Image courtesy The Economic Times
 
The first step towards the crystallisation of what we today call Hinduism was born in the consciousness of being the amorphous, subordinate, other. In a sense this was a reversal of roles. Earlier the term mleccha had been used by the upper caste Hindus to refer to the impure, amorphous rest. For the upper castes, Muslims and especially those not indigenous to India, were treated as mleccha since they did not observe the dharma and were debarred from entering the sanctum of the temple and the home. Indigenous converts to Islam also came under this category but their caste origins would have set them apart initially from the amorphous Muslim. Now the upper and lower castes were clubbed together under the label of ‘Hindu’, a new experience for the upper castes.

This in part accounts for the belief among many upper caste Hindus today that Hinduism in the last one thousand years has been through the most severe persecution that any religion in the world has ever undergone. The need to exaggerate the persecution at the hands of the Muslim is required to justify the inculcation of anti-Muslim sentiments among the Hindus of today. Such statements brush aside the fact that there were various expressions of religious persecution in India prior to the coming of the Muslims and particularly between the Śaiva and the Buddhist and Jaina sects and that at one level, the persistence of untouchability was also a form of religious intolerance. The authors of such statements conveniently forget that the last thousand years in the history of Hinduism have witnessed the establishment of the powerful Śankarācārya maṭhas, āśramas, and similar institutions attempting to provide an ecclesiastical structure to strengthen Brahmanism and conservatism; the powerful Daśanāmi and Bairāgi religious orders of Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava origin, vying for patronage and frequently in confrontation; the popular cults of the Nāthapanthis; the significant sects of the Bhakti traditions which are to be found in every corner of the subcontinent; and more recently a number of socio-religious reform movements which have been aimed at reforming and strengthening Hinduism. It was also the period which saw the expansion of the cults of Kṛṣṇa and Rāma with their own mythologies, literatures, rituals and circuits of pilgrimage. What defines many Hindus today has roots in the period of Muslim rule. Facets of belief and ritual regarded as essential to Hinduism belong to more recent times. The establishment of the sects which accompanied these developments often derived from wealthy patronage including that of both Hindu and Muslim rulers, which accounted for the prosperity of temples and institutions associated with these sects. The more innovative sects were in part the result of extensive dialogues between gurus, sādhus, pīrs and Sufis, a dialogue which was sometimes confrontational and sometimes conciliatory.  The last thousand years have seen the most assertive thrust of many Hindu sects. If by persecution is meant the conversion of Hindus to Islam and Christianity, then it should be kept in mind that the majority of conversions were from the lower castes and this is more a reflection on Hindu society than on persecution. Upper caste conversions were more frequently activated by factors such as political alliances and marriage circuits and here the conversion was hardly due to persecution. Tragically for those that converted on the assumption that there would be social equality in the new religion, this was never the case and the lower castes remained low in social ranking and carried their caste identities into the new religions.

When the destroying of temples and the breaking of images by Muslim iconoclasts is mentioned—and quite correctly so—it should however at the same time be stated that there were also many Muslim rulers, not excluding Aurangzeb, who gave substantial donations to Hindu sects and to individual brāhmaṇas. There was obviously more than just religious bigotry or religious tolerance involved in these actions. The relationship for example between the Mughal rulers and the Bundela rājās, which involved temple destruction among other things, and veered from close alliances to fierce hostility, was the product not merely of religious loyalties or differences, but the play of power and political negotiation. Nor should it be forgotten that the temple as a source of wealth was exploited even by Hindu rulers such as Harṣadeva of Kashmir who looted temples when he faced a fiscal crisis, or the Paramāra ruler who destroyed temples in the Caulukya kingdom, or the Rāṣṭrakūṭa king who tore up the temple courtyard of the Pratihāra ruler after a victorious campaign. Given the opulence of large temples, the wealth stored in them required protection, but the temple was also a statement of political authority when built by a ruler.

The European adoption of the term ‘Hindu’ gave it further currency as also the attempts of Catholic and Protestant Christian missionaries to convert the Gentoo/Hindu to Christianity. The pressure to convert, initially disassociated with European commercial activity, changed with the coming of British colonial power when, by the early nineteenth century, missionary activities were either surreptitiously or overtly, according to context, encouraged by the colonial authority. The impact both of missionary activity and Christian colonial power resulted in considerable soul searching on the part of those Indians who were close to this new historical experience. One result was the emergence of a number of groups such as the Brahmo Samaj, the Prathana Samaj, the Arya Samaj, the Ramakrishna Mission, the Theosophical Society, the Divine Life Society, the Swaminarayan movement, et al., which gave greater currency to the term Hinduism. There was much more dialogue of upper caste Hindus with Christians than there had been with Muslims, partly because for the coloniser power also lay in controlling knowledge about the colonised and partly because there were far fewer Hindus converting to Christianity than had converted to Islam. Some of the neo-Hindu sects as they have come to be called, were influenced by Christianity and some reacted against it; but even the latter were not immune from its imprint. This was inevitable given that it was the religion of the coloniser.

The challenge from Christian missionaries was not merely at the level of conversions and religious debates. The more subtle form was through educational institutions necessary to the emerging Indian middle class. Many who were attracted to these neo-Hindu groups had at some point of their lives experienced Christian education and were thereafter familiar with Christian ideas. The Christian missionary model played an important part, as for example in the institutions of the Arya Samaj. The Shaiva Siddhanta Samaj was inspired by Arumuga Navalar, who was roused to reinterpret Śaivism after translating the Bible into Tamil. The movement attracted middle-class Tamils seeking a cultural self-assertion. Added to this was the contribution of some Orientalist scholars who interpreted the religious texts to further their notions of how Hinduism should be constructed. The impact of Orientalism in creating the image of Indian, and particularly Hindu culture, as projected in the nineteenth century, was considerable.

Those among these groups influenced by Christianity, attempted to defend, redefine and create Hinduism on the model of Christianity. They sought for the equivalent of a monotheistic God, a Book, a Prophet or a Founder and congregational worship with an institutional organization supporting it. The implicit intention was again of defining ‘the Hindu’ as a reaction to being ‘the other’; the subconscious model was the Semitic religion. The monotheistic God was sought in the abstract notion of Brahman, the Absolute of the Upaniṣads with which the individual Ātman seeks unity in the process of mokṣa; or else with the interpretation of the term deva which was translated as God, suggesting a monotheistic God. The worship of a single deity among many others is not strictly speaking monotheism, although attempts have been made by modern commentators to argue this. Unlike many of the earlier sects which were associated with a particular deity, some of these groups claimed to transcend deity and reach out to the Absolute, Infinite, the Brahman. This was an attempt to transcend segmentary interests in an effort to attain a universalistic identity, but in social customs and ritual, caste identities and distinctions between high and low continued to be maintained.

Romila Thapar (born 30 November 1931) is an Indian historian whose principal area of study is ancient India. She is the author of several books including the popular volume, A History of India, and is currently Professor Emerita at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi.

This article was first published on Indian Cultural Forum

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'Why can't we think of civilisation as a process of tracking cultures?': Historian Romila Thapar

Full text of the speech delivered at the 8th BR Ambedkar Memorial Lecture that pitched for rethinking civilisation as history.

Let me clarify at the outset that I am looking at the concept of civilisation as it has been used in reconstructing world histories. The term has had philosophical and other connotations that introduce dimensions other than the historical. I am, however, confining myself to the historical perspective.

The history of the world from pre-modern times has, in recent centuries, been projected in the form of stages, some culminating in civilisations. However, in the light of recent studies of history, civilisation as it was earlier defined is becoming rather paradoxical. The concept is a construction that emerged at a particular point in European history in the 18th century. It was a way of comprehending the past. Other theories of explaining the past that are now emerging in historical analyses may lead us to rethink the concept. Historians today try and peel events, viewing them as part of larger, and often diverse contexts, as I hope to show.

A civilisation implies a kind of package with specific characteristics. Thus the territory of a civilisation has to be demarcated; civilisation is identified with a period of high intellectual and aesthetic achievement – what some call “high culture”, including an emphasis on humanism and ethics; associated with this is a premium on refined manners exemplified by the elite; civilisation is articulated in a particular parent language; it is symbolised in a single religion; it assumes a stratified society, evidence of a state and governance; its elite is distinctive and dominates its surroundings; there is a marked presence of what are described as aspects of culture – art, monuments, literature, music, all of a sophisticated form; and above all, a civilisation records its knowledge of the world and attempts to advance it.

I have two concerns here. One is that a civilisation draws on the identities of its creators and its participants, but the identities of both change in the course of history. The other is that concepts help us understand social reality; but they, in turn, have to be investigated, and more so when they claim to be foundational to understanding history.

The somewhat spare definition I have just given needs enlargement. The territory is expansive, resulting from the ultimate success of one from among a number of competing others. The dominant culture monopolises the constituents of civilisation to the near exclusion of the lesser cultures that then tend to be sidelined. What are taken as the constituents of a civilisation reflect the dominant culture, whereas there is much more that goes into the making of a civilisation that has historically as yet remained in the wings.

Change is endemic to most societies, either from within, or from contact with other societies. This can disturb the social equilibrium, either increasing or decreasing the integration of its various units. A civilisation, therefore, cannot be static as its constituents inevitably change.

Constructing a concept
Let me begin with how and when the concept of civilisation first came to be constructed. Used in France in the 18th century, the concept assumed a departure from a prior condition. The Enlightenment understanding of history, together with social Darwinism in the subsequent period, placed human society in an advanced evolutionary stage. It underlined humanistic values as embedded in the literature, and the belief that rational beings could control the world around them.

German writers differentiated between civilisation and kultur/culture. Culture referred to what was thought of as intellectual and artistic in terms of value and ideals, and to morality. Cultures, again, were not compact, enclosed and static. Civilisation, however, had a broader spread and included more, as the definition suggests.

Why was it given a specific definition? Perhaps we need to keep in mind the ambience resulting from historical change at the time. Europe was moving from the imprint of an aristocratic feudal society to being gradually remoulded by the start of industrialisation and the emergence of new social categories. Entrepreneurs of various kinds were reformulating society, but at a slow pace, since the mores of the previous society were still viewed as exemplary. The emerging vision required pointing up the glories of the European past in a more insistent way than had been done earlier with the Renaissance.

This change coincided, and not accidentally, with the acquisition of colonies. When control over these colonies by European powers became more direct and fruitful, it had to be conceded that the colonies had their own cultures, but with the caveat that the European achievement in the past had been by far the highest. The colonies may well have even had civilisations, although these had been partially marred by the presence of the primitive in their midst. This took away somewhat from the achievement. Recognising this perspective on their past, the colonised also began to register among the evolving new groups of people their new ambitions, anxious to identify with a praiseworthy past to compensate for their subordination in the present.

In a sense, the seed of the idea of civilisation may have existed in the differentiation that past societies made between the dominant society, and those that used a different language and had a different way of life. One’s own society was always superior. But the growth of the idea into a concept of civilisation was associated with historical change, and the need for emergent social groups to claim new identities and a clearly defined heritage.

Civilisation assumed that the historically preceding societies did not qualify. These were labelled as barbarian. This dichotomy was present in the self-perception of ancient societies as well, but with a different connotation. Those regarded as “the Others” were assumed to be uncivilised. For the Greeks it was the non-Greeks, for the Chinese the non-Han, and for the aryas it was the mlecchas. If the Greeks called those that were their “Others” barbaros/barbarians, Sanskrit speakers referred to some as barbara-karoti, or those speaking in a confused way. The barbarians, irrespective of whether they lived as nomadic hordes threatening the civilised, or in the midst of the civilised, were recognisable by their markers – difference of language and custom. The concept of civilisation assumed the existence of the barbarian as a kind of all-purpose counterpoint to the civilised.

Colonial thinking
In the 19th century, the dichotomy was further elaborated. Human society was said to go through three stages of change. Starting with savagery, it improved somewhat when it reached barbarism, and this was prior to civilisation. Only some societies evolved to the third stage. It was thought of, essentially, as a process of evolution, and used to point to the distinction between the stages.

The other more effective route was seen in the imposition of the civilised on the barbarian through conquest, an obvious attempt to justify contemporary colonialism. A classic example was that of the Aztecs of Mexico. They were thought of as being less civilised, therefore performing human sacrifice, and the civilised Spanish conquest brought this activity to an end.

The concept was now used in two ways. One was its role in colonial thinking. The other was the appropriation of social evolution by theories of explanation in anthropology, archaeology and history.
Colonial thinking was clear about the distinction between the civilised and its alternative – the primitive. The coloniser, as the representative of a superior civilisation, introduced it to the colonised, the uncivilised primitive. In India, two divergent views – the Utilitarian and the Orientalist – emerged from colonial writers. James Mill and the Utilitarian thinkers writing on the Indian past saw the territory of India as hosting two nations, the Hindu and the Muslim, each intensely hostile to the other. Its governance conformed to what was called Oriental Despotism, pointing to the absence of a civilised society. The colonised therefore required correcting to be civilised.

The Orientalist view differed. It began with William Jones in the late 18th century, enquiring of the learned brahmanas as to the texts he should study to understand India. He was directed to the Vedas and to classical Sanskrit literature. Significantly, the Buddhist and Jaina texts were largely ignored. Jones’ comparative studies of language and religion were a search for parallels to the Greco-Roman.

The Orientalists and Sanskritists in Europe disagreed with the Utilitarians. They argued that India did have a civilisation that needed to be recognised. Influential among them was Max Mueller, who focused on the Vedas, especially the Rigveda. Such studies led to the theory that the Vedas were the foundation of Indian civilisation, and that it reached its crowning point in the golden age of the Guptas, extending into a few later centuries. Seeing India as a single unitary civilisation, specifically defined, made it easier for the colonisers to understand the colony, irrespective of how problematic these definitions were. We have inherited these colonial views about religion, language and history, views with which we still grapple.

A different turn
Dividing the world into civilisations provided portals to the study of global history. Association with a single language and, preferably, a single religion, meant that each civilisation could be more easily monitored as compared to non-structured history.

Asia, it was said, could boast of three civilisations: the Islamic, with Arabic as its language; the Sanskritic Hindu; and the Chinese, associated with Confucianism. I have often asked myself why Buddhism was lost sight of in this typology. It was once the inter-connecting thread through most of Asia. It was made to disappear in India; it faded in Central Asia; and was, on occasion, actively persecuted in China; yet it emerged as a crucial Asian link in civilisation markers and ethical values. A deeper investigation of the critique posed by Buddhist thought to many existing Asian cultures may help us redefine some aspects of Asian civilisations.

The concept of civilisation, however, took a different turn when associated with anthropology and archaeology. Patterns in the development of human societies drew from the theory of evolution, moving as a trajectory from simple to complex societies.

It was held that human society began with the stage of savagery in the bands of hunter-gatherers. Subsequently, there were societies of agro-pastoralists. Many took shape as highly efficient herders of animals – especially cattle and horses – and in systems of cultivating crops. The institution of the family, and notions of property that radically changed societies, emerged slowly. This took them to the stage of barbarism that was extensive and diverse. They were identified by the typology of the material goods they produced, such as pottery and metal-ware.

Some remained at that stage; others moved to the third and highest stage, that of urbanism. As in the case of animal life, evolution did not move in a vertical line for all societies. For some, a horizontal movement became permanent. Those not recognised as civilisations were described as cultures. A culture was defined as a pattern of living. There could be many cultures encompassed in a civilisation, but its definition was based on the features selected and said to be its markers. The primary features of the civilisation stage were urban centres, literacy, and the existence of a state; high culture alone, therefore, did not suffice.

Controversy abounds
This archaeological-anthropological trajectory, formulated in the early 20th century, has lately been extensively debated. The critique has suggested alternative ideas, but not annulled the theory. It has, however, been problematic in a few instances where earlier definitions of civilisation were already in use, as, for example, in India. According to the archaeological definition of the 20th century, the Harappan cities are the foundation of India’s civilisation. These predate the generally accepted date of Vedic culture by quite a few centuries. For some of the Orientalists of the 19th century, it was Vedic culture that was foundational to Indian civilisation, since the Harappan cities were not known at that point. But this culture lacked some of the fundamental components of the civilisation stage, urbanisation and literacy for instance.

Harappan cities were not only elaborate urban systems, but were carefully planned by people who understood the working of urban centres. The location of public functioning was concentrated in one area, in some cases on an artificially constructed mound, and was distinct from an expansive residential area. Other features are familiar to us from our school textbooks – a sensible layout with planned roads, a remarkable drainage system, warehouses and granaries, and complicated defences at the city gates. Among the other aspects of an advanced culture was the central role of a system of writing.

