India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

by J. Sai Deepak

Tata Sons had sued Greenpeace International and Greenpeace India in the High Court of Delhi for alleged trademark infringement and defamation citing Greenpeace India’s use of the Tata logo in its Pacman-style game, Turtle v. Tata. The High Court’s judgment in this case, while dismissing Tata’s prayer for interim injunction on the game, laid down the law on the interplay between trademark law, the law of defamation, and the right to parody and fair comment as part of the fundamental freedoms of speech and expression under the Constitution. This judgment remains one of the finest in its genre to date, and is appreciated for its nuance and clarity.

I 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.

Constitution in an effort to better understand whether this document captured the essence of and reflected Bharat’s civilisational spirit. B. Shiva Rao’s six-volume publication The Framing of India’s Constitution: A Study, V.P. Menon’s The Story of The Integration of the Indian States and Justice Rama Jois’s Legal and Constitutional History of India: Ancient, Judicial and Constitutional System served as some of my principal references in this regard.

The review petitions were heard in early 2019, and later that year, acknowledging that the review petitions had merit, seven questions of law were framed by a Constitution Bench headed by the then Chief Justice Shri Ranjan Gogoi,

Pending the outcome in the proceedings before the nine-Judge Bench (known as a ‘Reference’, when a larger Bench is called upon to decide on questions of constitutional import), the next Chief Justice, Shri Sharad Arvind Bobde, declined to grant security to any woman of the reproductive age group who sought entry against the temple’s religious practices and beliefs, thereby restoring the status as it existed prior to the first verdict.

2011 judgment of the Kerala High Court. In its judgment, the High Court had held that the Travancore Royal Family had no authority over the administration of the Padmanabhaswamy Temple after the abolition of royal titles and privileges by the Constitution (Twenty-Sixth Amendment) Act of 1971. The High Court had also transferred control over the Temple to a trust, which was to be managed by the appointees of the State Government of Kerala.

the history surrounding the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the Constitution; and

To romanticise and venerate the Constitution, I argued, was to conflate the means with the end to the detriment of the civilisation. In a nutshell, I took the position that the Constitution must be alive to history to serve its intended purpose.

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.

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.

I believed that it would be unwise to put economics and civilisational priorities in walled gardens because the relationship between the two was too close to risk a silo-based approach. After all, the average person was bound to assume and attribute the West’s economic prosperity to the values and ideals it subscribed to, and ultimately to its onto-epistemology and theology (OET).

Also, based on the writings of leonine civilisational icons, such as Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, I believed every culture had something of value to contribute to the global pool of thought. It was, therefore, clear to me that recasting Bharat in the mould of the West would kill its originality and character, making it a mere vassal of the West, that too after the European coloniser had left its shores.

As a result, I started reading the works of scholars, such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter D. Mignolo, Sylvia Wynter, Ramón Grosfoguel, Catherine E. Walsh and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, among others. Dr. Viswanathan also put me in touch with another brilliant scholar of decoloniality, Ms Sumita Ambasta, who introduced me to literature that shed light on colonial language policies, and the writings of Arturo Escobar whose perspectives on the relationship between coloniality and ‘development’ is a must-read for development professionals in Bharat.

I learnt that ‘coloniality’, as first conceptualised by Latin-American scholar Aníbal Quijano, informed the European coloniser’s use of power and was the very basis and justification for exploitation of the world.

This colonial matrix of power, to which both modernity and rationality were integral, had the effect of negating the cultural experience and subjectivities of colonised societies, so much so that according to the coloniser, their histories began only upon his advent.

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.

In the first section, citing the literature on coloniality, I broadly discuss the genesis of a Eurocentric/Western-normative framework starting from the Age of Discovery, which began with Christopher Columbus’ expedition in 1492,

‘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.

Scholars agree that every society has the right to define coloniality and, therefore, decoloniality for itself based on its own history and experience.

Western imperialism, both of which have been collectively referred to as Eurocentrism or Western-centrism or Western-normativism or ‘North Atlantic abstract universal fictionalism’.

In fact, the investigative spirit of ‘The Renaissance’, which is believed to have started in the fourteenth century, is credited to have laid the foundations for the Age of Discovery. The Age of Discovery significantly overlapped with The Renaissance, which was followed by ‘The Reformation’, leading to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which was, in turn, followed by what is treated as the zenith of European civilisation—‘The Age of Enlightenment/Reason’ and ‘The Industrial Revolution’.

