India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

by J. Sai Deepak

Decoloniality doesn’t propose a return to a pristine past, but the reconstitutions and restitutions in the present (and towards the future) of destitutions in the name of modernity, rationality and emancipated thinking.

Such perceptual distortions arose from the unconscious and largely unquestioning acceptance of ideas of modernity that came to dominate intellectual life in the nineteenth century and accepted as valid by both colonisers and the colonised.

In effect, the decolonial framework seeks to reinscribe the primacy of indigeneity, indigenous consciousness and its subjectivity in formerly colonised societies and civilisations.

Propagating the gospel was affirmed as a purpose at the very outset in 1614 and subsequently repeated unequivocally, and the East India Company was specifically authorised to make war on ‘heathen nations’ by a Charter in 1683.

I gradually came to understand that while the instinctive human reaction would be to protect the sub-identities one was closest to, the priority should be to preserve the civilisational tapestry and its foundations, which enabled the birth, growth and expression of diverse sub-identities.

On the contrary, history seemed to teach us that the survival of the Indic civilisation as a civilisation depended on the flourishing of its sub-identities, with each of the sub-identities realising that they were part of a federal symbiotic whole and that it was in their own existential interest to remain part of the whole.

started reading the works of Pandurang Vaman Kane, Jadunath Sarkar, Radhakumud Mookerji, R.C. Majumdar, K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, K.S. Ramaswami Sastri, S.L. Bhyrappa, R. Nagaswamy, Ram Swarup, Sitaram Goel, Dharampal, Kapil Kapoor, Koenraad Elst, Michel Danino, Shrikant G. Talageri, Meenakshi Jain and Sandeep Balakrishna, apart from the publications of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.

In a nutshell, I took the position that the Constitution must be alive to history to serve its intended purpose.

In fact, there seemed to be a shared view across ideologies that there was indeed a ‘universal’ and uniform moral standard that all ‘civilised societies’ must adhere to.

Barring a handful of scholars, such as Ram Swarup, Sitaram Goel, Dharampal, Koenraad Elst, Dr. S.N. Balagangadhara and Dr. Jakob De Roover, very few seemed interested in challenging the Western-normative framework which informed these so-called universal standards.

Even those who publicly extolled the Indic civilisation for its spiritual, philosophical, legal and epistemological traditions, seemed more interested in calling out the selective application of such supposedly universal standards. For some reason, they would not question the application of the Western-normative framework that refused to accommodate Indic thought. Critically, the ontological and theological origins of this framework and their e...

To me, this did not bode well even for Bharat’s economic aspirations since the premise of an Indic Renaissance, that is, a re-inscription of indigenous consciousness onto contemporary Bharat, was that it was not necessary for Bharat to play by the West’s rules in order to achieve economic prosperity. On the contrary, I believed that a civilisational reclamation had the potential to spur confidence and originality of thought, thereby paving the way for economic progress in a way that was consistent with Indic ethos, which valued a balanced approach to nature and development.

The goal of decoloniality was to unshackle hitherto colonised societies from the totalising universalisms of European colonialism and its current-day successor, Western imperialism, in order to restore agency and dignity to their consciousness.

the underlying idea being that Bharat’s version of decoloniality must address both forms of colonialities to preserve its civilisational character in light of its history and continuing contemporary challenges.

what exactly is coloniality, and how is it different from or related to colonialism and colonisation? What is the specific historical context in which these terms must be located, and is their use limited by and to such context?

Colonisation, as understood by scholars, refers to a process or phenomenon by which people belonging to a nation establish colonies in other societies while retaining their bonds with the parent nation, and exploit the colonised societies to benefit the parent nation and themselves.

Simply put, the process of establishing colonies is called colonisation and the policy of using colonisation to increase one...

At least four forms of colonialism are recognised, namely exploitation colonialism, settler colonialism, surrogate col...

