by Amartya Sen
Understanding Secularism
The long history of heterodoxy has a bearing not only on the development and survival of democracy in India, it has also richly contributed, I would argue, to the emergence of secularism in India, and even to the form that Indian secularism takes, which is not exactly the same as the way secularism is defined in parts of the West.23 The tolerance of religious diversity is implicitly reflected in India’s having served as a shared home – in the chronology of history – for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Parsees, Sikhs, Baha’is and others. The Vedas, which date back at least to the middle of the second millennium BCE, paved the way to what is now called Hinduism (that term was devised much later by Persians and Arabs, after the river Sindhu or Indus). Buddhism and Jainism had both emerged by the sixth century BCE. Buddhism, the practice of which is now rather sparse in India, was the dominant religion of the country for nearly a thousand years. Jainism, on the other hand, born at the same time as Buddhism, has survived as a powerful Indian religion over two and a half millennia.
Jews came to India, it appears, shortly after the fall of Jerusalem, though there are other theories as well (including the claim that members of the Bene Israeli community first arrived in the eighth century BCE, and, more plausibly, that they came in 175 BCE).24 Jewish arrivals continued in later waves, in the fifth and sixth centuries from southern Arabia and Persia until the last wave of Baghdadi Jews from Iraq and Syria, mostly to Bombay and Calcutta, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Christians, too, came very early, and by the fourth century there were large Christian communities in what is now Kerala.25 Parsees started arriving in the late seventh century, as soon as persecution of Zoroastrianism began in Persia. The Baha’is were among the last groups to seek refuge in India, in the last century. Over this long period there were other migrations, including the settlement of Muslim Arab traders, which began on India’s western coast in the eighth century, well before the invasions that came from other Muslim countries via the more warlike north-western routes. There were in addition many conversions, especially to Islam. Each religious community managed to retain its identity within India’s multi-religious spectrum.*
The toleration of diversity has also been explicitly defended by strong arguments in favour of the richness of variation, including fulsome praise of the need to interact with each other, in mutual respect, through dialogue. In the last section, I discussed the contributions made to public reasoning by two of the grandest of Indian emperors, Ashoka and Akbar. How relevant are their ideas and policies for the content and reach of Indian secularism?
Ashoka, as was mentioned earlier, wanted a general agreement on the need to conduct arguments with ‘restraint in regard to speech’: ‘a person must not do reverence to his own sect or disparage the beliefs of another without reason.’ He went on to argue: ‘Depreciation should be for specific reasons only, because the sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another.’ Ashoka supplemented this general moral and political principle by a dialectical argument based on enlightened self-interest: ‘For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own sect, in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest injury on his own sect.’26
Akbar not only made unequivocal pronouncements on the priority of tolerance, but also laid the formal foundations of a secular legal structure and of religious neutrality of the state, which included the duty to ensure that ‘no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.’27 Despite his deep interest in other religions and his brief attempt to launch a new religion, Din-ilahi (God’s religion), based on a combination of good points chosen from different faiths, Akbar did remain a good Muslim himself. Indeed, when Akbar died in 1605, the Islamic theologian Abdul Haq, who had been quite critical of Akbar’s lapses from orthodoxy, concluded with some satisfaction that, despite his ‘innovations’, Akbar had remained a proper Muslim.28
The meetings that Akbar arranged in the late sixteenth century for public dialogue (referred to in the last section) involved members of different religious faiths (including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsees, Jains, Jews and even atheists). While the historical background of Indian secularism can be traced to the trend of thinking that had begun to take root well before Akbar, the politics of secularism received a tremendous boost from Akbar’s championing of pluralist ideals, along with his insistence that the state should be completely impartial between different religions. Akbar’s own political decisions also reflected his pluralist commitments, well exemplified even by his insistence on filling his court with non-Muslim intellectuals and artists (including the great Hindu musician Tansen) in addition to Muslim ones, and, rather remarkably, by his trusting a Hindu former king (Raja Man Singh), who had been defeated earlier by Akbar, to serve as the general commander of his armed forces.29
The tolerance of variation in different walks of life has also had other – if less regal – support throughout Indian history, including in Sanskrit drama, with criticism and ridicule of narrow-minded persecution, for example in Śūdraka’s Mricchakaṭikam (The Little Clay Cart) and Mudrārākṣasam (The Signet of the Minister). It finds expression also in Sanskrit poetry, with celebration of diversity, perhaps most elegantly expressed in Kālidāsa’s Meghadūtam (The Cloud Messenger), which applauds the beauty of varieties of human customs and behaviour through the imagined eyes of a cloud that carries a message of longing from a banished husband to his beloved wife, as the cloud slowly journeys across fifth-century India. A similar commitment to accepting – and exalting – diversity can be seen in many other writings, from the prose and poetry of Amir Khusrau, a Muslim scholar and poet in the fourteenth century, to the rich culture of nonsectarian religious poetry which flourished from around that time, drawing on both Hindu (particularly Bhakti) and Muslim (particularly Sufi) traditions. Indeed, interreligious tolerance is a persistent theme in the poetry of Kabir, Dadu, Ravi-das, Sena and others, a circle which, as was discussed earlier, also included a number of distinguished women poets, such as the remarkable Mira Bai in the sixteenth century.30
