Postcolonial perspectives on India's past have tended to focus on representations, which served the purpose of colonial domination. The view, for instance, that Indian society is fundamentally constituted by caste or religion legitimated the supposedly secular or neutral system of governance introduced by the British. Building upon Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), scholars have suggested that some of our most widely held assumptions about Indian society were more rooted in an imperial worldview than in real social experiences of Indians. The attempt of colonial administrators to understand and govern India through the study of ancient texts formed the basis of an Indian variety of Orientalism. How colonial courts deployed this text-based knowledge in relation to the actual practices of religious “communities” is the central focus of this essay.

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Over the past two decades, journalists, legal analysts and scholars of India have devoted much attention to the political advances of the 'pro-Hindu' Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the growth of Hindu nationalist sentiments among the nation's burgeoning urban middle class. This decade alone has reaped a harvest of more than 70 books addressing the issue of the 'secular state' in India, prompted, no doubt, by the clamour of Hindutva. Extensive print media coverage of events leading to and following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 brought the issues of secularism, national identity, and politicised religion to the forefront of public debate. The BJP's success in forming a coalition government after the general elections of 1998 revived questions about the direction of the party's Hindutva agenda and its viability as a 'secular' party.' At some distance now from the tumult of the Babri Masjid demolition, this article offers not another critique of Hindu nationalism, but an evaluation of both Marxist and post-modernist ways of explaining its rise during the 1980s and 90s. The categories 'Marxist' and 'post-modernist' are by no means monolithic, but contain elements that may either converge or conflict with each other. The more 'traditional' Marxist perspective discussed in this article is represented in varying degrees by Bipan Chandra, Sumit Sarkar, Nasir Tyabji, Aijaz Ahmad and K Balagopal. This perspective is limited by its economic determinism which downplays the religious dimension of culture, politics and national identity. Writers who are more influenced by post-modern thought, by contrast, replace the rationalism and class dialectic of traditional Marxism with the dialectics of literature, culture (East vs West) and history-writing (Orientalist vs post-Orientalist). Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ashis Nandy create a space for the exploration of culture and religion, but do so with post-colonial distaste for the organs of statecraftthe very machinery that was supposed to have protected the Babri Masjid and the thousands of Muslims who were killed in the bloody aftermath of its destruction. 1 1 The categories 'Marxist' and 'post-modernist' do not preclude instances where selfdesignated Marxists address 'post-modernist' kinds of questions. Chatterjee and Chakrabarty, for instance, are self-described Marxists who critique rationalist South Asia Research, 19, 2, 1999 SAGE PUBLICATIONS New DelhiUhousand Oaks/London some Western countries, the Indian constitution has sought to define 'secular state' in terms of the government's 'equidistance' to the country's many religions.3 Eight days after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Girilal Jain wrote, 'The bloated rhetoric of secularism, constitutionalism and rule of law has to give way to commonsense and realism and the Muslim leadership, such as it is, has to recognise the urgent, indeed desperate, need for a change of course on its part.' Times of India, 14 December, 1992, p. 7. For a concise history of how, over the past several ...

The Thomas Christians are the only Christians of India whose origins cannot be linked in any way to European influence. They trace their origins to Jesus’s apostle Thomas, who they believe visited India in 52 ce and established a church there. From the third century on, through trade, migration, and exchanges of ecclesiastical personnel, the lives of the Thomas Christians and Persian Christians became intertwined. Gradually, the Thomas Christians fell under the oversight of the Church of the East, whose capital was at Sasanian Ctesiphon. The ties of Thomas Christians to the Church of the East did not make them any less anchored in south Indian society. Their interactions with Persian Christians went hand in hand with their coexistence with Hindu and Muslim neighbors in the coastal region of southwest India now called Kerala—a dual participation that continues to the present day.