Religion in India always had the potential of becoming a source of social and political violence. Even the independent secular democratic republic of India in August 1947 was born from a protracted and horrendous religio-political conflict (between groups claiming to speak for the Hindu majority and Muslim minority), a conflict that led to the infamous Partition, the splitting up of British India into the two independent countries: Muslim majority Pakistan and secular Hindu majority India. The Partition of 1947 made the issue of religion in India forever into something constitutionally and politically highly sensitive, if not outright perilous. It is against this background that Geetanjali Srikantan’s book offers an important new take on religion in India, especially in relation to Indian legal theory.

The principal topic of discussion in this work is about how to define religion in a Hindu and Muslim context. Throughout her book, Srikantan argues that the concept of religion as used in Indian legal theory and legal decisions and Indian law itself is ultimately based on Christian concepts of religion. These, according to her, include even notions such as secularisation, emphasis on beliefs, and a normative order (cf. pp. 30-34). Christianity, being a universal and proselytising religious movement, laid down a moral order that was supposed to be applicable always and everywhere. ‘Natural law also reflects God’s will and can be found in divine law as well as in human reason and conscience’, Srikantan aptly observes about this Christian perception (p. 36). Precisely this perception was brought to bear on the Indian (Hindu and Islamic) legal reality of early colonial India by British administrators and legal experts trying to codify what they thought constituted Hindu ‘law’ (selected Dharmashastras) and Islamic ‘law’ (mainly the Quran and the Sharia). The Christian bias of British administrators made them look for fixed written texts such as ‘scriptures’ to go by when dealing with non-Christian religions (see for example pp. 46-54). In her detailed historical analyses of the development of ‘Hindu Law’ and ‘Anglo-Muhammadan Law’ in British India, Srikantan is elaborately explaining the fundamentally Christian understanding and bias of the idea of religion (chapters 2 and 3).

In the fourth chapter of her study Srikantan applies her historical analysis to a major issue, namely the disputes and conflicts around places of worship in India. She argues that regulating by law the places of worship and legal mediation in disputes on such matters, is difficult since there is no possibility the Indian courts of law can identify what exactly ‘religion’ is. Secular Indian legal reasoning in this case is influenced by Christian theological frameworks that ‘produce’ categories like ‘Hindu law’. But then in legal practice ‘Hindu law’ as a category turns out to be intractable. Another example is the legal category of ‘place of worship’: this operates within the legal framework of charitable institutions, something that was adopted from English law and is not adaptable to the Indian situation. Quoting and discussing numerous legal cases of Hindu and Muslim disputes on places of worship, Srikantan demonstrates how the categories of ‘religion’, ‘place of worship’, and ‘charitable institution’ cause confusion and contradictory legal opinions in Indian courts of law. One of the points she stresses in chapter four is that the British in India understood ‘religion’ primarily as universal codified ‘scriptural’ doctrine informing actual practices, and this understanding remains undisputed in independent India. She notes that when Indian judges rely ‘on doctrine’ this ‘does not help in finding out whether [religious] practices are essential or not as it leads to inconsistency’ (p. 168). Because Indian judges apply categories that are alien to Indian religious realities, they make contradictory and inconsistent judgements. Furthermore, ‘the conditions that generate the legal category of the religious place are also the conditions that generate the application of [religious] doctrine’ (p. 170). The inconsistency is that local religious practices do not always follow, or flow from, sets of universally valid doctrines that are supposed to define these practices. In chapter five Srikantan continues this line of analysis and concludes that regarding the present Indian legal system ‘understanding the difficulties that Indian courts have in defining religion … judges carelessly advocat[e] social reform in line with … secularism practised by the secular state’ (p 203). In other words, Indian secularism is perhaps a Christian theological and therefore a foreign concept. Based on such a concept the judges in independent India must deal with legal disputes involving religion; and in this context some judges have applied constitutional notions of secularism to promote social reforms. The examples of this she provides in her discussion of a dispute regarding a Swaminarayan temple in Ahmedabad (see pp. 185-203).

In her conclusion Srikantan proposes that ‘legal reasoning is dependent on generating coherence’, but ‘legal discourse on religion in India today is replete with disjunctures and dissonance’. The legal discourse is informed by a normative ‘analysis which dominates current discussions of law and religion’ and this ‘needs to be rejected in favour of a historical understanding of law’ so that ‘fresh solutions can be generated to resolve current imbroglios’ (p. 212). Srikantan thus supports a more historical approach to what religion in the Indian legal theory should entail, and she rejects what she perceives as the present-day normative approach that derived from British (i.e. Christian) legal practice and was introduced in India during the colonial period.