We now have a somewhat contrary situation: archaeology informs us that the foundations of Indian civilisation lie in the pre-Vedic cities of the Indus Civilisation; but the Orientalists, half a century earlier, had projected the Vedas as the foundation, and this continues to be preferred in some circles today. There is a significant difference between the two. Whereas texts are absent in the Harappa Culture even though a writing system is in use, the Vedic corpus boasts of oral compositions of a high order, composed over a millennium; but it has left no evidence of a writing system. It is difficult to identify the urbanism of the Harappan cities in the descriptions of settlements in the Rigveda, the earliest of the Vedas. Inevitably, there are controversies today about the origins of Indian civilisation.

Drawing boundaries
The concept of civilisation popular among 19th century historians was, of course, not the archaeological one, since that was worked out in the early 20th century. Yet, it is the 19th century definition that is, more often, in many people’s minds when they refer to Indian civilisation. Hence, I would like to discuss the definition of Indian civilisation that has prevailed in many works on the subject since the 19th century.

The territory chosen was that of British India. The confidence of colonialism made it seem that it would be permanent and stable. Earlier names for parts of the subcontinent, such as Jambudvipa, Aryavarta, Bharatavarsha, or even al-Hind, had shifting boundaries. But even British India broke up into three nations in the 20th century. This was not unusual, as every century has seen changing alignments in the borders of the many states and kingdoms comprising the subcontinent. There were no permanent boundaries in history.

In pre-cartographic times, defining boundaries with any precision was problematic in the absence of maps. The more common usage was that of frontier zones marked by geomorphological features, such as mountains, rivers and forests. For instance, Manu describes Aryavarta as the land between the Himalaya and the Vindhya, and the eastern and western seas. A study of frontier zones suggests that sometimes the more interesting historical interactions took place in such zones. Frontier zones have the advantage of looking both inward and outward, and they even had the choice of deciding which was which.

For a variety of reasons, the geographical focus of high cultures shifted. The Harappans occupied the Indus plain and its extension, but their artefacts are found as far west as the Gulf and Mesopotamia. The authors of the Vedic texts settled in the Punjab and the north-western borderlands, and moved eastwards to the Ganga plain. The second urbanisation had its epicentre in the middle Ganga plain. In general histories of India, the peninsula and the south are sometimes off the radar in this period, probably because the archaeology of their impressive Megalithic cultures differed from the cultures of northern India, as did the Dravidian language associated with that area.

Speaking of frontiers from the sub-continental perspective, the Kushanas were half in and half out. Their fulcrum was the Oxus valley. We may well treat them as integrated into north Indian history, but it would be worth asking whether they, in effect, may have looked upon north-western India as a frontier zone of their own Central Asian kingdom? And if so, how did they see it? Did Kushana polity focus more on Central Asia and China? Indian texts have less to say about the Kushanas but they are a presence in the Chinese annals of the time, the Hou Han Shu. The Indian writing of early times lacks curiosity about frontiers and beyond, compared, for instance, with Chinese inquisitiveness on the subject.

Significant frontiers
In controlling territory within India, the Guptas and the Cholas were virtually mirror images, one having a northern perspective and the other a southern one, separated by a few centuries. The Turks, Afghans and Mughals, irrespective of their origins, were firmly ensconced in northern India. Interestingly, the Mauryan and Mughal states incorporated the north-west borderlands, but not the entire peninsula. Territorially, neither made it to being a fully sub-continental empire. Identifying people with territory has now become complicated, with the frequent inputs of those working on DNA analyses to determine migrations and the mixing of populations.

So in terms of the territorial base of the civilisation, we are not speaking of a compact sub-continental area, but of parts of it that hosted a variety of cultures. The variations are pertinent to the notion of constructing a civilisation. But these are frequently ignored when selections are made of what goes into civilisation as a package. This applies not only to India, but to other civilisations as well. In Asia it would be as true of West Asia and China. What this suggests is that we should be sensitive to changes in the frontier areas, both overland and maritime. We should be open to how they may have contributed to the creation of what we call civilisation, since this would be pertinent to evolving cultures in various parts of the sub-continent. The view from the other side cannot be overlooked.

It is interesting that there was such a substantial interest in Buddhism among Chinese scholars but comparatively much less in Brahmanism, if, as we like to believe, the latter was central to Indian civilisation. At the same time, cultures also evolve over time within themselves. This makes it necessary to see civilisation, not as a permanent entity, but as a continuous process that also registers historical change.

Language and culture
Language is often a good barometer of historical change. We know that all languages mutate. Given the array of Indian languages, the change was impressive, both through mutation and through contact with other languages. This poses a couple of questions for the historian.

One is that we don’t yet know what language the Harappans spoke. Attempts to read the Harappan symbols as Indo-Aryan or Dravidian have not succeeded so far. The Vedic corpus refers to the mlecchas and the dasas as different from the aryas. They either spoke the Aryan language incorrectly, or not at all. They worshipped other gods and observed unfamiliar customs. There is also the puzzling group referred to as the dasi-putrabrahmanas, something of an oxymoron. Can the sons of dasis be brahmanas? But there they are, and respected by the brahmanas. It seems that more than one language was being spoken, and more than one cultural group involved.

But let’s leave aside the yet inexplicable, and turn to certainties. For almost a millennium, the most widely used language was not Sanskrit, but Prakrit, though they co-existed. The Jaina texts were initially composed in Prakrit, the Buddhist in Pali. Prakrit is, of course, related to Sanskrit, but its use was sharply differentiated. Discussions on causality in thought, dharma and ahimsa, rationality, the existence of deity and such ideas, were discussed, not by all, but by a number of people, in Prakrit. The evidence of inscriptions points to Prakrit as the initial common language used even by royalty, and Tamil in the south. The earliest inscription in correct Sanskrit dates to AD 150 with a lengthy statement by a ruler of Central Asian origin. Prakrit travelled to Central Asia, Southeast Asia and, together with Tamil, to the trading centres of the Red Sea. It was the language associated with those who came from India.

Learned brahmanas continued to use Sanskrit. But its use on a larger scale, or the emergence of what has recently been called “the Sanskrit cosmopolis”, dates to a later period, from the Guptas onward. This was when it came to have a monopoly as the language of learning, creative literature and administration; it was also the language of those aspiring to status. It expanded further with courtly culture in newly established kingdoms. This required its use by local court poets, but also in official documents, in which, occasionally, the scribe could even make mistakes. However, in Sanskrit drama, women and lower castes continued to speak Prakrit, presumably as befitting their inferior social status. Newly established kingdoms from the late first millennium AD onward, would use the emerging regional languages when hard pressed, especially when new castes of local origin became upwardly mobile. But Sanskrit was pre-eminent for a millennium in virtually every branch of learning, and more so in courtly literature and in religious scholarship, composed more frequently by upper caste authors.

Composition as dialogue
The history of this prior patronage explains, in part, its high status at the Mughal court where brahmana and Jaina authors interacted with scholars of Persian, also patronised by the Mughals. There was more than one translation of the Mahabharata and the Bhagvad Gita from Sanskrit to Persian, done jointly by brahmana pandits and Persian scholars. Such activity was not limited to an interest in religion, but was, more effectively, a form of translating cultures. Medieval patronage to Sanskrit as one of the languages of learning and formal religion is borne out by the numbers of literary texts, commentaries and digests that were composed in the last thousand years under multiple patrons.

This continued into modern times with patronage from the colonial state, conscious of the upper caste connections of Sanskrit. The literature in other languages received less attention as carriers of civilisation. It might be worth doing a survey of what was composed in these languages throughout history, to gauge the lineages of thought and articulation. This in itself would be insightful in evaluating the role of the single language as a civilisation idiom.

Any text of any kind, and in whatever language, assumes an audience. All composition is, in essence, a dialogue. If a text is written by the elite and uses the language of the elite, it reflects the elite culture and can, at best, reflect the participation of other cultures only indirectly. To that extent, it curtails our understanding of the civilisation.

Dual divisions
Much the same can be said about choosing a particular religion as the single one to represent a civilisation. The colonial readings of religions in India described them as monolithic. But were they? Many colonial scholars tended to see Indian religions through their knowledge of the medieval European past, with its single monolithic religion of Catholicism and later Protestantism. It is debatable whether religions in India were monolithic and unitary. Virtually every religion was articulated and propagated through a range of sects, each with the choice of being autonomous, or associated with another.

These religious sects have a long history. Their survival is also partly conditioned by their closeness to particular castes or caste clusters, and not unconnected to the patronage of the royal or wealthy. This highlights the interface between religion and society, an aspect seldom given enough space in the concept of civilisation. By bringing together virtually every religious articulation other than the Muslim and Christian under the label of Hinduism, the extensive divergence characteristic of religion in India, with its unique qualities, was denied.

That Indian civilisation was characterised by a singular and monolithic religion is unlikely. Dharma, which we today take to mean religion, was viewed as consisting of two streams. One was Vedic Brahmanism. This required a belief in Vedic and other deities. It insisted on the sanctity of the Vedas authored by the gods, and held that each mortal had an immortal soul. Strongly opposed to these beliefs were various groups jointly referred to as Shramanas, who doubted or rejected deity and the immortal soul, and treated the Vedas as authored by humans. Across the centuries, dharma was defined as the two streams of the Brahmana and the Shramana, or the astika/ believers, and the nastika /non-believers, which we today regard as the orthodox and the heterodox. The nastika consisted of Buddhists, Jainas, Ajivikas and those of such persuasion, including the Charvaka, with their philosophy of materialism. Interestingly, the initial social context of the Shramanic rejection of Vedic Brahmanism was urban.

This dual division was referred to in the edicts of Ashoka Maurya (bahmanam-samanam), in the account of Megasthenes (Brachmanes and Sarmanes), as well as in that of Xuanzang, and continued up to the time of Al-Biruni – a period of 1,500 years. Patanjali, at the turn of the millennium AD, mentions it in his famous grammar, and adds that the relationship between the two is comparable to that of the snake and the mongoose. The Shramanas in some Puranas are called the great deceivers – mahamoha – who deliberately mislead people with the wrong doctrines. They are therefore pashandas – frauds. The Buddhists sometimes refer to the brahmanas with the same epithet.

We are told that on some occasions, the relationship between the two became violent. A deeper investigation of our history of religion may show us as being less tolerant and more violent than we claim to be. We can certainly take pride in the absence, so far at least, of something like the Catholic Inquisition that forced people to make statements or to recant. Nevertheless, the degrees of intolerance and non-violence that prevailed in the past need to be re-assessed.

Striking changes
Intermeshed with religion and society was social oppression and the exclusion of those declared to be without caste, or of the lowest status and polluting. Caste discrimination linked to pollution was the Indian equivalent of the observance of other forms of discrimination in other civilisations. In practice, this was observed by every religion in India and by most communities. Surprisingly, it is rarely mentioned in discussions on ethical values and humanism in Indian civilisation, neither in the texts of the high culture nor in later descriptions of Indian civilisation. We owe our current highlighting of this aspect to the writings of Ambedkar and some of his predecessors.

The practice of treating demarcated members of the society as polluting negates the idea of a tolerant society, signifying as it does extreme intolerance and a lack of social ethics.
Yet, at a different level, there was a dialogue and much discussion between brahmanas and shramanas on philosophical questions, on, for instance, the definition and use of logic. By the mid-first millennium AD, the Shramanas were also using Sanskrit in philosophical discourse. But soon Buddhism was to be swept away in most parts of India.

The last thousand years have been quite striking in terms of the changes introduced at various levels in what we would regard as aspects of civilisation. The landscape changed. Temples and mosques replaced Buddhist monasteries and stupas. Some of the most magnificent Hindu temples dedicated to divergent sectarian deities, and also Jaina temples, were constructed in this period. These were endowed with land, and their committees of control were engaged in substantial commerce, as had been the case with some of the Buddhist monasteries in earlier times. Economic enterprise was open to all religious institutions and places of worship, and they did not hold back, since many had substantial wealth to invest.

The religion that we today refer to as Hinduism also had roots in the teachings of the medieval Bhakti sects. These encouraged new forms of worship, some reflecting ideas from the presence of other religions, and they taught in the regional languages. In the transition from the Vedic to the Puranic religions, a distancing of the later from the earlier took place, and this was acknowledged only among some. For the majority of people, Vedic belief and ritual as such, although patronised by royalty, became peripheral. Much of the teaching, attracting substantial numbers, was oral, since the larger numbers were not literate. The result was a multiplicity of sects of every kind, either drawing from, or opposing, the more formal religions. This receives less space in the classic descriptions of religion in Indian civilisation.

Compact aspect
What I am suggesting is that the conventional description of what constitutes Indian civilisation is partial. It does not sufficiently include the reality of the substantial contribution beyond that of the elites and the upper castes.

The concept of civilisation needs to draw from a far wider spectrum if it is to represent more than just the dominant cultures. This critique applies equally to descriptions of other civilisations. One could argue that the concept itself is therefore limited. Let me try and explain this.

The compactness of civilisation is partly due to its land-based and demarcated territory and the social origins of the cultures it encapsulates. But many of the achievements resulted from the co-mingling of groups, elites and non-elites, both within this territory and those on its frontiers and, sometimes, beyond. The commissioning of a monument or a cultural object may lie in the hands of a wealthy patron, but its creator is often a lower caste professional. Styles can therefore be a reflection of localities and popular trends, either of the elite or of others.

Icons of the Buddha illustrate this. The Gandhara image from the north-west is Indo-Greco-Bactrian in features and style, whereas the one from Mathura has no element of the Gan-dhara style. It is strikingly different, as is the one from Amaravati in the south. It changes again in Borobudur and Angkor in Indonesia and Cambodia, as also in Dunhuang and Lung Men in Central Asia and China. The images do not conform to a single aesthetic, but do suggest the richness of the dialogues that must have taken place among those sculpting them. These are, unfortunately, unrecorded. But surely some shilpins and sthapatis, as artisans and craftsmen, also travelled with the traders, brahmanas and Buddhist monks to Southeast Asia in the early periods, to assist with constructional problems, or the precision, if not also the aesthetics, of iconography?

How are forms transmitted to distant cultures? Surely the idiom in a new context should be read in its own context as well? The diversity points to the inspiration’s not being limited to a single elite source, yet the creators of the icons find little place in discussions of civilisation. How were the complexities of the Sanskrit manuals converted into visual forms by artisans not educated in Sanskrit? This is the interface that civilisation is all about, not the separation of the two.

Texts requiring scholarship travelled with brahmanas, Buddhist monks and traders. Many ventured beyond the frontiers, creating innovative mixed cultures that would have challenged the existing civilisational models. This would be more marked in the formation of new states, especially in distant lands. Some Indian texts were rendered into local languages and adjusted to local perspectives, in an effort to imprint their own culture and influence patronage. The variations speak volumes. In the controversial additions to the Hikayat Seri Rama of Malaysia, the patriarch Adam carries messages from Ravana to Allah. Other variations are similar to those known in India, but what these say remains outside the delineation of civilisation.

Carriers of culture
Adaptations provide another perspective. It is argued that the original Javanese version of the Ramayana story did not draw on the Valmiki text, but drew on the narration of the story in the much later grammatical work, the Bhattikavya. The question is why. The choice of one from a diversity of sources needs explanation, especially now, when some insist on cultural singularity. Even if it is a transaction between high cultures, the cultural presence of the Other is crucial to explanation.

Central Asia provides parallels. The carriers of the cultures were the same as those that went to Southeast Asia, but the Buddhists drew greater attention. Buddhist monasteries marked the staging points of the trade routes that went from China through Central Asia and northern India to the Mediterranean. This was the Old Silk Route. A healthy patronage encouraged each monastery to host murals of the highest quality, illustrating narratives from the Buddhist texts, in the context of local history. Their versions become, in a sense, a commentary on the Indian texts, an attempt to see a part of India from the other side of the border. Do their perceptions confirm our current view of Indian civilisation?

The involvement of Indians in this trade continued until the last century, although latterly in segments because of historical changes. For over a millennium, it had cut across what were identified as the separate civilisations of Asia, civilisations whose distinctiveness we have thought of as being crucial to their identity. But in each case, the achievements, be they in philosophy, religion or the arts, drew on the interaction of these cultures rather than originating in isolation. The initiative was taken by the traders, and the rest followed.

