Jakob De Roover
Ghent University, Comparative Science of Cultures, Faculty Member
- Political Theory, Religion and Politics, History of Political Thought, Secularisms and Secularities, Comparative Secularism, Liberalism and Toleration, and 27 moreSecularism, Comparative Science of Cultures, Political Philosophy, Comparative Religion, Political Theology, Law and Religion, Secularization, Indian Politics, John Locke, Separation of Church and State, History of Colonial India, Lautsi v Italy, Religious Studies, India, Liberalism, Hinduism, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Religious Conversion, Politics of Secularism, Freedom of Religion, Comparative Political Theory, Post-Colonialism, Religion, Comparative Philosophy, Indian studies, Intellectual History, and South Asian Historyedit
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... Record Details. Record ID, 354762. Record Type, journalArticle. Author, Sarah Claerhout [801001730802] - Ghent University [email protected]; Jakob De Roover [801001577622] - Ghent University [email protected]. ...
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Abstract: Early modern political thought transformed toleration from a prudential consideration into a moral obligation. Three questions need to be answered by any explanation of this transition: Did religious toleration really become an... more
Abstract: Early modern political thought transformed toleration from a prudential consideration into a moral obligation. Three questions need to be answered by any explanation of this transition: Did religious toleration really become an obligation of the state in this period? If ...
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In discussions about religious freedom in India, the country’s conflict regarding conversion plays a central role. The Constitution’s freedom of religion clause, Article 25, grants the right “freely to profess, practise and propagate... more
In discussions about religious freedom in India, the country’s conflict regarding conversion plays a central role. The Constitution’s freedom of religion clause, Article 25, grants the right “freely to profess, practise and propagate religion,” but this has generated a dispute about the meaning of the right ‘to propagate’ and its relation to the freedom to convert. The recognition of this right is said to be the result of a key debate in the Constituent Assembly of India. To find out which ideas and arguments gave shape to this debate and the resulting religious freedom clause, we turn to the Assembly’s deliberations and come to a surprising conclusion: indeed, there was disagreement about conversion among the Assembly members, but this never took the form of a debate. Instead, there was a disconnect between the member’s concerns, objections, and comments concerning the draft article on the one hand, and the Assembly’s decision about the religious freedom clause on the other. If a k...
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The call for a “comparative political theory” (CPT) that includes non-western perspectives into political theory is about two decades old. Still it finds itself unable to either carry out the task adequately or identify the obstacles... more
The call for a “comparative political theory” (CPT) that includes non-western perspectives into political theory is about two decades old. Still it finds itself unable to either carry out the task adequately or identify the obstacles satisfyingly. If theoretical knowledge generated by other cultures is gleaned from their texts, and most of us read non-Western theories in translations, could the knowledge imparted by translations be one of the hindrances for a creative dialogue? To investigate this question, we look concretely into the issue of translational fidelity by taking an important verse from an Indian text also well-known to many political and social theorists, viz., the book on ‘The Laws of Manu’. We analyze the translations, the alleged ideology it expresses and provide an alternative. We show that CPT can reach its goal, only if its inputs are ‘correct’ texts and not interpretations masquerading as translations.
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The classical account of the Brahmin priestly class and its role in Indian religion has seen remarkable continuity during the past two centuries. Its core claims appear to remain unaffected, despite the major shifts that occurred in the... more
The classical account of the Brahmin priestly class and its role in Indian religion has seen remarkable continuity during the past two centuries. Its core claims appear to remain unaffected, despite the major shifts that occurred in the theorizing of Indian culture and in the study of religion. In this article, we first examine the issue of the power and status of the Brahmin and show how it generates explanatory puzzles today. We then turn to 18th-and 19th-century sources to identify the cognitive conditions which sustained the classical account of the Brahmin priest and allowed for its transmission. Three clusters of concepts were crucial here: Christian-theological ideas concerning heathen priesthood and idolatry; racial notions of biological and cultural superiority and inferiority; and anthropological speculations about 'primitive man' and his 'magical thinking'. While all three clusters were rejected by 20th-and 21st-century scholarship, the related claims about Brahmanical ritual power continue to be presented as facts. What accounts for this peculiar combination of continuities and discontinuities in the study of (ancient) Indian religion? We turn to some insights from the philosophy of science to sketch a route toward answering this question.
