Superficially speaking, Islamification looks very much like religious conversion, but it is not. The violent subduing of socio-cultural phenomena and… - S. N. Balagangadhara

What I hope will happen in India is that a generation will come which can look at the ravages wrought by colonialism and the post-independence institutions and start dismantling the useless and dangerous structures and start building anew. They will have to be intellectuals and builders, formed and shaped by the consequences of the current generation’s failures. Perhaps the grandchildren of the millennials. They will need intellectual tools and frameworks. It is for that posterity that I write.

If this is true, it also helps us understand why both ‘conversion’ and the notion of ‘secularism’ jars Indian sensibilities. Somehow or the other, Nehruvian ‘secularism’ always connotes a denigration of Indian traditions; if you look at the debates in the EPW and SEMINAR and journals like that, one thing is very clear: none of the participants really understands what ‘secularism’ means. In India, ‘secularism’ is counter posed to ‘communalism’ whereas ‘the secular’, in European languages, has only one contrast—‘the sacred’.

Going deeper into the history of these disciplines (with respect to India) drove home some lessons very deeply: in both form and content, there was pretty little to differentiate between the Christian missionary reports of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and the Indological tracts.