In the past, Indians and Chinese came to Southeast Asia through maritime exploration. This linked up ports and hinterlands, and required traversing the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Seas – an Indian Ocean route, linking the segments of the chain from North Africa to South China. This is not a compact land mass but the contacts it nurtured impacted civilisations. Like the Silk Route, it virtually created its own cultures. Can we call it a maritime civilisation? It boasted of multiple cultures – high and low, literature in various languages, architecture and art that competed in quality with those in what we call established civilisations. Above all, it demonstrated that ultimately, knowledge advances when there is an exchange between those in the know, irrespective of where they come from.

Evolving process
This is superbly demonstrated in the study of astronomy and mathematics across Asia, dependent on this exchange for many centuries. This was not just a casual mixing of ideas. It involved the careful sifting of what goes into any knowledge system so as to understand it better. This, surely, is the more essential requirement of civilisations. The ascription of origin to a single author was not the point. Authorship was the contribution of more than one. Nor was a there a desperate competition to claim that one’s own civilisation got there first.

When we begin to think of the concept of civilisation as something that is not either territorially compact or pertaining to a limited period of history, we will, perhaps, recognise the limitations of singularity and isolation in the current concept. We can either dispense with it; or we can redefine it. Redefining it will require that some existing ideas be unpacked and rejected, some repacked, and some replaced.
Civilisations as we know them now tend to segregate rather than integrate. Colonial conquests the world over, with their new and precise boundaries, ended existing inter-connections between cultures. A case in point is that of contacts between India and Southeast Asia. Various regions of India had connections with various parts of Southeast Asia. Colonialism split Southeast Asia into colonies held by the British, French, Dutch and Spanish.

This carving up terminated the earlier links.

Colonialism reformulated cultural identities with new hierarchies of status both within a society and across its frontiers. This, in part, accounts for what are erroneously described as civilisational clashes. What is striking about the swathes of cultures that we study from the past is their porosity. Territories, languages and religions, however stable we would like them to be, are in fact constantly taking fresh shapes. The change comes from many sources: internal pressures that alter social hierarchies; alien cultures that accrete to them and take on new identities; diversities that transform even the cultures of the frontiers; and the ensuing perceptions that those beyond the frontiers have of us.

Civilisation is a process that evolves over a long period, mutating as it goes along. We have to recognise the mutations and discover their source. In focusing on the culture of the elite, the construction of civilisation overlooked its dependence on the cultures of others as participants in the same society. The essential concerns with the “why” and the “how” of history did not find space in the concept.

Overlooked in earlier histories, these perspectives can provide revelatory insights by forcing us to peel the layers, and refrain from insisting that civilisation is a uniform entity. Cultural articulations have to incorporate the dialogue among varying social groups in the societies that constitute the players. How did the participants in a civilisation perceive themselves and their own activities, and in relation to the social hierarchy? Did they all see themselves as part of one civilisation? This is a tough question, but we may find answers if we are willing to enquire.

If we choose to redefine the concept, can we think of civilisation, not as a self-contained homogenous entity valid for all time, but as a process of tracking cultures, even those perpetually in transition? The perceptions that this may provide can, perhaps, translate the past in ways that will enable a new understanding of both the past and the present.

(The Full Text of this Lecture first appeared on Indian Cultural Forum)
(Romila Thapar is Professor Emeritus in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the eminent author of numerous books. This speech was delivered at Ambedkar University in Delhi on April 21.)

The post Indian Civilization Unlikely to have been Characterised by One Religion: Romila Thapar appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
In the 1960s we were confident that the use of religion for political mobilisation would decline because nationalism, namely, the secular, all-inclusive, anti-colonialism nationalism that brought us independence, would, despite Partition, be firmly established. This was in some ways such a firm belief that it was not thought necessary to specify the inclusion of secularism in the Constitution at the initial stage.  This has not happened. Religion as political mobilisation, and religion-based identity as the core of nationalism, sometimes called communalism, is back in full force.
 
Historians and other social scientists do not make predictions. Our inability to do so is because there may always be some irrational factor in our society that intervenes. So we can only analyse what went wrong and make some suggestions for how to put it right.
 
It is useful to consider the changing contours of communalism in post-colonial India since the parameters and the historical context are no longer the same as they were in colonial times. There was, to begin with, an anti-colonial relatively secular nationalism that pre-dated and was distinct from communalism, both Muslim and Hindu.
 
Communalism was born out of colonial policy, and took as its foundation the dubious two-nation theory that culminated in two categories of communalism – Muslim and Hindu. The first led to the creation of Pakistan. Hindu communalism is awaiting its fulfillment.
 
Communalism continues to have a role in the politics of post-colonial India, but this is not identical with its earlier role. The prime reason for anti-colonial secular nationalism has ostensibly been removed after independence, since we are no longer a colony and do not require an anti-colonial nationalism. But we still have to contend with the kind of communalism, that is aspiring to a Hindu Rashtra, of the 1930s vintage.
 
Interestingly the defining of this form of a nation, is embedded in the colonial interpretation of Indian society. It goes back to the nineteenth century interpretation of Indian history by James Mill who spoke of the two nations that have always constituted India – namely, the Hindu and the Muslim.
 
The two-nation theory fueled communalism, assisted by another colonial contribution which was the Census that led to describing Indian society as consisting of a majority community and minority communities. To this was added the colonial theory of the foundation of Indian civilisation being the Aryanism of the Vedas. This contributed to the concept of the nation as a Hindu Rashtra and the Hindu therefore being the primary citizen of India.
 
Whereas the major nationalism of anti-colonialism led the movement for independence, the colonial perceptions of the history and society of India, gave root to the two communal nationalisms in the form of the Muslim league and the Hindu Mahasabha – to be replaced with the RSS. These latter two did not support secular anti-colonial nationalism but instead focused on opposing each other.
 
Subsequent to Independence, secular nationalism was no longer confronting a colonial power, but instead, it had to confront the power of identity politics that draws on religious extremism. The need for awareness to check the activities of religious extremism was under-estimated. Both Islamisation and Hindutva took the path of concretising Islamic and Hindu identities as oppositional.
 
Indian Governments have each to a greater or lesser extent, been party to such politics. We have experienced extreme violence against various minorities – Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Dalits. It has been and continues to be a serious threat to democracy in India.
 
It is difficult to establish a functioning democracy in a society where there are special categories of privileged and under-privileged groups, and majority and minority communities based on religious identities with varying rights ; and an ideology that endorses the two-nation theory, where religion, caste, and language, become identities. It is difficult because democracy requires the reverse of this – it means equal rights for all and an equality in laws applicable to all citizens.
 
Many of our problems come from an unquestioned inheritance that we have accepted of colonial policy, administration and law. We continue to base our identities derived from religion and caste on those that the colonial system imposed on us. If we were to question these, something different may well emerge.
 
 I often wonder whether all post-colonial societies nurture continuity and conservatism by clinging to what their colonizers had taught them about who and what they were and are ?  

Communalism was born out of colonial policy, and took as its foundation the dubious two-nation theory that culminated in two categories of communalism – Muslim and Hindu. The first led to the creation of Pakistan. Hindu communalism is awaiting its fulfillment.

It would be interesting to do a comparative study with African and Caribbean nationalism, for instance, that saw the emergence of theories such as Negritude and where people read Aimee Cesare and Leopold Senghor when constructing their nationalisms. Did they also go back to colonial versions of their past or did they question these versions?
 
Are the ideologies of religious and cultural extremism invariably drawn from the interpretations of the society and culture of the ex-colony as constructed by the colonisers ? In other words do we have to endorse the identities that British colonialism imposed on us?  Can we not instead question these identities and consider alternatives. The continuation of such identities is inherently anti-democratic. They were meant for a colony not for a free democracy.
 
This debate has been going on for a while now. There is a need to change the premises.
 
Instead of speaking of the past only in terms of who victimised whom, (and as we all know such theories of victimisation are easily constructed), we should instead look more carefully at what we want from the present and what from the past can help us construct a more positive present.
 
We have to recognise that we too, like every other society with a long past, have not been a society characterized by tolerance and non-violence. However much we may wish to believe that we were tolerant and non-violent, it simply isn’t true.
 
Such theories served their purpose in the days when we were contesting colonialism. But they are not of much help now with the constant daily actions that we witness or even experience, of intolerance and violence, and it seems to increase by the day. But we cannot suddenly have become violent and intolerant. There have to have been some elements of such behaviour in us in the past as well, which we perhaps kept under better control. It would be salutary to investigate why there was less of violence and intolerance in the past, if that was so?
 
Our texts from pre-Islamic times tell us that there were two streams of dharma that were dominant – the Brahmanical and the Shramanic. The latter were the Buddhists, Jainas, Ajivikas and such like.  There are rulers that insistently call for tolerance among the sects as in the edicts of Ashoka Maurya, or there are references to conflicts between sects in Sanskrit texts, or in accounts of visitors to India in those times.
 
Patanjali, the great grammarian of around the second century BC, refers to the two streams of dharmaas dominant, and adds that their relationship can be compared to that of the snake and the mongoose. Buddhism was finally exiled from India. Sectarian conflicts continued into Islamic times with now an additional factor.
 
As far as intolerance goes, we must also remind ourselves that every religion in India discriminated against what we today call the Dalits. Even the religions that claimed that all men are equal in the eyes of God, did not give them equality.
 
Islam and Christianity did not have a category of Dalits outside India, but in India, Muslim, Christian and Sikh Dalits were segregated and lived separately.  These are aspects of our society that we still have to come to terms with. We cannot claim to have been a tolerant society in the past by ignoring our treatment of some sections of society that we are now trying to amend. Intolerance does not refer only to religion. It also refers to the demeaning of another human being.
 
If we want a democracy then it has inevitably to be secular, and not give rights to privileged groups. This is irrespective of whether the claim is that such rights are justified by status or by numbers. It means that institutions of society have to be so organized that privileging a group becomes redundant.
 
This means a constant check on the functioning of those institutions that sustain a democracy to ensure that they are doing so. This also means being aware, for instance, that institutions of education where we learn about secular democracy, and are socialised to belonging to a democratic society, are not dismantled, or are replaced with teaching that is anti-democratic. This is a serious threat.
 
It also means changing the mind-set of institutions and people to encourage them to understand and support a democratic society.
 
What are the major institutions that would be involved with this?
 
The Constitution is based on values of secular democracy but most of us know so little about it. Perhaps we should be more aware of how it defends democracy. This would also involve greater knowledge about the functioning of the judiciary – so crucial to the current many crises.

We have to recognise that we too, like every other society with a long past, have not been a society characterized by tolerance and non-violence. However much we may wish to believe that we were tolerant and non-violent, it simply isn’t true.
 
The Code of Civil Laws should be geared to eliminating the continuing discrimination against Dalits, Adivasis and women. We also need to check from time to time to ascertain as to how affirmative action is working and who is benefitting from it.It does seem curious – and this question is now being commonly asked – as to why dominant castes in so many parts of the nation are taking to violence to ensure that they be given reservation rights, some of which are reserved only for those that have an under-privileged status.
 
A major positive change can be brought about if quality education is made available to all.  The aim should not be just for literacy but also to teaching the young how to think, how to question their world, and how to improve it. The aim should be to impart how to  handle knowledge and why this is important. Education is not just the acquiring of information.  We have to remember that in the coming generation virtually half the population will be young adults with aspirations.
 
We have to ensure basic human rights so that five hundred million Indians can live with dignity. We have to think of how we can perhaps insist that our administrators, those that run our institutions as well as those that are required to protect us, be taught that their prime function is to protect the rights and the person of the Indian citizen ? Subservience to authority is not what is required from them. They have to be encouraged to be helpful to the citizen.
 
May be that if we begin to make these our demands and do so with a firm commitment, then some of the indignities associated with the communal mind-set, and that are so common in our society, may start to fade.
 
Communalism is ultimately an attitude of mind among people based on the assumption that whatever is told to them by their mentors is all they need to know. It shows a disinterest in knowing better. To focus therefore solely on the rights of religious communities – whether of the majority or the minority – ultimately has a limited purpose. This will not terminate communalism.
 
It seems to me that we have to think of other ways by which identities are defined. We seem to have arrived at a point when communal ideas and activities are taken as legitimate nationalism. We have to disentangle nationalism from communalism. No group has a monopoly on claiming that its activities alone, constitute nationalism, and all others are anti-national. We have to reconstruct nationalism in an inclusive, secular mode, to allow every Indian to participate equally and with equal rights.

The post Religion-based Nationalism is back in Full Force: Romila Thapar appeared first on SabrangIndia.

It is indeed an honour for me to have been invited to give this lecture, and I greatly appreciate it. Kalakshetra has been something of a legend from the time it was founded by Rukmini Devi and subsequently for the work that it sustains. The respect for the institution grows both for the attention it gives to what we regard as our heritage and for helping in the construction of an on-going heritage. Since both history and heritage conduct a dialogue between the past and the present, we have much to talk about.

‘Heritage’ means that which is inherited. It is used for many things – from genes to geometrical patterns, from property to culture. It was once assumed that heritage is what has been handed down to us by our ancestors, neatly packaged, which we pass on to our descendants, as is implicit in the term, parampara. We sometimes call it tradition. This is what goes into the making of our cultures and our civilization. Heritage is thought of as static whereas tradition is said to mould our way of life. We prefer to think that these have been passed down from generation to generation, relatively untouched. But the more we seek to understand them, the more we realize that each generation changes the contents, sometimes marginally and sometimes substantially.

More recently it has been argued that tradition is actually the inter-play, of what we believe existed in the past, combined with our aspirations of the present. In exploring this inter-play and the new ideas it generates, our concept of heritage takes shape, or can even be invented to serve the needs of the present. Rituals and ceremonies, thought of as ancient, are often on investigation found to be recently invented. The past therefore can even be invented in order to legitimize our actions. Historians now investigate what we call, the invention of tradition.

The on-going discussion of what constitutes heritage or tradition leads to analyzing concepts such as culture and civilization. There is no easy definition of these and there have been intense arguments about their meaning especially at times when existing norms are questioned. The European Enlightenment in the seventeenth century resulted from striking historical changes and became a time when new questions were asked. Basic concepts needed fresh exploration. In India too, we are experiencing similar change and the constituents of heritage need to be examined afresh.

Heritage can be of two kinds. One is natural heritage that came from the physical creation of the earth. This is the heritage that we are currently busy depleting because we cannot control our greed for the wealth that comes from destroying natural resources. But by linking environment to history, this heritage is now being seen as essential to the other one.

The other heritage is the one that was cultivated and created by human effort. What we refer to as sanskriti and shrishti also involve creating and constructing and interestingly is often either juxtaposed with or contrasted with prakriti, that which is natural. This is what goes into the making of what we call ‘cultural heritage’. It includes objects and ideas that determine our pattern of life. They define our concepts of culture and civilization. This heritage is the subject of my talk. I shall try and explain how the historical assumptions that went into the making of these concepts have changed. Consequently, historians now see heritage not so much as something inherent and inexplicable, but as constructed and changeable.

Let me begin by defining the terms that I am using. Culture was once linked to the achievements of a society listed as in literature, the visual and performing arts, architecture, philosophy, and in extending the frontiers of knowledge – of what we would call the life of the mind. In pre-modern times these activities were associated with the elite. So it was viewed as high culture to differentiate it from popular forms. But this was too narrow an assessment. The essentials of these activities come from a wider social range. The definition of culture needed to reflect this range. So culture came to mean both the pattern of life of all segments of a society, and the forms in which they expressed their ideas.

Culture then can refer to something as simple as the pattern of life of hunter-gatherers, pastoral people, farmers or urban dwellers. Out of this simplicity rise the complexities of what people make and do both to render life more meaningful and to understand the world and the cosmos within which they live. But then it was found that cultures change and are both vulnerable and porous. Patterns have changed often enough in history. So we speak of successive cultures registering these changes. The past therefore does not conform to a single culture as some would like to believe but is made up of multiple cultures. The cultures of the elite were dominant, as elite cultures have been everywhere. These were linked to the pattern of life of royalty, the upper castes, and those that controlled power and economic resources. But the cultures of the rest of society sustained the elite culture and therefore were essential.

