Books On Religion And About It: Critical ReflectionsAmiya P. Sen It was a perplexing moment when the editors
of TBR asked me to comment on a
book on religion that had been important
in its time and continued to be so in our own.
This request, I have to admit, made me more
acutely aware of the distinction that ought to
be made between a book on religion and about
it. At least in the context of Hinduism (however
debatable that term might be), a book on religion or more generally,
a text motivated essentially by a religious inspiration or consciousness
does not appear to have been produced in a long time.
On one level, surely, this indicates the state of sustained uneasiness
or discomfiture that most contemporary Indian intellectuals share
with regard to religion. There is both fear and deep distrust, not to
speak of an outright debunking of the ‘religious’.1
The nation-state
in India, as it appears to me, remains deeply conflicted in its approach
to religion or the religious consciousness. On the one hand, it views
religion as a potential source of disorderliness and civic conflict and
sets constitutional limitations on matters like public religious instruction
or propaganda. On the other, it views a religious consciousness as
part of abiding Indian values. Men like Tagore and Gandhi appear to
have considered patriotism itself to be a spiritual virtue.
When deliberating on the question of whether or not religious
studies ought to be made a part of higher education, three successive
officially constituted bodies: Radhakrishnan Commission (1950),
Sri Prakasa Committee (1959) and Kothari Commission (1964) have
adhered to the view that there ought to be something close to an
‘Indian National Religion’ which was vital to good civic life and
inter-faith harmony. The problems here are two-fold. First, the study
of comparative religion as consistently recommended by such bodies
is in itself an anachronistic agenda. In an environment which remains
complexly plural, why, as one may well ask, should religions
be at all compared? Second, the Indian state also appears to have
uncritically adopted an older Deistic view which requires religion to
be singularly bereft of all ritual and dogma. A religion so sanitized
would indeed be eminently suitable as a ‘National Religion’ but
functionally quite incapable of winning over people who will not as
rigidly separate matters of faith and practice. Further, the recommendation
that religious studies be taken seriously, at least in our
institutions of higher learning, has itself ... Table of Contents >> |