Secularism in contemporary India, which received legislative formulation in the post-independence constitution of the Indian Republic, contains strong influences of Indian intellectual history, including the championing of intellectual pluralism. One reflection of this historical connection is that Indian secularism takes a somewhat different form and makes rather different demands from the more austere Western versions, such as the French interpretation of secularism which is supposed to prohibit even personal display of religious symbols or conventions in state institutions at work. Indeed, there are two principal approaches to secularism, focusing respectively on (1) neutrality between different religions, and (2) prohibition of religious associations in state activities. Indian secularism has tended to emphasize neutrality in particular, rather than prohibition in general.*
It is the ‘prohibitory’ aspect that has been the central issue in the recent French decision to ban the wearing of headscarves by Muslim women students, on the ground that it violates secularism. It can, however, be argued that such a prohibition could not be justified specifically on grounds of secularism, if we accept the ‘neutrality’ interpretation of secularism that has powerfully emerged in India. The secular demand that the state be ‘equidistant’ from different religions (including agnosticism and atheism) need not disallow any person individually – irrespective of his or her religion – from deciding what to wear, so long as members of different faiths are treated symmetrically.
The immediate issue here is not so much whether the French ban is the wrong policy. It could, quite possibly, be justified for some other reason (other than the alleged violation of secularism), for example on the grounds that the headscarves are symbols of gender inequality and can be seen as demeaning to women, or that women (especially young girls) do not really hav
e the freedom to decide what to wear, and that dress decisions are imposed on them by more powerful members of families (with male dominance).† Those can be important concerns (I shall not undertake here a critical scrutiny of their comparative relevance and force), but they are distinct from the demands of secularism itself.
The point is that the banning of an individual’s freedom to choose what to wear could not be justified on the ground of secularism as such when that principle is interpreted in terms of the need for the state to be neutral between the different faiths. Being equidistant between different religions does involve a rejection of favouring one religion over another, and this could be taken to imply that state schools should not follow an asymmetrical policy of brandishing symbols from one religion, while excluding others, in the school’s own display.* But it need not rule against the freedom of each person individually to make his or her own decisions on what to wear – decisions that others should be willing to respect.
As Ashoka put it in the third century BCE: ‘concord, therefore, is meritorious, to wit, hearkening and hearkening willingly to the Law of Piety as accepted by other people.’31 The form as well as the interpretation and understanding of secularism in India can be linked to the history of the acceptance of heterodoxy.
Sceptics, Agnostics and Atheists
The long tradition of arguing also has considerable bearing on the reading of India’s past, along with the understanding of contemporary India. Recognizing the history of heterodoxy in India is critically important for coming to grips with the cross-current of ideas, including intellectual processes and scrutinized convictions, that have survived through the turbulence and turmoil of Indian history. Underestimation of that heterodoxy, which alas is far too common, can prevent an adequate understanding of Indian traditions. Let me illustrate this with the status and relevance of religion in India, in particular the need to understand the long heritage of religious scepticism in India.
The powerful presence of religious scepticism in India goes – or at least may appear to go – against a standard characterization of Indian culture, which is exceedingly common, that takes the form of focusing particularly on religion in interpreting Indian traditions. The religious connection is certainly there. For example, it is indeed the case that India has a massive religious literature – perhaps more voluminous than any other country. This is among the reasons for associating the understanding of Indian civilization with religiosity – not merely at the level of popular practice but also that of intellectual engagement. As the Reverend A. C. Bouquet, an accomplished expert on comparative religion, has pointed out: ‘India in particular furnishes within its limits examples of every conceivable type of attempt at the solution of the religious problem.’32
And so it does. However, these grand explorations of every possible religious belief coexist with deeply sceptical arguments that are also elaborately explored (sometimes within the religious texts themselves), going back all the way to the middle of the second millennium BCE. The so-called ‘song of creation’ (or the ‘creation hymn’, as it is sometimes called) in the authoritative Vedas ends with the following radical doubts:
Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?
Whence this creation has arisen – perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know.*
These 3,500-year-old doubts would recur in Indian critical debates again and again. Indeed, Sanskrit not only has a bigger body of religious literature than exists in any other classical language, it also has a larger volume of agnostic or atheistic writings than in any other classical language. There are a great many discussions and compositions of different kinds, conforming to the loquaciousness of the argumentative tradition.
