This is a continuation of the previous article. It attempts to contextualise the contemporary relevance of Professor Awadh Kishore Saran’s works from the 1960s and 70s on secularism, modernization, and Hinduism. The purpose of this article series is to point to the dangers that are imminent when Hindus indulge in a blind and uncritical embrace of secular modernity.

While tracing the origins and growth of secularism in the classic church-state separation mould, Saran acknowledges the transition in Europe where the religious realm and its authority progressively shrank and got confined to the “inner” and private dimensions of a man’s life. Political power ceased to be the temporal arm of the Church and prepared to assume, eventually, full sovereignty over the public realm and the “outer” life of man.

This is a transition that Hindus have uncritically accepted over the past 75 years of independent India as well. Today, Hinduism is largely restricted to an occasional public festival, a temple visit, puja room or private family rituals for most Hindus. The role of religion has shrunk dramatically in our lives.

Saran cautions that this shrinking of the role of religion is just the beginning. He states:

The logic of the idea requires that both the “outer” and the “inner” life of man, both the public and private realms be ultimately secularized, that is cut loose from their divine, transhuman, absolute center. A major concern of this essay is to show that once the idea is accepted and the process started, their dialectic and progress cannot be stopped midway or at will.

The secularisation of the private realm is slowly underway in many Hindu households. Several households have fully converted as well. Religion has very little role to play in their day-to-day lives. While a lot of energy is spent on understanding the threats posed by Islam, Christianity, or leftist liberals to the Hindu way of life, we don’t spend as much energy on understanding the threats posed by secularisation and the costs thereof to Hindu religion.

Saran refers to one of the earliest definitions of secularism from 1851 as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. This definition is attributed to George Jacob Holyoake, one of the earliest thinkers on secularism.

The doctrine that morality should be based on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from the belief in God or a future state.

Here, the contrast between secularism and religion hits us the hardest as Hindus. A secular morality based on the YOLO (“You only live once”) mindset is totally at odds with the idea of karma-janma-punarjanma-papa-punya complex. Today, a lot of us Hindus assume that a happy marriage is possible by accepting a YOLO mindset in some spheres of our lives and still continuing to retain a religious core elsewhere. This assumption needs some critical scrutiny.

Saran further refers to Holyaoke’s public discussion on this question: “What advantages would accrue to mankind generally, and the working classes in particular, by the removal of Christianity, and the substitution of secularism in its place?”

This question is equally important even in the Hindu context. In fact, given that a lot of us Hindus have silently agreed to this mode of living for a while now, it is about time to understand the costs and benefits of this way of life for us as a people. This project of shrinking the religious sphere is something that unites activists of all flavours, not just Marxists alone.

Saran quotes Holyaoke verbatim to capture his world-view:

The problem solved by secularism is this, that this partially comprehended and unexplored universe is yet, in its material and ascertainable relations to man, a possible theatre of the limitless happiness of humanity – that the light of duty may be seen, that a life of usefulness may be led, indefinite refinement may be attained, and tranquility in death, and the highest desert in untried existence beyond us may be won, though the Origin of all things shall be hidden from us and the Revelations of every religious sect shall be rejected.

The above quote summarises the world-view of many HINOs, as they are popularly called on the internet, i.e., Hindus in name only. It is this flavour of secularism that dominates our discourse today, particularly in matters of education, and it is very much aligned with the world-view of the average Marxist intellectual and that of the non-Marxist progressive liberal intellectual.

Saran discusses two forms of this autonomous-humanist interpretation of secularism. The Marxist and the liberal. The liberal form of autonomous secularism has two chief variants: Robert J. Barrett’s theory of civil religion and Gellner’s neo-episodic theory of progress, Saran says. The details of these theories are too academic and beyond the scope of this essay. However, some lines from both thinkers’ writings on progress are pertinent to this piece.

A belief in progress means that time ceases to be “morally neutral,” Gellner says.

