Total Atheism: Making 'Mental Revolution' in South India

Abstract

The dissertation titled “Total Atheism: Making ‘mental revolution’ in South India” is an anthropological study of an organised atheist movement in the two South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. This movement consists of groups and individuals who self-identify as atheists, rationalists, or humanists and engage in various forms of public activism aiming at the reconstruction of an equal, just, and rational society by practically realising atheism as a comprehensive and constructive way of life. Atheists tend to conceptualise these endeavours of practical implementation and social reconstruction as being premised on a complete “mental revolution” (Telugu: bhavaviplavam) in oneself and others. The main analytical focus of this dissertation lies not only on the relationship between concepts and practices but also on how atheists themselves conceptualise this relationship. The data for this study was collected in thirteen months of ethnographic research in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana (participant observation, semi-structured qualitative interviews, informal conversations) as well as systematic analyses of the literature published mostly in Telugu by members and associates of the movement. At a more general level, the dissertation contributes to current anthropological debates on the genealogy of the secular by offering a detailed empirical and qualitative account of ‘lived irreligion,’ which complements the as yet dominant focus of those debates on either macro-processes of secularisation or political regimes of secularism. Its main purport lies in offering an ethnographically informed starting point for rethinking Eurocentric narratives which tend to homogenise the secular into a single conceptual grammar or a unified social imaginary originating out of the history of Christianity and the Enlightenment in (Western) Europe. The main methodological argument developed in this dissertation is that more sustained and systematic attention to locally meaningful, emic concepts and their use within and through concrete practices is necessary in order to prepare the ground for more complex genealogies of the secular which are able to pay due attention to global entanglements as well as local specificities. For this purpose, the structure of the thesis is guided by the concrete ways in which atheists in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana discuss how to practically realise their vision of Total Atheism. Through an ethnographic analysis of how the conceptual grammar of Total Atheism informs practices of corporate social activism (oratorical propagation, anti-superstition campaigns, anti-caste programmes) as well as everyday life (individual life stories, marriage, family and gender relations), this dissertation argues that an anthropology of the secular needs to move beyond genealogies of a supposedly “European” religious-secular binary or its juxtaposition with “other”—in this case Indian—alternatives. The atheist movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as a contemporary form of lived secularity is not only deeply embedded in local concepts of individuality, power-knowledge, agency, social organisation, gender relations et cetera; it is also a self-aware engagement with a complex and on-going process of global interactional translation which goes into the making of multi-layered concepts like, for example, “mental revolution” or “Total Atheism.”