Despite provocations, the majority of India’s 80 per cent Hindu population has not succumbed to majoritarianism. Jews fleeing persecution in Europe and the Middle East too found refuge in India’s southern states, living in peace with Muslims and Christians amid a Hindu majority. The communalisation of Goa’s social fabric was caused not by India’s innate secular ethos but by Portugal’s …
At a time when the fault lines are becoming starker, how corrosive and baffling it would be to define the boundaries of an accepted Indian-ness along lines of Hindu and Muslim otherness? “The Hindu, like the eunuch,” wrote James Mill in the early 19th century, “excels in the qualities of a slave.” Through these sentiments, the Scottish historian, economist and …
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