A number of questions arise. Were they all integrated as we assume when we paint rosy pictures of the past, or were they segregated by caste, language and religion. Are we doing something different now in our attempt to integrate them? The attempt seems restricted to the slogan of ‘unity in diversity’? I call it a slogan because we have never defined as far as cultures go, what constitutes unity or how far we extend the diversity in terms of culture. Are we instead, trying to indirectly justify the segregation through using colonial categories such as majority and minority communities determined by religion? And when we look back at the cultures of the past do we confine ourselves to the easily recognizable dominant cultures alone or do we attempt to search for the ways of life of the rest of society?

There was additionally as there still is, a tension between change and permanence. A seeming continuity when analyzed can point to change. For example, it is said that the four-fold system of caste society with its established hierarchy, has been prevalent in the sub-continent for many centuries. Yet the hierarchy differs quite noticeably in various regions. The dominant caste is not always the same. In the Punjab it was khatri traders, whereas in some other regions it was the brahmana, or it was rulers claiming kshatriya status. And in some areas the varna stratification is absent. Such differences invariably affect the form of the local culture.

The past therefore does not conform to a single culture as some would like to believe but is made up of multiple cultures. The cultures of the elite were dominant, as elite cultures have been everywhere.

The presence of dominant and subordinate groups is characteristic of all societies. Who belongs to them can change over time, as do the cultures that they patronize. A single dominant pattern is neither uniform nor eternal. Until recent times, the upper levels of society were in a better position to leave records and markers of their culture. Reading between the lines has been one way of trying to ferret out the culture of those of lesser status who have not left records. Archaeology provides some information on this. Even the culture of the elite can be better understood if we can follow its interactions with the rest of society, rather than see it isolated.

Cultures, as we know, can also change because of external factors. The effect of ecological change in the past is now being noticed. Deforestation, a changing river course, climate change, all happened in the past. These are now among possible explanations for the decline of the Indus cities. Technological innovations as also adjusting to social and economic changes are often required in such situations.

Contact with new people through trade or in-coming migration, or the political dynamics of conquest, introduces new patterns of living. Conquest is more prominent as a new political pattern. Trade and migration are defining features because they affect larger numbers of people across bigger areas, yet we always give greater prominence to invasions. This is illustrated by what happened at the turn of the Christian era in the Northwest of India with the coming of Greco-Bactrian Hellenistic forms that evolved into the influential Gandhara art.

The art highlighted the aesthetic differences between Buddhist art in this region and in Mathura and Central India as well as further south, as in Amaravati. These differences were sharply debated among art-historians during the last couple of centuries, in defining the Indian aesthetic. Were Indian artistic forms, resulting from contact with Hellenistic forms, superior to those not influenced by the Hellenistic? Nineteenth century art historians did not think to ask the craftsmen still sculpting icons and friezes, to give their reactions to these earlier forms. The art under discussion all came from guilds of artisans. Unlike the art, the languages of the region remained distinct. Both Greek and Prakrit were spoken.

In the same region, a thousand years later came the arrival of Turkish, Afghan and Persian migrants from Central and Western Asia. We dismiss this experience as one of invasions and conquest, and leave it at that. But the flip side of invasions is that they enhance trade connections and attract migrants. The impact of these can sometimes redefine the culture of a region to a greater degree than invasion alone. This time round it was not the style of sculpture that changed, but language intertwined with religious belief.

I am not referring to the introduction of formal Islam but to the more creative side of the infusion – the Sufis and their influence on local languages. New ideas entered the indigenous languages requiring the induction of new words, or else existing words were given a new meaning. With a large popular usage of these ideas, the languages themselves took a new form. A new word for God – rab – entered the Punjabi language. Derived from Arabic it had common currency among all religions using Punjabi. Poets and teachers of the likes of Guru Nanak, Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah and others, composed their poetry not in Persian or Sanskrit but in this commonly spoken language, creating a new cultural idiom. This would extend to other cultural aspects as language always does.

All languages change. Traces of change are carried in grammar and style with each fresh generation that uses the language, introducing new forms of expression. The grammarian Panini makes a distinction between the Sanskrit of the Vedas, and the more commonly used somewhat later Sanskrit. Changes in the language is one way in which we can date texts that have been composed over long periods of time. For example, the text of the Arthasastra as we have it now took a few centuries to put together. It registers recognizable linguistic differences between the earlier segments and those added later. Where a language is in contact with other languages there is bound to be mutual borrowing. The nature of what is borrowed, is the clue to recovering the relationship between the speakers of the languages. Thus, it has been argued that one of the words for the plough, langala, in Vedic Sanskrit is of Dravidian origin. This raises a host of interesting questions about one aspect of the relationship between the speakers of the two languages, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian.

Migrants come in various ways. One is that of pastoral groups searching for pasture-lands who establish themselves and their annual circuit and interact with the settled farmers in a region. They are carriers of oral traditions as is evident in the folk music and epics of pastoral communities. Migrant communities of traders settle in new places for a variety of reasons. Establishing trade routes brings in settlements of traders that foster new communities and create new cultural patterns. This has happened repeatedly in India, with the coming of peoples from Central and West Asia. They settled, inter-married locally and became a part of the Indian population. These communities so established identified themselves with the local culture and this resulted in new patterns. Caste/jati names, such as Huna and Durrani, among many others point to these origins.

The coming of the British was however, different. They did not settle in India. Their control was through re-organizing the economy of India to enable them to drain its wealth and take it back to Britain. Nevertheless they were curious about the Indian past and applied modern methods to advancing our knowledge of this past. This information contributed to the construction of heritage.

Dominant cultures backed by wealth leave the maximum traces. They have texts, describing their ideas, icons in stone and metal, and their architectural forms indicate their religious and social preferences. Subordinate groups in society leave few such traces. They do not have the wealth to build monumental temples and mosques or to house manuscripts in libraries. Those at the lower end of the social ranking, provide the wherewithal for the wealth, but are not participants in elite culture, as for example they have been excluded from places of worship. Their culture has been different and much of it from the past has to be inferred from how they are viewed by the elite. This information inevitably carries the perspective of the author, not always free of bias. But we should recognize that the living patterns of the wealthy are ultimately dependent on the aesthetics and the expertise of those who make the artifacts and work the resources.

Nineteenth century art historians did not think to ask the craftsmen still sculpting icons and friezes, to give their reactions to these earlier forms. The art under discussion all came from guilds of artisans. Unlike the art, the languages of the region remained distinct. Both Greek and Prakrit were spoken.

Culture that is said to constitute heritage is not static, whether object or idea, although it is often treated as such by us in the present. In claiming an ancestry for cultural items, we are inducting the past into the present and thereby giving it continuity. We should perhaps investigate what has been retained, replaced or discarded in this believed-to-be unchanging continuity.

Claiming ancestry is also a way of acquiring legitimacy from the past. Such a claim can be a stamp of desired status and thus a demonstration of social success, or it can be an attempt to deny questioning an identity – one that may be acceptable to some but questioned by others. By insisting on a particular ancestry for a cultural item we may be denying its other possible ancestry. There could be many reasons for this if it is deliberate. Possibly its other ancestry comes from sources that earlier were quite acceptable but have now become less so. But recognizing the entire ancestry may be crucial to understanding the cultural form. By not recognizing it we are either distorting or inventing a tradition.

To take an example that is much discussed. It is generally agreed that some among the forms of performing arts that we treat as Classical are traced back to the devadasi performances, together with ideas derived from textual sources. Is it enough to know the technicalities of the form or should we not also relate it to the context. In this case it was women choosing or being chosen for a profession that was contrary to the norms of the caste code. They created their own social nucleus distinct from the mainstream. Many other groups of women asserted their autonomy but in a entirely different way when they became Buddhist and Jaina nuns. Did this social code give them the flexibility of experimenting with their professional expertise? How did they relate to the bigger civilizational context through both their performance and their social culture?

The concept of civilization has now become complex. The earlier simplistic definition of its conforming to an elite culture is now giving way to the idea that it encompasses many cultures. This change comes from the new ways in which historical connections of the past are being viewed.

In the seventeenth century, the core of a civilization was a Classical period from the past. ‘Classical’ referred to a style, seen as the high-point in a culture, chosen from a particular historical period. It was the exemplary norm, typifying excellence and against which successors were measured. There was a suggestion of the static in this description and it was not expected to change. All societies with a long history had to have a Classical Age that was viewed as the cultural and intellectual pivot.
The concept of civilization had four components, each of which are now being questioned – territory, language, religion and the classical. Each civilization had a demarcated territory. This was feasible when cartography became common and boundaries of territories could be mapped. Prior to that frontier zones between states were marked by natural features, such as rivers, mountains, forests, deserts etc. These were areas where people came and went so cultures were mixed or overlapped.

The borderland of Northwestern India functioned as a frontier zone for centuries. It hosted peoples from Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran, and India. Nodal points of trade and of advancing religions were located there and it also provided spring-boards for invasions in various directions. Buddhist monks travelled with traders and established important monasteries in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan and through the Gobi Desert to China. A few centuries later these same routes were taken by Sufi orders coming from Western and Central Asia.

For the east coast of India, the sea was a frontier. This was traversed through close links with Southeast Asia and southern China, as is evident from the impressive monuments still standing. On the other side the long coast of western India had its own history of large settlements of Arab traders that inter-married and founded new communities of Indo-Arab cultures – the Bhoras, Khojas, Navayats, and Mapillas. The Northern frontier zones were land-based, and in communication with cultures across the Eurasian land-mass. The peninsula experienced a different factor, the geographically extensive networks of the Indian Ocean, projecting as it did into the centre-point of the Ocean. These provided a different perspective that we now have to induct into our narrative of Indian civilization.

Where then should we mark the territorial boundary of Indian civilization? We have defined it from the perspective of the Ganges heartland, the perspective from which histories were written until recently. But civilization when seen from the rim, reflects other more distant but significant contacts. Cartographic boundaries enclose and isolate lands, frontier zones extend them and open them up. The concept of civilization has become territorially open-ended.

We apply labels of indigenous or foreign to people of past times. But the boundaries of British India, that defined the concept of Indian civilization according to colonial writers, were meaningless for pre-colonial times. Foreignness in the past was assigned by cultural features – language, custom, ritual – and not by boundary lines. The term mleccha, can mean alien or out-of-caste. There were areas of what were regarded as mleccha culture even within the sub-continent as for example, the communities of forest-dwellers, marginalized in Sanskrit texts and described as raksasas. They were seen as alien. So too were the Yavanas and Turushkas initially. But such aliens and their culture were gradually assimilated.

Looking east the rulers of Cambodia built Angkor Wat with its magnificent sculptured panels depicting the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Khmer style; or the rulers of Java built Borobudur as a gigantic stupa to honour Buddhism. Did they think of themselves as patronizing a foreign culture?

A second component of civilization was that it should have a single language of culture and communication. It was said to be Greek in Europe, Arabic in West Asia, and Sanskrit in India. This meant that the texts written in this language had priority and were treated as the norm encapsulating the entire body of local cultures. To research the past using the texts largely of one language in a multi-lingual area, is historically untenable.

The earliest deciphered records pertaining to Indian cultures are inscriptions in Prakrit and date to the first millennium BC. The earliest surviving written use of Sanskrit, is again in inscriptions, and dates to the start of the first millennium AD. Manuscripts from a slightly later period have survived. Vedic and epic texts composed in Sanskrit were earlier than the inscriptions but were to begin with part of an oral tradition. The major ideologies that opposed Vedic Brahmanism, such as Jainism and Buddhism, initially taught and wrote in various Prakrits and in Pali. From the turn of the Christian era Sanskrit began to replace Prakrit as the language of the elite. But Prakrit continued to be used although with a lowered status, spoken by women and lower castes.
Colonial scholars investigating the Indian past, began with the Sanskrit texts given the highest status by their brahmana informants. It was a while before attention was directed to texts in other languages such those of the Buddhists and Jainas.

A new word for God – rab – entered the Punjabi language. Derived from Arabic it had common currency among all religions using Punjabi. Poets and teachers of the likes of Guru Nanak, Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah and others, composed their poetry not in Persian or Sanskrit but in this commonly spoken language, creating a new cultural idiom.

This differentiation was also made in defining the single religion of Indian civilization, as Hinduism. This was before it was discovered that Buddhism had once been a major religion, and had been exported to Asia, and had subsequently declined in India. Making religion the third component of civilization and arguing for Hinduism in India and Confucianism in China, tended to eliminate Buddhism in Asia, whereas it can arguably be described as the main religion of the early history of Asia. That other religions, Jainism and Islam for instance, had been important in specific times and regions in India, was not thought relevant.

Since the structure of Hinduism was different from Christianity and Islam, the attempt was to reformulate it so as to make it comprehensible to European scholars and colonial administrators. This created problems of another kind. Hinduism did not grow around the teaching of a single, historical personality with a relatively precise chronology. It was instead a mosaic of sects, independent and some linked, each associated with a particular deity and its rituals. Its extraordinary survival lay in the legitimacy of the segment. It was not monotheistic and did not preclude reverence for other deities. More attention was given to the performance of rituals – orthopraxy, rather than the dogma of theology – orthodoxy. It did not have an overall ecclesiastical authority. The sectarian identity could be and often was linked to particular categories of castes. Inevitably the ranking of sects was not impervious to the hierarchy among castes.

The fourth component of civilization is the existence of what was called a Classical Age. For Greco-Roman civilization it was Athens under the rule of Pericles, and Rome in the time of Augustus, for Islam it was the Caliphate based in Baghdad, and for India it was the Gupta period. But neither cultures nor civilizations can be confined to a single period. That makes them static and stasis is not what governs a golden age. Variant aspects of a culture develop in different periods and they are all inheritors and contributors to an on-going evolution.

Dynasties are more often chronological labels, rather than the handlers of cultural idioms. Of the many rulers in a dynasty only some chose to patronize particular cultural forms. Thus when a new form of devotional worship, bhakti, that virtually radicalized Hinduism emerged from the seventh century onwards, not every ruler of the dynasties in the area uniformly patronized it, but some did. Similarly Firuz Tughlaq ruling in Delhi in the fourteenth century, was the first major Indian conservator of objects from the past. He moved the Ashokan pillars from out-of-the-way places where they lay in a neglected state, to secure locations. He recognized them as heritage even though no one could tell him what was written on them. But he was the only Tughlaq to do so. The Mughals however were remarkably creative in inter-weaving cultures. Akbar was curious about ancient Sanskrit texts and had some translated into Persian. This doubtless facilitated his discussions with religious scholars. He would have received a rather different picture of the tradition of belief and practice of the majority of the Indian people, if his discussions had included the yogi, the sant, the pir and the fakir.

Indian cultural items were not a source of heritage for the British. They were a source of information on the colony and fed their curiosity about its culture. Nineteenth century Europe held the view that the world consisted of the civilized, the barbaric, and the savage peoples. The civilized was the society predictably of the European colonizers. The Others constituted the primitive. This incorporated both the barbaric and the savage depending on the area colonized.

So deeply rooted was the distinction between the civilized and the primitive that it was even included in the British Indian court of law as a valid legal differentiation. The transgression of laws by the natives was explained as due to their being primitive and not civilized.

The concept underwent a radical change in the next century. Instead of a single Classical age it was argued that any age with the required characteristics could be a Classical age. This emerged largely from the efforts of archaeologists and historians to periodize the past. In India the dual division of history into Hindu and Muslim periods was discontinued as it was an inaccurate explanation of historical change. The changes in material culture noticed by archaeologists also called for a systematic explanation.

Civilization now meant a society that lived in cities and communicated through a writing system. Control by a state system and a stratification of society was assumed. The city manufactured articles that could be traded. It was dependent for food from the surrounding agricultural settlements. There was no single period of urbanization and city cultures arose in different regions at various times. This culture, both material and intellectual, was believed to be the cradle of sophisticated aesthetics and the life of the mind accompanied by a distinct improvement in material conditions. This allowed more people to think beyond the mundane.

The new definition opened up many hidden aspects of cultural expression and brought them together in diverse ways. There was a move away from seeing just a narrow vertical space of a dynasty, or a text or a monument that called for attention. The horizontal lateral view provided an entry into far more than had been earlier seen as contributing to either culture or civilization. What was evident was already known but now the search began for the less evident or for the hidden within what was thought to be the evident. The making of a cultural item began to be viewed as the consortium of many ideas and artifacts. Civilization was no longer a static entity but had developed a kinetic form.

