In the early 1960s, Donald Smith's India as a Secular State questioned the credentials of the Indian state's secularism. Since then the issue of what constitutes secularism in India has loomed large in Indian political thought. Like a number of other key categories in political history, such as nationalism, the debate has centred on the question whether the Indian state's version of secularism is viable in its own right or not, and if it is viable, whether it extends the concept of secularism in new and innovative directions. The other possibility is to see this secularism as a “derivative discourse” (to adopt a phrase from Partha Chatterjee), confusedly echoing Western notions of secularism, with the caste and communal complexities of Indian society and the structuring role of religion in everyday life at odds with any coherent or recognisable notion of secularism.

Donald Smith defined secularism in terms of the strict separation between church and state. For a state to be described as secular it had to play no role in religious affairs or organizations.Footnote ¹ Charles Taylor has argued that the concept of a secular state developed in two directions in Europe and North America. The first is of a state which is equidistant from and even-handed between religious communities in public life, and the second is of the extrusion of religion from the public domain altogether. Both are built on the requirement of a distance between the church and the state.Footnote ² What makes the Indian state's secularism complex in relation to this definition is that since independence it has played a key role in shaping religion through legislation. One major instance of this is the enactment of the Hindu Code Bill in 1955 which laid down a code of personal law for all Hindu citizens. As Partha Chatterjee has pointed out, by departing from traditional Brahmanical practices in the enactment of the provisions of this code, the state was making decisions as to what constitutes Hinduism.Footnote ³ Moreover, Hindu personal law is one of a set of personal laws, inherited from colonial India, belonging to each of the major religions in India. These personal laws coexist with Article 44 of the Indian Constitution which declares, “The State shall endeavour to secure for citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” To many observers, there appears to be a conflict between personal laws rooted in religion and the state's commitment to the project (or what the Constitution calls a “directive principle”Footnote ⁴) of a secular and uniform civil code, applicable to all citizens (generally referred to as the Uniform Civil Code).Footnote ⁵ These defining issues in Indian secularism are explored in the two books reviewed here, the collection of essays edited by Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan titled The Crisis of Secularism in India and Neelam Srivastava's Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English. For both books, the question of what constitutes secularism in India has been given a new urgency by the rise of the militant Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since the early 1990s. Both take an interdisciplinary approach, responding to the need to explore the multiple dimensions of Indian secularism as a political concept underpinning the Indian Constitution and a range of governmental and juridical interventions in civil society. The division of Rajan and Needham's collection into different sections on secularism's historical background, secularism and democracy, sites of secularism (this covers education, media and cinema), secularism and personal law, and secularism and conversion, usefully categorizes these dimensions and lays out the breadth of the issues at stake in any discussion of Indian secularism. In her original and thoughtful book, Srivastava opens up another dimension in these discussions by considering the role of the Indian novel in English, now an established part of the canon of world literature, in expressing and defining notions of secularism in India. She argues that key Indian novels published in the 1980s and 1990s defend secularism against its erosion in the public sphere through their allegorical representations of national history, their style of narration, and the personas of their narrators.Footnote ⁶ At the same time, she shows how these novels are committed to different kinds of secularism, and how their commitments are expressed through the varied stylistic and aesthetic strategies that characterize them. For her, then, Indian secularism also needs to be explored as an aesthetic and literary project, and not a political one alone. In making her case, she produces elegant and insightful readings of individual texts, woven together with historicist and political analyses, which makes her work an interesting illustration of an interdisciplinary approach to the question of secularism in India.

Commentators have had good reason to see a possible conflict between the Indian state's secularism and the existence of multiple personal laws rooted in religion. In addition, older systems of the patronage of religious institutions by the colonial state or princely states have continued in independent India. As Needham and Rajan observe, the state's involvement in running temples and religious endowments raises serious questions about the nature of its secularism. Some states, such as Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, have sizeable bureaucracies for temple administration and the management of religious endowments (39–40, endnote 35). The question whether the Indian Constitution is secular or not is also dealt with in Upendra Baxi's exploratory essay in Needham and Rajan's work. He summarizes the liberal theory of secularism, and usefully lists some of the disputations that the Supreme Court of India has had to deal with in trying to put the ideal of secularism to work (267–8, and endnote 1). He asks five key questions that emerge from the state's interaction with faith communities which, although they are outside the scope of his essay, help to map out future discussions about the relationship between secularism and civil society. In addition, by identifying and exploring six key terms of Article 44, he lays out the complicated background behind this article of the Indian Constitution, which is crucial in understanding the complex nature of its secularism.Footnote ⁷