‘Coloniality’ refers to the fundamental element or thought process that informs the policy of colonialism and advances the subtler end goal of colonisation, namely colonisation of the mind through complete domination of the culture and worldview of the colonised society. In short, coloniality is the fount of the policy of colonialism that results in colonisation, whose ultimate objective is to mould the subjugated society in the image of the coloniser.

In other words, unless indicated otherwise, ‘coloniality’ means not just ‘cultural coloniality’ but ‘European cultural coloniality’, while the response of erstwhile colonised societies (primarily, Latin American) to European cultural coloniality in order to reclaim their agency over their consciousness and subjectivities has been termed ‘decoloniality’.

However, where the decolonial school differs from postcolonial thought is its identification of the element of ‘coloniality’, which, according to it, informed European colonisation that began with the Age of Discovery.

Decolonial scholars have gone a step further to claim that while postcolonialism is a state of affairs, decoloniality is a state of mind just as coloniality is.

In other words, decoloniality, by definition, accepts and underscores the need for subjectivity, contextuality and local resistance to abstract universal definitions.

In other words, owing to coloniality, the vision of independence of most native elites was limited to the politico-economic sphere, namely decolonisation, but did not include decolonialisation because they accepted the European worldview on the all-important cultural front as well.

Therefore, given the omnipresence of European politico-economic and cultural coloniality, perhaps the only viable option available to the newly decolonised societies was to embrace the political structures, institutions and lexicon left behind by the coloniser to avoid the prospect of disintegration, annexation, anarchy and global isolation.

In other words, colonisation is the process, colonialism is the policy and coloniality is the mindset or the thought that underpins or drives colonialism.

The effect of the introduction of the modernity/rationality complex into the culture of colonised societies was that the entirety of native worldviews, especially their ontological, theological and epistemological systems, were ‘otherised’. That is, the indigenous worldview became the ‘other’ to the ‘modern and rational mainstream’ and had to prove itself on the judgemental anvils of the latter.

The native worldview could never succeed at proving its ‘modern’ relevance because the coloniality/modernity/rationality complex was designed either to exclude indigenous perspectives, or acculturate it in case it happened to be of value, without crediting the indigenous perspective.

According to Quijano, this is where the true genius of the European coloniser lay—not in the brutal economic and political repression of the native, but in successfully proje...

The cumulative effect was the deep embedding of coloniality in the consciousness of the colonised society, so much so that it started believing that it had been defeated because of its cultural moorings. To the colonised and now colonialised native, it seemed that the only way to regain dignity was by adopting European culture and thought processes, which included the European way of achieving economic prosperity, that is, by exploiting nature.

In a nutshell, European coloniality/modernity affected not just ontology, theology, epistemology and anthropology, it also birthed new notions of ethics (and therefore, affected education), and defined both politics and policy.

What is important to note is that whether approached from the perspective of Wynter, where natives were seen as idolators by Columbus, or from the point of view of Torres, that Columbus considered them soulless, both views emanated from Christian OET as it existed then and shared a common purpose—native non-Christian communities had to convert or die.

It was only a matter of time before the new convert to European culture and religion not only disowned his previous identity but also spewed venom against it because he associated his past and heritage with weakness, superstition and defeatism, thus completing the process of severing ties with his roots.

The natives’ respect for nature gave rise to their faith, and the symbols or icons used were inspired by animals and landforms, thereby putting nature at the centre of their lives. Connections among members of the community were forged through specific traditions.9 Even their epistemology revolved around nature and communal harmony. It was this deeply spiritual relationship, embedded in traditional practices and oral knowledge of tribe elders that constituted their ‘religion’, thus tying together nature, faith and knowledge.

The ‘modern’, ‘rational’, ‘scientific’, Christian European coloniser could not get himself to acknowledge that the lived experience and traditional knowledge of native societies gathered over millennia could teach him more than a thing or two about living in harmony with nature as opposed to merely salvaging what remained of it in the name of ‘sustainable’ development.