What this allowed for was the idea that everything does not have to be traced back to the earliest beginning or to a single point. Some facets of culture may have evolved later and this process reflects on what went into its making. This in turn introduced the idea that items of heritage are selected by a society. Who does the selecting and what goes into the making of heritage is another question. This is reflected and some would say sadly so, in some of the current formulators of culture – state patronage, Bollywood and the visual media. But citizens can and do demand alternatives even if they remain at the margin. The Khond tribe in Orissa did insist on preserving their sacred site of Niyamgiri and not have it eroded by the mining corporates. The pluralities of Indian culture require that we give such questions more thought than we have done so far.

Cultural innovation can give a new meaning to heritage. Earlier forms presented in contemporary ways have often been the trajectory of cultural items. This not only links the present with the past but can convey additional meaning. The contemporary presentation can open up new ways of understanding the item. This is most commonly seen when the aesthetics of elite groups have to be extended to include those of other segments of society. What is incorporated however different in origin, can create new forms. The juxtaposition of these with existing ones tells its own story. One thinks of Chandralekha inter-facing Bharata-natyam with Kalari. Dialogues between the presumed authors of existing forms and the new authors making the transposition, become meaningful.

An example from literature comes to mind. In the early eighteenth century when the Mughal court wanted to host a performance of the story of Shakuntala, the drama of Kalidasa was adapted to the occasion. The language was changed from Sanskrit to Braj Bhasha, currently used in the royal court and outside. Shakuntala herself was a feisty, forthright woman rather than the more shy, demure woman of the Kalidasa version. The episodes of the ring and the curse were deleted. Unlike the Kalidasa version that has largely remained within the upper caste-upper class cultural norms until recently, the Braj version had a wider audience. Such extensions express a changing aesthetic. Maybe one day we too shall see Shakuntala performed in a contemporary adaptation.

Much is made of the centrality of memory as a component of heritage. But memory is amazingly short and few cultures take pains to remember the past. When they do, the earlier memory is reshaped to accommodate the aspirations of the present. Slivers of remembrance can hardly go beyond a couple of generations after which they are grist to oral narratives. Buddhist rock cut monasteries went into oblivion with the decline of Buddhism. Even when texts are memorized as were the Vedic compositions, their previous contexts are forgotten. When scripts change texts can no longer be read. The edicts of the emperor Ashoka that we quote as a valuable heritage were unread and ignored for a millennium and a half until their script was deciphered in the early nineteenth century. That is a long cultural hiatus for the message of non-violence and tolerance that they carried. And when the edicts were initially read none knew who he was. Only the Buddhist texts tell us about him. But these Pali Buddhist texts ceased to be read in India when Buddhism declined.

The colonial definitions that we have internalized have often been divisive in slicing apart common cultures, separated by religion and caste. Within these divisions, the cultures of the elites were given priority. This often disallows dialogue between cultures such as those that exist at lower social levels. Now that we are searching for a national heritage it is again elite cultures that surface more readily, whilst much remains hidden. Heritage can give prominence to or submerge aspects of its own history. Earlier forms may continue or new ones be described as the old. My argument is that we need to explore in greater depth what we refer to as our traditions and to recover from these explorations, the diverse strands of our cultural inheritance that might currently be submerged. If heritage is not a fixed item and can be added to and subtracted from then we have the opportunity to construct it and perhaps argue over the construction.

Looking east the rulers of Cambodia built Angkor Wat with its magnificent sculptured panels depicting the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Khmer style; or the rulers of Java built Borobudur as a gigantic stupa to honour Buddhism. Did they think of themselves as patronizing a foreign culture?

The definition of national heritage is invariably contested since there are many competing for inclusion, especially in societies that host multiple cultures. Sometimes the contestation leads to the deliberate destruction of heritage, possibly for political reasons, as for instance with the Babri Masjid. Contestation can also but not invariably be linked to competition among dominant groups, as with the destruction of sacred places by rulers of various religious persuasions. Sometimes the opposite happens and an item of heritage over time absorbs much more than it started with and takes on incarnate forms. This quieter and gentler history of heritage is more often linked to those of lesser status with smaller ambitions and aspirations. Knowing the link between cultural forms and the societies from which they come helps in assessing these connections.

An interesting case of both absorption and contestation is the current confrontation over the narrative of the rama-katha. There are a few hundred versions of the story familiar to the Indian sub-continent and Southeast Asia and some go back many centuries. Each version is special to its authorship and its audience. This plurality has always been viewed as the strength of this particular cultural idiom. Amoeba-like, it has fissioned off, each segment growing and absorbing diverse ideas and incarnated in new forms, including dramatic presentations and exquisite poetry. The range is quite remarkable. Then comes the contestation when the story becomes a pawn in modern politics. The Valmiki version is declared to be the sole acceptable version, encapsulating a religious and social identity, to the exclusion of other versions. Where such political moves are successful, the definition of this cultural idiom will inevitably change and shrink. National heritage will then include only the items that survive. The Valmiki Ramayana is undoubtedly of the highest quality, but can we exclude the other versions? Some of these give us extended insights into the meaning of the story as well as the communities that associate with that version of the story.
We are perhaps somewhat ambivalent about constructing our heritage. We should search for and discuss insights that will give meaning to this construction. To give priority to certain patterns of culture, be they of the elite, or of any particular religion or language or region, leaves the search incomplete. We have to accommodate many more aspects of our diverse cultures if we are to justify the richness of this diversity. Such an accommodation requires sensitivity, both to the constant adjustments made by cultural forms, and to a changing history.

[I would like to thank Rajani and Shirish Patel and Kumkum Roy for their helpful comments on an earlier draft]
(Romila Thapar is Professor Emeritus in Ancient History, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)
 

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In speaking about Indian society and the secular, let me say at the outset, that secularism goes beyond just politics, although our political parties have attempted to reduce it to a political slogan. So one party endorses it in theory but hesitates to apply it properly in practice, the other makes fun of it since the party’s foundational ideology is anti-secular. Supporting secularism or dismissing it, is not just a political slogan. It is deeply tied to the question of the kind of society that we want. This is perhaps why it was widely discussed in the early years of independence whereas now attempts are being made to scuttle it. Questioning the secular would mean seriously changing the direction that we have intended to give to Indian society. If secularism is removed from the constitution then democracy becomes a victim, with an unthinkable future.

If however we want a secular society, then we would have to stop identifying ourselves primarily by religion, caste or language, and start thinking of ourselves primarily as equal citizens of one nation, both in theory and in practice. This involves mutual obligations between the state and the citizens and between citizens, not just in theory as of now but in actuality. The relationship of other identities such as religion, caste, language and region will inevitably become secondary. These latter have to be adjusted so as to ensure that rights of citizenship together with what they entail remain primary. Eventually the state will not be expected to support any religious organisation, even those it is currently supporting.

I would like to begin by trying to explain what I mean by the terms secular, secularism and secularising. Secular is that which relates to the world and is distinct from the religious. Secularism involves questioning the control that religious organisations have over social institutions. This is sought to be justified by arguing that it ensures morality. But the morality fundamental to secularism goes beyond any single religion and extends to the functioning of the entire society. Secularism does not deny the presence of religion in society, but demarcates the social institutions over which religion can or cannot exercise control. This distinction is fundamental. And finally, secularising is the process by which society changes and recognises the distinction.

What secularism is and is not
When the term was first used in 1851, secular had only one basic meaning. It described laws relating to morals and social values as having been created by human society in order to ensure the well-being and harmonious functioning of the society. These laws were neither the creation of divine authority nor did they require the sanction of divine authority. Authority lay in working out – through reasoning and sensitivity – what was best for society in keeping with generally accepted values of tolerance and social responsibility, by those who constituted that society. Authority was exercised through laws. Social values therefore grew out of rational thinking, debate and discussion. This was needed to establish a moral code agreed to by the entire society and was not linked to any particular religion, caste or class.

What this means is that the laws and social values that govern the society should be observed as laws in themselves and not because they carry any divine sanctions. They have their own authority distinct from religion or caste or whatever. Religion involving belief and faith in a deity and in an afterlife continued to exist. However, the civil laws were sanctioned and upheld by secular authority and did not require the sanction of any religion. Secularism therefore is not what it is sometimes said to be  – a denial of religion – but a curtailment of the control that religious organisations have over social functioning. And I would underline this definition repeatedly.

This theory after it came to be widely discussed had various consequences. One was that it allowed people the freedom to think beyond what was told to them as being religiously correct. Again this did not mean throwing religion overboard but disentangling the codes of social behavior from religious control. This did not make people immoral as some had feared at that time, since the threat of punishment for breaking laws was enforced, and punishment came immediately in this life. It was not postponed to the next life as in most religious codes. So it made people think about the purpose of their laws and such thinking is always extremely useful. The observance of the law is strengthened when people understand its purpose.

Having to reason things out meant that people had to learn to think independently. The thinking came from their education. Here too the explanation of everything being part of a divine plan and requiring divine sanction was not always the answer to simple questions. Therefore, education began to involve searching for explanations other than those based on faith and religion, or possibly even honing these explanations if there was evidence to do so. But preferably, social laws began to be drawn from rational enquiry into both the natural and the human world in which we live. Occasionally there might even have been a small leap of imagination ultimately to be explained by reason. So the explanations for the laws and a discussion of these, became an essential part of education, and of thinking about the implications of being secularised.

Religion had originated as a personal emotional need. This was then extended to explanations of how one experienced life and beyond that how the universe functioned. This was all attributed to a supernatural power who was held in awe. Gradually however, this personalised religion became a complex organised religion and took the form of institutions ambitious to control society and politics. With this change, religion became powerful both as the focus of belief and as an authority controlling social institutions through various religious organisations. In some places, its power paralleled that of the governing authority – the state. It is this particular aspect of religion – the control that religious organisations have over social institutions – that the secular person wishes to keep separate from the state. The distinction is important because we often overlook it, in saying that secularism denies religion altogether.

Secularism then takes on an additional meaning. The state having authority over the making and observing of laws by human agencies should be distinct from religion since religion has its sanction from faith and from deity. The authority of each was clearly different.

Social laws are the spine of a society. They should protect the right to live and they should ensure that there should be no discrimination that affects life and work. This is crucial to protecting the points of change in the human lifecycle for which laws are necessary, such as registering birth, marriage, or even divorce, processes of education by which a child is socialised into society, occupation and employment, and inheritance, generally of property. Actions linked to these come under the jurisdiction of civil law. To make this link effective, social laws have necessarily to provide the basic aspects of welfare in a modern state – the absolute minimum of which are equal access to education and to health care for all members of society, and to employment, and this is to be irrespective of religion and caste. If civil laws are to be universal and uniform as they would be ultimately in a secular society, then we must guarantee this endorsement by the state. Discrimination on any count would be completely unacceptable.

So religious authority continues in a secular system but is limited. It extends only to governing religious belief and practice. It has been argued that there should be no rigid barrier between religion and the state, but there can be a negotiated, principled distance between them. This can allow for new alignments within the religion or between religions or between religion and the state. The overall relationship would disallow the dominance of any single religion since each would have equal rights on the state and the state on them and equal status before the law. Nevertheless, there is a degree of stipulated separation in this arrangement in as much as religious authority would no longer be controlling social laws.

‘Indian’ secularism
This is not of course the same as what is sometimes described as the Indian definition of secularism, namely the coexistence of all religions. Mere coexistence is insufficient as religions can still be treated as unequal and some be marginalised, as they often are. The acceptance of coexistence together with equal status before the law can certainly be a first step. But we do have to ask how far does this go and what should be the next step.

This definition based on the coexistence of religions is incomplete in many ways since the question of the jurisdiction of religious authority remains unanswered. The intention would in any case be not to put up barriers between state and religion. It would be to demarcate the activities that come under a civil jurisdiction and those that would continue to be controlled by the organisations representing religious authority. In a democratic system the equality would be essential – as essential as spelling out who controls which laws. In contemporary India, the coexistence of religions exists but their equality has yet to be established. The secular is less evident and some might even say that it is virtually absent. Political and state patronage does not invariably distance itself from religious organisations. In fact, it is sometimes closely tied together as we know.

Some oppose secularism by arguing that it is a western concept not suited to India. Should the same be said about nationhood and democracy, both new to post independence India? And surely our internalising the new liberal market economy is a far stronger imprint of the west. To support the secularising of society does not mean subordinating ourselves to a western concept but rather trying to understand a process of change in our contemporary history. Being a nation-state is a new experience of modern times and is current now in every part of the world. We have chosen democracy as the most feasible system despite its being new to us. I would argue, that a secular society is essential to democratic functioning.

A secular society and polity does not mean abandoning religion. It means ..the religious identity of an Indian has to give way to the primary identity of a citizen. And the state has to guarantee the rights that come with this identity, as the rights of citizenship.

Let me turn now to the specifically Indian aspect of the subject and comment on how I see religion and society in the past in order to compare it with how it is viewed in our times. My argument is that colonialism introduced a major disjuncture in how we perceive ourselves and that we have accepted this without much question. Any deliberate social change with sizeable consequence becomes a little easier to handle if one can see the earlier historical forms of the society and its gradual mutation. The present, after all, does emerge out of the past. In the important area of the relationship between society and religion, we have been nurtured on ideas about how religion functioned in India. These ideas came from colonial views of Indian religion that we have internalised without adequately questioning them. So a brief look at these might be useful.

Colonial view of religion
Colonial perceptions were based on the European experience of religion in the context of European society. With reference to Europe, secularism is often described as the separation between Church and State. This is taken as a one-to-one relationship because generally the religion was a single monolithic religion. This was so strongly asserted that in past times those that questioned Catholic belief and practice in Europe were heavily punished as heretics. Some were burnt, some had to recant as did Galileo and many faced the punitive actions of the Inquisition. Although Protestantism later was more flexible, the earlier experience was not forgotten.

This was the perspective of religion that was familiar to the colonisers. Their reading of Indian religion was through this perspective. Recent writing on Indian religion and society suggests that this was a defective view and therefore needs reinvestigation. The colonial image of Indian society projected two nations – the Hindu and the Muslim – defined by monolithic religious identities and inherently hostile to each other. And because of their mutual hostility, a controlling authority from outside was required. This became one justification for colonial rule. As many historians have pointed out, this image was then imprinted on the history of India – especially on the medieval period – thus enforcing a distancing between the two religions.

The concept of majority and minority communities identified by religion was also introduced by colonial policy. This further consolidated the idea of monolithic religions and these in turn fueled communal politics. Permanent majority and minority communities are of course contrary to the norms of democracy. A democratic majority is formed on each occasion when a large number of people come together in support of a particular opinion. The number has to be larger than of any other group, and those that join it are not restricted to membership of any previous affiliated organisation. Forming a majority, therefore, is not based on any pre-existing religious, caste or linguistic identities. The constituents of the majority change with each issue. There are no permanent members of majority or minority communities.
 
A Hindu Mahasabha pamphlet from 1937
Anti-colonial nationalism tried to confront this image since broad based nationalism has to be inclusive, has to induct a range of opinion, and has also to draw on a shared history. The shared history is crucial. I would also like to quote Eric Hobsbawm who wrote that history plays the same role in nationalisms as does the poppy in the life of opium addicts. It is the source. It feeds ideas of identity. Anti-colonial nationalism did not question the monolithic nature of religious communities. It focused on denying their antagonism and projecting their coexistence. This became central to its idea of secularism. But this did not fully succeed. One reason was that the colonial view of religion in India was, and it still is, also foundational to the ideologies of what are now referred to as religious nationalisms, Hindu and Muslim, that went into the making of the communal landscape of India. In other words, anti-colonial nationalism and both the religious nationalisms build on the colonial construction of Indian religion, though the first borrows much less so whereas the second make it foundational to their ideologies. A century or so ago, the organisations propagating religious nationalisms were the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha. These were not religious orthodoxies but rather ideologies using religion for political mobilisation. Today, religious nationalisms include a range of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and other religious organisations, politically ambitious and anxious to continue their control over community laws to ensure a political constituency. History in religious nationalisms is not shared, it is divisive and it becomes the arena of battle. The struggle over history text-books, therefore, is the attempt to ensure the projection of a history slanted towards one religion and a denial of a shared history.

We may well ask was this actually the way in which religion functioned in relation to Indian society from early times? Have we looked analytically at our past? Have we examined the role of religious organisations from that past? What form did these organisations take, how did they exert authority and which sections of society supported which organisation ?

