George Jacob Holyoake and the Indian Constitution: How secularism was born and travelled the world

Indian Express

10-07-2025

Who even remembers George Jacob Holyoake? The 19th-century British social reformer and journalist hardly ever features in conversations on politics and religion today. And yet, a single word coined by him about 150 years ago has shaped the nexus between the political and religious domains all over the world. In 1851, Holyoake had first established the word 'secularism' to denote a specific kind of approach to the nation state and its affairs.
More than a hundred countries today affirm support for secularism. At the same time, the concept is increasingly being contested in many parts of the world. In India recently, senior leaders of the BJP-led government have demanded the removal of the word 'secular' from the Preamble of the Constitution, citing its controversial inclusion through the 42nd Amendment during the Emergency of 1975.
Backlashes against the concept in other parts of the world have revolved around issues such as the legalisation of same sex marriages, assisted dying, freedom of expression, abortion rights and many more.
Political scientist Steven Kettell, in his article 'Secularism and Religion' (2019), explains the troubles over secularism emerging from the conflicting relationship it has with the idea of religion. 'Supporters of a role for religion in public life maintain that religion provides a range of valuable public goods and gives individuals a sense of meaning and identity. As such they argue that efforts to keep religion out of the public sphere are illiberal, intolerant, and undemocratic,' he says.
Secularists, on the other hand, he writes, claim that the separation of church and state provides the best framework for upholding the rights and freedoms of all citizens regardless of their religions or beliefs.
Most experts would argue that the idea of secularism ought to be understood in the context in which it took birth and the historical forces that have shaped its understanding today.
The beginnings
Holyoake's idea of secularism was a product of his own imprisonment on account of being convicted of blasphemy. In 1842, during a speech in Cheltenham, England, Holyoake responded to a question on religion by stating that he did not believe in God. 'There is no statute which punishes a man simply for denying the existence of God,' he declared and berated the church for failing to protect the poor. Soon after, Holyoake, who was then the editor of an atheist publication, Oracle of Reason, was convicted for speaking with contempt towards God and Christianity.
During the six months that Holyoake spent in the Gloucester County Jail, he reflected upon the conditions of English life and came out convinced of the need for a new social order that would release the individual from the grasp of enforced religious doctrine. 'The English society at this time was dominated by a very powerful church,' British historian Andrew Copson explains in an interview. 'It dominated the education system, judiciary, and political life,' he says.
Holyoake was keen on finding an alternative to this way of living. The concept of atheism that he had first embraced, he realised, was often understood as a devilish ideal that rejected God. He spent the next decade struggling to articulate a more acceptable idea, and finally came up with the term 'secularism'.
Canadian journalist and author Ray Argyle, in his book, Inventing Secularism: The Radical Life of George Jacob Holyoake (2021), has explained that the word was drawn from the English adjective 'secular' which itself was derived from the Late Latin saecularis which meant 'worldly, of an age', and the French word, seculier, to create the new terminology. Holyoake's secularism, explains Argyle, was 'founded on the idea that the duties of a life on earth should rank above preparation for an imaginary life after death'.
Holyoake realised that secularism could coexist with Christianity, with religion remaining a free choice in the private domain of people's lives, while education, science, government and economy could be devoid of religious dictates. 'Over the coming century, the United Kingdom embraced the substance of secularism while retaining the formality of an established church and a monarch who serves as 'defender of the faith',' writes Argyle.
Experts point out that Holyoake's idea of secularism had its antecedents in both India and Europe, even though it was not called so. Copson points to the case of ancient Greece, where gods, goddesses, temples and public festivals were important in civic life. 'But the Greek Gods never interfered in human politics,' he argues. He points to the writings of the 3rd century BCE Greek political philosopher Aristotle, who said that the purpose of the city was the 'best and highest life possible'. 'The question of what was 'best and highest' was to be approached entirely in this-worldly terms, not in terms of the divine,' Copson writes in his book, Secularism: A Very Short Introduction (2019).
A similar idea of a separation of state and religion can be found in India as well, he says, where 'the rajas were always advised to keep the Brahmin at a distance so he could rule over the subjects without interference'.
In the political history of Christianity, the seeds of secularism can be said to have been sown in the Protestant Reformation in 16th-century Europe, which challenged the authority of the Catholic Church. 'The Protestants argued that there should not be anyone between human beings and God, and therefore the state or the king could not tell you what religion one should adhere to,' he explains.
Political theorist Rajeev Bhargava, in an interview with indianexpress.com, suggests that the wars of religion triggered by the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent divisions within Christendom gave rise to the idea of toleration, which is the precursor to secularism. 'An outcome of the religious wars was the idea that the king or queen of a territory will announce what his or her religious allegiance is. Accordingly, all the subjects converted to the same religion and those who did not were expelled on grounds of religious dissent,' says Bhargava. 'But there were some who managed to stay behind. They did not appear in the public domain and were largely restricted to their own little private lives. The state chose to look away and that is how the idea of toleration began,' he adds.
According to Akeel Bilgrami, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, secularism as an idea developed in Europe alongside the birth of the idea of a nation. This, he suggests, was done by declaring some segment within the population as an enemy and by further announcing that this nation was 'ours' and not 'theirs'. The Jews, Irish, Catholics in Protestant countries, or the Protestants in Catholic countries, are all familiar examples of these subjugated enemies within a nation. This gave rise to tremendous religious strife in Europe. 'In the face of such strife, a view emerged that religion itself, having such a political profile, was the problem, even though the initial fault line lay in religious majoritarianism,' says Bilgrami in an interview.
Secularism, he says, emerged to correct this religious source of strife by steering religion out of the orbit of the polity and its institutions, into places of personal life only or at most to sites of 'civil society'. This, argues Bilgrami, is the biggest contrast in the historical context in which secularism emerged in Europe to that in India.
A secularism of one's own
Soon after Holyoake's vision of secularism gained ground in the United Kingdom, European colonialism transported variations of it to much of the world, notably in India. America and France, on the other hand, would continue to pursue their own historic visions of the concept. The United States Constitution, for instance, laid out that the 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion'. The walls of separation between the state and the church, though, were a lot more impenetrable in France, where in 1905, a law separating the two was passed. Then there was Canada, which is nominally secular, but recognises the 'supremacy of God' in its Constitution and provides public funding for Roman Catholic schools.
Copson asserts that secularism, like all political systems, is a human creation, which means that wherever it is applied, it is conditioned by the culture and the history of the people living there. 'If you look at secularism in France, for instance, it is evidently driven by a Catholic understanding,' says Copson. 'It is applied in an absolute sort of way, very similar to the way the Christian religions were incorporated into the state.'
Similarly, argues Copson, in India, when secularism was first applied, it bore the imprint of the Hindu approach to diversity. 'Secularism in India is a secularism of diversity in a way that other secularisms are not,' he says.
Speaking about the distinctiveness of the Indian variant of secularism, Bhargava notes that 'unlike Europe, which only had one religion to contend with, India always had multiple religions'. Consequently, the state was not trying to separate itself from the church, or from one religion, but it had to show even-handedness and impartiality vis-à-vis all religions. This idea of responding to religious diversity through a policy of pluralism can be traced as far back as the rule of the 3rd-century Mauryan emperor Ashoka. 'Even the British, and for very pragmatic reasons, at least from the 1850s, adopted a principle of neutrality,' Bhargava contends.
The unique approach to secularism is precisely why the founding fathers of the Indian nation in 1947 chose to ignore the term's inclusion in the Constitution. Bilgrami explains this when he says that neither Mahatma Gandhi nor Jawaharlal Nehru talked about secularism at all through the long freedom movement, (except passingly, a little bit in the 1940s, when the acrimonies around Partition made it inevitable), precisely because they thought that the damage that secularism was constructed to repair had never occurred in India. There had never been a time when religious majoritarianism had resulted in backlashes from the minorities and civil strife. Rather, as Bilgrami notes, Nehru and Gandhi perceived Indian history to be characterised by 'unselfconscious pluralism'.
