Seventy-Five Years Since the Inaugural Moment of Post-colonial History

Some Reflections on the 75th Anniversary of India's Independence

The Great War, World War II, and the Cold War are frequently used as waypoints for navigating 20th-century history. However, the time between World War II and the close of the Cold War was anything but cold for most nations. It was a time when the transformative political ideals of the 18th and 19th centuries—namely, fundamental rights, individual liberty, and freedom—had begun to concatenate into the ascendant progressive ideals of the 20th century—namely, social reform, social engineering, and social justice— and was reaching a tipping point. It was also when the Irish poet, playwright, pamphleteer, and political revolutionary Terence MacSwiney’s hunger strike for the Irish War of Independence inspired armed Indian revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh’s hunger strike in 1929 and encouraged Gandhi’s non-violent fast, among other efforts from several other Indian stalwarts to help the Indian civilization achieve its political independence, albeit with painfully clipped wings, but kicking off a robust anti-colonization movement nonetheless. Soon after, Indonesia to countries in Africa began to free themselves from the burden of their colonial overlords. The end of apartheid in South Africa served as a significant breakthrough in the anti-colonization movement in recent memory.

The first cabinet of the Republic of India with the newly appointed President, on 31 January 1950.

This momentous period of forty-seven years, starting with India's independence, the turbulent activity with fever-pitch aspirations of proud civilizations, characterized by protracted struggles against colonial hegemony coming to fruition, is usually bracketed under the overarching label of the intervening Cold War period. Such Global North-centric segmentation of any period in world history is nothing new. Though it is customary to uncritically apply the divisions of European history, i.e., the fabled ancient period, the despised medieval dark ages, and the modern era of reason and light on Indian history, it is evident that the dark ages of Western Europe did not necessarily correspond to the dark ages of Indian history. Alternatively, the period of "high culture" that descended on India by Europeans and earlier by Turks and Mongols could also be regarded as a time of extended darkness, as it forcefully diminished the flame of Indian knowledge systems and Indic wisdom traditions. Therefore, such borrowed periodization denies India a meaningful look at its history while mainstreaming the legacy of “high culture” and syncretism and marginalizing brutality and enduring iconoclasm in the wake of invasions and colonization.

No matter which aspect of “high culture” and modern syncretism we choose to emphasize to promote peaceful cohabitation in the contemporary world—which is necessary, and I'm not downplaying it—it is crucial to acknowledge that Indian history as it is taught in schools has allowed one to conveniently exclude India from its innate and unbroken Indic nature by relegating the Hindu character to the distant past, never to permeate the secular present. Indian Marxist historians present Hinduism with particular antipathy. They portray Hinduism as a myth-ridden national culture with racialized fables and, most importantly, lacking any cohesion outside of a few spiritual insights that, in their opinion, are better crystallized in Buddhist philosophy. This antipathy towards Hindus is, of course, drawn from Karl Marx himself, who, though not a great admirer of British imperialism, was much less an admirer of Indian civilization. Marx believed that, despite the material suffering that the hegemonies of the Turk, Mongol, Persian, and British had brought to India, there was no point to anything the Indians did or had. He felt the only way to save India was to westernize it through the agency of a victorious European working class. Thus, colonialism endures in the dominant Marxist perspective of India and controls India's image in the Republic of Letters, its current social fabric, and exacerbates problems in its legal, administrative, and intellectual frameworks despite having gained freedom from colonialism's outward manifestation of imperialist armed force. Consequently, India's social, political, and legal frameworks bear imprints of ambiguities emanating from juxtapositions of many imported zeitgeists.

In the social sphere, hill stations as popular summer getaways for the Indian upper middle-class today have their roots in the nineteenth century. The sport of cricket, a colonial pastime still loved by Indians arguably more than the British, and social organizations like clubs and gymkhanas, still active today, are all hallmarks of British culture. Even if these social attributes are inconsequential, they serve as evidence of the many contemporary manifestations of the British presence in India, which makes the retention of colonial vestiges in India’s post-independent socio-political systems quite worrisome.

For instance, the universities in India inherited from the British that replaced Indic learning centers created a decisive split between emotion and reason, giving young Indians, especially those being educated in Christian convents, a perception that the spirit of scientific inquiry is an antidote to all that is Hindu, which was seen by the missionaries, later by the progressive activists and continued to be seen by post-independent India's administrators as a bundle of superstition and organized magic.

The missionary Alexander Duff perfectly encapsulated this abominable attitude when he said in 1839:

“There are scarcely any European works translated into the Sanskrit ; and even if there were, every term in that sacred tongue is linked inseparably with some idea, or sentiment, or deduction of Hinduism, which is a stupendous system of error ;- so that a native in acquiring it becomes indoctrinated into a false system ;and, after having mastered it, is apt to become tenfold more a child of Pantheism, idolatry, and superstition than before I Whereas, in the very act of acquiring English, the mind, in grasping the import of new terms, is perpetually brought into contact with the new ideas, the new truths, of which these terms are the symbols and representatives ;-so that, by the time that the language has been mastered, the student must be tenfold less the child of Pantheism, idolatry, and superstition than before.”

The careers of today's hyper-rationalists in Indian society, both at home and abroad, are built on the colonial categorization of Western knowledge as rational and everything Hindu as a collection of superstitions. In the name of "modernity," they only perpetuate stereotypes from colonial missionaries against contemporary Hindu society, whether in the contexts of familial relationships, daily rituals, or public life. Given how remarkably creative the Hindu mind has been in esoteric and exoteric matters for many millennia, it is ironic that post-independent India's secularism, its scholarship, and Marxist social commentary have participated in resentment towards Hindu India to create a large cohort of modern Indians who are constantly ashamed of their Indic culture and equate their paralyzed imagination to empowerment.

