India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

by J. Sai Deepak

belief that nature existed solely for the ‘pursuit of his happiness’ and his ‘manifest destiny’.

commodification of nature was the driving force behind imperialism and colonialism, which gave birth to capitalism and universalist developmentalism.

the consequent treatment of oral traditions as apocryphal and ‘mythical’, may collectively explain the coloniser’s attitudes to indigenous onto-epistemological systems.

religion of the European coloniser deifies its central scripture as the ‘Word of God’ given its revelatory treatment. Therefore, only that which was contained in their scripture or the Book was deemed to be true, making the colonisers the People of the Book. The expectation that every religion must have a ‘book’ as its sole

authority that captured its tenets was essentially a Christian expectation, which was imposed on the onto-epistemological systems of native communities in order to delegitimise or Christianise their faiths.

The Christian coloniser was acutely alive to the fact that language captured a culture’s journey and reflected it through its stories, idioms, proverbs and usages, which connected the

speaker with the collective past.

native children were forbidden from speaking in their languages,20 a practice that continues in Engli...

Children were separated from their families and placed in boarding schools to eliminate the influence...

them. In this sense, colonial education was a form of exorcism performed on the heathen native by the Christian coloniser.

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.

‘psychocultural marginality’,41 wherein loss of cultural identity results in social and individual disorganisation which manifests as ‘low self-esteem, extreme poverty, oppression, depression, loss of identity, substance abuse, violence, lower life expectancy, low educational attainment, limited employment, poor housing and ill health’.

This dualist approach gave birth to the European coloniser’s sense of superiority over the rest of nature, including non-Christian idolatrous and nature-worshipping indigenous peoples.

Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism

theological underpinnings of both the

Reformation and the Enlightenment.

especially for indigenous societies, for them to become aware of the patently non-secular context of the modern distinction between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘secular’ because it calls out the claim of neutral application of values, such as secularism, which have been inherited from the coloniser.

rationalised

Attempt to justify, explain with logical reasons, even if they are not appropriate

monks and their way of life were exemplified as truly Christian by the Church, a hierarchy of sorts was created among the subjects of God, with monks occupying the top position followed by the clergy, the ‘earthly secular’ rulers and finally, the laity (lay believers).

was an allocation of worlds between the monks and the clergy; the monks would lead the rest of the ‘flock’ in the other world,

Church and its clergy would lead the flock, including the rulers, in the earthly world akin to shepherds.

extra ecclesiam nulla salus—all salvation is through Christ and Christ can be reached only through the Church, and therefore there is no salvation outside the Church.

the Church, the soul which was deemed superior to the body, took it upon itself to preserve order in the earthly world and assumed an advisory role to the body, that is, the earthly rulers, on all matters both religious and secular.

Christianity into a religion of the priests and the entirety of Christendom into the fiefdom of the Church, which freed the Church from the scrutiny of any form of earthly authority, and secured for it overlordship over earthly authority.

secure complete proprietorial ownership of the Church, which was the property of the temporal rulers/kin...

King James Bible, namely John 18:36 (‘My kingdom is not of this world’), Luke 20:20 and Mark 12:17 (‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’).

Even the common people, the lowest in the spiritual hierarchy of Christianity, resented the sanctimonious intervention of a hierarchically organised Catholic Church in all facets of life. The constant sermons to overcome sin and to repent for it contributed to a general distrust of the Christian clergy, while their own ability to rise above

Protestant Reformation.

‘monasticisation of daily life’,

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 C...

people were willing to believe the accounts and stories of lecherous priests, and the Church itself began to be seen as the biggest obstacle ...

No longer were the Church and its clergy seen as the sole conduits to God, nor were they treated as exclusive or spec...

empowered the lay believer’s ability to pursue his or her own faith through individual and direct submission to God without any ...

draw parallels between the Protestant Reformation’s grievances with the Roman Catholic Church and the projection of similar grievances onto institutions, practices and groups in Bharat that were seen as ‘Brahminical’.

Protestant lens led the Christian European coloniser to treat ‘Buddhism’, ‘Jainism’ and ‘Sikhism’ as Reformative movements that challenged ‘Brahminism’.

history of indigenous religious developments within the Dharmic fold were reimagined on Protestant lines and...

Protestant Ref...

democratised the spiritual process of conversion beyond the monasti...

according to the Reformers, no one was a priest and everyone was a priest, which led to deeper percolation of Christianity in society.

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.

according to the Reformers, no human had the power to lay down spiritual laws since even they were ultimately human laws with nothing ‘spiritual’ about them.

‘freedom of conscience’, which has become part of the discourse on religious freedom in ‘civilised nations’,

contrary to the contemporary assumptions of the ‘modern’ State being a ‘secular’ entity, Protestant Reformers were of the clear view that the State too was a divine order whose existence was necessary to prevent people from following an immoral path, since as sinners they were fundamentally prone to depravity without an external check.

What this proves is that the irreligious or ‘secular’ nature that is imputed to a ‘modern’ nation-state owing to its observance of the policy of separation of the Church and State is completely ahistorical and baseless.

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;

Those Christian citizens whose denominational affiliation was different from that of the State were guaranteed the freedom of conscience to practise in private and limited rights to practise in public. In other words, religious ‘minorities’ in this context were denominational minorities from within the same religion, namely Christianity, and their ability to practise their denominational faith in public was contingent upon the goodwill of the State and therefore, the majority denomination;

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.

Members of the Christian civilisation that subscribed to Westphalian principles were equals, but those outside of it, namely the non-Christian indigenous societies of the New World, were lesser and unevolved, who needed to be ‘civilised’ and ‘reformed’ through the instrumentality of international law.

is often assumed that the Enlightenment represented the predominance of reason over faith not just for Europe but also for the rest of the world. That non-European civilisations had their own respective journeys and subjectivities is often lost in this simultaneously deliberate and unconscious Europeanisation of world history.