Summary: In this piece, we continue the discussion on Prof. Nivedita Menon’s latest book, Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South. The summary of the book by Prof. Menon can be accessed here and a response piece by Prof. Kalpana Kannabiran can be accessed here. In this piece, Prof. Aditya Nigam provides his comments on the second, fifth and seventh chapters of the book.
How does one think from and within the Global South today? What exactly does it mean? Has the work of thinking been performed for all of humanity, once and for all, by thinkers and philosophers in the West, leaving us in the role of mere interpreters of their exalted thought? Is it our job in the global South then to simply “apply” what comes dressed as theory from the Euro-American world, to our own conditions? One is bound to face such questions repeatedly and unavoidably while reading Nivedita Menon’s Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South. This is not so because the book rejects Western theory and knowledge, which have long treated the “Orient”/ the “non-West” / the “Global South” as backward and/or exotic, where no intellection takes place. In fact, the book does not reject Western theory or knowledge but it does do away with the “need” to genuflect to it or to frame its questions by invoking the names of big philosophers from the West. At the outset, Nivedita identifies three tasks that need to be undertaken, not just in thinking from the global South, but also “thinking the global South itself”. These are, firstly, a critique of Eurocentrism, which she argues has been done quite substantially since Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978); secondly, to question and unpack the West/ non-West binary by simultaneously tracing the “interweaving histories of these two categories of thought”, which too has begun to be done lately by scholars from the global South; thirdly, and most critically, to “identify concepts internal to (different) knowledge traditions”. The third task also involves thinking about “the extent to which these concepts can travel to other contexts” and seeing what “productive translations (and mistranslations) can come about in the process. (p.5)
Thinking the global South
Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, in his famous essay on Kafka remarked that “every writer creates his own precursors”, by which he meant not only those writers that the writer in question either consciously refers to or whose “influences” one may discern in her/him but also, more profoundly, how the latter might throw a different light on earlier ones, allowing them to be read in unexpected ways. The linear idea of later writers somehow only being “influenced” by earlier ones is challenged in this claim made by Borges. When we are looking not at individual writers but different traditions of thought, this dynamic becomes far more complex and we can begin to see the “interweaving of histories” of different traditions of thought that Nivedita talks of, as a kind of web where it is impossible to identify any linear succession or movement. My reason for bringing up this statement by Borges here, is therefore, also to underline that “thinking the global South” is not simply thinking about the global South, for it is also a way of thinking the entangled histories of exchange and conflict of ideas between the West and non-West, in ways that might change our understanding of the global North itself.
Much of this has already begun to happen as we look at the concepts of secularism and capitalism through a different lens, for it also confronts Western history itself afresh, pointing to the imbrication of both secularism and capitalism in histories of colonialism. No longer can we think of capitalism as arising in some endogenous development from the womb of feudalism within Europe. From the point of view of the global South, the present theoretical conjuncture is one that moves towards a reconstitution of thought by taking seriously traditions of thinking that had been denounced and delegitimized by “modern”, “secular”, “scientific” knowledge. The cognitive enterprise of the secular-modern could only have been established through the subjugation and de-legitimation of whatever was seen as spiritual or in some way, suffused with pagan “religiosity”, in societies colonized by it. A part of the decolonial enterprise is to reinstate these forms of life – of knowing and being – that see themselves as integral parts of the cosmos, where the great divide between the “human” and the “non-human” inaugurated by modernity, simply does not exist. This is not to say that one must shy away from a critique of religion and community; far from it, the book suggests that these critiques of non-modern hierarchies must be situated and contextual, not transcendent.
In that sense, Nivedita’s is a situated argument that takes the long Indian debate on “secularism” as its precursor and moves to an exploration of what this term might actually mean in the specifically Indian context. Even though that earlier debate is not directly referenced in the book, except in passing, it is clear that it takes insights from the pioneering Indian critiques of secularism by Ashis Nandy and his colleagues, to another level – beyond critique – to its reconceptualization as a master discourse that produces a grid of meanings which orders our understanding of our reality itself. In this structuring of our vision, Nivedita Menon argues, secularism performs a double function – making certain things hypervisible, while screening out certain others. (p.1) In the brief comments that follow, I will take up two of these “objects” that are made invisible by this grid – namely caste (discussed in Chapter 3) and capitalism (discussed in Chapter 5).
“Hinduism”, Caste and Hindutva
Chapter 3 (“The Failed Project of Creating Hindus”), deals with precisely this aspect of the matter, with respect to the question of caste, which is one of the key phenomena invisibilized by the grid of secularism. The chapter though, is much more than about “caste” – for it dismantles some key beliefs about “Hinduism” and its relation to the politics that goes by the name of “Hindutva”. This is not accidental because it examines “Hinduism” by taking internal critiques from the Dalit-Bahujan, Adivasi standpoints as its point of departure.
