India that is Bharat

Title: India that is Bharat – Coloniality, Civilisation and Constitution

Author: J Sai Deepak

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2021 (First)

ISBN: 9789354352492

Pages: 460

 

India attained its political independence from Britain in 1947. Even though the foreign masters were forced to go home, the soul of colonialism firmly stayed back. India did not even try to dismantle the colonial institutions, but chose to wear some of them on its sleeves. The concept of a nation-state, constitutionalism, modernity, secularism and the understanding of what is a civilisation are borrowed from the British and held in high esteem. At this point, the question naturally arises whether these aren’t indeed ideals that are estimable and worthy of emulation. Without a trace of doubt we can answer it in the affirmative, but with a caveat. Our value system is moulded by education and exchange of ideas both locally and between nations. Both of these modes are suffused with colonial morals. Unbeknown to us, the colonized people’s thoughts are restrained within the bounds set by ideas having a colonial origin. Indian society unquestionably accepted the ideas of modernity that came to dominate intellectual life in the nineteenth century and accepted as valid by both the colonizer and the colonized. The veneer of coloniality is to be first removed to appreciate the indigenous values that have been systematically vilified by colonial era historians and evangelists. This book seeks to unravel the veil of coloniality that has profoundly shaped the thinking of the conquered by white European Christian subjugation. The title of the book refers to Article 1 of the Indian Constitution which states that India, that is, Bharat shall be a union of states. The title also refers to the unreconciled dichotomy between an India shaped by colonialism and a Bharat which represents indigenous consciousness. J. Sai Deepak is an engineer-turned-lawyer practicing as an arguing counsel before the Supreme Court of India. He has carved a niche for himself as a litigator in civil, commercial and constitutional matters. This is his first book.

 

Sai Deepak promotes the use of the word ‘coloniality’ to denote the mindset that still keeps the coloniser’s ideals deeply entrenched in the colonised’s thoughts. Coloniality is the fundamental element of colonialism that facilitates colonization of the mind through complete domination of the culture and world view of the colonized society. A confusing point confronts us here. Unlike other colonialized societies, the religion and culture of India is still largely intact after centuries of European Christian and Middle Eastern colonization, the latter being a euphemism for Muslim conquest of India. The author argues that beneath this façade of continuity, the essential cultural aspects have changed to emulate the European prototypes. The vision of independence coined by native elites was limited to the politico-economic sphere but did not include decolonization on the cultural front. The true genius of European colonialism lay not in the political and economic repression of the native, but in successfully projecting his way of life as the aspirational ideal.

 

The author then moves on to explain how the colonizer could dislodge awareness of one’s roots from the minds of Indian ‘heathens’. The education policy of Britain was heavily tinted by the evangelical hue where the missionaries were assigned the task of teaching the children of other faiths seemingly secular topics. The evangelists always dangled the carrot of conversion as a way of uplifting the natives through plum jobs in the colonial administration. On the other hand, the government wanted to produce a generation of people ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’. We have to accept that the colonizer achieved what he targeted. Colonial education annihilated a society’s belief in itself. It made the colonized people see their past as one vast wasteland of non-achievement and it made them desirous of distancing themselves from that wasteland. European coloniality was directly responsible for disrupting the sacred relationship between indigenous peoples and nature, the destruction of their faith, language, political and social structures and knowledge – in short, their entire culture. The Christian tenet that placed man at the centre of creation brought in the idea of nature as just a resource for exploitation. The world is still witnessing the dreadful aftereffects of carrying this idea too far.

