India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

by J. Sai Deepak

Be it therefore enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons in this present Parliament assembled, and by the Authority of the same, as follows; that is to say, Transfer of the Government of India to Her Majesty

There was certainly no attempt on the part of the British government to conceal or skirt around its Christian identity and the foundations of its infrastructure in Christian political theology. Surely it cannot be contended that a Parliament which legally provided (and still does) for the presence of 26 Bishops representing Christianity was a secular Parliament. Why, then, do we attempt to hyper-secularise what was essentially a Christian establishment when statutory facts, not merely opinion, coming straight from the horse’s mouth, speak for themselves?

This period also saw the Home Rule Scheme of 1889, which was the first attempt towards securing the right of franchise to Indians and Indian representation in the legislative councils, and the preparation of the Constitution of India Bill, 1895 (also known as the Home Rule Bill), most probably drafted under the stewardship of Lokamanya Balgangadhar Tilak.11

It was highly inconsistent with our promise to elevate and improve the condition of the Natives of India if we excluded from our schools in that country the Bible, which was the only standard of right and wrong. It was said that the fear of exciting distrust among the Natives and of weakening our hold upon.

In any case, did the British government stop its expenditure from revenues earned in Bharat on the Church establishment in Bharat after the Proclamation of 1858 to prove its secular and neutral credentials? No. This is demonstrated by the question raised in the House of Commons on 28 September 1915 in relation to the Ecclesiastical establishment in India, which is extracted below

As we shall see in the next chapter, this fact is clearly demonstrated yet again in the convergence of international events leading to the founding of the League of Nations, such as the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and the debates in the British Parliament surrounding the passing of the Government of India Act of 1919. The ensuing material will show that international law was used as a springboard and a force multiplier to give effect to universalisation of the Christian political theology which forms the basis of the European/Western civilisation.

global development would be ahistorical in light of the cogitations

Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s ‘Political Testament of 1914’ stands out in this regard since it addressed the issue of ‘provincial autonomy’ with a certain degree of specificity. Subsequently, in October 1916, a Memorandum of post-war reforms was presented to the then Viceroy of India, Lord Chelmsford, by 19 non-elected members of the Imperial Legislative Council, which included Mahamana Madan Mohan Malaviya and Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

The 1935 Act, in turn, provided the broader framework for the Constitution of independent India, as admitted by the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar, in the Constituent Assembly Debates.5 Since the foundational document is the Montford Report, those who wish to understand the origins of independent Bharat’s constitutional framework must read the 256-page Report which, among other things, is a one-stop shop of sorts to understand the evolution of the British politico-legal and administrative infrastructure in Bharat.

In Part II of the Report, the proposals of the authors are set out along with the reasons in Paragraphs 178–199. These portions of the Report, according to me, are mandatory reading to understand the continuing colonial consciousness and civilising tendencies of the Christian coloniser.

The inevitable result of education in the history and thought of Europe is the desire for self-determination; and the demand that now meets us from the educated classes of India is no more than the right and natural outcome of the work of a hundred years. There can be no question of going back, or of withholding the education and enlightenment in which we ourselves believe;

Further, we have every reason to hope that as the result of this process, India’s connexion with the Empire will be confirmed by the wishes of her people. The experience of a century of experiments within the Empire goes all in one direction. As power is given to the people of a province or of a dominion to manage their own local affairs, their attachment becomes the stronger to the Empire which comprehends them all in a common bond of union.

It goes without saying that the authors of the Report clearly understood the causal relationship between the education system and ideas that drive a society’s polity.

Montford Report must also be read for its impact on the structure of Bharat’s Constitution, such as the introduction of Central and Provincial Legislatures, the creation of Central and Provincial Lists (that is, lists of subjects they could legislate on), streamlining of the Indian Civil Service and so on and so forth.

sanctimony of the British coloniser, his concern for the ‘European community’ and his expectation of gratitude from Indians for ‘India’s material prosperity’, which is owed to Europeans, is captured brilliantly in Paragraph 344 of

India has benefited enormously by her commercial development in European hands: nor is the benefit less because it was incidental and not the purpose of the undertaking. What then are the obligations of the various parties?

No less is it the duty of Indian politicians to respect the expectations which have been implicitly held out; to remember how India has profited by commercial development which only British capital and enterprise achieved; to bethink themselves that though the capital invested in private enterprises was not borrowed under any assurance that the existing form of government would endure.

If missionary efforts were to assume a form that aroused widespread alarm in Indian minds, or if orthodox Hindu or Muslim zeal sought to impose disabilities which would lead to India’s necessities losing the material and moral benefits which missions afford, we should hold it to be the duty ·or the Government which is responsible to Parliament to step in and apply the remedy

expenditure classified by the order of the Governor-General in Council as— (a) ecclesiastical

This takes us to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919–1920, which led to the founding of the League of Nations and requires us to understand terms, such as Standard of Civilisation, ‘civilised nations’, ‘self-determination’ and ‘nation-state’. Readers may recollect that earlier, in Chapter 4, I had discussed the role of the Standard of Civilisation as a legal standard for the entry of only civilised nations into the international society that laid down international law.

Therefore, calling a nation ‘civilised’ is a secularised way of labelling it a ‘Christian nation’ or a Europeanised nation that has organised itself on the lines of a nation-state. The literature shows that for non-Christian non-European countries, the path to being treated as a ‘civilised nation’ was obviously more arduous, and therefore they had to effect a fundamental change in their systems to be accepted into this elite European/Western club of nations.

‘The Standard of “Civilisation” in International Society’ by scholar Gerrit Gong,

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is true that every nation or culture had its own definitions of who was civilised and who was the savage; the difference, however, was that Europe sought to universalise its definitions whereas others used it primarily to provide or restrict access to their societies and territories. That the distinction struck by the Christian White European was based on his obsession with race and ethnicity, especially his superiority thereof—which he believed as an anthropological fact—is evident from the historical treatment of ‘inferior’ races.

Owen Chadwick defines secularization in the following terms12: ‘the relation (whatever that is, which can only be shown by historical inquiry) in which modem European civilization and society stands to the Christian elements of its past and the continuing Christian elements of its present’.

One element of the Christian tradition which the trend toward secularization not only maintained but intensified was the universality manifest in the biblical injunction to take the good news to every nation. Christianity’s universalist aspirations were easily transformed into notions of a universal civilization which could progress by adhering to scientific principles.