This is the text, with a few verbal modifications, of a lecture delivered by T. N. Madan at the President's Panel in Honor of the Fulbright Fortieth Anniversary Program, on the occasion of the 1987 meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in Boston. T. N. Madan has invigorated the social sciences in India for many years by his research, writing, and teaching. As an author he has written on such themes as Hindu culture, culture and development, ethnic pluralism, family and kinship, and the professions. As editor of Contributions to Indian Sociology, he has attracted to its pages distinguished research and writing from an international pool of contributors. This achievement is related to his capacity to combine discriminating intellectual taste with a friendly capacity to insinuate the journal into the publishing program of outstanding social scientists. It is also related to the fact that his anthropological understanding is combined with a wide-ranging methodological sympathy for other social sciences as well as the humanities.
L'auteur examine les faits saillants de l'émergence et de l'évolution de la tradition religieuse Sikh. Il fixe son attention sur le processus de sécularisation. Il tente de montrer comment la répudiation de l'idéal Hindu de renonciation et I'accent mis sur une morale d'orientation intra-mondaine ont conduit le Sikhisme & a g r a v e ; envisager progressivement le pouvoir politique comme un but légitime. Foi religieuse et conflit armé se sont alors imbriqués et sont devenus les moyens de cet objectif. Au cours de ce processus, la conception Sikh du sécularisme a entraîné la suppression de la séparation entre la religion et l'Etat. Mais cette perspective entre toutefois en conflit aujourd'hui avec le processus de modernisation qui cherche au contraire & a g r a v e ; limiter le rôle de la religion dans la vie publique. Social Compass, XXXIII/2-3, 1986, 257-273 The word secularisation has been used in the West in a number of interrelated meanings. These include notably the following: (1) an increasing involvement with 'this, our, world' and an affirmation of 'this-worldliness' as a value; (2) a process of ' ' privatisation' such that the religious life of the individual is regarded as being his or her personal concern which, therefore, should be protected from undue interference by the Church or the State; (3) a gradual narrowing down, if not the elimination, of the role of religious beliefs, practices and institutions in everyday life. These (and other related) notions of secularisation have emerged, it seems to me, not in stark denial of the place of religion in human life but from a dialectic of the religious and secular domains the complementary opposition of which has been recognised from the very beginning in the Christian tradition. In this paper I attempt an examination of the significance of the fact that, in the Sikh religious tradition an original attitude of world affirmation was in course of time redefined to emphasise the unity of the Church and the State, so that what might seem contradictory in terms of the Western civilisation is here sought to be reconciled. This development within the Sikh tradition cannot but be of deep interest to students of comparative religion and to theorists of secularisation.
The present paper seeks ‘to explore the nature of Indian secularism, the difficulties it has run into, and the ways in which it may be revised’. This is a large undertaking for a short text, originally written as public lecture, particularly because the issues posed do nopt readily translate into plain questions. The most that I can hope to do is to raise some doubts and make a few suggestions for rethinking the issues involved.
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