What makes the title of Rajan and Needham's book particularly apt is the rise of the militant BJP since the early 1990s. Two events in particular have come to define their electoral success, the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, and the state-sponsored violence in Gujarat in 2002, described by Rajan and Needham as the “most recent and most serious crisis of secularism” (31). Gyan Pandey points out in his essay that the carnage in Gujarat, and earlier events such as the anti-Sikh violence in Delhi in 1984 and the violence in Bombay in 1992–3, represent a shift in the nature of communal violence for which the term “riot” is no longer accurate. These events were instead “organized political massacres” and “progroms organized by the government of the day” (172–3).Footnote ⁸ Partha Chatterjee argues that the scale of organized violence against Muslims in Gujarat reached such a level as to put the very idea of a constitutional state guaranteeing the physical safety of all its citizens under threat (142). For Neelam Srivastava and the contributors to Rajan and Needham's The Crisis of Secularism in India, then, the rise of Hindutva politics in general, and the 2002 violence in Gujarat in particular, are defining events in the crisis of secularism. This crisis is incisively adumbrated in Flavia Agnes's essay in Rajan and Needham.Footnote ⁹ She shows how the Uniform Civil Code has itself become communalized, and how the decisions of the Supreme Court have boosted the Hindutva position. Agnes also provides evidence of the bias of the apex court towards Hindu personal law, and outlines the parallels between some of its judgments and Hindu right-wing rhetoric. Her convincing analysis of how the state and its juridical apparatus have been severely compromised clearly brings home the crisis of secularism in India. Equally important here is her analysis of the role of the media in presenting judgments in cases which are not in fact relevant to Muslims as having something to do with their supposed “backwardness” and “bigotry”. In keeping with Needham and Rajan's aim to consider the various sites of secularism in India, two other essays in their volume also deal with the role of the media (in this case film). Shyam Benegal offers a useful and clear account of the representation of secularism and nationalism in Indian cinema,Footnote ¹⁰ while in his insightful essay Ravi Vasudevan shows how the state is marginalized in popular narratives about the relationships between and within communities, and the social realm is assigned a significant autonomy and authority of its own.Footnote ¹¹ This seems to suggest that in the popular imagination as rendered by cinema, state-led secularism is not a significant framework for the day-to-day practicalities of the interaction between different religious and/or caste communities.

In rising to the challenge of this crisis of secularism, Needham and Rajan's work opens up new and innovative ways of exploring the different aspects of Indian secularism. By pointing to how the BJP and its affiliated organizations pose a grave threat to the fabric of secularism in India, their book is a corrective to deeply rooted views of secularism in the West, in which it is generally assumed, as they stress, that Islam is secularism's “Other” (3).Footnote ¹² This alone opens up a different angle from which to view the travails of secularism in the contemporary world. However, their edited collection and Srivastava's book are not just written by authors who have been taken by surprise by the crisis of secularism in India. They develop perspectives on how the idea of secularism might be rethought on the basis of the history of secularism in postcolonial India, and in Srivastava's case, how it might be strengthened by drawing on aesthetic modes of thinking and novelistic conventions of writing. In doing so, they expand secularism's reach as a concept and its scope as a project. Moreover, Srivastava's insightful book is concerned to analyse both the historical context of the Indian English novels she interprets, and those novels’ own representations of the historical contexts that were crucial to the formation of the state as “secular”. For example, she focuses on the different historical settings chosen by Rohinton Mistry in A Fine Balance and Rushdie in Midnight's Children, showing how these underpin their contrasting dramatizations of different notions of secularism, with Seth writing in a realist mode to critique the 1975 Emergency, and Rushdie's “structural digressions and linguistic excess . . . a metaphor of the democratic forces rising up against the authoritarianism of the Emergency” (9).

