A.B. Shah

From Philosopedia

Shah, A. B. (1920–1981)

Shah, the future founder-president of the Indian Secular Socity, was born in a Digambar Jain family in Gujarat. At the age of seventeen he was a practicing Jain, one who did not believe in God, soul, or gods.

According to Norwegian philosopher Finngeir Hiorth in The Secularist (India, January-February 1991), Shah along with M. N. Roy, Gora, and Periyar was among India’s most interesting atheists. In 1968, he founded the Indian Secular Society. He was also founder-editor of New Quest, a journal of criticism, creative writing, and ideas. And he was an indefatigable crusader for secular humanism. “Secularism,” he wrote in 1968, “primarily means the separation of religion from man’s secular life,” a definition which shows George Jacob Holyoake as the source for his concept.

Two books by Shah are Religion and Society in India and What Ails Our Muslims? In 1968, his correspondence with Shankaracharya of Puri was published in Challenges to Secularism.

In 1966, he addressed the Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Paris. When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Shah was president of the Indian Secular Society, which he had founded in 1969, and was director of the Institute for the Study of Indian Traditions.

Biographical Notes by Ramendra

Ramendra has written some concise notes about Shah:

A. B. Shah was the founder-president of Indian Secular Society, which is an important non-political organisation working for the promotion of secular human values in Indian Society. Among prominent Indian secularists of twentieth century, Shah is perhaps the only one who has paid much attention to Islam and to the problems of Indian Muslims.

A. B. Shah was born in 1920 in Gujarat in a Digambar Jain family. He was an atheist since his childhood. However, until he went to college in 1937 at the age of 17 and read Ernst Haeckel's The Riddle of the Universe and Hyman Levy's The Universe of Science, he was a believing and, to some extent, a practising Jain. These two books convinced Shah that not only God, but even the soul whose existence Jainism believes in, had no existence outside the human mind. Shah was also influenced by Winwood Reade's The Martyrdom of Man.

M. N. Roy was another important influence on A. B. Shah. He was particularly impressed by Roy’s Man and Nature, Science and Superstition, The Ideal of Indian Womanhood, and Memoirs of a Cat. According to Shah, "Roy opened out new vistas of thought and intellectual freedom which gave positive content to my negative atheism."

From 1937 onwards, Shah was what he describes as "conscientious atheist". He did not feel the need for the consolations of religion even during some of the worst crises in his life. On the contrary, he increasingly came to believe that "man can be truly human when he is on his own and refuses to use the crutches of traditional religion or take recourse to drugging of religious mysticism, which claims to take him beyond the 'illusion' of this world with its good and evil."

Shah's interest in study of religion from the social point of view was not aroused until he began to take interest in the problem of development in 1964. Religions struck to Shah as the "residual" factor in the theory of stagnation. He began to wonder whether "the glaring contradictions between the professions and practice of most Hindus did not had something to do with the persistence of the religious mode of thought which determined the response they made to the challenges of modern world".

It was at this time that Shah came across the typescript of Philip Spratt's Hindu Culture and Personality. This book "explained" to Shah why the average Hindu, even if highly educated and "modernised" in many respects, fails to develop the kind of virtues that the citizen of a modern, open society should have. Shah's own study of Hindu scriptures and philosophy confirmed, to him, Spratt's basic thesis that Hindu personality is essentially narcissistic, that is, suffering from excessive self-love. Shah concluded that the Hindu personality is "incapable of coping with the contemporary world unless it sheds its narcissistic traits."

Shah began to take interest in Islam as a culture only after meeting Hamid Dalwai (1930-1977) in 1967. As Shah's says, "it was a constant dialogue with Hamid, in which his remarkable understanding of the Muslim mind was confirmed by external events on a number of occasions, that prompted me to undertake a serious study of Islam". In November 1968, Shah founded the Indian Secular Society (ISS).

Two years of vigorous efforts by A. B. Shah and Hamid Dalwai to mobilise public opinion in favour of secularism preceded the foundation conference of the Indian Secular Society on November 24 at Bombay. Hamid Dalwai conducted a study tour to have a first hand knowledge of Hindu-Muslim relations and the causes of communal conflict. His study − Muslim Politics in India − was released as a book at the foundation conference of the ISS. The conference was presided by Prof. G. D. Parikh, a close associate of M. N. Roy and a former Rector of the University of Bombay.

A.B. Shah in his introduction to the "Report of the Foundation Conference" defined the role of the Indian Secular Society:

The Indian Secular Society has chosen to work mainly at the level of ideas and communication. It would document and discuss secularist as well as obscurantist trends in Indian society. It would examine the grievances pertaining to religious freedom and the other handicaps of minority groups with a view to suggesting and canvassing their secular solutions. It would explore ways and means of secularising public life through a change in the prevalent accommodative attitude of the Indian intelligentsia to obscurantism and communalism. And, finally, it would expose anomalies and contradictions in our national life which amount to a betrayal of the spirit of the Indian Constitution and the United Nations Charter of Human Rights.

V. K. Sinha has described the years 1969-72 as "the seed time of the Indian Secular Society". The demand for uniform civil code was one of the issues highlighted by the Society in this period. Besides, in the aftermath of communal riots in parts of Maharashtra, Shah attacked Hindu communalism in a special issue of The Secularist (January-June, 1970). Shah highlighted the views of Dayanand, Savarkar and Golwalkar under a section titled "Apostles of Hindu Communalism". Shah was of the view that "communalism, like war, resides in the minds of men and that is where it has ultimately to be fought".

Hamid Dalwai, who has been described "the stormy petrel of reform in the Muslim community in India" died in 1977. A.B. Shah's important book Religion and Society in India, published in 1981, is dedicated to the memory of Hamid Dalwai whom Shah describes as a "friend and comrade in the fight against religious obscurantism".

In addition to being the founder-president of the Indian Secular Society, Shah was the editor of the society's journal The Secularist until his death in 1981. Besides, Shah was the Director of the Institute for the Study on Indian Traditions and an honorary professor at the Indian Institute of Education at the time of his death. Both these institutes as well as the headquarters of the Indian Secular Society were situated in Pune, Maharashtra. (The headquarter of the Indian Secular Society has now shifted to Mumbai.)

A. B. Shah was the editor of The Secularist, the journal of the Indian Secular Society. Besides, he was also the editor of the New Quest, journal of the Indian Association for Cultural Freedom. His publications include Scientific Method, Religion and Society in India, What Ails our Muslims?, Challenges to Secularism, and Planning for Democracy and Other Essays. Besides, Shah edited several books on education, politics and culture, including Jayaprakash Narayan's Prison Diary written in jail during the Emergency of 1975.

Shah died of a heart attack. At the time of his death, Shah was director of the Institute for the Study of Indian Traditions and honorary professor at the Indian Institute of Education, both at Pune in India’s State of Maharashtra.

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