Comment: Cultural secularization. (1994, 20 Marks)
Cultural secularisation is the process by which religious meanings lose authority over how a society thinks, celebrates and decides — a sociological process, not the normative doctrine of secularism. In comparative politics the term belongs to Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell (Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach, 1966), who paired it with structural differentiation as the marks of political development: citizens move from traditional, ascriptive orientations to rational, analytical and empirical ones. India shows the process is real but not one-directional.
Meaning and dimensions
- Peter L. Berger (The Sacred Canopy, 1967) defined secularisation as the process by which “sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols”, and added a secularisation of consciousness. Cultural secularisation sits between the two: art, science, festival and custom move into a profane or aesthetic register.
- Political secularisation is narrower. Donald Eugene Smith (Religion and Political Development, 1970) described the polity separating from religious structures and expanding into law, education and welfare. A state can secularise institutionally while its culture does not — India is the standard case.
- M. N. Srinivas (Social Change in Modern India, 1966) saw differentiation: economic, legal and moral spheres growing discrete from ritual, purity–pollution rules weakening in cities and offices.
- Rajni Kothari (Caste in Indian Politics, 1970) identified the secularisation of caste — a ritual unit turned interest group bargaining for quotas and tickets.
The desecularisation critique
Classical theory, from Max Weber’s “disenchantment” to Bryan Wilson, expected religion to retreat. It has not.
- Berger recanted in The Desecularization of the World (1999): Western Europe apart, the world remained “as furiously religious as it ever was”.
- José Casanova (Public Religions in the Modern World, 1994) split the thesis into differentiation, decline and privatisation; only differentiation holds generally, and religion has undergone deprivatisation.
- Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (Sacred and Secular, 2004) tie religiosity to existential insecurity.
Indian evidence: both directions
| Secularising trends | Counter-trends |
|---|---|
| Kolkata’s Durga Puja recast as art, sponsorship and tourism (UNESCO listing, 2021) | Pew Research Center, Religion in India (2021): 97% believe in God; over four in five call religion very important |
| Elected panchayats displacing caste panchayats; wider marriage choice among the urban educated | 64% of Hindus link being “truly Indian” to being Hindu |
| Caste associations as interest groups | Maha Kumbh 2025; Ram temple consecration (22 January 2024) as a state occasion |
The deeper pattern is that rituals shed doctrinal content while gaining political content. Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s public Ganeshotsav (1893) was a mobilising device, and Ram Navami processions in 2023 became flashpoints in Bihar and West Bengal. Ashis Nandy explains the paradox: modernity converts religion as faith, plural and tolerant, into religion as ideology, a marker of populations — so a society can grow less devout and more communal at once. T. N. Madan (Secularism in its Place, 1987) held that where secularisation has not occurred, secularism imposed from above provokes revivalism.
Assessment
Indian cultural secularisation advances through differentiation — markets, science, bureaucracy, law — not through decline of belief. That matters less for the polity than pessimists claim: Rajeev Bhargava argues Indian secularism seeks the de-politicisation of religion, not its exit from public life, so it need not wait for a secularised culture.
Conclusion
Cultural secularisation is the reordering of religion rather than its retreat: religion has left the command of economy and state and returned as identity, spectacle and mobilisation. The democratic task is not to secularise belief but to keep religion from becoming the currency of political power.