Inwardly Mobile

In the Name of the Secular: Cultural Activism in India is essentially a set of essays, written at different times and modified somewhat to bring them together in the form of a book. As essays which are written at different times tend to do, these ones too often reflect the time of writing and do not necessarily hang together as a book. But that is about the only criticism one can make of this important and elegantly written work.

For me, this book is revealing not only for what it has within it, but also for what it represents in the broader world in which "secularism" has almost become a dirty word. There is hardly a work on the subject that does not get caught up in defining what the word means, and in looking at the adequacy or otherwise of the definitions.

Bharucha pays passing attention to definitions. "The secularist debate," he says, "continues to be caught between the polarities of separating religion from politics and accommodating different religions through the arbitration and assumed neutrality of the State." To get out of this bind we need to turn our attention to the ways in which we have understood and communicated this concept. We need to be clear that the old Nehruvian binaries within which secularism was once understood and articulated will no longer suffice. Bharucha prefers instead to examine how secularism works on the ground, pointing to the complex interplay of factors which make for both its successes and its failures: the intention behind a particular cultural "form", whether film or play or exhibition, the messages it communicates, how those messages are conceived and so on.

In an empathetic—and I think courageous—critique of the Sahmat exhibition at Faizabad, Hum Sub Ayodhya, Bharucha asks what the mounting of such an exhibition meant for the local inhabitants of Ayodhya/Faizabad. If the reactions of people he quotes are anything to go by, there was a great deal of resentment about what seemed like an intrusion on the part of urban, middle class people. Are such cultural interventions then appropriate, he asks. If not, how can we do better?

Setting himself firmly against the valorisation of the "indigenous", of the "community" and other such fashionable categories, Bharucha points to the dangers of these, and investigates how secular cultural activism can sometimes inadvertently lend itself to communicating communal messages. His analysis takes him through the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), to Sahmat, to a movement known as the Third Sector Movement in Brazil where Bharucha shows how a wider involvement of the community in secular cultural activism is possible. He looks too at film (Hum Apke Hain Kaun and Roja as well as Anand Patwardhan's Father, Son and Holy War) coming back eventually to the question of what sort of future we are seeking, and the dangers and "terrorism" inherent in the kinds of utopias we have in mind.

Here, I have no resort to the common, but often true, excuse that it is not possible to do justice to a book as complex and nuanced as this. While the complexity of ideas Bharucha raises leaves the reader wanting more, it is nonetheless important to note that secularists are now confident enough to discuss the concept and reality of secularism with each other, that they can now actually air their differences.

To my mind, the only other political "ideology", if you like, that has been able to do this is feminism. Over the years the discourse on feminism and by feminists has matured enough for us to feel confident of talking about and living with difference. Bharucha has come a long way since his biography of Chandralekha and his A Question of Faith and this book marks a first step in the process of self-criticism for secularists.