India that is Bharat (Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution)

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India that is Bharat, the first book of a comprehensive Bharat trilogy, explores the influence of European 'colonial consciousness' (or 'coloniality'), particularly its religious and racial roots, on Bharat as the successor state to the Indic civilisation and the origins of the Indian Constitution. It lays the foundation for its sequels by covering the period between the Age of Discovery, marked by Christopher Columbus' expedition in 1492, and the reshaping of Bharat through a British-made constitution-the Government of India Act of 1919. This includes international developments leading to the founding of the League of Nations by Western powers that tangibly impacted this journey.

Further, this work traces the origins of seemingly universal constructs, such as 'toleration, 'secularism' and 'humanism, to Christian political theology. Their subsequent role in subverting the indigenous Indic consciousness through a secularised and universalised Reformation, that is, constitutionalism, is examined. 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. In order to liberate Bharat's distinctive indigeneity, 'decoloniality' is presented as a civilisational imperative in the spheres of nature, religion, culture, history, education, language and, crucially, in the realm of constitutionalism.

J. Sai Deepak is an engineer- turned-lawyer with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Anna University (2002- 2006) and a bachelor's degree in law from IIT Kharagpur (2006- 2009). From July 2009 to June 2016, Sai practised as a litigator primarily before the High Court of Delhi and the Supreme Court of India as part of a leading National Capital Region-based law firm, reaching the position of an associate partner in 2015. In June 2016, he founded Law Chambers of J. Sai Deepak and set up an independent practice as an arguing counsel. Ever since, Sai has been engaged by law firms and solicitors to appear and argue on behalf of their clients before the Delhi High Court, the Supreme Court, the Madras High Court, the Competition Commission of India, NCLAT, the NCLTS and arbitral tribunals. In 12 years of practice, Sai has carved a niche for himself as a litigator in matters relating to civil commercial laws, intellectual property laws, constitutional law and competition law. Over the years, he has been a part of several landmark cases, such as the Sabarimala Ayyappa Temple and Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple matters, and the dispute over Basmati Geographical Indication.

Sai is also an avid legal commentator and has articles to his credit in reputed international and national legal journals. As a law student, in May 2009, his blogpost on the Bajaj-TVS patent dispute was cited extensively and relied upon by a Division Bench of the Madras High Court to vacate an interim injunction granted by a Single Judge Bench of the Court. This was perhaps the first instance in Indian judicial history where a law student's work was cited, and relied upon, by a court. Sai frequently writes on constitutional issues for Open magazine, the New Indian Express, the Financial Express and the Daily Guardian. His talks and lectures on law and society are widely followed. Sai has also been consulted on a variety of IP-related issues by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Ministry of Commerce, Government of India. In August 2019, Sai was among the 19 alumni of IIT Kharagpur who were awarded the Young Alumni Achiever's Award.

The almost accidental journey of J. Sai Deepak, once a student of engineering, towards the legal profession, and then a momentous apparent decision to grapple with the future of his very civilisation, is a fascinating story worth reading for the narrative alone. His awakening is also an account of the growing reawakening of the Indic civilisation itself, the subject of V.S. Naipaul's celebrated book India: A Million Mutinies Now. The protagonist of this tale, J. Sai Deepak, did not apparently begin with any remarkable antecedents for this quest, except perhaps, an urgent desire to understand the troubling predicament of his own civilisation. His thirst for deeper knowledge to analyse the vexatious situation of Bharat amounted to a manifestation of gnana and an approach that echoes darshana. It prompted him to begin a trilogy on the experience of Bharat as a civilisation, with the present volume ending in 1920 and two projected volumes covering the period from the early 1920s and beyond. The civilisational issues evaluate a number of core issues that define its encounter with the modern world. Sai Deepak describes them as the impression on Bharatiya civilisation of the tension between coloniality and Constitution, exhibited specifically by the impact on religion, nature, language, caste and tribe.

