As I hold J. Sai Deepak’s new book, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution, a tweet by a former journalist, with whom I had worked in a newspaper years ago, caught my attention. She has now left journalism and become an entrepreneur—and a reasonably successful one, I am told. “Islam does not need reform. Rather, Islam reforms people. It reformed Arabia out of its bloodied tribalism towards a society based on justice and civility,” she wrote, adding: “If you are Muslim and demand ‘reform’ of Islam, what are you even Muslim for? You don’t believe in the Quranic Ayat where Allah says He ‘perfected’ this religion? Introspect before agreeing with anyone suggesting ‘reform’.”
It struck me hard. I had met her. She was well-read, extremely bright and eloquent, and had all the resources at her disposal to make her realise that there was nothing in the world that could be called perfect. Perfection is what we strive for—and we should always! Even before going into the debate of what’s there in the Quran, the very notion that an order created 1,400 years ago was perfect and won’t ever need a reform was baffling. For, we arenot talking about a simple mathematical formula (even that may differ from one universe to another in this wide, never-ending space, as the new post-Newtonian, non-determinist science says today).
And then I realise that a convert’s worldview can be starkly different from the rest. Sir Vidia Naipaul, during one of his visits to India, as he eloquently recalled in his book Beyond Belief, realised the idea of spiritual vacancy in his life. “In Bombay, in a crowded industrial area—which was yet full of unexpected holy spots, a rock, a tree—that I understood that whatever the similarities of climate and vegetation and formal belief and poverty and crowd, the people who lived so intimately with the idea of the sacredness of their earth were different from us.” He continued, “Perhaps it is this absence of the sense of sacredness—which is more than the idea of the environment—that is the curse of the New World.”
Taking this argument further, Naipaul looked at the converted Muslim countries where “the fundamental rage is against the past, against history, and the impossible dream is of the true faith growing out of a spiritual vacancy”. He took the example of Pakistan to explain his argument: “All the history of the ancient land would cease to matter. In the school history books, or the school ‘civics’ book, the history of Pakistan would become only an aspect of the history of Islam. The Muslim invaders, and especially the Arabs, would become the heroes of the Pakistani story…. It is a dreadful mangling of history. It is a convert’s view; that is all that can be said for it. History has become a kind of neurosis. Too much has to be ignored or angled; there is too much of fantasy. This fantasy isn’t in the books alone; it affects people’s lives.”
Pakistani historian and columnist Nadeem Farooq Paracha too found this malaise afflicting Pakistani society. In his book, Points of Entry, he found it difficult to believe that Mohammad bin Qasim, the Arab invader who attacked Sindh in 712 CE and killed and enslaved the very ancestors of the people who are eulogising him today, was given the official title of the “first citizen of Pakistan”!
History, no doubt, has become a kind of neurosis in Pakistan. The same could be said about the journalist who believes that the religion she pursues is “perfect” and would never need any reform whatsoever!
Deepak’s book too talks about such neurosis, amnesia and fantasy being paddled in the once colonised world. He says that the purpose of colonial education was to create a new “native elite” that looked up to the coloniser and his way of life, similar to what Naipaul found during his Islamic incursions among the converted people. What fundamentalist Islam did to the converted people, the Europeans did to their colonies in Asia, Africa and America.
Deepak says that “it was only a matter of time before the new convert to European culture and religion not only disavowed his previous identity but also spewed venom against it because he associated his past and heritage with weakness, superstition and defeatism, thus completing the process of severing ties with his roots”. The political colonisation may be over, but this mental, educational and, worse, cultural colonisation still holds its sway.
While emphasising that most studies on European colonialism are focused on its impact on the political independence of colonised native societies, or the immense economic harm caused to them and the consequent ‘illiteracy’ and impoverishment of these societies, Deepak says that “this in itself is proof of coloniality”.
The author—a well-known Supreme Court advocate who would otherwise have become an engineer had he not visited Ramakrishna Math and not read the writings of Swami Vivekananda and Arun Shourie—while quoting Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, does well to expose that the “true genius of the European coloniser lay not in the brutal economic and political repression of the native, but in successfully projecting his way of life as the aspirational ideal”. No wonder, as he says, in former colonies labels such as the Left and Right, liberal and conservative still work within the colonial parameters and framework.
An interesting notion put forward by Deepakin the book says that European colonialism’s “deadliest consequence” for the world has been its “fundamental conceptual alteration of the relationship between human beings and nature”. He explains as he says that there was a symbiotic relationship between human beings and nature till the time colonists came and divided the world into two: Humans (read White Christians) and non-humans (including non-Whites). The author quotes Raymond Murphy, who goes to the extent of saying that control over nature and its utilisation as a resource may have even shaped the European coloniser’s ideas on government, empire, and economics since the goal was to govern all of nature.
Exposing the critics of “Indic sub-identities”, Deepak says that while these criticisms were apparently “directed at specific Indic sub-identities in the name of societal reparation”, these were, in reality, “meant to weaken the larger Indic civilisational edifice”. He argues, “I gradually came to understand that while the instinctive human reaction would be to protect the sub-identities one was closest to, the priority should be to preserve the civilisational tapestry and its foundations, which enabled the birth, growth and expression of diverse sub-identities. This also meant that protection of Indic civilisational integrity did not require the submergence of its sub-identities at the altar of a well-intentioned, albeit misplaced, grand unity project. On the contrary, history seemed to teach us that the survival of the Indic civilisation as a civilisation depended on the flourishing of its sub-identities.” Indeed an incisive observation!
The book India that is Bharat also says that the so-called liberal model of religious toleration and secularism, in currency in the West and in decolonised countries, is actually based on the “specific theological framework that was conceptually conceived of during the Protestant Reformation”. Given this state of affairs and the entrenched state of coloniality still existing in post-colonial states like India, a colonial law allowing state interference in Hindu temples—and Hindu temples alone—continues to be in place seven decades after Independence.
“This is but one of the examples of the manner in which concepts, such as ‘secularism’ and ‘equality’, have played out in so-called independent, decolonised Bharat—to the extreme detriment of its indigenous consciousness,” writes Deepak as he emphasises that the Indian state has enacted at least 15 Hindu-specific legislations that enable state control and facilitate state entrenchment in Hindu institutions. “Clearly, this is attributable to the Indian state’s embracing of the colonial assumption that the ‘Hindoo’ is corrupt, debauched and backward, especially if Brahmin, and therefore, such institutions must be under state control in order to ‘reform’ them.”
This book, which could only have been written by a lawyer with an immense, uncompromising love for the Indic civilisation, is a reminder that Indians are still not free, mentally. While there’s a section of people denying their own past, there are others whose idea of history has been corrupted by colonialism. It’s a tough civilisational battle ahead. But where’s the option except fighting it out to save the soul of our past—our civilisational past?