Self-respect and Atheism
The Self-respect movement comprised a substantial number of atheists and freethinkers. They subjected religious dogma, the power of priests and the prevalence of obscurantist customs in the practice of all faiths to a penetrative social and political critique. Their atheism possessed an energetic and satiric charge: trained as it was against faith that appeared a travesty of reason as well as of human decency. Thus, the self-respecters objected as much to the use of religion to retain and legitimize hierarchies of caste, class and privilege, as they did to its irrationality.
Atheist arguments were utilized in several contexts: to advance a critique of Congress nationalism that appeared in concord with unbending orthodoxy; to argue for and re-define the right of adi dravidas to temple entry, as an essentially public and civil right; to mount an unrelenting critique of those who set themselves up as opponents of marriage reform and women’s equality; and finally to interrogate the truth claims of all religions in the Indian context. Significantly, atheism was understood not in the limiting sense of a negative doctrine, but also as an idea whose time had come. Thus, Revolt featured regular articles on religious reform in Kemal Pasha’s Turkey and Amir Amanullah’s Afghanistan. It wrote glowingly of the achievements of the Soviet State. In each of these instances, self-respecters endorsed what appeared to them important moments in the progress of secularism: the separation of the powers of state and church, the abolition of priestly privilege and the power of religious institutions and reform of marriage laws.
Revolt’s atheism was characteristically home-grown: it took its cues from world-wide debates in radical rationalism and freethought but adapted them brilliantly to explain and illumine conditions in the Indian sub-continent. Revolt was also encouraged by the fact that rationalists elsewhere were looking to Indian radicals to do their best by a society that was described as a ‘slumbering giant’ which had to be woken up to the day of reason. Revolt’s writers (and readers) were also interested in the principles invoked by rationalists and freethinkers – they followed these debates keenly, and re-published articles from a number of freethought journals, including The Rationalist, The Truthseeker and the tracts of the London-based Rationalist Press Association.
The first section of this selection comprises articles that argue Revolt’s case for atheism. The arguments are largely ethical in origin. Secularism is also debated, especially in those essays that interrogate the politics and wisdom of religious instruction in schools. S. Guruswami’s essays on Hindu itihasas and puranas, adapted from Tamil texts published in the Self-respect weekly, Kudiarasu, savagely funny and profoundly argued, are featured in this section as well. Included here is a collection of ‘Atheist Miscellany’ containing humorous fragments and short essays on the oddities of belief.
The second section contains essays that engage with the relationship between faith, reason, law and citizenship. Here are articles on religious and political reforms in Afghanistan and Turkey, and the abolition of religion in the erstwhile Soviet Union. They rehearse a set of arguments that continues to haunt us, as we continue to struggle with public opinion, custom, and legal reform with respect to religious customs in our own time and contexts. Significantly, these arguments were debated at that time in societies that resolved them with surprisingly critical alacrity. For self-respecters this manner of resolving the vexed question of faith was highly attractive, though they were also aware of the pitfalls of state intervention in matters of faith. In fact, they were convinced even then of the need to not merely enact State legislation to transform social attitudes, but to actually persuade civil society to think critically.
The third and fourth sections are compact: the one comprises essays on the problematic question of Eugenics (see also The Women’s Question for more articles on birth-control and eugenics). The other features select articles by rationalist radicals from across the Anglo-American world, whose writings featured prominently in Revolt: the essays that examine the religious right in the USA and Britain remind us that these are battles that rationalists continue to fight.
