India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

by J. Sai Deepak

There is enough literature to suggest that at least until 1795, when Kant completed the manuscript of Toward Perpetual Peace at the age of 71, he consciously and openly believed in the hierarchy of races, and in particular, the superiority of the Whites over the non-Whites. In 1788, he was of the view that people from Africa and India lacked the drive to activity, and hence lacked the mental capacities to be self-motivated and successful in northern climates.33 To him, the Native Americans were weak, inert, incapable of any culture and occupied the lowest rung of the racial hierarchy. For someone who is credited with the formulation of a universalist moral theory, until the age of 71, Kant’s belief that the Whites represented the perfection of humanity was writ large in his writings. At the very least, it calls into question the views expressed by Kant during this period on a host of topics, such as equality and morality, when he published some of his most seminal works, such as the Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

That they never felt the need to offer indigenous views an equal place at the high-table of human thought as a matter of right, and not privilege, is proof enough of their patronising approach to indigenous worldviews. Surely it cannot be argued on their behalf that their egalitarianism can be presumed despite an express absence of dialogue with the indigenous peoples in the formulation of universalist theories which treated Europe and its civilisation as the centre of the universe.

Those who did not play by these rules were treated as outliers to the ‘world order’ and subjected to constant judgement stemming from never-ending Reformation-style sanctimony and virtue-signalling, which remains the position till date.

Naturally, over time, the constitution, which was initially intended to be a means to forge a nation-state and was a product of necessity, was elevated to the status of a religious document.

Naturally, the never-ending process of conversion and its end goal, namely reformation, were given a pride of place in an ostensibly secular legal instrument, namely constitution, whose claim of neutrality in relation to indigenous worldviews was as true as a modern-day politician’s promise.

While the monasticised Roman Catholic Church served the true God, the true religion and Christ, and advanced the process of conversion towards reformation of man in the image of God, modern day constitutional institutions serve colonial constitutionalism and advance the cause of reformation of the native society in the image of the European civilisation, perhaps under the belief that the native society’s salvation lies in Westernisation.

the premise is rooted in colonialised versions of indigenous history, it is but natural that transformative constitutionalism constantly sees the need to reform the native out of his/her identity. On the contrary, if the historical premise is the recognition of deep-seated coloniality in every aspect of the society, which is sought to be addressed, transformative constitutionalism could lead to shifting the locus of onto-epistemology and consciousness from the West to the indigenous society.

avail of the ‘fundamental rights’ guaranteed by constitutions, indigenous OET systems have had to conform to colonial definitions of ‘religion’, ‘religious denomination’ and the like, which are clearly rooted in Christian OET.

The harsh reality, however, is that such practitioners are a minority within a numerical majority, with the numerical majority itself being a colonialised global minority. This makes the practitioners of indigenous ways of life a micro-minority, who may perhaps be the last surviving members of their cultures and civilisations.

It is this deep-seated coloniality and sense of cultural/civilisational inferiority among colonialised natives that has given rise to bizarre creatures, such as ‘constitutional patriotism’.

That their identity as a member of the indigenous community has been weaponised to act against indigenous consciousness is lost in the incoherent and self-absorbed din of modernity, rationality and constitutional patriotism.

discussion has revolved around the origins and character of coloniality, modernity and rationality, it is equally important to understand the response, namely decoloniality, indigeneity, subjectivity and relationality.

European coloniality and its continuing after-effects. In other words, decolonial thought appears to have understood the motivation underlying European colonialism better than other schools of thought, as reflected by the discussion undertaken in the previous chapters.

Having recognised the tendency of the coloniser to obsessively universalise the European provincial worldview through secularization,2 decoloniality steers clear of the same mistakes and instead believes in a pluriversal approach, thereby enabling the coexistence of diverse subjectivities.

Decoloniality, according to Walter D. Mignolo, is a political project which recognises that coloniality, modernity and rationality are inseparable and therefore, the relevance of decoloniality is determined by the presence or absence of coloniality.

However, what distinguishes indigenous perspectives from the European is that the former’s vision accommodates and acknowledges the desirability of heterogeneity and diversity, whereas the latter insists on homogeneity, which is traceable to its Christian OET.

