Is India a secular state? Did it become secular only after the 42nd constitutional amendment when the word was included in the preamble? Is the interference of the Indian state in temple management antithetical to secularism? There are a series of false notions about secularism in India that have come to penetrate our consciousness so deeply that slaying them becomes significant, especially in these times. To do so, though, it’s important to marshal our facts carefully. To that end, Abhinav Chandrachud’s fine new book, Republic of Religion: The Rise and Fall of Colonial Secularism in India offers an excellent resource.
Three assertions
Republic of Religion makes three core assertions: one, that the British colonial government introduced a version of secularism that was quite distinct from what the government practised in its own homeland; two, that this colonial secularism was softened after India became independent; and three, that the destruction of colonial secularism pre-dated the rise of India’s Hindu right.
He makes these claims not through linear argumentation, but through a telling of the interplay between state and religion on six different subjects: cow slaughter, conversions by Christian missionaries, separation of electorates and reservation for Muslims, administration of Hindu temples, personal laws and the creation of a uniform civil code, and the taking of oath by public officials.
The journey
The book by itself doesn’t aim to dispel any existing shibboleths on Indian secularism. Instead, it is an effort at giving us the facts to help make our own minds up about how we might want to regard the relationship between state and religion in India, how we went from colonial secularism to soft-colonial secularism to our present-day constitutional model.
What Chandrachud means by colonial secularism comes through best in his chapter on the temple and the State.
He shows us how when the East India Company began to capture control over territories in the subcontinent, England was not a secular nation. There was at the time no strict wall of separation between church and the state. Indeed, it could be said that there was really no wall at all, exemplified best perhaps by the Act of Supremacy enacted in 1534 that declared that the British monarch would be the “Supreme Head of the Church of England.” This arrangement, as he argues, wasn’t altogether dissimilar from how pre-colonial rulers acted in India, where kings through their local bodies managed and controlled temples and mosques.
When the East India Company first began to wrest control, it followed this norm.
As Chandrachud points out, much like the monarch appointed the Archbishop of Canterbury the colonial government now appointed senior priests at the Jagannath Temple. But this mingling of state and temples came to pique the Christian missionaries, who then put pressure through the clergy to bring these practices to an end.
The consequences, the book shows, were felt in a letter of instructions issued by the “Court of Directors” of the East India Company to the government in India. “All religious rites and offices,” the letter observed, that were “harmless” in that they were not “flagrantly opposed to rules of common humanity or decency... ought to be tolerated, howsoever false the creed by which they are sanctioned.”
But the letter cautioned the government against taking part in the “celebration of idolatrous ceremony,” and in the provision of assistance and “systematic support” to such practices.
Knotty issue
Slowly, the colonial government ceded control over temples. But when it began to constitutionalise its power, through the creation of local governments in the provinces, those legislatures found this colonial version of secularism knotty. They found that in relinquishing control the colonial authority had created different kinds of power structures, where dominant communities within the Hindu fold virtually appropriated religious foundations and trusts. The Madras Legislature, therefore, in 1926 enacted a Hindu Religious Endowments Act that sought to re-introduce state control over temples.
Amid a movement
When the Constituent Assembly deliberated over what kind of secular state India would be, and on what limitations ought to be placed on the right to freedom of religion, it was this history of colonial secularism and the history of the prejudices wrought by practices such as untouchability that they had before them.
All of this is important because today we find ourselves once again in the midst of a movement that seeks to delink the state and the temples. When we read Chandrachud’s book, and as we try to understand Indian secularism, we might want to ponder over this question: when people campaign for a renunciation of state interference in temples who exactly do they regard as the state’s successor?
Republic of Religion: The Rise and Fall of Colonial Secularism in India ; Abhinav Chandrachud, Penguin Random House India, ₹599.
The reviewer is an advocate practising at the Madras High Court.
