Dilemmas of Public Reason

The opposition between the secular and the religious is a construct for, in reality, both often co-produce notions of culture that are intimately connected with violence. To recognise this intimacy could be the beginning of imagining a new political language which transcends the secular and religious through a process of creative contamination. The search for a new political language begins in this paper with two sets of descriptions of animal sacrifice from the past - one by the Tamil Saivites, who were at the forefront of campaigning against animal sacrifices in temples during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the other by the Madras legislative assembly in 1950, when it debated a bill to abolish animal and bird sacrifices in temple precincts.