 

What is really unexpected for the readers is to learn that the modern morals shared by colonialism such as rationality and secularism were shaped by reformative concepts on Christianity which found its expression in the Protestant Reformation. The religious wars popularly known as the Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia which ended it engendered nation-states and postulated the twin ideals of a spiritual and temporal sphere. Enlightenment represented the predominance of reason over faith. Noted philosopher John Locke divided society also into two spheres, the civil and the religious. This suggested a civil authority to safeguard the nation and also to prevent outrages of humans who are designed ‘to prey on the fruits of others’ labour’. This was a replica of the Christian political theology of two kingdoms – the material and spiritual. The civil society acted as a secularized reproduction of the Christian assumption that humans are stained by sin and fundamentally depraved. The book criticizes the claim of the Indian elite that Britain unified the country and made investments in infrastructure such as the railways. The very idea of India, its civilizational unity, its relationship with time and its subjectivity have been thus tied to the advent of the colonizer. This is an abysmal understanding of global history and clear evidence of the nature and dominance of coloniality in Indian secular thinking.

 

The colonial influence on the legal systems and constitution is still felt, mostly to the detriment of diversity and indigenous spirit. Traditionally, the colonies were forced to adopt legal mechanisms to preserve their integrity upon achieving independence to overcome the fissiparous tendencies created by the imposition of nation-statehood. The foremost among these was a constitution which was initially intended to be a means to forge a nation-state. This was often elevated to the status of a religious document. Judiciary in decolonized societies assumes a similar position as the Roman Catholic Church during Reformation. Instead of decentralizing morality and allowing the society’s indigenous cultural moorings to inform law and policy, blind and unthinking constitutionalism has effectively contributed to the concentration of totalizing powers over morality and world view in the hands of unelected institutions and individuals. This is a clear reference to the author’s own experience when he appeared in court to argue against the plea of feminists demanding entry into the Sabarimala temple in Kerala. This temple forbids entry of women of reproductive age based on custom and legend of the deity who is worshipped as a brahmachari. The court ruled for entry of women in an immediately stunning though eventually fruitless verdict.

 

Sai Deepak spares enough space to examine the difficulties posed by the framework of a nation-state on India. The monochromatic concept of a nation-state does not do justice to India on account of the sheer human diversity. A different yardstick is to be applied, such as the civilisation-state like China or Japan. In a civilisation-state, the core unit is not the individual; instead it is the group or groups to which a person belongs. This is a crucial difference between the concept proposed by the author and what the people have become used to over the centuries. Individuals, of course, have rights, but it should necessarily be traded off if it adversely affects the interests of the group or the civilizational interest. The author is somewhat vague on this front, claiming that such ideas would become clarified only after decoloniality is applied to the accumulated wisdom.

 

This book ends with the introduction of the Government of India Act, 1919 which the author claims to be the first Constitution of India. Even though the British state claimed to be secular and thus impartial to all religions, almost a quarter of this book is dedicated to list out the instances in which it went out of the way to promote Christian evangelism. The Charter Act of 1833 included provisions for appointing bishops to the presidency towns, with the Kolkata bishop having supremacy over them. The onus for appointing the bishop was on the government. Similarly, the 1919 Constitution specified that the expenditures made for ecclesiastical purposes shall not be submitted to the vote in the legislative assembly and that they should also not be open for discussion. Many more such cases are described in the book. But the utmost harm to Indian society was felt on another arena. The blatantly Christian attempt to understand the fundamental tenets of Hinduism led to the quest for a Moses-like law giver. This quest yielded Manu, author of the Manu Smriti. This treatise in fact constituted only a descriptive recording of customs and practices, rather than religious law, but it is now wrongly treated as the essence of Hinduism by liberal thinkers.

 

Make no mistake about it. This book is a very serious effort and has the potential to change the outlook of readers. This is only the first part of a trilogy. It provides the theoretical underpinnings of a new school of thought in Indian politics. That it supports the Right is an understatement. This book furnishes its theoretical framework in a sophisticated language understandable to all political scientists in the world. This book also heralds the coming of age of solid rightist thinking. If I may say so without causing offence, the arguments and logic in this book unshackles the proponents of Hindutva from the philosophically candid but rather unsophisticated oeuvre of the early leaders of the Sangh. The author consistently uses the term ‘Bharat’ throughout the book. Any slight incoherence in his logic is answered by the convenient assertion that whether the issue of pre-colonial India needed reform cannot be examined until there is a decolonialised understanding of pre-colonial India’s indigenous culture and society.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star