## Highlights In 1998, the Kerala government decided to celebrate the 500th ‘anniversary’ of Vasco da Gama’s ‘arrival’ in India as though he was a benefactor of sorts. However, this only shows the comprehensive extent of the success of the European colonial project. — location: 69 ^ref-17072 --- 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, with each of the sub-identities realising that they were part of a federal symbiotic whole and that it was in their own existential interest to remain part of the whole. — location: 304 ^ref-4182 --- The more I read the HRCE Petition and the material assiduously put together by the team in support of the petition, the more it convinced me that there was a clear causal link between State control of Hindu temples and the visible degradation of the temple ecosystem. — location: 363 ^ref-26767 --- the diversity of my reading was handicapped by the unfortunate reality that I was more comfortable consuming content in English than in Indian languages, which represented the very problem I hoped to understand better. — location: 392 ^ref-7352 --- The extent of the divide was such that I was told on social media that the use of ‘Bharat’ for India was bigoted and against the Constitution’s promise of secularism. 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. — location: 441 ^ref-19542 --- To romanticise and venerate the Constitution, I argued, was to conflate the means with the end to the detriment of the civilisation. In a nutshell, I took the position that the Constitution must be alive to history to serve its intended purpose. — location: 452 ^ref-63939 --- It seemed to me that regardless of labels, there was a common acceptance of the colonialised version of Bharat’s history, especially in matters of human rights, religion, education, environment, development, caste and gender. In fact, there seemed to be a shared view across ideologies that there was indeed a ‘universal’ and uniform moral standard that all ‘civilised societies’ must adhere to. — location: 461 ^ref-47745 --- Coloniality reshaped the very concept of history and time through the creation of constructs as ‘modernity’ and ‘rationality’, terms which are loosely used in contemporary everyday conversations without knowledge of their colonial origins. — location: 535 ^ref-42202 --- the framework gave me the opportunity to call out the double standards that were being applied to decolonial movements in other decolonised societies on the one hand, and the Indic movement for cultural decolonisation and reclamation of its civilisational identity on the other. While the former has received serious and positive attention, the latter has been branded illiberal, xenophobic and lacking in historical basis. This hypocrisy needed to be called out. — location: 545 ^ref-61328 --- What I found most interesting was that those who disagreed with me used words, such as ‘orthodox’, ‘traditional’, ‘anti-rational’, and ‘anti-modern’, to caricature my position.4 To be clear, I was intrigued not by the criticism itself, which was expected, but by the use of such words as pejoratives to criticise a position that supported a religious institution. After all, I asked myself, was not a religious institution’s commitment first and foremost to the object of its establishment, and in the case of a temple to the object of its consecration and worship, namely the Deity and the associated practices and traditions? If yes, why was ‘traditional’ being hurled as a pejorative if adherence to tradition was hardly surprising given the religious nature of the institution? — location: 630 ^ref-27995 --- The use of ‘The’ for each of these essentially European milestones by Europeans and the rest of the world is significant since it demonstrates the universalisation of European history as the history of humanity, in particular its ‘modern’ history. — location: 691 ^ref-43879 --- According to decolonial thought, European coloniality gave birth to the ‘cultural complex’ of ‘modernity’ and ‘rationality’, apart from the ‘modern’ categories of religion and race. Importantly, according to the decolonial school, ‘postcolonialism’ gives the impression that the colonial mindset or consciousness ended with decolonisation, when, in fact, it has survived decolonisation and continues to impact decolonised/‘independent’ societies. — location: 720 ^ref-2250 --- the early introduction of colonial education systems in colonised societies and the replacement of indigenous epistemologies and their structures ensured that coloniality informed their present, shaped their ideas of the future and, critically, coloured their vision of the past. — location: 812 ^ref-5799 --- owing to coloniality, the vision of independence of most native elites was limited to the politico-economic sphere, namely decolonisation, but did not include decolonialisation because they accepted the European