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September 1 - October 9, 2021
There is no part of the world better marked out by Nature as a region by itself than India, exclusive of Burma. It is a region indeed full of contrasts in physical features and in climate, but the features that divide it as a whole from surrounding regions are too clear to be overlooked.
Mookerji cites the use of names, such as ‘Jambudvipa’ and ‘Bharatavarsha’, to identify this vast geography both by its people and outsiders. He clarifies that while Jambudvipa is a geographical reference, Bharatavarsha is a political reference, both of which demonstrate a unified geographical and political consciousness much before the idea of a British identity was even born. The underlying premise behind Mookerji’s argument is that if a landmass with immense variety, natural and human, is given a common name, it is proof of unity in diversity with clear historical and political significance.
The unification of this land by Emperor Bharata after whom Bharatavarsha is named, just as Rome is derived from its founder Romulus, is the argument advanced by Mookerji to establish Bharat’s civilisational unity. He marshals evidence from the Aitareya Brahmana of the Rig Veda to support his argument.
that sense, Bharat’s civilisation may be understood as a federal civilisation with multiple sub-identities that are free to retain their identities but have remained culturally and politically bound for millennia. This is evidenced by the fact that this land has a recorded history of being politically referred to as ‘Bharatavarsha’ or ‘Bharat’ without interruption notwithstanding the Islamic invasions or European colonisation. Simply put, Bharat’s self-understanding as a single cultural, civilisational and political unit has not changed and its internal diversity has not come in the way of
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Mookerji explains that the connection of the Indic civilisation with Bharat rests on its veneration of the land, quite literally, since She is worshipped as the vast Mother who is a living Deity with Her geographical attributes, such as the land and its rivers, being woven in hymns and prayers to simultaneously evoke shared feelings of devotion, unity and patriotism. This deification of the land itself, the blending of faith and patriotism, is proof of the inseparable and most fundamental connect between the land and its civilisation.
It was this supremely Indian institution in fact which served in the past in place of the modern railway and facilities for travel to promote popular movements from place to place and intercommunication between parts producing a perception of the whole. It allowed no parochial, provincial sense to grow up which might interfere with the growth of the idea of the geographical unity of the mighty motherland; allowed no sense of physical comforts to stand in the way of the sacred duty of intimately knowing one’s mother country; and softened the severities of old-world travelling by breaking the
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Simply put, from the Vedic period to the time of Adi Shankaracharya, the establishment of a network of pilgrimages in the extremities of the land has served to reinforce respect for nature and the fundamental unity of this land and its people as the inheritors of one civilisation with federal components contained within its bosom.
there is indeed credible material that reasonably establishes the following: 1. The framers of the Constitution acknowledged the umbilical cord that connects independent Bharat with its civilisational history; and 2. The presence of ‘India that is Bharat’ in Article 1 of the Constitution is the consequence of civilisationally conscious suggestions that were put forth by several members of the Constituent Assembly, which were ultimately accepted.
In fact, there is nothing in the Constituent Assembly debates that suggests that the framers of the Constitution operated under the belief that Bharat was a synthetic product of colonial efforts or that Bharat owed its very existence to the Constitution. In other words, there is no basis for the colonialised myth that Bharat was created by the British coloniser prior to which it lacked a sense of self and history.
Sir, I move: ‘That for clauses (1) and (2) of article 1, the following clauses be substituted:- (1) India, that is, Bharat shall be a Union of States.
The Honourable Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (Bombay: General): Is it necessary to trace all this? I do not understand the purpose of it. It may be well Interesting in some other place. My Friend accepts the word ‘Bharat’. The only thing is that he has got an alternative. I am very sorry but there ought to be some sense of proportion, in view of the limited time before the House. Shri H.V. Kamath: I hope it is not for Dr. Ambedkar to regulate the business of the House.
