India, that is Bharat by J Sai Deepak

Author:J Sai Deepak
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-08-14T18:30:00+00:00

8

European Coloniality and the Indic Civilisation

Missionaries travelling in India

‘When the Missionaries in Heathen countries find that the people will not come to them to be taught, they go and look after the people. In this picture you see two Missionaries, who are travelling in India from place to place, where they think they shall find people to listen to their teaching.’ - The Wesleyan Juvenile Offering, December 1860 (published by Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society).

This chapter and the following one are intended to enable the reader to draw parallels between the global and the Indian experiences with coloniality, through an examination of the impact of coloniality on Bharat’s indigenous OET systems and social structures. The objective is to broadly lay out the politico-legal, religious and social infrastructure established by the European coloniser in the backdrop of which Bharat’s constitutional journey up until the year 1919 must be understood, so as to assess whether it was influenced by colonial perceptions of the Indic civilisation.

I must clarify that when I speak of the European coloniser, my focus is limited to the British, given that they had greater success than any other European nation in colonising Bharat in terms of the expanse of the territory under their control, the longevity of their colonisation, the institutions established, the fact that Bharat secured its independence from Britain, and their continuing impact on the consciousness of Bharat. Also, despite the distinct nationalities of European colonisers and the critical distinctions in their administration as well as their politico-legal theories, I have consciously proceeded on the established premise that European coloniality cut across European national identities.

Given these considered caveats on the scope and nature of my discussion, in this section I will place before the reader the material drawn from watershed legislations enacted by the British Parliament in relation to Bharat until 1853, which include legislative debates that shed light on the coloniality, that informed their understanding of Bharat and influenced their laws and policies. Alongside this legislative material, I will also present to the reader a snapshot of the scholarly work on the colonial reshaping of Bharat’s indigenous OET systems, societal structures and social practices. As the material shall demonstrate, this colonial exercise resulted in either distortion of indigenous identities or creation of new ones by the coloniser to further his goals which were not purely political or ‘secular’ in character.

The Company, the Crown, Coloniality and Civilisation

On 31 December 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a Charter of incorporation to the Governor and Company of Merchants of London, better known to the world as the English East India Company (‘the Company’).1 The Company was founded to establish direct trade relations with Bharat, which was necessitated, among other things, by the fear that if the English did not show the initiative, the Dutch would replace the stranglehold of the Spanish over trade in the East. In a way, the founding of the Company can be traced to the events triggered by the Inter Caetera, the Papal Bull of 1493 issued by Pope Alexander VI, which is referred to in Chapter 2.

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