Colonial Consciousness

[ Published on swarjyamag Aug 26, 2022] Let me recollect the question we agreed upon: how does the combined phrase (colonial mindset and servitude) make sense within the framework of my research programme? My hypothesis on religion includes characterizing the dynamics of its expansion. As I see it, such a dynamic includes (a) conversion and (b) secularization. The first side of the dynamic, …

Chairman Sir, Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Morning. Actually I’m the odd man out. We have success stories. We have spiritual leaders; we have an extraordinarily organizational leader in front of us. And now I have to do an exam. You see, normally I take exams in the university. Now I have to do an exam. The exam is this I must move you from these wonderful stories, success stories, good stories, to …

Note: For a broader application and context, please read this paper: translation, interpretation and culture The word ’temple’ is not used in English to refer to a place where false gods are worshipped. It is used to speak of “the temple of Solomon” (the king Solomon of the Jews) too and there is no suggestion in the western culture that the Jews worshipped false gods. Your friend is providing you …

This post will use an imagery as its organising thread, which tracks the search for enlightenment in terms of notions known to us from our secondary and higher education. If we consider the search for happiness in these terms, then the ideas expressed there could be reformulated thus: as human beings, almost all of us would like to be literates or would like to have a primary education. This is …

In so far as one sees this article as a beginning of a certain type of enquiry, it is excellent. However, it is not adequate as a formulation of either the problem that confronts the Indian intellectuals (and not merely them) or the solutions. The problems are far more complex and the task is far more daunting than they appear at first sight. What may not be forgotten, if one wants to be relevant …

Two substantial questions have been raised in response to what I wrote : (a) why do we need to study and understand the Western culture in order to access our own traditions? (b) Is it my claim that Buddha and Shankara (for example) are irrelevant to us? One other sort of ‘objection’ too has surfaced, albeit disguised as a characterization of what I have said: (c) is not my position itself …

M. N. Srinivas (MNS) claims that “a caste was able, in a generation or two, to rise to a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting vegetarianism and teetotalism and by changing its rituals and deities.” The first basic problem here is how one can establish the position of a jati in the supposed hierarchy and measure it in such detail that one can see over two generations that the jati has …

As I have often said, the most intriguing aspect of the Indian culture is the kind of knowledge it produced and encouraged people to produce: experiential knowledge which emerges by systematically reflecting on our (human) experiences in the world. As human beings, our experiences are many: no one set, no one kind of experience exhausts what we go through. From the purely personal experiences of …

If we want to grasp the nature of the discussions in the Indian traditions, there is much we need to do beforehand: (a) identify the entity they were talking about; (b) identify the specific questions they were answering; (c) identify the generic questions that defined both the outlines of the acceptable answers and the formulation of the specific questions; etc. (The ‘cetera’ indicates that I do …

As I see it, the issue is not whether Arun Shourie is an intellectual (or whether Prakash Karat and EMS Namboodaripad represent intellectuals). The point I was trying to make is the one between a social movement and intellectuals. Any movement that captures the imagination of a people (or even of a cross-section of a people) has to have some or another kind of narrative. Normally, the crafting of …

Colonial Experience of Indian Intellectuals Opposing factions in the Orientalist-Anglicist controversy in the 19th century shared a common understanding of Indian religion and society. Europeans from diverse ideological and religious backgrounds identified the brahmins as priests and brahmanism as a ‘religion of the priests’. This common understanding derived its consistency from a Christian …

When we go-about with our fellow human beings, we need to possess some or another idea about the nature of ourselves and our fellow human beings. (Call it, for the sake of convenience, an ‘intuitive theory’ about human beings.) It is an implicit understanding because each one of us does not have to be a professional philosopher or psychologist to get along with ourselves and fellow human beings. …

Colonialism has been one of the most significant phenomena in the history of humankind in the last three hundred years or so. Its importance can hardly be overstated. Yet, as many have said before, it has not been adequately theorized. There is of course a great deal of material on the histories, the effects, and the political resistances to colonialism. Reading them, however, merely increases the …

As Indians, if we have to access the Indian traditions we need two things: (a) it must be possible for us to access them; (b) we must know how to access them. That is to say, growing up in the Indian traditions not merely means that we have the possibility of accessing them if we want to but we have also learnt how to access them when we want to. Only for the sake of convenience, let me put it …

“How do we understand the idea that an enlightened person has no wants?” Before we understand what the idea says, it would be good to find out what it does not say. Understanding this would also allow us to appreciate the depth and extent of colonial consciousness. If you look at the way the Buddha was portrayed in the middle-class text books you studied (that is also how he was more or less …

How the Indians learn whatever they learn will be in accordance with their ways of going-about in the world. That is to say, the configuration of learning determines how they learn whatever it is they learn. What do they learn from the West? That theoretical knowledge is the foundation of all human going-about. That is, that their activities have to be theoretically founded. However, in the …

I have come to accept that the most interesting facts that a theory explains are those of the theory itself. Furthermore, a ’theory’, which collects all kinds of facts first and tries to ’explain’ them subsequently, is worse than having no theory. Such a theory is completely ad hoc and is cognitively uninteresting. It is pernicious too because it generates the belief that one understands such …

Many are concerned that English translations of some words from native languages distort their meaning. If we restrict ourselves to terms like ‘Deva’, ‘Dharma’ and such like, the worry is not just that their translations distort the meaning of these words (as we use them in our native languages) but that they suggest something (by way of reference and meaning) that does not even exist in these …

I do not have a theory of meaning. I do not know which of the many fragmentary theories of meaning I should choose from and why. Even though I acknowledge the importance of the topic, I do not feel called upon to do research on it. So far, I have been able to steer clear of the topic in an interesting way: I am able to show that what appears as translation problem or a meaning problem (how should …

Colonial consciousness incorporates the following element: in making statements about the colonized, the colonizer thinks that he is describing the colonizer. The latter, for his part, takes such statements as true descriptions of himself. What is involved is not the authority of the explainer (the colonizer) but the truth-value of the statements. How do we know this to be the case? Because we …