Time could have been said to be ‘morally neutral’ in the historic perception of a society, for whom excellence was just as likely to be found in the past as in the future. A society can be said to believe in progress when this symmetry does not obtain, when there is, at the very least, some predisposition to tie up the past with bad (in one word: backward) and future with good (progressive). [Barrett]

Life has come to be lived on an upward slope. The nature of things has a bias towards improvement. Improvement is both anticipated and required. This is sometimes an explicit doctrine, but generally a tacit assumption, the recognition of a manifest truth. [Gellner]

This belief in progress traces its mainstream origins first to eighteenth-century Europe and then to post-Colonial India for us Hindus. The Hindu outlook prior to this belief taking over us was similar to what Gellner mentioned above: excellence was just as likely to be found in the past as in the future. From that mould of thinking, we have now moved to an ideology where we tie up the past with the bad. Several Hindus today abhor their past because the imagery of their own past is one that is affected by their colonial consciousness, and they see their past in light of the idea of progress, where life has come to be lived on an upward slope, i.e., the past is bad and the present is a journey towards better future.

Interestingly, the 20th-century cultural critic and media commentator Neil Postman made a similar remark on the hold of this ideology of progress on America in his time: “…all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.” Many Hindus are also Marxists today, given how much this thinking dominates our collective psyche today.

The Hindu ritual world, on the contrary, continues to operate in the traditional mould in many places to this day. The ritualist strives for excellence and compliance, not an improvement in the sense of tinkering or reform. The focus is on upasana, sadhana, vidhi, niyama and not necessarily on improvising or reforming. This offers an interesting contrast.

One can well say that when you have a society designed in such a way that all life is a long, elaborate ritual, then excellence can indeed be as likely to be found in the past as in the future.

Saran says that the scientific-industrial way of life evolved from this worldview of autonomous-humanist secularism. When confronted with it, the non-Western non-White people are doubly wretched, Saran says.

…deprived of their tradition and impelled to uproot themselves from their heritage, their humanity, by the force of the basic injunction of contemporary imperialism ( alias modernization ), viz,. “Thou shall not re-possess thine heritage”, they must worship and woo the scientific-industrial form of life. They must not fail to comply; besides they cannot do otherwise for that is their fate.

As Hindus, we continue to worship and woo the scientific-industrial form of life. Subordinating tradition to it and, in some cases, letting go of tradition altogether. It is a strange predicament of the times we live in and our collective fate.

Saran gives a call to those who are religiously minded people amongst the non-white and non-western people. He says that such people need to carefully identify and fight the omnifarious and omnivorous forces of the mentality that is based on the imperialist pseudo-dogma of the irreversible (hence irresistible) progress of modernism (“the scientific-industrial form of life”) and the permanent global hegemony of the West. Secularism, Transitionalism, Civil Religion, Secular Theologies, Hindu or Buddhist secularism, historicist Sarva Dharma Sambhava are all manifestations of the same mentality, according to Saran, and must all be resisted vehemently.

Their next task is to show that to be contemporary, a religious tradition—be it Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Islamic, or Christian—needs to be renewed, not “modernized,” and that this renewal means recovery of roots and restoration to wholeness, a counter-stream journey to the source, as Saran says.

That is a significant task for Hindus, not only in the era in which Saran wrote this but also in our own time. The popular assumption today is that we can secularise and modernise in compartments, carefully adapting to the scientific-industrialized form of life while still remaining traditional somehow. These contradictions need to be understood better. To begin, the idea that religious traditions should be renewed rather than modernised is a good frame to suggest a way forward.

In another chapter in the book, Saran distinguishes between contemporaneity and modernity. Explaining the difference, he says, contemporaneity is time-consciousness: awareness of the time one lives in. Modernity also refers to time, but it is a comparative concept in the sense that contemporaneity is not. A period or an institution is modern only in relation to another that is ancient, primitive, or archaic. On the other hand, contemporaneity stands for one’s relationship to one’s own time.

Saran here refers to the concept of Kulasila (inspired by a lecture given by the art historian Niharranjan Ray): “Kula is the whole of man’s biological, social and cultural heritage. sila is his intelligence and character by which he re-animates this inheritance and uses it in the specific set of circumstances of his life, carries it forward and transmits it to the next generation. The sila of the present generation becomes part of the kula of the next generation which has to transmute this deadweight of the past into a living asset to its own sila.”

