India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

by J. Sai Deepak

indigenous societies have suffered the most as a consequence of this approach since their journeys of millennia, their lived experiences, their onto-epistemological systems, their individual and collective identities and their right to agency all have been casually and superciliously dismissed as legends, myths and superstitions.

context of Christianity, which only proves that even the challenge to Christian orthodoxy was a conversation within Christianity and not outside of it.

toleration was a means to an end—to save the soul of those outside the true religion, with the Word of God acting as the soul-piercing sword.

attitude of such thinkers was distinctly Christian because the idea of one God and/or one universal morality for all peoples was at the heart of this thought

temporal overlap between the Enlightenment and the prime years of colonialism, including the very birth of contemporary notions of modernity, cannot be dismissed as a mere coincidence.

individual or a society, neither must cede or surrender the inherent and fundamental right to self-definition or self-determination to an external entity.

is to externalise the locus of one’s consciousness and its most tangible outward manifestation—identity.

decolonial world cannot be and, might I add, must not be built using the conceptual tools of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

decoloniality seeks to rid both ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’ of its colonial code, an exercise integral to the freeing of indigenous societies from the burden of having to demonstrate their cultured and civilised status on Western-normative benchmarks.

Unfortunately, the very suggestion to identify in- and out-groups is bound to ruffle quite a few feathers and invite criticisms of ‘parochiality’, ‘narrow-mindedness’ and so on and so forth, but the fact is that even in the contemporary ‘modern’ and ‘liberal’ world, these are the very issues that public discourse, law and policymaking revolve around, especially when questions of heritage, identity and access to resources are involved. Neither modernity nor liberalism has been able to do away with ‘identity politics’.

Consequently, since othering is a reality of life that cannot be avoided, it is better to do so on the basis of consciousness as opposed to

‘identity’.

decoloniality’s approach to indigeneity is primarily OET-centric as opposed to being purely ethnocentric since ethnocentrism and race-consciousness are central to coloniality.

Thanks to coloniality, othering has occupied centre stage,

notwithstanding the current-day professions of universalism, globalism and cosmopolitanism, all of which rest on the colonial foundations of universalisation of Western provincial thought.

Same with universal brotherhood concept of Islam, valid only when one is part of them

Such an ethnocentric distinction makes sense in the context of those colonies that experienced European settler colonialism and continue to have significant settler populations.

definition, it appears that the distinction is equally applied to those former colonies, such as Bharat, where the European settler population is not considerable.

the distinction between ‘dominant national communities’ and ‘indigenous/tribal peoples’ when applied to countries like Bharat introduces internal coloniality within the native population by treating ‘minority tribal communities’ as being racially and culturally distinct from ‘m...

permanent fault line or division is created through an international instrument that manufactures an artificial power hierarchy between ‘national communities’ and indigenous populations or tribes while treating majority national ...

Clearly, these instruments act as tools to undermine the sovereignty of former colonies, with the ‘international’ community or the West acting as the Big Brother.

none of these instruments address the thorny subject of evangelical attempts to convert ‘tribal’ populations to Christianity, which ought to have been fairly obvious given the history of the Americas and other regions. Ironically, while the ‘dominant’ national majorities are expected to respect the identities of ‘indigenous peoples’, there is no international commitment to prevent external actors, such as missionary groups, from interfering with the course of indigenous life in the name of ‘educating’ or ‘civilising’ them.

Also, if ethnicity or birth were to be accepted as the sole or primary metrics for indigeneity, it would fail to address those situations where ethnicity remains the same and the entire OET framework is altered owing to evangelisation.

his true objective—the acquisition of territory for the imposition of his worldview and subjugation through conversion or elimination of those who stood in the way.

relationality means seeing humans as being part of nature and not outside of it. This translates to obligations towards nature, including ‘reciprocal obligations between humans and the other-than-human’.

While trade was the ostensible purpose of Christian European arrival in Bharat, the Inter Caetera of 1493 issued by Pope Alexander VI authorising Spain and Portugal to colonise, convert and enslave indigenous peoples is proof enough of the European’s colonising and evangelising objectives regardless of his ‘nationality’.

