colonial power on a conquered people. It was an unnatural foreign imposition, perhaps one that was bound, in some measure, to come apart once colonialism ended, given colonial secularism's dubious origins.