This chapter begins with a critique of Savarkar’s key text – the manifesto of Hindutva as it were – namely, The Essentials of Hindutva. It does so, however, not simply by demonstrating its violent and intolerant character but also by entering into the world of the Puranas to contest his claims regarding the supposed “invasion” of India by “foreign Buddhistic powers” (like Japan, China and Thailand). Through a fascinating reading of literature and scholarship around the Puranas, not only does it examine such claims, it also shows up the difference between his demonization of Buddhists and the reverential tone in which he talks about the advent of the “intrepid Aryans” who lit their “first sacrificial fires on the banks of the Sindhu”. Through an engagement with Dalit intellectuals like Kanwal Bharti and ancient historians like Upinder Singh, it poses a question missing in most dominant accounts, including Savarkar’s: “who were the original inhabitants of the region’s forests, and of the vast lands described by Savarkar as ‘waste’, ‘wild and unkempt’?” The answer to this question leads Nivedita to explore the wholesale contemporary re-readings of myths and legends around key “Hindu” festivals undertaken by Dalit-Bahujan intellectuals, in order to show the violence at the very heart of the colonization of forest peoples by the Brahmins.
Two very important formulations emerge from the explorations in this chapter. One, Nivedita dismantles the idea of “Hinduism” as a religion – an idea that has been unquestioningly accepted even by serious scholars and historians. Ambedkar was perhaps the sole thinker to argue that “Hinduism” does not exist and that it is simply a collection of castes. Nivedita takes this insight as a starting point rather than a conclusion, in order to systematically show that even today, it simply remains a construct of the Indian state and law. It is, in fact, Brahminical religion that masquerades as Hinduism, as it continues, despite significant gaps and a break in modern times, the millennia old project of “creating Hindus”. Two, this chapter demonstrates, quite persuasively, that the now common sense position that “Hinduism” is an ancient, tolerant religion, while Hindutva is an intolerant modern political project is no longer tenable. Endorsing Brahma Prakash’s argument that rather than see them as good Hinduism versus bad Hindutva, we need to understand that both are two sides of the same coin and that Hindutva has, in fact, given crisis-ridden Hinduism a new lease of life.
Capitalism, Women and Commodification of Nature
Chapter 5, entitled “Capitalism as Secular Science” moves to an entirely different territory. The key argument in this chapter is that capitalism is made invisible by the discourse of secularism by standing in for the “development-science-progress” complex and functioning as the “reason of the (modern) state”. In doing this, “secularism” takes the divide between humans and non-humans and the construction of “nature” as a “disenchanted” realm as its point of departure. Invoking Bruno Latour’s argument that the separation between the natural and the social-political is the “founding mythology of modern thought” and Walter Mignolo’s claim that “in decolonial thinking ‘nature’ is already a colonial term, desacralized and separated from the human world”, the chapter lays the ground for the elaboration of the subsequent argument. (p. 263) In that argument, much in tune with Mignolo’s insistence that “indigenous peoples of the global South see themselves as inside nature, not apart from it”, the chapter takes indigenous peoples as the anti-thesis of capitalism who continue to resist commodification of “nature”. Nivedita cites Mignolo’s understanding of spirituality as something that goes beyond organized religion, where “reinscriptions” of spirituality express “the desire to find ways of life beyond capitalism.” (p. 264)
This ties up well with the “long history of feminist critiques of the invisibility of ecology as a concern for both capitalism and Marxism, and a recognition of the parallels between nature and women in the masculinism that characterizes modernity.” (pp. 264-65) One is reminded of the recent work by scholars like Sylvia Federici that sees the onset of modernity and creation of a masculine “proletariat” in the widespread phenomenon of “witch-hunting” that displaced women’s knowledge and power to pave the way for capitalism. Witch-hunting, Federici argues, was not a phenomenon of the “Dark Middle Ages” but very much that of the dawn of modernity.
The chapter explores “capitalism as secular science” through a detailed discussion of two telling instances, namely the Sethusamudram shipping canal project and the question of women’s rights as a capitalist agenda. The discussion on women’s rights as a capitalist agenda is particularly startling as it shows how this progressive and radical-sounding agenda is pushed by global capitalist agencies in order to break and dissolve common property and the commons so to speak, which are not very easily amenable to commodification, tied as they are to indigenous peoples’ “worldviews”.
The only section of the chapter that does not seem to tie up with the secularism question is the one on Coronacapitalism and data capitalism, which perhaps is there more as an indication of a future project to be pursued. The very interesting and fresh critique of Universal Basic Income in Chapter 7 (Reshaping Worlds – Beyond the Capitalist Horizon) and its basic premise of direct cash transfers also suggest a possible direction for future exploration. One hopes that a critical study of digital capitalism from the perspective of the global South will emerge as a future project from here.
Prof. Aditya Nigam is a political theorist, formerly with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. He has earlier worked on the question of identity and secular-nationalism as well as written extensively on issues related to Marxism and modernity in the postcolony. His recent work has been concerned with the decolonization of social and political theory.