Rajan and Needham also stress that secularism should not be thought of as simply religion's opposite. The peaceful existence of different peoples, the problem of “national unity”, the nature of democracy and the rights of minorities are important issues for the nature of secularism (3). This expansive view of secularism is reinforced by some of the contributors to their book. In outlining the historical background to the question of communal representation, Shabnam Tejani argues that secularism in India is less about religion as such, and more about the dilemmas of democracy. Rather than being distinct from the categories of community and caste, nationalism and communalism, liberalism and democracy, Indian secularism emerged at the nexus of all of these. In her words, it “was a relational category arising out of a series of specific historical negotiations” (47).Footnote ¹³ Sunil Khilnani points out that if secularism has multiple meanings, then so too has faith. For him this includes Nehru's faith in “reason”.Footnote ¹⁴ In drawing attention to the fictional and aesthetic representations of secularism in the Indian novel in English, Neelam Srivastava also works with a blurred distinction between secularism and religion. Drawing on the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogism in the novel, she argues that the novel is uniquely suited to dramatizing and representing different kinds of secularism in relation to a variety of religious world views. For Bakhtin the dialogic nature of the novel form refers to the staging of different world views in the text through the voices of different characters. The interaction between these world views is seen in terms of unresolved and irresolvable dialogue. Rather than a dominating authorial position, the differences between characters compete without ever being concluded or resolved.Footnote ¹⁵ On this basis, Srivastava argues for a radical secularism (which she finds dramatized in the complex forms of Rushdie's fiction), that engages with, and takes into account, religious and mythological world views. This secularism would be self-relativizing; that is, it would “localize” its universalizing and transcendent tendencies in relation to other world views. Rather than being the expression of a universal reason, it would work with notions like translation and dialogism to move between different worlds. As an anti-totalizing activity, mediating between secular and religious identity, dialogue with religion and the spiritual is not closed off, but opened up, calling upon the resources of literary and aesthetic modes of thinking (24–5, 36–7). By engaging with the aesthetics of secularism in the Indian English novel, Srivastava opens up a crucial dimension in its scope as a concept, one which has not been adequately explored before. She makes a strong and persuasive case for the refurbishment of secularism as a mode of thinking that calls upon the resources of literary texts and aesthetics, rather than seeing it as a political philosophy alone.

Alongside this questioning of an opposition between secularism and religion, a number of contributors to Needham and Rajan's work dismantle secularism as a monolithic concept by showing how it is viewed and appropriated differently in the diverse regions of India. In “A View from the South”, Paula Richman and V. Geetha outline the brand of secularism defined in Madras by E. V. Ramasami in his Self-Respect movement and later by the Dravidar Kazhagam, which focused on a critique of caste and Brahmanical Hinduism. Ramasami's secularism was eclectic, drawing on the diverse strands of anticlericalism associated with the European Enlightenment, the beliefs of freethinkers like Shaw and Bradlaugh, and recent reinterpretations of Buddhism (69). They also stress his disquiet at some of the ambiguities (he would say evasions) regarding secularism in the Indian Constitution (77), and rightly comment that his criticisms of the dangers of Hindu nationalism seem notably prescient (85).Footnote ¹⁶ Partha Chatterjee also considers how the tensions of Indian secularism acquire a distinctive form in West Bengal, but here he shows how the local situation in this state cannot be separated from the global context of the US “war on terror”. As he puts it, attention has to be paid to “the limit set by the parameters of global politics on political possibilities inherent in the local situation” (155). He also calls attention to “a zone of paralegal practices, opposed to the civic norms of proper citizenship,”Footnote ¹⁷ in which negotiations between community-based organizations in “illegal” settlements of the kind which might be described as “shanty towns” can give sections of the poor and underprivileged some access, however restricted, to the welfare and developmental opportunities provided by the state. Similarly, privately funded madrassahs in Bengal might be seen in terms of a “different modality” of secular politics, one which straddles both government and community (154–5).Footnote ¹⁸

The blurring of local Indian with global contexts is alluded to in Rajan and Needham's introduction. They argue that if there is a crisis of secularism in India, so too might there be one in the United States, where the resurgence of the Christian right and the religious idiom in which the supposed clash of civilizations is being played out suggest that the US is in some respects an actively religious player, rather than a secular victim of “the Other's religious fundamentalism” alone (4–5). Furthermore, as they rightly point out, since the BJP and the Hindu right receive considerable support from the Indian diaspora, there is a global dimension to the crisis of secularism in India as well. Different meanings for religious identitarian politics are produced by Hindu minorities in the diaspora and by those in India, but these politics do merge and reinforce each other. Hindu cultural organisations might be part of the fabric of liberal multiculturalism in European and American universities, but this has disturbing implications for Hindutva politics in India itself (9, endnote 19). Given the support that the BJP and the Hindu right garners from the Indian diaspora, its cultural isolationist view of India (what Amartya Sen called its “miniaturization of India”)Footnote ¹⁹ is ironically at odds with its own global connections.

