INDISPENSABIUTY OF SECULARISM 19 denounced by the Church in 1326. The papal condemnation forced him to flee from Paris where he was rector of the university. For two centuries what Marsiglio started was carried on by the renaissance thinkers20 and for these same two centuries after this condemnation, whenever popes or cardinals wished to condemn thinkers as heretics, they would condemn them for getting their ideas from the "accursed Marsilius." It was, I gather, as subversive to be Marsilian in those days as it is to be Marxist in our times now. When it comes to reactions centered around debunking the dominant institution or thinking, times do not quite seem to change so much! NOTES The author is thankful to Rajeev Bhargava, Satish Hegde, Vinod Raina, Subhash Palsikar, Aditya Nigam, Udaya Kumar and others for comments during the Study-Week on "Communalism and Secularism** held at the Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.) 1. Collected Works, vol. 76, p.402. 2. Entrenched modernity is a term I have borrowed from Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge University Press, 1979). I use this term to make a distinction between the dominant form of modernity which became historically embodied in close epistemic correspondence with capitalism from those other trends in modern philosophy which have remained as an untapped surplus. For a detailed discussion of these are my India: Living with Modernity (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999), chapters one and two. 3. Ashis Nandy in "An Anti-Secularist Manifesto** (Seminar^ no.314, Oct. 1985) asserts that these terms are in the nature of "imperialism of categories." In a more recent piece, "The politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,** that appears in Mirrors of Violence edited by Veena Das, he begins his argument with the assertion that "A significant aspect of the post-colonial structure of knowledge in the third world is a peculiar form of imperialism of categories. Under such imperialism, a conceptual domain is sometimes hegemonized by a concept produced and honed in the West, hegemonized so effectively that the original domain vanishes from our awareness.** This is not an isolated instance. More or less a similar position is held by many others. Partho Chatterjee, in a Foucouldian argument in "Secularism or Tolerance** (EPW), has treated it as a universal of this kind. 4. Akeel Bilgrami used the word Archimedian for the Nehruvian concept of secularism. I am not clear what is his sense of this term. Though he tried to clarify, the term becomes complicated as the argument develops. Indian National Movement could never fully settle on what meant to be secular. It tried different ways from the very beginning. Community associations were allowed to hold their meetings at the same time as the Indian National Congress but not at the same venue. Nehru too kept struggling with an appropriate definition of secular for the Indian context. I am not sure if he