shobhitdeshwal
July 12th, 2006, 07:02 PM
There was a thread by Ratan Anmol.... on Exisistence!!
In the pursuit of the same I would like to provoke thought of fellow members over faith and ideology!!
'Faith' becomes a particularly contested 'language' and 'reality' in the context of 'ideology'. Today, as fundamentalist forces collude with communalist parties to interpret religion for their puroses, the enigmas of faith have become almost totally vulnerable to manipulation. It would seem that we have no choice but to accept a 'split', in Ashis Nandy's words, between religion as faith, 'a way of life, a tradition which is definitionally non-monolithic and operationally plural' and religion as ideology, which 'identifies' entire population as 'sub-national', national or cross-national' for essentially 'political and socio-economic interests'.
While accepting the juxtposition of 'faith' and 'ideology', how-ever, we should be careful not to reduce faith to an unchanging essence. One's faith after all is shaped from childhood through filiations to family, caste, class, and community. At a theoritical level, therefre, it would be difficult to deny the ideological base of 'faith' itself insofar as the institutions of 'family', 'caste', 'class' and 'community' are products of ideologies in their own right. On the other hand, if we accept the total complicity of 'faith' to the larger structures and discourses of life in which it is grounded, then, at some level, we are foreclosing its capacities to resist these structures in the first place.
In opposing the mystique of an a priori condition of faith, therefore, we also run the risk of inscribing 'faith' totally within a historical process. While this has its methodological and analytical uses, it also assumes that 'faith' can be contextualized with the categories of the social sciences, leaving no space for those aspects of 'faith' which can not be readily grounded in the language of reason. Perhaps, in the inscription of 'faith' within existing rationalities, what is more evident are the ideological premises of the writer in question rather than the ontological significance of 'faith' itself.
Moreover, it is necessry to discriminate between those belief structures that shape a person's faith within the immediate context of everyday life, and those ideological interventions of a more explicitly political charcter. To spell it out more crudely, every devout Hindu is not necessarily a VHP activist, though the possibilty of his or her devotion becoming 'activized' cannot be ruled out. But neither can the possibilty of those residual elements of faith resisting the new ideology be ruled out. Ideologies of and faiths in particular religions cannot be conflated, though they do impinge on each other and affect each other's stabilties and power affiliations.
With these qualifications in mind, I would uphold the categories of 'faith' and 'ideology' in a predominantaly oppositional context. What matters is that we do not 'fix' these terms in a static way thereby affirming a false monolithic dualism. rather, it would be more appropriate to view these terms as variables in a dynamic relationship that changes according to the mutations in history.
Cheers!!
Shobhit Deshwal
In the pursuit of the same I would like to provoke thought of fellow members over faith and ideology!!
'Faith' becomes a particularly contested 'language' and 'reality' in the context of 'ideology'. Today, as fundamentalist forces collude with communalist parties to interpret religion for their puroses, the enigmas of faith have become almost totally vulnerable to manipulation. It would seem that we have no choice but to accept a 'split', in Ashis Nandy's words, between religion as faith, 'a way of life, a tradition which is definitionally non-monolithic and operationally plural' and religion as ideology, which 'identifies' entire population as 'sub-national', national or cross-national' for essentially 'political and socio-economic interests'.
While accepting the juxtposition of 'faith' and 'ideology', how-ever, we should be careful not to reduce faith to an unchanging essence. One's faith after all is shaped from childhood through filiations to family, caste, class, and community. At a theoritical level, therefre, it would be difficult to deny the ideological base of 'faith' itself insofar as the institutions of 'family', 'caste', 'class' and 'community' are products of ideologies in their own right. On the other hand, if we accept the total complicity of 'faith' to the larger structures and discourses of life in which it is grounded, then, at some level, we are foreclosing its capacities to resist these structures in the first place.
In opposing the mystique of an a priori condition of faith, therefore, we also run the risk of inscribing 'faith' totally within a historical process. While this has its methodological and analytical uses, it also assumes that 'faith' can be contextualized with the categories of the social sciences, leaving no space for those aspects of 'faith' which can not be readily grounded in the language of reason. Perhaps, in the inscription of 'faith' within existing rationalities, what is more evident are the ideological premises of the writer in question rather than the ontological significance of 'faith' itself.
Moreover, it is necessry to discriminate between those belief structures that shape a person's faith within the immediate context of everyday life, and those ideological interventions of a more explicitly political charcter. To spell it out more crudely, every devout Hindu is not necessarily a VHP activist, though the possibilty of his or her devotion becoming 'activized' cannot be ruled out. But neither can the possibilty of those residual elements of faith resisting the new ideology be ruled out. Ideologies of and faiths in particular religions cannot be conflated, though they do impinge on each other and affect each other's stabilties and power affiliations.
With these qualifications in mind, I would uphold the categories of 'faith' and 'ideology' in a predominantaly oppositional context. What matters is that we do not 'fix' these terms in a static way thereby affirming a false monolithic dualism. rather, it would be more appropriate to view these terms as variables in a dynamic relationship that changes according to the mutations in history.
Cheers!!
Shobhit Deshwal