Nivedita Menon also argues for a transnational perspective on the crisis of secularism in India. Liberal secularists need to force open the political agenda of the Hindu right and expose what, in an apposite phrase, she calls “the long-distance nationalism of its diasporic supporters” (130). She points out that most democratic and secular arguments contesting the Hindu right's picture of the growing Muslim and Christian population, rather than confronting this fear of a minority status, tend to deflect it by factual corrections and reinterpretation of data. These arguments offer reassurances that there is no way Muslims and Christians will outnumber Hindus. She argues instead that the key issue here is to ensure that the size of the community of one's birth will make no difference to one's status as a citizen in a democratic polity, so that the question of Hindus being in a minority or a majority ought to be immaterial (128–9). For her a secular position should also interrogate the fixity of borders in order “to recall the past and present implications of what is today called India with other parts of Asia”. She suggests that teaching and learning the history of South Asia rather than of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh would have important implications for secularism (139). Srivastava's line of thinking is in agreement with this. One aim of secular criticism, she suggests, is to challenge terms like Indian and Pakistani. She interprets Midnight's Children as addressing this imperative by articulating a version of India which is both India and Pakistan, and by deploying a narrator who is both Indian and Pakistani at different points in the narrative (65). She also reads Midnight's Children and Amitav Ghosh's Shadow Lines as questioning the naturalized status of Indian and Pakistani citizenship (chapter 3). To teach a history of South Asia, rather than of its separate nation states, is an excellent idea and one with which this reviewer sympathizes. But it is unlikely to be successfully implemented, not just in South Asia, but also in European and North American universities, because of resistance from academics themselves who belong to the Indian diaspora as well as from non-South Asian academics who work on the region. In this reviewer's experience, the ranks of both include some who like to think of themselves as secular yet hold on firmly to the fixity of these borders as well as to communal and caste categories.

Srivastava and many of the contributors to Needham and Rajan's book, then, question a binary opposition between secularism and religion. A number of them also problematize the terms “majority” and “minority”. In her book, Srivastava argues that a radical secularism should shape a conceptual framework for the rethinking of India in which “Muslim” does not function as a minority. Following Aamar Mufti,Footnote ²⁰ she avers that the obverse of this is that Pakistan should be recognized as an Indian, and not merely a South Asian, polity (40, 65). She also draws on Edward Said's notion of secular criticism as (in his words) always situated, sceptical, “reflectively open to its failings”, and “oppositional”. For Said, secular criticism is not reducible to a doctrine or to a political position on a particular question. Instead it is suspicious of totalizing concepts, discontented with “reified objects”, and impatient with “guilds, special interests, imperialized fiefdoms, and orthodox habits of mind”. Its “social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom”. Criticism ceases to be criticism once it “starts turning into organized dogma”.Footnote ²¹ Srivastava combines Mufti's argument with this idea of secular criticism to suggest that radical secularism or a “minoritarian critical stance” can critique rationalist and majoritarian forms of secularism from a minority position (41). She situates the possibilities of this minoritarian position in a global perspective in her reading of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988). Arguing that this text dramatizes an idea of “postcolonial citizenship”, she shows how this involves negotiating layered identities of gender, caste, social class and language in relation to a modernizing concept of citizenship both in Britain and in India. Postcolonial citizenship is a secular enterprise that scrutinizes enduring mythologies and cultural assumptions of the indigenous British and the non-white migrant alike (chapter 3).

