Book Chapter

Indian National Identity: Secular or Hindu?

Charlton, Sue Ellen M.

2015,2014

Overview

The term \"communalism\" is used in the Indian sense to mean loyalties to and tensions among the communities of faith that characterize the various religious groups, especially Hindus and Muslims. The Mughal and British Empires were superimposed on a Hindu society that had been evolving for more than two thousand years when the first Muslim invasions in the tenth century began to undermine Hindu rule. The Mughal and British architectural, linguistic, and cultural imprint is found across the Asian subcontinent, but the heritage of these two empires is continually contested in debates about the Indian national identity. The years from 1946 to 1948 were years of political promise and tragedy for the new Indian nation-state. The chapter closes with a question that, though nearly buried for the first decades of the new republic, re-emerged in the 1980s: whether India is, and should be, a secular republic.

• Publisher: Routledge,Taylor & Francis Group
• ISBN: 0813348838, 9780813348834