The place of religion in Indian history
I would argue that the historical picture of religions in India was complex. It was not just a simple binary of Hindu and Muslim, because religious groups took the form of an array of sects, and not of a large monolithic community. I see it in terms of two sets of relationships, each required for investigating the link between religion and society. The first was the interaction of sect with a close social linkage through caste connections, present in every segment of Indian society. The second was the mediation with and through political authority that then became a three-way process involving sect, caste and the state. There was no church to bring together the sects into a single entity. In other words, I’m arguing for a much more decentralised way of looking at religion.

What this means is that the laws and social values that govern the society should be observed as laws in themselves and not because they carry any divine sanctions.

In the Indian past, the crucial relationship lay in the connection between multiple religious sects and many castes. The sect propagated belief, the caste often determined its social context. Status was measured through an interdependence of the two. Upper castes across religion – whether they observed caste restrictions strictly or not – tended to be more closely associated with the text-based formal manifestations of the religion, whereas the lower castes, perhaps being less text-based, were far more flexible. Caste determined the social code, maintained formally by those who claimed to be educated and knew the law. For most people, however, it was the hearsay of tradition. The authority of caste and sect over the social code has now to be replaced by civil law applicable to all. This will require looking afresh at the civil law claimed by all religions to ensure its secularity and its endorsement of social justice. Both secularity and social justice are familiar as values but their application in social institutions is new.

Many valuable and meticulous studies have been made of religious texts that have enhanced our understanding of them. However, less attention has been given to examining the institutions created by various religions both to propagate their beliefs and as agencies of social control. Rather than focusing on monolithic undifferentiated religious society in general, what may be more insightful is if we study the link between caste and sect in order to comprehend more precisely the interface between religion and society in our past. The link between caste and sect had a flexibility, even a fluidity that monolithic religions lack. We could then ask whether the rigidity lay less in religion and more in caste discrimination. In that case, the colonial construction of religion in India, so readily accepted by us, would need to be examined again. Perhaps we need to look more carefully at how caste in past times and now class in its turn, has shaped and is shaping the relations between religion and society. Which groups in society support which politico-religious organisations and why.

In pre-Islamic times, there are no references to any monolithic type of Hinduism. Interestingly, what we today use as labels for religion, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, are not mentioned as such. Instead, there is reference to two broad categories of sects that propagated their distinctive ideas. These were the Brahmana and the Shramana. The basic differentiation was based on belief in or denial of, divinity, and the theories of the afterlife. Brahmana referred to brahmanic beliefs and rituals, Shramana referred to the shramanas or Buddhist, Jaina, and other monks of so called heterodox orders, the nastika/non-believers, and their followers. The latter rejected the Vedas, divine sanctions and the concept of the soul. They were consequently associated with more rational explanations of both the universe and human life. Within each of the two, distinct sects with various beliefs were recognised.

Neither of these were monolithic groups. They were a collection of diverse sects. This duality of Brahmana and Shramana continues to be used in a variety of texts with reference to what we would today call religions, and over a period of 1500 years from the edicts of Ashoka, to the accounts of Megasthenes, the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, and Al- Biruni in the 11th century AD. References are made in Brahmanical texts such as the Vishnu Purana, and in Buddhist texts, to occasional hostilities between the two. Interestingly, they use the same abusive terms for each other. The grammarian Patanjali of the early centuries AD, refers to the two and adds that their relationship was comparable to that of the snake and the mongoose.

A third category that is not mentioned was that of those who were discriminated against because of their caste or lack of it. Because of this, they had their own belief systems and forms of worship. This was the category that was intrinsic to caste. The equivalent of what we call the Dalit today is found in every religion under different names, such as, pasmanda, mazhabi, etc;. The Dalit is present even among those religious sects that claim that all men are equal in the eyes of God. Technically all Dalits, irrespective of religion, should have the same rights but this is not generally conceded.

The importance of sects
Among the multiple sects that were emerging over time, some adhered to the orthodox and others were supporters of the heterodox. The advantage of sects over monolithic religions is that sects shade off from the very orthodox to those far less so. This allows the less orthodox to assimilate new beliefs and these are not treated as heresy. The heretics function in a stream of their own.

Our understanding of conversion would be much clearer if we could focus on sect and caste, wherever the evidence exists or can be traced back. This would provide a far better explanation than merely going on referring to Hindus becoming Muslims. What we understand of historical interactions in the past moulds to a fair extent our thinking about present-day interactions. It is, therefore, incumbent upon us to be far more analytical and precise in our historical exploration and explanation. We should not allow history to be reduced to, or dismissed, as political slogans of various kinds.

The creation of a sect was open and led to a plurality that became characteristic of every religion in India. This constitutes an important aspect in understanding the relationship between religion and society, and these relationships differ from society to society. We cannot assume therefore that the role of religion that emerged for Europe can be applied automatically to India – a mistake made by colonial scholarship. This does not imply that the meaning of secularism can change, but that the manner in which it is introduced into a society may vary.

Since Shramanism in the main was based on historical founders, it takes a fairly linear form with segments referring back to a central teaching. The history of Brahmanism is far more complex. An early phase was Vedic Brahmanism focusing on the ritual of sacrifice, the yajna, invoking many deities and specially Indra and Agni, and performed by upper castes. A variety of heterodox sects, pre-eminently the Buddhists, Jainas and Ajivikas, questioned these beliefs. Heterodox groups tended to provide rational explanations about social institutions and established a critical tradition of questioning orthodoxy, although eventually establishing their own orthodoxies.

By the early centuries AD, Brahmanical ritual became more individualised with a shift to the worship of Shiva and Vishnu. Sects of worshippers came together differentiated by particular deities, as for example the Vaishnava Bhagavata and the Shaiva Pashupatha. From the seventh century, religious belief and worship took the form of devotional sects – what we call the Bhakti sects. They arose at varying times in different parts of the sub-continent. The earlier recognisable ones were the Alvars and Nayannars in the south to be followed by many in the north. Some among the later ones reflected striations of new religious ideas.

Secularism then takes on an additional meaning. The state having authority over the making and observing of laws by human agencies should be distinct from religion since religion has its sanction from faith and from deity

Both Brahmanism and Shramanism received hefty patronage and became wealthy, powerful, established religions. This gave them status and enabled them to control social laws. Donations were made to sects and not to a monolithic religious entity because this did not exist at that time. This continued to be the norm even in later periods.

Centres of the wealthy sects became the nucleus of education. This added to their authority and they could induct the elite. Frequently, sects with large followings and authority began to function as castes in themselves as for example the Lingayat in Karnataka, and many others in others parts of the country. They did not necessarily identify with the formal religions, and some actually opposed them. But in colonial records they were assigned to either one or the other.

The arrival of Islam
With the arrival of Islam and more so with the presence of the Sufis, the exploration of religious ideas – orthodox and heterodox – expanded, as did the number of sects. Some took orthodox positions, others held out mixed beliefs and worship. The latter were popular among the larger number of ordinary people.

The new presence was marked by the elaborate mosques and khanqahs built by royal patrons and the wealthy. The religious endowments became richer and richer, as is so in all well-patronised religions. As with Buddhist monasteries and Hindu temples and mathas, these endowments tied to Islamic centres also enabled their recipients to participate in the world of scholarship and in politics. Detailed studies of the social institutions controlled by various religious authorities that we refer to as the Hindu, Muslim, Sikh etc. would be revealing.

As in earlier times the sect remained the popular religious identity among the majority of people. This becomes more evident if we look at two processes involved in the coming of Islam – settlement and conversion. Today this event is projected at the popular level largely in terms of invasion and its subsequent political consequences. But there were many other avenues that took different forms, as in the settlements of traders, migrants, Sufis and such alike.

Mohammad bin Qasim’s conquest of Sindh is known. But far more interesting were the settlements of Arab traders all down the west coast of India from Sindh to Kerala. Some Arabs entered the service of the Rashtrakuta kings of the Deccan dating to the 8th and 9th centuries. The more senior among them exercised their right to give grants of land to temples and brahmanas as had been the prevailing custom in the area. Arab traders inter-married locally and new communities evolved with a new take on existing religions. Inevitably, these became new sects – such as the Bohras, the Khojas the Navayat, the Mapilla and many others – where belief, ritual, and civil law did not hesitate to draw from existing practice. So no two were identical. Gujarati Bohras had little to do with Malayali Mapillas. Many such sects mushroomed all over but have not been sufficiently studied as part of the history of society and religion.

This pattern continued into later centuries at the level of the wider society. This was despite the emergence of other patterns that arose from political power and administration. Such dichotomies run through history and only their constituents change. The newly emerging teachers of various persuasions attracted supportive followers. Until recently, these remained the essentials of how a major part of Indians experienced religion irrespective of having to declare conformity to formal religions in colonial times. This was prior to the ingress of Hindutva and Islamisation, that have considerably hardened the boundaries and even altered practices. Many people today who identify themselves with the monolithic religion, whichever it may be, when pressed further, will mention the sect that they belong to, or the holy man whom they revere – the baba, guru or sant – who can be of any persuasion. This link is often more pertinent to the lives they actually live. And interestingly, the sects that they identify with are generally those that were established in the last thousand years.

Myth-making about medieval history
In the history of India, medieval history, which colonial historians called the Muslim period, is located in the last thousand years. This history has had a raw deal from religious extremists and politicians in being described as the age when, to quote the slogan, “We were slaves” – the assumption being that Islamic rule tyrannised an oppressed Hindu population. This is a continuation of the British interpretation of Indian history eagerly taken up by religious nationalism. Viewed historically, the scene differs at many levels.

The interaction between what we call Hinduism and Islam had its moments of confrontations and conflicts in the face offs between competing politics and were manifested in various ways, and often through religious organisations. What was a largely political act at that time is often interpreted today as an entirely religious act, with the politics left out. Some confrontation was to be expected. Such confrontations were not new to the Indian scene if in earlier times the brahmanas and the shramans had a relationship comparable to the snake and the mongoose – and this was probably a correct assessment as we know that in some regions Buddhist monks were killed and in others Jaina monks were impaled. In the subsequent millennium, that is the last thousand years, things may not have changed strikingly. It was neither a culture given over to religious aggression as colonial scholars maintained, but nor was it entirely free of such aggression. It was, in fact, a normal culture similar to many others in the world at the time.

But as was so in earlier times, the medieval period continued to be a time when striking creativity enriched facets of Indian culture and we still live with these. The intellectual liveliness of the time expressed in Sanskrit and Persian and in the regional languages matched that of earlier times, although in different genres. It was precisely this period that gave shape and form in various ways to much, although not all, that we now identify as Hindu in the landscape of present times.

Leaving aside for the moment the interaction of cultures practicing diverse religions, even some of the activities clustered around the Brahmanic tradition are most impressive. Throughout the second millennium AD, that is the last one thousand years, from Kashmir to Kerala and in between, there were scholarly commentaries being composed on Brahmanical texts and religious practice. Sayana’s explanation of the Rig Veda is a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a learned scholar of the 14th century with its mix of reality and fantasy. Social change draws out new commentaries on existing social codes. Kulluka’s commentary on the Manu Dharmashastra incorporates a reaction to the social change of the times, as in the debate over the status of temple priests vis-à-vis other categories of brahmanas, a matter of concern only when temples became powerful institutions, at a time simultaneous with the arrival of Islam in the sub-continent. The looting of some of the wealthy temples did not prevent the building of other equally wealthy ones and striking innovations in architecture.

There were many commentaries, digests, discussions on classical Sanskrit poetry and literary compositions. With the gradual switch to the regional languages, grammars required commentaries. New and prior philosophical theories are discussed in texts such as the Sarva-darshana-sangraha of Madhavacharya in the 14th century. Discussions on the Advaita Vedanta and Mimamsa schools of philosophy, to mention some, date to this period. There were explorations into theories in mathematics and astronomy going from Ujjain to Baghdad and beyond, with Indian scholars at the cutting edge of knowledge. Classical Hindustani and Carnatic music was patronised by the courts of Maharajas and Mughals and in the homes of the wealthy.

Arab traders inter-married locally and new communities evolved with a new take on existing religions. Inevitably, these became new sects – such as the Bohras, the Khojas the Navayat, the Mapilla and many others – where belief, ritual, and civil law did not hesitate to draw from existing practice. So no two were identical. Gujarati Bohras had little to do with Malayali Mapillas. Many such sects mushroomed all over but have not been sufficiently studied as part of the history of society and religion.

In addition to Sanskrit and Persian, literary compositions of high quality began to be composed in regional languages that acquired a new standing in the royal courts and in places linked to religious sects. These compositions carried much of the thought and creativity of their own times, as is evident in the Ramacharitamanas, and the Krittibasi, distinct from the Valmiki Ramayana and much revered by Hindi and Bengali speakers. There were even alternate histories sung as legends by folk poets and bards, very different from the court chronicles that we quote. These were the voices of numbers of people as also expressed in the bhajans of Meera and Surdas and the compositions of Tyagaraja. These were not the achievements of enslaved people. We are today unable to look beyond what we have been told by those who colonised us, and those who loyally continue to carry on with that legacy.

The task of secularisation
In this rather scattered attempt to look at some aspects of the past, I have tried to underline the plurality in the articulation of religion in India often in the form of sects and their interface with caste. To eventually disengage religious institutions from controlling the functions of civil society would help us in bringing about a more equitable society. The process of secularising society will have to address both religion and caste, and to that extent it requires a different kind of analysis from that of religions elsewhere. We have internalised the colonial version of the relationship between our religions and our society, and are experiencing its aftermath in the stridency of dominant religious organisations. We have also allowed some of these to become mechanisms for political mobilisation. Secularisation therefore will have to be thought through with sensitivity, care and thoroughness. Although it cannot be a rapid change, nevertheless a serious beginning has to be made to introduce secular values through establishing confidence in a secular society and explaining its necessary link to democracy. The resort to assassination to silence secularists can never succeed – it merely leads to the suffusion of terror that will one day rebound on those terrorising others. If there is one lesson that history teaches us it is this.

A secular society and polity does not mean abandoning religion. It does mean that the religious identity of the Indian, whatever it may be, has to give way to the primary secular identity of an Indian citizen. And the state has to guarantee the rights that come with this identity, as the rights of citizenship. This demands that the state provides and protects human rights, a requirement that at the moment cannot be taken for granted. Such an identity, while adhering to human rights and social justice, would also be governed by a secular code of laws applicable to all.

A beginning could be made in two possible ways. One would be to ensure the secular in education, and the other, the secular in civil laws. Education means the availability of all branches of knowledge to all citizens without discrimination. Knowledge means updated information and training young people to endorse the method of critical enquiry. I would like to add to this the need for young people to know what is meant by a shared history. Given that we are a democracy, we can perhaps work out how best this could be done.

Our civil laws were drawn up in colonial times although we have made some changes after independence. In a turn to the secular, we shall have to comb through the existing civil laws to ensure that they conform to equal rights for all citizens with no exceptions. Resolving the differences between the civil laws and the laws of each religion and caste, will have to be discussed with the communities concerned and not only with those currently controlling religious and caste codes. A uniform civil code does not mean merely doing away with the laws of one religious code. It means reconsidering jointly the social laws of all religious codes and arriving at a common secular civil code. In this process, injustice and discrimination against minorities and against the underprivileged – whether because of religion, gender or caste – will need to be annulled. Law does not remain law if it can be manipulated to allow discrepancies. This is likely to be the most problematic in our turn toward secularising society. Is it not time now to start work on this?

The overwhelming projection of religiosity – not religion but the excessive display of religiosity – in the world that surrounds us sometimes appears to be a surrogate for not coming to terms with real life problems; or perhaps it is due to our having become a competitive society with all its unexpected insecurities. Can we instead consider how we can make the reality of citizenship a guarantee of our social welfare, our well-being, our understanding of our world, and our wish to bring quality into our lives? The secularising of society is not an overnight revolution. It is a historical process and will need time. But hopefully it will be assisted by the recognition that the state and society need to function in a new way. Implicit in democracy is the upholding of the ethic of human action. Secularising society is an advancing of that very ethic.

Romila Thapar is Emeritus Professor of History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has been General President of the Indian History Congress. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and holds an Hon D.Lit. each from Calcutta University, Oxford University and the University of Chicago. She is an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and SOAS, London. In 2008 Professor Thapar was awarded the prestigious Kluge Prize of the US Library of Congress, which honours lifetime achievement in studies such as history that are not covered by the Nobel Prize.

Romila Thapar delivered the Ali Asghar Engineer Memorial Lecture at Jamia Millia Islamia on August 19, 2015. This is the text of her lecture.The same lecture was delivered again on October 26, 2015 under police protection at the KC College Hall, Mumbai.
 