It took him ages to even concede that there was something seriously amiss in his attitude to nature, by which time nature had started reacting to the plunder and devastation it had been subjected to.

Commenting on the objective of colonial education in Africa, Nelson Mandela remarked thus36: The educated Englishman was our model; what we aspired to be were ‘black Englishmen’. We were taught—and believed—that the best ideas were English ideas, the best government was English government, and the best men were Englishmen.

To cut a long story short, colonial education annihilated a society’s belief in itself. It made the colonised people see their past as one vast wasteland of non-achievement and it made them desirous of distancing themselves from that wasteland, and instead identify with an entity that was furthest removed from them—European culture. Not only did it push the colonialised natives further away from their heritage but it also undermined their self-confidence at an individual level.

This transgenerational trauma is ‘cumulative, unresolved, historic, and ongoing’43 as long as coloniality is alive and kicking. It was to the credit of the determination of native peoples which kept alive whatever remained of their culture. It was this determination that gave colonised societies the strength and confidence needed to aspire for political independence, which was also partly a consequence of colonial education backfiring on the coloniser.

The extent of dependence was evidenced by the fact that even the native elites, or perhaps especially the elites, began to subscribe to the coloniser’s view that the native society would fall into disarray and utter confusion if the coloniser were to pack his bags and leave. In the mind of the native, the success of the coloniser in keeping the native society under his thumb was attributed to his overall cultural superiority (race included) and specifically, to the most visible aspect of the colonial apparatus, namely the administrative and legal systems imposed on the colonised societies.

An independent ‘nation-state’ modelled on European lines was the decolonised future towards which native aspirations were generally oriented.

Therefore, an examination of such worldview through the prism of coloniality necessarily requires us to question whether a specific foreign theological framework was at play, notwithstanding all the attempts at secularising and universalising it because universalisation of a particular way of life was the very object of coloniality.

What is to be discerned from this history is that the distinction between the secular and the spiritual was drawn from within the Christian framework and not outside of it.

After all, the Church’s monopoly over sin and penitence was being seriously undermined owing to the secularisation, rather de-Churchification, of conversion and reform, the very pillars of Christian belief—the raison d’être of the Church.

Therefore, the theory of two kingdoms was formulated, with Biblical support of course, by both Luther and Calvin, who struck a distinction between Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the temporal Kingdom of Earth where secular authorities held sway. It was postulated that Christians enjoyed freedom in the spiritual sphere while being required to obey the secular laws of temporal rulers to the extent that the latter did not encroach upon their faith. The caveat to this position was that true Christians were free from all human laws, similar to the view held by monks and priests, except that this freedom was previously limited under the Catholic position to those belonging to the spiritual estate, namely the monks and the priests themselves. In contrast, since the Reformers rejected the authority of the Catholic Church, its clergy and the monks, all true Christians were entitled to freedom from human laws if the process of conversion was complete and submission to God was undiluted.

It was a conversation happening within the Christian society, and therefore any present-day discussion on separation of the Church and the State is incapable of being supported by assumptions outside the fold of Christianity.

De Roover makes it abundantly clear that a secular government in terms of the Protestant Reformation is nothing but a Christian secular government without any conflict or logical inconsistency, given its clear Christian origins.

What needs to be appreciated is that the Peace of Westphalia did not result in the creation of ‘secular’ sovereign States as we understand them today, that is, States without an official religion. On the contrary, the war itself was fought for the right to have an official State religion, more specifically, to choose a State denomination within the Christian religion without having to dance to the writ of the Roman Catholic Church;

There is sufficient basis to conclude that these States were driven by inter-denominational competitiveness, triggered by the Protestant Reformation and the Peace of Westphalia. The New World or the non-Christian world became the battleground for this aggressive rivalry for wealth, territory, resources and ultimately, national cum denominational supremacy.

Effectively, European imperial powers gained extraterritorial jurisdiction over non-Western societies through application of international law, which was nothing but the enforcement of Protestant Reformation-inspired Westphalian principles.