The Government of India Act of 1935 was to become the bedrock of ‘independent’ India’s Constitution in 1950. That there was almost nothing Bharatiya about this Constitution is evident from the copious analysis in Sai Deepak’s seminal first volume.
This is a seminal, pathbreaking book that is bound to transform the conversation about the profound impact of coloniality on India’s Constitution and cultural discourse. Introducing the term “coloniality” into India’s conversation is itself a crucial contribution of this book: previously, coloniality was confined primarily to discussions about how indigenous cultures in Latin America were suppressed by Christian ideology.
Indigenous societies of the Americas (as well as Bharat) lived in harmony with nature, taking from nature but also giving back to it in a symbiotic relationship. Christians believe that man is superior to nature, and must “conquer” and suppress it; humans are at the apex, animals beneath. It took just a marginal extension of such thinking to demonise indigenous cultures, effectively labelling them “barbaric” (animal-like) and uncivilised.
Sai Deepak extends that framework to analysing the ways in which the Christian ideology and world-view came to characterise key aspects of the Indic legacy and way of life. The book refines our understanding of the colonialist (and hence Christian/Protestant) foundations of our “modernity”, values, and Constitution, and the loss we suffer culturally from the suppression of our rich Indic heritage.
He traces the Christian origins of the term “secular”, and of the Christianising mission of the “Age of Discovery” that began with Columbus setting out to “discover” a western route to India, but ending up in the Americas. Pope Alexander VI had in 1493 divided the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres, with the two Catholic kingdoms made responsible for converting the “heathens” of each part of the world that they brought into the Christian fold.
Within decades, however, the Christian Reformation began, with Martin Luther in Germany and John Calvin in France and Switzerland. Their ideology was anti-clerical, blaming the corruption and other ills of the Church on the moral degeneracy of priests and bishops (effectively an extension of the New Testament, which blames the ills of Judaism on Pharisees). The wars over religion in Europe ended with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 which established the notion of the nation-state, with each state defined as “civilised” on the basis of its acceptance of Christian tenets.
Sai Deepak demonstrates meticulously how the anti-clericalism of the Reformation was easily extended to anti-Brahminism as the basis of the colonial attack on Indic religion (the Sanatan Dharma). From its outset, the English East India Company had a strongly Christian agenda as Sai Deepak demonstrates by citing its goals from as early as 1614. As the British Parliament got more involved with the running of the East India Company, its Reform Acts of 1813, particularly 1823, 1833 and especially 1854 increasingly incorporated more and more goals for explicitly “improving” the “morals” of British India through proselytization and the spread of Christian values.
As part of this ideological journey, Sanskrit was demonised—ironically using the petitions of Rammohun Roy decrying how difficult it was to master Sanskrit (and hence claiming the effort to be useless)—and English became the basis of a “modern” education. (Roy, incidentally, was educated in a madrasa, and his first three books were in Farsi; he became an early self-learner of English, with the zeal of a convert in a new regime).
Over time, the ideology of the newly English-educated was imbued with a persistently anti-Hindu agenda, disguised by terming it secular. Islam, as being “of the book”, was less subjected to the unique demonisation of idolatry and heathenism that Indic religions were victims of. The legal system that emerged in British India thoroughly disdained the Bharatiya legacy, and temples were subjected to particularly onerous colonial control, because they were seen as the greatest threats to the spread of Christianity.
This book takes the argument up to the 1919 Government of India Act, the first “constitution” written for India by the British. Sai Deepak demonstrates the overtly Christian ideas that imbued the Treaty of Versailles and the establishment of the League of Nations. William Howard Taft (the US President preceding Woodrow Wilson) justified the League of Nations in March 1919 in explicitly Christian terms: “Such a war as the last is a hideous blot on our Christian civilization….If Christian nations cannot now be brought into a united effort to suppress a recurrence it will be a shame to modern society….Against the war, the chaos and the explosive dangers of Bolshevism…a League of Nations must be established to settle controversies peaceably….It must stand as the living evidence of the united power of Christian civilization to make this treaty a real treaty of peace.”
Taft (a former colonial Governor-General of the Philippines) was to become Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court (1921-30). Any nation becoming an independent member of the League of Nations was subject to a Christian definition of “Standard of Civilization”. Japan was the only explicitly non-Christian nation that was grudgingly accepted as having achieved that standard (having been a key ally during the Great War); other parts of the Ottoman Empire were made “mandates” of European powers, while the former Christian colonies of the German and Austrian empires were made fully independent.
The Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, had promised “progressive realisation of responsible governments in India as an Integral part of the British Empire” in a speech in the UK House of Commons on 20 August 1917. But “responsible government” fell well short of “self-government”, and the Montford Reforms made minimal real concessions, while embedding Christian notions into the supposedly secular laws of British India.
The succeeding Government of India Act of 1935 (mainly to be discussed in the next volume) was to become the bedrock of “independent” India’s Constitution in 1950. That there was almost nothing Bharatiya about this Constitution is evident from the copious analysis in Sai Deepak’s seminal first volume.
Japan is the shining example of how the absence of “coloniality” has enabled a civilisation to thrive while absorbing aspects of non-indigenous institutions and culture on its own terms. It is hardly surprising, then, that Japan is the most economically developed (and egalitarian) society in Asia, living in genuine harmony with nature, evident in the cleanness of its air and the tranquil beauty of its temples, cities and villages.
Among Asian cultures, the Philippines is at the other end of the spectrum, a thorough victim of both Spanish and American coloniality, with its indigenous legacy thoroughly buried beneath five centuries of colonial depredations. Despite the foundational novels of Jose Rizal attacking the corruption and rapacity of the Catholic church (novels that all Filipinos are obliged to read in school), the Philippines remains devoutly Catholic.
Bharat avoided the fate of the Philippines, partly because the indigenous society resisted the attempts at converting—having successfully resisted West/Central Asian coloniality for seven centuries. Magellan was killed by a Hindu king of Mactan (a small island near Cebu) in 1521, because this king (Sri Lapu-Lapu) refused to convert (as his counterpart in Cebu, also a Hindu Chola raja, had converted to Catholicism); but such resistance faded in the Philippines. In the 19th century, many prominent Indians (Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, several children of W.C. Bonnerjee, the first Congress president) did convert to Christianity, but faced ostracism and the loss of their inheritance: despite the loss of power, society found ways to resist.
While the Brahmo Samaj founded by Rammohun and others was an attempt to accommodate Christian and Muslim precepts, a much stronger Bharatiya response came from Swami Vivekananda (and his disciple Nivedita), Sri Aurobindo and Dayanand Saraswati. Ironically, their Dharmic precepts did not imbue the new Constitution of India, which was instead steeped in Christian coloniality. An alternative, authentically Bharatiya Constitution based on Dharmic principles isn’t outlined in this volume, but will hopefully emerge by the final volume. Nonetheless this first volume is bound to become a transformative text that alters the nature of our discourse about the Constitution and the basis of the civilisational-state of India that is Bharat.
Prasenjit K. Basu is an economist and historian, and the author of the award-winning book “Asia Reborn”.