Analysis: The Primitiv Again

My distant paternal uncle, being a staunch communist for his life arranged his daughter’s marriage with an unconventional ritual. He decided not to pursue any traditional ritual; indeed to all our surprise, assigned the hieratic job to one of his close friends. With little nervousness in the new-found clericalism, his close friend addressed the gathering. In his words, different cultures and belief systems in the world have different rituals to sanctify the institution of marriage and no two rituals are same. In view of that, the atheist uncle’s unique ritual can also be accepted as one. At this moment, the nuances of this story may be contested by utilitarian vis-à-vis non-utilitarian divide of rituals, once we engross ourselves with the recent hullabaloo on Irrfan Khan’s comments on Ramadan and Quarbaani.
Undoubtedly, natural tension subsists between individuality and potentially totalitarian implications of ritual discourse. The banal actions of rituals strip the semantic layers of individuality which bring about a swing from individual to strong collective awareness of identity. Likewise, the ritualistic discourses develop more and more exclusivist forms of identities which are adversative on a partition between “us” and “them,”. These stand for the
Secularism in India is a product of the pre-colonial traditions of anticlericalism and anti-superstition transformed by colonial encounter. The religion was reformed and modernized to make it a part of the morality of Indian nation state. Now, how to imbibe the philosophy, symbolism and theology of tolerance intrinsic in the various faiths within the ambit of modern secular state? The Gandhian “moral maturation” based on Sarvadharma Sambhav may be an integrative process of assimilation which can also smudge the demarcation between the traditionalist, religious and the