Gyan Prakash outlines a similar perspective on the category of “minority”. He argues for a form of strategic politics that questions the structures of identity and authority that organize the nation and its “others” along majority–minority lines. He traces the origin of this structure in the history of Indian nationalism, in terms of Muslims as a sign around which the nation was imagined as uniform and united. In confronting the Hindu right, secularism cannot simply preach tolerance, for this “merely reaffirms the minoritization of Muslims.” Instead, it is important to re-examine secularism from the position of the minority, questioning the nation as an organic, majoritarian space and envisioning it instead as an open, plural space of contingency and contention from the vantage point of those defined as minorities (187–88).Footnote ²² In a different inflection of this position, Gyan Pandey argues for the “unyoking” of the state from the nation, so that no one “majority” community alone can be closely identified with the state. There should be no place for an unquestioned and permanent majority; instead we should aim for a new society of “multiple minorities” (176). In outlining this position, Pandey shows how the renewed debate on secularism has revolved around the necessity of dialogue between diverse communities in a liberal, democratic regime. The stress on dialogue between clearly defined communities of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and others is a persistent feature of Indian political discourse. Pandey unpicks the assumptions behind this notion of dialogue, paying attention to who establishes the boundaries between these communities, who nominates the language of negotiation, and who decides when this language breaks down and violence takes over (160). Significantly modifying a Gandhian notion of conversation between groups (an unfortunate aspect of which is the assignment of people to a place in an unambiguous hierarchy), he argues for a language of communication between different kinds of beliefs and values, with state and legal–constitutional arrangements safeguarding this language (164–5).Footnote ²³ Here again Srivastava's work on the aesthetics of radical secularism is pertinent, since it suggests how the strategies of dialogism (as exemplified in the novels of Salman Rushdie) and processes of translation might provide a model for such a language of communication, by staging secular and religious perspectives without a final, totalizing resolution.

In Rajan and Needham's volume, there are also keen analyses of the defining contradictions and constitutive blind spots of Hindutva ideology. Romila Thapar is particularly good on this, showing how Hindutva borrows from Islam and Christianity even while differentiating itself from them. In parallel to this, she also shows how Hindutva's historical narratives are largely revivals of nineteenth-century British colonial history.Footnote ²⁴ Arvind Rajgopal explores how “Hindu national realism” operates, delineating its modes of perception and terms of understanding in a self-confirming universe, in which violence by Hindus does not even register as violence. His essay calls attention to the importance of the mass media in enacting an epistemological break in Indian secularism.Footnote ²⁵ In her perceptive piece, Gauri Vishwanathan explores Hindutva's hostility to conversions, and how it keeps the two issues of conversion and welfare economics in the same frame of reference. She notes the tension within a religious ideology which in fighting against the right to propagate religion ensures that religion is isolated and made inactive. For the BJP, culture becomes a surrogate theme for economic and development issues, displacing the failure of its economic policies onto another plane.Footnote ²⁶ On the same issue of conversions, Sumit Sarkar makes the point that doubts and concerns about conversions from Hinduism extend beyond Hindutva adherents. He identifies and explores three assumptions behind these concerns, and with characteristic verve shows how these assumptions cannot be substantiated.Footnote ²⁷

The books reviewed here, then, open up possibilities for exploring the multiple dimensions of Indian secularism as a political concept underpinning the Indian Constitution, as a range of governmental and juridical interventions in civil society, and, in Srivastava's case, as a spectrum of aesthetic and literary strategies. Both books embrace an interdisciplinary approach, cutting across political philosophy, historiography and cultural criticism, in order to grapple effectively with the multifaceted complexity of Indian secularism and the need to strengthen its intellectual foundations. Though the works reviewed here are rich and interesting, five general reservations would seem relevant.

The dismantling of any clear-cut opposition between the secular and the religious, while in some ways enabling, needs to be more rigorously and explicitly differentiated from the BJP's own blurring between the two in its commitment to the Uniform Civil Code (noted and commented upon by Ashis Nandy in Rajan and Needham, 109–10). It also needs to be differentiated from a secularism that might be the articulation of an upper-caste Hindu majoritarian position, in which the boundaries between the secular and the religious are again blurred. Here secularism, as Aravamudan has reminded us, can contain vestiges of anterior majoritarian religion which are naturalized so as to be invisible.Footnote ²⁸ This possibility was also noted by Eugene Smith, when he discussed whether a secular state means a state which aids all religions impartially, or a state which is separate from religion. He suggested that in India a no-preference doctrine can be used to promote syncretistic religion based on Hindu assumptions. He also saw this tendency revealed in the 1949 Radhakrishnan report on university education.Footnote ²⁹ The porous boundaries between religion as a whole and Indian secularism are also evident in Durga Das Basu's Introduction to the Constitution of India (first edition 1960). This concise and rigorous study of the Indian Constitution is prefaced with a citation from the Amritabindu Upanishad, beginning with “One Universal Soul / Dwells in every being.”Footnote ³⁰ In Needham and Rajan's book, Ravi Vasudevan is insightful on how the “secularist transcendence” of the divisions within Indian society might be read as “an opening out of the Hindu high-caste self and a bid to reacquire power over the subordinated Other” (245; see also his perceptive interpretation of the film Ghulam-e Mustafa, 261–3). Srivastava also touches on this, when she considers the narrative voice of national secularism in A Suitable Boy in terms of its concealed, Hindu upper-caste/upper-class component (65–69), and she is particularly good in analysing the differences between this kind of Nehruvian secularism and the secularism of Rushdie's novels. For Midnight's Children in particular, syncretism and eclecticism are irreducible components of Indian identity, while for Vikram Seth and his enabling figure Nehru, these are to be transcended and sublated into a modern, rationalist secularism (56–7). Srivastava also argues that Midnight's Children can be interpreted as parodying Nehruvian metaphors of the Indian State (111, 123–9). But however complex the boundaries are between religion and secularism in India, there needs to be a more rigorous distinction between appropriations of secularism by right-wing religious nationalisms and a non-transcendent, self-relativising secularism that is in dialogue with and open to religious world views. At times the two can look perilously close to each other. What is required is a firewall of concepts and arguments to separate the hijacking of secularism by the BJP from the reworking of secularism to accommodate religion by secular liberals.

