Sushmita Nath, "The Secular Imaginary: Gandhi, Nehru and the Idea(s) of India" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

New Books in Indian Religions · Nov 23, 2022 · 1h 2m

Given the popularity and success of the Hindu-Right in India’s electoral politics today, how may one study ostensibly ‘Western’ concepts and ideas, such as the secular and its family of cognates, like secularism, secularisation and secularity in non-Western societies without assuming them simply as derivative, or colonial legacies or contrast cases of Western societies? While recognizing that the dominant language of political modernity of Western societies is not easily translatable in non-Western societies, The Secular Imaginary elaborates upon an intellectual history of secularity in…