It is obvious that this study addresses an important question in Indian legal practice and theory: how to understand ‘religion’ as a legal category in India. Concepts such as ‘religion’ or ‘Hinduism’ have evoked passionate and intense scholarly debates as Srikantan briefly shows in her introductory chapter. These debates are mostly conducted from a post-colonial vantage point and done by modern historians, social theorists and scholars of religion. Srikantan is probably among the very few who have made these insights relevant for Indian legal theory.

Srikantan mentions as one of the important sources of her analysis of the concept of religion the Indian anthropologist S.N Balagangadhara (cf. Srikantan pp. 8, 20, 32-34, 46, 54, 104, 137). The latter, of course, has famously argued that Western understanding of Hinduism (as indeed of other non-Christian religions such as Buddhism, Jainism etc.) was largely shaped by deeply ingrained Christian theological biases (Balagangadhara 1994). Balagangadhara’s observation seems justified. In connection with Hinduism there is a general tendency to still describe it in terms of doctrines and beliefs, whereas the lived experience of Hinduism seems to point more to the central importance of local practices and customs. It was perhaps only in the nineteenth century that Hindu reformers tried to mould Hinduism into a somewhat Christian model: i.e. identifying Hindu scriptures as the basis for ‘reformed’ Hindu doctrines and beliefs (cf. van Bijlert 2021: 5-18; 42-63). However, it is the same Balagangadhara who argues against Western Christian ‘secularism’ in the Indian Constitution and against conversion from Hinduism to other religions (Balagangadhara 2012: 198-227). It is perhaps just as well that Srikantan is trying to start a fresh debate on secularism in India. She maintains that the ‘secularist project is … essential for the success of the modern democratic state’ but while secularism ‘assumes that religion is easily identifiable’, it ‘does not achieve the political consensus that it is supposed to achieve’ (p. 4). And this would be due to the alien, viz. Christian theological, understanding of the concept of religion. There is no denying that much Indian thinking on religion is informed by Christianity (cf. once more van Bijlert 2021) and that even much international secular academic debate on religion may still hark back to notions that have originated from Christian theology (which is the main argument in Balagangadhara 1994). Therefore, it is certainly appropriate to investigate the range of associations connected with the notion of religion as Srikantan does in her extremely well-researched study. One would really hope that the book contributes to a rational and humanistic approach to religion in India, in line with letter and the spirit of the first 51 articles of the Constitution of India.

It is very useful for the reader to find the around hundred legal cases listed alphabetically with their relevant page numbers in an appendix. Her bibliography illustrates her wide reading in related theory and history. The index of the book is elaborate and extremely useful for quick reference.

There are perhaps a few small notes of criticism: (a) Srikantan discusses only two major Indian religions in her book and draws on legal cases involving them: Hinduism and Islam. But what about Christianity in India? Christians form the second largest minority religious community in India, after Muslims. And what about disputes involving Sikhs and Buddhists? Nevertheless, also in the case of these other minority religions, the lack of workable definitions of the concept of what constitutes religion from an Indian legal point of view, would probably not seriously alter Srikantan’s findings. Any legal definition of religion suitable for the overall Indian situation would always have to first involve Hinduism and Islam. And (b), it is remarkable that Srikantan consistently refers to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as ‘Semitic’ religions (cf. pp. 8, 20, 46, 136, 137, 151). This term is not in use in most academic religious studies writings. The more common designation is ‘Abrahamic’ religions. It is perhaps important to note that the term ‘Semitic religions’ is also consistently used by Balagangadhara to denote Judaism, Christianity and Islam (cf. for example Balagangadhara 2012: 12, 202-241).

A few remarks about the copy-editing of this book. It is published by Cambridge University Press which guarantees, one assumes, a text relatively free from errors. Unfortunately, this book has dozens of errors: misprints, misspellings, awkward sentences, etc. This is not to disparage the author. Removing errors as much as possible would have been the task of a copy editor. But apart from this the book is highly recommended reading for legal theorists, modern historians, students of religious studies, and social scientists.

References

Balagangadhara, S.N. 1994. The Heathen in His Blindness …: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

Balagangadhara, S.N. 2012. Reconceptualizing India Studies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Bijlert, van Victor A. 2021. Vedantic Hinduism in Colonial Bengal: Reformed Hinduism and Western Protestantism. London and New York: Routledge.