Sir, I am enamoured of the historic name of ‘Bharat’. Even the mere uttering of this word, conjures before us by a stroke of magic the picture of cultured life of the centuries that have gone by. In my opinion there is no other country in the world which has such a history, such a culture, and such a name, whose age is counted in milleniums as our country has. There is no country in the world which has been able to preserve its name and its genius even after undergoing the amount of repression, the insults and prolonged slavery which our country had to pass through. Even after thousands of
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‘Bharat’ or ‘Bharat Varsha’ is and has been the name of our country for ages according to our ancient history and tradition and in fact this word inspires enthusiasm and courage in its [sic]; I would, therefore, submit that we should have no hesitation at all in accepting this word. It will be a matter of great shame for us if we do not accept this word and have some other word for the name of our country.
In other words, a State that presides over a civilisation is not a civilisation-state; instead, a State that is conscious of the civilisational character of its society and structures itself on civilisational lines is a civilisation-state.
Bharat’s civilisation is not one that reduces nature to just another branch of study, namely ‘environmentalism’, to be ticked off as just another box in an environmental impact assessment checklist. Instead, it puts nature right at the heart of its worldview and sees divinity in every aspect, form and manifestation of nature. From such lofty heights that directly affected ecological balance, and therefore survival, for this civilisation to now put development and nature in two different baskets with the former being treated as the priority, is the clearest reflection of the pervasion of
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Pointing this out may invite labels, such as ‘tree hugger’, ‘luddite’ or being ‘anti-development’, but all of these are terms typically used in the West, thereby exposing the coloniality even in the reactions.
The creation of such institutions that maintained an arm’s length distance from the State allowed the core of the Indic society to remain largely untouched by the disruption of the State apparatus due to repeated Islamic invasions or systematic European Christian colonisation.
The irony is that, as opposed to appreciating the value of such systems which were independent of the State, every such system (including civilisational nerve centres, such as places of worship) has been brought under the looming shadow of the State in ‘modern’ India. In the process, the Indic society has been left entirely dependent on the State for preservation of its core interests, while the State continues speeding down the path of greater colonialisation (not colonisation) while paying lip service to Bharat as a civilisational State. This poses a serious and existential challenge to the
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As a consequence, the Indic civilisational worldview finds itself disempowered in its own homeland despite decolonisation.
Simply put, as long as a non-Indic worldview is capable of coexistence with Bharat’s indigenous worldview and does not seek to deny or sever the bonds that tie this land to its culture and its adherents, Bharat provides refuge and shelter to even such worldviews. After all, there are credible instances of groups whose OETs are diametrically opposite to that of Bharat’s, and have yet thrived in Bharat without persecution or loss of their individuality. This is attributable to the fact that they put aside some of their scriptural mandates in the larger interest of coexistence and with a spirit
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According to Mookerji, the lesson that Bharat’s internal experience as a civilisation holds for the rest of the world is that no sovereign power must attempt to impose its values on others, despite its best intentions.
Even in responding to the European coloniser’s contention that Bharat was never a ‘nation’, Mookerji does not feel the need to prove that we are a nation bound by a single ethnicity or language or ‘religion’ in the Christian sense. Instead, his calm response is the rejection of European nationhood as a yardstick for Bharat to pass muster on, and the emphasis on federal civilisationalism as the appropriate lens to understand Bharat.
That such assertion, crudely and simplistically dubbed as ‘Hindu nationalism’, is, in fact, an Indic civilisational and decolonial reawakening, somehow never occurs to those who crinkle their noses at it. Simply put, it is the expression of the decolonial urge of the silenced and long-silent native to reclaim and re-exist. When this expression is pejoratively and phobically caricatured as ‘Hindu nationalism’, the only logical inference that can be drawn is that every other culture and society has the right to exercise the decolonial option, except Bharat.
other words, if Bharat had converted to the religion of either coloniality, it would have been acceptable for it to bemoan its past applying primarily the racial filter like the Americas or Africa, but since it has clawed and retained its native OET systems, its attempts at decoloniality are conveniently labelled ‘Hindu nationalism’, which endangers the safety of ‘national minorities’—spaces forcibly or fraudulently carved out by Middle Eastern and European colonialities at the expense of and to the detriment of Bharat’s native consciousness.