worldview on the all-important cultural front as well.3 Therefore, all that the colonialised native elites sought by way of ‘independence’ was the agency to be able to write their own futures but using the ideas, rules, tools and institutions of the erstwhile coloniser, which were designed for top-down imposition on a conquered and subjugated people in order to ‘civilise’ them. — location: 820 ^ref-26674 --- the coloniser subtly co-opted dominant groups or the elite from the colonised society into the colonial power structure to gradually wean them away from the rest of their people. This was done by inventing pseudo-scientific racial theories to create fissures in the social structures of the native society, while simultaneously teaching them the ways of European culture. — location: 895 ^ref-27585 --- The direct and intended consequence of coloniality and the introduction of the modernity/rationality complex was the creation of supposedly universal standards for morals, ethics, religion, language, knowledge, scientific temper, political organisation, nationhood, individual rights and more—in short, culture and civilisation. — location: 932 ^ref-11443 --- as scholars have identified, coloniality goes hand in hand with modernity/rationality and vice versa. As long as coloniality is alive, despite its outward proclamations of open-mindedness, dialogue and diversity, the colonial DNA of modernity and rationality will continue to actively resist and oust indigeneity. — location: 936 ^ref-1908 --- European conceptions of religion when the Christian — location: 1117 ^ref-64445 --- A once thriving and vibrant society with its own centres of production of culture and knowledge was physically and culturally exterminated and reduced to a colonised human mass of illiterate peasants, thereby creating the infamous ‘White Man’s Burden’. On the other hand, the yawning void so created was filled by offering European culture as the way to climb the social ladder. In other words, the demand for European culture was created and met by the European coloniser, not just for the present but for all time to come. This the European coloniser passed off as his benevolence for he was saving the heathen native’s soul from the latter’s own ignorance, superstition and savagery. — location: 1172 ^ref-5180 --- Interestingly, while the Enlightenment is celebrated for ushering in the Age of Reason through its supposed challenge to Christian dogma, it is the Enlightenment whose emphasis on Christianity’s Cartesian dualistic approach to humans and nature that advanced the idea of superiority of the ‘rational human mind’ over ‘non-rational nature’. This paved the way for the conquest of nature by the ‘superior’ human. — location: 1277 ^ref-10464 --- Native knowledge traditions were largely passed on through the generations orally, employing storytelling as a means of transmitting knowledge.19 One of its objectives was to keep the knowledge within the community, so that it was accessible only to those who understood both its meaning and, importantly, its sanctity. This obviated the need for written records. However, the fundamental differences in their ontologies, coupled with the absence of written records, the importance given to the written word by the Christian coloniser, and the consequent treatment of oral traditions as apocryphal and ‘mythical’, may collectively explain the coloniser’s attitudes to indigenous onto-epistemological systems. — location: 1325 ^ref-42575 --- 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. — location: 1346 ^ref-28393 --- There even exist recorded instances of European legislators in colonial South Africa exhorting the South African government to ‘win the fight against the non-White in the classroom instead of losing it in the battlefield’. — location: 1380 ^ref-25997 --- The educated Englishman was our model; what we aspired to be were ‘black Englishmen’. We were taught—and believed—that the best ideas were English ideas, the best government was English government, and the best men were Englishmen. — location: 1424 ^ref-11684 --- European coloniality is like the Matrix. One just needs to become aware of it, after which it is impossible to unsee, especially in matters of religion, polity, education, economics and the law. — location: 2685 ^ref-49663 --- 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. As opposed to crediting the inherent strength of the indigenous OET for resisting the coloniser’s evangelising overtures, the benefit of benevolence or tolerance is extended to the coloniser, who consciously operated under a distinct sense of anthropological superiority that stemmed from his religious beliefs. — location: 2692 ^ref-11857 --- This laid the foundations of the colonial stereotype that the indigenous idol-worshipping Hindu was ‘untrustworthy, immoral, corrupt and cowardly’ and compared poorly to the ‘unyielding