Acknowledgements;
INTRODUCTION: THINKING SECULARISM FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH;
Thinking from the Global South;
Critique of Eurocentrism;
Asia as Method;
Spirituality and Decolonial Thinking;
Unpacking West and Non- West;
"Other" Conceptual Traditions and the Question of Translation;
1. Secularism as Misdirection - A Map of the Book 28 STATE, RELIGION, AND THE BODIES OF WOMEN;
Hindu Supremacism as Secularism in India;
French Secularism as Majoritarianism;
Secular/Secularisation 45 Multiculturalism;
Challenges to Secularism as a Neutral Category;
The State Determines "Religion";
The United States of America;
France;
India;
Can Bharat Mata Enter the Sabarimala Temple?;
The Uniform Civil Code;
Religious/Caste/Race Identity and Secular Politics;
A Hindu Left?;
Postsecularism Debates in the Global North - Read from the South;
2 HINDU MAJORITARIANISM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELIGION;
The Hindu Rashtra as a State Project;
The Majoritarian Politics of Numbers and Religious Conversions;
"Reconversion" and "Inter-denominational" Conversion;
Essential Religious Practice;
Religious Institutions as Income-generating Entities;
Religious Institutions/Deities as Juristic Personalities;
Global Hindutva;
3 THE FAILED PROJECT OF CREATING HINDUS;
Savarkar's Imagined Hindu Nation;
The Puranas;
The Violence of Brahmin Expansion;
Who Are Hindus?;
Adivasi-Dalit-Bahujan Counternarratives to Hindutva;
Dalit Bahujan Adivasi Goddesses;
Hinduism and Hindutva;
4 THE SELF AND PSYCHOANALYSIS FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH;
Ideas of the Self;
Psychoanalysis as Culture: China, Japan, and Buddhism;
Psychoanalysis as Culture: Arabic and Islam;
Psychoanalysis as Culture: A "Hindu" Landscape;
Secularism as Standardisation;
Secular Psychotherapy, Religious Faith, and Healing the Self;
The Other in the Analyst's Chair;
Global South as Analyst, Not Analysand;
Historicising "Myth";
5 CAPITALISM AS SECULAR SCIENCE;
The Construction of Nature;
The Secular Reason of State;
Capitalism versus Religious Sectarianism;
Coronacapitalism in India;
Data Capitalism and the Aarogya Setu App;
The Sethusamudram Ship Canal Project;
Natural or Man-made? Secularism versus Hindutva;
Natural or Man-made? Environment versus;
Development;
Religious Belief and Science on Trial;
Land Rights for Women as a Capitalist Agenda;
Land Struggles in India;
Land Rights Through Custom and Tradition in India;
Women's Rights to Land in Personal Laws;
Forests and Community Rights;
Customary Laws and Women;
Property Titling for Capitalist Transformation;
Individual Rights to Land and Land Acquisition;
6 INSURGENT CONSTITUTIONALISM AND RADICAL FRAMES OF CITIZENSHIP; Insurgent Constitutionalism - Chile and India;
Chile;
India;
Pathalgadi;
Constitution-as-Commons versus Populism;
Citizenship;
Are Citizenship and Citizenship Rights Unambiguously Empowering?
Why Is Citizenship a Feminist Issue?;
Should We Not Cast Citizenship Rights Within the Frame of Place of Work, Not Place of Birth?; Citizenship and "Non-Secular" Identities;
7 RESHAPING WORLDS - BEYOND THE CAPITALIST HORIZON;
The Universal Basic Income Debates;
Universal Basic Income - An Anti-capitalist Critique;
Towards Escaping a Capitalist Horizon;
Rewilding;
Conflict Between Dalit and Ecological Concerns?;
Life Itself - The Virus and the Human;
The Problems with "Green Energy";
Degrowth, the Pandemic, and Radical Change;
Food and Land Sovereignty;
Commoning;
Pirate Care;
Escaping the Rulers;
Utopia, the "Outside", and Solidarity;
Bibliography;
Index.

In the performance of a magic trick, misdirection draws attention away from the trick to another place which appears more fascinating. This book shows how secularism creates such a misdirection.

Menon argues that secularism stands in as an umbrella term for a range of associated ideas – global science, historical progress, general development, individual freedom, rational choice. Within this grid of meanings linked with secularism, certain features become hypervisible (religion, women) while others are obscured (caste, capitalism, the non-individuated and non-rational self). Secularism, Menon shows, is merely a strategy of rule, being compatible with both democracy and authoritarianism, capitalism and socialism. Only when we are no longer dazzled by secularism’s ability to misdirect can meaningful values – democracy, social equality, and ecological justice – emerge centre stage.

This book is a powerful reconceptualisation of what secularism really means – of what is really being said under cover of the term secularism. Menon’s perspective is from the global South, specifically India, though her book is not about the global South. She explores religion, state, and women; Hindu supremacism’s project to equate Brahminism with Hinduism; psychoanalysis and the self in the global South; and new articulations of constitutionalism and citizenship across the world.

This is one of those profoundly interesting books that make you rethink the nature of the world you were sure you understood.