This chapter considers the wider contexts of secularism in relation to Salman Rushdie’s novels. It delineates different conceptions of secularism with which Rushdie is preoccupied. Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Shalimar the Clown are especially concerned with the notion of the syncretic and secular ideal of the Indian nation, championed by Nehru and the Indian National Congress at independence. It is the concerted dismantling of this postcolonial settlement and the Nehruvian vision of the nation at independence, and the replacement of this founding myth with an exclusionist nationalist narrative, that Rushdie critiques in these novels. This chapter also delineates the wider contexts with which Rushdie engages to chart the decline of Indian secularism and the syncretic concept of the Indian nation. It furthermore considers debates of secularism in relation to western definitions and how these feature in novels such as Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. These intersections open up complex ideological debates around rationality, faith, and religion, central to much of Rushdie’s works.