India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

by J. Sai Deepak

‘belief in the mastery of nature and of humans through increased scientific and technical knowledge’;

The ‘modern’, ‘rational’, ‘scientific’, Christian European coloniser could not get himself to acknowledge that the lived experience and traditional knowledge of native societies gathered over millennia could teach him more than a thing or two about living in harmony with nature as opposed to merely salvaging what remained of it in the name of ‘sustainable’ development.

Native knowledge traditions were largely passed on through the generations orally, employing storytelling as a means of transmitting knowledge.19 One of its objectives was to keep the knowledge within the community, so that it was accessible only to those who understood both its meaning and, importantly, its sanctity.

The absence of a ‘book’ not only rendered their faiths but also their entire history legendary and mythical in the eyes of the coloniser. Simply put, if the proof of the object of faith did not exist in writing, the object did not exist.

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. To remove traces of the past in the language of the future, native children were forbidden from speaking in their languages,20 a practice that continues in English-medium schools to this day.

There even exist recorded instances of European legislators in colonial South Africa exhorting the South African government to ‘win the fight against the non-White in the classroom instead of losing it in the battlefield’.26 So much for all the vaunted liberation and civilisation being benevolently offered by the coloniser through his education.

Impressionable young Africans were being taught that a ‘civilised’ African was one who assimilated into European culture. Even teachers were trained in such a manner so as to ensure that African and European children in British colonies did not receive the same education.

Clearly, as some scholars on colonial education in Africa have pointed out, non-European and European children in British colonies did not receive the same education: while one was taught to serve, the other to rule, which was the vision of the coloniser—to colonialise the colonised society.

To cut a long story short, 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.

It was to the credit of the determination of native peoples which kept alive whatever remained of their culture. It was this determination that gave colonised societies the strength and confidence needed to aspire for political independence, which was also partly a consequence of colonial education backfiring on the coloniser.

As we shall see, the manifestation of ‘secularised’ coloniality remains most rampant in the political, legal and religious spheres, which reflects in the misplaced sense of pride that several decolonised nations draw as inheritors of a ‘common law tradition’, or being part of the ‘commonwealth of civilised nations’ or as the ‘beneficiaries of the Magna Carta’.

Importantly, the manner in which natives were recruited into the colonial power structure was yet another proof of the European coloniser’s deeply ingrained ethno-religious consciousness.

similar approach to army recruitment based on ethnicity was employed in British Borneo, Burma and the British areas of Africa. The Dutch were no different in their recruitment strategies in the Dutch East Indies.

The extent of dependence was evidenced by the fact that even the native elites, or perhaps especially the elites, began to subscribe to the coloniser’s view that the native society would fall into disarray and utter confusion if the coloniser were to pack his bags and leave. In the mind of the native, the success of the coloniser in keeping the native society under his thumb was attributed to his overall cultural superiority (race included) and specifically, to the most visible aspect of the colonial apparatus, namely the administrative and legal systems imposed on the colonised societies.

Why obsess over the coloniser’s religion? Such a question misses the entire point of the analysis, namely to identify the theological foundations of the colonial infrastructure since it has no legs to stand on independent of them, and therefore, their identification is necessary to outline and define a decolonial approach.

Therefore, an examination of such worldview through the prism of coloniality necessarily requires us to question whether a specific foreign theological framework was at play, notwithstanding all the attempts at secularising and universalising it because universalisation of a particular way of life was the very object of coloniality.

Starting from at least 1517 ce, that is, over 100 years before the Peace of Westphalia, resistance to the Catholic Church led by pastor-theologians Martin Luther (German) and John Calvin (French)—known as the Protestant Reformation—had begun, owing to the abuse of papal authority and the absolute control of the Catholic priesthood over Christianity.

The nature of the Protestant Reformation warrants understanding, especially from the perspective of Bharat, for yet another critical reason—its anti-clericalism was exported by the coloniser to the colonised indigenous societies as well.

The nature of the society, based on protestant anti-clericalism

Dr. Jakob De Roover’s book Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism is deeply educative.

Read

Therefore, wherever I believe a certain work has not received its due in Bharat despite its manifest relevance, I have consciously chosen to discuss it at length, as opposed to merely referencing it, in the hope of greater dissemination of important decolonial scholarship, such as that of De Roover.

This meant that the process of conversion towards the object of reformation was a never-ending one for two reasons: first, the ‘original sin’ was too seductive to overcome and therefore, human beings would assuredly fail, thereby reinforcing their status as wretched sinners; and second, this process had to continue until the second coming.

However, the influence of the monastic orders on the Church led to the morphing of priesthood to mirror the rigours of a monastic life, which involved the four-stage process of vocation, reform, conversion and purification. Since 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).

This effectively turned 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.

This empowered the lay believer’s ability to pursue his or her own faith through individual and direct submission to God without any form of ecclesiastical intercession. This was the bedrock of the approach of the Protestant Reformation to Christianity.

