In a book published in 1865, When one travels, the French novelist and litterateur Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) speaks of his surprise at seeing a procession headed by a Catholic priest walking under a red canopy, a ciborium in his hands, followed by assistant priests, a church boy ringing a bell, with armed soldiers in tow. Along the procession route, people knelt down and recited prayers. This religious march was staged to deliver the last sacraments to a dying person. Gautier saw this ceremonial display in the streets of Caen, a town in Normandy, and he expressed his astonishment: in the mid-nineteenth century, such a spectacle, he remarked, was already a rare sight in the streets of the capital. He wrote: “In Paris, religion does not take the risk of leaving sanctuaries or churches. We have long been unaccustomed to seeing such external manifestations of ritual life.”
This remark illuminates the rapid (yet also chaotic) process of secularisation in the capital in nineteenth-century France, almost sixty years after the Revolution, and the persistent hostility of French Republican forces towards the Catholic religion. However, the comparison with Nepal is even more illuminating! Throughout Hindu and Buddhist Nepal, public space, whether urban or rural, has so far been widely used for religious processions. Cohorts of Nepalis march in ceremonial order, in line or in corteges, in the streets during funerals, weddings, bratabandhas, various vratas, and on so many other similar occasions. At festive times, people take part in the ritual march or watch the divine parade in the public space which is usually devoted to secular activities.
Interestingly, what can still be seen in Nepali cities (and in most Indian towns as well), was common in pre-revolutionary times in Catholic-dominated France and during the whole of the nineteenth century in its provinces and rural areas. These collective, processional performances in the public space have slowly declined in Europe over the ages. They have almost totally disappeared today, except in some Southern-European Catholic countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal), which are more resistant to the process of secularisation, and on some rare special occasions such as official visits by the Pope. Protestants in northern and central Europe were the first to put an end to these practices and to turn to an interiorised form of religion.
The process I would like to stress here is precisely the privatisation of religion. In North America and Western Europe, this phenomenon is recognised by sociologists as a central process to the development of modernity. In a word, religion in these countries has increasingly become a matter of individual choice rather than of social obligations. The situation is drastically different in South Asia. In Nepal, religion is still a public act performed in a public arena. Rituals and ceremonies are performed in view of everybody and of the gods whose abodes are scattered throughout the public space. Rituals are put on display; they are not only part of the family but of broader social life. There is no distinction between private and public affairs in these matters. In the whole of South Asia, including Nepal, religion is in fact still a holistic subject. Personal faith is still encompassed by widely shared communal values regarding morals and social status.
Making religion a private domain implies a separation of the transcendental realm from other spheres, related to the life of a country, including its politics. The streets belong to the citizens and their representative organisations, not to devotees and followers of such and such a religion. The same logic has recently led French authorities to ban ostensible religious signs expressing a person’s sense of belonging to a specific faith, such as the Islamic scarf (but also the Christian cross) in schools. In sociological terms, this privatisation of religion is closely associated with both secularisation, i.e. the process by which religious values are losing weight in society, and with modernisation. However, the term secularisation insists more on the decline of religious beliefs and practices, whereas privatisation refers more to a change in the way one expresses one’s beliefs and practices.
Secularism, a term coined in England in the nineteenth century, has yet another meaning. It involves two basic prescriptions. The first is the strict separation of the state from religious institutions (very few countries have achieved this goal). The second is that people of different religions and beliefs are equal before the law. Secularism is therefore more a political concept, such as democracy (to which it is closely related), related to the proper governance of a country. In Nepal today, it is associated more or less with minority rights. In contrast, secularisation is more a sociological word, focusing on the position of religion in society. All these terms need to be set apart to avoid confusion in debates and any misunderstandings.
Unfortunately, the common meanings of these words are not totally distinct. The connotation of the word secularism sometimes overlaps with what is meant by secularisation. Both terms ultimately lead to the withdrawal of religion from public life, even when seen through a South Asian lens. In Westerners’ eyes, Nepal is everything but a secular country. It is difficult to understand how a country where religion is still all-pervading and where the political realm is so overloaded with religious symbols can be called ‘secular’. Similarly, how secular can a country be where most offices remain closed for weeks during two major Hindu festivals, Dashain and Tihar, a period during which most people are busy making offerings to the gods. All in all, the proclamation of Nepal as a ‘secular state’ in 2006 has so far had no visible effects, save the abolition of kingship, and some changes in festive calendars as well as in some judicial matters. Religion, the opium of the masses for orthodox Marxists, remains a crucial element of Nepali self-identity and social life.
Toffin is Director of Research at the National Centre for Scientific Research, France
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