Secularism beyond the East/West divide: Literary reading, ethics, and The Moor's Last Sigh

Abstract

The rise of Hindu majoritarianism in India's political and cultural life has led to questions about the viability of secularism in the postcolonial context. Despite the colonial power relations that inform secular discourse, it is assumed the state should maintain a critical distance from religious culture in the face of the increasing marginalization of minority groups in Indian society. At the same time, concerns have been raised that secular rhetoric around syncretism, the preservation of diversity, and religious tolerance often ends up laundering the cultural norms of the majority as national or universal. This paper seeks to displace the East/West divide that informs liberal commentary on secularism - a divide characterized by an opposition between tradition and modernity, faith and rationality. Rather than reject secular discourse on the basis of its colonial genealogy, it is possible to see it as 'an enabling violation' of Enlightenment thought that must be renegotiated through one's ethical relationship to the other. Gayatri Spivak's understanding of ethics as 'a problem of relation before they are a task of knowledge' necessarily shifts our understanding of ethics from a 'self driven political calculus as "doing the right thing" ' to 'ethics as openness toward the imagined agency of the other'. My paper considers how Spivak's concepts of ethical alterity and literary reading link ethics with praxis in thinking about secularism in the postcolonial context. I argue that while Rushdie's media statements, recently republished in Step Across this Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992-2002, seem complicit with liberal views of secularism, his novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, works to displace secular discourse's Enlightenment assumptions.