The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Ira Raja’s class Beyond Ethics: Critical Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism (summer semester 2022), which explored a layered understanding of a conceptual perspective on cosmopolitanism whose capacity for understanding, critiquing and negotiating the world in which we live today is beginning to be questioned.

The novel A Dying Banyan is a story of duress. Set against the anxious backdrop of a modernizing India, we see a problematization of the distinctions between the religious and the secular. This modernity never ceases to call into question our attempts at carving out a place for ourselves; in fact, what we find in the novel is that secular civility often claims to repudiate (or silently tolerate) all religiosity only to replace it with a dogma of its own. In A Dying Banyan, the dream of secularism can be understood, however, within the context of an apparent assault on the private sphere. The elderly Abbu, for instance, recounts to our narrator (Rashida) a period in the late seventies and early eighties where India was fraught with heightened tensions surrounding the consolidation of religious identities, both Hindu and Islamic. “Religion—so far confined to the four walls of one’s home—had taken to the streets,” says Abbu. (Ahtesham 61) It was a time in which new borders were established in the name of religion; many of those who did not comply were butchered by rioters or generally ostracized, forcing many to flee. In all cases, there is a palpable sense of homelessness, in which the right to stand one’s ground where one had previously taken root is encroached upon. Despite all of this strife, Abbu insists he and his wife were able to stay together, by crafting a love outside of the confines of religion. In contrast to Abbu, his wife is highly religious—their love representing a cosmopolitan space of co-existence within the novel. Abbu thereby advises the young Rashida to carve out a space for herself in a similar fashion, for “nothing new can take place in the barren soil of religion. However, culture—a thing apart—is not static: it keeps changing with the times.” (Ahtesham 63)

The chapter ends abruptly with Rashida—exhausted as it were from this grim retelling of events—tossing and turning in bed as no dream of her own manages to overtake her. Here, the metaphor is clear. Rashida bears within her the imperative we are all subject to: despite having been uprooted, we are expected to have a story to tell that we may own as private property; a space we carve out for our individuality so that it may be exchanged with others. In particular, Rashida suffers from the demand that her experience be “valid.” We can imagine the secularist Abbu insisting that she has culture, culture does not have her.

As Priya Kumar writes of secular societies: “Collective identities or attachments of any sort—other than nationalism —are viewed as dangerous and regressive and can be tolerated only if they are contained within the domestic or private sphere.” (Kumar 28) Liberals, as positivists, believe that individuals have culture or religious beliefs, not the other way around. My home country of the United States, for example, prides itself on its supposed secular civility. Its hallmark separation of church and state could more accurately be read as Martin Luther’s Two Kingdom doctrine: whereby the temporal kingdom has no authority on matters relating to the spiritual kingdom. It is fundamentally Protestant, despite the United States’ secular ambitions; seen in this light, religion is not something apart from secular matters, it is superior to them. After all, if you believed your soul was in jeopardy given your stance on abortion, would you in any way authorize it, despite your attempts to be a rational agent?

This situation is similar to what disenchants Suhail’s character in the novel. As he attempts to follow in his father’s secular footsteps, he discovers that the secular model is rife with distinctions and divisions of a religious type. Having been ostracized by both the fundamentalists as well as the secularists, Suhail’s primary crime is refusing to subordinate truth to something exchangeable. This all presents an uncomfortable possibility to cosmopolitans; that being, if we are to lend an ear to those of different religious backgrounds in the name of our secularity, we are simply subordinating their subjective experience to our own culture’s division between private and public reason. In this light, our impulse to shake Suhail’s angst-ridden shoulders, so that he may provide a counterpoint to his pessimistic woes, may very well negate our cosmopolitan aim to mediate between the religious and the secular in a fruitful way, lest we fall prey to imposing a false (in my case, Western) notion of objectivity onto our reading of Rashida and Suhail‘s disenchantment.

Caleb Smith

Works Cited

Ahtesham Mañzūra. A Dying Banyan. Rupa & Co., 2005.

Kumar, P. Limiting secularism: The ethics of coexistence in Indian literature and film. 2008.