Inheritance without testament is Kula without Sila: quality without virtue.

The question of inheritance is something that bothers or should bother many Hindus today. We seem to have moved beyond Kula without the Sila predicament above. We seem to be in a situation where we lack either, or we lack or refuse to engage with the Kula inheritance and seek to reconstruct the present based on Sila sans Kula. What we pass onto the next generation now is a debatable issue.

Elaborating further on modernization, Saran makes some very prescient points.

The idea of modernization of non-Western peoples, the idea of socialist revolution for world communism, and the idea of the scientific-industrial form of life which is common to both are the latest forms of the universalist spirit of European civilization.

The idea of the “scientific-industrial form of life” is the latest in the line of succession from the Imperial Idea (the Roman empire), the Christian Idea (Christendom, world Christianity) and the idea of White Man’s Burden (the British Empire). Indeed, it follows almost immediately on the failure of the White Man’s Burden Idea and is necessitated by the increasing difficulties of the Christian Idea.

These are harsh rulings on modernization and the scientific-industrial form of life. The trajectory of how this form of universalist spirit has come to dominate our times is important to acknowledge. Hindus today spend a disproportionate amount of their mindset on refuting allegations, distortions, and ideological battles with left-liberals, Islamists, and Christians. But the impact of the relentless march of the scientific-industrial way of life on the Hindu psyche is least acknowledged.

The typical Hindu reaction to this is to hope for a version of Hindu modernity that is both Hindu and modern at the same time. To this end, they aim to seek inspiration from Chinese and Japanese modernity as examples of civilizations that managed to retain their identity but also modernized. These phenomena need to be studied to better understand the bargain in the Hindu context. These conflicts between the scientific industrial form of life and traditional forms of life, as well as the increasing scrutiny on the environmental costs of modernization, must be addressed as we seek to imagine a new future.

To understand the challenges posed by secularism to Indian tradition, one needs to also understand the historical context of the major challenges Hindu society has faced in the course of its long history. Saran here makes some very important remarks on Buddhism. In spite of the metaphysical unity between the two traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism, there is one major difference, Saran says:

Buddhism is a monastic religion in the sense in which Hinduism is not. However, let it be pointed out immediately that this does not refer to a question of this-worldly and otherworldly orientations. Both Hinduism and Buddhism transcend this dichotomy and both have a renunciatory ideal for man. The point here is that Hindu religious life finds an essential expression in social life, while that of Buddhism is expressed through the monastic way of life. Hence in an important way Buddhism is outside society. Apart from many vested interests and historical factors involved in the Hindu opposition to Buddhism in India, one persistent complaint expressed in different ways against it was its non-social character.

One can look upon Buddhism as an internal revolution of Hinduism; it renewed it in many fundamental ways; but its non-social character and fundamental metaphysical agreement (the philosophical controversies, say between atmavada and anatmavada or between advaitavada and sunyavada do not really compromise the truth of this statement) eventually enabled Hinduism to absorb Buddhism and to displace it as a rival to itself on the Indian scene.

These are important lines to absorb and understand given the embrace of Buddhism by many forces in our time as a mark of resistance against Hinduism. It is unclear how the proponents of Buddhism in our time seek to make up for the absence of a unique social system within Buddhism.

Unlike the threat posed by Buddhism, Saran says the Islamic invasions created the first instance where Hinduism faced the challenge of living in a non-Hindu world. He says this was the first real challenge of secularism to Hindu society.

This was so because Islam, like Hinduism, is itself a social religion: in other words, strictly speaking, under Islam the whole society would have to be Islamic – just as Hinduism posits a Hindu society because for the most part the Dharma for the Hindu individual is the faithful carrying out of duties his social order imposes. Since the whole life is a ritual, no real distinction between the religious and the non-religious, the sacred and the profane, means and ends, is made. This is the case with Hinduism as a way of life when strictly interpreted.

This interpretation of Hinduism is at odds with the understanding of Hinduism that a lot of modern-day Hindus carry. “The whole life is a ritual” is an important phrase to understand and contrast with our own lives today.