What makes decoloniality more appealing as an option compared to postcolonial critique is that it draws its strength and vitality from the fact that unlike coloniality, it is not bound by one universal definition. This fundamental character of decoloniality is underscored by scholars, such as Catherine E. Walsh and Mignolo, who acknowledge that decoloniality is meant to be subjective and contextual and therefore, to provide abstract universals may go against its very grain.

The other extreme of the non-West’s response is to reject the validity of everything that has emanated from Europe without realising that some of the so-called European contributions may, in fact, be products of acculturation that the coloniser may have misappropriated from indigenous cultures without attribution.

indigenous society can choose to completely overhaul its political structure based on its indigenous traditions, or retain the skeletal structure inherited from the coloniser and infuse it with the indigenous spirit by defining the role of the State and the concept of rights and duties based on its native onto-episteme. This also means either doing away with the imported ideological divides of the Left, the Right and the Centre, or redefining them based on indigenous intellectual traditions and experience.

first, most contemporary national and intra-national or sub-national identities are the products of colonial remapping of geographies and creation of identities, and therefore cannot form the basis of a decolonial approach; and second, a purely ethno-centric approach to culture is characteristic of coloniality which decoloniality seeks to counter.

Further, 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.

After all, if coloniality is a state of mind that cuts across ethnicities, so should decoloniality, which too is a state of mind.

In this regard, the decolonial approach should be to understand such structures through the indigenous lens sans colonial biases, and it must be left to each indigenous society to determine the contemporary purchase of such structures based on its OET without being burdened by the guilt-racked conscience of the West. This would be consistent with decoloniality’s commitment to diversity. This point shall be explained better in the context of discussions surrounding ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’ in and about Bharat in the next section of the book.

‘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’.

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

As a consequence of this, 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 ‘majority national communities’, which has no basis in the native worldview.

This proves my earlier point on international law being an instrumentality of coloniality. Further, the focus of both ILO definitions is on ‘identity’ as opposed to ‘consciousness’, wherein the former focusses on who are ‘indigenous peoples’ as opposed to also asking what constitutes or makes up ‘indigeneity’.

That said, this definition too is better applicable to those countries with significant European settler populations, such as the Americas, New Zealand and Australia, since it is based on the premise that such indigenous groups are in a position of relative non-dominance. Application of this definition to countries like Bharat with negligible European settler population results in the same pitfalls as the ILO definitions. Effectively, it passes on the European coloniser’s guilt as a legacy to the native ‘dominant’/‘majority national communities’ of Bharat.

tribal groups has only worked to the detriment of the native society since ‘tribal’ groups have been incongruously arrayed alongside ‘religious minorities’, and pitted against the rest of the ‘majority’ population of which they have been an organic part for millennia.

However, the silver lining is that the declaration does not define indigenous peoples or spell out the parameters for their identification, giving former colonies the chance to break from colonial stereotypes and metrics. In other words, the absence of a universal definition, although unintentionally decolonial, provides a pluriversal window to former colonies to address issues of indigeneity.

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.

Therefore, until ‘development’ is itself subjected to a decolonial filter, it will single-handedly propel indigenous peoples towards a Westernised future because it first and foremost affects a community’s relationship with nature, which percolates right down to the individual. Clearly, at the heart of it, the tussle is between colonial perception of humankind’s centrality to nature on the one hand and its actual place within nature on the other, which informs indigeneity, and hence decoloniality.

Decolonial thought takes a multipronged approach to ‘indigeneity’ by distilling the building blocks that constitute the ‘state of being indigenous’ beyond the superficial plane of ‘identity’.33 This is also because decolonial thought is aware of the Latin origins of ‘indigenous’, which is derived from the Latin term ‘indigenes’, meaning ‘born in the country’.

This means that those who retain their indigenous consciousness by subscribing to the indigenous way of life (‘indigeneity’) are dwindling in number while the indigenous ‘identity’ has become merely an external legal marker.

what must be the priority of indigeneity should be determined not by scholars of decoloniality, but by decolonialised indigenous societies, even if it takes the shape of an ethnic or religious identification project based on their respective histories.

