Recovering Bharat from India
Pingali Gopal (2024). Decolonizing Bharat: The Balu Way. Indica.
As expected of a country under colonial rule for the last seven centuries, despite its independence from British rule in 1947, India, it seems, is colonized even today. A few examples may illustrate this point: it is one’s fluency in English and his accent that decide the status of that person in polite society; the social elevation of a person is complete only after the person spends some time studying or working in Western/foreign lands; the people exhibit a strong and jaundiced view about their past while being almost illiterate about what their ancestors wrote, said, and contributed to make India a land of deep thought and myriad achievements. The polarized left and the alleged right-wingers of India converge in their understanding of all of the above issues. How quaint, isn’t it? The colonial apparatus in politically independent India is the Anglicized education that shapes the worldview of the elites and binds the country to its colonial past.
While words like colonization, decolonization, coloniality, and colonial are bandied among Indian academics, their world, particularly in the humanities, liberal arts, and social studies departments, are the ones wedded to and mostly framed and bound by colonial scholarship and modern-day offshoots of them. The video of a celebrated academic known for her criticism of colonization in academic discourse, chastising a student sharply for nothing but a faulty English accent, went viral on social media a few months ago. It was quite a revealing incident about the extent of colonization of those writing and speaking about colonization.
This problem arises because Indian academics fail to understand the real vehicle of colonization — not the geographical origin of the person but the faulty understanding of the world imposed on the colonized by the colonizer. This understanding of colonization can be found in the tradition of Indic knowledge that defines systems (tantra) — swatantra and paratantra. The former is the system reflecting the true self without any imposed understanding. The latter is the system imposed from the outside by the colonizer, so to speak. Swatantra is cherished in the Indian tradition, with the Goddess (Shakti) being worshipped as a destroyer of the imposed system from outside (Paratantra Vinashini).
This Indic understanding is best explored by the towering academic S. N. Balagangadhara and his students at the Ghent School in Belgium founded by him. The Ghent School scholars have programmatically studied the shaping of the Indian mind by colonial theorizing and speculation — an imposition on the collective psyche of the people. Balagangadhara and his students recognize that Indian mores, ways, realities, and practices have sought to be explained and universalized by the colonialists—needlessly and arbitrarily.
While the approach of the Ghent School to explain Indian society and civilizational mores is quite novel and deep, it presents a grave danger to the academic world—a large chunk of academics would lose their prestige and position if the “Balu way” becomes mainstreamed. This would surely shock some, but it is a manifestation of the repetitive pattern found in the history of science: the narrow personal interests of some, broadcast to and accepted by many, could suppress and censor some of the most trenchant criticism of those interests while offering new and insightful ideas. For example, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was simply “Jewish science” for a large group of entrenched skeptics. Einstein, however, could show the superiority of his theory over the conventional theories of those times using some irrefutable astronomical observations recorded during the time of a solar eclipse. Einstein could not be stopped or ignored after this factual verification.
Much less opportunity exists for the Balu School to become part of the mainstream academic domain of social studies. A factual observation that could separate one theory from another theory is quite rare in the social sciences. Therefore, factual observations may not necessarily refute a theory. Moreover, the plausibility of a theory may not make much sense for someone who could further her/his career rapidly by ignoring all the nuances and catering to the dominant political camp. This is a problem of superlative magnitude in a politically polarized world with the lion’s share of the academics being in the so-called “liberal” camp. They would either ignore the Balu School completely or, despite a token recognition of Balu, keep and protect their prior theoretical frameworks and conclusions.
Essentially, entrenched academics cannot be left to their own devices and their deviousness in the academic world. In a democratic system, everybody needs to understand everything a bit to be able to function effectively as part of the collective and academics are no exception to this rule. Pingali Gopal is an esteemed surgeon but takes an avid interest in observing the social, cultural, and political world. He has studied the works of Balu and associated scholars from the Ghent School carefully and diligently. It is neither unprecedented nor surprising that he has written this work despite not being from the social studies academic world. In economics, Hayek, one of the most influential and unique economists of the twentieth century, was a psychologist. Michael Faraday, the scientist, was an apprentice to a bookbinder.
Gopal’s book Decolonising Bharat: The Balu Way cogently presents a summary of the key perspectives of the Balu School. This school neither likes scholars to hide behind incomprehensible linguistic jugglery nor motivate them to stay in ivory towers but to remain grounded on a host of hot-button issues like “religion,” “secularism,” and “caste.” Gopal has gone through the basic premises and arguments made by the Ghent School scholars on these issues. He has narrated them in simple language for ordinary readers to motivate them to read those books in the original. He has also highlighted the crucial thought that frames the Ghent School endeavors.
In a way, Gopal’s work is a compendium to understand not only the contribution of the Ghent School but also the avenue for reforming the humanities, liberal arts, and social sciences departments in India. Even the most educated people in India are unaware of the reality and issues with these departments—for some, these departments speak the Gospel truth and for others, they are the practitioners of some mumbo-jumbo best left to their own devices. Neither stance will contribute to developing one’s civilizational understanding of India. There is a sane, sober, and constructive middle ground that exists in understanding these academic departments and the men and women who have mastered the art of leveraging the complaints about colonialism to embed it more deeply in the “system” they are the keyholders to. The Balu Way can contribute to the transformation of those academic disciplines to make them both constructive and have predictive power.
Bharat is in jeopardy today—both from liberals and Indian nationalists. The former discounts anything worthwhile in Bharat and relies on contrived theory-driven lenses over any stock-taking of reality. On the other hand, Indian nationalists are, often, trying to forge India as a European nation mimicking European conservatives. Bharat—the civilizational force that has survived millennia and created tremendous social harmony—will be the casualty in this polarized world with both rejecting the essence of Bharat. This is why Dr. Pingali Gopal’s book is a must-read for all educated Indians.