I first came in contact with CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) when I was invited to give a triad of lectures in what has become the famous B.N. Ganguly series. This was back in 1981, after the Centre itself had been going for almost two decades, although it was nearer to the beginning of the Ganguly lectures.

I jumped at the chance for a number of reasons. I had first visited India for an extended visit in the summer of 1956, which involved participating in an international meeting being held in Mysore, but which also gave the occasion to travel to many parts of the subcontinent. I was eager for a chance to go back. But there were also reasons which had to do with my intellectual trajectory in those days.

I had returned to Montreal from Oxford after completing my doctorate in 1961, and although my degree was in philosophy, there was no job in that area at McGill, and so I ended up in a political science department. In a way this suited me very well. I have always been interested in political theory, and was glad of the chance to teach this in a more systematic manner. But in another way, I found myself very dissatisfied with the assumptions which underlay much of American political science in those days, and which were having a growing influence on Canadian departments in general and ours in particular.

The reasons for this dissatisfaction were already crystallizing in my mind. The kind of science which seemed to me ill-founded took as its model the natural sciences (as these were understood in our department); in particular, they took as their aim the establishment of universal, that is, cross-cultural, generalizations (what they would call ‘laws’) on political behaviour: what determines voting, or the forming of coalitions, or what can be identified as the social and economic conditions of various regimes, especially democracy, and the like.

It was taken for granted that one could identify various actions (like voting), and various conditions (like levels of income or economic ‘development’) which would have similar effects in very different situations. In addition, these cross-national comparisons assumed that one could test populations for their attitudes to certain things – like honour, prosperity, equality, hierarchy – by administering questionnaires, suitably translated, to the people in different countries.

 

The faulty assumption leaps out at once in connection with this last kind of research: How can one be sure that the terms you are testing for have the same meaning in different societies? Does ‘honour’ have the same meaning to a Sicilian Mafioso, and a Scottish worker? Do you even know if what you think of as an adequate translation has a similar semantic force?

The difficulty here touches on linguistic meaning, but it obviously extends to ‘meaning’ in another sense: it involves the ‘meaning’ in the sense of the significance which (seemingly similar) actions like voting, forming alliances, and so on have in different cultures. A theoretical similarity in legal institutions (parliaments, civil service, etc.) by no means guarantees this similarity in significance.

In short, what was fatally missing in this kind of social science was a study of the common meanings which institutions and actions have for the participants and agents in different societies. Human science has in this quest for significance to be ‘hermeneutic’, to concern itself with the key terms which the people of a given society understand themselves. In other words, what was missing was what we might call the ‘ethnographic’ dimension of study.

 

Now my principal concern at the time was that this kind of putatively ‘universal’ science of laws was inapt for the study of our western societies, which were quite different from each other. American political science had an ethnocentric cast, even if you considered its application to other western societies. Moreover, American society itself contained differences of which the mainstream ‘behaviouralist’ science took inadequate account, and beside this, western societies were hardly static; they were involved in constant change. We had just been through one of these epochal shifts in the youth culture and rebellions of the late ’60s and early ’70s. This cried out for some hermeneutical account of what was afoot in these movements, which saw new kinds of demands come to the fore. What politics was about, the stakes we were struggling over, were changing, often in subtle and not-so-obvious ways, and we couldn’t come to grips with these if we assumed that static and perennial ‘interests’ were always driving the process.

And, of course, one of the main points where a sense of disconnection with reality forced itself on me was the experience of politics in Quebec, with its nationalist demands which didn’t fit neatly in the general categories of western politics as then understood. A good part of what was at stake could only be adequately expressed in terms of the politics of recognition, which I was struggling to articulate at the time.

But, I reflected at the time, if this paradigm of political study doesn’t even fit the societies that invented it, how much less relevant must it be in a quite different civilization. The person who first gave me notice of the invitation to deliver the Ganguly lectures described the CSDS as a group of scholars who were trying to work out a really adequate language to understand the society and politics of contemporary India. The prospect of being able to have some contact with a project so parallel to my own, but involving a much greater break with mainstream political science, couldn’t but intrigue and attract me. So I eagerly accepted the invitation.