For instance, while the postcolonial school focuses on the local, it tries to universalise the local, thereby falling prey to the same universalising tendency of colonialism.

Importantly, according to the decolonial school, ‘postcolonialism’ gives the impression that the colonial mindset or consciousness ended with decolonisation, when, in fact, it has survived decolonisation and continues to impact decolonised/‘independent’ societies.

However, since the rest of the world did not live in the Dark Ages prior to the fifteenth century, the celebration of the Age of Discovery by several erstwhile colonised societies is truly tragic and naïve.

They are oblivious to the impact of the Enlightenment on their ability to evaluate their own histories and cultures sans the shame, judgement and sanctimony induced by it.

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, as we shall see, is attributable to the predominance of postcolonial thought in Asia and the Middle East, especially Bharat and Palestine.

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

These complex realities may explain the predominant focus of decolonial scholarship on race, as opposed to both religion and race. In my view, the Critical Theory of Race (popularly acronymised as CRT for Critical Race Theory), in some ways, may be treated as the precursor to decolonial thought.

They may have been genuinely apprehensive of being isolated in a largely Europeanised and integrated world if they reverted to their precolonial political institutions.

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

Decoloniality has been described as the movement for reclamation and restoration of indigeneity and its subjectivities. In hindsight, it could be said that the 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.

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. This belief, which was the premise of the colonial power structure and a figment of the coloniser’s self-important worldview, was legitimised as being ‘objective’, or ‘scientific’, or ‘rational’ and therefore, ‘natural’.

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 projecting his way of life as the aspirational ideal. The blanket consumption of this idea by the dominant native elites served to alienate them from the rest of the colonised society.

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.

After all, as scholars have identified, coloniality goes hand in hand with modernity/rationality and vice versa. As long as coloniality is alive, despite its outward proclamations of open-mindedness, dialogue and diversity, the colonial DNA of modernity and rationality will continue to actively resist and oust indigeneity.

Seed, the word modern simply meant ‘different’ without any value being imputed to it, neither positive nor negative.

Papal Bull called Inter Caetera was issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, which authorised Spain and Portugal to colonise, convert and enslave non-Christians.

religion as an anthropological category and race as an organising principle of human identification and social organisation were the products of European colonialism, which only expanded with the growth of Western modernity.

Citing the work of Guy Stroumsa, an Israeli scholar of religious studies, Torres took the view that the Age of Discovery prompted a new approach to religion in view of Christianity’s encounter with Amerindians; this is what makes the Age of Discovery relevant for understanding the emergence of the modern categories of religion and race.

This divide between those with a soul and without, according to Torres, led to race consciousness in the European coloniser, because the coloniser saw the coloured native people as ‘non-souls’. This converted religion into an anthropological category because it had become a marker of race.

Christian OET as it existed then and shared a common purpose—native non-Christian communities had to convert or die.

Conversion to Christianity was also projected to the native as a way of gaining social respectability, acceptance into the circles of the coloniser and access to European education being offered by missionaries. This meant that Christianity satisfied the practical needs of the native peoples, needs which were created by the coloniser, instead of fulfilling their spiritual needs.

it is sometimes argued 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.

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.

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.

Instead, it is about restoring something as fundamental as dignity to the native perspective so that the indigenous society can rebuild itself using its own ideals and tools instead of those of the coloniser.

That a fraternal bond existed between diverse communities, which are often lumped together as ‘indigenous peoples’, is clear from the fact that when the European coloniser arrived in North America, there were close to 2,000 cultural groups that had their own lifestyles, languages, beliefs and customs. Notwithstanding territorial conflicts, which may be attributed to human nature, their coexistence has been attributed to their ‘human-to-land’ ethic and their belief that they were all citizens of nature.

Amerindian peoples lived ‘a metaphysic of nature’, wherein each group spelled out in great detail the roles and responsibilities of the members of the community. This enumeration of roles was based on the realisation of the ‘vast web of humankind’s cyclical interrelationships with the elements, the earth and all that lives upon the land’.

One worshipped nature and saw himself as a part of it, while the other put himself above nature and sought to enjoy its plenty as a matter of divinely ordained right.

Cartesian dualistic approach, whose distinction between subject/mind and object/body placed human beings above nature.