Such an ahistorical, secularised and self-defeating approach to the intent and conduct of the Christian coloniser is clear proof of entrenched coloniality in contemporary Bharat’s consciousness. As a consequence, Bharat’s analysis of colonialism revolves around race and economics, while the Christian OET of the coloniser gets a free pass even in the most withering analysis of his rule of close to 200 years.

Christian OET that mandated that devil-worshipping heathens had to be ‘saved’ from their ‘false religions’ and their own immorality.

it was axiomatic that false religion abounded and immorality prospered. This laid the foundations of the colonial stereotype that the indigenous idol-worshipping Hindu was ‘untrustworthy, immoral, corrupt and cowardly’ and compared poorly to the ‘unyielding Muslim’ who, though he

rejected the gospel, was closer to the Christian worldview, being ‘of the book’.

critical realm of faith that led to ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Jainism’ being reshaped and reimagined as rebellions against ‘Brahminical hegemony’, which re-imagination was evidently inspired by the anti-clericalism of the Protestant Reformation.

while the colonised must take responsibility for advancing the same even after decolonisation.

colonised being complicit in advancing and nurturing colonial consciousness because it feeds off of the unquestioning acceptance of the Western worldview.

hybridity because it relegates the formerly colonised to the eternal status of the ‘other’, of the ‘Occident’, which forms the basis of Orientalism.

the reinforcement, entrenchment and secularisation of colonialism (whose origins are not secular), the alienation of the native’s own cultural experience, the stifling and suppression of indigenous consciousness, and its replacement with self-loathing.

‘the West’ is more a state of mind and not a mere geography, ‘the Middle East’ too is a state of mind.

Middle Eastern consciousness and Indic consciousness are lumped together under the category of the Oriental and are seen as equal victims of European colonialism.

impression that Middle Eastern consciousness is native to the Indic civilisational fabric is dishonest and without basis in history.

the creation of Pakistan is not too far back in time and the event has not put an end to Middle Eastern colonialism; instead, it has only provided a firm launch pad for the systematic advancement of Middle Eastern colonialism through the instrumentality of a State that was expressly created for the attainment of the said goal.

Pakistan would pave the way for the triumphal return of Islam as the ruling power over the entire subcontinent. The

justifiably contend that Bharat’s definitions of coloniality and decoloniality must include European and Middle Eastern colonialities,

these stalwarts successfully refuted the self-serving claim of the White European Christian coloniser that it was his civilising benevolence that led to disparate and unrelated communities being stitched into one political unit.

gnana or knowledge is the true religion of Bharat, which was made possible only due to the ‘pre-eminence of morals, philosophy, literature, science and general culture’.

The Hindu religion is the knowledge and comprehension of those eternal principles which govern nature and man, those immutable laws which in one sphere are called ‘science’, in another, ‘true philosophy’. It concerns itself not with things true under certain conditions or at certain times: its precepts are ever true, true in the past, true in the present, true in the future. True knowledge being one, it takes, without any distinction, into its fold, Indians, Arabs, Europeans, Americans, Africans and Chinese. Its principles circumscribe the globe and govern all humanity.

Mookerji takes the clear position that this unity antedates the arrival of the British coloniser by millennia and therefore, the coloniser cannot remotely claim to have unified and created ‘India’.

on Bharat

From its mountains to its rivers, almost every geographical feature of Bharat is treated as a place of pilgrimage, which brings out the triple matrix of nature, faith and patriotism that was used to forge cultural unity while keeping the diversity alive.

the institution of pilgrimage not only sanctified the parts but also mandated reverence of the whole.

The network of shrines spread across the length and breadth of the land naturally triggered a movement of people so that their allegiance to vibrant regional identities did not submerge or prevail over the civilisational identity.

It is evident that the objective of establishing such networks even for individual sects was to prevent any sense of regional parochialism from informing the faith of the worshipper, apart from, of course, seeking to disseminate their philosophy in the entirety of Bharat.

This firm territorial connection between Indic OET systems and Bharat is what makes the Indic OET native to this land and, as a corollary, also explains why the OETs that inspire and drive Middle Eastern and European colonialities are not native to it.