Muslim’ who, though he rejected the gospel, was closer to the Christian worldview, being ‘of the book’. These stereotypes continue to find purchase long after the British have left, proving the continued existence of colonial consciousness. — location: 2775 ^ref-19221 --- This position is justified in my view since contemporary decolonial scholarship concerns itself predominantly with the impact of European settler colonialism, and Bharat has experienced Middle Eastern settler colonialism longer than it has experienced the European variant. Critically, the living embodiments of Middle Eastern coloniality, regardless of the faith they subscribe to, presently thrive within Bharat’s boundaries as well as in its immediate neighbourhood, which were carved out of its civilisational geography through force. — location: 2870 ^ref-56097 --- both forms of colonialities are significantly inspired by their respective OETs, which enjoin them to colonise, enslave and evangelise idol-worshipping indigenous societies.6 Both proceed on the axiomatic presumption that prior to their advent, colonised societies were consumed by darkness and ignorance (called ‘Jahilliya’ in the case of Middle Eastern coloniality), which requires them to spread the ‘light’ of their respective OETs either through force or inducement or both.7 In fact, their attitudes towards their own respective pre-Christian and pre-Muslim histories are one of contempt and condescension, which are directed at the rest of the world, after their own respective conversions to the ‘true faiths’. As a corollary, both believe in the concept of ‘the true faith’ and heathendom, which ‘others’ and dehumanises the rest of the world at the outset. Both view the lands of the infidel or the heathen, as the case may be, as objects of conquest, an attitude that persists even after settling in conquered lands since both owe their allegiances to OETs that have their origins outside of the conquered lands. — location: 2846 ^ref-19174 --- Marx believed that England had to fulfil ‘a double mission in India’, namely the annihilation of the old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.10 These were his views despite his own knowledge of the selfish nature of British colonisation of Bharat, best captured by his statement that ‘whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution’, that is, in laying the foundations for ‘the material basis of the new world’. — location: 2892 ^ref-26719 --- according to the Marxist school, had it not been for British colonialism, the concept of scientific temper, progress and ‘development’ were and would have remained unknown to Bharat.11 In that sense, Marxism shares the Eurocentric belief that science is the monopoly of the West, and ‘rationality’, although universal, owes its origins to Europe. — location: 2900 ^ref-3695 --- What is important for the present discussion is that notwithstanding Dr. Ambedkar’s views on native OETs, he did not lose sight of the fact that Middle Eastern colonialism had its origins in OETs that lay outside the pale of the Indic civilisational fabric. — location: 3019 ^ref-64990 --- My other objective, as stated previously, is to draw the attention of the reader to Indic scholars whose works have either been systematically sidelined or completely pixelated on the ground that they championed ‘Hindu nationalism’ and sought to exclude non-Hindu identities from the journey of Bharat. These labels were expectedly hurled at such scholars by the postcolonial and Marxist schools, which have normalised such labels in mainstream discourse, largely due to the monopoly enjoyed by them in the realms of education, journalism, culture and policymaking. — location: 3100 ^ref-26580 --- I understand Mookerji’s reliance on the Vedas given their centrality to Indic OET and their treatment as documents of historicity. Coloniality would result in the Vedas being dismissed as embellished and exaggerated myths, while decoloniality would require us to respect them as primary sources of indigenous OET, and therefore not apply colonial benchmarks to what indigeneity has to say about the journey of this land and its civilisation. — location: 3220 ^ref-24874 --- From its mountains to its rivers, almost every geographical feature of Bharat is treated as a place of pilgrimage, which brings out the triple matrix of nature, faith and patriotism that was used to forge cultural unity while keeping the diversity alive. — location: 3271 ^ref-61799 --- the deities and the devout belong to all of Bharat and all of Bharat belongs to the deities and the devout. This firm territorial connection between Indic OET systems and Bharat is what makes the Indic OET native to this land and, as a corollary, also explains why the OETs that inspire and drive Middle Eastern and European colonialities are not native to it. This is not a matter of subjective opinion or