Therefore, the issue brought on by colonization could either be that an Indian secular intellectual is sympathetic but lacks the analytical categories in an aggressively secular academic discourse to do justice to Indic cultural connections and wisdom traditions or is willfully apathetic and desires to be alienated from Indic civilizational frameworks that are essentially pre-political and the substratum holding India together. If the colonial discourse's deliberate and unnecessary division of the emotive from the analytical characterizes the socio-cultural sphere, India's Constitutional formulation, which emerged when the transformative political ideals of the Enlightenment had begun to concatenate with the ascendant progressive ideals of the 20th century, both hostile to Indic public life in different ways, present another dichotomy. India's Constitution echoes 18th and 19th-century ideals of fundamental rights, individual freedom, and liberty, while the section of Directive Principles in particular echoes the ideals of social reform, social engineering, and social justice captured by the 20th century, leaving the constitutional framers, their actions after the framing, and the electorate of independent India for the last seventy-five years equally lacking in producing a succession of champions of personal freedom and liberty and champions of meaningful revitalizers of Indic knowledge systems.

The legacy of ambiguity and confusion that drives Indian socio-political systems can be illustrated by a middle-aged woman from Madras (now Chennai) named Champakam Dorairajan, who, after receiving her degree from the University of Madras in 1934, applied for admission to the Government Medical College. She discovered that she had little prospect of getting into the college's MBBS program because admission was strictly restricted by the ratio stated in the Communal General Order. Because she was a Hindu Brahmin, she couldn't get in. As she was infuriated by the completely unjustified discrimination in a newly independent India, she filed a petition contending that the Communal General Order was an infringement of her fundamental rights and inconsistent with the provisions of the Constitution. As a side note, this incident brings out semantic duplicity because the State's formulation of advancing secular social justice was labeled "Communal General Order." However, "communal" has evolved into the critical antonym of secularism in India instead of the more appropriate theocratic values.

The Constitution being a monument of the nationalist determination and proof of the new government's devotion to freedom and republican democracy was thought to set a clear boundary between the colonial legacy and the republican present. But Champakam Dorairajan's petition, by 1951, had made it clear that this boundary was more nebulous than previously thought and frequently did not even exist.

Though the Indian Judiciary upheld Champakam Dorairajan’s fundamental rights in this landmark Supreme Court of India case, it was short-lived. Neither India’s first Prime Minister, Nehru, the chief architect of the Constitution, Ambedkar, nor the first Minister of Home Affairs, Patel, were conceptually clear. They were stranded between Enlightenment values and Progressive ideals, confused about social justice movements actively discriminating against certain sections of Hindus (a trope resurfacing in the Progressive parts of the United States) and upholding the fundamental rights they had just codified in the Constitution.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Paraphrasing Jawaharlal Nehru’s defense of the Communal General Order, he asserts that the dominant values of the nineteenth century had been fundamental rights, individual liberty, and freedom, remnants of a static age that sought to uphold preexisting social arrangements and socioeconomic disparities. The Directive Principles of State Policy, which served as guidelines for the newly independent state, and the comprehensive programs of the Congress party had replaced these outdated concepts with the bigger and better ideals of the twentieth century, dynamic ideas of social engineering and reform.

Syama Prasad Mukherjee

Paraphrasing the 'Indian Burke', head of the Opposition's response to Nehru, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, argues in vain that the Prime Minister will undermine the foundational tenets of the Constitution, which he and others helped pass only about a year and a half ago. Does he believe that until he is given greater and more arbitrary powers, he cannot continue to run the country and that his will must be the final authority on all matters? Does he believe that the Indian people have become irrational and cannot be trusted with the freedom that has been granted to them? Or is it his lack of faith in the judgment of the people he has spent his entire life defending?

Eventually, the Indian Constitution's Articles 15 and 29, which forbade discrimination based on race, sex, caste, religion, etc., were altered and rendered unenforceable. By the explicit removal of any reference to economic criteria, nothing in those articles would ever prevent the State from making special reservations constitutionally permissible, paving the way for a paradigm change in Indian social and political life by making an economically backward Hindu Brahmin non-existent on paper to this day and creating a mockery of the concept of individual rights while reinforcing the alluring idea of collective rights.

In an editorial titled "Fundamental Rights," published in the Times of India newspaper on December 5, 1950, in Bombay, p. 4, harsh criticism was made.

“It is a tragic irony that our popular governments should, at every stage, feel the need of repressive laws against which leaders of our struggle for freedom cried themselves hoarse for generations. The whirling of time brings some strange revenges. The decriers of a Government, once termed Satanic, flatter our previous rulers by imitation. They resort to preventive detention even without declaring a state of emergency.”

Ever since then, with each successive socio-political moment, the Indian State, the electorate, and the elites are conditioned to think only in terms of groups and collectives in barely different ways and manufacture the arbitrary "progressive vs. conservative" dichotomies within this constrained self-imposed framework embodying a confusion between the Indian State, Indic Social groups and Individual Self, the last of which is of utmost importance in most schools of Indic philosophies.

The realization of these confusions after seventy-five years of independence is beginning to fuel a transformation of regret and irony into politics of resistance and scholarly critiques of Eurocentric and Marxist meta-narratives of Hindu India in the hopes of considering decolonized interpretations of the Indic past. If this transformation is effective, India may go on to produce significant revitalizers of the Indic knowledge systems as well as several champions for individual liberty in the future because, in my opinion, the two will go hand in hand. India is one country that holds the promise to bridge provisional freedom and profound spiritual freedom. If that happens, it will be the most genuine manifestation of independence in India, that is Bharat.