The only divine purpose fulfilled by the indigenous peoples was to present the coloniser with the opportunity to fulfil his evangelical obligations. In other words, the relationship between coloniality and nature/land/geography was one of ownership for the purposes of enjoyment, which is the product of its dualist undergirding and the specific Christian OET behind humanism.

This translates to obligations towards nature, including ‘reciprocal obligations between humans and the other-than-human’. Such relationality not only informs the relationship between indigenous communities and nature, it also shapes their epistemologies and faiths as we saw earlier.

Clearly, there is a marked difference in the land ontologies of the European Christian coloniser and the non-Christian precolonial non-West. This does not mean that there is no element of territoriality in the indigenous approach to land; however, what underpins the territoriality, namely relationality, forms the substratum of its land ontology.

It raises questions of agency to practise a way of life that is associated with a geography owing to the relational dynamic between the indigenous worldview and the geography it is contained in. This also explains why indigenous epistemology sees its people as custodians of a sacred geography, whereas European nationalism perceives territory as an external object of possession and ownership.

Some believe the world has changed forever by virtue of European colonialism and there is no going back to precolonial ways of life, which makes indigenous societies eternal victims. However, ever since the offshoots of coloniality, namely globalisation and unconscientious mercantilism, have begun to expose the utterly destructive impact of coloniality on nature placing the world in a crisis, the cautious hope is that the world will begin its quest for alternatives that respect nature as being central to civilisation as opposed to relegating it to the category of a mere resource.

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’.

in Bharat, the failure of the very same coloniser to significantly convert the indigenous population to his faith is interpreted as proof of his secular and purely mercantile intent.

The result being that the deep and innate strength of Bharat’s consciousness—which has resisted the tsunami of coloniality with a greater degree of success than most other indigenous societies whose cultures, civilisations, and consciousness were nearly wiped out—is never recognised and acknowledged.

In short, the very idea of Bharat, its civilisational unity, its relationship with time and its subjectivity have been tied to the advent of the coloniser, independent of whom it is assumed that Bharat had no consciousness of its own. This is glaring evidence of an abysmal understanding of the global history and nature of colonialism.

To explain this position in greater detail, as in the first section, I will use this opportunity to discuss material that, in my opinion, deserves wider dissemination and whose relevance alongside, if not within, the framework of decoloniality is evident to me. In this regard, the works of Dr. Balagangadhara and Dr. De Roover are particularly important since they are closer to the decolonial school owing to their recognition of the existence of ‘colonial consciousness’, which is similar to Quijano’s recognition of coloniality.

This is evident from the coloniser’s belief that he was merely discharging his moral and binding obligation to ‘educate’ and ‘civilise’ the native, which flowed from his Christian OET that mandated that devil-worshipping heathens had to be ‘saved’ from their ‘false religions’ and their own immorality.

The point being advanced is that the framework of our discussions, conversations and debates, and its undergirding are predominantly colonial and until that lens is replaced with the indigenous lens, there is no scope for an honest discussion on the need for ‘reform’.

Simply put, the treatment of the European experience and view of the Indic society as ‘fact’ is a textbook case of the colonised being complicit in advancing and nurturing colonial consciousness because it feeds off of the unquestioning acceptance of the Western worldview. This position is similar to the one taken

But Balagangadhara and De Roover are of the view that hybridity and deliberate contamination of Western thought, even if employed as strategies of resistance, reduce the formerly colonised to the status of ‘immoral’ creatures because their ‘moral cowardice’ is writ large in the forgery and mimicry they employ while challenging Western thought.

In any case, to hope to subvert Western thought by operating within its framework is to fail to recognise that it only serves to further and legitimise the framework as a whole along with its claims of universal validity. The net result is the same—while the coloniser’s coloniality painted the native as fundamentally untrustworthy due to the immorality ingrained in his ‘false’ religion, postcolonial thought’s endorsement of hybridity and mimicry as tools of subversion internalises this immorality and doublespeak, thereby validating the untrustworthiness of the native.