Secular South Asia

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

>What is your definition of Ancient India?
>How many years is ancient?

May I suggest a quantitative measure? Taking the latest, latest possible
date for Rgveda as say 1000 BCE, let's say that the time scale we are
interested spans 3000 years. The Khilafat movement dates to 1914, i.e. 85
years. 17:600 is the probability of how much interest there will be on this
list in the Ottoman empire. It gets worse if we look at it logarithmically,
and/or if we weight it for the actual impact of the Khilafat movement in
India and elsewhere (almost zero, except for one high profile court case).

Discussions of the success or otherwise of secularization in south Asia,
whether secularization necessitates westernization (or vice versa), these
would all be highly interesting and perennial topics, but on another forum,
dedicated perhaps to politics and public policy in the subcontinent. Or
maybe on a list dedicated to *intelligent* discussions of British colonial
history.

Vidyasankar


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