India that is Bharat Quotes

“Bharat as a civilisation was a reality, and reducing that reality and near-unbroken lived experience to a mere talking point to score brownie points over one another was more a proof of expediency than real conviction in the values the Indic civilisation stood for.”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“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.”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“is precisely for these reasons that De Roover calls both secularism and liberalism secularised versions of Christian onto-epistemology, obscured by the employment of secularism itself as a filter to understand history. De Roover is not alone in holding this view. There are others, such as Carl L. Becker, S.J. Barnett and Elizabeth S. Hurd, who believe that at the very least the evidence to support the common assumption that the Enlightenment was a move away from Christianity towards secular reason is as far as it can get from being conclusive. That the secularisation of the Enlightenment is perhaps the consequence of a retrospective approach to history, appears to be the more plausible argument. This is because several of the leading Enlightenment thinkers were pious Christians in a society heavily committed to Christianity, whose philosophies were significantly more influenced”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“despite the experience of other indigenous societies whose precolonial religious identities have been either annihilated or reduced to a minority by the coloniser, 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.”
― J. Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“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.”
― J. Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“The spiritual character of the relationship between indigeneity and nature is an emotion that the coloniser can at best exoticise but can never relate to.”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“The fact that Article 1 of the Constitution expressly began with ‘India, that is Bharat.…’ to declare its roots and heritage to the world was barely known, and even if it was known, the significance of the use of ‘Bharat’ in the very first Article of the document appeared to have been lost over time.”
― J. Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“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.”
― J. Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“At least four forms of colonialism are recognised, namely exploitation colonialism, settler colonialism, surrogate colonialism and internal colonialism,”
― J. Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“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. This was, of course, in addition to the writings of Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and other civilisational icons.”
― J. Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“coloniality was a form of ‘inception’ performed on the minds of the colonised so that colonialism and colonisation were no more external to their consciousness, but became internal to it.”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“Critically, the pursuit of economic prosperity through the mere imitation of a Western framework, according to me, would cement the notion that the only viable way was the Western way, which would have irreversible and catastrophic consequences for the survival of Bharat’s indigeneity. 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).”
― J. Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“In etching the arc of the Hindu civilisation, what is astounding in hindsight is that Sarda treats the end of the Mahabharata War, the beginning of Kali Yuga, as the turning point in the history of Bharat—an approach consistent with that of Indic epistemological systems. Now, barely 115 years after Sarda’s book was published, anyone who believes in the historicity of the Mahabharata War or the concept of a Kali Yuga, would be ridiculed for putting stock in ‘myth’ and ‘fiction’. This demonstrates the manner in which the agency of the Indic consciousness over time and its subjectivity has become entirely subservient to the totalising nature of the casual coloniality we encounter in Bharat today.”
― J. Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“In short, coloniality is the fount of the policy of colonialism that results in colonisation,”
― J. Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“parent”
― J. Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“Propagating the gospel was affirmed as a purpose at the very outset in 1614 and subsequently repeated unequivocally, and the East India Company was specifically authorised to make war on ‘heathen nations’ by a Charter in 1683.”
― J. Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“decoloniality”
― J. Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“Google, to take upon themselves the”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“Until a decolonial approach is employed by experts and ‘intellectuals’, we will continue to see the entrenchment of colonialised identities and fissures, which began with an anti-Brahmin slant but whose rapid movement towards an anti-Dharmic/anti-Hindu position is less veiled with each passing day—thereby revealing the end goal of European coloniality.”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“Rest of the world was not living in the Dark Ages before Pax Europaea or European Peace, and will certainly not plunge into ignorance and darkness after the demise of Pax Europaea. Therefore, it is time to discard the idea that the rest of the world is the Christian White Man’s burden.”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“It is important to remember that in the middle of the twentieth century, when 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.

Instead, decolonisation engendered a new talking point, namely that the newly formed ‘nation-states’ must ‘catch up’ with the West by focusing on ‘development’ the European way.”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“Colonisation, as understood by scholars, refers to a process or phenomenon by which people belonging to a nation establish colonies in other societies while retaining their bonds with the parent nation, and exploit the colonised societies to benefit the parent nation and themselves. Simply put, the process of establishing colonies is called colonisation and the policy of using colonisation to increase one’s footprint is called colonialism.”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“This could be because in the geography of origin of decolonial thought, namely the Americas, colonised societies have become almost entirely Christian. In other words, the preoccupation of decolonial scholarship with race and its reluctance to address religion with the same degree of candour may be attributed to the fact that the regions that have produced much of the scholarship on coloniality so far, follow the religion of the coloniser, namely Christianity. Their demographic reality, perhaps, offers an explanation as to their gaze being more alive to race than to religion, since reclaiming their indigenous religious identities may seem impossible despite having embarked on their decolonial journeys. Given the huge Christian settler colonial populations in the Americas in particular, the numbers may not even be conducive for indigenous peoples even if they wanted to revert to the faith of their ancestors. And if this were not enough, pragmatic considerations, such as the highly organised and evangelical nature of Christianity and its status as a global majority, have a direct and real bearing on the ability of any erstwhile non-Christian colonised society to reclaim and return to its roots.”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution