Some more reflections on secularism

By Uditha Devapriya

When I wrote that I felt discussions about secularism seemed inadequate, I did not mean that we weren’t talking enough about it. I simply meant that the discussions we are having now have not accounted for certain important cultural and historical factors. There is no point dwelling on secularism if, for instance, it is seen by a certain community as hostile to their values. In Sri Lanka secularism is perceived as being antithetical to Buddhist interests. This is, at one level, a misperception. But perceptions feed into narratives, and the result has been to give secularism a bad name and bad press.

More problematically, and particularly in public spaces like schools, secularism is seen as a “bourgeois” luxury, having almost no relevance for working class or lower middle-class communities. That is again a misperception, but it should not be brushed aside. This is especially so given that secularism has an innate class dimension. Ethnic and religious conflicts are driven by cultural differences, and our refusal to see beyond those differences. Class struggle, on the other hand, focuses on productive relations, on issues of relative advantage. Secularism provides an antidote in that it enables us to see privilege as having to do with social class rather than ethnicity or religious affiliation.

The problem in our schools, however, goes deeper than this. Take a simple yet persistent issue: our history textbooks. The official history taught to us tells us almost nothing of the atrocities visited on our minorities. This is not peculiar to Sri Lanka. In the US, too, hardly anything is mentioned about how indigenous communities were exterminated and slavery was legitimised for centuries. Once you ringfence such narratives with an aura of religious dominance, schools turn out to no more than factories for religious apologists. This is why, especially in schools historically reputed for their secular character, such tendencies must be addressed. But to address them, we must examine their causes.

The elite response to these developments, predictably, has been to invoke the “good old days” and wish for us all to return to them. This is a problematic if inadequate response, not least because we can never go back to those days – or because they never existed in the first place. As Regi Siriwardena has aptly noted, when the elite recall their halcyon days at these schools, where ethnic differences supposedly never existed, they overlook the fact that their social class was what made them forget such differences.

It was their class that dominated these institutions, making them elite enclaves: a point that should render their observations irrelevant at once. The transformations that we have been seeing in these institutions since the 1950s cannot be reversed. Nor should they: for all its regressive aspects, 1956 enabled a section of the underprivileged to enter these spaces.

However, I would not be so hasty as to discount and dismiss the elite response. What we have been seeing since the 1950s, in secular institutions and public spaces, has been the replacement of one mode of social differentiation – class – with another – ethnoreligious identity. Both should be combated and done away with. But the tactics we can use in one are not necessarily valid for the other.

In the case of class stratification in schools, legislation and education commissions have proved to be more than adequate, especially since there was popular support for broadening class participation in these institutions. In the case of ethnoreligious stratification, however, mere laws will not suffice, because there is no similar support for secularisation. The solution appears self-evident: legitimise such campaigns in the eyes of ordinary children, including the underprivileged.

I realise this is a difficult proposition. These institutions have transformed so much as to make it impossible to get such a campaign going, still less popularise it. If I may invoke Marxist analysis here, in our public spaces including our schools the bourgeoisie have given way to a petty bourgeoisie, a rural suburban middle class whose affinity for ethnoreligious identity is sharper, and more pronounced, than the bourgeoisie.

It is for this reason that the most avowedly secular schools have become breeding grounds for the most insidious religious agendas. In any case, these places are no longer the preserve of a secular crowd. Therein lies their paradox: while becoming more inclusive in terms of social class, they are becoming more exclusivist in terms of ethnic identity.

We cannot resolve these paradoxes by building a time machine and returning to the past. This country is not the country that existed before 1956. Despite their chauvinist tendencies, the rural suburban middle classes are here to stay and to dominate in elite institutions. Mostly Sinhala speaking and Buddhist, they can harbour the most insular sentiments.

Yet they also harbour a progressive potential, a desire to see things differently. I know this is putting things a little too abstractly. But if we are to secularise our schools, including those that have got a reputation for their secular character, we should channel the progressive potential of the communities which populate these spaces. Of course, we cannot do so by appeasing these groups. Yet nor can we do so by alienating them.

In times like this I prefer to rely on the insights of some of my proteges. Pondering on how elite schools have transformed and on whether they are losing their secular character, a student of one eminently secular institution argued,

“Is X a school for the elite or a school for the best? We are moving from A to B and as a result more rural beliefs are getting installed [sic] here.”

This is as profound a statement as any I have heard, full of sociological and I daresay anthropological meaning. Civil society activists campaigning for secularism in our public spaces, including our schools, should listen to it and take heed.

The writer is an international relations analyst, independent researcher, and freelance columnist who can be reached at .

udakdev1@gmail.com.