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A pre-history of Indian secularism: Categories of nationalism and communalism in emerging definitions of India, Bombay presidency c. 1893--1932

Posted on:2003-03-20Degree:Ph.DType:Thesis
University:Columbia UniversityCandidate:Tejani, Shabnum ShaukataliFull Text:PDF
GTID:2466390011981547Subject:History
Abstract/Summary:
Since Independence, secularism has been central to the ideology of the Indian nation-state. An inextricable part of 'mature' nationalism, secularism signified all that was progressive about a modern society. The public identification of religion--- 'communalism'---would result in the miring of India in the pre-modern identities that had resulted in the horrors of Partition. The debates on the place of the religious community in Indian society have turned on the oppositions of 'secularism and communalism'. However, these categories have become locked into a binary relationship which is unhelpful in understanding conflict between Hindu and Muslim communities or its historical relationship to the construction of Indian nationalism.;This thesis historicizes the meanings of secular nationalism and communalism in India. It shows that these categories are not transhistorical, but were defined together. Indian secularism was not about creating a tolerant society where all religions were equally true. It was about the democratic project that a newly-independent national state had embarked upon, and the ways in which this state sought to resolve the place that minorities, specifically Muslims and backward castes, would have within it. I argue that broad-based notions of Hindu community, and categories of nationalism and communalism, majority and minority, emerged over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These categories provided the conceptual preconditions for the meaning of Indian secularism as it existed by 1950.;The dissertation has charted the emergence of these categories. I look at the cow protection riots and Ganpati festivals in Maharashtra 1893 for the emergence of the category of a (high caste) Hindu community; the swadeshi movement and the reworking of Maratha history for the idea of the Indian patriot as essentially Hindu; the 1909 constitutional debates for the emergence of the category 'communal', and its association with the Muslim community; the Khilafat movement in Sind as marking the possibility of defining Indian nationalism outside of majoritarian terms; the post-Khilafat period for the crystallizing of definitions of 'nationalism' and 'communalism'; and the conflict between Gandhi and Ambedkar which determined that Untouchables would be considered part of a Hindu majority and not a minority in their own right.
Keywords/Search Tags:Indian, Nationalism, Secularism, Categories, Hindu
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