Sai Deepak became an autodidact, reading widely and consulting eminent intellectuals of the human sciences. It could not have been an easy task to immerse oneself in a vast literature with which he did not have familiarity, given his educational background in engineering and the law. But he has grasped the essentials of the vast and complex arguments and put them down in a readable form in his single-handed endeavour to impact the course of Bharatiya history. There are and were others traversing this stony path but he is unique in the import of his practical focus on the law to bring about concrete change, which ideological campaigns alone cannot achieve. Reading his book highlights the clarity and nuance for which he has become justly admired and respected as a lawyer. His book also encapsulates the need for even more thoughtful research to fully explicate the issues raised by Sai Deepak.

Sai Deepak's involvement in historic cases-such as the Sabarimala Ayyappa Temple case as a Supreme Court advocate serves as the trigger for his book because they underline the critical issue of the historical consciousness of Bharatiyas evident in how they were presented, argued and received by the Supreme Court. The apparent dichotomy counterposed between tradition and the rationality of modernity by those involved on opposing sides exposed the parameters of the key intellectual conundrum analysed by Sai Deepak, namely coloniality and the distorted consciousness, by and large, of the Bharatiya society. Such perceptual distortions arose from the unconscious and largely unquestioning acceptance of ideas of modernity that came to dominate intellectual life in the nineteenth century and were accepted as valid by both colonisers and the colonised. The argument advanced in the book is the exact obverse of the accusation of 'false religion' levelled by Christian evangelists against Hindus. What Sai Deepak seeks to unravel is the mystique and veil of coloniality itself that has profoundly shaped the thinking of the conquered by White European Christian subjugation since the advent of Christopher Columbus in 1492 CE.

It you grew up in the 1990s in a middle-class Hindu family in southern Bharat, not to perpetuate stereotypes, but chances are that a career in engineering or medicine featured right at the top of your life goals. My goals were no different, not just because of my limited means and exposure but also because I was keen on pursuing a career in aerospace engineering. However, eventually, I had to settle for mechanical engineering and committed myself to performing well so that I could pursue a master's in aerospace engineering. By the time I reached the end of the sixth semester in mid-2005, I was well placed to start a career in the core manufacturing sector, in the event I failed to secure admission to a good aerospace programme.

Just when it seemed like I had it all figured out, I started having second thoughts about what I truly wanted to do in the long run. This introspection was partly triggered by my visits to Ramakrishna Math, the writings of Swami Vivekananda, Dr. Arun Shourie's incisive and piercing books', and the spike post the elections of May 2004 in the normalised and open hostility directed at specific Indic sub-identities, especially on academic campuses. Had it not been for the writings of Swami Vivekananda and Dr. Shourie, I would have missed the forest for the trees since it was evident that the hostility, while on the face of it, was directed at specific Indic sub-identities in the name of societal reparation, it was, in reality, meant to weaken the larger Indic civilisational edifice. Systematic isolation, ostracisation and acculturation of one Indic strand at a time seemed to be at play. It became clearer with each passing day that this hostility had the previously tacit but increasingly overt support of extra-civilisational, specifically colonial and non-Indic, systems, that stood to benefit from this motivated internecine tussle. Thanks to my interactions with better-informed people who were civilisationally rooted and had worked on the ground, 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, 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. I also learnt that the tumultuous and fissiparous state of affairs that met the eye was the product of sustained long-term investment at a very fundamental level much before 1947. Therefore, it required, at the very least, an equally sustained long-term investment by the society at the most fundamental levels, namely the group and the individual, in order to undo the damage sustained by this living civilisation.

This realisation had a profound effect on me; however, I was not remotely sure of the path I had to take. Any drastic change in career paths required me to take the immediate family into confidence and convince them of my decision, and rightly so, because I had not given them the slightest inkling that I was going through a churn. But before breaking it to them, I wanted to be sure of the path myself, and so, I spent the seventh semester evaluating a career in civil services and alternatively, the law. Book's Contents and Sample Pages