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By arguing that a new ‘School’ is crystallising in the study of India, Deborah Sutton (2018) has brought to the surface phenomena that are typical of any encounter between competing research traditions. Some difficulties of understanding... more
By arguing that a new ‘School’ is crystallising in the study of India, Deborah Sutton (2018) has brought to the surface phenomena that are typical of any encounter between competing research traditions. Some difficulties of understanding are caused by conceptual change: in the dominant research tradition, ‘Hinduism’ and ‘the caste system’ refer to structures that exist in Indian society; in the research programme developed by Balagangadhara, these terms designate experiential entities embedded in a western cultural experience of India. This conceptual divide also extends to the empirical: because the study of caste and Hinduism is collapsing under the weight of accumulated anomalies, certain problems are crucial to the alternative theorising of the Ghent School, whereas they seem irrelevant to the dominant tradition. Sutton engages in the polemics characteristic of confrontations between competing research traditions. She distorts and domesticates unfamiliar ideas from this School by mapping them onto notions familiar to her. Consequently, she confuses Balagangadhara’s hypotheses about colonial consciousness with hackneyed stories about ‘Orientalism’. The article concludes with a puzzle: Why does Sutton recognise a group of researchers as a new School, while trying to dismiss them as ‘acolytes’ who reproduce the ‘mantras’ and ‘dogmas’ of an Indian thinker?
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India's legal system gives a decisive role to membership of a specific set of caste groups. Groups included in the schedule attached to the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950 are the beneficiaries of special protections and... more
India's legal system gives a decisive role to membership of a specific set of caste groups. Groups included in the schedule attached to the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950 are the beneficiaries of special protections and provisions. This legislation appears to discriminate on grounds of caste. However, the Supreme Court permits such special treatment under the condition that the classification is reasonable: for one, it must be founded on intelligible differentiae which distinguish the persons grouped together from others left out of the group. Which intelligible differentiae then distinguish the groups that belong to the Scheduled Castes? This essay argues that this question was never answered in any satisfactory manner. The Constituent Assembly simply accepted the colonial division of the Indian population into 'Caste Hindus' and 'Depressed Classes'. Yet, the colonial administration had also failed to find empirical tests that allowed it to identify the 'Depressed Classes' as a distinct set of castes. The notion of 'untouchability' did not help here, because it functioned as a label used to name a collection of practices. It was unclear how to identify the victims at the receiving end of 'untouchability', since these practices could be found both among groups classified as Depressed Classes and among those considered Caste Hindus. The conclusion is puzzling: in 1936, the British Monarch ordered how the people of India should be divided into Scheduled Castes and others. Since 1947, Indian political and intellectual elites have enforced this decree in their country through caste legislation.
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Chapter published in: Western Foundations of the Caste System, eds. Martin Fárek, Dunkin Jalki, Sufiya Pathan, and Prakash Shah, 173-220. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Introduction and first chapter of a new book: Even though ‘the crisis of secularism’ was declared decades ago, it remains unresolved. This book argues that its roots are internal to the liberal model of secularism, which emerged from the... more
Introduction and first chapter of a new book: Even though ‘the crisis of secularism’ was declared decades ago, it remains unresolved. This book argues that its roots are internal to the liberal model of secularism, which emerged from the religious dynamics of the Protestant Reformation. In Europe and India, this model has gone hand in hand with an intolerant anticlerical theology that rejects certain traditions as evil ‘political religion’. Consequently, liberal secularism often harms local forms of coexistence rather than nourishing them.
Research Interests: Christianity, Hinduism, Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Indian studies, and 14 moreSouth Asian Studies, Protestantism, Secularization, History of Political Thought, Comparative Secularism, Modern Indian History, Secularisms and Secularities, Liberalism and Toleration, Tolerance, Comparative Political Theory, Religious Toleration, India, Religious Studies, and Political Thought
Today, some commentators argue that the caste system in India is founded in Hinduism; others deny this is the case. This article argues that we do not possess any conceptual apparatus to address this question today, because it was... more
Today, some commentators argue that the caste system in India is founded in Hinduism; others deny this is the case. This article argues that we do not possess any conceptual apparatus to address this question today, because it was originally raised and answered in a Christian-theological context. The secularization of a Protestant-Christian notion of false religion gave shape to the European conception of ‘the caste system’ as an immoral social hierarchy. Basic theological ideas about the connection between false religion and social practice were transformed into topoi of social theorizing, which constituted the caste system as an experiential entity and conceptual unit in the Western cultural experience of India.
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In countries as far apart as the US and India, courts of law have faced the difficult question of deciding what counts as religion. In such cases, judges and other legal authorities end up smuggling in a particular theological conception... more
In countries as far apart as the US and India, courts of law have faced the difficult question of deciding what counts as religion. In such cases, judges and other legal authorities end up smuggling in a particular theological conception of religion into secular courts of law and rejecting certain practices or beliefs as not truly (and therefore only falsely) religious. My chapter argues that this happens because the religious and the secular were originally configured within the Christian religion in relation to a third sphere, that of idolatry and false religion. During the expansion of Roman-Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity, clerical authorities were obsessed with drawing the line between the 'secular' sphere of practices indifferent to religion and that of idolatrous practices. My argument explains this tendency in terms of a particular theory of religion and shows how the trichotomy between the (truly) religious, the secular and the idolatrous or falsely religious was necessary to the dynamic of expansion of the Christian religion. It then examines the case of colonial India and its legal system to show how the sphere of idolatry and false religion disappeared from the equation. The hypothesis is that the notion of false religion had become an obstacle to an internal Christian dynamic of expansion or 'secularization', whereby Christian structures are spread in secular guise. However, the realm of false religion remains present implicitly in the institutions and practice of secular law and, thus, certain models of religion are spread insidiously.
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The principles of liberal political theory are often said to be “freestanding.” Are they indeed sufficiently detached from the cultural setting where they emerged to be intelligible to people with other backgrounds? To answer this... more
The principles of liberal political theory are often said to be “freestanding.” Are they indeed sufficiently detached from the cultural setting where they emerged to be intelligible to people with other backgrounds? To answer this question, this essay examines the Indian secularism debate and develops a hypothesis on the process whereby liberal principles crystallized in the West and spread elsewhere. It argues that the secularization of western political thought has not produced independent rational principles, but transformed theological ideas into the “topoi” of a culture. Like all topoi, the principles of liberalism depend on other clusters of ideas present in western societies. When they migrate to new settings, the absence of these surrounding ideas presents fundamental obstacles to the interpretation and elaboration of liberal principles. The case of Indian secularism illustrates the cultural limitations of liberal political theory rather than showing its universal significance.
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This chapter raises three fundamental questions to clear the conceptual ground required for theory formation on the construction of Hinduism. First, the authors analyze the question ‘Is religion a construct?’ The claim that religion is... more
This chapter raises three fundamental questions to clear the conceptual ground required for theory formation on the construction of Hinduism. First, the authors analyze the question ‘Is religion a construct?’ The claim that religion is only a conceptual tool of the scholar, which does not refer to any empirical reality, they argue, fails to make sense in the absence of a theory of religion. However, this does not imply it is nonsensical to speak of the construction of Hinduism. ‘Is Hinduism a construct?’ is answered in the positive but qualified in a limited empirical sense. Third, the authors raise the question as to ‘What is constructed in the process of construction?’ On one hand, one could argue, as they do, that Hinduism has been created as a conceptual unit in certain descriptions of India. These descriptions have had impact upon Indian society, but this does not entail that Hindu religion exists in India today. On the other hand, one could suggest that Hinduism has come into being as an object also, a new religion that materialized on the subcontinent.
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Early modern political thought transformed toleration from a prudential consideration into a moral obligation. Three questions need to be answered by any explanation of this transition: Did religious toleration really become an obligation... more
Early modern political thought transformed toleration from a prudential consideration into a moral obligation. Three questions need to be answered by any explanation of this transition: Did religious toleration really become an obligation of the state in this period? If this was the case, how could tolerating heresy and idolatry possibly become a moral duty to Christians? How could Europeans both condemn practices as idolatrous and immoral, and yet insist that these practices ought to be tolerated? To answer these questions, the article shows how the early policy of toleration in British India was constituted by a Protestant theological framework. Toleration turned into a moral obligation, it is argued, because the Reformation had identified liberty in the religious realm as God’s will for humanity. This gave rise to a dynamic in which Christian states and churches were continuously challenged for their violations of religious liberty. The principle of toleration developed as a part of this dynamic.
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Page 1. Rethinking Colonialism and Colonial Consciousness The Case of Modern India SN Balagangadhara Esther Bloch Jakob De Roover Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap Ghent University Belgium Onderzoekscentrum Vergelijkende ...
Recently, scholars have disputed whether Locke’s political theory should be read as the groundwork of secular liberalism or as a Protestant political theology. Focusing on Locke’s mature theory of toleration, the article raises a central... more
Recently, scholars have disputed whether Locke’s political theory should be read as the groundwork of secular liberalism or as a Protestant political theology. Focusing on Locke’s mature theory of toleration, the article raises a central question: What if these two readings are compatible? That is, what would be the consequences if Locke’s political philosophy has theological foundations, but has also given shape to secular liberalism? Examining Locke’s theory in the Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), the article argues that this is indeed the case. The liberal model of toleration is a secularization of the theology of Christian liberty and its division of society into a temporal political kingdom and the spiritual kingdom of Christ. Therefore, when liberal toleration travels beyond the boundaries of the Christian West or when western societies become multicultural, it threatens to lose its intelligibility.
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There are few places in the contemporary world where the problems of religious pluralism are as acute as they are in India. The Indian case poses fundamental challenges to the political theory of toleration. By tackling the problem of... more
There are few places in the contemporary world where the problems of religious pluralism are as acute as they are in India. The Indian case poses fundamental challenges to the political theory of toleration. By tackling the problem of religious conversion, our analysis shows that the dominant way of conceiving state neutrality becomes untenable in the Indian context. The Indian state, modelled after the liberal democracies in the West, is the harbinger of religious conflict in India because of its conception of state neutrality. More of ‘secularism’ in India will end up feeding what it fights: the so-called ‘Hindu fundamentalism’.