“Secular Fundamentalism”…alive & kicking in India

In a short piece in Outlook, Mark Tully reviews his book, “India’s Unending Journey” and talks about how:

“India traditionally does not write full stops because it understands the uncertainty of certainty, it prefers the middle road, and believes in the perpetual search for balance….The West, on the other hand, tends to see things in black and white, to look for certainties, and so to lurch from one extreme to another…

The most obvious evidence for this contrast lies in the different attitudes to religion. R.C. Zaehner, who held the chair at Oxford India’s philosopher-president S. Radhakrishnan once held, wrote, “Hindus do not think of religious truth in dogmatic terms…. For the passion for dogmatic certainty that has wracked the religions of Semitic origin they feel nothing but shocked incomprehension.” This suspicion of dogmatic certainty is a feature of all the other great religions born in India.

Even the religions of Semitic origin in India have been touched by this pluralism. The two theologians who have done the most to persuade the Roman Catholic Church to soften its attitude to other churches and other faiths were deeply influenced by the many years they spent in India. I often tell people in countries that are having problems with religious pluralism that India has the second-largest Muslim population in the world, that they are entirely free to practise their religion, and that the suggestion that a Muslim woman should not dress as she pleases would never arise here.”

Continued below…

Image Courtesy: BBC

He then mentions how secular fundamentalism suffers from unexamined dogmas…

“We hear a great deal about religious fundamentalism these days, but very little about secular fundamentalism.

John Gray, who is a professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, has written, “Today religious believers, driven to the margins of a culture in which science claims authority over all human knowledge, have to cultivate a capacity for doubt. In contrast secular believers– held fast by the conventional wisdom of the time– are in the grip of unexamined dogmas.” Secular fundamentalism is alive and kicking in India too.

I know from experience that you only have to mention the word Hinduism to be accused by some secularists of being a supporter of Hindutva.”

Could not have put it any better.