India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

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This book seeks to unravel the veil of coloniality that has profoundly shaped the thinking of the conquered by white European Christian subjugation. Swarajya - a big tent for liberal right of centre discourse that reaches out, engages and caters to the new India. There cannot be a more searing example of the sacred land ontology being elided out of the human consciousness.

He makes no attempt to understand that the humanities are inherently subjective and all the evidence that is provided by scholars of humanities is purely interpretations of observations and should be judged based on their utility in real life rather than their ideological underpinnings. They challenged the notion of Bharat not being a united entity before their arrival, and the author cites various examples for this.The blatantly Christian attempt to understand the fundamental tenets of Hinduism led to the quest for a Moses-like law giver. 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. He then introduces 'Decoloniality', what it means, its origins and refers to the scholarship works on it.

The book criticizes the claim of the Indian elite that Britain unified the country and made investments in infrastructure such as the railways. While Middle Eastern Coloniality was defended against by the natives owing to its "in-your-face" nature, the end goals of European coloniality were much more oblivious. That is, instead of treating the European position as the sole universal benchmark, decoloniality prefers The monochromatic concept of a nation-state does not do justice to India on account of the sheer human diversity.He again very clearly demonstrates with original transcriptions of Parliamentary debates, letters between various church officials and British officials and how Christian values were subtly but surely introduced in Bharat and what the intent and ultimate aim was of the Coloniser and how they wanted to achieve that. This book is an honest attempt at highlighting these colonial traits and raising awareness in this regard so that as Indians, we could contemplate how to truly contribute towards decolonising our nation. The civil society acted as a secularized reproduction of the Christian assumption that humans are stained by sin and fundamentally depraved. Neither does it lie in his understanding of Christian nature and intent of the European Coloniser or in his ability to put it down in the form of a scholarly book.

And yet, that is precisely what lawyer J Sai Deepak has achieved in his first of a proposed trilogy of books on Bharat and Bharatiya consciousness. J Sai Deepak’s book India That is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation and Constitution quite unsettled me. One may describe the three respectively, as a culture’s metaphysical beliefs, knowledge structure and praxis of rites and rules. Summarizing this in the author's words - "the decolonial framework seeks to reinscribe the primacy of indigeneity, indigenous consciousness and its subjectivity in formerly colonized societies and civilizations. This is a crucial difference between the concept proposed by the author and what the people have become used to over the centuries.

The normative Western mindset, incapable of both acknowledging and respecting such relationship proceeds to mercilessly pillage the land and enslave the native. It also puts forth the concept of Middle Eastern coloniality, which preceded its European variant and allies with it in the context of Bharat to advance their shared antipathy towards the Indic worldview. India, That Is Bharat, the first book of a comprehensive trilogy, explores the influence of European 'colonial consciousness' (or 'coloniality'), in particular its religious and racial roots, on Bharat as the successor state to the Indic civilisation and the origins of the Indian Constitution. All the while a sanctimonious charade was maintained that the ruler will not intrude in the natives’ ways, however distasteful they are thought to be.

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. A society which looks at its culture and traditions through the eyes of colonizers is doomed for eternity. Before I review this book, I'd like to elucidate how difficult it is to review such a book as it poses more questions to the reader than it answers, it poses difficult, uncomfortable and yet very relevant and pertinent questions to the individual, the groups and the society as a whole and makes us question everything in our country from the administration of a Village Panchayat to the administration of our nation, from the mindset of the elite to that of the common man, from our approach to education to foreign policy, from our perspective on environment to development and much more. The book itself is compartmentalized into three sections and forms the first installment in a trilogy.

To comment on this book in conclusion, I'll mention what supreme court said regarding the book written by rana ayub — " it is based upon surmises, conjectures, and suppositions and has no evidentiary value. As I understand it, the difference between coloniality and post-coloniality is this: the former has unconsciously internalised the coloniser’s prescriptions, and the latter is consciously aligned with the coloniser’s mission.