Under the domination of another and alien tradition, this distinction between the religious and non-religious spheres of life had to be made. Aspects of a formerly integrated way of life, then, appeared as a ritualism and formalism. Under an alien rule the religious and the non-religious spheres of action got necessarily bifurcated because not the whole life was free; only in those spheres of life and institutions that were left undisturbed, could one have one’s way of life; and when interferences were made by the alien power, one had necessarily to decide which areas were essentially religious and must be stoutly defended against encroachment and where it would be better to yield.

If one goes by this analysis above, it is clear that Hindus continue to lead a life under alien power even now. As a consequence, the religious sphere continues to shrink further and further, and the non-religious sphere continues to expand. This plays out differently across different religions. Some religions get to keep their religious spheres intact. This is another tragedy of how secularism operates in independent India. It is also unclear what areas Hindus today consider essentially religious and are willing to vigorously defend against encroachment by courts, states, or activists in general.

It was in this environment of an encounter with Islam, followed by the Bhakti movement and the Mughal empire, that European powers arrived on the Indian scene, Saran says. He here also delves a bit into Akbar’s efforts to try to solve the socio-political problem of religious pluralism with his Din-i-illahi. Saran cites this as another example of finding a solution within religion, i.e., the search was for a religious solution, not a secular solution.

The advent of the British into India brought some decidedly new challenges to the Hindus. Since modernism and Christianity came to India almost simultaneously, the Hindu reaction was that of reforming and rationalising Hindu religion and society, a response that differs greatly from the one to Islam, Saran says.

The sheer amount of reformist zeal that captured the Hindu psyche in the colonial era and after is unprecedented in our long history.

While there were attempts by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and later by Keshub Chandra Sen to do a synthesis of Hinduism and Christianity, this tapered off over the years, says Saran. The idea of a new universal religion or of a synthesis of various religions gradually became marginal. The challenge was not Christianity and it was the domination of the West. From this, a new idea emerged, that of the nation, to which the idea of Hinduism was joined, and the tension thus produced has continued to the present day, Saran says. As antireligious Saran points out, the idea of a nation is not a religious idea; it is a secular idea, and certain religious leaders have vehemently attacked it.

Hindus today continue to experience this tension between their idea of Hindu religion and their relationship with the secular idea of a nation.

The main point Saran attempts to make in this historical overview of the Indian context is that the forces of secularism represented by Western dominance were not accepted by the reform movements, nor even by the nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; all that the majority of leaders up to Gandhi recognised was that Western science, technology, and secularism had great strength, which could not be dismissed but had to be acknowledged. The reform of Hinduism was aimed at making it powerful enough to assimilate the new forces and be revitalised by them. In other words, until two decades ago (writing in the late 1960s), the solution to the problems posed by secularism and modernism in India was sought within the religious sphere, and particularly within Hinduism itself, as Saran emphasizes.

This is an important observation that until the Nehruvian era emerged, a lot of efforts amongst our intellectual class of the pre-Independent era were not to divorce the religious sphere and relegate it to the margins of life.

Saran brings attention to the fact that this ideology of synthesis called the Nilakantha syndrome has failed us. The Nilakantha syndrome, he says, is the belief that India has a unique and somewhat magical power to absorb anything into its tradition without thereby damaging it; essentially, that we can produce a synthesis of the most modern and the most traditional, of the religious and the secular. So far, the Nilakantha pattern has failed not only in the case of Islam but also in the case of Christianity and so far in relation to Westernism and modernism, says Saran.

This is something that a lot of Hindus fail to understand to this day. They either don’t realise the value of what they are losing or they are choosing to let go of their Hindu identity bit by bit. Death by a thousand cuts! It appears that a lot of Hindus have resigned to the Kali Yuga analogy, saying that such are the times and we have to move on. Saran cautions:

The situation might well indicate that perhaps the whole religious framework is outworn and must be given up. But this, though a highly probable move, is neither historically nor logically an inevitable move. In fact, if one does go to that conclusion, one is in fact making a decision, not an inference; and what this decision involves is not a new response to the challenge but giving up the whole thing, completely overwhelmed by the challenge. It means the abolition of man.