The post What Secularism is and Where It Needs to Be Headed appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Nikhil respected intellectual and academic opinion about public matters. He provided space to those who questioned the nature of the inter-dependence of society and politics. Today that space has shrunk and the intellectual parameters have narrowed. It seems that those in authority and those influencing public opinion have less respect for the public intellectualnow than was so before.I would like to speak about whether or why this is so, a subject that I suspect would have interested Nikhil. It becomes pertinent where there is a concern with the kind of society we want and why we want it.

In the talk today I shall refer briefly to what I think is implied by the presence of public intellectuals. As a historian I cannot help but instinctively go back in time. So I’ll begin with mentioninga few persons from the European past associated with the kind of thinking that in modern times gave rise to the public intellectual. And then I’ll mention some from the Indian tradition who played a similar role. There is no connection between the two but I think they are parallel in many ways. And finally I shall suggest what could be the role of public intellectuals and why there should be a greater visibility of such persons in our society today.

Public intellectuals frequently concern themselves with issues related to human rights and to the functioning of society such that it ensures the primacy of social justice. These issues cover an immense span. I shall choose a couple from among them,thosethat I think have priority. One isthe question of what we regard as authority- whether it be religion, the state or anything else, in accordance with the issue under discussion, and how do we assess the choice. The second is how we drawupon knowledge and the use to which it is put. We must expect for instance, that new knowledge opposes existing orthodoxies or well-established authorities. How do we handle the opposition ? This hinges on the primacy of reasoned, logical argument, in explaining the world around us as well as its past. In emphasizing the rational I am not expunging imagination as a process of thought, but the distinction should not be ignored.

Such concerns are not recent. They go back to antiquity and were addressed many centuries ago. I shall mention a few people from the past whose thinking laid the foundation for our right in the present to ask questions from those who are shaping our society. In earlier times the questions emerged largely from rational argument and logical thinking, but tempered by recognition of the human condition. Their answers did not foreclose the imagined future of a better society on earth,and did not require us to wait for heaven,or the next birth. Europe claims a tradition of such thinking. And its presence in Indian thought is more often dismissed. But I would contest this dismissal. Societies invariably have to allow the questioning of orthodoxy and authority, at least at challenging moments, or else they rapidly become moribund.

To turn to the European past. The forerunners of the public intellectual indulged in philosophical questioning but this thinking also penetrated the political sphere and was reflected in suggested social action. Such persons claimed the right to critique authority even if on occasion they had to suffer for it, as did Socrates. The Athenian Greeks objected to his denying the existence of deities andto his criticism of the methods of justice in Athens. For this he was condemned to drink poison.
However, an important strand of European thinking traces itself back to the Socratic method of the fifth century BC. A statement was subjected to many questions, and was prised apart to observe the inter-connections of its component parts. These could then be linked causally in a hypothesis and tested. A proposition counter-posed by its opposite could lead to a dialectical form of debate. The Roman orator Cicero, of the first century BC, who exposed the corruption of some of the Roman governors, claimed the right to question whatever he thought needed to be questioned, and used his legal brilliance to do so.

In the second millennium AD the Catholic Church wielded power over kings. This power was subsequently questioned. It wasone of the issues that stoked European thought into the movement known as the Enlightenment. Philosophers, with whose names we are familiar – Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau and others – began questioning conventional knowledge and practice.There were disagreements among them and with others,but by and large their questions were conceded because they drew on critical reasoning. This brought them together, apart from their common challenge to the moral authority of the Catholic Church, especially in matters concerning what we would today call civil society. The latter was now seen as constituted of essentially secular institutions, some run by the state. Religious exclusiveness and intolerance was viewed as backward. Progress, it was argued, lay in inclusiveness and the tolerance of differences. 

It was not because of wanting to oppose religion per se that the Church was criticized but because of opposition to the hold that formal religion hadon the institutions of society – the family, education, governance and justice. The divine sanction of these institutions was rejected. Thus the source of authority for governance was said to be a social contract among people. Apart from other things an emphasis on reasoned analysis rather than on quoting faith, made it easier to locate the mainsprings of social functioning, and to suggest changes in society where necessary.

However, the public intellectual, as distinct from philosophers, is said to have emerged as a recognizable category in the nineteenth century, linked to what has been called the Dreyfus Affair. A Jewish captain in the French army, Dreyfus, was wrongly imprisoned charged with leaking secrets to the Germans. Those opposing this action, argued that the General Staff of the army in league with the politicians, had unjustly punished Dreyfus. This accusation written by Emile Zola carried the support of a large number of writers, artists and academicians, all of whom jointly came to be called, ‘intellectuals’. Eventually an enquiry, divorced from an emotional anti- Semitism, declared Dreyfus innocent, and reinstated him. The meaning of ‘intellectual’ crystalized around the notion that such a person need not be a scholar but had to be someone who had a recognized professional stature, and who sought explanations for public actions from those in authority, even if such explanations required critiquing authority and power.

Such questions come more easily if there is a critical analysis of the intellectual tradition of the society. Basing arguments on accepted modes of reasoning, involves verifying and analyzing the evidence, even if the historical context changes the mode of questioning. (Incidentally, this method is now basic not only to the sciences but also to the social sciences, providing intelligible explanations of social and political institutions and activities. Unfortunately it is not always appreciated when applied to historical research and conventional views are therefore questioned).

The notion of rational argument over the last two centuries has however, faced criticism. Its centrality was questioned in the statement that the premium on rationality cannot provide complete explanations, and that all explanations -rational or otherwise – are equally viable. Critiques based on rational thought could be diverse depending on the evidence and the logic inherent in causal explanation. However, although the idiomof critical reasoning may differ in changing historical contexts, critical reasoning itself, can and doescontinue.

It is worth remembering that many of the roots of modern thinking, such as liberal values and democracy, by which we describe ourselves as not being medieval or feudal, go back tothese debates among philosophers and others. Nor were thedebates confined to Europe since some of these ideas met with confirmation or rejection when they arrived in other parts of the world, initially riding on the back of colonialism.

Let me turn now to the Indian tradition and randomly refer to a few persons that challenged existing ideas and practices and who advocated reasoned and logical explanations for change. We have been so implanted with the theory that our ancestors had no use for rationality as an avenue to knowledge that we tend to ignore our heritage of rational thought.

 The Indian philosopher who encouraged questions and who explored causality and rational explanations was a close contemporary of Socrates in the fifth century BC, although they livedcontinents apart and had no links. I am referring to the Buddha. The latter fortunately did not have to drink poison, but his teaching was strongly opposed by early brahmanical orthodoxy. It was described as delusional and misleading. This was one among many other reasons why Buddhism got slowly edged out of India. It went into neighbouring lands where it flourished, and in some places became in its own turn, orthodoxy.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the history of ideas is the diverse ways in which societies explain their evolving structures. When asked about the origin of government, the Buddha explained that at the beginning of time there was a pristine utopia where everyone was equal and had equal access to all resources. The first change came when families were demarcated and became the units of society. Subsequent to this came claims to ownership of land as private property. These changes resulted in confusion and conflict. So eventually people came together and elected from among themselves one person – the mahasammat, the great elect – to govern them and to provide them with laws that annulled the chaos. It was effectively a social contract. Let me hastily add, tongue-in-cheek of course, that neither Jean-Jacques Rousseau nor Frederick Engels, had read the Buddhist texts !

This Buddhist explanation contradicts the many Brahmanical versions. In these the story involves the gods and demons at war, and since the gods were faring badly they appealed to the great god Prajapati for help. In some versions he appointed his son, Indra, to lead the gods to a victory – in which action lie the roots of governance. Appeal to deities and divine sanction is essential and itcolours the attitude to authority. The Buddha’s notion of the ‘great elected one’ is in some ways the reverse of the king –who was divinely appointed, concentrating power in himself. The assumptions in the two myths, differ.

When religion is referred to in these early texts, there is of course no mention of Hinduism – a term invented much later. The multiple sects that constituted Indian religion,are referred to by their individual names. When speaking generally they tend to get assigned to one of the two streams : brahmana – associated with Brahmanicalbelief, orshramana – representing Buddhist and Jaina teaching. (Shramana was the term used for Buddhist monks). This is the form in which the religions are mentioned for over a thousand years,from the edicts of Ashoka in the third century BC to Al-Biruni’s account of India in the eleventh century AD. The Sanskrit grammarian Patanjali, writing at the start of the first millennium AD, provides an additional perspective when he compares the relationship of the two, to that of the snake and the mongoose. Clearly the debates could be virulent, as happens in societies where some believe unquestioningly in what they are told, but others raise questions.

And then there were the Carvakas also called the Lokayatas. They were opposed to most philosophical schools as they adhered to a materialistic explanation of life, making virtually no concession to other ways of thinking. No text of theirs has survived, but references to them keep cropping up unexpectedly in various nooks and crannies of known texts. The Buddha describes the arguments of some of these sects as ‘the wriggling of an eel’.

At the turn of the Christian era, when Buddhism had the patronage of royalty, traders, land-owners as well as popular support, important Brahmanical texts registered sharp opposition to them describing them as heretics, referring to them as nastika– non-believers. From the Brahmanical perspective, the Shramanas, Carvakas, Ajivikas, atheists,materialists and rationalists, were all one category – nastikas. And this because they questioned the existence of deity, and therefore also of the Vedas as divinely revealed ;of the rules of caste practices ;of the existence of the atman, soul ; and their views on karma varied as some rejected the idea altogether. (I am reminded of the followers of Hindutva in our times for whom anyone and everyone who does not support them, are all put into one category and called Marxists !Interestingly, I am told that Muslim religious fundamentalists in India have also starting putting liberal Muslims who oppose the orthodoxy into  one category, and are calling them Marxists.)

The Manu Dharma–shastra is almost paranoid about the heretics, calling them atheists and preachers of false doctrines. They are said to be like diseased men and are a source of tamas – the condition of darkness. It was in some ways a time of troubles for the orthodoxy, given that some dominant schools of philosophy were striated with degrees of atheism.But that is what makes it an intellectually exciting time.

Wherever the heretics had a popular following, the attack on them became stronger. The VishnuPurana, of the early centuries AD, is replete with negative references to a person called Mayamoha and his followers. Delusion and deception, as the name, maya-moha, implies, are characteristic of the group.Mayamoha collects all the evil ones – the asuras and daityas – and converts them to his way of thinking. Some of their practices point to their being Buddhists and Jainas : such as wearing red robes, removing theirhair,not observing rituals and living off alms. Discourse with them is not permitted, since such discourse is declared polluting. A record of such a dialogue would have been fascinating but only brief references survive. 

The Carvakas continued to be part of the landscape even if not always directly visible. Shankaracharya in the ninth century AD refers to their theory of the primacy of matter over spirit.And the Sarvadarshana–sanghraha, a discussion on major philosophical schools put together in the fourteenth century, by Madhavacharya, begins with a lengthy discussion on the viability of Carvaka thinking. Although he finally rejects it he nevertheless discusses it at some length.  If the Carvaka thinking had been of no consequence, it could as well have been ignored. This of course, did happen later in the world of nineteenth century colonial scholarship, when some colonial writers argued that rational thought was absent from Indian civilization and was one of the causes of Indian backwardness. This argument although unacceptable to nationalist thinking was not confronted in any significant way by Indian scholars. Those that ask questions are anathema to any kind of autocratic authority. Similarly, those trying to build a single national identity based solely on Hinduism would not have conceded the significance of teachings that contradicted the Brahmanical.

The heretics were dismissed by the orthodox. However,  some of their ideasand other similar ideas were exploredin philosophical schools of the early centuries AD. At the scholarly level, discussions among learned brahmanas and Buddhists, gave rise to various impressive philosophical schools. Logic and methods of reasoning were sharpened, as also were other methods of thought more sympathetic to idealistic philosophy. The major logicians, at this point were interestingly largely Buddhist, such as Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Dignaga and Dharmakirti, some of whom had been born brahmanas and educated accordingly but preferred to be Buddhists. They teased out the ideas, and especially more so when discussing the nuances of atheism. Views were not uniform and were widely debated, the argument sometimes taking an almost dialectical form.

What would have been of much intellectual significance but which is unfortunately difficult to locate, are conversations between philosophers using critical reasoning with astronomers or mathematicians, even more closely allied to rational thought. Aryabhatta on the basis of mathematical calculation argued that the earth went round the sun. This theory preceded that of Copernicus and of Galileo by a millennium. In Europe the potential of these ideas was feared by Catholic orthodoxy as undermining the Bible and therefore also the control of the Church on society. Galileo had to recant.  In India there was a debate among astronomers on the heliocentric model, but its wider implications seem to have been by-passed, possibly because there was no Catholic Church. But if I may suggest another reason, adopting the heliocentric system would perhaps have upset some astrological calculations. Astrology was one mechanism by which royal power was controlled by religious orthodoxy. Old knowledge therefore continued unshaken in most places. Indian theories of mathematics and astronomy expanded creatively in their own space, but ironically became moreinfluential when taken to Baghdad, the then centre of proto-science.

In India meanwhile, other sects provided an ambience in which similar questions were being raised. Scholars questioned beliefs and practices upheld by religious authorities and by those who governed ; or they questioned other orthodoxies, other than the Brahmanical. Some among them were women, such as Andal, Akka Mahadevi and Mira, flouting caste norms, who were listened to attentively by people at large, creating their own social codes. But we seldom give enough attention to this aspect of their discourse, focusing as we do largely on religion.

 Amir Khusrau was not unknown to the Delhi Sultans. He provides a poetic view of court politics in his Tughlaq–nama composed in the fourteenth century, as a form of traditional history. His study of astronomy however, underlining a heliocentric universe, distanced him from orthodox Islam, as it implied questioning accepted truths. And it was his poetry and musical compositions that gave him a status and a following, such that even though he was regarded as a court poet, the Sultansand the orthodox thought it better not to antagonize him. His mentor and friend, Nizam-ud-din Auliya, a Sufi of the Chishti order, kept his distance from the Sultans and made a point of asserting the distance.

A few centuries later Ekanath in Maharashtra also questioned the control exercised by formal religion. His versions of the Bhagavata Purana and of the Ramayana defined his brahmanical scholarship. This did not stop him from questioning the viability of the social order and caste practices.

Not everyone who was teaching a new form of worship was questioning authority, but where they were, this has to be recognized by us. We have hesitated to do this since the form in which social commentary occurs in earlier times is unfamiliar to us. We tend to brush aside the views of such people on matters other than those referring to belief and worship, forgetting that religious belief does make the claim to be all-encompassing, and to speak on all aspects of life. Therefore even those who were primarily religious teachers did have views on society and social values. These views are of considerable interest and especially at moments in history when religious sects were incorporating ideas from a wide range of sources.

Turning to modern times, the ideology of nationalism made attempts to re-order society. Nationalism may have opposed colonialism but was not always averse to appropriating theories from colonial scholarship. Social reform movements pertaining to upper caste Hinduism, such as the BrahmoSamaj, Prarthana Samaj and Arya Samaj, suggested new forms of Hindu religious organization and the role of caste. We are all familiar with Raja Ram Mohun Roy and socio-religious reform, but so little is said about his exact contemporary in Tanjore – Serfoji II, a minor Maratha raja. He questioned orthodoxy by focusing on the content of education. His reading of Enlightenment authors convinced him that knowledge was based on processes of reasoning and that these were taught through education. The schools he established were intended for this purpose, as were the books and objects that he collected for the Sarasvati Mahal Library.

Although these movements were not intended to critically question the intellectual traditions, they did occasionally scrape the surface. Despite the centrality of caste hierarchies legitimized by religion, the inter-face between religion and caste was seldom investigated. In the nineteenth century Bal Gangadhar Tilak supported the Aryan foundations of Indian civilization and upper caste culture, even if, according to him, the Aryans did have to trek all the way from their Arctic homeland to India. But Jyotiba Phule saw the coming of the Aryans as a logical explanation for the oppression of the lower castes. For him the Aryans were brahmanas that oppressed the indigenous inhabitants who were the shudras. Tilak extended the accepted view,Phule questioned it to explain existing society. Both readings were historically faulty, but Phule was asking an incisive question.

There were others who were also questioning the legitimacy of caste, and were critical of brahmanical beliefs. Periyar, or EVR, although not an academic, was known to be as well-read as were his academic colleagues. He was critical of the contradictions in Hindu mythology which, as a rationalist, he dismissed as fabrications of the Indo-Aryan peoples. He took a strong position in favour of social equality, and more particularly the equality of women.

