India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

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Till the day we see our morality through the eyes of colonizers we will always end up seeing our self as savages, brutes and uncivilized. All these qualities come through in his writing., which doesn’t mean he can be understood if you are paying less than full attention. For those who aren’t aware, the Portuguese inquisition in Goa was one of the most brutal events where Hindus were tortured using various means to convert to Christianity and become the followers of the ‘true religion’.

So, despite having a perfectly legitimate POV on issues like CAA (not NRC), Article 370, Triple Talaq abolition etc, the Union BJP govt was unable to put forward coherent and well-constructed arguments. While they somehow managed the Indian public with emotional appeals and SM, the international perception was and is continued to be shaped by our left-liberals. Hopefully this changes with the rise of J.Sai Deepak (and Vikram Sampath). Al-Qadir Trust corruption case: Pakistan's jailed former PM Imran Khan moves Supreme Court for bail

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Ever since J Sai Deepak announced his plans to write a book on the Indic Civilisation and the effect of Coloniality on it and the constitution of Bharat, I was eager to get my hands on it. The book has delivered on all its promises and more and how. The author is simply trying to put his biased narrow opinion forward. The author in a very shrewd way mixes up some random historical facts and mixes his opinion with them. And ultimately creates a new hochpoch khichdi conspiracy theory type narrative and present it to public. In addition to wealth transfer and proselytisation, there was yet another colonial objective. It was to influence the Indian constitution-making process with a view to alienate it from Bharat’s OET roots and rule it through postcolonial proxies. The author traces the origins of Eurocentrism to ‘the Age of Discovery/Exploration’ in the 15th century, when Christopher Columbus set out in 1492 to ‘discover’ the ‘New World’. This was the beginning of European colonisation. This volume ends in 1919, when the British gave India a constitution — the Government of India Act of 1919, 84 years after Macaulay introduced his education policy. This was also the year when the League of Nations was formed, which was a cosy club of European nations which ruled most of the world. The Asian experience could impact the way colonialism, coloniality and decoloniality are perceived. India that is Bharat," written by J Sai Deepak, is an insightful exploration of the history of India(1857-1919) from Coloniality, civilisational and constitutional perspective. With its thought-provoking content, the book challenges readers to delve deeper through different Onto-Epistemological and Theological(OET) lenses, which has a direct impact on our way of thinking, education system, governance, Judiciary and in turn our way of life. He mainly talks about India which is based on European(Christian) OET and Bharat, if looked through a lens of Bhartiya OET.

In the first two books of the trilogy: ‘ India, that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution‘ and ‘ India, Bharat and Pakistan: The Constitutional Journey of a Sandwiched Civilisation‘, JSD takes on the path less travelled, expounding how the concept of “coloniality” extends beyond the physical occupation of land and exploitation of resources and is a product of a deep-seated mindset that fuels colonialism. He traces the individual and combined impact of European consciousness through British rule and the Middle East consciousness through centuries of Muslim rule on the Indic consciousness, their role in shaping India’s constitutional journey, and the bloody partition of the country.He finally shows us how Protestant Christian values were universalied through international laws, the League of Nations and other such world bodies and how it affects everyone even today and especially Bharat as it is the only standing civilisation since the dawn of Christianity and Islam. While I do not wish to undermine the extensive research done by J. Sai Deepak, which is exemplary to say the least, I want to say that this book is not meant for ordinary readers at all. It is meant for historians and scholars. Maybe other reviewers are not being completely honest about this point.

We are then exposed to the nature of colonization and how it affected the consciousness of our people to such an extent that the only way the native felt they could redeem their dignity was by "adopting European culture and thought processes". It made them forget and detest their own roots and made them think of their past and history as a colossal failure, thus undermining their self-confidence. The entire colonization process aims at universalizing and standardizing ways of life instead of allowing the diversity of different groups and societies to flourish. I can see the white man shake his head and mutter: “Tut, tut. That’s not the way to do it, you Turk.” He defines four forms of colonialism: exploitative colonialism, settler colonialism, surrogate colonialism and internal colonialism, the first two being the best-known. By ‘coloniality’, he refers to the thought process that advances the goal of colonisation, namely colonisation of the mind through complete domination of the culture of the colonised society. Of all the sources and forms of colonialism and coloniality the world has witnessed, none equals the Western European version of imperialism, which is seen as the descendant of and the successor to European colonialism.With a view to ameliorating the malevolent designs of colonialism from constantly festering in the psyche of policy making mavens and the common man alike, decolonization attempts to “release production of knowledge from the stranglehold of the West, which could lead to greater diversity of thought and subjectivity, in particular, resurgence and re-existence of indigenous perspective.” The primary goals of decolonization as articulated by Sai Deepak include an untethering from the moorings of identity politics and a conclusive escape from the entrenched dogmas of exclusionary ethnocentrism (race politics in short). 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. " Deepak also attempts to debunk the common argument that the idea of India as a nation state did not exist before the mutiny of 1857. That there existed a rough outline of ‘the civilisation state’ that was clinically, greedily operated upon by the intruder’s mindset. This mindset, Deepak believes, is for all its posturing of modernism and progressiveness a ‘Christian exercise’. Nobody can really argue the religious inspirations for Columbus’ missions and the British government’s casual insertion of missionary ideas into the Indian social curriculum. Deepak’s arguments about the existence and therefore pending reclamation of indigenous consciousness, of an ‘Indic civilization,’ are appealing in terms of ideas and can to some extent even be corroborated. Often the evidence of what existed can be found in what was being systematically wiped out.