 

I arrived in Delhi in March 1981, an ideal time of year, particularly if you’re flying in from the UK with its dreary skies (I had been teaching for a while at Oxford). I met Rajni Kothari, and also Ashis Nandy, and my initial sense that some really important intellectual change was in the making was greatly reinforced. The sense of affinity and attraction became all the stronger when I saw that this intellectual enterprise was powered in part by a political commitment to democracy and equality. I became an instant adherent to the CSDS project, and was overjoyed at the thought that some of my reflections might be of some use to those who were carrying it out.

It was more than ten years before I managed to get back to India, but I remained in contact with people around the Centre, and began to follow some of the arguments. And in the course of this time, the centre of gravity of my reflections on a hermeneutical social science began to change. Along with a number of others, I began more explicitly to question the understanding of ‘modernity’ as a single bundle of related institutional and cultural changes, taking place globally, and affecting all societies, albeit some earlier than others. Modernization was seen as the journey of a vast caravan, in which some societies were in the vanguard, defining the road to be travelled by all, and others were following behind, some towards the front, others trailing far in the rear. But all had to accept the regnant definition of what ‘modernity’ means. We can’t be too surprised that western thinkers thought in these terms in the early 20th century, when European countries still held on to their vast empires, and didn’t have to deal seriously with the demands of other peoples. But by the end of the century, this entire outlook began to look increasingly weird and distorted.

 

The shift that many people made in my generation was to a notion of alternative’ or ‘multiple’ modernities. We can speak of ‘modernities’ in the plural, because the changes in different societies involved analogous features, mostly at the institutional level. Societies in all parts of the world developed modern states, engaged in transforming their societies (the key word here was ‘development’); these states possessed bureaucracies, they fostered industrial economies, linked to international trade, and this process triggered off migrations, the growth of cities, some degree of social mobility, and so on. It sometimes led to the formation of representative institutions, whether democratic or not. But the cultural changes, the new forms of social imaginary, which made these institutional changes possible, were very different, and in the nature of things had to be. It couldn’t be otherwise, because each society has to call on its historical culture, modes of sociability, types of organization, in order to wreak the transformation in these which could form the basis for state, bureaucracy, nation, market economy, and the rest. The modernities were analogous, but the paths which made these generally similar institutions possible were particular in each case, and emerged from a peculiar history, whose specific difference had to be grasped and adequately articulated in each case, if the process of modernity was to be properly understood in each society.

As my immediate contacts with CSDS resumed and became more frequent in the 1990s and 2000s, the links and contrasts with India became for me the principal context in which I thought out my own path to this now very common idea of multiple modernities. This had a profound effect on my work. When I launched on the (too gigantic) enterprise of writing what became A Secular Age, in which I had to deal with mainstream secularization theory, I deliberately broke with the framework of universality in which this theory is usually placed. Instead of trying to explain the process of secularization as the path of the universal caravan with the West at its head, I deliberately set myself the task of accounting for this process in the context of the West (or more precisely Latin Christendom). My idea from the beginning was that this particularist way of posing the question could facilitate a more fruitful approach, to which people from other civilizations could react by saying: ‘That’s not what happened here’, and in the process of articulating why, we might both discover something more about the trajectories our respective societies have travelled. I am very pleased that the book has sparked interesting exchanges with Indian historians and political theorists.

 

Both sides can gain greatly from this kind of exchange, wherein we come to articulate better our own society through a clarifying contrast with another. This type of contrast can be carried out monologically, and often is; it frequently ends up in sterile self-congratulation, as one contrasts one’s own splendid civilization or religion with some caricature of the other’s inferior one. But dialogically, in the attempt to reach a common understanding of the differences, it can be extremely fruitful. Each benefits from the comparison with an external interlocutor. You grasp better what you are when you get clearer what you are not.

