Coming of Age in the Secular Republic of Fiction

Criticizing the concept of culture as bounded, static and intrinsically connected to the nation, Peter van der Veer emphasized global connections and showed how global notions like the nation or religion are translated locally. This emphasis on global connections took him from India, his first ethnographic region, back to Europe—Britain and the Netherlands in particular—before he moved on to work on China. This ‘enigma of return’ perspective stirred up received ideas within the academic milieus in these countries. My aim in this chapter is to try and do something similar by returning to questions about religion, the secular and the nation after working on similar issues in Pakistan. I do this by rereading novels from the 1960s and 1970s that not only expressed changing ways of thinking and living, but also took these ideas further. I argue that the Dutch literary scene reflects the secular culture of the post-war generation, which still informs political debates about the place of religion, such as Islam, in the nation in the contemporary Netherlands. I also argue that contemporary secular culture is artistically and creatively barren in comparison to what it was in the 1960s and 1970s.