expression of xenophobia of any kind but is a statement of fact. — location: 3305 ^ref-33131 --- when a State of this complex composition and structure happens to pass under foreign control, the nation can maintain the freedom of its life and culture by means of that larger and more vital part of the State which is not amenable to foreign control, and is, by design, independent of the central authority. — location: 3598 ^ref-60801 --- First, when he calls Bharat more of a cultural possession than a material one, Mookerji strikes a clear distinction between the territorial nationalism of the European coloniser and the cultural veneration of the Indic native. It is this cultural veneration and a sense of relational custodianship, to put it in the language of decoloniality, as opposed to a sense of territorial ownership, that has made it possible for Bharat to be a melting pot of diverse sects that have coexisted within the Dharmic fold. — location: 3629 ^ref-6765 --- The realisation that custom and practice have more wisdom and utility in a society that is civilisationally diverse is the reason laws in ancient Bharat were not top-down impositions by the ruler, but were, more often than not, codifications of the collective experience of a society as long as relevant. In that sense, Mookerji alludes to the fact that perhaps the Smritis were more descriptive than prescriptive and a similar approach in contemporary Bharat may serve the cause of ‘law and order’. This would also mean that sitting in judgement over the Smritis by treating them as prescriptive injunctions or mandates in the sense law is understood by the European makes very little sense since the colonial and Indic understanding of law is starkly different. — location: 3690 ^ref-57126 --- Given the internal homogeneity of a European nation-state, it makes sense and is perhaps more desirable to treat the individual as the core unit whose rights must be safeguarded against intrusion by the State and other individuals. However, in a civilisation-state, every group is rightly interested in protecting its own identity from encroachment by other groups as well as by the State. — location: 3721 ^ref-38651 --- Bharat has certainly accommodated cultures and OET systems whose centres of consciousness are outside its sacred geography, such accommodation has been contingent on such cultures not seeking to annihilate Bharat’s indigenous civilisation. Simply put, as long as a non-Indic worldview is capable of coexistence with Bharat’s indigenous worldview and does not seek to deny or sever the bonds that tie this land to its culture and its adherents, Bharat provides refuge and shelter to even such worldviews. — location: 3744 ^ref-14017 --- there are typically only two acceptable choices for those who wish to understand Bharat’s history—they must either subscribe to that school of thought which denies Bharat’s antiquity, unity and Indic consciousness, or accept the view which recognises the validity of Bharat’s indigenous OET, with the caveat that ‘Hindu nationalism’ must be exorcised from the Indian mind. — location: 3841 ^ref-34164 --- While it is typically assumed that the Company, as a commercial entity, had no ‘civilising’ interest in aiding the spread of Christianity in Bharat, there is evidence to suggest the contrary. For instance, in 1614, the Company put in place measures ‘for the recruitment of Indians for the propagation of the Gospel among their countrymen and for imparting to these missionaries such education, at the Company’s expense, as would enable them to carry out effectively the purposes for which they were enlisted’.4 Further, in 1659, the directors of the Company were clear that it was ‘their earnest desire by all possible means to spread Christianity among the people of India’, which led to missionaries being allowed to travel to Bharat on the Company’s ships.5 — location: 3920 ^ref-49127 --- the Charter of September 1698 is an important document, since it took forward the colonial evangelical intent of both the Company and the British Parliament in a limited yet concrete fashion by specifically inserting what came to be known as ‘the Missionary Clause’. This Clause required the Company to maintain Christian clergy at their Indian factories and to have chaplains on their ships which weighed 500 tons or more.13 The clergy so appointed to reside in Bharat were required to learn Portuguese within a year of being sent to Bharat, and critically, were also obligated to learn the native language of the country where they shall reside ‘to enable them to instruct the Gentoos that shall be the servants or slaves of the same Company or of their agents, in the Protestant religion’. — location: 3972 ^ref-61066 --- it also translated to the coloniser approaching Indic OET systems with the same anticlerical political theology that characterised the Protestant Reformation’s approach