BOOKS

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. First published in 1985, reprinted in Romance of the State. The summary of Nandy's critique of secularism that follows is based on this article as well as on ‘The politics of secularism and the recovery of religious tolerance’, first published 1988 and republished in Time Warps 2. See Bardhan (1997 Bardhan, Pranab. 1997. “‘The state against society: the great divide in Indian social science discourse’”. In Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India, Edited by: Sugata, Bose and Ayesha, Jalal. Delhi: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]) for an interesting account of the shifts in social science literature on India. 3. See also Rajeev Bhargava's (1998 Bhargava, Rajeev. 1998. “Introduction”. In Secularism and its Critics, Edited by: Rajeev, Bhargava. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]) discussion of Ashis Nandy. 4. The debate on Nandy's writings on Sati particularly after Roop Kanwar's immolation in Deorala is not strictly relevant here since those writings are not in the volumes being reviewed. However, readers interested in a nuanced feminist critique that does not caricature Nandy's position will find useful Ania Loomba's (1993 Loomba , Ania (1993) ‘Dead women tell no tales: issues of female subjectivity, subaltern agency and tradition in colonial and postcolonial writings on widow immolation in India’ , History Workshop 36 [Google Scholar]) review essay. 5. The emphasis I place on location must not be misread as ‘indigenist’, that all-purpose term of abuse. With the term location, I mean to gesture towards the materiality of spatial and temporal co-ordinates that inevitably suffuse all theorizing, the very co-ordinates that Subrahmanyam et al. intend to emphasize when they locate Nandy in CSDS. A sensitivity to location would invariably lead to a productive contamination of the purity of empty universalist categories and challenge their claim to speak about everywhere from nowhere. A characteristic example of location testing high theory is Kuldeep Nayyar's ‘fuzzy’ understanding of secularism and its tension with his professed pure secularist values. 6. ‘History's forgotten doubles’ (1995; republished in RS).