Indian texts include elaborate religious expositions and protracted defence. They also contain lengthy and sustained debates among different religious schools. But there are, in addition, a great many controversies between defenders of religiosity on one side, and advocates of general scepticism on the other. The doubts sometimes take the form of agnosticism, sometimes that of atheism, but there is also Gautama Buddha’s special strategy of combining his theoretical scepticism about God with a practical subversion of the significance of the question by making the choice of good behaviour completely independent of any God – real or imagined.* Indeed, different forms of godlessness have had a strong following throughout Indian history, as they do today.
The ‘Lokāyata’ philosophy of scepticism and materialism flourished from the first millennium BCE, possibly even in Buddha’s own time (judging from some references in the early Buddhist literature), some two and a half millennia ago.33 There is even some evidence of the influence of that line of thinking in the Upaniṣads.34 Atheism and materialism continued to attract adherents and advocates over many centuries, and were increasingly associated with the exposition of the intellectually combative Cārvāka.* That ‘undercurrent of Indian thought’, as D. N. Jha has described it, finds later expression in other texts, for example in the ‘materialist philosophical text … Tattopalavasimha written by a certain Jayarishi in the eighth century’.35 In the fourteenth century when Mādhava Ācārya (himself a Vedantist Hindu) wrote his authoritative ‘Collection of All Philosophies’ (Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha), the ‘Cārvāka system’ had the distinction of receiving an elaborately sympathetic defence in the first chapter of the compilation, consisting of a reasoned defence of atheism and materialism.36 After being expounded and defended in the first chapter, the atheistic claims are subjected to counterarguments in the following chapter, in line with the dialectical strategy of the book, in which each chapter defends a particular school of thought, followed by counterarguments in later chapters.
The exposition of the Cārvāka system begins with a strong assertion: ‘how can we attribute to the Divine Being the giving of supreme facility, when such a notion has been utterly abolished by Cārvāka, the crest-gem of the atheistic school?’37 In addition to the denial of God, there is also a rejection of the soul, and an assertion of the material basis of the mind: ‘[from these material elements] alone, when transformed into the body, intelligence is produced, just as the inebriating power is developed from the mixing of certain ingredients; and when these are destroyed, intelligence at once perishes also.’38 Along with these radical beliefs about the nature of life and mind, there is also a philosophy of value, which concentrates on identifiable pleasure, not any ‘happiness in a future world’. There is recurrent advice on how to live: ‘While life is yours, live joyously!’ There is also an acrid and cynical explanation of the cultivated survival of religious illusions among people: ‘There is no heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world … it is only as a means of livelihood that Brahmins have established here all the ceremonies for the dead – there is no other fruit anywhere.’39
The active presence of atheism and materialism continued through the regimes of Muslim kings. Indeed, even in the late sixteenth century, when the Moghal emperor Akbar held his multi-religious dialogic encounters in Agra, the Cārvāka school of atheism was well represented among the alternative positions that were selected for presentation (as Akbar’s adviser and chronicler Abul Fazl noted). In philosophical discourses throughout Indian history, atheists and sceptics make frequent appearances, and even though, in many cases, their points of view are ultimately rejected, they do get their say.
An adequately inclusive understanding of Indian heterodoxy is particularly important for appreciating the reach and range of heterodoxy in the country’s intellectual background and diverse history. This is especially critical because of the relative neglect of the rationalist parts of the Indian heritage in the contemporary accounts of India’s past, in favour of concentrating on India’s impressive religiosity. That selective inattention h
as, in fact, produced a substantial bias in the interpretation of Indian thought, and through that in the understanding of the intellectual heritage of contemporary India.*
The exaggerated focus on religiosity has also contributed to an underestimation of the reach of public reasoning in India and the diversity of its coverage. For example, Kauṭilya’s classic treatise on political economy and governance, Arthaśāstra (translatable as ‘Economics’), initially composed in the fourth century BCE, is basically a secular treatise, despite the respectful gestures it makes to religious and social customs.40
The neglect has also led to the long tradition of rational assessment, central for Indian science and mathematics, being underestimated.† That particular connection is worth discussing, and I turn to that in the next section.
Science, Epistemology and Heterodoxy
It is not hard to see that the possibility of scientific advance is closely connected with the role of heterodoxy, since new ideas and discoveries have to emerge initially as heterodox views, which differ from, and may be in conflict with, established understanding. The history of scientific contributions across the world – the experiences of Copernicus, or Galileo, or Newton, or Darwin – shows many examples of the part that resolute heterodoxy has to play, in scrutinizing, and when necessary rejecting, the views that are standardly accepted. We can argue that the flowering of Indian science and mathematics that began in the Gupta period (led particularly by Āryabhaṭa in the fifth century CE, Varāhamihira in the sixth, and Brahmagupta in the seventh) benefited from the tradition of scepticism and questioning which had been flourishing in India at that time.41 There are also methodological departures in this period in epistemology and in investigating the ways and means of advancing the knowledge of the phenomenal world.42