to the Catholic Church and Papal authority. As stated earlier, the consequence of this approach was that Brahmins, ‘Brahminism’ and ‘Brahminical institutions’ replaced the Pope and Catholic Church as the new objects of hatred and perpetual ‘reform’ at the hands of evangelical Christianity. — location: 4683 ^ref-2794 --- Which specific set of laws did the Hindus mistake for God’s revelation? This was the obsession of early colonial scholars. — location: 4712 ^ref-10490 --- This blatantly Christian attempt to understand ‘the Hindu religion’ also manifested itself in the coloniser’s understanding of the fundamental tenets or ‘laws’ of Hinduism, leading to the quest for a Moses-like ‘lawgiver’. This quest yielded Manu, the author of the much-reviled Manusmriti. Whether the Manusmriti, or for that matter the Dharmashastras, constituted a religious commandment/law, or a descriptive recordal of customs and practices was never clearly understood by the Christian coloniser since he was incapable of viewing the indigenous society through an indigenous perspective. — location: 4731 ^ref-26467 --- The 1863 Act was then replaced by the Madras Hindu Religious Endowments Act of 1923, which was the first legislation to apply solely to Hindu religious institutions, in contrast to previous legislations. Perhaps, in the eyes of the coloniser, Muslims, being ‘people of the book’, were deemed less corrupt and immoral than idol-worshipping heathen, and hence were exempt from State interference. — location: 4777 ^ref-21722 --- the coloniality of the Indian State is evidenced by the fact that as opposed to preserving and respecting the space of Indic consciousness, which would have been consistent with the policy of Christian toleration and secularism of the coloniser that accorded primacy to Christianity, the Indian State acts as the successor of the coloniser in its stepmotherly treatment of native consciousness. Consequently, non-Indic institutions and practices enjoy better protection from State interference than their Indic counterparts. This is supported by the fact 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. — location: 4797 ^ref-23706 --- thenceforth, the State or more often than not, constitutional Courts, would determine what constituted ‘essential’ aspects of a religion despite professing to be secular bodies with no institutionalised training in the OET of any faith. The irony is compounded by the fact that the religious versus secular divide was conceived of in the Christian faith to limit the scope of State interference in matters of religion, which, in Bharat, has yielded diametrically opposite results particularly with respect to Indic faith systems. — location: 4838 ^ref-11596 --- The adherents of Indic faith systems are concerned, and rightly so, that the treatment of Hinduism as ‘a way of life’ and not a ‘religion’ by the Indian State might deprive them of their fundamental religious freedoms under the Constitution that are guaranteed to the followers of other religions. At the same time, they do not want ‘Sanatana Dharma’ or ‘Dharma’ to be equated with the Christian or Islamic idea of ‘religion’, again rightly so, since their OETs are very different. Nor do they want to be told that the ‘Hindu religion’ is essentially a Christian colonial construct because they understand that by calling it a colonial construct, some call into question the very precolonial existence of Dharmic belief systems and the notion of Dharmic oneness underlying the various Hindu sampradayas. There is more than an element of truth in these strands, each of which warrants unpacking. — location: 4848 ^ref-12507 --- Did Indians, with their own background framework and cultural experience, understand what the British meant when the latter said ‘religion’, ‘law’, ‘scripture’, ‘priests’ or ‘caste’? Did the British and other Europeans, with their specific background framework and cultural experience, understand Indians when they spoke of ‘dharma’, ‘shastra’, ‘puja’, ‘brahmanas’ or ‘jati’? — location: 4956 ^ref-53414 --- The other colonial attitude that the Indian State appears to have embraced is the need to codify and systematise indigenous ‘personal laws’ in order to make them ‘uniform’ and ‘consistent’, in the process ossifying and centralising them. The ‘Hindu Code’ legislations passed between 1955 and 1956, which resulted in the Hindu Marriage Act, Hindu Succession Act, Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, and Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, are cases in point. In the process of this codification, the Indian State, which presides over a civilisational society that values context, subjectivity and custom, has stifled the evolution of custom at the altar of uniformity, homogeneity and codification. — location: 5029 ^ref-30387 --- important to briefly examine the education and — location: 5204 ^ref-27798 ---