For instance, in 1614, the Company put in place measures ‘for the recruitment of Indians for the propagation of the Gospel among their countrymen and for imparting to these missionaries such education, at the Company’s expense, as would enable them to carry out effectively the purposes for which they were enlisted’.4
Effectively, in less than 90 years of its entry into Bharat as a trading entity, the Company had managed to establish a framework that had the trappings of a sovereign power.7
This led to competitive evangelism, wherein each group tried to win more converts for itself (‘soul harvesting’) to prove its commitment to the gospel, with both groups agreeing on the need for greater missionary activity in Bharat.21 This was captured in the proposal put forth to the British Parliament in 1811 by William Wilberforce,22 a British politician and Protestant Christian, which required the Company to finance missionary activities in its territories.
and with all their attachment to their altars and their homes, they had been obliged by exaction and oppression, to leave both, and migrate into the territories of a native Indian prince, the Rajah of Mysore—there to find, under the government of a heathen and an infidel, that mercy which had been denied them under the Christian government of the India Company, to which we were nevertheless now called upon to consign over a hundred millions of these helpless people for a period of twenty years more [emphases added]!
Apart from citing the need for uniformity in laws and legal outcomes, the approach to indigenous societal structures and the demonisation of the ‘caste’ system as well as Brahmins may be traced to Macaulay to a significant extent. Critically, he made no bones of the fact that the spread of European civilisation in the East would benefit Britain from the standpoint of governance since Europeanisation of the native population would bridge the cultural gap and make governance and assimilation less cumbersome.
The contents of these debates prove that Bharat was treated as a fertile territory for soul-harvesting by various Christian denominations, all of which sought a level playing field to compete for the status of the true champions of the one true religion, the one true God and His gospel. Therefore, this much can be said without equivocation—one of the primary intents behind the provisions of the 1833 Charter Act, as evidenced by the debates, was to lay the foundation of Christianity in Bharat through State support for conversion of the native (through a long-term Europeanisation project), with
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Therefore, it can be concluded, without reservation, that this inextricable enmeshing of the Christian obligation to proselytise and the civilising attitude of the British coloniser is a matter of fact, not subjective opinion. This had a direct bearing on the coloniser’s understanding of Indic faith systems, societal structures, and on his education and language policies,
As stated earlier, the consequence of this approach was that Brahmins, ‘Brahminism’ and ‘Brahminical institutions’ replaced the Pope and Catholic Church as the new objects of hatred and perpetual ‘reform’ at the hands of evangelical Christianity. Since temples were predominantly seen as ‘Brahminical institutions’, the narrative employed against pre-Christian pagan temples in Europe was pressed into service with respect to Hindu temples and their practices.
For instance, the charge of ‘sacred or cultic prostitution’ that was employed by early Christians to malign and slander pagan temples in Europe was extended to the Devadasi practice in Bharat as well, which ultimately resulted in the legislative abolition of the practice.
This translated to a doctrinal and scriptural approach to ‘Hinduism’, that is, only those practices which could be traced to the sacred texts of Hinduism would be tolerated by the colonial State, while the rest would be treated as superstitious and immoral, warranting State interference.
The boundary was drawn along the lines of the Protestant division between the essentials commanded by God in scripture and indifferent things falsely superimposed as religion… . In its secularized form, this division between pure religion and human additions was viewed as a general characteristic of all religions, including Hinduism. Since the task of locating this boundary was displaced to the ‘scriptures’ and ‘priests’ of ‘Hindu religion’, the colonial legal system effectively transplanted this conceptual structure into the Hindu traditions.
Whether the Manusmriti, or for that matter the Dharmashastras, constituted a religious commandment/law, or a descriptive recordal of customs and practices was never clearly understood by the Christian coloniser since he was incapable of viewing the indigenous society through an indigenous perspective.
Therefore, even conceptions of what constituted ‘religious law’ in the ‘Hindu religion’ were introduced through a Christian lens, which significantly affected both the coloniser’s understanding of the native society as well as the colonialised natives’ understanding of their own culture, since the Christian idea of seeking scriptural support for traditions was embraced by the latter.