In Constituent Assembly debates, too, the inclusion of the term 'secularism' in the Preamble was discussed at length. All the members agreed on the need for establishing a secular state since the connection between secularism and an effective functioning democracy was well established in Europe. However, the debates made the ambiguity inherent in the terminology when applied in the Indian context amply clear. Nehru and B R Ambedkar were both strongly committed to the idea of secularism, and yet advocated that it not be included in the Constitution.
In order to follow secularism in its truest form, the State would be disallowed from making any kind of religious interventions, which included the reservation system, protection of the Muslim personal law and the directive principle to protect cows, all of which the Constitution went ahead with.
Bhargava explains the reluctance on the part of the Constituent Assembly to include secularism in the Constitution when he says that it probably would have created more conflict. 'Remember that a state that had just been formed specifically for Muslims, so there must have been tremendous pressure from both within and outside the Congress to create a Hindu state,' he says, adding that having a nameless state instead of secular would have satisfied everyone, including the Hindu right.
Secularism does enter the Indian Constitution, although much later and in very different circumstances. It is inscribed into the Preamble through the 42nd Amendment during the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi. 'The 42nd Amendment's insertion of secularism was motivated by a range of issues confronting Indira Gandhi in a fraught period in India and in her own panicky responses to electoral opposition and opposition on the street, so it can hardly be doubted that seeking the support of the minorities was a major motivation,' explains Bilgrami. He goes on to explain that, keeping aside the motivation for the term's introduction, it is in the following decades of the 1980s and 90s that the term gained far more relevance due to multiple political factors.
The two key developments that resulted in ensuring the relevance of secularism in India in this period included 'the moral high ground that the Hindu right gained in the campaigns against the Emergency and its subsequent electoral respectability in the Janata Party's electoral successes'. Then there were the determined efforts to combat the Mandal politics' exposure of Hinduism's caste divisions, by unifying Hindus to see Muslims as the external enemy within. Both these factors, argues Bilgrami, created a situation of damage caused by religious majoritarianism of the kind that had occurred in Europe centuries ago, fuelling the need for secularism there.
Dealing with a global backlash
Scholars agree that there is a global backlash against secularism at present. Kettell, in his article, asserts that Western democratic societies are increasingly becoming 'post-secular'. 'The 'return of religion', the endurance of religious communities, and the growth of religious influence in public life are said to have challenged the underlying assumptions on which secularism is based,' he writes.
In the United States, for instance, the Christian right, in close association with President Donald Trump, is trying to undermine LGBTQ rights, restrict women's access to reproductive healthcare and increase religious influence in social and political life. Turkey's secularism is under threat by the governing regime, said to be increasingly pursuing an Islamist agenda. Kettell writes that similar developments are taking place in India as well, where Hindu nationalism is on the rise.
Copson says that the rise in the popularity of authoritarian leaders, along with religious extremists, is the key challenge being faced by secularism today. 'Be it Putin in Russia or the Communist Party in China, they may or may not have very strong religious views themselves, but they want a single doctrine in their state in the same way they would want a single party or a leader,' he argues.
Speaking about the resistance against secularism in India in recent times, Bhargava points out that the introduction of the word in the Indian Constitution under Gandhi's Emergency is unfortunate because it linked it to a certain kind of authoritarianism. 'However, India's Constitution was secular even without the word secular,' he says.
And yet the introduction of the word through the 42nd Amendment needs to be studied in the political context of today, says Bhargava, as he argues, 'Imagine if the word secular was not included in the Indian Constitution, how easy it would be for the extremists to turn this into a Hindu state today.'
Adrija Roychowdhury leads the research section at Indianexpress.com. She writes long features on history, culture and politics. She uses a unique form of journalism to make academic research available and appealing to a wide audience. She has mastered skills of archival research, conducting interviews with historians and social scientists, oral history interviews and secondary research.
During her free time she loves to read, especially historical fiction.
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