Neeti Nair’s new book Hurt Sentiments: Secularism and Belonging in South Asia (Published by Harvard University Press in 2023) advances a thesis that “hurt sentiments—invoked by minority and majority religious communities alike—have played a critical role in the making of new laws, in reshaping state ideologies, and in the fashioning of new idioms of citizenship” in South Asia. The book is heavy on archival research yet accessible. It shows how past actions influence contemporary politics. Nair is very much aware of this and thus starts the book with the recent legislation regarding citizenship in India, and notes how the Narendra Modi government sees it as undoing the “wrongs committed” by the 1950 Delhi Pact between India and Pakistan regarding the protection of minorities.

Secularism as a value has to be safeguarded for as Nair puts it, to be secular is to belong fearlessly. I would take this statement, by which she closes the book, later but first let me focus on what I think is a running theme of the book: definitions i.e. defining something. It is a task Nair laboriously takes and shows that there is a refusal to define secularism in India, at least by the governing political elite. In Pakistan, the same tragedy happens with the category ‘Islamic’ as the ideology of the country. Bangladeshi political elites may have been successful in understanding what they mean by secular or Islamic but other problems entail their political predicaments. For example, whether secularism was inherent in Bangladesh. In the four chapters (with an introduction and a very political epilogue), Nair makes efforts to understand a range of issues from Gandhian politics, the meaning of secularism in India, the ideological nature of Pakistan, and the influence of Bangladesh’s war of liberation on its future.

I would concern myself with one question that animates the book: what would ‘defining’ as a political action do to the social and political life in South Asia? In his response to Gil Anidjar’s essay The Idea of an Anthropology of Christianity, Talal Asad noted that “to define is to repudiate some things and endorse others.” Furthermore, defining things, and Asad was specifically talking about modern secular states, has “profound implications for the organization of social life and the possibilities of personal experience.” The moment Nair suggests that the Indian ruling party in 1975 was not eager to define secularism despite calls from the opposition it seems to me she endorses a particular form of secularism. I fear it might be even essentialist: in India’s case, a Gandhian ideal and in Pakistan’s case, Jinnah’s August 11 speech. To be fair to Nair, she does mention that while defining the constituent elements of establishment ideology, whether secularism or Islamic, “sometimes [it]became punitive to those deemed to be religious minorities.” I added emphasis on sometimes stressing the exceptional moments in which minorities were at the receiving end. Is the qualifying word sometimes the exception or its opposite true whether in Pakistan or India is not an open question to debate. Rather, it is there looking back at us with full force laying bare our helplessness.

Defining secularism or the Islamic, only makes things easier for the state apparatus to discipline citizens—sadly through violent means. Ahmadiyya Muslims is a worthwhile case to understand it.  However, if defining concepts is an attempt to make our societies livable, it is a task worth to be taken. Nair does a remarkable job of showing how South Asian lawmakers navigated it. The book provides insights into what happened at the founding moments that influence the trajectory of the political life in the nation and its constituent elements, notably the marginalized. Nair makes a noteworthy argument, although stretched, that assassination of Gandhi resulted in the lack of minority safeguards in the Indian Constitution. In Bangladesh, the wartime atrocities committed in the name of Islam, she argues, helped the lawmakers to enshrine secularism in the constitution. In Pakistan, it was stated that no law repugnant to the principles of the Quran and the Sunna would be part of Pakistan’s Constitution. But Nair questions: “Who would decide on these laws and their interpretation?” At another place, she asks, “What did it mean to proclaim the Constitution was Islamic?” I wonder if different answers were provided to these queries, what social and political life in South Asia would be like.  

Coming back to the question, what does it mean to have a clear definition of secularism? That it should be made part of the law.  At one point in the book, Nair quotes a functionary of an NGO who says, “Law, by definition, is intimidation.” Throughout the book, law acts as a device, which drives the book forward in its narrative as well as the argument. It does not matter what definition is there, rather it is the law that deals with citizens. That is, how the modern state intends to control its population irrespective of whether the Indian state has an obvious lack of commitment to secularism in recent years or whether the Pakistan state is becoming more Islamic or whether Bangladesh is turning into a secular haven. Unless there is a critique of the powers of the state, minorities and the marginalized would continue to suffer.   

Despite the troubling history of South Asia regarding minorities and the marginalized that Nair narrates, she ends on an optimistic note. By 2020, there was a new and renewed faith in secularism. By whom? She answers “Hundreds of thousands of Indians” but sadly, among the hundreds of millions of Indians. Meanwhile, in South Asia, the subject of her book, Nair wants equal respect for all religions—the secularism of Gandhi, Jinnah and Mujib—so that religious minorities can belong to the nation-state (is it even possible!). Against them and their idea of secularism are the bigoted political parties and individuals. I wish things were so easy and simple. Perhaps, for a lot more difficult answers, Nair or someone else needs to ask a different set of questions.

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Iymon Majid is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen.