Living well together | The Indian Express

Living well together | The Indian Express

Written by Priya Kumar |Updated: July 23, 2019 12:37:33 am

Kumar is associate professor, Department of English at Delhi University and author of Limiting Secularism: The Ethics of Coexistence in Indian Literature and Film.

Living well together

‘Live and let live’ is a minimal requirement. Beyond it, there is neighbourliness.

It has become something of a truism to say that secularism in India has been expanded from its traditional concern with emancipation from religion, or the privatisation of religion.

Irena Akbar’s article (‘Secularism is no spectacle’, IE, July 11) responds to the widely divergent — and often hypocritical — media and political responses to the choices made by two young Muslim women, Nusrat Jahan and Zaira Wasim. My response does not seek to comment on the “choices” — saratorial or otherwise — exercised by these two women, rather, it addresses the larger issues raised by the article: The question of religious coexistence — what does it mean to “live well together” — and its entanglement with the concept of secularism in India.