Those who feel that Indian secularism, as a phenomenon, remains unfortunately as underanalyzed as it is overdebated, as this reviewer does, will doubtless welcome this book as an extremely significant contribution to firmly locating it intellectually in the history of India, and thereby particularizing it to India, even if the term “Indian secularism” today possesses no single stable meaning and may uneasily accommodate no fewer than four distinct semantic trajectories (pp. 7–12). The term may, in fact, be capable of such polyvalence precisely because of the diverse strands, such as those of nationalism, communalism, and so on, that it weaves together and whose historical role in its emergence has hitherto been ignored. This complexity may account for the situation in India today, where a majority feel that they have to make do with the Hinduism of secularism, and where minorities feel that they have to make do with the secularism of Hinduism—leaving both feeling short-changed at the hands of Indian secularism.

This book drives home the fact that Indian secularism did not fall like manna from heaven, but possesses a geography and a history. It is particularly important to realize this because Indian secularism “did not replicate the narrative of history as staged in the West” (p. 15). Its history is identified in this book in the form of six nodes: (1) the rise of nationalism in Maharashtra (1893–94); (2) Swadeshi and the new patriotism in Maharashtra (1905–10); (3) the debates around constitutional reform (1906–9); (4) the Khilafat movement and the separation of Sind (1919–32); (5) the depressed class question (1932); and (6) the defining of the secular citizen (1946–50). It thus turns out to be the case that “the emergence of Indian secularism as an idea marked not only the beginning but also the end of a historical process” (p. 13). One may be tempted to overlook this on account of the fact the term “secularism,” despite its currency (which includes its periodic talismanic political invocation), entered Indian political discourse only “well into the 1940s” (p. 5; also see pp. 13, 15). This may also account for the fact that a striking feature of “Indian secularism is its presentism” (p. 12).

It is a major historiographical achievement of this book to demonstrate, in meticulously documented and painstaking detail, that while “studies in Indian nationalism and secularism have tended to treat constitutional politics on the one hand and popular politics on the other, as analytically separate arenas” (p. 264), they, far from being incompatible, may be fully intelligible only when taken together. Current discussions of secularism in India often seem to lack historical depth, and this book remedies the situation admirably. It could, however, have explored the relationship between partition and secularism in more detail. The connection between the two is touched on at times toward the end of the book (as on pp. 247, 250, and 253), but the discussion is more or less limited to the dynamics of constitution making in India.

It is perhaps no mere coincidence that the idea of secularism, in terms of the chronology proposed in the book, surged to the fore when the demand for the formation of Pakistan, as a separate nation carved out of India on religious grounds, was formulated. To discuss Indian secularism without reference to partition is somewhat like discussing the American Civil War without reference to slavery. The question that needs to be asked is, how could the Indian National Congress justify its about-face on this issue to the Indian people, when after a half-century of stubborn resistance to partition, it suddenly accepted it. The justification surely consisted, in part, of the claim that while partition may have meant the division of British India into a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan for Pakistanis, for the Indians, it meant the division of India into a “theocratic” Pakistan and a “secular” India, and this is how secularism became one of the founding ideologies, or even a founding myth, of modern India. This also helps explain what makes the Kashmir issue so intractable, because it is inextricably tied to the founding myths of both Pakistan and India. If Pakistan was based on the religious claim that it was meant to comprise of all the Muslim-majority areas of British India, then obviously Kashmir belongs to it. If, however, India represents a secular democracy and thus manifests territorial rather religious nationalism, then for India this argument does not work.