‘religion’ in the Christian sense. De Roover presents ‘the Hindu reformer’ Raja Rammohun Roy as one the prime examples of those who actively applied the scriptural approach to Hinduism to rid it of its ‘ills’ in the interest of ‘social reform’. Under this approach, Roy treated the Vedas as the Hindu ‘Bible’ and at...
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In practical terms, the application of the Christian framework to understand what constituted ‘the Hindoo religion’ translated to its ‘essentials’ being distilled. This had the following two consequences that are of patent relevance to contemporary debates surrounding Hinduism, both in society as well as in judicial treatment: 1. The Essential Religious Practices (ERP) test, as applied by the Indian Supreme Court in matters involving protection of religious practices and institutions under Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution, may be traced to the Christian colonial distinction between
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This policy resulted in undermining the autonomous, localised, community-driven and self-sufficient nature of temple administration by making it increasingly dependent on a centralised bureaucracy.
Ironically, the very same provisions of the 1951 Madras HRCE Act, which were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1954, were reintroduced in sum and substance in the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act, 1959, which is still in force to date. These reintroduced provisions, along with the corresponding provisions of the HRCE legislations of Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry, are currently under challenge before the Supreme Court in a Writ Petition filed in 2012 by the late Swami Dayananda Saraswathi, founder of Arsha Vidya Gurukulam. Clearly, the Indian State
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This is but one of the examples of the manner in which concepts, such as ‘secularism’ and ‘equality’, have played out in so-called independent, decolonised Bharat—to the extreme detriment of its indigenous consciousness. This is in stark contrast to the Christian secularism of Europe which protects Christian institutions from State interference.
Consequently, non-Indic institutions and practices enjoy better protection from State interference than their Indic counterparts. This is supported by the fact that the Indian State has enacted at least 15 Hindu-specific legislations that enable State control and facilitate State entrenchment in Hindu institutions. Clearly, this is attributable to the Indian State’s embracing of the colonial assumption that the ‘Hindoo’ is corrupt, debauched and backward, especially if Brahmin, and therefore, such institutions must be under State control in order to ‘reform’ them.
Article 25(1) of the Constitution guarantees to all persons the freedom of conscience and the right to freely profess, practise and propagate ‘religion’ subject to public order, morality, health and other provisions of that part of the Constitution. Article 25(2)(a) enables the State to make laws ‘regulating or restricting any economic, financial, political or other secular activity which may be associated with religious practice’.
However, it would ultimately morph in subsequent judgments of the Supreme Court into a test to determine the ‘essential aspects’ of a religion for the very purpose of the enjoyment of fundamental religious freedoms under Article 25(1). In other words, thenceforth, the State or more often than not, constitutional Courts, would determine what constituted ‘essential’ aspects of a religion despite professing to be secular bodies with no institutionalised training in the OET of any faith.
The irony is compounded by the fact that the religious versus secular divide was conceived of in the Christian faith to limit the scope of State interference in matters of religion, which, in Bharat, has yielded diametrically opposite results particularly with respect to Indic faith systems.
The fact that native faith systems are not fully bound by scripture and have evolved as much through custom, practice and context flummoxed the Christian European coloniser just as much as it seems to confound contemporary Indian institutions, including the judiciary.
It bears noting that this colonialised understanding of Indic faith systems forms the bedrock of the eternal project of ‘reform’ of the ‘Hindu religion’ and society in ‘independent’ Bharat.
reading of the said judgments reveals that, surprisingly, the position of the Supreme Court is largely consistent with the decolonial position that Indic faith systems are distinct from both Abrahamic religions, and yet qualify for protection under the constitution as ‘the Hindu religion’. In other words, the Supreme Court, while recognising that Sanatana Dharma cannot be understood through the Abrahamic construct of ‘religion’, has not taken away the right of Dharmic OET systems to be treated as ‘religion’ for the purposes of enjoyment and exercise of constitutionally guaranteed fundamental
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Therefore, while it could be argued that the Supreme Court was only operating within the rules of interpretation accepted in English law (which is its standard practice even today), the fact is that owing to the Christian backdrop of the coloniser’s lexicon, the Court unconsciously applied a manifestly Christian concept and definition of religious denomination to a Dharmic institution.