As we shall see in the next section, the Protestant lens led the Christian European coloniser to treat ‘Buddhism’, ‘Jainism’ and ‘Sikhism’ as Reformative movements that challenged ‘Brahminism’. In other words, even the history of indigenous religious developments within the Dharmic fold were reimagined on Protestant lines and presented as historical facts.

Therefore, the theory of two kingdoms was formulated, with Biblical support of course, by both Luther and Calvin, who struck a distinction between Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the temporal Kingdom of Earth where secular authorities held sway. It was 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.

However, 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.

De Roover makes it abundantly clear that a 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.

This gave the rulers/princes of States within the Holy Roman Empire the freedom to choose one of the two denominations under the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio, which translated to ‘whose realm, his religion’. Effectively, the Augsburg Settlement had the historic consequence of allowing each State within the empire to determine its Christian denominational identity, which laid the foundation for sovereign States in Europe, and marked the beginning of the decline of the Holy Roman Empire.

In fact, the Peace of Augsburg is proof of freedom of religion within the Christian fold with each State/principality within the empire claiming for itself a State denomination of Christianity, namely either Roman Catholicism or Lutheranism.

The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 along with the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio was recognised, strengthening the concept of religion-defined State sovereignty, with a defined territory having an official Christian denomination being identified as the realm of a particular State over which princes/rulers held dominion.

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,

State in the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States

state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.

Peace of Westphalia was distinctly Christian in nature, which has been secularised over time.19 In fact, while it is true that the Peace of Westphalia resulted in a transition of hegemony from the Habsburg Empire to sovereign States, parties to the peace saw themselves as ‘the Senate of Christian Europe’.

The freedom from the vice-like grip of the Roman Catholic Church allowed the people to develop a closer connection with their States and their national identities, paving the way for greater crystallisation of nation-statehood and the beginnings of European nationalism.

This spurred on the race for competitive nationalism and colonialism while remaining firmly within the Christian fold, a point which needs to be emphasised given the excruciatingly embarrassing contemporary tendency to secularise history. There is sufficient basis to conclude that these States were driven by inter-denominational competitiveness, triggered by the Protestant Reformation and the Peace of Westphalia.

Some scholars believe that these alliances contributed to the rise of capitalism, which is still a visible feature of the Westphalian nation-state system, where those with capital work with those in power to preserve and advance ‘national interest’.

general principles of law recognized by civilized nations;

However, scholars agree that these ‘sources’ themselves are the product of the Western civilisation. In fact, they believe that international law is ‘a living artifact’ of the Western civilisation, or more specifically the ‘Westphalian civilisation’, since this politico-theological framework of civilisation was universalised through its imposition on the rest of the world by Europe and the United States under the garb of ‘international law’.

Interestingly, the expectation was not limited to the application of the SOC framework to Westerners in the non-West; instead, non-Western societies were expected to re-order themselves on the same lines as European Westphalian States, which meant that the change was not merely external but also deeply internal to the non-West.

several colonised societies attained ‘independence’, the focus of the ‘civilised world’ suddenly fell on the ‘poverty’ of the ‘Third World’. It was conveniently forgotten that this impoverished situation of the Third World was a direct consequence of centuries of colonisation.

While on the one hand the Westphalian system emphasised State sovereignty and non-interference in the domestic affairs of nation-states, it hypocritically interfered with the domestic affairs and the fundamental consciousness of non-Western societies.

To start with, De Roover examines the views of one of the central figures of the Enlightenment, the English philosopher John Locke, who contributed significantly to the development of liberalism with his views on religious toleration, equality and the concept of rights.

De Roover explains the relevance of this examination especially for non-Christian societies because a liberal model of toleration that draws significantly from the Protestant framework is bound to interfere with the course of such societies, unless they share the same underlying ontological and theological premises, which cannot be said of most indigenous societies.

What this means is that equality per se as a notion was not unknown to non-Christian societies prior to the advent of the Christian coloniser; however, every society has the right to define equality according to its cultural experience sans the judgement induced by Christian coloniality. Further, to fashion a universal definition of equality, if at all it is desirable and possible, it must equally consider non-Christian positions on equality, which has not been the case thus far.

The limits of Locke’s religious toleration are thrown into sharp relief when Catholicism and atheism stand excluded from his idea of toleration, which demonstrates that his views were clearly informed by the Protestant conception of true and false religions.

Thus, even here, it was Christian liberty at play with the end goal being realisation of God’s will on earth. In light of this, there is no escaping the fact that the Enlightenment’s ‘toleration’ was a secularised fulfillment of a true Christian’s obligation, namely conversion for reformation of both Christians and non-Christians. The political theology of the Protestant Reformation could not have been written clearer on the walls of the Enlightenment project.

This may be because ‘orthodoxy’ was passé and it was more acceptable to speak out against orthodoxy in favour of the new, the ‘modern’, even in the context of Christianity, which only proves that even the challenge to Christian orthodoxy was a conversation within Christianity and not outside of it.

the idea of toleration is sought to be invoked to canvas the secular, liberal and broad-minded vision of the Enlightenment, the very writings of the leading thinkers of this movement only prove the contrary, that is, whether intentional or otherwise, 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.