The point that secular criticism ought to adopt a minoritarian position, that there should be no permanent place for a majority and that we should aim for a society of multiple minorities can fetishize the status of being a minority. This position can also play into the hands of ideologues of Hindutva, who have been skilful in making their adherents feel as though they are minorities discriminated against in “their own” country (this fantasy of being a minority in one's own country is also a key component in the rhetoric of the British National Party and the English Defence League in the UK, although it is unlikely that either of these parties will form a national government). From this fantasy is generated, at least in part, much of the rage and violence against Hindutva's others. The espousal of a minoritarian position again needs to be carefully distinguished from the appropriation and mimicking of a minority position by the BJP and its affiliated bodies. Without due care, the two can slide into each other. What guarantees are there that this minoritarian position will not be the powerful fantasy of a culturally and politically dominant majority, working with blurred distinctions between majority and minority?

The stress on secular criticism questioning the fixity of national borders and nationalities in South Asia, and the rejoining of Pakistan with India in studies of post-partition South Asia, is valuable and important. For this reason, what is missing in Rajan and Needham's volume is an essay which performs that task. The crisis of secularism in India needs to be framed in South Asian terms, one which includes the Pakistani state and the variegated phenomenon of Islamism in Pakistan. A sustained consideration of the simultaneous collusion and enmity between Hindu nationalists and Islamists, complicated by the recent casting of Jinnah as secular by ideologues and ex-ideologues of the BJP who now seem to be trying to hold Nehru responsible for partition,Footnote ³¹ would have broadened even further the canvas of Indian secularism.

As far as the aesthetics and literary narratives of secularism go, the picture of the novel as intrinsically secular needs to be qualified. Srivastava does not consider the influential role that Protestant Puritanism played in the rise of the English novel.Footnote ³² What Valentine Cunningham called the “Nonconformist novel” was an important subgenre of the nineteenth-century novel in Britain, as was the social Christian novel in late nineteenth-century American literature.Footnote ³³ Furthermore, it would be difficult to describe all of the novels written in Indian languages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as secular. This term would not be apt for Bankimcandra's Bengali novels, for example. Some engagement with the history of the rise of the novel, both in Britain and North America, and in India in English and Indian languages, would have helped to complicate this picture of the novel as necessarily secular in its very form.

Finally, what is missing in the works reviewed here is a sustained examination of the crisis of secularism in India in relation to the changing place of India in the world economy. Neither work adequately tackles the question of the economic context to this recent crisis. Is it a mere coincidence that this crisis occurred during the heyday of the liberalization of the Indian economy and its growing role in the world economy? The possible connections between the changing role of the Indian economy in global capitalism and the neo-fascist reification of a Hindu national culture might have been examined in terms of the tensions between the incorporation of the Indian economy into the global economy and its disruptive effects on notions of a national space.

These qualifications apart, the work reviewed here is distinguished by the breadth of its range and its innovative angles of approach. Rajan and Needham's edited collection of insightful essays, with their engaging introduction, and Srivastava's original contribution on the aesthetics of secularism represent important interventions in the debate about Indian secularism. They develop the richness of secularism's content as a concept, and extend the forms it might take. Their work will be of use in a number of disciplines from politics and literature to history and media studies.