Book Review of

Shabnum Tejanis Monograph on Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History (1890-1950)

Tejanis monograph is a historical analysis of the changing meaning of secularism in Indian

context. Her key arguments are twofold first, that understanding the genealogy of secularism in
India requires one to move beyond religion to a consideration of caste; second, that secularism
assumed very particular historical meanings in Indian setting due to its emergence at the nexus of
community and caste, liberalism and democracy and nationalism and communalism(p.15).
Grounded in French theorist Rosanvallons idea of history of the political, Tejani reconstructs a
history of secularism in India by examining the conflicts and possibilities it grappled with and the
competing ideas that lost ground in the process(p.16). She focuses on six historical moments
during 1890-1950 as milestones that crystallized political concepts including community,
patriotism, communal, communalism, democratic majority and secular citizenship(p.18). These
moments are discussed under three sub-themes: Nationalism, Communalism and Secularism.
The section on Nationalism first discusses the emergence of a Hindu community in Maharashtra
(1893-94) through conflicts over Hindu procession music and cultural innovations including cow
protection movements and Ganapati festivals. Tejani examines how these protests and public
displays helped create collective memories and meaning of being a Hindu even among the Shudra
castes and provided avenues through which local grievances were articulated to rulers who
preached non-interference and yet sought to reconcile them by looking for trans-local
solutions(p.75). Acting together, these developments articulated broad-based, regional ideas of
patriotism.
Tejani argues that this regional articulation of patriotism became national through the Swadeshi
movement (1905-1910). Popular challenges to emerging definitions of nationalism and patriotism

were branded anti-nationalist, isolating the non-brahmins and Muslims who felt alienated by a
nationalism that appropriated Shivaji as a Hindu patriot and portrayed his Muslim enemies as
foreign interlopers (p.108). It culminated in the emergence of dharmic universalism that
ascribed incorporative qualities to Hinduism, meaning that even Muslim and Christian converts
were essentially Hindus, thus erasing any possibility of distinguishing the Hindu from
Indian(p.109).
In the section on Communalism, Tejani first explores the shift of Indian Muslims from a religious
community to the communal minority, over the course of debates preceding the Morley-Minto
Constitutional reforms(1906-09). The reforms aimed to retain control over a changing Indian
society and counter the anti-colonial nationalism of urban, educated, upper-caste Hindus by
bringing in conservative sections including Muslims and landowners and the depressed-classes
into the public sphere(p.117). Tejani tracks how the debates used the euphemisms of balancing
Indian societys communal interests and reflecting the countrys structural particularities for
constitutional innovations such as separate electorates. She argues that separate electorates made it
possible to treat communal interests not as constitutive of but as external to the main
representative structure(p.142) and minority not as a qualitative but as a numerical entity(p.143).
In the process, Hindu-Muslim relations got sorted into the binary classification of majority and
minority.
In the chapter on Muslim autonomy, Tejani examines how the majority-minority divide widened
with the break down of Khilafat and non-cooperation movements and the frustration of Muslims
with the constitution-making process spiraled into mistrust among national leaders. This eventually
led to the separation of Sindh province on communal grounds, thus cementing the isolation of
Muslims as the communal minority.

The section on Secularism first examines the journey of depressed-classes from untouchable to
Hindu. Tejani argues that the settlement of depressed-classes question by retaining untouchables as
Hindus while ascribing minority status of Muslims was critical to the demarcation of majority and
minority populations as it enabled the extreme Hindu nationalist to win the number game and the
moderates to ensure national unity. She notes how these processes culminated in untouchable who
wanted to be considered as a minority being appropriated into a majority and Muslims who had
fought against a minority status being confirmed exactly that(p.23).
The final chapter traces the journey from nationalism to secularism through the Constitutional
debates of 1946-50. She argues that the decision to separate the rights of caste and religious
minorities determined how secularism came to be defined in 1950 and post-independence period
(p.236). While nationalism defined Muslims as minorities, secularism was invoked as an argument
against the protection of minorities on the grounds that it would re-ignite the processes that once
led to partition (p.262). She observes that the transition from nationalism to liberal secularism
required religious minorities to forego any claim to inequality (p.264). She concludes that this
fraught relationship between inequality and identity lies at the heart of secularism and democracy
in India and that a truly democratic and plural society can emerge only when historical meanings of
secularism are understood and its destructive ideological formulations are discarded.
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Nayana RenuKumar
MPA Student
Harvard Kennedy School
Cambridge, USA