Identity Politics in India and Europe by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

Roma Chatterji

Today, many people think of religion as such, or a particular religion as a threat.

What is your personal experience in this regard?

It depends on what you think of religion. I don’t think religion is a threat

in that way. I would possibly want to reformulate the question. What is

probably a threat is identity politics. The way that identities get defined,

religion may be used as a particular feature in the definition of identities

as opposites perhaps. I suppose it becomes a threat when it becomes a

diacritical mark. But questions of ideas and faith, and after all atheism,

could also be a form of religion. I wouldn’t think that anyone would

consider it a threat today. So it depends on what you mean by religion,

I suppose. And certainly that’s not the way sociologists have ever looked

at religion, when I think about it.

How has this perception of religion been reflected in your academic environment?

In my academic environment, I suppose, we lead a fairly sheltered life.

We are, after all, a central university. So I don’t think we would per-

ceive it in the way that, for instance, the University of Kashmir would

perceive it. I assume that it could be an experiential sort of threat that we

carry with us all the time. But again, as I said before, I think it’s more a

way of distinguishing different groups. And clearly, when it begins to

be articulated only as a way of distinguishing certain groups rather than

in any other way, then religion is a threat. Here in this department, in

fact, it’s a non-issue. Whether this is good or bad, I really don’t know,

but it really is a non-issue. So, I think, more than anywhere else it’s in

University departments where the separation between religion and

the rest of life takes place, where it is considered as being part of your

private sphere, not public at all, which you might say is at once removed

from the rest of the society.

Some perceive the West, Western modernity or Westernisation as a threat in India.

How do you relate to that?

I think the West is a term that is used very rhetorically. Again, it is not

one that I use ever myself because I have actually done fieldwork in the

194 IDENTITY POLITICS IN INDIA AND EUROPE

West as an anthropologist, in the Netherlands, and I have a fair amount

of knowledge of the US because I visit reasonably frequently. They’re

so different. Just think about the role of religion. It is kept— at least it

used to be, because I was looking at the welfare state in the 1980s—to

the private sphere in the Netherlands. Church membership had fallen.

It was a function of age. Now, if you go to the US and if you see how

important religion is as part of the public sphere it’s quite different.

I would say it’s far more visible in the lives of middle class people in the

US than in India. So in terms of the role of religion in people’s lives,

it depends on whether you mean a kind of religion of display or spect-

acle. That is certainly on the rise in the way that it defines public space

in different kinds of ways.

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