India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

by J. Sai Deepak

Its continuing adroitness in nurturing extra-national loyalties and tethering Bharat’s intellectual life to the interests of extra-civilisational detractors can only be described as dismaying.

role of coloniality in Bharat’s failure to truly excavate the nature of the Islamic impact on Indic culture,

The net result was the same—Bharat would continue to operate within the coloniser’s framework, while its civilisational character would be put to symbolic and ornamental use without any real and lasting impact on policymaking.

it was not necessary for Bharat to play by the West’s rules in order to achieve economic prosperity.

contemporary Bharat, unfortunately, sought global validation of its position even on cultural decolonisation.

universalisation of European history as the history of humanity,

And yet, Asia is not at the forefront of decolonial scholarship, which could indicate a deep-seated, continuing and unconscious coloniality in Asian societies, notwithstanding the survival of their cultural systems.

This is precisely why societies and civilisations of Asia can and must craft for themselves their own definitions of coloniality and decoloniality without being fettered or limited in any manner by the experience and conclusions of the Americas and Africa.

Asia has managed to preserve its non-Christian character to a considerable degree,

representative of European coloniality’s unfinished business in Asia.

study of coloniality all the more relevant and critical to their existence and survival.

that the colonialised native elites sought by way of ‘independence’ was the agency to be able to write their own futures but using the ideas, rules, tools and institutions of the erstwhile coloniser, which were designed for top-down imposition on a conquered and subjugated people in order to ‘civilise’ them.4

even more worthy successor—

Western imperialism—

subterranean nature of Western imperialism has ensured that the dominated society aspires to become part of the erstwhile coloniser’s social fabric after decolonisation.

existence of omnipresent coloniality and the constantly shrinking space for indigeneity meant that at some point indigeneity would resist and talk back to coloniality, and seek to reclaim its consciousness and space.

several decades after decolonisation for the natives to find their voice and

7 decades for India

true nature of coloniality, its motivations, underpinnings, invisible ye...

The European coloniser consciously believed in the ‘biological and structural superiority’ of his race, which, in the mind of the coloniser, distinguished him from the colonised.

figment of the coloniser’s self-important worldview, was legitimised as being ‘objective’, or ‘scientific’, or ‘rational’ and therefore, ‘natural’.

scientism by the coloniser to perpetuate, normalise and legitimise stereotypes about the colonised in or...

led to race-based stratification of colonised populations across the world, and created specific forms of discrimination which remained in th...

who negate and deny the histories and the lived experiences of entire civilisations from the moment of their arrival.

true genius of the European coloniser lay—not in the brutal economic and political repression of the native, but in successfully projecting his way of life as the aspirational ideal.

past. The adversarial pitting of the past and the present with the balance tilting in favour of the latter occurred in English in the sixteenth century

when ‘modern’ meant ‘someone who takes part in the tastes and cares of his age, and is opposed to all conservatism’. In a nutshell, positive connotations, such as open-mindedness, newness and relevance, were imputed to ‘modern’, and negative stereotypes, such as parochiality, outdatedness and rigidity, were associated with ‘conservative/traditional’.

coloniser (‘the Occident’)

culture and civilisation outside of Europe,

‘the Or...

globalisation, contrary to popular perception, is not a friend of diversity, nor is it a melting pot of cultures.

denotes the gradual and unconscious eradication of heterogeneity, more particularly, the diversity of indigeneity, and is proof of existence of common denominators of culture and civilisation for the entire world, which are distinctly Western-normative in character.

European coloniality required the entire world to share a common perspective on the entirety of human history and experience.

onto-epistemological

serious efforts were invested by Christian European missionaries to map local traditions and deities onto Christianity to reconcile the two and gradually ease the native into the coloniser’s religion.

This meant that Christianity satisfied the practical needs

the native peoples, needs which were created by the coloniser, instead of fulfilling their spiritual needs.

to spread the word of the Gospel and the second was to acquire the land of indigenous populations.

just about 10 per cent of the native population survived European diseases, massacres, displacement and assimilation23 which wiped out most of its bearers of tradition and knowledge.

that the little that survives of indigenous

tradition is proof of the coloniser’s accommodative nature, when, on the contrary, it is proof of the determination of the community to keep its identity alive.

A once thriving and vibrant society with its own centres of production of culture and knowledge was physically and culturally exterminated and reduced to a colonised human mass of illiterate peasants, thereby creating the infamous ‘White Man’s Burden’.

Had it not been for archaeological and ethnological studies, it would have been next to impossible to reconstruct native life as it existed in precolonial times or the genocides perpetrated by the coloniser. But for this evidence, European coloniality would have successfully justified and explained the civilising effect of colonisation and convinced us all that its culture, religion and way of life were globalised through peaceful means.

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 victorious Christian forces destroyed the holy Irminsul, a tall pillar in the wood representing the world tree Yggdrasil.

Most studies on European colonialism are typically centred around its impact on the political independence of colonised native societies, the immense economic harm caused to them and the consequent ‘illiteracy’ and impoverishment of these societies. In my opinion, this in itself is proof of coloniality since quite a few native societies are yet to understand the true impact of colonialism, namely the loss of an original indigenous perspective, which does not even

seem to figure in their list of things to reclaim.

European colonialism’s deadliest consequence for the entire world has been its fundamental conceptual alteration of the relationship between human beings and nature.1

the introduction of ‘humanism’ and its relationship with ‘materialism’ and ‘consumerism’

contrast to the benevolent connotations imputed to humanism, the literature reveals, as we shall see, that it has the direct effect of placing humans over and above...

What was particularly interesting was the way the Sioux referred to each other in relational terms. For instance, an old woman would be addressed as ‘mother’ and a much older woman as ‘grandmother’. Such an approach to human relations is a direct corollary of the community’s spiritual attitude to nature.