Limiting Secularism: The Ethics of Coexistence in Indian Literature and Film is an examination of the limitations of the idea of secularism in the Indian context. In this book, Priya Kumar attempts to map out an ethics of coexistence through her readings of the cosmopolitan fictions of writers such as Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh, as well as partition literature and films that explore the question of Muslim identity in contemporary India.
The way the term “secularism” is deployed in the Indian context goes beyond the attempt to demarcate a public domain outside any religious influence; it refers to the attempt to create a space that can accommodate multireligious and multicultural perspectives within the framework of a democratic nation-state. Kumar acknowledges the importance of maintaining this space, especially in the context of the growth of right-wing Hindu movements in India. However, in one of the central arguments of the book,...
