Lived Secularism: Studies in India and Turkey

Abstract

AbstractPlaces of interreligious encounter provide opportunities to understand secularity as an experience, one that almost necessarily involves the religious other. As the meaning and operations of secularism and its entanglements with the state vary across cultural and legal systems, this is also a fruitful terrain for comparison, particularly regarding states in which the structures of governance are bound up with some form of political secularism. The case studies presented here explore formations of secularism in India and Turkey by paying attention to how the secular works in everyday life through interreligious relations at shared sacred sites. Personal understandings and experiences of multireligious coexistence oftentimes are articulated and performed through arenas of mundane interaction, giving shape and substance to otherwise abstract concepts of pluralism, secularism, and laicism. However, these ways of being secular exist within frames of intensifying religious nationalism in which the secular is being redefined by state actors and political networks to protect and promote the majority’s religious sensibilities. In this shifting landscape, secularism is reworked as a tool of the ruling parties in Turkey and India to further their religio-political agendas. Comparing cases of lived secularism in India and Turkey reveals a constellation of shifting meanings and sensibilities around sharing polities and places with religious others. Whether peacefully shared or contested, monumental or wayside, shared shrines expose the mundane ways in which the secular is a shifting signifier, sometimes evoking a political principle, sometimes an ethical ideal, and sometimes an oppressive, antireligious ideology. This article identifies what is at stake in these various formations and how each perspective on secularism comes with its own set of expectations and dispensations.