We cannot give up on the religious framework because of the insurmountability of the current problem. Abolition of man in the religious sense is not a desirable goal for men of religion. That such an obvious fact needs to be stated is a sad commentary on our times today.

In his writing on the consequences of secularization, Saran emphasises the meaning of secularism as one that is concerned with the autonomy of man and his present world. It denies all central significance to anything beyond this humanistic world. It deepens and enriches man in a certain sense by shedding away all superfluities. So this involves some kind of freedom. Some kind of liberation. But is this liberation from something that is no longer really necessary to man’s meaningful existence or something absolutely essential to human life? Our view, of course, is that it is the latter, Saran says.

This is again an important question to ask. Freedom and liberation from what? What freedom does one get by rejecting these superfluities that belong to the religious order? Are we consciously making a choice here? Is our consciousness schooled enough in the religious worldview, to begin with so we can understand the bargain?

Elaborating further Saran says this:

Secularity does involve a progressive impoverishment of man and reality. Both metaphysically and historically, the positive side of this impoverishment has been the unprecedented development of technology, which in any case, has been the most patent, important and spectacular expression of secularization: the secular city is also the technopolis.

A good five decades after Saran first wrote this, it is clear that we are now enamoured by this secular technopolis and we seem to seek Moksha within its confines.

This question on technology is important, and there aren’t too many thinkers in the past century on the Hindu side who have delved deep into that problem. Saran is one of those few thinkers. Gandhi, Lohia, and a few traditional gurus and thinkers have also done this thinking.

On the question of controlling technology Saran says the below:

A non-exploitative social order and an indefinitely developing technology are not compatible. Any real control of technology could be possible only if the technological order were subordinated principally and practically to the symbolic order, which means not only that the technological order is not allowed to grow virtually autonomous, but also that this cannot be accomplished by humanistic and hence secular values alone.

There isn’t enough discussion about the significance of lines like these in Hindu circles today. We tend to assume that subordinating the technological order to anything is not possible. But at the same time, we don’t understand the cost to our religious self if we give up on this cause in toto. Today, there is a lot of discussion about technology philosophy, technology ethics, sustainability and technology, and so on. One barely finds Hindu interventions on these topics. These are very important questions to delve deep into if we are to reimagine Dharmic life again for our times today.

What we mean when we say that secularisation and the resulting impoverishment of man and reality give rise to freedom without responsibility is that we have a lot of power today, but a limited ability to assume and carry out the responsibility.

The question of responsibility does come up occasionally in public discourse today. But it is very much limited to humanistic and secular ideals, and even then, there are significant gaps between what is stated and what is delivered or achieved.

Explaining this Saran says the below:

Man’s relation to time becomes the key to his responsibility. The symbolic order or the sacred alone mediates Time and Eternity. To try to find the ground of human responsibility in man himself is a mode of self-fixation. Insofar as technology is taken as a given and is implicitly allowed to develop autonomously, responsibility is continually in danger of degenerating into a new fatalism and the search for new myths and false gods.

This view of time and eternity is a very traditional one. Given that our discourse today is broadly dominated by Marxist intellectuals and secular liberal intellectuals, it is an uphill battle to convince them of this sacred symbolic order where the ground of human responsibility can lie. At least this line of thought deserves an ear and a seat at the table. We owe it to our ancestors and to whatever inheritance we still have left within us.

He concludes the book with this passage. This is a part of his concluding note on a seminar in 1971 at IIAS, Simla, on the Secular and non-Secular forces in Indian society.

Saran remarks here that most participants refused to tackle the basic issues head-on and didn’t indulge in a fundamental critique of secularism. There was an emphasis by the participants to get back to reality and deal with the practical problems of contemporary society. In this light, he said it is good to remember Lord Keynes’s famous dictum: “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”

While the concepts and ideas discussed in this note may sound theoretical and intellectual to many Hindus in our time, it is important to understand Keynes’ dictum cited above on the power and gradual encroachment of ideas.