But this kind of exchange can also afford you another kind of insight. Your way may have seemed before as the only possible one; no alternative was conceivable. Whereas now your grasp of the other may suggest an alter-native way of dealing even with your own situation.

 

A good example of this emerged from the international discussions of scholars around the issue of the best type of secularist régime. Rajeev Bhargava’s attempts to define the bases of Indian secularism opened up new possibilities for people in the West. Indian secularism responds to a condition where a virtually unlimited religious diversity has existed since time out of mind. Western secularism has often been concerned with overcoming and pushing back the hegemony of one dominant confession. Of course, issues of religious domination, both intra- and inter-confessional, arise in India, but this doesn’t alter the fact that the main issues of Indian secularism concern how to live fairly and democratically with wide diversity, while in the West the question is often put in terms of defining and then policing the proper place for religion in political society.

But the West itself is rapidly diversifying religiously; both migration and the creation of new outlooks have shattered the earlier confessional monopolies. And so Bhargava’s account of Indian secularism, which starts with the basic principles of liberty and equality that this régime strives to protect and maximize, offers the possibility of defining western secularist rules and institutions in the same way, instead of focusing in our traditional fashion first and foremost on the place of religion in society. The insight that some of us followed out is that the formula which emerges out of Indian historical experience also might suit us in the West, now that we have grown beyond religious monopoly to ever-widening diversity. This is the insight that I and my co-Chairman of the Quebec Commission on Reasonable Accommodation built on in our definition of the kind of laïcité which we think best suits Quebec today. And I and a colleague on the commission, Jocelyn McLure, later published a short book laying out this general formula.¹

 

These exchanges not only lead to greater self-understanding, but can also bring about creative borrowing. But the exchange also suggests a clarification by contrast on the Indian side. What was the basis of the epochs of religious coexistence in a genuine acceptance of diversity which we find in Indian history, such as the Maurya Empire under Ashoka, or the Mughal Empire under Akbar? Historians, even Indian historians, have tended to talk here about ‘toleration’. But this word has its proper place in modern European history. Starting from a basic presumption that society ought to be unified by some orthodox religious belief, conformity with which was enforced by the ruling power, we in the West gradually moved away from this through a series of concessions to minority dissidence, defined as measures of ‘toleration’. The assumption was that the norm was conformity, but that a certain measure of deviation could be allowed, if that helped things to run more smoothly.

Hence the rebellion against the notion of toleration in the contemporary West, because of the background understanding of this term in our history, that it is a reluctant concession offered to certain minorities which absolved them from the ‘normal’ demand that they conform. On the contrary, many people protest, in a modern society founded on rights, I practice my religion (or non- or anti-religion) without needing anyone’s permission or any kind ‘concession’. This whole background to the issue of toleration in the West was missing in India. The admirable periods of peaceful and creative religious diversity have to be understood in different terms. What are these terms?

A number of Indian scholars are now trying to articulate what they must have been, consulting the texts (and rock edicts) of the past. In my last visit to the CSDS, as the Rajni Kothari visiting professor in 2011, I had the privilege of participating as an ‘external’ (and lamentably ignorant) interlocutor in some discussions with the director, Rajeev Bhargava, on exactly this question, discussions from which I learned a great deal.

 

Coming thirty years after my first contact with the Centre, these discussions reflect the way in which this exceptional institution has figured in my intellectual trajectory as I have become more and more involved in questions of multiple modernities; hoping perhaps to help in a minor way to further the Centre’s goals, and certainly learning an immense amount in the process.

I realize that this essay has been largely autobiographical, explaining what the Centre has meant to me. I have not tried to describe the great progress that the Centre has made towards its original goal of finding the languages with which to understand Indian society, and particularly Indian democracy. The work of younger scholars like Yogendra Yadav shows how much has been accomplished in this field. But my hope is that my idiosyncratic take on the Centre and its work will find echoes in the experience of many other scholars who have visited it over the years.

 

Footnote:

1. Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor, Laïcité et Liberté de Conscience. Boréal, Montréal, 2010.