This book looks at the variety of secular states from a plurality of Asian perspectives and traces their origins in distinctive trajectories shaped over centuries by religious traditions, languages, and social and political structures and interactions. These case studies de-center and widen the debate on secularity away from references to Christianity as a frame of reference to think about the disenchantment of the world.
We look at the secular state in the context of contemporary Asia and we investigate whether there existed before modernity the antecedents to the condition of secularity, understood as the differentiation of the sphere of the religious from other spheres of social life. The chapters presented in this book examine this issue in national contexts by looking at the historical formation of lexicon that defined the "secular", the "secular state," and laïcité. This approach requires paying attention to modern vernacular languages and their precedents in written traditions with often a very long tradition. This book presents three interpretive frameworks: multiple modernity, variety of laïcité, and typologies of post-colonial secular states.