The people I have mentioned were not public intellectuals in the modern sense. They were among those who questioned the existing reality as a means of attaining an improved society. They were listened to because they were respected in their diverse professions. The point is not the similarity or otherwise of their questions. It is the way in which they reasoned even if the nature of the questions changed in accordance with the issues of the moment. Such questions are not arbitrary. They have to be governed by acknowledged critical reasoning. And people who question, were and are, articulate at moments of significant historical change.

Moments of historical change coincide with the exploration of new ways of ordering society, as has been happening off and on in the Indian past. Now we have more insightful ways of understanding social and economic conditions and how they give a form to society. These connections require exploration. Public intellectuals, playing a discernable role are needed for such explorations : as also, to articulate the traditions of rational thought in our intellectual heritage. This is currently being systematically eroded.

Mainstream anti-colonial Indian nationalism and the emergence of a liberal democracy,  aspiring to be secular, made space for the visible presence of the public intellectual. More than a few took on this role especially in the years just after Independence. They were responsible for wide-ranging debates. Later events, be it the Emergency or the genocides of religious communities, heightened our awareness of the need for public intellectuals, if only to speak out and prevent a repetition of such events. We must remind ourselves that NikhilChakravarti, Romesh Thapar, and others like them, opposed forms of censorship, and the attempt to silence alternate voices.

Today we have specialists in various professions, but many among them are unconcerned with the world beyond their own specialization. It is sometimes said that they are replacing the public intellectual. But the two are not identical. There are many more academics for instance, than existed before. But it seems that most prefer not to confront authority even if it debars the path of free thought. Is this because they wish to pursue knowledge undisturbed, or, because they are ready to discard knowledge should authority require them to do so ?

Much has been written on trying to define the public intellectual. Such a person it is assumed, should take a position independent of those in power, enabling him or her to question debatable ideas, irrespective of who propagates them. Reasoned critiques are often the essential starting point. The public intellectual has to see himself or herself as a person who is as close to being autonomous as is possible, and more than that, be seen by others as such.

An acknowledged professional status makes it somewhat easier to be autonomous. The public intellectual of today in addition to being of such a status, has at the same time a concern for what constitute the rights of citizens and particularly inissues of social justice. And further, there is a readiness to raise these matters as public policy.

A justification for the critique is the claim to speak for society and to claim a degree of moral authority. The combination of drawing upon wide professional respect together with a concern for society, can sometimes establish the moral authority of a person and ensure public support. This is a conceded qualification and not a tangible one. In the past it was those who had distanced themselves somewhat from society that were believed not to have ulterior motives in the changes they suggested. But this was not always so. Formal affiliation to a political party in our times can inhibit free-thinking and prescriptions for action, even if it has the advantage of providing a support. 

As an attitude of mind, autonomy is more readily expected of the professional specialist or the academic. Such persons, and they are not the only ones, can suggest alternate ways of thinking, even about problems of the larger society. Such thinking emerges from reasoned, logical analyses. Yet academics today are hesitant to defend even the right to make what might be broadly called alternate, if not rational interpretations, however sensitively they may be expressed. This is evident from the ease with which books are banned and pulped, or demands made that they be burned, and syllabuses changed under religious and political pressure, or the intervention of the state. Established publishers are beginning to suffer from a paralysis of the spine. Why do such actions provoke so little reaction among many academics and professionals? The obvious answer, usually given, is that they fear the instigators who are persons with the backing of political authority. Is this the only answer ?

Many today comment on the narrowing of the liberal space in the last couple of decades. It was fought back, and now it is upon us again. To question those that represent conventional authority and to demand responsible action, needs to be repeated again and again, especially where it involves a negation of justice. The social media were thought of as a free space and to some extent they are. But people now hesitate to share critical comments on religious activities or on contemporary politics, for fear of action against them. More specifically when it comes to religious identities and their politics we witness hate campaigns based on absurd fantasies aboutspecific religions and we no longer question these frontally.
Such questioning means being critical of organizations and institutions that claim a religious intention but use their authority for non-religious purposes. They invoke the rules and regulations of formal religion, sometimes recently invented, in order to legitimize their actions. Their actions may bring murder, rape and mayhem. Those not associated with such organizations maintain that the values of religion are such that none preach violence. But that is not the issue. Of course all religions endorse virtuous values. But it is not the values that are under question, it is the beliefs and actions of organizations that act in the name of religion, but not always in conformity with religious values. We are only too familiar with such organizations that have identified with Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism and have not hesitated to breed violence and terror. Can the law be brought to bear against those that disrupt the law even if they speak in the name of religion ? Although necessary, it is not enough to castigate such actions and rest at that. We have to understand why such actions, supposedly to defend religion, are resorted to and how can they be brought to a close. Do believers, identifying with the religion endorse such actions ? And if not should they not be defending the values of their religion by disassociating themselves from the perpetrators of violence and the terror, using their religious identity?

There are many reasons for the decline of the public intellectual. I can only mention some. The most obvious but least conceded are insecurities generated by the neo-liberal culture. These have arisen out of the economic boom it was supposed to bring, but which boom has misfired. Jobs have become far more competitive and this adds to existing aggressions and erodes a reliance on human relationships. Almost obscene disparities in wealth further the aggressions. Values are being turned to tinsel with the endorsing of ostentatious display. The ready acceptance of corruption has become normal. Money is the new deity lavishly worshipped among the rich. The rest wait anxiously for the trickle down. There is a clash between the excitement of having the right to demand equality but of its being denied because of new versions of caste and money power.

The neo-liberal culture and economy cannot be easily changed but its ill-effects can be reduced, provided we are clear that society must be rooted in the rights of the citizen to resources, to welfare and to social justice. This after all was the issue at the time of independence when the nation-state was created. I can recall the arguments and debates in the 1960s and 70s, on how to create a society where citizens had equal rights, not just in theory but in actuality. If such discussions are to continue, as they should in a vibrant society, and questions be raised, then we have to turn to public intellectuals to bring them to the fore. But beyond that, it also needs a public that would regard the asking of such questions as appropriate.
How can we create a public that is aware of what needs to be discussed and why ; a public that would respond to questions drawing from critical reasoning. The response does not invariably have to be an affirmation of what is being suggested, but at least alternative ideas can be subjected to discussion and solutions suggested. This assumes for a start, an educated public, a public that would not only appreciate the role of public intellectuals but also the need for them.

 In order to become an educated public, how should we be educating ourselves ? The question involves both professionals in various disciplines and many public intellectuals who in part draw their alternative authority from their professional standing. Today there are effectively two sources of educating ourselves. One is the informal indirect visual media as an oral form, and the second is the formal category of educational institutions. The intermediary here is the Internet, and like the other two, at present its catchment area does not include the entire society. TV Channels, with rare exceptions, imitate each other with panelists playing musical chairs on the channels. Everything, but everything is seen in terms of current politics, even where this may be irrelevant. So every discussion is over-loaded with representatives of each political party whose propaganda disallows searching debate. Seldom do programmes investigate the reality beyond their statements. I have begun to wonder whether it is not possible to have an alternate channel on TV, and if this is difficult to finance, then even a broadcasting station on radio, which is not solely concerned with commercial profit ?  One that encourages exploring alternate ideas and solutions, and goes well beyond the single byte, and draws its inspirations from a critical enquiry ? How do we finance the voice of those that have more than a momentary interest in society extending to the next election ? And who are thoughtful about its future?

Then there is the other source, that of formal education. This has to be seen at two levels:  the content of education and the autonomy of educational institutions. Education is moving out of the hands of educationists and into those of politicians and of political organizations, pretending to be cultural and religious institutions. This makes it crucial to be aware of how politicians today relate to intellectuals – if at all they do so.

Ideally, the essence of learning lies in enabling a person to think in forms that are analytical, logical, and autonomous, not to mention creative. It is only by using the power of reasoning that an educated person can, for instance, be made aware of the fact that knowledge where it takes the form of a technology has a particular context that produces that knowledge and sustains it. It cannot take shape from nothing. Specific technological inventions of the twentieth century can only have been made in that century. They cannot have existed three thousand years earlier without the technical and associated knowledge. Scientific inventions have a long gestation period and historians of science can mark such a period by drawing out the evidence for it. They can observe how the technology and knowledge that has made the invention possible at a particular point in history has evolved and advanced. 

If we are to claim scientific advance in our society then we have to track the role of science in the past both at the level of knowledge and its application through technology. Instead of claiming the prior existence of twentieth century inventions in ancient India, many thousands of years ago, we should be investigating the nature of the knowledge and technology that we had, and which is proven to have existed during the course of our history, and what we did with it. If the Kerala mathematicians discovered calculus in the fifteenth century AD, what use was made of this discovery as a method of advancing knowledge?

The first step in education is to provide information of existing knowledge. The next step is to assess whether there is a need for replacing existing knowledge with new, improved knowledge through the process of learning. The educational system today does not even reach the first step in most schools. Some suspect that the acute shortage of schools and the poor condition of those that exist, may be deliberate policy, arising from the fear of a citizenry that is not only literate but educated. Hence the striking neglect of school education in the last half century. We have an absurd situation where there is virtually no preparation even for secondary school, leave alone university, in terms of handling knowledge. Yet, we are rushing to open more universities, IITs, IIMs and what have you. Inevitably this situation leads to diluting education to the point of being almost meaningless – in fact to reduce it to the Lowest Common Denominator, what might therefore be called ‘LCD Education’.For most young people the methods of thinking that are essential to the nurturing of enquiring minds and thosethat might resonate with public intellectuals, are stymied by the very system of education. One is thankful that there are some who do manage to think independently and creatively despite the system. But they don’t add up to the critical mass that we require. Imagine what an energetic, thinking society we would have if the concept of education we adopt were to encourage students to ask questions and be provoked to think independently.

One might ask, what are the issues that could be raised by contemporary public intellectuals. For the under-privileged citizen, in fact the majority of Indians,good governancewould requires  changing the current ways of survival in an anachronistic system clinging to its colonial roots. The unjust distribution of national wealthkeeps the poverty line high. Caste and religious priorities still prevail using the same categories as werecreated by colonial policy. Colonial administration invented majority and minority communities and encouraged the identity politics of religion. These are now treated as permanent categories. They disallow democratic functioning because in a democracy those that make up a majority change from issue to issue. Reservation in education and employment, if retained on a permanent basis, re-iterates these religious and caste identities whatever the marginal benefits may be. The solution actually lies in ordering our society and economy in a different way, such that these colonial identities are set aside and attempts are made at a more equitable distribution of wealth. 

The ultimate success of a democracy requires that the society be secular. By this I mean a society that goes beyond the co-existence of all religions; a society whose members have equal social and economic rights as citizens, and can exercise these rights irrespective of their religion ;a society that is free from control by religious organizationsin the activities related to these rights ; a society where there is freedom to belong to any or no religion. Public intellectuals would be involved in explaining where secularization lies and why it is inevitable in a democracy and in defending the secularizing process.

Public intellectuals are not absent in our society, nor are they alien imports. They do have a lineage as I have argued. Historical change requires us to recognize that their role, although not entirely dissimilar to that of earlier intellectuals, nevertheless needs to be extended in our times. Their predecessors added new dimensions to understanding our society. Were they nurtured subconsciously by earlier heterodoxies, that explained the human condition through rational and logical argument ;and by exercising a secular moral authority over those that controlled society ; and closer to us in time, by negating colonial dominance. Public intellectuals drawing on critical reasoning are the inheritors of this bequest.

Since the title of this talk is about asking questions, I would like to conclude with a long question. It is not that we are bereft of people who think autonomously and can ask relevant questions. But frequently where there should be voices, there is silence. Are we all being co-opted too easily by the comforts of conforming ? Are we fearful of the retribution that questioning may and often does bring ? do we need an independent space that would encourage us to think, and to think together ?   
 
(This is a slightly expanded version of the text of the lecture. I would like to thank AmitBhaduri, Deepak Nayyar and Neeladri Bhattacharya for their comments on the first draft of this lecture, comments that helped me sort out my ideas).
 

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Prof. Romila Thapar

Ancient India

Within colonial historiography, we have two distinct trends- the Orientalists and the Utilitarians. The first presented a sympathetic image of a Golden Age. The Utilitarians (James Mill for example) on the other hand, moved away from this romantic vision of a glorious Indian past and periodised Indian history into three periods, Hindu, Muslim and British (not Christian). This was a meaningless categorisation as it no way reflects or characterises an age.
 
In their search for an identity in the early part of this century, nationalist historians harked back to the descriptions and imagery of golden ages of the past. To fight colonialism these interpretations of Indian history pointed to a backward-looking utopia.
 
All these streams show a close link between ideology and history writing. And it was in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s that the culmination of this link, this time in the form of communal ideologies and history writing, became transparent. This clash of communalisms continues with us (Hindu and Muslim communalist history writing).
 
One way of breaking out or away from these kinds of motivated interpretations of history is to study an age not merely through political events but also through social and economic relations.
 
A major theory of historical explanation which evolved in the 19th century was the theory of the Aryan race. This theory, developed as an explanation of common origin by Max Mueller who held that the Aryans originated in Central Asia and came as invaders into North-Western India, subjugating the locals and imposing their language, Indo-Aryan (technical term for Vedic Sanskrit). This theory divided Indian society along racial lines arguing that the fair arya and the dark dasa of the Rigveda were racial distinctions.
 
This theory is untenable because it equates language with race. Language is an acquired, cultural feature which can be learnt by a member of any race provided it is taught whereas race has got to do with biological descent.
 
An interesting thing happened with this theory of the Aryan invasion. Jyotiba Phule argued that the Aryan invasion brought the brahmanas who subjugated the indigenous peoples; thus making them – sudras, dalits and tribals – the rightful claimants and inheritors of the land.
 
At the other end is the Hindutva version of history which holds that there was no invasion, the Aryans being indigenous to India, therefore giving a clean, linear descent to the Hindu Arya as the rightful inheritor of the land.
 
The explanation of origin is critical to any communal ideology. For Hindutva to be tenable, it must be established that only Hindu Aryas are true descendants of the land. How else can the notion of pitrubhumi hold valid?
 
Neither of these interpretations, however, is borne out by historical evidence. Apart from the Rigveda being the earliest source that refers to the arya, today we have the evidence provided by archaeology and linguistics. The Harappan cities cannot be equated with Vedic society as the urban culture of the former is distinctly different from the predominantly pastoral culture of the latter.
 
Archaeological evidence from the North-West of the subcontinent and dating to 3000 B.C. onwards provides no evidence of a large scale invasion or migration. However there is evidence of contact between the North-West and the areas beyond in Afghanistan, North-Eastern Iran and the Oxus valley, especially in the second millennium B.C. That would suggest there was a frequent movement of people and goods between these areas.
 
Religious monuments, their creation and destruction, often become central to communal discourse. In studying history, we must understand that religious monuments represent the religions of the elite, that they are a statement of wealth, power and authority. Only the rich build monuments and because the religious monument, be it the temple, mosque or stupa has also been the safe deposit for a lot of wealth, they have been the target over the ages of ravage and plunder.
                                              
Religious conflicts there have been many and periodic. But that these have been only between the Muslims and the Hindus is nonsense. Shaivites and Buddhists had conflicts, King Shashanka of Assam destroyed Buddhist temples in the North-East and there is evidence of Jains and Shaivites clashing in the region of Karnataka during the ancient period.
 
When we study Indian history, we also need to examine religion in Indian history which was quite different from the way religion evolved through the history of Europe. Indian or sub continental history is replete with instances, from the ancient period on, of the patronage by rulers of religions other than their own. The ruler or the monarch had to observe a policy of pluralism.
 
This is unheard of in European history where you would never hear of a Christian monarch ever building a mosque. Various eras in Indian history are full of such examples: during the rule by the Kushans, there was evidence of a co-existence of Shaivism and Buddhism, during the medieval period, the Moghul kings provide examples of this.
 
So we need to ask ourselves the motive or reason behind this multi-purpose patronage? Was it a good political policy? Or was it pragmatic for a pluralist society?
 
—Prof. Romila Thapar
J.N.U. New Delhi

In 1997, Khoj education for a plural India programme held a workshop that enabled interaction
between in India's leading historians and school teachers in Mumbai. This article is the edited transcript of the lecture by professor Romila Thapar. 
Archived from Communalism Combat, March 1997 – Cover Story
 

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