Indian secular nationalism bought its secular sphere by leaving religious texts unchallenged.

Evidence

Rare would be a text of our canonical nationalism (witness, for example, the agnostic, socialist Mr Nehru’s Discovery of India) which did not in some way assume that ‘spirituality’ was the special vocation of the Indian in world history. Positivist kinds of secularism and modernism which grew during the same period often found it difficult to withstand these pressures for identifying Indian cultural nationalism with metaphysics and revivalist tendencies. At the very least, a sort of bargain was struck whereby a secular, even non-religious sphere was gained by conceding that the hallowed religious texts were never to be challenged directly and were always presumed to be ‘great’ because, after all, they were the great monuments of our ‘tradition’. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 531

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth investigating: does this ‘bargain’ model transfer to other postcolonial nationalisms, e.g. Egypt or Indonesia?
• XREF: connects to: Secular Indian modernism conceded religious texts’ greatness in exchange for a nonreligious sphere. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1204

Related

• Secular Indian modernism conceded religious texts’ greatness in exchange for a nonreligious sphere. (similarity 0.90)
• Secular positivist modernism could not withstand pressures aligning Indian nationalism with metaphysics. (similarity 0.82)